I wot well that I have gone over-far with this faux Middle English, good ladies and gentle sirs. Yet bridle this wench if ye can, for she meaneth not to mend her ways, repent, reform, nor return peaceably to modern speech. May Chapter 2 please thee more than it vexeth the grammarians. Make ye merry!

Chapter 2

Night had fallen and a low hum coursed its way through thick veins in the ground. And one by one, the men of the village rose from their beds without lighting candles, dressed in the dark, and bent to kiss wives who slept, or pretended to sleep, beneath thin woolen blankets. No farewells were dared spoken at this hour and for this purpose. Doors opened, then closed softly behind them, and solitary figures slipped between their humble huts, gathering upon the varied moonless roads until they became a silent procession moving toward the old tithe barn, summoned there by a great beast living in the loam.

They entered separately. Oswin the blacksmith approached from the western wood, having blackened the bright buckles upon his boots with soot. Hugh Talmadge arrived carrying a mattock across one shoulder, so that any watchman who questioned him might believe he had been summoned to repair a ditch in the dark, though no watchman would have believed it for long. Walter Reed, whose brother had been hanged seven years before for leading laborers away from their service, came with a knife beneath his cloak. Simon Cobb came unarmed and seemingly unafraid; at sixty-two and the oldest man in the village, he knew that death required no blade to find him. Martin Fletcher came smiling, he was always smiling for no reason at all. Thomas Payne brought the steward’s wage tally from the previous harvest, its mean little notches recording what each man had been paid before the pestilence made labor scarce. Alfred Atwood came in with his hood drawn low. They were seven in all, or so any mortal counting the figures below would have said. But an omniscient god looking down through the broken roof might have counted eight, for high in the barn, where the rafters opened upon the stars, Eleanor lay hidden in the hay. She had been watching the night sky when the first man slipped through the door beneath her, and then another came after him. At once she drew herself deeper into the shadows, pulled the loose straw over her dress, and lay silent among the beams, the gathering’s eighth and unsuspected guest.

“Bar the doors,” Thomas said.

Hugh Talmadge shifted uneasily. “If the doors are barred, we cannot flee.”

“If the doors are not barred,” Thomas replied, “we may have no warning before the duke’s men enter.”

Walter Reed lowered a heavy timber into place, the sound echoed through the barn. Several of the men glanced upward, but none saw Eleanor. She had rolled onto her belly in the hayloft, pressed beneath a rotting horse blanket which smelled of dung, near enough some dead thing she dared not dwell on. Splinters dug into her palms and dust filled her nose. Each breath had to be taken slowly, silently, through parted lips.

Oswin struck the flint against his firesteel until a spark caught in the scrap of tinder cupped between his hands. He breathed gently upon it, coaxing forth a frail flame, and from this lit a candle of sheep’s tallow brought by Simon. Its light was small and ill-smelling; it climbed into the rafters, revealing to Eleanor the bowed crowns of the men below and their long shadows streaked across the wall, awaiting some brave soul to lead them into the light.

Martin Fletcher peered at the small flame, “Is that the best candle thou couldst bring?”

Simon lowered himself onto a broken chest, his knees cracking beneath him, “Nay. I keep the best candles for treason.”

Martin Fletcher, not knowing one way up or down, nodded gravely. “A wise precaution, that is, Simon.”

Thomas Payne set the steward’s tally upon an overturned barrel. “Come nearer,” he said to the group. “I did not steal this that ye might admire it from the dark.”

Oswin the blacksmith remained where he stood, his thick arms folded across his chest. “A notch looks much the same near or far.”

“Aye,” Thomas replied, “and a fool looks much the same whether he stand beside thee or across the room, yet wise men draw near enough to know him, for folly is no harmless thing.”

Hugh Talmadge shuffled closer, resting both hands upon the head of his mattock. “Best lower thy voices. The night carries sound strangely over the fields, most especially when the ground is wet, and it rained hard this morning. My father ever said a whisper travels farther over wet earth than a shout over dry.”

Thomas began softly, “All right, Hugh. Take no heed whether it be wet or dry, but let every man be still. Ye have all heard the proclamation from Master Beauchamp. Much have we to speak of, and little time to spend ere the new day’s labour begin.”

“Aye, Thomas,” the group rang out in varying tones and times. Alfred alone remained silent beneath his cloak. Eleanor could scarcely distinguish him, pressed as he was into the darkest corner, beyond the candle’s reach.

Thomas tapped the tally with one finger. “Here is the steward’s account from the last harvest. One penny for a full day’s labor. One penny for the reaping, the binding, the lifting, and the loading. Another halfpenny if the grain reached the manor ere the sun went down. But for any cart that came after dusk, only the penny.”

Martin leaned nearer the tally, his brow furrowed with the grave attention of a most serious scholar. “And if the cart reached the manor when half the sun remained above the hill, yet the other half had gone beneath it, would the steward pay the halfpenny entire, or only half of the halfpenny?”

Simon Cobb regarded him across the candle flame. “He would pay thee nothing, Martin, and fine thee besides for setting thine arse against the sun and casting more shadow than a laborer hath leave to own.”

Martin considered this with some concern. “My arse, good sir?”

Oswin cut across them, his voice sharp with scorn addressing Thomas. “A halfpenny! Whose grain?”

“The duke’s,” said Thomas.

“And whose cart bears it? Whose axle groans beneath the weight?”

“The duke’s.”

Oswin stepped nearer. “And the road beneath its wheels?”

Thomas held his gaze. “Aye. The duke’s road as well, Oswin.”

“There, lads. Ye have the measure of it.” Oswin swept a hand toward them. “What belongeth to the lord is his, whilst it profiteth him and ours the moment it breaketh.”

Hugh Talmadge shifted his mattock against his shoulder and wrung his hands. “To speak justly, the lower road hath been in poor repair since Michaelmas. I told Beauchamp the eastern rut required stone, but he said the ground would harden with frost or the spring warm sun would dry the wet earth, which did not. I did not believe it when he said the carts could avoid it, but they cannot ‘fore this is the straightest road from here unto the manor.” Hugh lowered his head in shame, he was a wounded man no doubt, hearing nothing but excuses that did not make sense.

Walter, ever the empath, watched him awhile, then gave his shoulder two stiff and tender pats on the back. “There, there, Hugh,” he said. “Thou hast yet thy wife, thy sons, and that damned pig of thine. Many a man hath gone to the gallows with much, much less.”

Thomas bent over the harvest tallies, his finger tracing the columns of grain and coin over the last few years. “Salt, iron, wool, almost everything we rely on, costs more than it did before the pestilence. Though a man’s day is bought for the same old penny. Living hath grown more costly.”

Thomas stood up tall, “The truth is plain enough. There are fewer laborers, yet more labor demanded of each. The pestilence carried men from their beds and children from their sickly mothers, but it had spared the duke’s acres. The barley still requireth sowing and the wheat all the reaping though half the hands that once performed those works lie beneath the churchyard earth. We have seen it! We have lived through it! And what do we get in return?! Nothing.”

Silence fell among the men, the heaviest of silences as the earth heaped upon a grave. There was no turning aside from the truth, for it lay bare in the steward’s tally, and etched more deeply still in their hollow cheeks and work-worn hands. Such truths are the black beetles that sleep beneath dead bark, hiding through the long cold and stirring at the touch of the smallest flame. The painful, deepest truths.

Thomas continued. “Harthill lost near half its laborers and because of this, six cottages stand empty, and Lord Harcourt’s steward hath offered them rent-free until Michaelmas to households bringing two able workers to the land.”

Walter folded his arms. “So what is it Thomas, speak plainly. We flee one lord and kneel before another now?”

“We bargain with one by means of the other,” Thomas replied.

“With what strength?”

“The value of our labor.”

Simon laughed. “A mighty weapon. Shall we threaten the duke with our blisters?”

Thomas faced him. “A sword may spill blood, Simon, but it cannot reap barley. The duke hath acres, carts, barns, horses, and writs bearing seals. Without hands he hath only fine English grass beneath his feet and nothing more.”

Oswin nodded. “What wouldst thou demand?”

“Two pennies at harvest. A penny and a half on common days and bread at noon. Payment for women who labor in place of husbands or sons retained for the duke’s company. Fewer service days from households deprived of able men.” Thomas pointed to the Harthill tally. “We go before the duke and tell him plainly that Harthill hath offered better terms. If he refuseth ours, six households depart before harvest.”

Hugh looked uneasily about the gathering. “How shall we know which six? A man may speak boldly in a barn and less boldly when his wife asketh where the children shall sleep, whether the cottage roof holdeth rain, and how much remaineth after the journey.”

Martin, our serious scholar, frowned. “Could they not sleep beneath the cart?”

Simon turned his head toward him. “Aye, Martin. And when winter cometh they may burn the wheels for warmth and eat the axle upon feast days.”

“The axle would be hard eating, Simon.”

“Then thank God thou hast no mouths to feed nor household to lead.”

Martin agreed, hardly knowing why, “Aye, Simon. ‘Tis a good thing.”

Oswin chimed in, “Harthill’s offer maketh no man free. He who hath pledged a season may be imprisoned for breaking service, and a villein who departeth without leave may lose cottage, field, and goods before he hath walked half the road. Beauchamp’s men will seize them as fugitives and return them before their hearths have cooled in their huts.”

Hugh scratched his beard in exasperation and fear. “Then what strength hath the offer? We may as well threaten the duke that we shall fly there.”

Martin looked upward. “How far is Harthill by air?”

Simon sighed. “Farther for thee than for most birds.”

It was then that Eleanor heard her father’s voice, the first time this night. “The law, if he hath bound himself to another’s service,” Alfred replied. “The manor, if he be villein and departeth without his lord’s leave. Beauchamp may present him as fugitive, seize what goods remain behind, distrain his kin, or command that he be taken should he return.”

Thomas turned to Alfred, “What dost thou propose?”

Alfred thought deeply, “The strength lieth not in every household departing. The strength lieth in enough men departing that those who remain cannot gather the duke’s harvest without accepting the old wage.”

Oswin’s eyes narrowed, “Those who remain refuse hired labor?”

“Aye. They perform what service custom plainly requireth and not one hour beyond it. No reaping for the old penny. No carting after dusk for no chance of a halfpenny. No wives sent in place of sons without payment. If six households go to Harthill and the rest refuse the duke’s hire, Beauchamp must either grant the wage or watch grain rot upon the stalk.”

Walter gave a dry laugh. “Thou speakest as though the duke will stand in his hall wringing his hands rather than lay hand to steel. Hast thou forgotten his knights?”

“Nay,” Thomas replied. “I forget them not. He will threaten fines, imprisonment, seizure, and perhaps the rope, should anger overtake judgment. That is why we must know the hour when the cost of enforcing his will exceedeth the price of granting ours.”

Hugh, who trusted no future until it had safely become the past, and even then, shifted uneasily upon his feet. “And how may a man know when such an hour hath come?”

“As he knoweth when a tree shall fall,” Oswin said. “By where the weight lieth.” Thomas nodded in agreement and continued, “And we do not yet know where the duke’s weight lieth. We see his fields, his barns, his carts, and the men he commandeth, yet these are but the outward parts of his strength. Somewhere within the manor there will be an account of what grain hath already been promised, to whom it must be delivered, upon what day, and what silver is lost if the measure falleth short.”

Alfred approached the group, “Thou speakest of a grain agreement, Thomas?”

Thomas responded, happy to see his close friend speak up, “Aye, Alfred. With a merchant.”

Alfred replied, “Mayhap. Or an abbey, a purveyor, another lord’s household. It mattereth little who awaiteth the grain. What mattereth is whether our man York hath taken silver beforehand or bound himself to deliver a fixed quantity before the winter come.”

Thomas’ voice came quietly. “And if he hath?”

Alfred with resoluteness, “Then his harvest no longer belongeth wholly to him. It hath become a debt standing in the fields and he’ll yield to our demands more readily.”

The men were silent. Thomas placed one finger upon the old wage tally. “To raise every harvest wage from one penny to two may cost him several pounds. A great sum to men such as us, yet no great sum beside a failed delivery, a forfeited advance, or a quarrel with some merchant whose friends sit near the king’s officers. If we learn the measure promised and the day appointed, we may reckon how long the grain may stand before his loss exceedeth the price of our demand. Thus we shall confront the duke when he hath the greatest need of peasants and the fewest knights with which to explain that he hath none.”

Thomas looked at all the men after a few moments of silence. “A lord may endure shame longer than loss. We shall therefore speak in the language he understandeth.”

Simon nodded gravely. “At last, a translation fit for court.”

Martin leaned over the tally. “And where is this grain agreement and these accounts?”

Thomas looked toward Alfred. “The steward must know the expected yield of each field, the number of hands required, the cost of cartage, and the quantity already promised. Such writings will be kept in his chamber or in the coffer where he holdeth the estate accounts.”

Oswin folded his arms across his chest. “And how, precisely, are we to lay hands upon these accounts?”

Walter’s fingers strayed beneath his cloak and came to rest upon the hilt of his knife. “We take them.”

Alfred regarded him from beneath his hood. “Thou art ever fond of that answer, Walter. A pity thou art less generous with the part that followeth. Shall we walk through the gate, bid Beauchamp good even, and ask him to stand aside whilst we rob his coffer?”

Martin chimed in, “Things are commonly kept behind doors.”

Alfred turned to Martin, “And manors commonly keep guards before them.”

Simon in his own nonchalant way, “Guards sleep.”

Alfred, “So do men whose throats have been cut.”

Thomas ignored them and traced the rough shape of the manor upon the parchment. “Oswin may enter the lower yard when iron requireth mending. Hugh may be summoned to a ditch if the rains worsen. Neither will pass the household offices unwatched. Alfred will be recognized before he gaineth the gate, and Martin would bring suspicion with him were he dressed as the Blessed Virgin.”

Martin raised his hand, “Hast thou forgotten that I have entered the manor kitchen.”

Thomas looked at Martin, “Didst thou pass the steward’s chamber?”

“I passed many chambers.”

“Which?”

Martin thought for a long moment, “One contained lady things.”

Simon sighed. “The rebellion prospereth.”

“No man here can enter Beauchamp’s chamber without giving cause for inquiry,” Thomas said. “Nor can any man remain within the manor long enough to discover when the room standeth empty, where the coffer key is kept, and which writing containeth the harvest reckoning.”

Alfred was silent for a long while, his face hidden beneath the fall of his hood. When at last he spoke, his voice was scarcely louder than the tallow flame. “What of Agnes?”

Eleanor’s heart gave a wild flutter against her ribs. Both hands flew to her mouth before the cry could escape. Her mother’s name did not belong in that place, it belonged beside the warm stones of the hearth and among the drying bundles of rosemary, feverfew that hung from the rafters of their cottage. It belonged in birthing rooms, spoken by frightened husbands when the blood came too freely, and by children burning with fever who reached for Agnes before they reached even for their own mothers.

“Twice has Agnes entered the manor,” Alfred said. “Once when Master Elric’s mother took the summer fever, and once when the laundress’s child came feet-first and the child lived. Those within know the worth of her hands and will think nothing of her there.”

Walter’s fingers remained upon the knife beneath his cloak. “Then she may enter again without trouble.”

Thomas bent over the rough drawing of the manor. “If Lady Eira’s confinement draweth near, Agnes may be summoned and kept within the household through the night. A difficult birth emptieth corridors while servants run for water or anything else that promiseth aid.”

“She would be there to save a life, Thomas, we must remember that,” Alfred said.

“Aye,” Thomas answered. “And no man here should ask her to neglect that duty, but there are hours in such a night when the mother sleepeth or the child hath not come. Agnes observeth more than most men know and may learn where Beauchamp keep his keys, which door leads to the accounts, and when that door is left unwatched.”

Above them, Eleanor felt the cold rise through the barn, though no wind had entered and the tallow flame continued to burn steadily below. In her mind she saw Agnes passing beneath the manor walls with her medicine satchel pressed against her hip, walking between guards whose swords shone bright in the torchlight, admitted because men trusted a healer, and a woman at that! The vision sharpened until it seemed less a fear than a memory of some evil not yet come: Agnes upon the gallows beneath a bleak morning sky, her dark hair torn loose by the wind whipping about, her face already strange with the distance death put between the condemned and the living; Agnes searching the gathered village, not for mercy, for there would be none, but for the faces of her children one last time. Eleanor bit down upon her knuckles until pain flared through her hand..

Hugh shifted uneasily and looked about worried someone had been listening. “And what must she take? The agreement itself?”

“If she can,” Thomas said. “Or Beauchamp’s harvest reckoning and other accounts. We need not keep it, of course. Alfred readeth the figures, I copy them, and Agnes returneth the writing before its absence is noticed among the men with the swords.”

Simon looked across the candle at him. “A simple matter, then! She need only enter a guarded manor, deceive a steward, deliver a babe, rob the coffers of the accounts, and return it all before supper. Simple, indeed.”

Martin nodded gravely. “It soundeth less difficult when told in order like that, Simon.”

Eleanor shifted back, and the rotten blanket tore beneath her knee with a harsh rasp. Walter’s knife flashed free before the sound had died and every face snapped toward the sky. “A rat,” Hugh breathed. “No rat weareth wool,” Oswin said, already moving. Eleanor snatched at the hem of her dress, but the board beneath her palm gave a long, traitorous groan. Thomas thrust the candle high. Light knifed through the beams, caught her sleeve, and lit Alfred’s face below, pale with dawning horror. She tried to crawl away, but the timber split. Her arm plunged through to the shoulder, straw burst downward in a choking cloud, and the candle flame leapt wild as Walter sprang beneath her with steel raised. “Come down,” he snarled, “or I shall bring the sky down with thee!”

For More Information

“Living in the 14th Century.” The National Archives, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/living-in-the-14th-century/. Accessed 2 Feb 2025.

“Manors and Manorial Records.” The National Archives, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/manors/. Accessed 21 Mar 2025.

“The Statute of Laborers; 1351.” The Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, avalon.law.yale.edu/medieval/statlab.asp. Accessed 4 Jan 2025.

When I found out that there would be a movie about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 I let out a shriek. To say I was excited would be an understatement. Then I remembered that I had written something earlier last year. Here is chapter 1 of this story. It’s also a draft so you will see weird perspective shifts as I tried to test whether first person and close third person narrative made more sense here. I apologize to all my readers, I have so much unfinished fiction on here, I promise that I will get it to you all in its entirety at some point in the near future. Also, I will be reposting a short article on Joan/Johanna Ferrour1 who led the peasants revolt in London. I wish we knew more about her2. More to come!

Chapter 1

A few hours before sunrise, the fathomless sky, dotted with thousands of shimmering stars, beckoned Eleanor out of her deeply rooted slumber. Her father once told her, before the family settled down to supper one night, that stars were like handwriting on a wall that could be deciphered and understood like a story. With knights and kings and queens who loved and danced at court and ruled the land, so did the stars rule the heavens with a heavy hand.

“Father, does God live among the stars?” Eleanor knew her family and everyone in the village looked to a man called God. They crossed themselves, kneeled down to him, and looked up in supplication at the sky. He must have been important, but she never saw him and wondered if he would ever come and visit with grandeur and pomp, like the duke and his retinue.

“Eleanor, he is not of this Earth and lives in Heaven, he sees all that you do,” her father definitively proclaimed with an earnestness in his calm blue eyes. She was intrigued and frightened.

“Father….will I ever get to see him?”

“One day, if you are good you will see him in Heaven and he will welcome you with love in his heart.”

“But father, I would like to see him soon. May I visit him and bring him turnips from the field?”

“Your time will come when you get to see him, but it will not be a time of your choosing. Only He will decide when you can and IF you can enter the gates of Heaven. Until then look up to the stars and call to Him and beg for forgiveness for all us who have been born sinners.”

“How do you know, Father? How do you know all of these things about God?”

“I do not need to see things to know, Eleanor.”3

God had captivated Eleanor because she felt his presence but could not see him and wanted to learn more. So Eleanor looked to the sky every day and prayed. When she felt alone, cold and hungry, she looked to the stars wondering what God was like, what she needed to do to be good, and how to ask Him to forgive her people. In this earnestness, she would squint and focus her eyes and look for God’s face in the clouds. Her mother would admonish her, “Eleanor do not strain your eyes, there is no such thing as God. You’re better looking at your feet and the floor near in front of you ‘fore you trip over yourself.” This admonishment always came with a chuckle and a knowing smirk of a woman who knows she knows too little of this world for high and mighty thoughts.

In that deepest of night with those same stars in the sky, Eleanor tip-toed heedfully out of the bed she shared with her two younger sisters and crossed the small hut in which her entire family lived. There was no moon and the large pile of wood her father and brothers chopped the day before in her usual spot behind the hut, looked alarmingly like the Turners’ frazzled dog with its splinters like wisps of hair and upended roots like gnarled teeth. She meandered carefully over to the logs and sat upon them conscientiously, undeterred by its canine-like appearance but guarded against its sharp edges. She clasped her hands together as she saw the elders do at mass every Sunday and began her requests.

