Through the Looking Glass

Who are the children of God? Perhaps you may say, none but the white. If so, the word of the Lord is not true.

-William Apess, An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man

Early Christian Indian writers, especially William Apess, seemed to realize that U.S. society had to understand--if in fact it was capable of any self-analysis whatsoever--that its offenses against Indians were a part of its broken relationship with God. Apess knew that otherwise he could not reach his audience."

--from Reasoning together: the native critics collective By Janice Acoose, Lisa Brooks, Craig S. Womack, Tol Foster, Daniel Heath Justice, Christopher B. Teuton

William Apess certainly does make a lot of Bible-based arguments in Looking-Glass; that much is obvious to anybody who's read past the first page of the text. As a liberal Christian myself, I agree with his line of reasoning. But I also find myself shaking my head in wonder at how the arguments he (and Douglass and Jacobs) uses seem to parallel the debate going on in the US now over gay rights and women's rights, with each side using the Bible to bolster their own arguments, one side trying to increase human rights, the other trying to limit them. And when the side trying to limit rights uses the Bible as a proof-text, the side trying to increase rights finds itself obligated to use the same text as a basis for its own arguments. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, I guess.

However, there's more here than just the Biblical argument. A few other things in the text caught my attention.

In the 2nd paragraph, Apess writes of the Indian women, "they are made to believe they are minors and have not the abilities given them from God to take care of themselves." (Some may argue that he's talking about Indians of both genders here, but earlier in the paragraph he establishes that he's talking about the women: "the females are left without protection" and "one reason why they are left so is . . . .") So while this essay is not specifically about the rights of women and doesn't develop this argument, it does at least mention a key issue that we still struggle with today, the infantalization of women. Cue "I'm Just a Girl"....

It's also interesting the way Apess, as the narrator, shifts his identification partway through the essay. He starts out by calling the Indians of New England "my brethren," but then almost immediately starts referring to them as "they" or "them" - "Their land is in common stock, and they have nothing to make them enterprising". He also aligns himself with his audience when he writes "if these people [that is, the Indians] are what they are held up in our view to be" (italics mine), and again when he addresses the audience with "but stop, friends". By the end of that paragraph, however, he is back to including himself with the Indians: "I do not see why it should so long as they (the whites) say that they think as much of us as they do of themselves" (italics mine, but parenthetical is Apess'). By switching his identity like this, he makes himself into a bridge between his (presumably white) audience and the Indians, and thus leads the audience over that bridge so that they can identify (and sympathize) with the Indians, too.

Then there's the 3rd paragraph. Apess' use of "they" here is ambiguous. The entire paragraph is about the "Agents," which Norton defines as "those appointed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to oversee Indian affairs in such towns as Mashpee," and so "they" clearly refers to these men until we get to the last sentence. Here Apess writes, "Another reason is because they have no education to take care of themselves; if they had, I would risk them to take care of their own property." Does "they" here refer to the Indians or the Agents? It could be seen as either a reference back to the 2nd paragraph, in which he listed the reasons why the women were left alone, and so could mean the Indians, but I think a case could be made that he's really talking about the Agents - if they would take care of their own property, they wouldn't need to encroach on Indian lands, and they need an "education" to make them realize that they're in the wrong (and isn't education the point of the whole essay?).

There's a lot more of this little nit-picky stuff, but I also wanted to mention that the Norton Anthology itself seems to show a bit of bias in its footnotes to this essay, too. When Apess writes, "According to the writings of some, it [the word "heathens"] could not mean the Indians, for they are counted Jews," Norton says in a footnote, "A reference to the (mistaken) notion that Native Americans were descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel." This prompted me to look up Mormonism, since that was once (still is?) their belief. Sure enough, Joseph Smith was writing in the 1820's and 1830's, so it could very well be that Apess had heard of Smith's work. That Norton labels it "mistaken" is amusing because it seems that Norton usually goes out of its way to not call any belief system "mistaken." This is in contrast to the footnote to Apess' statement "it is well known that the Jews are a colored people": "Referring to the belief that Moses and the biblical Hebrews, including Jesus, were people of color" -- here, it's just a "belief" and Norton makes no claim as to the belief's validity.