“God, please help Father till the land with ease. Even though he shouts and gets angry at Godwin and Wymond for eating the radishes. Father needs to feed us and the duke and his family. He is only upset with my brothers so that they do not pull all the radishes from the field again. Also, please forgive my brothers for they are hungry and do not eat until supper from early in the morning to dusk. Radishes are nutritious and satiating and stave off this hunger. Please forgive them even though they pinch and push me.

“For Beatrice and Matilda, they are but babies and do not mean to cry so much at night. The dark frightens them, and their teeth are growing in slowly which looks like it causes much pain. Mother is very tender with them and patient with me. Please help Mother feel better. She has developed pain in her head, she is always tired, and is sick constantly. Nurse Mathilda came over with some herbal remedies that smelled lovely, but you know all and love all that is good so I know you will help her feel better.”

After imploring God for help for her family, Eleanor sat in silence waiting for a reply, a sign, or proof that God thought her family good and worthy of His assistance. After a few moments of searching for a sign, she only heard the silence of a sleeping village. Some time had gone by since her Father described God, where he lived and what he did for his people. Months– quite a long time for a person of thirteen years– of incessant prayer up at the stars. Still her brothers ate the radishes, still her Father yelled and became quick to anger when the crops would not grow, STILL her sisters cried and her Mother tired easily. Eleanor thought it possible that her family was not worthy of God’s love. Sitting there thoughtfully, she knew this did not seem right.

The Duke’s family received answers to their prayers. They were healthy and strong, dressed finely, and the son, Master Osric, got to eat all the radishes and game he desired without reproach from anyone. Eleanor at this tenderest age, grappled with these notions of inequity and knew not how to reconcile this with God. Maybe her mother was right. She would focus on the ground below her and think nothing more of this god she could not see.

Amidst Eleanor’s quiet questioning, a more sinister undercurrent of activity had started to form. It started one morning, when Eleanor, kneeling down dutifully to recite her morning prayers, looked up upon the raucous gathering of villagers forming outside her family’s hut. She saw the Duke of York ride into the village from the little window, a square cutout in the wall, next to her straw bed.

Master Elric, the Duke of York, came into the village frequently to oversee the health of the crops and the management of the serfs. He worked with his aide to identify the sick and those who died from illness, birth of babies, starvation, and accidents in the field. “The life of a serf, whether it be good or bad, is still in the best interest of Master Elric.” Her father would proclaim this maxim secretly to the village men that would visit her family’s hut for a round of mead after supper. “Aye Alfred, you’ve a clean tongue and better is the wound of truth than a kiss of a lie,” the men would proclaim in turn. A dead serf was of no use, which is something Nurse Matilda recited often when Eleanor would get too near the fiery stove, or when she found Eleanor high up the maple trees perched there to hide from her brothers. These all but daily reminders of who they were to the duke and to God.

The little village of eight families was situated cozily on the landed estate of the Duke of York. These families cultivated the land primarily for the duke’s family, and the little they had for themselves split among one hundred hungry people. Both men and women worked before the sun rose and well after sunset, with the only respite on the holy day of Sunday when Eleanor’s mother would sit the family around a tiny wooden table so they could pray in the morning. In the afternoon, when the day got warmer, the Talbots and the Paynes would come over and someone would be playing the flute and all of the children would dance and sing, quite relieved of the daily toil exacted upon them the rest of the week.

All this to say that amid the busy doings of a village of eight families and despite the Duke having come often before, the duke’s arrival that morning caused an unexpected stirring within the village–even the sheep in Eleanor’s father’s yard scurried around in their pen, more anxious than usual. Eleanor’s father, having been in the field, hurried back on the insistence of her mother who dashed out as soon as whispers of the duke’s arrival came to pass.

Master Elric was an austere man, who ruled the estate diplomatically and strategically. A member of the English baronage and fiercely loyal to King Edward III, he was also pious and devoted to the religious teachings of the serfs. Although not completely kind, he was a meticulous surveyor of all that occurred within the village and, as much as he could within the bounds of his rank, addressed the concerns of the people.

At night, Eleanor would stay up when her mother thought she was asleep and listened carefully to the words of her father and his friends, who would come into the hut and share a pint of mead to end the day and talk about the topics of most interest at the time. Usually the topics concerned the other serfs, the duke, and all the gossip and affairs that passed from the market in between.

On that fateful morning, Master Elric came in with his usual aide, but also other men bedecked in thick plates of armor. Eleanor was both frightened and curious. “How do these men stay atop a horse with such a heavy weight upon them?” They were called knights and many in her village feared them for they were vassals of the duke that had unruly command over the serfs . They were also arbitrators of all that was evil in this world – war.

In all of Eleanor’s short life, she knew little of war or battle, but only of what was passed in these late night conversations about infidels and men who worshiped in ways that were different and quite possibly wrong. They worshipped what sounded like the same god, but they called him Allah. She felt an ominous foreboding of the attendance of the knights, a fear most likely shared by the others and confirmed by the whisperings and the crying babies among the crowd (for babies can sense the fear within their mothers).

Master Osric’s aide, a Sir Hugh Beauchamp, spoke first.

“Attention! I invite all of the Duke of York’s men to come around here. If you do not forfeit yourself from your present duties and heed his commands, you shall surrender yourself to the might of God and in his judgment and upon pain of death you shall be forever banished to the gates of Hell!”

Master Elric looked haggard on his white mare, an old man of thirty-nine years. The men looked up at him, setting down their tools. The villagers stood quiet, with dirt and sweat on their faces and more than slightly mystified about these commands so proclaimed with little censure.

They knew to respect the duke’s words, but secretly harbored their own anxieties and anticipations. Eleanor’s father placed her on his shoulders so she could get a better view over the crowd–having dashed from the hut and the grasp of her mother’s arms.

“Thank you...erm…for the introduction, Beauchamp. I shall take it from here.”

With a grand pause, the duke continued and with a commanding voice. “God has called upon his people to fight against the infidels in the far east, the savages that slay all that is good and righteous in the Holy Land. His Royal Highness is summoning all lords of the land to take up arms and support the cause. Being lord of this vast estate, I look to ALL able men to take the sword.”

A stirring in the crowd. The knights whipped their horses around in an effort to quiet these rumblings with much effect. Eleanor’s father placed her down tenderly and whispered, “Go to your mother and help her with supper.” Eleanor ran back to her mother, but felt restless and excited and so her mother let her peer out the window to listen to the remainder of these shocking proceedings.

Thomas Payne spoke up with a modicum of hesitation and kneeled down in obeisance. “My Lord. We are but serfs, trained by birth to work the land, provide for your family, what we can for ourselves, and pray to God. We are not trained to fight so effectively against the infidels. As you say, they are savages and will strike us down with little effort. What make you of….”

Sir Beauchamp, offended by this audacity, answers in kind. “You will have the power of God driving your efforts and it is He who will give you the strength of twenty savages. How dare you speak up against your lord!” Beauchamp fumed these last words through gritted teeth – a large man, he strode down from his horse to lay his hand against Thomas in a rather fearsome way.

Eleanor’s father and Thomas always discussed matters of the estate and it was clear that Thomas disliked the duke and at times even God. Her father once told her that “Thomas is not a believer, but we must love him despite this.”

“But father, why must we then always fight the infidels who are themselves nonbelievers? I am sure they deserve our compassion?” Her father’s solemn expression was never the satisfactory answer she needed.

As the others parted to make way for Beauchamp it was Eleanor’s father who moved forward deftly to block Beauchamp’s strike against Thomas. Father was even stronger and much taller than Beauchamp so the block was successful. Regardless, Eleanor felt a tightening in her stomach as she witnessed this clash of titans. She did not want Father to get hurt or be punished later by the duke for this boldness. However, as soon as the punch was blocked everyone was given reassurance. The duke exclaimed, “Stop!” raising his hand forcefully and with a finality that only a man with all the blessing from an English king could command.

“Let us save the fighting for the infidels. For anyone who can spare an able-bodied son, meet in the same exact location here in a fortnight’s time. Your sons and brothers will be trained by our knights and taken to the Holy Land no later than Michaelmas. There is no time to waste and if I hear of any trouble from either serf OR knight, I will see to it that God’s might counter in kind. And if your sons die in this valiant effort, take comfort in knowing that families will be eternally pardoned.”

Upon a smaller brown horse, behind the duke and the rest of the knights was a boy who looked to be about fourteen years old. Regaled in ermine and with small jewels on his sash, he looked out of place among a sea of sweat, dirt and raggedness. However, Eleanor noticed a soft compassion in his green eyes and rather than showing a stern expression like the knight’s or a haggard one like the duke’s, his face showed only sadness. Eleanor concluded that he was the duke’s much talked of first son, Master Elric. The possibility of Master Elric longing to enter into battle with the knights struck Eleanor as rather boyish and not unlike her own adventurous brothers. “For why else would he be sad? What boy of fourteen does not dream of being a knight himself astride a war horse running valiantly into battle?”

The thought then came surging into Eleanor’s mind. “Able-bodied son. Did that mean her brothers would need to fight?” Turning to her mother, Eleanor received a most definitive answer. A few moments after hearing Master Osric’s words, she dropped the spoon she used to stir their dinner and crouched over with a pained expression. This, an expression reflected in all the mothers in the crowd. Eleanor’s mother may have held back her tears to show restraint in front of the duke, but she desperately thought of Godwin and Wymond.

And with a promise of eternal pardon the men on horseback rode away, leaving behind the villagers who had an array of emotions: the mother with her sadness, the father with his anger (some at the infidels, others at the duke), and excitement from the young men who were called to battle.

“You think because you never raise your voice, God cannot hear you?” Miriam heard this thin piercing question coming from somewhere in the umbra1 of her prison cell. She slept with the Bible under her pillow, but tonight she had it on her chest with her left hand resting upon it and the other hand behind her head looking up at the ceiling where she painted pictures, played her favorite movies, traveled to faraway places she never got to go to, and flashed her worn out and jagged thoughts upon that obscure and relentless sky. Somewhere in a distant cell another prisoner coughed until they gagged.

When Miriam didn’t answer, she heard her cellmate hiss out again, “did you hear me? Pssttt….Miriam?”

“What?! Quiet, the guards will hear you.”

“But I can’t sleep, and because I didn’t hear you snore, I assumed you couldn’t sleep either. I want to talk.”

“Okay, let’s talk, but I don’t want to talk about God right now.”

“That’s okay, I don’t either. We can talk about anything, really.”

“Then why did you mention God?”

“Because I thought that would be something you would be interested in….especially since the other night….”

“The other night, what?”

“Well, the other night, you woke me up. You were shouting in your sleep, saying things like ‘God! Hear me!! Don’t leave me!’ and you shot your hand right up into the air as if you were reaching for something. Your hand made a weird shadow along the wall and it looked like a monster ...like a serpent rising up and out of your bed.”2

Exposing My Insecurities Around Writing About The Penitentiary System

I knew I wanted to write a story about women in the American prison system, though I also knew almost immediately that this was a risky subject and I had to be careful, because the truth is that my knowledge of prisons, and especially prisons built to hold women, is still relatively superficial3. From a creative standpoint, there is so much there that interests me: how people deal with the loss of freedom, the interesting ways people organize themselves inside a semi-closed/closed system, the psychological differences between how women and men might form alliances or rivalries in self-made hierarchies. But that interest can very easily become a dubious exercise if I am not paying attention or doing the responsible thing of researching this system and recognizing that the creative world I build within this system, will be one angle of many that deserves attention. And that as much research as I do here, it will never replace the very real world it rests upon.

I also do not want to write about incarcerated women in a way that erases what brought them there. Some have committed terrible and hateful crimes, and observing their humanity should not mean diminishing the humanity of their victims or treating suffering as though it only belongs to the person being incarcerated. Even in fiction, I feel some responsibility to hold both things at once: that a person may have caused real, irreparable harm, and that the conditions under which justice is exacted upon her still matter and need to be discussed. And then there is the harm that moves beyond the individual within the prison itself. There is a real impact on children, parents, partners and families who are also upended by a woman’s incarceration, though none of them received a sentence. That is where I think the story began to feel overwhelming for me. The following is some of the research I conducted, relying on both primary and secondary sources, to help me contextualize the fiction I am writing.

On the Penitentiary System of the Early 19th Century

In 1816, Jerusha Blackman sat in a Boston jail because she could not pay a federal fine. She was a poor widow with seven children and had been convicted after selling liquor without the license she could not afford to purchase. She was fined $150, assessed additional costs, and imprisoned when she proved unable to satisfy the judgment. A petition sent on her behalf warned President James Madison that, unless she was released, “her family must be left to want and wretchedness.”4 The sentence had been made against one woman, but it was her children that felt the full effect of that sentence. Madison remitted the fine and his order acknowledged that Blackman’s family depended almost entirely upon her labor5. But before we get all gushy about Madison he also mentions that keeping her imprisoned would continue costing the federal government money, maybe more than the $150 fine required to redress her crime. He was reasoning through the economic trade-off.

Her release, however, remained an exception rather than the systemic result of a legal system required to account for poverty or dependency. Blackman’s case preceded the completion of the great American penitentiaries, but it reveals a problem the penitentiary movement would not resolve, and in many ways, still has not resolved. Punishment was administered to an individual while its material effects spread through a household6. Women’s work, particularly the unpaid and poorly paid labor that sustained children and relatives, remained largely invisible until its removal made it…visible.

By the late 1820s, American reformers believed they were creating a more rational form of punishment. Pennsylvania’s 1828 legislative report described the new Eastern State Penitentiary as “adapted and modelled to the system of solitary confinement.”7 The thought went that this new formulation, aka its cells, exercise yards, corridors, surveillance, work, and religious instruction would separate prisoners from corrupting associations and compel private reflection.

The penitentiary presented itself as an alternative to the bodily punishments of the past. James Madison praised penitentiary discipline as “a substitute for the cruel inflictions so disgraceful to penal codes,” although he also doubted the wisdom of constant, unoccupied solitude8. The penitentiary presented itself as an alternative to the public bodily punishments of the past. Punishment did not necessarily disappear; it moved into the prisoner’s schedule, labor, limited movement, censuring of speech, dictating sleep, and controlling contact with other people. In short, penitentiary reforms naturally focused on which form of disciplined punishment could plausibly claim to produce moral character improvement. But, of course, the prisoner imagined by this new system was overwhelmingly male. And I say “of course” because, even in the 19th-century, the penitentiary population was overwhelmingly made up of men.9

In 1831, the French magistrates Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to the United States under a mission authorized by the Ministry of the Interior to investigate American penitentiaries. The assignment was genuine, although Tocqueville later acknowledged that the penitentiary question also provided a useful “pretext” for studying American democracy more broadly in the aftermath of the turbulent revolution of July 183010. Their findings appeared in 1833 in On the Penitentiary System in the United States, and Its Application in France11. The English edition included extensive notes and additions by its translator, Francis Lieber, whose commentary sometimes made the gender assumptions of American penal reform even more explicit. At some point, Beaumont and Tocqueville make conclusions about some of the data they had observed regarding the return of prisoners back into society, and Francis Lieber does too much to drive this point home:

“Girls, destined much more for tranquil and passive virtues than men, act still more against their nature, and, therefore, sink deeper, by giving themselves up to vagrancy, and the crimes following from it, (for which they are sent to the house of refuge,) than boys, whom the Creator has destined to push, at some future period, their way in the agitated scenes of life ; and, in proportion as girls deviate from their moral nature, the difficulty increases of bringing them back ; the more they degenerate, the more difficult it is to restore their moral health.”12

They described girls as destined for “tranquil and passive virtues.” A girl who became involved in vagrancy or crime had therefore fallen farther from her supposed nature than a boy, and the authors believed she would be correspondingly more difficult to restore. Women and girls were presumed naturally passive so when they behaved aggressively, resisted authority, moved independently or violated sexual conventions, their conduct appeared especially unnatural. That supposed unnaturalness was then cited as evidence that they were more deeply corrupted.

Male criminality violated the law, but female criminality violated the law and femininity. This distinction dictated reform here, especially around expectations for rehabilitation. A male prisoner might be trained to become disciplined, industrious and economically useful (I love a good early 19th-century utilitarian pressure cooker13), but a woman was expected to recover virtues associated with obedience, domestic order, modesty and sexual restraint.

When Beaumont and Tocqueville arrived in the United States, two penitentiary systems were competing for legitimacy. Under the so-called Pennsylvania system, associated with Eastern State Penitentiary, prisoners remained in individual cells and performed their labor alone as discussed. But there was another method under the Auburn system, where prisoners occupied separate cells at night but worked collectively during the day under compulsory silence. Despite their differences, both systems treated isolation, regulated labor, surveillance, and the prevention of communication as instruments of correction and rehabilitation toward better moral character/virtue.14

The new penitentiary presented itself as a humane improvement upon older forms of punishment, but corporal violence did not disappear with the scaffold and whipping post. Beaumont and Tocqueville described American institutions sustained by “silence and isolation” while acknowledging that officers at Auburn and Sing Sing retained considerable authority to chastise prisoners.15 Reform changed the organization and justification of suffering, but it did not eliminate suffering itself.

The apparently universal prisoner imagined by these systems was overwhelmingly male. Men constituted the dominant prison population, supplied the industrial workforce, and occupied the center of debates about productive labor and rehabilitation. The way in which cells were arranged and workshops organized, as well as the political literature surrounding prison discipline, assumed a male subject. Women entered this system later as a problem of accommodation rather than as prisoners around whom the institution had been designed.16 Beaumont and Tocqueville understood the administrative logic plainly. Women, they observed, “occupy little space in the prison.”17 Their small numbers did not exempt them from punishment; instead, numerical marginality became a reason to devote fewer rooms, programs, workshops, officers, and political reforms to their confinement.

The consequences were visible at Auburn. New York authorities opened an attic story for female prisoners in 1825, and women continued to be confined there for decades.18 While male prisoners were assigned individual cells and marched into organized workshops, women remained physically inside the celebrated Auburn institution but peripheral to the system that made it famous. An 1833 account by Auburn chaplain B. C. Smith exposes the contradiction between administrative reform and women’s actual conditions. Smith praised the appointment of a matron and reported that the women’s department displayed “silence, order, neatness, and cheerful industry.”19 These were the visible signs by which officials measured improvement: quiet bodies, orderly rooms, cleanliness, and productive work. Unfortunately, Smith also acknowledged that the women remained confined in rooms that “almost exclude the air and light of heaven.”20 They lacked regular access to fresh air, and he associated their quarters with sickness, exhaustion, and inactivity. Some women endured sentences of seven, ten, twelve, or fourteen years under those conditions. The male prison had gained new cells and organized workshops; the women’s quarters remained so unsuitable that Smith concluded their punishment was materially harsher than that imposed upon men in the same institution. Officials could celebrate the disappearance of noise, fighting, chains, and visible disorder while conceding that the conditions producing such order also damaged women’s health.

Women and girls also encountered a different moral standard. In an interview with the superintendent of Philadelphia’s House of Refuge, Beaumont and Tocqueville asked which habits were most difficult to correct. For boys, the superintendent identified theft; for girls, he emphasized sexual “immorality” and treated prostitution as an almost irreversible moral condition. Boys were classified principally through offenses against property. Girls were classified through sexuality.

Beaumont and Tocqueville could not rely upon a comprehensive national prison database. They assembled institutional reports, interviews, financial records, administrative returns, and statistical tables from selected prisons and reformatories in states including New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.Their figures remain historically useful, but they combine different institutions, years, record-keeping practices, and legal jurisdictions.

The tables nevertheless preserved evidence of substantial racial disparity. In several institutions, free Black people appeared among prisoners in proportions considerably larger than their representation within the free population used for comparison. Women also constituted a larger share of the imprisoned Black population than of the imprisoned white population in the institutions for which sex-and-race figures were available.21

Their explanation of these figures was far less reliable than the figures themselves. Beaumont and Tocqueville treated imprisonment as evidence of criminal propensity, including the claim that “coloured women” committed more crime than white women. But prison statistics record the operation of a legal system: whom authorities watch, arrest, prosecute, convict, sentence, imprison, and pardon. They do not provide a neutral census of every crime committed within society.

The report therefore reveals more than its authors understood. Its tables documented racialized imprisonment; its interpretation converted that disparity into a judgment about the character of Black women.

The categories also excluded much of the coercion experienced by enslaved women. Their lives were governed by surveillance, confinement, forced labor, sale, and physical punishment, yet that captivity could disappear from penitentiary tables because it was administered through slavery rather than the criminal prison.22 The archive counted what the penitentiary recognized, but it did not count every system of organized confinement.

Up Next: Women Reformers 1840 - 1900

The next article will follow women’s prison reform after 1840, focusing on Margaret Fuller, Eliza Farnham, Maria M. King, and the creation of the Indiana Reformatory Institution for Women and Girls.

Footnotes & Sources

The Androgynous Mind (vs the Authoritarian One)

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own1 contains within it a multitude of angles by which she attempts to answer the question on the topic of Women in Fiction. In it she starts with the premise that:

“A Woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.”2

Every angle opens into another, in which the mind may wander and linger for some time, maybe even forever, should we surrender ourselves entirely to this exercise. She considers what Jane Austen might have written had she been permitted a life beyond the narrow boundaries prescribed to her; she examines anger, and the role of metaphorical mirrors, by which women are made to reflect men at twice their natural size, thereby sustaining that agreeable illusion of their own masculine superiority. She traces, too, the limitations imposed upon middle-class women who wished to write, paint, think, or create, and considers the collective consciousness from which all enduring art must, in some measure, arise, so that behind the solitary voice of the writer there may be heard the accumulated experience of the many: “the experience of the mass behind the single voice.”3

At the pinnacle of Woolf’s argument stands a thought experiment. She asks us to imagine that Shakespeare, that prodigious genius, so furnished with imagination, had possessed a sister named Judith, his equal in talent, intelligence, and distinguished from him only by the accident of sex. Woolf then leads us through the life such a woman might have lived in Elizabethan England: denied education, mocked for her ambition, commanded into marriage, and shut out from the theatres in which her brother’s genius found its natural expression. The conclusion is a cruel reality. Judith would most likely have written nothing at all; she might have fled, fallen into despair, or been driven mad by the violence done to her gifts. And even had she succeeded in setting something upon the page, it would, Woolf writes, have been “twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination.”4 Judith thus becomes more than an invention or thought experiment. She is the embodiment of every female genius deprived of the conditions in which genius may have found an outlet, and of the obstacles women have faced and, though altered in form, continue in some measure to face when attempting to bring the life of the mind into the world.

For the purposes of this article, however, I mean to focus on the idea that made me most uncomfortable; for discomfort, though seldom a welcome guest by nature, is often the most obliging companion of the curious mind and quite possibly the best way we learn and retain. The idea is that of the “Androgynous Mind.” Let’s take a few moments to get Woolf’s perspective here who cites Samuel Coleridge, who would have thought about this about a century before her:

“Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilised and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine, I thought.”5

A considerable body of literary criticism has attempted to determine precisely what Woolf and Coleridge intended by the phrase “androgynous mind.” Woolf does not appear to mean that the writer must be without sex, nor that the distinctions between men and women are to be denied altogether. Rather, she imagines the fully developed mind as one in which the qualities conventionally called masculine and feminine are permitted to meet, mingle, and cooperate, so that no portion of human experience is barred from the writer’s understanding.

Such a mind is capable of transmitting the whole range of feeling “without impediment.”6 It does not strain to assert its masculinity or femininity, nor does it allow resentment, self-consciousness, or the desire to prove one sex superior to the other to obstruct the passage between experience and expression. The mind is, in Woolf’s image, fully fertilised; all its faculties remain open, and emotion may pass into art without catching upon the obstacles that get in the way when we consider gender.

Shakespeare is Woolf’s supreme example of this creative androgyny. His imagination moves so freely among kings and daughters, lovers and murderers, fools and queens, that one never feels the author anxiously insisting upon the sex from which he writes. Proust, she suggests, was likewise androgynous, though perhaps inclined a little too far toward the feminine, while Wordsworth and Tolstoy possessed, in her estimation, rather too much of the masculine. Her judgment is not offered as a measurement of their private lives, but as an account of the degree to which the writer’s consciousness remains open to the full variety of human feeling in their work. But! Part of my resistance comes from the apparent division of the mind into complementary opposites: one portion “man,” the other “woman,” each arriving with its stereotypical assignment of attributes. Such language carries a faint whiff of something sinister where rationality has been seated beside the gentlemen and intuition, having been praised for its sensitivity, has been left with the ladies.

My education trained me to distrust this sort of convenient and simplistic partition of the mind. Contemporary research does not reveal two discrete varieties of human brain, one masculine and the other feminine, each furnished with its own reliable cognitive processing and neural structures. But neither does the evidence permit the equally convenient conclusion that biological sex is wholly irrelevant to brain development. The disagreement is manifold and complex, and therefore less suitable to the short treatment I would give it here. It’s certainly a contentious topic and as Woolf would say “At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial – and any question about sex is that – one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.”7 I would argue, however, that no rigorous scientific inquiry has yet established the existence of two neatly dimorphic forms of brain, one properly “male” and the other properly “female.”8

But I do not think that is what Woolf had in mind. Or, at least, I do not think she was making the sort of empirical claim that could be confirmed by placing male and female brains beneath rigorous scientific study. She introduces this with some hesitation through an observation of a man and woman entering a taxi cab in London together, a natural fusion that seems to bring her some ease. The two sexes of the mind are not presented as anatomical territories so much as temporary names for a condition of internal differences that must come together to make up the human race in its entirety.

When Woolf attempts to define the androgynous mind, she abandons almost entirely the expected and stereotypical inventory of masculine and feminine traits by giving rationality to the man and intuition to the woman, nor courage to one and tenderness to the other. Instead, she describes a mind that is “resonant, porous, incandescent, and undivided”9: a mind through which emotion can pass without obstruction. The controlling distinction may therefore be not between man and woman but between movement and blockage. The androgynous mind transmits while the single-sexed mind is too narrow and arrests the flow of the emotions and insight that would make writing and creation.

Woolf’s fictional Mr. A offers the latter condition. His novel is overshadowed by the immense letter I. His selfhood is so solid, so polished by education and authority, that no other person can acquire independent shape beneath it. The masculine failure Woolf identifies is not an excess of logic or physical courage but an excess of self-consciousness. Mr. A cannot forget that he is a man whose superiority has been challenged, and therefore he cannot create anything that does not return eventually to the defense of manhood. This may be what makes Woolf’s argument stranger and more compelling than the familiar instruction that writers should cultivate both masculine and feminine qualities. The androgynous mind is not half man and half woman. It is a mind in which no single identity has been permitted to dominate or feel superior to the other; this sense of superiority of man over woman is as much a mechanism of its own destruction as it is for woman.

Woolf’s androgynous mind is therefore not best understood as a theory of sexually differentiated brains that come together to create a whole. It is a theory of imaginative hospitality and flexibility and freedom. The writer must be able to receive experiences that do not confirm or oppose the writer’s identity. On Mary Carmichael she wrote:

“[Mary Carmichael]...mastered the first great lesson; she wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself.”10

The mind must be porous enough to admit an opposing consciousness and stable enough not to experience that admission as annihilation.

And because all of this was written in between two world wars in 1929 and the rise of Mussolini in Italy, Woolf made some connections of the androgynous mind to what was clearly lacking in Fascism.

“Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father. The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some county town. Such monsters never live long, it is said; one has never seen a prodigy of that sort cropping grass in a field. Two heads on one body do not make for length of life.”11

This is Woolf’s satire of “Fascist art” and a little prelude to what we would see in her anti-fascist manifesto Three Guineas published about a decade later. By “mother” and “father” she is referring to genuine creation that requires the cooperation of those powers conventionally called masculine and feminine, aka the androgynous mind. The fertile imagination cannot be exclusively aggressive, self-assertive, hierarchical, or conscious of its own manhood. It must also be receptive, porous, capable of sympathy, and open to experiences outside the writer’s own identity. Poetry is born through an inward union, not from one sex of the mind shouting down the other. As expected, Fascism, as Woolf imagines it here, destroys that union. It glorifies masculine authority, discipline, violence, obedience, and national potency while reducing women largely to subordinate or reproductive functions: to a mirror in the metaphorical sense. A Fascist government may gather up important men, intellectuals even, and solemnly wait for a great national poet to appear, but it cannot build this imaginative fertility through command; “it is doubtful whether poetry can come out of an incubator.” 12The grotesque image of the creature preserved in a museum jar therefore describes Art that has been produced without genuine creative conception. The “Fascist poem” is an aborted work which is something twisting in the air, completely malformed, arrested and falling before maturity, incapable of independent life and left rigid on the ground. It’s a two-headed specimen, some sort of monstrosity that may be displayed and gawked at, but can it grow like art that evolves over time? Can it reproduce or inspire the budding of other great works? or wander freely through the world? Fascist art has that exaggerated appearance that makes it superficially spectacular, even prodigious, but superficiality is not the seed you sow in the ground. In the same way, an art swollen with ideology, masculine self-consciousness, and national vanity may appear powerful while possessing no organic life beneath the display. Maybe I am belaboring the point here, I want so much to drive the point home and I’m not efficient with my words. Maybe this will make it clearer:

“The Czar and the Kaiser would never have worn crowns or lost them. Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks;[...]”13

Let me try again to be very clear here what this is saying about Fascism or rather…14the “authoritarian mind” which I imagine is the antithesis of the androgynous mind. In Woolf’s view the androgynous mind is whole and complete when both the masculine and feminine exist in the mind whereas the authoritarian mind imagines that one faculty and identity must command and prevail and make up the whole. Woolf’s whole self is formed not through this inequality and dividedness, but through integration and cooperation. What has been divided into masculine and feminine is permitted to meet within a single consciousness without either portion being degraded or erased. Such a self has no need to magnify itself by diminishing the other, because equality results in the “whole” and the “self” and doing otherwise would cause the imbalance that would destroy the self. In this way, the androgynous mind requires no flattering reflection because the inherent beauty of it lies in being capacious enough to contain both sides/parts. The authoritarian man is incomplete because he has cast the feminine portion of the mind outside himself and lodged it in woman, whom he then uses as a mirror; he is frightened by the reflection this woman casts back upon himself, which his self and magnitude depend upon, as she begins to find her voice, to speak, to write.

Woolf imagines this of the woman writer of the future:

“...give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days. She will be a poet, I said, putting Life’s Adventure, by Mary Carmichael, at the end of the shelf, in another hundred years’ time.”15

Judith If She Had a Room of Her Own (Plus 500 pounds a year and an Androgynous Mind)

Judith is an imagined woman, but she is interestingly also an amalgam of all those very real women who did not have the means, education, money, privacy to write or create. She stands for the lost women of literature: not only those who were prevented from publishing, but those who never reached the page at all. What might she have written? Perhaps something like this?

A Soliloquy

Five hundred pounds! O purse of liberty,
Thou little key to kingdoms inward-born.
No gold-walled throne, no sceptre, seal, nor sword
Could buy so deep a sovereignty as this:
To breakfast where I will, and think till noon.

My brother had the school, the stage, the street,
The alehouse tongues, the scholar’s Latin fire;
Whilst I, bone-twinnèd to his very wit,
Was lessoned in the needle and the nod,
And taught to hem in my soul lest it show through.

Yet thought did itch beneath my woman’s skin,
A brain-fever, a word-worm, inkish lust,
A speechling beating at the cage of teeth,
Still crying, Out, thou womb-dark’d thunderling!

They called it madness when I penn’d my will,
And modesty whene’er they stopped my mouth.
O modesty, thou satin-bellied gag,
Thou virtue-mask stitched finely over fear,
How many tongues lie strangled in thy lace?

But here no father thunders me to wed,
No husband lays his shadow on my page.
The candle bends its gold ear to my breath,
The paper waits, pale-patient as the grave,
And all my dead unwritten sisters knock.

Come, wordless mothers, warm-bereavèd maids,
Come, thought-starved wives whose fancies soured in the pale;
Come, all ye quillless, shelf-unmothered souls,
Whose tales were cradle-smothered ere they cried.
Lend me your mouth-hoard16. I will spend it all.

Yet shall I write no woman only, no.
I’ll house the king and begar in one brest,
The sword-hand and the wound that hand hath made,
The murderer’s night and the slain man’s morn,
The maid’s first love, the widow’s after-cold.

I have been glass enough. Now let me see.
Let mine own eye grow worldful with its gaze.
For in my breast two contrary tides meet,
The thrusting flame, the deep-receiving sea,
And neither shall be king nor captive made.

Ophelia!

Thou deck’dst her hands with flowers, and stopp’dst her tongue.
I’ll give her speech sharp-finned against the stream.
She shall not drown to furnish Hamlet grief,
Nor float naturally crowned for pitying men to praise.
And from the flood return no emblem thine.

Deliverance from thee is not fame nor praise,
Nor hearing “Judith” shouted through the pit,
But one forgetful, godlike hour wherein
I cease to guard the woman that I am
And lose myself within the life I make.

This hand, once schooled to stitch and smooth and mend,
Now takes the quill, that thought-spear17, soul-plough, wing—
And though the whole man-world cry, Put it down,
I’ll write till Death himself unhands the quill

Then snatch it back and drive its blackened point,
Cast it like a dagger through thy heart.

The following is an essay I wrote when I was a wee freshman student in undergrad for my Gothic literature course. I had to scour back a number of years through Facebook to find it and very happy I did. I remember writing it in a few hours1, which makes me wonder what kind of drugs they were slipping into the dining hall fro-yo’s. Anyway, I take on the voice of Jane Austen writing to her sister Cassandra. The date would have placed her at the end of her brief, brilliant and prolific life.

Jane Austen’s Apology for the Gothic: May 23rd, 1817

My Dearest Cassandra,

Due to unfavorable circumstances and provoked by a sense of ending, natural to all characters in life, I write this letter hoping you to be the ultimate heir and guardian of its content. After it is agreed upon that I take my leave in an eternal manner, it becomes of utmost significance that you, a most beloved sister, carry on what is to be written in these pages. Winchester offers wonderful scenery and the afternoons here are pleasant and cool, yet it is not enough to tempt me from the disquietude and distress of my current disposition. The affects are not necessarily caused by ill-health, but of an irritation of a more debilitating quality inasmuch as it involves that, which is dearer to me than anything else (save yourself): the writing of novels. In particular, novels of any stature recommend themselves to me, but, of late, those of Gothic predilection, which I feel most sincerely attached to, have been the cause of much scrutiny by way of a deplorable class of observation meant to degrade what I stand for. I hope I do not write in vain, when, in a final moment of literary affectation, I come to the defense of a victimized sort of artistic aptitude.

The condemnation from the few has afforded young readers the general impression that what they so choose to read threatens the fine sensibilities of their nature. In a state of hypocrisy and ignorance, the preachers, who demonize the evils of a Gothic text and claim that the highest disregard to humanity is the publication of the finest arrangement of words in the English language, seem to disdain from the same allowances of ferocity toward the publication of our nation’s history. Look only to King Henry VIII who, under his own divine sense of pride, beheaded multiple wives in a cold and dark tower by the blaze of a scathing sword. Look only to Oliver Cromwell, they say, whose attempt to scourge existing peace by resurrecting liberty and justice, commanded the execution of Charles I. The Norman Conquest, the Battle of Naseby, the Battle of the Boyne, the bloodshed spilled over the legitimization of the Magna Carta, and much more injustice condoned by the efforts of greed and insatiable thirst for power recommends The History of England as a superior alternative to the beauteous orbs of a Matilda or the forbidden pleasures of a conflicted Ambrosio2. Can the violence of a terrible reality, a history deemed fit for merit among my contemporaries, compare to the demonization they so easily offer to that made in accordance with the human mind? Human action is somewhat justified in polite society, but imagination’s creation, the perseverance of thought, is shunned as the arbitrator of “children of sickness and solitude” (Coleridge). I do not mean, dear sister, that history should be rewritten in a manner congruent to certain standards of decency, but that those who praise the literary works concerning historical dissertations should recognize that it too shares the vice, corruption, and folly that they seem to wonder at when flipping through the pages of The Monk or The Castle of Otranto.

Oh, just imagine my incredulity when Henry condemned The Castle of Otranto to a fiery pit, a burning hell, yet sat complacently and unnaturally fixated on the Spectator3, believing all the while that both are unfit for the other’s comparison. Well let me rightly inform you that both are absolutely intertwined, not because they deserve equal disapprobation, but for the reason that both encapsulate the reader within the confines of a certain mode of understanding. For instance, it has been only too severely stated that the Gothic reader will come to “suspect man of a species of brutality” (Coleridge). Ambrosio, in The Monk, falls from the good graces of a higher standard of being to the depths of man’s profound savage passion, henceforth one may look upon man in expectation that he is weak and brutal; the best of men, the Gothic text reads, will succumb to a degree of destruction. From the latter message you may wonder how it pertains to the Spectator whose sole aim is to teach the essence of man’s morality in which it claims that it will “enliven morality with wit, and temper wit with morality.” Lessons of morality profoundly imply that morality is simply taught, that man without civilized guidelines will fall into something entirely horrid and barbaric. We look to the Spectator to understand how to catch our own mistakes and, in so doing, we commence a certain level of mistrust with ourselves and others when the artifice of societal rules is temporarily cast aside. Do not we then suspect ourselves to be a naturally savage race when the Spectator claims to exist in order to demand of us something beyond our primitive being? Critics, whose primary belief that the Gothic text casts a cynical perspective on the human race, need only look to the works they so dutifully praise.

It is hardly in my power to demean the blatant, moral message in the Spectator, but I find that not only does the Gothic text share the same purpose, but through a distinctive manner that accommodates a higher and more superior level of understanding. The Spectator relinquishes a set of rules upon the masses, who follow them unhesitatingly, ciphering the gilded words in proximity to every utterance and movement. In essence, the Spectator informs us on what should be done, but, in keeping with the intricacies of a worldly doctrine, morality also adheres to another mode of conscientious enlightenment. To learn what is right it becomes positively requisite to understand that which is wholly wrong. In accordance with this golden rule, the Gothic text then becomes an important benefactor to the education of our youth on the trivialities of moral conduct. When it is fated that Ambrosio, in The Monk, decide between the renunciation of “immediate and certain benefits the hopes of a salvation difficult to obtain” or seek heavenly salvation with the price of suffering, does not this same decision, in a depressed extent, have a foundation in the judgments we overcome within the never-ending cyclic routine of our lives (366)? When it is fated that Ambrosio take the former route, selling his soul forever to the damnation of hell, it is Satan who, “darting his talons in the monk’s shaven crown” punishes him for eternity (376). The Gothic text may portray the corruption of the human soul, but in conformity to moral orthodox, the corrupted are consequently rendered fallen angels, fit only for destruction and unhappiness. Through the instillation of fear of the “broken and dislocated limbs,” the young reader becomes better equipped to guard against such evils (376). The Gothic text, like the Spectator, enlivens a spirit of morality among its readers, but by contributing to the message of man’s innate imperfection, rather than falsifying humanity within the context of perfection (which the Spectator implies to be reachable), the reader becomes more cautious of their actions knowing completely that they are vulnerable to the crookedness of their world and indeed to “banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, and to paralyze vitality (Ruskin).” Do my contemporaries also teach morality to be the absence of vital and creative spirit? I daresay, the Gothic text attempts courageously to combine personal expression and morality, which makes it all the more admirable.

There exists a tempestuous host of men who profess the Gothic novel as the primary causation of numerous bodily evils, but I entreat otherwise by turning once again to the much praised History of England. It has been so mildly stated that the reading of Gothic novels “kindle[s] a spurious sort of inflammation” and that “they excite a mischievous activity” (Beddoes). Beside the exaggerated tone that these words incite, much of it is logically inept. For the one matter, it is accurately noted that thousands read novels, among them The Monk is given particular notoriety, and yet we hear of only a few cases of physical degradation, a fact that attests to the coincidental association of Gothic novels with the statistically4 probable sickness of its readers. Among thousands in England who read Gothic novels, is it probable that all will be in perfect conditions of health and well-being? It is only assumed that sickness is but the result of leisure reading without the least attempt for further investigation of other causes. For another matter, when avid readers delve into The History of England and come upon the phrase that claims King Henry VIII the murderer of more than one wife, does that portend the murderous actions of the readers; does it entirely instigate the reader to murder his wife? The answer lies with the reader whose innate character, not the semantics of a Gothic novel, determines the effect it has on his or her emotional condition if it is true that the physical effects are not merely coincidental.

The arguments that tell us to abstain from Gothic reading forbid to understand that without Gothic novels, the natural aggressions of mankind would find outlet in reality rather than in fiction. To make my point clearer I break down all boundaries of civility when I wholly admit to my gross magnetism to Ambrosio when “he remembered nothing but the pleasure and opportunity” in Matilda’s arms (81). Without such scenes, I would have by now, dear sister, given myself up entirely to one man or another, and in so doing, would have realized those blasphemous pleasures in actuality; as a Gothic novel for a substitute I have not needed any man, Ambrosio has been a fine substitute. Those famished with certain desires need only look to the Gothic novel for their attainment rather than look to reality for fulfillment. Those seeking revenge look toward Ambrosio whose ordained fall from grace satisfies their desire to see a wronged man fall into the depths of hell, those searching for heartache do not need to break the heart of a loved one but only need to find Matilda rife with the pangs of jealousy and feelings of neglect. The Gothic novel allows us to exhaust depraved emotions within the confines of its pages, determined to absorb their dire effects from the substantive existence of our own world. Aristotle refers to this as a “catharsis” or purging of emotion, fear, and pity. In sudden bursts of exasperation I call out for someone, anyone, to hear my solitary argument that the emotional context of our endurance comes not in the form of guidelines and cold words of exposition or treatise, but from the words that prevail from the pens of fellow sufferers, from those whose hands raise the curtain of the artificial self. We endure as a civilized race not because we are told what to do and follow, but because we are told what not to do and then secretly find outlet in a depreciatively ignored form of writing.