As Alice is said to have remarked, "Curiouser and curiouser!"


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Life isn't all beer and skittles

Rip was ready to attend to any body's business but his own; but as to doing family duty, and keeping his farm in order, it was impossible.

-- Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle

Here lies the gentle humorist, who died
In the bright Indian Summer of his fame!
A simple stone, with but a date and name,
Marks his secluded resting-place beside
The river that he loved and glorified.
Here in the autumn of his days he came,
But the dry leaves of life were all aflame
With tints that brightened and were multiplied.
How sweet a life was his; how sweet a death!
Living, to wing with mirth the weary hours,
Or with romantic tales the heart to cheer;
Dying, to leave a memory like the breath
Of summers full of sunshine and of showers,
A grief and gladness in the atmosphere.

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, In the Churchyard at Tarrytown 1876


When I saw the name Washington Irving on the syllabus, my mind was full of all kinds of images & recollections from childhood. I remember watching the Donald Duck cartoon in which his 3 nephews try to convince him that he's slept for 20 years just like Rip Van Winkle. I remember the cartoon version of The Headless Horseman with Ichabod Crane and Mr. Toad (from "Wind in the Willows," another favorite of mine) -- and was it Don Knotts who voiced Ichabod? or Bing Crosby? I also remember learning that the reason we use ten bowling pins now instead of nine (like in the story) is because nine-pin bowling was outlawed for being a bad influence on society, so people started playing with 10 pins in order to circumvent the law.

Still, even though I knew the story, I think this was the very first time I've actually read Rip Van Winkle!

I think it's very interesting the way Irving makes Van Winkle into a sympathetic character. Here's a man who "would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound" and who had an "insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labour"--someone we might today call "a lazy bum"--certainly not a paragon of American Industriousness. And yet, "he was a great favourite among all the good wives of the village," and the village children "would shout with joy whenever he approached." Why, Irving even tells us that "not a dog would bark at him throughout the neighbourhood!" Even with this "great error in . . . composition," Van Winkle is a likeable character.

However, one thing in the story was different from the way I remembered it. I thought that Van Winkle got to party more with the strange characters in the glen, that he got to bowl, and that they all had a good time, making merry over their keg of liquor. I clearly remember some librarian or teacher telling us children that the moral of the story was that we ought not to waste our lives in frivolous pursuits, or else life would pass us by & it would be as if we suddenly woke up after having been asleep for 20 years and wonder where our life went (and her helper used the opportunity to warn of the dangers of alcohol).

But in the story I read today, the party in the glen is not so cheerful: "though these folks were evidently amusing themselves, yet they maintained the gravest faces, the most mysterious silence, and were, withal, the most melancholy party of pleasure [Van Winkle] had ever witnessed." He didn't even get to bowl with them, but instead just served them their drinks (and snuck a few for himself "when no eye was fixed upon him"), then fell asleep! That doesn't sound like very much fun! Obviously Hendrick Hudson & his crew don't know how to throw a very good party.

I googled some critical analysis of the story today, too, and found that many people think that Van Winkle represents Europe's view of America of the time -- kind-hearted and good-natured, but lazy -- and that his wife represents England, in that she's always telling him what to do so that he chafes under her "termagant" ways. After his long slumber, Van Winkle finds that he is finally out from under his wife's thumb & is free to just be himself -- just as the US was finally free of England's tyranny after the Revolutionary War and its citizens could make themselves into anything they wanted, without interference.