I urgently request that my spirits improve as a cause for greater extension upon the merit of my arguments, but I trust you will proclaim to the world what little I have said in this letter. Only to think of the day when the novel will gain due recognition, the Gothic text never again looked upon with disdain, but as a source of inspiration! Alas, I sit in a darkened room, looking out over the bleak shadows of a dying day, happy still to think that the Gothic novel proclaims there to be, in the somber corner behind me, the ghost of an old servant to keep me company until the very end.

She hopped back into the Duesenberg without opening the door, because this, she felt, was what Levi pants had been made for, vaulting over things with wild abandon, fleeing nonchalant Hollywood executives, and escaping one hellhole for another but this time with pools, cocktails, and sun. “Five minutes, my ass,” she muttered, throwing the finished screenplay with Persephone’s altered ending onto the passenger seat. Barry would probably have her back by Tuesday writing something for toothpaste, no doubt. Some minty little jingle about tartar control.

🎶Brush it away…brush it away, start your morning bright!🎶

Yes, I like that. What rhymes with bright? Oh yes, I got it!

🎶Keep that smile groovy, keep your teeth white!🎶

She smiled wide to check her pearly whites in the rear view mirror and unlike Narcissus-not-the-flower she hated her reflection and looked away.“Oh, kill me,” Mara muttered. The engine burred and the car rolled forward into the heat through the cocytian commute that was the 101S with her left hand clamped over her floppy hat, her switchblade pinning the screenplay in place, one knee doing the Lord’s work against the wheel, she sat her right hand lazily upon the radio knob fishing for a good tune. Static gave way to a glassy Heart song1. She was free-wheeling until she ferried herself to The Hollywood Roosevelt, that faded behemoth of old Hollywood glamour, and almost took out two twitchy street philosophers who had hung around the entrance of the hotel as she rounded the corner of Hollywood Boulevard onto Orange Drive; one of these philosophers yelling out “whoa mama, slow down!” a mantra for the ages. The other said nothing. He only widened his eyes at Mara, then drew his thumb once across his throat, slowly and without flourish. Mara took the gesture as she took most warnings from men which was under advisement, with no immediate plans for obedience. She turned up the music as she pulled in.

A burgundy-tuxedoed man stepped off the curb before the Duesenberg had fully screeched to a halt, one gloved hand lifted in greeting, the other already reaching for the door she had not bothered to use at all today.

“Why, hello Miss Mara,” he said gleefully. “Glad to see ya. Easy now, easy. You’re coming in hot.”

“Hiya Charlie.” She turned down the music.

Mara killed the engine and climbed out with the screenplay clamped under one arm. Charlie had been at the Roosevelt as long as she had been trying to become somebody in this town, a sort of common law marriage if she ever saw one. He had seen her arrive in borrowed sunglasses, stolen shoes, men’s jackets, glittery evening gowns with smudged mascara, and once in a waitress uniform with blood on the cuff that she insisted was marinara.

🎶Smudged mascara with cuffs scuffed with marinara, ooohhhh🎶 Maybe the next jingle for a mascara commercial?, Mara thought. Better table it, yes that’s right, table it.

Today she looked more bothered than usual. “Don’t start with me, Charlie. I got the big Boss Barry being…bellicose,” she warned.

“Bellicose? That’s new. But, hey! I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“You are dreaming right now. I can see it.”

He smiled and held out his hand for the keys. His name badge read CHARLIE, bright gold and ordinary.

“You got company,” he said.

Mara stopped. “Company?”

“Lady waiting for you by the Tropicana.”

“A lady?”

“That’s what we call them, yes.”

Mara glanced toward the hotel. Beyond the lobby, past the dim Spanish corridors and the bar where men sat, presumably, to test out their worst movie ideas on innocent tourists.

“She said she was with Silver Meridian?”

Charlie tilted his head. “Didn’t say.”

“She asked for me by name?”

“Yes.”

Mara frowned. The man from Silver Meridian was supposed to be bald, and named something like “Alan”, and a man. He was supposed to be waiting with a drink and a cigarette with a greedy expression and multiple ringed fingers. Mara had arranged the meeting behind Barry’s back, not even Barry knew, or at least he didn’t show it.

“This was supposed to be a man,” she said.

Charlie took the keys from her palm, but slowly.

“I don’t know what to tell you. It’s a woman, waiting for you. Beautiful, watch out.”

Mara looked at him.

He gave a small shrug. “In my experience, that’s usually where the trouble starts.” A horn sounded behind her. Charlie did not look back and never hurried for men who honked. That was one of the reasons Mara liked him.

“What did she look like?” Mara asked.

Charlie’s face altered then, not much, but enough such that the cheerful crease at his mouth flattened. “Like someone who isn’t used to waiting, so go!”

“That’s not a useful description” as she ran through the doors.

“No,” he said. “It’s more of a warning.”

She muttered to herself as she went up the staircase to the left where the long entrance to the poolside was located, “If Alan sent his wife, I’m going to walk right back out to deal with me...”

From somewhere beyond the palms near the Tropicana came the thin, saxophonic ache of a Stan Getz number2. And there by the outside bar was a woman at the far chaise who lifted her glass and smiled as if she had been expecting Mara since the beginning of time. The most beautiful woman in the world did not cut it. Beauty in Los Angeles was common as sweet, sweet…cotton-candy. This woman was something else. Luminous, chthonic, ethereal, even. Her hair was a dark red, her mouth the same red as if she had just bitten into an overly ripened strawberry and smattered her cheeks with it, her dress white and tight. “Miss Lyndon,” she said. “Punctual, I see. I heard LA women are always late. Traffic and all that.”

Her voice was formal, cool, and she had a Queen’s English accent. Dear Lord, and I’ve got a switchblade in my Levi jean’s pocket.

Mara stopped with the screenplay under her arm. “You’re not Alan.”

“No,” said the woman. “I have endured many humiliations, but that name has not yet been among them.”

“Silver Meridian sent you?”

“Not precisely.”

“That means no.”

“It means I am here and ready to discuss this…screenplay.”

Mara stared at her with caution, one eye raised. Around them, starlets crisped beneath suntan oil, agents murmured over sweating glasses, and one man at the bar was already drunk demanding his towel be returned to his chaise.

“Lady, I came here to pitch a picture,” Mara said. “If this is one of those producer games where the secretary or mistress, or worse, a wife/coke dealer sits down first to see whether the girl can be rattled, congratulations. I’m rattled. I am also tired, underpaid, and carrying a switchblade, so let’s keep the charade to a minimum.”

The woman smiled faintly. “You don’t take me seriously, do you?”

“I just know how women are treated around these parts. Look…you from England or something? I don’t know how familiar you are with the way things are done here, but you better listen to me when I tell you it’s a man’s world, we women don’t belong here. One woman in a room is enough, but with two women? This screenplay won’t see the light of day.”

“How reassuring. I had feared you might be timid.”

“I’m not timid. I’m just a realistic woman down on her luck.”

“A far more useful virtue.”

Mara looked at the woman’s glass. Something red rested at the bottom of it. Not a cherry nor an olive. One seed, dark and glossy, turning slowly in the clear liquid.

“Who are you?”

“For the purposes of this afternoon,” she said, “Penelope.”

“For the purposes of this afternoon, I’m Lana Turner.” Mara huffed, “Give me a break, lady.”

“No,” said Penelope, looking her over with grave courtesy. “You are not. Miss Turner possesses a more polished despair. Yours has not yet been properly handled.” Mara almost laughed. She disliked her immediately. She liked her immediately. Both reactions existed and in their co-existence existed a danger.

Penelope gestured to the empty chaise beside her. “Sit, if you please. I have come to hear how you have presumed to end my story.”

Mara did not move. “Your story?”

“No, I mean, not my story, but if it’s going to be taken by the production company I work for, it might as well be. I mean, the one in which a girl is taken to an Underworld. I understand you have made alterations.”

Mara didn’t send the screenplay in advance; this was an initial pitch she hadn’t told anyone. The heat seemed to thicken and perspiration floated above her brow. Mara heard the splash of the pool, the small silver click of ice in someone’s drink, the faint music bending around the palms.

“You’ve been talkin’ to Barry?”

“No.”

“Then you’re insane.”

“Possibly. I like to think I’m a little.”

Mara sat holding the screenplay tightly to her chest. Penelope leaned back, white glove loose around the stem of her glass. “Tell me the ending.”

Mara glanced down at the screenplay. “Persephone comes back.”

“That much they usually allow, don’t they?”

“She comes back changed, but permanently, not just during the Spring or Summer.”

“How does Persephone manage that?”

Mara sat back, pleased despite herself. This was the first decent and exciting question anyone had asked her all day.

“She does not escape by running,” Mara said. “That’s the rookie mistake. Everybody thinks escape means having fast leggy stumps, get out the door quick. A man looking the other way. No. That’s a stupid way to get a girl chased.” Penelope’s gaze did not move from her face.

“Then how?”

“Through deception and by making good, practical use of men’s vices, which are plentiful and usually left unattended, to run amok.”

“How American of her.” Penelope took a stealthy sip from her martini.

“I propose she reads the fine print.” Mara leaned forward. “The bargain says Hades gets Persephone, right?”

“Yes.”

“But who is Persephone by then? A girl? A wife? A queen? A few seasons of fun? Men love a few short seasons.”

Penelope’s expression did not change, but her attention sharpened.

Mara smiled, getting pleased with herself. “So maybe she gives him another Persephone.”

Penelope went still.

“A younger one,” Mara said, warming to the pitch in the vulgar way Hollywood had trained her. “Hotter, probably. Some poor gorgeous thing with legs up to Griffith Park and no survival instinct. Men in power eat that stuff with a spoon.”

Penelope’s interest died. “No,” Penelope said softly. “That does not save anyone. You’re trading one poor girl for another. The net effect is zero.”

“But wait, hold on! There is another explanation. We continue making use of another of man’s vices: stupidity.”

Penelope’s brows lifted.

“Yeah! Men never know the difference between a woman and the version of her they can stand,” Mara said. “That’s the trick.” Mara snapped her fingers. “Give them hair and a body, they won’t mind what else is there. They don’t want depth. They want a shadow, a willow of the wisp. Hades, though a god, is also a man and not a good one at that.”

Penelope was very still. “And you believe Hades would accept such a thing?”

“Hades rules the dead,” Mara said. “His whole kingdom is shadows and people who used to be people. Don’t tell me he’s suddenly picky about substance.”

For one second Penelope’s composure almost broke. Not with laughter, but with something dangerously near delight. Oh to be delighted!

“Miss Lyndon, I think this is wonderful, I really think my boss would love this. Would you have time to go with me to his office and pitch this exact screenplay to him?”

“Really?” Mara was beyond excited, finally a chance! “And he’d like it?”

“I think he would devour it.”

Mara’s face changed before she could stop it. Hope came over her nakedly, shamefully, like a girl caught undressing in front of a window and she didn’t know it.

“Really?”

“Yes,” Penelope said. “It is precisely the sort of ending he admires; a little clever, transgressive, unflattering.”

Mara clutched the screenplay tighter. “He can get it made?”

“He can approve it.”

“Where is his office?”

“Nearer than you think.”

“Is he here in the hotel?” Mara looked around hopefully.

“In a manner of speaking.”

Mara narrowed her eyes. “That usually means basement, casting couch, or some bullshit room with no windows. This place is haunted you know, I’m not going into the basement.”

Penelope rose then, and the world seemed to draw a little back from her. Her hair stirred first, those dark red strands slipping loose and lifting about her brow as though some wind had climbed out from under the earth to greet her. The white dress shone faintly, the last pale banner of a darkened kingdom. Her eyes darkened, and in their depths Mara saw no pool or LA sheen, but halls cut beneath mountains. She saw torches guttering in air that had never known the sun and ashen fields where no grain grew, rivers moving soundlessly through stone, and pale hands reaching from the dark.

The woman by the Tropicana was still smiling. Mara felt every brave thought in her body pack a bag and leave. “Oh, shit,” she said.

“My boss is difficult to reach,” Penelope continued. “He does not come up often. The upper air displeases him. It’s too noisy and smoggy for his taste up here.”

“Up here? So what, we take an elevator down?” Mara croaked out these questions.

“Not quite.”

Penelope walked to the edge of the Tropicana Pool.

The afternoon bent around her. Mara saw it happen and hated herself for seeing it. The bright Los Angeles glare dimming by degrees as if some great hand had lowered a heavy veil over the superficial glitz and glamor. The laughter at the bar drew thin and far away and those pesky palms stood suddenly black against the sky, their fronds like spears above a conquered gate. The water, a moment before all vulgar turquoise and swirly shine, grew still.

Penelope looked back and took out her pale hand.

“Come, Miss Lyndon. Bring your screenplay. He prefers writers to arrive with proof of their trespass.”

“Trespass? Will I be trespassing?”

Penelope didn’t answer. Then she tipped the glass, the red glossy seed fell and plopped into the Tropicana pool without a sound. For a breath, the water held its blue surface, bright as always. Then a dark ring opened where the seed had vanished. It widened into a large chasm and the deep end began to turn, slowly, until the pool was no longer a pool. Down through the turning water Mara saw, not tiles, but depth upon depth: black rivers moving and bubbling, pale steps worn down, torches burning with a flame that gave no comfort, and far beyond them a road of white stone descending into a dark unknown.

Mara stepped back. “That,” she said, voice dry as paper, “is not an office.”

Penelope extended her gloved hand. “We go to the Underworld. He is waiting below.”

Mara looked around and then into the chasm, uttering the question of all great women before her, “Hell, why not?” She had dealt with worse and she would do what she could. “I’m in, if it gets the film made.”

It was then that Persephone and Mara, holding hands, descended in the darkness together.

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Check Out Part I of Saving Persephone

Forgive me, Mother, that I came through night
Not maiden-white, as once I went away,
But laureled with ash and robed in starless light,
With winter set upon my brows forever to stay.

Forgive me that the flowers knew me changed,
That violets darkened where I touched the plain;
Forgive me that your daughter was estranged
In shrouded halls, where grief taught grief its name.

Forgive me that I wear the night so well,
As queens must wear the doom that gives them fame;
Forgive me that I found beneath your hell
A throne of iron and a crown of flame.

Forgive me, Hades, warder of the deep,
That I was never wholly what I seemed;
You thought the dark had lulled my soul to sleep,
Yet in your grasp I watched and dreamed.

Forgive me that I knelt beside you,
And let you deem my silence born of chains;
I took the seed you gave to make me known,
And made it sovereign fire within my veins.

Forgive me, Zeus, high-seated above the clouds,
For showing what Olympian laws conceal:
That gods may name a bargain just and proud
When daughters are the coin beneath the seal.

Forgive me that I lived to bear the tale,
That what was done in darkness came to light;
The thunder strikes for order, stern and pale,
But I returned and gave the wound its greater right.

Forgive me, fields, for what the seed has bound,
For every furrow locked in frost-bound sleep;
Forgive me, hearths, where hunger walks the ground,
And mothers count the grain they meant to keep.

Forgive me, mortals, for the frost I bring,
Though frost was never mine alone to make;
I ate one seed, and sorrow swallowed spring,
And all the waking world was made to ache.

Forgive me, forgive me, when the summer wanes,
When gold lies dim on field and orchard bough;
When hard-hewn earth beneath the ploughshare strains,
And seed lies deadened in the dearth below.

Then still they speak my name as though the curse
Were born from me, and not from Zeus or Hades,
sitting on their thrones: That woman—dark Persephone of earth—
Whose wickedness made the barren fields her own.1

Summer 1979 - Burbank

Mara was driving down the freeway in a 1935 Duesenberg chugging along with the top down. Sleek, fine, a mighty fine brute. The car had belonged to some B-lister; he croaked prematurely in Palm Springs with a grapefruit spoon in his right hand and an unfinished screenplay strewn across the kitchen table, page 47 soaked in grapefruit juice. They blamed the death on the benzedrine-cocaine cocktail, of course, but it was the damn grapefruit that ruined everything and destroyed the ending. Bad show all around. Too much citrus, she thought. We’re injecting acid and plastic, dissolving and preserving ourselves, in alternating fashion until we died too shiny and sour for the worms to tamper with.

Barry Klein, an exec, knew everyone’s business in town. He knew of the unfinished screenplay, he even knew that Mara was of the mind to adapt it for the studio. Finish what the B-lister started, which made her a B-lister-finisher and in the prime spot on the C-list, which was as good a spot as any considering she was living on the streets, peddling pieces of herself for less than prime for men who could get it cheap all over. Hot Stuff by Donna Summer2 was playing on the radio, pulsating through the chrome and the LA heat, picking up frequency through the electrified smog. Summer of 1979 when the palm trees looked especially leggy and indifferent. She arrived at the studio all wound up.

“Barry, can we have a chat?”

“No, no, no. I said no. When are you going to get it through your head? Stick to the commercials, we ain’t got the budget for this film. There is no itch for it. Especially a film written by a cocaine addict, dead, and a woman to boot. They just won’t go for it. Throw some pennies on its eyes and call it finito.” Barry slapped the back of his right hand into his left palm a few times, sealing the matter with sharp little cracks. He also had not looked up once from his desk, his balding head shining under the fluorescent light.

“But Barry, give me two minutes…I won’t waste your time. Give it a chance, you ain’t even got to read it all. Just let me give you a teaser.”

“The teaser.” He looked up then, amused. “Listen to her. The teaser. Since when do you talk like that?”

“Since I started talking to no-brained men, who don’t pay any mind unless it’s shiny.”

“Alright, listen. Come here and sit on my lap if you’re going to give me a little teaser. But be quick. I’ve got lunch with Paramount and they are a prissy bunch.”

“Watch it, Barry. I’ve got a switchblade. I mean it. You give me five minutes, and I’ll give you the pitch or you get nothing. No more commercials. You can find another broad to do it for you.”

“Whatcha doin’ with a switchblade, for?” Barry looked nervous, but chuckled to lighten the mood. He found the “edge of a woman” and recoiled, but Mara stood defiant.

“Alright, alright.” Barry held up both hands. “Don’t go fussing around and threatening people. It’s not a good look, alright? Sit down your majesty. Your time starts now.”

“The story of Persephone and Hades,3” Mara started.

“Yeah, what’s that about?” Barry frowned.

“You’re going to shut up and let me talk through this without any more interruptions, got it?”

“I’m all ears, milady.” Barry reclined in his leather chair, threw his feet up on the desk, and lit a cigarette.

“It’s an old story. Like old-old. Persephone is a Faye Dunaway type, very pretty and innocent out in the field picking flowers.”

“Sure, sure, but are we talking actual field or backlot field? Because actual field means bugs, weather, all that. I’m already seeing dollar signs and absolutely no Faye Dunaway.”

“Fine whatever. She’s in a field, but not a pretty field. It should feel almost obscene how alive everything is. I don’t want to see this in Stage 12 with fake flowers and that poor bastard from effects standing by. Real flowers, heat, bees a-buzzing, girls a-hollering, she is sweating a little, all that ripe business. She then bends down to pick a Narcissus.”

“You want us to get the bees in a specific location? Do they get their own trailer?,” Barry snickered.

“Concentrate, will ya!”

“Hold it.” Barry lifted one hand. “Narcissus…like the guy who loved himself? I’ve got a no-name nobody, a theatre buck, a guy named Richard Gere who I want to put in front of the camera…” Barry stopped mid-sentence, having caught sight of himself in the mirror to his left. For a moment, business paused while he restored order to three thin strands left on his head, smoothing it back with heavily ringed fingers.

“Narcissus like the flower.”

“Can we make it simpler? A rose maybe. Audiences know roses…worked for Sergio Leone.”

“The flower matters, Barry, it can’t be changed.”

“Fine, just fine.” He continued to take languid puffs on his cigarette.

“Then the ground opens.”

“Can we do the ground opening cheap?”

“Don’t know, Barry.”

“Can we shoot around the ground opening?”

“No. Say, Barry, you coked up or something?”

“No.”

“Then cool it. Let me finish, this is important. Now, I want you to shut your eyes and imagine it. Just really imagine it.”

Barry shut his eyes deeply and smiled. “Go on.” Mara drew herself up, as if the fluorescent-lit room had become a stage; her only stage, in fact.