I suppose that readers of the time would have seen this story as an allegory of the young United States, but unlike so many othe "period pieces," it still works as a good story when divorced from that interpretation. (I'm thinking of "Faustus" which I saw last spring - it was probably hilarious to the audiences of the time, but most of it makes no sense now. Is that how 22nd century audiences will view "The Capitol Steps"? What will they think of Stephen Colbert??)

With such a gift for story-telling, it's no wonder that Washington Irving remains one of America's most-loved authors.


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No Pun in Ten Did

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them all at once?

-- Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government

Unlike Thoreau, and perhaps like you, I am related to no Aunt who will bail me out of jail, have no relative who will lend me money to build a pond side shack, and have no friend who will grant me squatting rights to that shack by the pond. I have utterly failed my ambition to be a trust fund baby.

-- Dan Krotz, Henry David Thoreau, Henry David Catch?

I'm a little peeved. Way back when I was in high school there was a line of greeting cards that made verbal and visual puns on famous people's names. There was the card with impressionist flowers that said "'Tis the Cezanne" and opened up to say "And Manet more!" Then there was the card with the over-inflated checker that was labeled "Chubby Checker". But my favorite was the one of a man in 19th-century garb throwing a ball labeled "Henry David Thoreau" - when opened, it showed another man trying to catch the ball & said "Henry David Catch". I know: GROAN!!

I wanted to title this post "Henry David Catch" and wanted to use that card as my illustration, but when I googled the phrase, I found that not only Dan Krotz, but several others had beaten me to the punch (including an edublog dated yesterday)! In fact, this picture here is apparently a famous painting by artist Paris Pierce:


(I am left to wonder if my British friends will be offended by the catcher's leering expression combined with his vulgar hand gesture....)

So I'm peeved that I don't get to re-cycle the Thoreau/Catch pun, but I'm glad I had the idea because it led me to Dan Krotz's lovely post about Thoreau, Transcendentalists, and Douglass. I'm happy to have found it because I was thinking the same thing.

As I was reading Resistance to Civil Government, I found myself nodding along to most of what Thoreau was saying. Yes, "a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice" (and then the zinger: "even as far as men understand it" SNAP!); yes, "it is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right"; and oh very much yes, "when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize," which happens to fall at the end of a right-hand page, leaving the real meat of that paragraph to appear at the top of the next, sure to startle awake any reader who may be comfortably agreeing, thinking that Thoreau refers to some other totalitarian regime: "What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact, that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army."

These things are all very well and good - and I agree with them whole-heartedly - but I couldn't help but think that here Thoreau is exhibiting his Class Privilege in full force. It's easy to say "the only new question [money] puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend it" when you yourself have a roof over your head and food in your belly.

True, Thoreau spent one night in jail for failure to pay his poll-tax, but from his description of the jail, it certainly sounds like he could have had it a lot worse - and may have, had he been of lower social status. One night in jail does not erase a lifetime of privilege; and while Thoreau claimed that "a change had to [his] eyes come over the scene,-- the town, and State, and country" and that he "saw yet more distinctly the State in which [he] lived," I had to wonder, with Krotz, "if [Thoreau], or any of the Transcendentalists for that matter, were at all prepared to catch and handle the ordinary stuff that most folks go through."

Does the ordinary working stiff really have the opportunity for the type of civil disobedience that Thoreau was encouraging in this essay, when their main concern is putting food on the table and shoes on their kids' feet? Should they be vilified for attending to their own very real, very earthly needs?

It was therefore heartening to see that Thoreau seems to have some inkling of this quandary, as he writes, "if I deny the authority of the State when it presents its tax-bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly and at the same time comfortably in outward respects."


Perhaps Thoreau wasn't -- and isn't -- talking to the poor and downtrodden here, but instead to the people of his own social position, those who place their property above all else, those who are "more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity."

I sure hope so.

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No Jello Here!

Speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

I was very agreeably disappointed in Mr Emerson. I had heard of him as full of transcendentalisms, myths & oracular gibberish; I had only glanced at a book of his once in Putnam’s store — that was all I knew of him, till I heard him lecture. — To my surprise, I found him quite intelligible, tho' to say truth, they told me that that night he was unusually plain.

-- Herman Melville, Letter to Evert Duyckinck, March 3 1849


I remember trying to read Emerson in high school, I believe it was an excerpt from Nature. I remember his thick prose and convoluted sentences and thinking that reading it was like trying to swim in jello. Melville's quote above makes me think that he had a similar experience. (And yet, I have always been quite comfortable reading Donne and Shakespeare, so "thick prose" isn't really a problem -- maybe I do better with iambic pentameter??) Maybe it's because I'm 20+ years older now than I was in 11th-Grade English class, or maybe I've just had the life experiences to appreciate Emerson more, but whatever it is, I found his Self-Reliance much easier to get through than Nature.

In this essay, Emerson exhorts his audience to think for themselves -- and to keep thinking for themselves, each and every day, even if what they think changes day-to-day. And yet, isn't he telling his audience what to think? I read words like "you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it," and I can't help but think and yet, he's telling people what to do, too! Perhaps it is true that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," so why should I expect Emerson to be consistent? (or maybe that's just my "feminine rage" talking....)


Snark aside, I really do agree with alot of what Emerson says in this essay: religious things like "prayer as a means to effect a private end, is theft and meanness" and "everywhere I am bereaved of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors, and recites fables merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's God," as well as personal things such as "I must be myself. I will not hide my tastes or aversions" and "the power men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity." These things resonate with my spirit & it gives me great joy to see them articulated by someone who lived and died a century-and-a-half ago.

It's especially refreshing to read things like this after spending 3 weeks reading about the horrors of slavery, and the injustices of race and class issues. As I read the essay, I thought that Emerson seemed to "get it" - he seems to understand what it means to be human, that we are each one of us precious, and valuable as individuals rather than as just part of some group. When I then read what the editors of the Norton anthology had to say of Emerson, "Valuing individual rights and believing in the individual mind (or soul) as nothing short of divine, Emerson regarded slavery as abhorrent. In the same spirit, he argued in favor of women's rights," I was not surprised.

After all, this is the guy who wrote, "All men have my blood, and I have all men's."

***

Addendum: I actually tried to find a picture of someone swimming in jello - surely *someone* has tried it & posted pics! - but the pics I found were all of a decidedly, er, shall we say "non-family-friendly" type, so I decided against posting them. :-)

Addendum the Second, Tuesday morning: This morning, I woke up thinking that Emerson's essay reminded me of that scene from Monty Python's The Life of Brian:

Brian: Please, please, please listen! I've got one or two things to say.
The Crowd: Tell us! Tell us both of them!
Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't NEED to follow ME, you don't NEED to follow ANYBODY! You've got to think for yourselves! You're ALL individuals!
The Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!
Brian: You're all different!
The Crowd: Yes, we ARE all different!
Man in crowd: I'm not...
The Crowd: Ssh!

And now we have Addendum the Third, after Tuesday's class: This image is for Dr. Scott (I wish I had the Photoshop skills to put a cravat on it!!):



which of course reminds me of this classic:
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: [to Igor] Now that brain that you gave me. Was it Hans Delbruck's?
Igor: [pause, then] No.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: Ah! Very good. Would you mind telling me whose brain I DID put in?
Igor: Then you won't be angry?
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: I will NOT be angry.
Igor: Abby Someone.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: [pause, then] Abby Someone. Abby who?
Igor: Abby Normal.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: [pause, then] Abby Normal?
Igor: I'm almost sure that was the name.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: [chuckles, then] Are you saying that I put an abnormal brain into a seven and a half foot long, fifty-four inch wide GORILLA?
[grabs Igor and starts throttling him]
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: Is that what you're telling me?