“So she reaches for it, that’s all, she reaches, one hand, one bare little hand, and it’s nothing, Barry, it’s your daughter reaching for a balloon at the fair.” Barry opened one eye and grumbled something under his breath.

“It’s some girl on Sunset reaching for the radio knob because the right song came on and suddenly the whole of everything feels arranged in her favor, that’s a woman reaching for anything bright because life has been so lousy and so hot and so crowded with men and their opinions and their little offices and their big ideas, and for one second she thinks beauty has appeared, that the flower is only a flower, that the world has set something lovely before her and does not mean to do anything else for it.”

Mara took a deep breath, “And then the earth opens as if she were sitting on the San Andreas fault. The whole earth, Barry. Split clean open. How could they not save Persephone? Anyway, this is pretty much a Julie Andrew’s number.

“Yep, yep, clean open. Julie Andrews…”

Mara saw Barry dozing. “Jesus Christ! Keep your eyes open then.” Barry snapped to.

“Hades is waiting. Hades, who has already talked to Zeus, because they are brothers colluding. And Zeus, high up there with his thunder and his beard and his big executive cloud, says yes, take the child, what is she to me?”

Mara’s voice began to gather speed.

“And out comes Hades with his deathless horses, up from beneath the chasm. He comes up in his chariot, very grand, very dark and he seizes her. That is the word. Seizes. Takes. Carries off.” Mara throws her hands up in the air. “The meadow was all along a mouth with these large jagged teeth.”

“She cries out. She calls for her father, which is nearly more than I can bear, because she still believes her father will save her, but he does not. Imagine being that young, Barry. Imagine supposing someone has your interest at heart and then doesn’t save you. And only Hecate hears her from her cave, and also could do nothing. She is powerless.”

Mara had a crazed look in her eyes now. “And Demeter knows, they always know. She takes up torches then, the great grain-mother, she who gives wheat to kings and crusts to beggars and bread to every man who has ever buttered it with absolutely no respect, and she goes across the world crying for her child. Through valleys, through cities, by wells, by roads, over the wide mortal lands she goes, asking all what became of Persephone. And the gods, Barry, the gods lower their eyes and they wait…for nothing. Those all-knowing all-powerful gods, choose to do nothing! The audacity!”

“Demeter stops the whole damn thing. No wheat, no barley, now cut to the fields, Barry. Dead and flat, just awful. Think out in the desert. Men wandering around looking tragic because suddenly there’s no bread and they’re hungry.”

“And now Olympus cares. Of course now they care. The girl screaming was one thing, but no smoke from the altars? No offerings? No roasted bits going up to the gods on Mt. Olympus? Catastrophe! So Zeus sends Iris, then everybody else, all of them coming down with honors and gifts and big speeches, and Demeter won’t have it. Just not having it, she is a mother scorned and all that. She’s sitting there like, no, bring me my daughter or enjoy the dirt you filthy scums.”

Mara paced, then stopped, seeing the scene.

“That’s good, actually. We stage her very still. Everyone else is pleading, fluttering about, and Demeter barely moves. The lighting, hrmm….”

Barry murmured, “Mmm.”

“Then Hermes goes down. Messenger boy, we don’t cheap out here. He goes to the underworld.”

She leaned over the desk.

“And there she is. Persephone sitting beside Hades. She ain’t dead, but she don’t seem all right either. That’s important. Yes, yes. She’s changed, but she’s watching. Don’t have her weeping all over….sets up the drama right, you know that thing that actress what’s her name with the eyes?”

Barry gave a soft murmur.

“Hades knows he has to let her go, so he gives her the pomegranate. One seed, maybe a few, depends who’s telling it, but visually we only need one. Yesssss, that’s the shot, we zoom in on it.”

Mara swallowed. unsure of herself all of a sudden. “And then they make the bargain. She can go back, but not all the way. Some of the year above, some below. Very reasonable. Men love a compromise after they’ve ruined your life. So when she comes up, Demeter lets the fields live. When she goes down, everything dims again. That’s how they explain winter. That’s how the world goes dark for part of the year, it was all her fault.”

“And I think,” Mara said, softer now, realizing she was going to say something against custom, “I think maybe that is what the picture is. Maybe we give her another ending. Not a very happy one, audiences like a little tension now and then, Barry, nobody believes happy endings anyway. But an ending where she knows what has happened to her and then she returns to take her vengeance and rise, never to return to Hades…like an escape.”

She laughed once, but her eyes had gone wet. “I’m not asking we undo the story. But give the girl the last shot and then it’s summer forever. Smog-gold, hot, hot summer.”

Mara was breathing hard, almost embarrassed by going on so long. She looked over. Barry was asleep at his desk with his mouth open.“Barry, wake up! You’re going to miss your lunch.” She lurched forward and shook his shoulders.

“Yeah, alright! I’ve listened to you for five minutes, now scram. I’ll deal with you later.”

“Forgive me for wasting your time.” Mara grabbed the screenplay and her purse with some urgency and fled the building. She wanted to cry. No one took her seriously here.

Next Up: Saving Persephone, Part II. The Hollywood Roosevelt

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I’m having me an Eve Babitz Summer folks.

When an author writes a vivid line in a book, the line literally jumps out at me and starts turning in the air up, up, up, twisting and bending until it starts to glow and long threads, story filaments, start growing from it. I then pluck each thread until I form a little story of my own. I think this is what people mean by inspiration. You pluck the threads from the air, man. I mention this because this is exactly what happened when I read the following from Eve Babitz’s Eve’s Hollywood.

“In L.A. when someone gets corrupt, it always takes place out by the pool. And even the most flagrantly flaunting ex-Christian nevertheless takes a lot of Vitamin C.”1,2

Eve Babitz, ladies and gents. What was she trippin’ on? I think she might have meant something like: It’s the sun that is the tyrant, the one that will consume you whole, eat you up and spit you back out in the whirlpool so that you spiral down down down into hell and get yourself burnt right down to your toes.

She most likely drew on her experiences poolside, those chlorinated cesspools of The Garden of Allah, The Beverly Hills Hotel, The Chateau Marmont, and other such places of high-dosaged hedonism, portals to Hades. I like to think that while photon particles pummel us and sear into our skin and the jacarandas bloom like deep bruises this summer we all look toward Eve Babitz and, maybe, edge toward a Vitamin C overdose. Per luxum atque libidinem pereundi perdendique omnia3. So I followed the thread where it led naturally, into a chlorinated portal to Hades. The short story comes out this Tuesday.

The following is a short story that I wrote to help me practice writing dialogue. Writing dialogue is probably the hardest thing for me, especially when having to alternate between different styles and I’m not comfortable with it all. So naturally, I had to make things harder and get Virginia Woolf involved. Further revisions will be made. Hope you enjoy!

1964 - Los Angeles, Wilshire Boulevard

The Boss gave me thirty minutes for lunch today. Thirty lousy minutes. I hightailed it out of the office clickety-clacking out brittle taps as I walked in heels down the street. In the process, I tore a run clear up the back of my stockings. Goddamnit! On reflex, I reached for a Kent out of the compact in my purse. Light her up. But I left my lighter at the office. Goddamnit!!!!

“I need those carbon copies before lunch, three sets. And call my wife. Tell her I’ll be late.”

“Sir, she asked yesterday if you could–”

“Don’t get tangled in it. Just let her know.” My boss entered his office, then popped his head back out.

“And take your lunch quickly, 30 minutes no dawdling. We’re buried today. I got Baxter coming in at one and I don’t want you out powdering your nose while he’s in.” He slams his office door shut, and it takes me a second before I get to the carbons.

I was single, no husband or steady fella, no gal pal gang to call my own unless you counted the girls at the office who knew your best lipstick color and not much else, which I did. “You see this?” Darlene said, tapping the magazine with one red nail. “Vogue says every girl ought to have a tangerine mouth this summer. You’d look real sharp in tangerine, honey.” I thanked her profusely. And then there was family. Dead, mostly, or moved out to the Valley or San Bernardino and acting like they didn’t know you.

Before I left for lunch, I saw Helen. She had jammed the copier again and looked ready to cry. I showed her how to ease the paper loose without tearing it. “You’ll get it,” I told her. “Nobody knows anything the first month.” She looked at me like I had handed her a life raft, or maybe some water wings. She was constantly making mistakes; didn’t we all? I was happy she kept at it.

There was no shade on the street and I squinted in the sun down the boulevard to the restaurant where for the last five years I had a chicken salad sandwich, a coffee, and a cigarette or two for lunch. Aqua Net hurled around me as I continued on. The restaurant’s valet saw me barreling down the sidewalk with my clutch held tight under my left arm.

“Oye, Manuel! Por favor.” I made a hand motion that signaled lighter, you know the one with the thumb, as the cigarette dangled lazily from the side of my mouth.

Wonderful Manuel. Beautiful Manuel, in his red velvet suit and black bow-tie and lapel get-up; everything about him had a sheen, even his hair was gelled-down gloss. He snapped open a silver lighter, fwip, and held the flame out to me slowing down time. I leaned in and in that dime’s-worth of quiet there was just Manuel and me, chrome-smoked cars griddling like pancakes around us and the smell of sulfur wafting off Wilshire Boulevard. I drew hard until the Kent caught, fsssst, and I could smell the acetate come through clean. Fwip, he closed that lighter right back up with a flick of the wrist and just like that I was back on the clock. Twenty-five more minutes! Between the cigarette, the street, the cars, Manuel’s cologne and my hairspray, there wasn’t a single natural smell for at least a few hundred feet around me, which aggravated my hunger.

“You okay, Miss Gonzales?”

“Sí, Manuel. Just need me some comida.” I patted my stomach.

“You got it!” He ran to open the heavy wooden doors and I soon entered a cave, bringing in all the manufactured smells with me like a cloak wrapped tight around my neck. Restaurants in LA are typically dark, cold little grottoes with red sticky booths and bars with brass rails to counter the brilliant heat outside. A few people sat in these booths with their jackets off and their drinks already sweating during the lunch rush. Somewhere ice shifted in a shaker. A pretty hostess walked up to the hosting stand. “Welcome, miss.” She looked past me where someone ought to have been. “Will you be on your own today?”

She was new. “Yes.”

“Right this way.” She grabbed a rather large menu from a menu pocket dangling off the hostess stand; it looked different.

“They changing things up?”

“What’s that?”

“I said, are they changing things up?” I pointed to the new menu.

“Ah! Yes, in a manner of speaking, miss.” She smiled at me brightly.

As we walked down the aisle past all the booths and tables, I noticed the whole joint was…off. Firstly, no one looked up as we walked down. In Los Angeles, everybody looked up. Men looked because they were men and women looked because they were women; this was the nature of things, but they all had their eyes on their menus. Even the waiters had gone funny, circling around like hawks, looking at the floor. Usually they kept their eyes on the room, clocking who might tip, but today they didn’t bother. Secondly, where were all the lunchtime regulars? There were no salesmen bellied up to the bar with their hats shoved back and their sweaty collars going limp. I didn’t see studio boys in sharkskin suits talking big into highballs and punch-drunk before the three o’clock closeout. Hold up! No legal eagles sawing at steaks, these were the true staples of the place; no married big wheels leaning over shrimp cocktails toward girls from the typing pool, peddling their tired lunchtime razzle-dazzle. Strange, very strange.

I saw a lot more women and elderly people…wait, was that Clark Gable? He was dead, wasn’t he? Or maybe he wasn’t. In this city you lost track. Plus, people died here, but if you were famous enough you lived on, forever doing dinner theater in Encino, or some poor sap with the right mustache or chin was making five bucks posing for tourists outside Grauman’s, or having lunch in westside restaurants, taking on your name, looks, everything. Button up, sister. We ain’t got time for being spooked in the soup.

The hostess chose a booth in a dark corner. “Your waiter’ll be right with you, hon. Can I start you with a coffee?”

“Yes, please. And tell the waiter I’m in a jam, so I’ll take my usual.”

“Usual?”

“Chicken salad sandwich, coffee black, and if he’s feeling generous, an extra pickle maybe?” I chuckled.

She chuckled too. “Oh, no, no, no, no…we don’t do usuals around here, ma’am….” Then her face turned serious. “No.”

I started to feel deflated, maybe it was the artificial chill from the A/C. “Y-...Y-You don’t have the chicken salad sandwich anymore?”

“Your waiter will be able to explain the new menu,” she clipped and sauntered off. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack.

I grabbed the menu, it was heavy. A menu has no business weighing this much. People were not supposed to have this many options. Before I could open the thing, the waiter came briskly around the side of the booth with a salesman’s grin and a white jacket. “Well, well, well! Hello there, little lady. Have we had a chance to look over the bill of fare?”

“Just bring me a sandwich. Any kind. I don’t have much time.” He laughed. Why is everyone laughing?

“Oh, you’ve got time.”

“I really don’t.”

“Sure you do.” He leaned in, still smiling, breath sweet with mints. “Nobody’s waiting on you, are they? You’re not that important.”

He was right of course, but I just stared at him. His smile did not move, then he broke the stare.

“So,” he said, tapping the menu with one bright fingernail, “why don’t we quit playing and take a peek at what you actually came in for?”

“Hey! What kind of service is this?”

He didn’t hear my question or pay it any mind because he started quickly into an explanation. “Let me explain the new menu. We sell…conversations.”

I thought he was joking. “I can get that at the bus stop for free.”

“Not with these people, you can’t.”

He opened the menu into my hands. There were, indeed, no chicken salad sandwiches or sandwiches for that matter. No soups. No blue plate specials. Just names, printed in black.

“Is this a gag?”

“Not unless you laugh.”

I read the first line.

HUMPHREY BOGART — 19 MINUTES, 16 SECONDS OYL

Then another.

VIRGINIA WOOLF — 22 MINUTES, 0 SECONDS OYL

Then another.

SENECA — 1 HOUR, 13 MINUTES, 43 SECONDS OYL

I shut the menu.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No, no, no.”

“That’s usually how it starts.”

“What the hell is this?”

“You pick a name. Someone dead comes to the table. You talk as long as you like, or as long as you can stand it. When you’re done talking to them they go back to where they belong, or where they’re stuck, or wherever the dead punch their cards. The price beside the name is what it costs to bring them here. Send them back in ten seconds or keep them all afternoon….the house still gets paid.”

“You’re telling me I order a dead person.”

“You order a conversation with a dead person. We’re not animals.”

“And you mentioned the price?”

“Time.”

“Time?”

“Yours.”

He said it cheerfully, like he was offering me those extra pickles.

“Time off the end,” he said. “Sometimes hours. Sometimes more, if you’ve got expensive taste or a sentimental streak. Famous strangers are usually the cheap stuff. Movie stars, philosophers, singers, dead presidents. Blue plate ghosts of all shapes and sizes. Big names, low attachment.”

“And people I knew?”

His smile got smaller.

“Costs more.”

“How much more?”

“Depends how much they mattered.”

“That’s rotten.”

“That’s supply and demand, baby.”

I opened the menu again because apparently I was that kind of sap.

“What are the rules?”

“Simple. They had to have lived and died. And they had to cross your path somehow. Blood, book, screen, radio, newspaper, passing rumor, record, photograph, dirty rag, what have you. You can’t order what never was.”

“No fictional people?”

“No Hamlet. No Sherlock Holmes. No Mickey Mouse. We had trouble with a fellow who kept asking for Betty Boop, in fact, he’s still asking. We found him rummaging in the trash out back, poor guy.”

“No gods?”

He clicked his tongue.

“What about Jesus?”

He spread his hands.

“Off-menu. Too much overhead.”

I laughed once, by accident and this seemed to please him. “There she is. I knew we had a live one.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Force of habit.”

“And they really come?”

“They come.”

“And they talk?”

“Some talk. Or croon out a song…Or cry and complain. Some stare into their drink. All under the umbrella of Conversation. You can order as much Conversation as you can afford.”

“Afford?”

“That’s right.”

“So what if I order Queen Victoria but she takes nineteen minutes off my life…and I don’t have nineteen minutes to live?”

“Then you shouldn’t order Vicky, should you.”

“What happens if I do? I don’t know when I’ll….die…right?”

“We’ve taken care of that. She just won’t be on the menu.”

I looked at him, incredulous.

He tapped the page with his pen. “That’s the beauty of it. Menu only shows what you can cover. If you’re flush, you get choices. If you’re running short, the card thins out. A fellow slated to croak in the evening doesn’t get Aristotle AND his beloved mother, six feet under. He gets a long-lost second cousin and a cup of coffee, if you get my drift.”

He continued, cheerfully. “Also, there is no ‘time is up’, we’re open 24/7. You can stay here until you want to leave or…time runs out…and then you go ‘Check, please.’” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

I swallowed. Outside, I had 20 minutes for lunch. “But what am I going to eat? Conversation isn’t going to fill my stomach, now is it.”

“For sustenance, we give out just two things here. Coffee and a cigarette.” Christ.

“Alright, alright. Give me a few minutes. I need to look this over.”

“Take all the time you like.”

“Cute….very cute.”

He clicked his pen shut. “Lady, cute keeps the lights right on humming. I’ll be back for your order.” Then he left me there with a wink and the menu.

After all that, it was lucky the damn thing was such a hunking fat brute with pages and pages of names. I was lonely, broke, hungry, and down to one good set of stockings and three, no two, Kents, but at least the menu had some heft to it. Which meant, if the waiter was not completely full of hooey, I still had a long one ahead of me. A long life, yes, a long life was what mattered.

Let’s see, who will keep me company for the next *checks clock* 15 minutes?

Luckily, the menu looked like it was arranged chronologically by date of death, which made all this less overwhelming. The early pages were full of names I knew from schoolbooks or cheap paperbacks.

SOCRATES — 6 HOURS, 13 MINUTES, 12 SECONDS OYL (OFF YOUR LIFE)
CLEOPATRA — 4 HOURS, 40 MINUTES, 33 SECONDS OYL
JULIUS CAESAR - 2 YEARS… OYL
SENECA — 1 HOUR, 13 MINUTES… OYL
MARCUS AURELIUS — 47 MINUTES… OYL

It is worth noting that Hitler had a price tag of 450 years. A convo with him would kill you almost immediately.

I tapped on a name. “That Roman fellow.” The waiter leaned over my shoulder.

“Marcus Aurelius. Emperor. Big shot philosopher.”

“Forty-seven minutes?”

“Cheap for an emperor.”

“What’s the catch?”

“The catch is he’s serious.”

“That makes him cheaper?”

“Lady, serious men are always marked down at lunch. Most customers want glamour, scandal, they want Cleopatra with the eyes; of course, what they really want is Elizabeth Taylor, but she ain’t dead yet! They don’t want a prudish Roman.” I looked at the price again.

“Forty-seven seems steep then. Can I get him for fifteen?”

“Fifteen minutes OYL for Marcus Aurelius?”

“I’m going to be late for work, so it needs to be worth it.”

He shook his head. I pleaded “I don’t need the whole emperor. Just enough to get the gist.”

“The gist is still forty-seven minutes OYL.”

“What if I don’t like him?”

“You won’t.”

“Then why would I order him?”

“Because you already tapped the name.”

“And that’s binding? Why didn’t you warn me! What’s wrong with you?”

“Bit of a slow day.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll take Marcus.”

“Attagirl,” the waiter said. “A little gloomy, but he’ll do.”

The booth went cold as if the A/C was cranked on full blast. Then a man sat across from me. He was not dressed like a picture-book emperor, he was a tired man with a dirty beard. The waiter handed me my cigarette and coffee. Alright here goes.

Aurelius looked at the cigarette between my fingers. “What’s that?”

“It’s a cigarette.”

“Ah.”

He studied me for a moment.

“You are distressed.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Hunger is a form of distress.”

“Yes.”

His face did not change. That was the first thing that annoyed me. No smile, frown, blink, scratch of his jaw, nothing to show the words had landed. Marcus Aurelius only sat there.

“You have been given little time,” he said.

“I had thirty minutes for lunch.”

“And yet you are here.”

“I was trying to eat.”

“Were you?”

I was getting more annoyed.

He folded his hands. “You believe you have no time, but you spend what you have in resentment.”

“Well, I’m sorry my resentment isn’t better spent. I left my cheery attitude in the office.”

“Resentment does not alter your condition.”

“No, but it puts a little skip in my step.”

“Anger is not good.”

“It’ll do in a pinch.”

He looked at me with an irksome calm and patient expression. “You suffer because you imagine the world has singled you out.”

I laughed once. “Buddy, if the world singled me out, I’d at least have dinner plans. I don’t have those types of grand delusions.”

“The world does not owe you anything, you know.”

“There it is.”

“What?”

“Check, please!” I snapped my fingers. The waiter came sailing back to the table with that big toothpaste grin.

“Well now,” he said in mock concern. “Not to madam’s liking?”

“Take him back.”