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The Milk of Human Kindness

My mother's mistress was the daughter of my grandmother's mistress. She was the foster sister of my mother; they were both nourished at my grandmother's breast. In fact, my mother had been weaned at three months old, that the babe of the mistress might obtain sufficient food.

-- Harriet Jacobs (writing as Linda Brent), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Appalachian slave women were trapped by their owners in a vicious cycle of early weaning from breastfeeding, high child mortality, and high fertility. To maximize women's productive labor in the fields or at hired locations, masters required mothers to return to work within a few weeks of childbirth and to begin to wean their babies by the 6th month. Because breastfeeding acts as a natural deterrent to pregnancy, owners could also insure higher fertility through early weaning. Modern medical research documents the powerful biological linkage between breastfeeding and child survival. Infants who are breastfed longer than one year have the highest survival rates and higher natural immunization. Since people of African heritage are disproportionately lactose intolerant to animal milk, mountain babies died in great numbers from the diet substitutes that were mixed with contaminated water. Paradoxically, child mortality acted as a spur to high fertility. When their infants died, mountain slave women were often pregnant again within less than a year. While masters required early weaning of slave children, their own infants were typically breast-fed for at least two years. To accomplish that, owners employed black mothers to serve as wet nurses and care-givers for white offspring. At the same time that mountain slave women were weaning their own infants early, 1/5 of them worked as wet nurses for white babies. At some point during their enslavement, 2/3 of the females were employed as care-givers to white children, often requiring them to leave their own offspring without adequate nutrition and nurture.

-- Wilma A. Dunaway, Slavery and the Black Appalachian Family

In his narrative, Frederick Douglass uses blood to illustrate the horror of slavery and the connection that human beings should have with one another. Harriet Jacobs uses mother's milk to accomplish the same thing in hers. Again and again she points out the total control the slaveowners had over slave women's reproduction, and how the natural bonds of human family were torn asunder by masters and mistresses who treated their slaves like livestock. And yet these same masters and mistresses had often been suckled by black slave wet nurses, even as the slave's own children were left to languish un- or under-fed.

In the first chapter, Jacobs tells of her grandmother, who served her master's household "in all capacities, from cook and wet nurse to seamstress" (1810). She writes of her grandmother's unsuccessful efforts to save enough money to buy her own children, who were separated at the death of her mistress, who "possessed but few slaves; and at her death those were all distributed among her relatives. Five of them were my grandmother's children, and had shared the same milk that nourished her mother's children" (1811).

The milk that was shared by Jacobs' grandmother's children and the children of her grandmother's mistress represents what should be a lasting emotional bond between mother and children and between the children themselves. This "milk kinship" -- the connection of children nursed by the same woman -- is still recognized in Islamic law in that they are considered to have permanent family-like relationships and cannot marry (Wikipedia "Wet Nurse"). The Wikipedia article on "milk kinship" goes on to quote Avner Giladi's paper, "Breast-feeding in Medieval Islamic thought. A preliminary study of legal and medical writings", in which he writes: "It is extremely important to understand that in all cases 'What is forbidden by blood kinship is equally forbidden by milk kinship'."

Just as Douglass points out the perversion of human relationship that resulted in the slaveowner's soul being "stained with his brother's blood" (Douglass 2082), Jacobs shows us the vulgarity that wet nursing became -- rather than a basis for connection between human beings, it was merely another way of exploiting the slaves, of using the labor and products of their bodies for the benefit of slaveowners.


Addendum: Today, there is a resurgence in wet nursing as an occupation, especially among lower-income women. This practice is very controversial, especially when the wet nurse is a woman of color and the hiring mother is white. On The Black Breastfeeding Blog, author Jennifer James wonders, "How can any black woman in good conscience become a modern-day mammy? I know the money is good, but somewhere the line has to be drawn. There are simply too many historical implications around the wet nursing travesty that has led to devastating breastfeeding rates among black women today. In truth, I didn't know black women were still being wet nurses and I certainly don't want to see it happen in large numbers."

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Red-Blooded Americans

From the crown of my head to my feet, I was covered with blood. My hair was all clotted with dust and blood; my shirt was stiff with blood. My legs and feet were torn in sundry places with briers and thorns, and were also covered with blood. I suppose I looked like a man who had escaped a den of wild beasts, and barely escaped them.

-- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life, Chapter X

It’s hard to fathom being in bondage, physically in bondage, and you get out, and you’re human. Think of being an animal for 20 years of your life, and escaping from that, willfully—all the battles that you have to put up with—and now you’re a human being. And Douglass actually knew what it meant to be a human being, no doubt about it. He understood it, very keenly.

-- Ed Hammler, Frederick Douglass: Breaking Through to Freedom


In his first autobiography, Frederick Douglass writes about blood. He writes about it alot.

I am not normally squeamish at the sight or thought of blood, but Douglass paints such a vivid picture of the sheer brutality of slavery, with its torrential rain of blood from the backs, heads and faces of the slaves, that I had to put the book down several times to compose myself. Only then could I continue reading about the reign of blood that was American slavery.

One of Douglass' earliest memories is of the bloody whipping of his aunt: "I have often been awakened at the dawn of the day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he would tie up to a post, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered in blood" (2074). He further describes this incident as "the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery" (2074). Throughout the memoir, Douglass recounts many bloody events ranging from whippings (2079), to beatings (2082), to shootings (2081), to fights involving kicking (2101) and stoning (2114).

His Biblical references involve blood, even if indirectly: for the murder of Demby, Douglass says that Mr. Gore's soul is "stained with his brother's blood" (2082), a reference to the Genesis stories of either Cain and Abel, or Joseph and his brothers (who sold him into slavery), or possibly both. Later, he describes his fellow slaves as "in very deed men and women of sorrow, and acquainted with grief," (2092) a reference to Isaiah 53:3. Readers of the time familiar with the Bible would surely, in their own minds, proceeded a few verses farther along to verse 5 which says "But he was wounded for our transgressions, . . . and with his stripes we are healed." These "stripes" are usually interpreted by Christians as a reference to the thirty-nine lashes received by Jesus during his trial before Pilate. Douglass even mentions "thirty nine lashes" as the punishment feared by those slaves attending the illegal Sabbath school (2108).

These, and the many more references to blood, make me think that Douglass is trying to strongly impress on his readers not only the incredibly awful cruelty of the slave owners and overseers, but also to remind us that all humans share a common blood, that the white slave-owners and the black slaves alike are both "red-blooded Americans."

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall

Her figure, her air, her features -- all, in their very minutest development were those -- were identically (I can use no other sufficient term) were identically those of the Roderick Usher who sat beside me.

--Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher

"Had Mr. Poe written nothing else but 'Morella,' 'William Wilson,' 'The House of Usher,' and the 'MS. Found in a Bottle,' he would deserve a high place among imaginative writers . . . there is scarcely one of the tales published in these two volumes before us, in which we do not find the development of great intellectual capacity, with a power for vivid description, an opulence of imagination, a fecundity of invention, and a command over the elegance of diction which have seldom been displayed, even by writers who have acquired the greatest distinction in the republic of letters."

-- (Louis F. Tasistro, [a review of Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque], New York Mirror, December 28, 1839.)


Wow, there's so much stuff in Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher that I'm having a hard time deciding what to write about! Of course there's the theme of isolation which has been running through all of our readings so far, exemplified in this story by the mansion being in an isolated location and surrounded by a moat-like tarn (Poe 1553), as well as by the information that Roderick and Madeline had been isolated in the house for many years (1556-57) (and does this imply an incestuous relationship?).


Then there's Poe's use of language, especially his seeming obsession with the word "phantasmagoric," denoting a bizarre collection or assemblage (Merriam-Webster definition 3) and its relation to "phantasm," something supposedly seen, but having no physical substance (The American Heritage Dictionary definition 1).