Marcus looked at me for one second, seemingly shocked, and a second later he was gone.

The booth warmed up. Somewhere a glass clinked, a woman laughed too softly at something that was probably not funny. The waiter tucked his pad under his arm. “Shame. You paid for premium OYL for only a few seconds of conversation. But keep in mind you still get charged full freight. Prices don’t reflect the length of the conversation.”

“Of course they don’t.”

“House policy. You send a fellow back, that’s your affair, but green is green.”

I looked toward the door. Outside, somewhere beyond the blinds and the brass and the cold red booths, my office still existed. My boss, the Henderson account, the switchboard, those damn invoices, the damp back of my blouse, all of it waiting for me, but was it? There was no going back to the office now.

The waiter knew it too. The rat.

“Do you want to leave,” he said, “or order something else?”

“Something else.”

His grin got warmer. “Now we’re talking!”

“Don’t look so pleased.”

He plucked the menu from the table and turned a few pages with confidence. “May I offer a recommendation?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t want another serious man. Not on an empty stomach. Serious men are for after dinner, after two drinks, or after a divorce. What you need is a not so serious man.”

“No, no, no. What I need is a woman.” I grabbed the menu back and tapped on a name.

VIRGINIA WOOLF — 22 MINUTES, 0 SECONDS OYL

I peered more closely. “Writer?”

Waiter replied, “Lady Writer.”

I asked what the difference was. He shrugged, “Not too sure. Costs less than a man with half the talent, market forces, and all that. But English and sharp, big on rooms.”

“So why is she so cheap then?”

“Because she thinks hard and broods, makes the customers nervous. High turnover, but on a busy day she keeps the tables moving.”

“I just sent back an emperor within 30 seconds, can’t get faster than that, and he was more expensive.”

“Yes, but emperors are simple. They command, not much to do but follow right? And most people tend to find that easier, better for digestion. They’ll keep him around for a while until they get bored eventually. People like Woolf talk about pain, try to sit with it and you’ll see; it will be a fast one.”

I looked at the name. Where have I seen her? Ah yes, I had read her once in a library copy with a cracked spine, mostly because a girl at the office said it was the kind of thing you did to look smart and serious. I remembered liking A Room of One’s Own and also resenting it. That seemed as good a qualification as any.

“I’ll take her.”

“You’ve already tapped her name, you have no choice,” the waiter quipped cheerfully.

“Whatever.”

The booth cooled, but not the way it had for my man Marcus. That had been marble cold, but this was…this was damp. English. Very English.

Then Virginia Woolf sat across from me. She wore dark clothes, plain but not dull, and had a long grave face. Her eyes moved first to the menu, then the coffee, then my cigarette, then underneath the table at my torn stocking, then back up to my face.

“So,” she said. “This is lunch in Los Angeles.” I guess they don’t remember past conversations with other restaurant patrons? Have to remember to ask the waiter later.

“That’s the rumor.”

“How very strange.”

“If you think that’s strange, you should see microwaves.” I took a hit from the cigarette and a swig of the awful coffee. This was already starting off better than the convo with Aurelius.

She had calm, searching eyes and landed them softly on my face. “Mmm-microwaves?”

I wanted to change the subject and fast. “Soooooo…Woolf is it? What do you do for fun?”

“Pardon?”

“Nevermind….uhhhh” I twiddled my thumbs on the table. What do you ask people who are not alive? Keep it light, keep it light.

I looked at the table beside us. A man, with an elderly woman who appeared to be his mother, was laughing, crying, and talking. How lovely. I pitied them both. Which one was dead? I thought of my own mother, who was very much alive.

“Do you like observing other people?”

I snapped back to Woolf. “Erm….no I just noticed them that’s all.”

“One must be careful with ‘just,’” Virginia said. “It is a very small word, and therefore very good at hiding large things.”

“It’s a restaurant,” I said. “People look around in restaurants. It’s not a big deal.”

“Indeed,” said Virginia, “among all the indignities that attend being a woman in a public room—and I give you the thought as it came to me, not as it ought perhaps to be arranged in the mind afterwards—there is none more curious than this: that one is so often looked at and so seldom seen. Or rather, no; seen is not the word. For one is seen continually. The hat is seen, the glove, the man and his mother, the chair opposite if it is empty. A woman alone at luncheon.”

She paused, then went on.

“To observe is a very different matter from knowing. Don’t pretend to understand. Observation is a kind of ownership attempted by the eye, but it’s an illusion. Observation says: she is young, she is tired, she is pretty, she is plain, she is waiting, she has been left, she is respectable, she is not respectable, she is eating too quickly, she is smoking too much, she is alone and therefore available, or alone and therefore pitiable. How briskly the world writes these little biographies for us! A whole life composed between oneself and others.”

“That’s cheerful,” I said.

“But to be known,” she said, “requires time, and idleness, and that blessed irresponsibility without which no soul ever shows itself truly. One must be allowed to contradict oneself. One must be allowed to sit silent and not have the silence entered against one as permanent judgment. One must be allowed to change a word, as Milton changed a word perhaps in Lycidas—though Lamb, dear Lamb, would have suffered at the thought—without being told that the alteration proves some defect of character.”

I looked quizzically at her. “What has Milton got to do with anything?”

“Everything, perhaps; nothing, certainly. That is how thoughts behave. They are excellent trespassers. I say things as I think them. I don’t need to riddle off facts to give you the truth.”

She folded her hands. “And the terrible thing,” she said, “is that after years of being revised in the mind of another, one begins to read the false copy as if it were oneself. We transform into the hollowed-out thoughts of others.”

“Whatcha getting at Woolf?”

She continued. “That man over there,” Virginia pointed to the man and his mother next to us, the pair I had been observing with so much pity, “had killed his mother and got away with the murder. There was nothing there, one would say, upon which pity ought properly to settle. And yet for a moment pity did settle there. How often we attach the wrong feelings to the wrong people and all because you were ‘just’ observing.”

I said nothing, but I didn’t care to look at the man and his mother after that.

“Virg?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.” I gave her a soft smile, then “Check please!” and she vanished. I felt a little better than I cared to admit to the waiter. It was good to sit across from someone and be answered, to hear people speak and to have some company. Beat going home to a TV dinner and Lucille Ball and her antics. The dead were easy company. They did not telephone or ask to be called back. They did not need a ride or any favors. They could not be disappointed in me in any fresh way. Whatever claims they had once made on the living had been settled, or lost, or written off. They sat across from me then, poof!, they vanished. I liked this company without any obligation and so I never left.

I do not know how long I remained in that restaurant. Two hours, perhaps. Two years. Longer. Outside, real time went on without me. There were no mirrors, but I could feel myself growing older on cigarettes, coffee, and conversation. Minute by minute, name by name, the far shore of my life drew closer and I didn’t want to leave.

Once, my mother’s name appeared on the menu. It was there between Bessie Smith and some French count who had died in a duel over a woman or a horse, I forget which. Plain as anything:

MRS. ELENA GONZALES — 7 YEARS, 3 MONTHS, 4 DAYS, 29 MINUTES, 36 SECONDS

I looked at it for a long while. Then I shut the menu so fast the coffee jumped in its cup. The waiter came by and said nothing. For once, the rat had the decency not to smile.

Another time, Darlene from the office came looking for me. I saw her through the blinds, older now, though I could not have said how much older. Her hair was higher, her skirt shorter, and she stood on the sidewalk with one hand over her eyes, peering into the restaurant as though she had lost something. For a moment, I thought of waving, but I did not.

She had probably come to tell me Mr. Hanley had fired me, or died, or ditched his wife and married the secretary he replaced me with, or that everybody wondered what had happened to me for a week and then stopped wondering. I didn’t have the heart to face that. I ordered Edna St. Vincent Millay that afternoon.

I remember the first time it rained and rain in Los Angeles always feels like a beautiful incandescent error. The drops ran down the restaurant windows and turned Wilshire into a long trembling river of headlights, which put me in the mood for a poet. I do not even remember which one. There were so many dead poets on the menu, and the restaurant gave us a 2-for-1 poet special on gloomy days. He sat across from me and spoke about nightingales or larks or whatever. I nodded as though I understood. Mostly I listened to the rain and felt grateful that, for one more evening, I did not have to go home.

I learned many things from the mouths of the dead. I learned about courage from those who had been afraid and gone forward anyway. I learned about joy from those who had lost it. I learned about suffering, goodness, evil, hunger, vanity, mercy, and guilt and everything in between. I lunched with kings and queens, suffragettes and soldiers, murderers and martyrs, revolutionaries, actresses, saints, tyrants, poets, and everything bright and glorious came from them all. I had company always; never alone. I liked that.

Yet in all those years, or hours, or whatever measure belonged to that place, I never once ordered a family member nor a friend. I told myself this was wise. I told myself the dead who mattered most should be left where they were. I told myself many things by then, and had become skilled at believing whichever one hurt me the least. Then, near the end, my waiter came to my table. He stood beside me with the same cheerful expression he had worn on the first day.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Your time is almost up.”

I looked at him.

“How much?”

“Thirty years taken from the end of your life,” he said.

The room seemed to grow very still.

“But I don’t want this to end.”

“I know.”

“There must be another menu.”

“There is always another menu,” he said gently. “But you can’t afford another conversation.”

I looked down at the table at the ring my coffee cup had left on the cloth; an ashtray filled to the brim. All this grand company, all this borrowed wisdom, all those splendid ghosts, and still I was sitting alone when the bill came.

“Well,” I said at last, reaching for my clutch. “Thank you for everything. I had a wonderful time. I learned so much.”

Then, because I was tired and a little sad, I added, “It was better than my real life. No one loved me there.”

The waiter’s face softened. “I am glad you found some comfort here,” he said.

I paid the bill. I even tipped him a few extra minutes.

“We appreciate your business!” he said. I stepped outside when the sun struck me hard and the city had changed. Chrome had given way to neon and the cars were sleeker, the air hotter, the sidewalks popped and crackled, the world turned on its axis without waiting.

I walked back toward the office out of habit. Perhaps Mr. Hanley was still there or maybe he already died. At the corner, the light changed and I stepped into the street. A bus came roaring toward me, roaring like a fire-breathing dragon in the glare. 3…2…1…And all was over.

1980- Los Angeles, Wilshire Boulevard

I walked into a cold, outdated restaurant with torn red booths, sticky menus, and dark wood paneling. The waiter handed me a menu. There was no food on it. Only names.

“You can order anyone listed,” he said. “For however long you like, until time runs out, you may speak with the dead.”

I should have left then. I did not like the prices. I did not like the idea of time being taken from my life, minute by minute. Then I saw her name.

I had not thought of her in years, or perhaps I had thought of her all this time. She had been my mentor sixteen years ago, when I was young and making all these mistakes as an intern in my first office job. She had been patient with me. Kind, when I had not known much kindness and I loved her for it. I stared at her name until the letters blurred.

Then I tapped it.

MISS MARIA GONZALES - 22 MINUTES, 1 SECOND OYL

At 10:55pm, on the evening of May 27th 1964, President Johnson secretly1 recorded a phone call he made to Senator Richard Russell2. Apparently, Johnson had a lot on his mind because the first thing he tells Russell when he is asked how he is doing is “Oh, I’ve got lots of trouble” and then asks Russell “what do you think about the Vietnam thing?” Now, I’ve lived long enough on this earth to know that if you’re up past 8pm asking these kind of questions on a phone call, you’re probably stressed the eff out and you need to get yourself an EKG and maybe some Xanax3. I mean, I don’t know how Russell felt about it, but the political jump scare this probably caused. Well hell’s bells, Lyndon, who in the blazes put you through?

“What do you think about the Vietnam thing?” How does one answer a question like that from a US president? We get a semblance of a clue from Russell. Russell being a Senator and Johnson being…. who he was, the question was answered truthfully, probably without much thought that the call was being recorded and would be made available 60+ years later to bored amateur history noobs in California for an analysis of its contents4.

Anyway, here is what I gathered from the exchange:

1. First and foremost, Russell’s derogatory language about Vietnam and the Vietnamese people needs to be named directly. He is not speaking from some neutral antiwar position and his skepticism is filtered through an imperial and racial mindset. Russell clearly sees Vietnam as unstable, inferior, and not worth the cost of American lives. But that does not mean he sees Vietnam as irrelevant. Like Johnson, he also views Vietnam through the Cold War logic of containment and as a possible “first domino” whose fall could extend Communist influence in the region and strengthen the broader Soviet-Chinese bloc. Frustration over this escalating involvement from China was evident throughout. Johnson:

“They [the United Nations] ainʼt going to take back and behave. We tell them every week, we tell Khrushchev, send China, Hanoi, and all of them word that we would get out of there and stay out of there if they just quit raiding their neighbors, and they just say, screw you.”

2. The optics of war are everywhere in this call. Johnson and Russell clearly do not think the average American knows much about Vietnam, and they were probably right. But they also knew that public indifference had limits especially when the inevitable occurred: American casualties. Johnson, especially, had ambitions at home to protect; he was trying to build the Great Society, and needed American backing and public approval as collateral to push these domestic policies through; the last thing he needed was the pesky problem of sending American men off to war to be killed.

   So if the United States did get pulled further in, the problem became not only how to fight, but how to leave quickly without looking…well…weak. What credible excuse could America use to get out quickly? Russell’s answer is essentially a self-determination alibi: find or allow someone in South Vietnam to ask the United States to leave, and then America could withdraw under the cover of respecting the “will of the Vietnamese people”. Russell offered the most psychologically manipulative solution:

“Some old freebooter down in there, Iʼve forgotten his name, I havenʼt heard about him lately, but he is still there, sort of a hellraiser and he donʼt know exactly what he wants, but I think he is the most dangerous thing to the present regime. I think that if he were to take over, he would ask us to get out. And, of course, if he did, with our theory of standing by self-determination of people, I donʼt think how we could say we not going to go if he is in charge of the government.”

American democracy at its finest.

3. Next up: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Boy, oh boy. I wonder if that fella ever laid eyes on this transcript? The US Ambassador to South Vietnam took a real hide-tanning in this exchange. Let me put it this way. Russell more or less says Lodge is bright and intelligent, but both men agree that Lodge couldn’t follow a trail if you painted it yellow. He doesn’t follow things through. And worse than that, Russell thinks Lodge is out there in Vietnam just making a mess of things and not following orders5. So why not just bring him back and put someone else in charge? Russell and Johnson thought of the power politics at home. They worried that Lodge would be a possible Presidential/Vice-Presidential Republican ticket. Johnson is contemplating keeping Lodge out there, and maybe he keeps making a mess, but at least he is out of the picture that would unseat Johnson from his presidential hold on the country. What’s a man gotta do around here to hold onto power? Geeze.

4. Both men knew the limitations of the American war machine fighting in Vietnam. Russell keeps referring to Korea as a lesson here. The United States could bomb roads, shell mountains, bury railroad tracks, spend millions of dollars, “by God, we’ve got them now”. But then, wait!, next morning the trains are running again “like the devil.” Ah, yes, guerilla warfare. Russell understood that American power could destroy infrastructure without destroying will. Johnson understood this too, but I suppose knowing something doesn’t always mean acting on it (see the Tet Offensive6).

5. Johnson is a bit of a complicated man, which is all very interesting and honestly this is the type of giddyup attitude you admire out in the Texan wilderness, but in DC this is not necessarily something you want to adopt when it comes to making foreign policy decisions. In one part of the conversation, Russell mentions thirty-five Americans killed in Vietnam and he compares that number to automobile deaths in Atlanta, rookie numbers according to Russell. In reply, Johnson quips:

   “Yeah, thatʼs right, and 83 went down in one crash on a 707 in one day, but that doesnʼt make any difference.”

   and then Johnson later admits

   “I think about sending that father of those six kids in there, and what the hell are we going to get out of his doing in? It just makes the chills run up my back.[...] I havenʼt the nerve to do it.”

   It’s nice to see a president with a conscience, even if he doesn’t act on it.

6. The end of the call is just….well….see for yourself:

Russell: It doesnʼt make much sense to do it. Itʼs one of these things, heads I win, tails you lose.

Johnson: Well, think about it, and Iʼll talk to you again. I hate to bother you.

Russell: I feel for you, God knows I do. Itʼs a terrific quandary that weʼre in over there. Weʼre in the quicksands up to our very neck, and I just donʼt know what the hell the best way to do about it.

Johnson: I love you, and Iʼll be calling you.

Russell: Iʼll see you, sir.

We also get into our own history with the movie, why it became so beloved, what it changes from the book, and why certain scenes still make fans lose their minds twenty years later. Expect affection, mild criticism, lots of Darcy and Elizabeth analysis, and one friend’s very sincere love letter to the film.

YouTube video will be up soon!

THE MANTEL

In a time, long ago, Mary Farleigh already displayed, in the first faint wispiness of her lineage, that airy, seed-borne disposition which her descendants would later cultivate. She fluttered in the cold southeastern wind with a pail knocking against her skirts, bound for the well some three hundred yards away, and spun and spun until her serious thoughts spun silly threads of silver to keep her warm and spry, but none too cheerful. She was out of the house! And being out of the house meant wind-tossed dandelion freedom in that sweet morning air, lasting only until the frozen path delivered her back to the kitchen door of the Harcourt estate, or, rather, the remains of it.

Lord Harcourt was not a loud man, and indeed had always considered loudness one of those unfortunate economies to which persons of insufficient property were driven when they had no better means of announcing or explaining themselves. Loud racket belonged to the unsecured. To debtors startled from their beds by a writ and a heavy fist upon the door (“Out of bed, you slippery bastard! I’ll not freeze my arse while you sleep. Pay what you owe, find a friend with coin, or come along quiet before we drag you out to the slaughter!”); to shopkeepers whom credit, that most amiable of fair-weather friends, had abandoned at the very moment it was required to prove its constancy; to embarrassed gentlemen improving, against their inclination, their acquaintance with the Fleet, the Marshalsea, or those melancholy liberties of the King’s Bench where a man might walk about with the impressions of freedom; and to all those inferior creatures who, having neither acres to murmur for them, nor ancestors to wail from their verdant graves, were reduced to the last vulgarity of pleading their own case to the tenth degree. His lordship’s opinions had never been obliged to enter a room unattended. They came preceded by power acquired through violence but so long ago that everyone duly forgot about it, accompanied by tenants, softened by connections, and received with all the respect naturally due to an opinion which had land behind it. It is remarkable how fluently wealth speaks for itself, and more remarkable still that those who possess it are so seldom satisfied with letting it do so without interrupting and adding to the conversation. A powerful man may seem modest, being sparing of speech and gentle in gesture, while all the while his consequence roars through the kingdom like a bell tolling under the earth. In Parliament he need only rise and sit again; yet the poor, upon whom such delicate verbs at last descend, hear not gentility but thunder. His words pass from chamber to statute, from statute to magistrate, from magistrate to gaol, from gaol to the empty stomach and the cold hearth; and by the time they arrive there, they are no longer words at all, but loud echos that have reverberated and enhanced in volume through the kingdom echo chamber. Thus, when he had lately risen in the Lords upon the matter of the Frame Work Bill, he did so with that grave and chastened composure by which severity may pass for some gleam of conscience. He had much to say of evil, and very little to say of hunger; for evil was a convenient abstraction, while hunger had the disadvantage of belonging to the ghastly reality of individual stomachs. Lord Harcourt sounded almost Biblical while avoiding the dangerous precedent of Joseph, who, upon hearing the cry of a famished people, had opened storehouses1. Poverty might require investigation and bread distributions to calculate and think on; but evil required only punishment, and punishment was a public remedy of which Lord Harcourt had always approved, having never been in any danger of becoming its example.

Mary Farleigh thought she could still see Lord Harcourt there by the hearth, though nothing of the hearth remained but a mantelpiece, cracked through the middle and leaning most pathetically upon the last remaining wall of that great room; an arrangement which, had his lordship been present to observe it, he would no doubt have praised for its soundness.

“There you be,” Mary said, setting down her pail of water and looking up at the cracked mantel. “Still a-leaning, my lord. The mighty cast down, like the parson read it, only he never said they’d crack so ugly when they fell nor lean so long after, as if falling were beneath ’em. Humph! That’s gentle blood for ye’.”

She caught herself then in the cracked looking-glass still hanging by one nail above the fallen washstand, and there was Miss Farleigh, split three ways by the break in the mirror: one eye larger than the other, her cap gone crooked, her cheeks hollowed by hunger. She smiled at herself, and her teeth showed black in the dimness.

“Well,” she said, humming under her breath, “there’s beauty for the drawing room.” The smile widened, ugly and pleased and all her own.

“Look at ye, Mary. Teeth like burnt pegs, hands mottled. And still here.” She leaned closer to the glass, and the broken mirror gave her back in pieces, which seemed fair enough, for the house had never taken her whole either. She tapped the glass with one hard nail.