This idea of "something supposedly seen also ties into the unreliability of the narrator, who several times calls Roderick a "hypochondriac" (Poe 1558, 1561, and 1563) and says that he has "superstitious impressions" (1556), all while he himself repeatedly recounts his own feelings of dread and impending doom.


Poe also makes symbolic use of the color red (or the colors at the red end of the spectrum), with his description of the "feeble glow of encrimsoned light" (1555), the "sulphurous luster" (1557), the "ruby glowing door" (1559), the "red-litten windows" (1559), and the "faint blush upon [Madeline's] bosom and . . . face" (1561). Likewise, the color red plays a part int he climactic finale of the story, appearing in the Trist here's name "Ethelred," who conquers the fire-breathing dragon (1564) (fire is also red) just as the "blood-red moon" could be said to conquer the mansion (1565) (not to mention the vault's copper archway and Ethelred's brass shield).



But I think a very interesting image Poe uses in Usher is that of a mirror. Despite our common illusion that a mirror shows an exact duplicate of an object or person, it actually displays the exact opposite image -- left is transposed with right and, depending on the relative orientations of mirror and viewer, up can be transposed with down, as with the case of the mansion's reflection in the tarn at the beginning of the story (1553). Roderick and Madeline are twins (1561). It could be said that they are mirror images of each other, identical in appearance but transposed male with female. Likewise their afflictions are similarly transposed: as Madeline becomes more devoid of sensation in her catalepsy (1557), so Roderick's senses become hyper-active (1556).


Is it fated that because they were born together, so too must Roderick and Madeline die together?

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

'I don't like it,' muttered an old woman, as she hobbled into the meeting-house. 'He has changed himself into something awful, only by hiding his face.'

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Minister's Black Veil

But Hawthorne's look was different from that of any picture of him that I have seen. It was sombre and brooding, as the look of such a poet should have been; it was the look of a man who had dealt faithfully and therefore sorrowfully with that problem of evil which forever attracted, forever evaded Hawthorne. It was by no means troubled; it was full of a dark repose.

--W. D. Howells, A Personal Retrospect of American Authorship

A veil is a curious piece of fabric. Some veils are translucent, others completely opaque. Over the centuries, people from various cultures have worn them for reasons ranging from decorative to punitive, and usually it is women who are veiled, but in The Minister's Black Veil, Father Hooper wears a veil made from black crape. This veil proves troubling to his congregation and isolates him from their community in many ways, but why? It's only a thin piece of fabric!

One famous veil that Hawthorne would have been familiar with was the veil in the tabernacle of the ancient Hebrews, and later incorporated into the temple of Jerusalem. According to Exodus 26, God decreed that "the veil shall divide unto you between the holy place and the most holy" (Ex 26:33 KJV). The "most holy" was the earthly dwelling place of God's spirit and no living human was supposed to enter this space (except under extremely special circumstances), under pain of death. Just as thin piece of fabric separated the glory of God from ignoble humankind, was Hooper's veil meant to separate him from humans said to be created in the image of God?



If that's the case, then the townspeople surely did not act as if they were so created. Hooper says, "have men avoided me, and women shown no pity, and children screamed and fled, only for my black veil?" (1320). The people were so intimidated by the veil that nobody except Elizabeth could even bring themselves to ask him why he wore it. Were they afraid to hear his answer? As Hooper asks, "what . . . has made this piece of crape so awful?" (1320).

We all separate ourselves from other humans every day. Whether it's the way we sit on the bus so as not to touch someone else, or the way we avoid eye contact as we walk along, we hide behind the veil of privacy or of politeness. Even while we do this, we pretend that we are not separated at all. While Hooper made his separation manifest in the cloth of his veil, not even Elizabeth could bear to really reach the human behind that veil. Even "his plighted wife" paid no attention to the man behind the curtain.