“Bits and pieces, weren’t it? A bit of Mary in the scullery. A bit on the back stair. A bit froze on the path to the well. A bit left standing with water down her neck while them Harcourt boys laughed fit to split.” She hummed a senseless tune.

“Mmm. And now here’s the rest of her.” She drew herself upright, slowly, for the house had worked upon her hard, ossifying every soft thing for the sake of others: her knees with curtsies, her hands with labour, her tongue with silence, her back with the scrubbing and the mending and the tending to, until Mary Farleigh stood in the ruin as one of its last entombed stones. “So lean on, my lord. Lean and look. Mary Farleigh’s got a room. Mary Farleigh’s got a fire when she can make one and water when she can fetch it.” It would be too much, perhaps, to say that Mary Farleigh had triumphed. The mighty had been put down from their seats, the Harcourt family sent empty away, and Mary, who had once entered that room only to mend a fire, now sat in it with her shoes off.

THE FRAME WORK BILL OF 1812

When I wrote of the fictional Lord Harcourt I was thinking of Mr. Secretary Ryder. In his parliamentary speech on February 14, 1812, Ryder was responding to the Nottinghamshire Luddite frame-breaking disturbances that had begun in late 1811. His stated motive was not sympathy for hunger or wage collapse, but the restoration of order and the protection of property. He says the disturbances were “lawless violence,” “enormities,” an “evil,” and “a system of riot” that had existed for three months and was “bordering almost on insurrection.”

The government’s first intelligence came on November 14, 1811, when the high sheriff asked for military assistance. Ryder says a squadron of dragoons was sent to Nottingham that day. By early December, officials feared the unrest would leech into Leicester and Derby, and between November 14 and December 9 the government sent 900 cavalry and 1,000 infantry into Nottingham, which Ryder himself calls an unusually large force for a local disturbance, and as I have stated in other places, the British public were naturally weary of militia presence in their part of town.2

Ryder also hints at an economic backstory for the Luddites. Trade had expanded about four years earlier because parts of South America were opened to British commerce; frames multiplied, hands were employed, and then, about two years later, the market failed. Manufacturers discharged workers, creating “discontent and distress,” worsened by the “unfavourable situation of trade.” But this admission is immediately contained: he says those “deplorable” circumstances still could not justify the frame-breakers. Frame-breaking was already a felony punishable by fourteen years’ transportation, but Ryder says that punishment had proved “completely insufficient.” His proposed remedy was to make it capital, in other words, punishable by death. He insists he is “by no means a friend to the increase of capital punishments,” and then, without irony, recommends one.

He justifies death through property and state danger. He points to the “immense body of property involved,” the “great expense” of machinery, nearly 1,000 frames broken, and the risk that continued destruction would become “dangerous to a state.” The Act that followed was blunt: offenders convicted of destroying or damaging stocking/lace frames or related machinery would “suffer Death” as felons “without Benefit of Clergy.

Why, it may be asked, should such a tremendous solution be fitted to so small a visible offense? A frame is broken and that is vandalism, but was it worth a life? The difficulty, in judging such a moment, lies in persuading the modern imagination to enter a mind so perpetually furnished with panic. To Mr. Ryder and those who supported him in Parliament, the broken frame was more than a broken frame. The Napoleonic Wars were causing paranoia and anxiety across Britain and the Luddites were considered by Ryder and his supporters as a domestic front in a country already at war. Additionally, if workers could destroy frames, meet in secret, threaten informers, and remain unawed by the militia, you had disobedience. And in a country at war with France, broken obedience was the one spectacle England could least afford to display.

For Further Study:

Feb 14 1812 Parliamentary Debates: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1812/feb/14/frame-breaking-and-nottingham-peace-bills

Feb 27 1812 Parliamentary Debates with a speech by Lord Byron: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1812/feb/27/frame-work-bill

The Frame Breaking Act 1812 in full: https://ludditebicentenary.blogspot.com/2012/03/20th-march-1812-1812-frame-breaking-act.html

Thomis, Malcolm I. The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England. Schocken Books, 1972.

Binfield, Kevin, editor. Writings of the Luddites. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. (I have some excerpts here I can share)

In a previous article1, I discuss the Enlightenment basis for a Unipolar World Order and promised I would get into more detail regarding the Unipolar Philosophy Vector, and I will write through the two critical components of that vector in this article: Hegemonic Stability Theory and Democratic Peace Theory. In a subsequent article, I would like to contrast these with the Hellenistic philosophies: Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism and link these to what I consider the initial threads into the Multipolar Philosophy Vector. On reading back these last few sentences, it all seems pretty daunting and I’m feeling less and less up to the task of hashing this all out, but one of my favorite TV shows right now2 is not coming back for another six months, so I’m bored and in search of a little fun.

Skip the next section to get straight into the Hegemonic Stability and Democratic Peace theories, but stick around if you want a quick brain warm-up:

A CALL TO ARMS, OR WHY DC BARS NEED MORE LARGE WHITE NAPKINS

I was surrounded by a large group of people in an underground bar in DC completely overwhelmed and overstimulated. In ⅔ cases, these situations push me to complete silence, not because I have nothing to say, but because I’ve got too much on my mind. Friends who know this of me usually leave me alone until I stop the hyper-observant fixation on my surroundings and find a thread back to reality. The thread, in this particular instance, was an unsuspecting, completely innocent person sitting by themselves in the corner of the booth. He was drinking a negroni (ugh), “I’ll have what you’re having!” employing one of my oldest conversational strategies: creating the illusion of shared ground before dragging someone onto the battlefield of my choosing. Negroni: the great equalizer and master manipulator.

At some point in the conversation, a napkin had to be used. Why? Well, because I steered the conversation toward Hellenistic philosophies and when dangerous philosophizing occurs, a preferably, large white napkin is the best mode of processing and discussing; a small black bar napkin just won’t do. But when did DC bars stop using white bar napkins? Is this an underhanded attempt to discourage dangerous philosophizing in underground, overpriced, dark bars? And why did DC bars get darker? My chosen conversational buddy for the evening suggested that this was all due to the trash economy and bars having to save on utility bills; plus, he offered, small black napkins are cheaper than large white ones since they use less material, right? Sensible enough, and I told him so despite thinking that there may be more to it than material. And, I offered my suspicions that the government was more anti-revolt lately and what’s more anti-revolt than depriving tipsy people in power hubs from writing on napkins in well-lit rooms?3

Which is why I call on all DC bars to provide more large, white napkins and lighting (if the economy allows). Anyway, enough of that, back to philosophies and vectors.

THE UNIPOLAR BEHEMOTHS: HEGEMONIC STABILITY AND DEMOCRATIC PEACE THEORIES

If you care for straightforward definitions, I can offer you a few:

Hegemonic Stability Theory: a branch of realist analysis [that argues that] the presence of a hegemon (say, Britain in the 19th century and the United States after 1945) generates patterns of stability within the international system. The hegemon has a self-interest in the preservation of the system and is, therefore, prepared to underwrite the system’s security with its military might. At the same time, the hegemon is responsible for the formulation of the rules that govern interaction within the international system.4

Democratic Peace Theory: the proposition that democratic states never (or almost never) wage war on one another.5

If you’ve ever been in a group in any capacity whether it be a social friend group, a student or work group project, a sports team, you may understand a little where the hegemonic stability theorists are coming from….in theory. Groups with rules and shared goals, whether they do this formally or informally, usually have a “natural leader”. This “natural leader” may not always command outright or dictate what and how things should be done, but through soft power s/he may delegate duties, keep track of deadlines, send reminders, organize spreadsheets, negotiate through arguments all in the name of cooperation. But, also, this is the person that people look to when things, from time to time, go wrong. You may have even been in a group that had (warning: oncoming cliched maxim) “too many cooks in the kitchen” and we tend to view that with some negativity and as an indication of inefficiencies and the inevitable dissolution of the group. Hegemonic structures, according to the advocates for this theory, suggest that this is a great way to avoid anarchy and human suffering that would come along with it.

But there is a dark side to this theory that might be apparent. System Justification Theory (SJT)

“provides a social psychological account of how and why the status quo is perpetuated and supported despite the fact that the systems that constitute the status quo are often flawed and disadvantageous to the individuals embedded in them.”

And even more enlightening,

“SJT posits that people possess a motivated tendency to justify and defend existing structural arrangements and that this tendency has a soothing “palliative function”, insofar as it helps people avoid the psychological threat or anxiety produced by acknowledging that the system they are embedded in may be flawed, corrupt, or otherwise suboptimal.”6

SJT helps explain why existing hierarchies can come to feel natural, necessary, or even comforting to the people living inside them. So, it would seem that even if the hegemon is acting out of self-interest, and in this self-interest, does not serve every member of the group (in this case the various political states), there seems to be a need to avoid change of the structure that supports the hegemon and so the hegemonic structure lives on. Or does it?

Scholars and political theorists argue whether the unipolar world order and US as a hegemon actually exists. In its review of Christopher J. Fettweis’s Psychology of a Superpower, Ethics & International Affairs usefully distills his argument that U.S. faith in hegemonic stability theory is sustained by three psychological tendencies rather than by a clear-eyed assessment of America’s actual role as hegemon:

“(1) people generally have an inflated sense of control over their lives, specifically with regard to positive outcomes; (2) they have an outsized view of how much they factor into the decisions of others; and (3) they consistently overestimate their our own benevolence and underappreciate that of their adversaries.” 7

However, whether this is the reality or not, the US “acts as if” it is the hegemon. Historically, we have Bretton Woods, the creation of the IMF and World Bank, the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, the fall of the Soviet Union. In 2014, President Obama made this grand statement at West Point’s Class of 2014 graduation ceremony:

“Here’s my bottom line: America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t, no one else will. The military that you have joined is and always will be the backbone of that leadership. But U.S. military action cannot be the only -- or even primary -- component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail. And because the costs associated with military action are so high, you should expect every civilian leader -- and especially your Commander-in-Chief -- to be clear about how that awesome power should be used.”8

At various times, the acting hegemon has used coercion or consent to control the hegemonic political system9. A hegemonic order is never innocent of force. Even when the hegemon does not use its military power, the system rests on the credible possibility that it could. The violence may be latent, institutional, economic, or strategic rather than constant and spectacular, but it is still there. That’s kind of what I like about the hegemonic stability theory, it doesn’t beat around the proverbial bush. It states very clearly that the hegemonic world order is inherently militarily engineered….and inherently violent, let’s call it for what it is10.

So, what is the hegemonic purpose of a unipolar world order with the US at its chewy center? It is the expansion of democratic principles, liberal institutions, and open markets. Essentially an infiltration of the formula we have discussed earlier (see Part I).

This is an order that serves American interests while presenting those interests as universal goods11. In this view, what benefits the United States also benefits the world, because American primacy is understood as the foundation of stability, prosperity, and democratic peace. A multipolar order threatens this logic because it allows rival powers to rise, resist, and organize alternative visions of world order, some of which may be hostile to liberal democracy itself.

And oh yeah, what about democratic peace?

Democratic Peace Theory does not explain why unipolar world orders emerge. It explains why democracies may avoid war with one another. We can look to history to give us a few examples of this. By the late 19th century, Britain, France, and the United States could all be multiple powerful liberal-constitutional or increasingly democratic states within the same international system, yet their existence did not automatically produce unipolarity.

But looking even earlier than that, early nineteenth-century balance of power gives us what a multipolar world order could look like despite a mixture of states that were not all democracies. After Napoleon’s defeat and the settlement of 1814–1815, the European powers did not try to create a single stabilizing hegemon, in fact, they tried to prevent one. The settlement after 1815 was designed around the fear that one state, especially France, might again dominate the continent, after Europe had already endured the long catastrophe of the Napoleonic Wars. The result was not democratic peace and not liberal unipolarity, but a conservative great-power system: Britain, Austria, Russia, Prussia, and eventually France managing European order through balance and restraint. This Concert of Europe rested on a different assumption: peace required several powers to recognize limits, preserve equilibrium, and restrain any state that threatened to become too large. In that world, order came less from one benevolent manager than from the mutual caution of multiple great powers.

Democratic Peace Theory, however, has two possible readings, and this is where it gets a little more challenging for the unipolar world hegemonic US-led order. In its unipolar reading, the argument runs something like this: if democracies do not wage war upon one another, then the leading democracy, being naturally persuaded of its own prudence and moderation, ought to expand and protect the democratic zone of peace. The more democracies there are, the safer the world becomes; the more liberal institutions there are, the less room remains for despotism; the more the United States leads, funds, arms, organizes, sanctions, lectures, reassures, and occasionally bombs in the ever-increasingly elusive and tenuous name of freedom, the more the world is said to be inching, however bloodily and bureaucratically, toward peace.

INCHING TOWARD THE HELLENISTIC

But there is another reading and one not particularly conducive to a US-led unipolar world order. If democracy is valid only through universal consent, self-government, and resistance to arbitrary power, then democratic peace should not require one state to appoint itself permanent guardian and military chaperone of the entire world. If democracy means anything beyond the pandering speeches to the masses, then peace among democracies ought to be possible through law, institutions, trade, diplomacy, and mutual restraint, without every road leading back to a single hegemonic capital (with dimming lights and dark napkins, mind you). Multiple democratic states should, at least in theory, be capable of coordinating with one another as political adults rather than as nervous and abused dependents. And aren’t we all just citizens of the world, is there something behind nation-state identities that can help us see the common humanity and shared goals and work together? I know this may seem like a pie-in-the-sky type of idealistic thinking that may not seem realistic, and therefore not possible. Multipolarity may mean making room for non-democratic entities, so how can we ensure political philosophies that promote peace in this type of world? The answer may lie intialy in the concept, very broadly, called “universalism”. The belief that human beings are citizens of the kosmos12, meaning that our moral obligations extended beyond the city, tribe, empire, or nation into humanity as a whole. If your first thought here is Stoicism you would be correct.

This is where looking at the Hellenistic philosophies, the heavy hitters Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism will be helpful. And I would love to continue on and write more about this, but I’m off to watch the World Cup and see countries around the world fight metaphorically on futbol fields, which is how I prefer it. So, bye for now!

This, my first Youtube video ever and a shameless attempt to share my passion for Pride and Prejudice and the history of Regency England.

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See transcript below:

It’s easy to love a book like Pride and Prejudice especially if you just like very good writing and that’s probably a little too trite to observe, but there it is, it’s as simple as that, the writing is great and the plot interesting. Of course, for many others it’s much more than that. You have a romance plot that shines a light on complex character development, you’ve got that elegant but sharp writing style of Jane Austen’s that if you were not accustomed to that from the very beginning is like seeing something like seeing the sunrise for the first time (now I’m thinking back to when I last saw a sunrise….and I don’t think I’ve ever properly seen one). It has irony and sarcasm, it has interesting supporting characters that you grow to love or to not love. And a lot of scholars agree that it fits nicely into the genres of Comedy of Manners and Social Satire in the manner of writers like Frances Burney who wrote Evelina and Cecilia a decade or so before Pride & Prejudice. You also see later writers like Edith Wharton and Oscar Wilde who write extensively in these genres. And without getting into too much detail about what that genre is, I want to share an example straight from Pride & Prejudice that highlights what I mean by “Comedy of Manners”. Keep in mind Austen is writing here about the Bennet sisters and a visitor, Mr. Collins, who is their father’s long-lost cousin who is the one to inherit their home on the passing of their father since daughters could not inherit land at this time. Of course, Mr. Collins, it was very much insinuated by Mrs. Bennet, would betroth one of the daughters….kind of like keeping it in the family so to speak:

“They were not the only objects of Mr. Collin’s admiration. The hall, the dining room, and all its furniture, were examined and praised; and his commendation of everything would have touched Mrs. Bennet’s heart, but for the mortifying supposition of his viewing it all as his own future property.”

Austen invites the reader to look with her at the absurdities of society, especially the small vanities and cruelties produced by class, property, and rank. What makes this so brilliant is that she writes as though the reader is already perceptive enough to understand the joke. She does not overexplain the ridiculousness of Mr. Collins, or Mrs. Bennet, or Lady Catherine. She lets us see them, and then seems to trust that we will feel the same mixture of amusement, irritation, and disappointment.

Reading Austen can feel like being drawn into a private confidence. She has the air of someone leaning slightly toward you and saying, with perfect composure, “You see it too, don’t you?” with a nod and a wink. That shared recognition is one of the great pleasures of Pride and Prejudice. Austen gives the reader the pleasure of intelligence, but also the pleasure of companionship in that intelligence. We are invited to laugh, to judge, to notice with her.

For someone like myself at a tender age when confidence didn’t come easily, as with many readers, this was their first entrance into this Regency English world, the very niche landed gentry that was somewhere between the everyday common man and the titled aristocracy of early 19th century England. I did not grow up instinctively understanding the landed gentry, entailments, assemblies, patronage, or the importance of marriage in early nineteenth-century England. At first, it looked like an elegant foreign country of manners and drawing rooms. But what is there to understand? At the heart of the novel you’ve got characters you would see walking around in our modern lives today: The overbearing mother, the nonchalant can’t be bothered father, the annoying younger sisters, the pretentious and uptight matriarch of a superior family, the jealous woman with a chip on her shoulder, the groveling man who does too much to brown nose his patron, a failed marriage proposal. Something here allows us to connect with the past we wouldn’t have otherwise, and to transcend time and place but still feel rooted in the present is certainly a very wonderful place to be.

On its own it’s a work of timeless beauty and power. But as with many pieces of literature, especially ones we are so fond of… we get curious. What was Austen thinking when she wrote the plot and her characters? Was she writing from experience, how much of the world around here was brought into this writing? How did her time and place infiltrate her work? These are not, necessarily, necessary questions to appreciate the book for what it is as a standalone novel. However, as I started understanding more about the historical context, I started viewing the novel in a different way. Characters who once seemed merely comic become a lot more interesting and poignant. Plot points that once felt like just romance or scandal are tied to real systems around money, law, war, class, and reputation.

So if these episodes do anything, I hope they help you see at least one character, one scene, or one plot turn in a new way. If that happens, I’ll feel like I’ve done my job.

Now, just a disclaimer for anyone listening, I will be talking about some of the plot elements of this book so if you want to avoid spoilers I would suggest listening to these episodes after you read it. So let’s get into it.

This particular series is four parts with parts published every day for the next few days. Check out my YouTube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/@theguildedquill_joanna

I was on a plane somewhere over Mexico, gripping the armrest and listening with unusual concentration to Parminder Nagra and Keira Knightley, running around in cleats, in a film I have seen countless times. You know the one with all the fancy football footwork and that Irish lad, who would later play King Henry VIII in The Tudors, looking super fine in a jersey? I was laser-focused as there had been a lot of turbulence the previous twenty minutes or so and I was panicking without making too much of a show of it. The cabin lights shuddered as our seats convulsed underneath us. The stranger beside me had been muttering a prayer under her breath to the Lord Almighty and, so, I would rate the overall situation as 6/10 in intensity. Then….whoosh!, she grabbed onto my arm and yelped. A pure drop for three seconds, maybe less, but you know how these things go when your life is precariously hanging 32,000 feet over land your feet should be on.

I didn’t want to freak her, the stranger sitting next to me, out by also freaking out so when things started calming down I tried taking a sip of water, from those little thimbles airlines call cups, like nothing happened. But the water was sloshing around as my steady hand had finally faltered and betrayed my calm exterior. Whoa there! Calm yourself. I looked out the window onto an expansive view of Guadalajara; we were ready to land, but it’s when the engines turn off and we’re coasting that I find life very peaceful. It’s at this point in a flight where my mind shuts down and goes absolutely numb. Forget everything; you’re just a body whizzing through the atmosphere and nothing more. This is where I always want to be, in the middle between the Icarian turbulence up above and the land-dwelling turbulence down below. The sweet spot with a bird’s-eye view.

Bird’s-eye views will lift you above the roads and roofs and baseball fields and the small bright cars moving along their appointed lines, but not so high that the world is an abstraction you don’t care all that much about. It’s a middle distance, at the perfect height where things just begin to show their meaningful texture and patterns; where you have the illusion of sufficient understanding, but enough distance to avoid the vulgar business of getting too close and burning your fingers.

It's a great life skill but also one helluva cinematic trick. And it's here that I want to write about Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1967 adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Bondarchuk gives us what I consider one of the greatest films of ALL TIME and he made use of the bird’s-eye camera view to great effect.

The Soviet government authorized the use of thousands of Red Army soldiers for Bondarchuk’s famous recreation of the Battle of Borodino1. In this scene, the camera pans over the dead and wounded as a cannon ball firing across the battlefield. Do we know whether these are Russian or French soldiers? Not really. All we see are bodies and smoke billowing about; war, a great equalizer of men.

What Bondarchuk gives us here is the beautiful cruelty of scale. He draws us close enough to know Natasha, Pierre Bezukhov, Andrei Bolkonsky, all these complex characters. Andrei Bolkonsky’s chilling monologue the night before the battle is an intimate look at his feelings:

“My country. The fall of Moscow. Tomorrow, I shall be killed. Then why this trial, when tomorrow I shall cease to exist? I won’t exist. So who is this trial for? New conditions of life will begin about which I will know nothing. I will cease to be. I will no longer exist…..I will no longer exist…..”2

And then, he pulls the camera back until the named characters become only part of a wider human wreckage. War happens to men with no dialogue or close-ups. Look there, will you? Do pay attention or the war will get you too.

In another great scene earlier in the film, Natasha Rostova attends her first ball. She is all nerves, suffering a private humiliation of wanting to be chosen.

“Is it possible that no one will come up to me? Is it possible that no one will notice me? […] They must know how I long to dance, how splendidly I can dance, and how they’ll enjoy dancing with me.”3

In a moment of just glorious acting by Ludmila Savelyeva, who played Natasha, we see a yearning there in her eyes, bright and desperate and indecently tearful. Then Prince Bolkonsky walks across the ballroom to ask her for her first dance. Hurray! We see her wisp through the ballroom crowd, light and quick on her feet. And then, just when we are tempted to stay with her in this grand miracle of being chosen, Bondarchuk pulls the camera back. Natasha’s individual feeling becomes part of a wider pattern of people being chosen, and choosing and simply enjoying themselves.

See around minute 10:35 for the bird’s-eye view you saw in the Battle of Borodino scene earlier.

It would be easy to look at these two scenes (the Battle of Borodino and the ballroom scenes) and see the grand division promised by the title: War on one side, Peace on the other. ooooohhh ahhhhhh Here is the battlefield, seen from above, with its dead and maimed soldiers. And there, in opposition, is the ballroom: peeking coquettishly through fans, men and women turning in their finest clothes….no one dying real deaths.

BUT!!!!! But….

Bondarchuk keeps returning to Tolstoy’s great, unsettling proposition: war and peace are not complete opposites. gasp. To see this fully, we have to leave the bird’s-eye view for a moment and look from the ground up. At the Battle of Austerlitz, Bolkonsky is wounded and falls.

For much of the battle, the camera has been constantly in motion: men running, shouting, riding their horses, dying,. Then Andrei is struck down, and for one of the first times, we are no longer looking down. We are flat on the earth, looking up, robbed, even since some nameless soldier has already helped himself to Andrei’s necklace. And then, in my favorite scene of the whole film, Andrei looks up.

“How quiet, peaceful. How majestic. How different from all the running, shouting and fighting. How is it that I have never noticed that glorious sky before? How happy I am that I have seen it at last! Yes, all is vanity. All is false except for that endless sky. Nothing exists but the sky.”4

Then a cut to complete darkness.

“And even the sky does not exist. There is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God for that.”

Then a cut to Napoleon looking down at Bolkonsky who says

“A glorious death.”5

After all the running, shouting, and fighting (this, where glory and rank and Napoleon do matter) Andrei looks up and finds peace in the one place it should not exist: the battlefield. War contains peace when the self is stripped of illusion and there is no need to think about rank and glory. As Part I ends and the camera pulls back over the battlefield, Andrei’s private revelation becomes part of Tolstoy’s larger pattern: human beings swallowed whole by these artificial systems, briefly illuminated by Bondarchuk’s bird’s-eye view.

Had he and I but met

By some old ancient inn,

We should have sat us down to wet

Right many a nipperkin!

But ranged as infantry,

And staring face to face,

I shot at him as he at me,

And killed him in his place.

I shot him dead because —

Because he was my foe,

Just so: my foe of course he was;

That’s clear enough; although

He thought he’d ‘list, perhaps,

Off-hand like — just as I —

Was out of work — had sold his traps —

No other reason why.

Yes; quaint and curious war is!

You shoot a fellow down

You’d treat if met where any bar is,

Or help to half-a-crown.1

In war, it is easier, perhaps, to fire the gun or to release the shell, to press a button (or a series of buttons), when one imagines the faces of one’s own people. This, for my mother, my father, my children, my…my….my…..The droning on and on in a whole blurry procession of beloved figures that makes it all feel less like….violence. After all, isn’t it love, not hate, that has always been one of war’s most useful servants?2 But sometimes, more often than we admit, the imagination wanders across the line when the other side is allowed to be a mother too, a child too. What of them? Does the hand, hovering over the button, pause just a little in these instances?

For Mary Seacole, we see a glimpse of what it means to think more deeply about the other side. She traveled from Jamaica to the Crimea as a nurse of Creole descent, entering a warfront where suffering was abundant and help was desperately needed. In her writing, she documented her time in Balaclava, the main British supply port in Crimea. She says she remained there for six weeks, spending days ashore and nights on board ship, while sick and wounded men were carried down by mule trains and ambulances to be lifted into boats. Here is what she had to write about the misery she witnessed there and what it revealed about human nature:

“I have often heard men talk and preach very learnedly and conclusively about the great wickedness and selfishness of the human heart; I used to wonder whether they would have modified those opinions if they had been my companions for one day of the six weeks I spent upon that wharf, and seen but one day’s experience of the Christian sympathy and brotherly love shown by the strong to the weak. The task was a trying one, and familiarity, you might think, would have worn down their keener feelings of pity and sympathy; but it was not so.”3

She wrote of her experiences, examining the ordinary human heart under extreme duress. The ordinary human heart, in her view, did not necessarily become smaller or numb to misery’s consistent presence. It might, under such pressure, reveal some stubborn and inconvenient, but real tenderness. The first tenderness of war: the tenderness for one’s own.

In war, we are very accustomed to thinking of our own. Are we fighting for just and righteous reasons? Are our soldiers fed, clothed, tended to? Have our men suffered at all, but if they have, was it nobly? How many of ours have been lost, and how shall we count or honor them? These are very natural, human questions. Under the name of both grand ideals and logistics, they are not entirely wrong. Some may even call it loyalty “to the cause”, that finicky and dishonest phrase. After the Battle of the Tchernaya, fought on Aug 16 1855, when Russian forces made a major attack against the Allied position near the Chernaya River, Mrs. Seacole continues to help as much as she can:

“I attended another Russian, a handsome fellow, and an officer, shot in the side, who bore his cruel suffering with a firmness that was very noble. In return for the little use I was to him, he took a ring off his finger and gave it to me, and after I had helped to lift him into the ambulance he kissed my hand and smiled far more thanks than I had earned. I do not know whether he survived his wounds, but I fear not. Many others, on that day, gave me thanks in words the meaning of which was lost upon me, and all of them in that one common language of the whole world – smiles.”4

It is an altogether different task to find this tenderness for the “other side.” To think of the enemy as human requires a more exposed kind of vulnerability, because it seems, at first, to threaten the home front of feeling. If they also suffer from real and private agony, then what becomes of our own mourning? Does it become smaller? Does sympathy for them weaken the care we owe to our own?

The fear that humanity is a limited ration, and to spend any of it on the enemy is to rob the wounded at home, is a false one. But Seacole’s writing does not offer any easy fantasy in which everyone is equally innocent or absolved in any meaningful way. The Russian officer remains the enemy and, as always, war remains brutal (and we always rush to war knowing this fact). The British, French and Turkish wounded still remain in her charge.

In another scene, Sergeant Timothy Gowing, a British soldier of the 7th Royal Fusiliers, brings forward the less palatable aspect of the matter, where tenderness toward the “other side” gets contaminated and ugly. In his account of the Battle of the Alma, fought on Sep 20 1854, the first major battle after the Allied landing in Crimea, he describes a brutal uphill assault under heavy Russian artillery fire; the Fusiliers suffered badly, and the field afterward was filled with dead and wounded. The Russian wounded, in his telling, did not always lie before the British as injured men awaiting pity. They could make the generous soldier feel like a fool, and there are few injuries which men resent more bitterly than having been made fools by their own better impulses.

“The Russian wounded behaved in a most barbarous manner; they made signs for a drink, and then shot the man who gave it them. My attention was drawn to one nasty case. A young officer of the 95th gave a wounded Russian a little brandy out of his flask, and was turning to walk away, when the fellow shot him mortally; I would have settled with him for his brutish conduct, but one of our men, who happened to be close to him, at once gave him his bayonet, and despatched him. I went up to the young officer, and finding he was still alive, placed him in as comfortable a position as I could, and then left him, to look for my comrade.”5

It is impossible to know, from the distance at which we stand, whether the event occurred in precisely this manner, or whether one cruel moment, heated by fear and recollection, grew in Gowing’s mind into an indictment of “the Russian wounded” altogether. This uncertainty does not weaken the passage, since memory, after battle, is rarely a modest servant of fact, but this uncertainty is a distressed author of meaning, taking the unimaginable horrors, some confusion or fear and arranging them into forms the heart can bear to despise. “Barbarous,” “nasty,” “brutish” these are harsh words from a man who is still angry remembering all those years later.

But the more important point here is that the wounded Russian is no longer just some “wounded” enemy. He becomes a mirror held up to a British officer’s pity at the moment it is most vulnerable. Mercy is soft and therefore exposed; dangerously slow to defend itself. The shot that killed the young officer wounds the confidence that mercy and tenderness can be had in a place where every humane impulse may be mistaken for weakness. It lets the soldier say, with some relief and even some disgust, that pity for the other side was the error, not war. It is easy enough, or at least easier, to pity the enemy when he is handsome, grateful, noble in his suffering, and safely incapable of harming us. It is another thing entirely to think of his humanity after he has behaved badly, cruelly, treacherously.

Then comes cholera, that invisible sovereign of the camps. Gowing writes:

“There were all sorts of sports got up in the camp to keep up the men’s spirits, which was much needed; we had an unseen enemy in the midst of us—cholera—that was daily finding and carrying off its victims.”6

Disease killed more Allied soldiers than battle; of roughly 155,000 Allied dead, more than 95,000 are believed to have died from disease. In the British medical returns, cholera produced 7,574 hospital admissions and 4,512 deaths, a death rate of nearly sixty percent among those admitted7. It was only a fraction of total disease admissions, and yet it accounted for more than a quarter of disease deaths. The Russian enemy could be watched and pursued, but disease like Cholera gave its enemy no such satisfaction of a face to strike. Disease makes nonsense of the fine separations men construct. British, French, Turkish, Russian seized by the sudden terror of discovering that his own flesh, not another, has betrayed him. Against such an enemy, hatred has little power. You can pity, loathe, even find tenderness on the other side, but one cannot loathe cholera into feeling ashamed of itself or to act differently. Sometimes it’s you and the “other side” fighting against a third side.

This is where Leo Tolstoy’s depiction of the war is so beautiful, because he sees that both sides rest on the shared knowledge that they are surrounded by the same foe, that of death and disease and exhaustive all-encompassing suffering, even while they remain enemies. Nothing is forgiven and nothing is solved (and most importantly the dead remain dead) but in a little human exchange, thinking of the other side did matter. In one of those truces typical of siege warfare, where a pause allowed the dead and wounded to be gathered from the space between the Russian bastion and the French trenches at Sevastopol, he describes a scene:

“Then a bold [Russian] infantryman, in a pink shirt, with his cloak thrown over his shoulders, accompanied by two other soldiers, who, with their hands behind their backs, were standing behind him, with merry, curious countenances, stepped up to a Frenchman, and requested a light for his pipe. The Frenchman brightened his fire, stirred up his short pipe, and shook out a light for the Russian.”

___

“‘Tobacco good!’ said the soldier in the pink shirt; and the spectators smile.
‘Yes, good tobacco, Turkish tobacco,’ says the Frenchman. ‘And your tobacco—Russian?—good?’
‘Russian, good,’ says the soldier in the pink shirt: whereupon those present shake with laughter.”8

Tolstoy describes this weird juxtaposition between enemy and friend in this very ordinary, human exchange:

“Where is the expression of evil which should be avoided? Where is the expression of good which should be imitated in this sketch? Who is the villain, who the hero? All are good, and all are evil.”9

And then, with disappointing cruelty, the next day arrives and the men who laughed over traded tobacco, who recognized one another for one brief, ridiculous, luminous interval as creatures of appetite and manners and breath, return to their places and they become enemies again. The little human exchange remains evident that recognition is possible, and still insufficient. Maybe this is war’s cruelest basis: the other side can become human to us, fully and unmistakably, and still that recognition may save neither them nor us.

Grimley Park, Nov 1811 -Knightley Ancestral Lands Held Since Henry III

The horses stood in elegant discontent upon the gravel, their breath rising in stately white plumes protesting the morning’s chill, which the sun, having finally dragged itself above the barren tree line, made no effort to dispel. Footmen stood aside with reins and flasks, attending to the gentlemen, a Mr. Knightly, Mr. Lambeth, and Captain Adleigh who were now mounted and attired in decadent garb consisting of gloves, breeches, whips and coats, exchanged little glances that stood for coordination among men of their standing. Each, in their own way, calculating the maneuvers that came with much practice from a sport that, through custom, was as natural to him as breathing.

The women, Mrs. Lambeth (formerly Miss Anne Cartwright), Miss Eloise Cartwright and Miss Charlotte Samson, just waking up from their slumber, hurried to the drawing room windows to observe and comment on a sport that they were little inclined to think highly of. Mrs. Cartwright, having come to chaperone her daughters, still asleep and laying content in the arms of Morpheus knowing that one of her daughters was married and the other, so much in proximity of men of consequence, nearly so.

Mr. Lambeth’s bay gelding, temperamentally similar to its rider, shifted beneath him with a toss of the head.

“I am told,” said Lambeth, adjusting his grip on the reins and with a loutish shift in his saddle, “that the foxes were last sighted near the east ridge, out from beneath the old ash grove.”

“You were told wrong,” said Mr. Knightley, coolly. “The fox will not take to open ground this early. If the creatures possess any sense, they’ll stay to the low cover near the copse of elms”, pointing confidently in the opposite direction of the ash grove, “over there.” Mr. Lambeth looked around confusedly, giving Mr. Knightley the impetus to add, “to your left, man, just beyond the rise!”

Captain Adleigh, already turning his horse toward the lower path, glanced sidelong at them both “No use crowding the line,” he called back. “Best to stay ahead and let the hounds do their work.”

The horn was sounded in a long, low note, almost mournful. The hounds leapt forward, the horses neighed in frightful determination, their hooves striking the frozen ground in rhythm sharp enough to wake the earth, and Mrs. Cartwright, in the arms of Morpheus. The riders were off.

They scattered in practiced formation: Knightley veered left toward the copse, Lambeth took to the higher ridge, poorly advised, and Adleigh, ever the tactician, galloped straight for the streambed between the rise and the copse where the fox, if clever, would attempt a crossing.

“Mr. Lambeth appears to be chasing nothing at all. Look at him bouncing in his seat,” said Miss Samson, lowering her looking glass.

“We know he is a man of enthusiasm,” said Eloise. “But I fear, direction is merely a secondary concern.”

Below, Lambeth gave a jubilant whoop as his horse stumbled slightly, recovered, and continued with determination unburdened by any sense. He did not have accuracy, but happiness, that generous fool, remained faithfully at his side.

Captain Adleigh’s horse thundered down the slope with the grim inevitability that naturally follows experience. He spoke no commands aloud, but adjusted his balance with such clarity of purpose that even the hounds behind him seemed to gather up their instincts more tightly. In Eloise’s assessment, the pageantry and orchestration appeared…excessive.

Knightley cut in from the side. Their horses briefly ran abreast.

The fox darted from the brush ahead of them close to the river edge, Captain Adleigh’s instinct correct, the fox’s body low to the earth, tail streaming like a banner of fire. The hounds bayed and the chase redoubled.

Near the ridge, Lambeth spotted a quarry far too late and attempted a correction, yanking his horse sharply and nearly unseating himself. He recovered, just barely, and turned to shout, “I had him! Nearly had him! If only the creature had the courtesy to run straight!”

Knightley sighed, drew his mount alongside, and said with civility sharpened: “Perhaps next year we might instruct the foxes in choreography.”

Meanwhile, Adleigh had dismounted near the stream. His boot prints left sharp impressions in the mud as he examined the trail. There was a bent reed, a faint mark and further on noted a disturbance in a patch of wet leaves.

“You’re not hunting,” Knightley observed as he approached with some distaste. “You’re reading and too much reading makes men idle. The fox is too far gone.”

“Hunting requires a good read of the situation,” Adleigh replied, straightening himself from the muddy trail. “Let the fox run haphazardly about and think it unseen.”

The sound of the horn echoed faintly through the trees calling for the midday meal. The hounds, though reluctant, began to draw back under the master’s calls, their baying softened into whines. The foxes, clever and evasive, had vanished somewhere into the lower thickets. The hunt, it seemed, had ended early and without ceremony.

“Dash it all, Henry! You’ve driven the fox clean through to the far end of the elms,” said Mr. Knightley, flushed with exertion and no small amount of irritation. “One might think you conspired with the creatures.”

“I did no such thing!” Mr. Lambeth replied. His cravat was soaked and his hunting cap nowhere to be found.

Knightley turned then to Captain Adleigh, who remained still beside his horse, a figure composed but not satisfied.

“Adleigh, should we call it or should we go after the kill?”

“It isn’t the kill that counts, Knightley,” Adleigh said mildly. “A good chase reveals far more who tires first and who shies at the hedge. A field betray its company, if one has the patience to take a look.”

Mr. Knightley, exasperated, “You speak in riddles, sir!” but deciding to play along, “And what has the field told you today?”

Captain Adleigh responded matter-of-factly, “That the fox always leaves a trail.” He walked past the men with the frustration from the hunt and some annoyance at Mr. Lambeth. He got back on his horse and the three men went off along the trail, ignoring the horn and continuing with the hunt.

By the time the gentlemen had returned to Grimley Park, dusk had settled over the grounds like a velvet curtain, the pale gleam of lanterns flickering across the gravel drive. Boots were removed, coats handed off, mud cleaned with attentive efficiency by the Grimley footmen.

In the drawing room after dinner, the fire burned steadily, its glow licking the brass and casting shadows across the patterned carpet. Outside, the fields were blanketed in fog, the hedgerows blurred into soft grey shapes the world itself had drawn a veil after the hunt.

Within, conversation floated lightly above the conversational and conventional duties of supper and claret without too much pomp and ceremony. Mrs. Cartwright had full command of the dinner table, ensuring that conversation steered toward nothing in particular, which she later admitted was a sure method for making the men fall in love. The men reclined with an ease born of hard work at the hunt, their cravats freshly tied, their boots traded for shiny black pumps. The ladies sat in diligent concentration at their embroidery and reading, or, in the case of Eloise, studying the scene as if she were some impartial observer, though she observed with much bias and feeling.

Eloise broke the silence with a studied languid air, as though mindful not to startle the assembly.

“Mr. Knightley, I remain unconvinced that fox hunting serves any purpose beyond self-applause,” she started. “The fox so rarely submits to capture, and when he does, the reward is a chorus of whining hounds.”

Mr. Knightley gave a small smile to suggest magnanimity rather than victory.

“Miss Cartwright, you mistake the object. It is not the fox that matters, but the pursuit. The alertness and the coordination prepare a man for battle…and for the ballroom.”

Mrs. Cartwright, dozing in her seat, came to with the sharp instinct of a seasoned chaperone whose charge was veering dangerously near the kind of philosophizing that led to the ruin of a woman.

“Ballroom?” she repeated, blinking. “Has someone mentioned dancing? Eloise, do not argue with the gentlemen, they’ve been outdoors and do not want to exert in the comfort of a drawing room in such a manner.” She adjusted her shawl with the air of one who had said something unanswerable and promptly drifted off again, her head nodding like a judge satisfied with her own verdict of the situation.

“Then it is a ritual without consequence,” Eloise said, folding her hands neatly in her lap. “You say it prepares a man for battle and the ballroom, but I rather think it does neither. A woman in a ballroom expects charm, not aggressive pursuit. And as for war, the French do not tremble in thickets waiting to be flushed out. They tend to shoot back.”

She continued, “No, if the gentlemen seek a rehearsal, fox hunting offers the wrong cast entirely. The fox is clever, yes, but solitary and wholly uninterested in conquest. He is not, I daresay, the likeness of a Frenchman in battle…or an Englishwoman in a ballroom.”

Miss Samson laughed cheerfully, and Mrs. Lambeth dropped her embroidery. The comment had struck rather too near the heart of Mrs. Lambeth, who found nothing amusing in the suggestion that Englishwomen sought to conquer anything, least of all when one’s own “conquering” had been so recently and publicly arranged.

“Why must something always be useful, Miss Cartwright?” Mr. Knightley said, with the sort of calm certainty of a confident man, but also with some amusement at the direction of the conversation ready to fan his wit, or at least the appearance of it. “Custom does not depend upon its outcomes. It endures because it is ours. That, I think, is the English way.”

Captain Adleigh, picking up where his friend left off, “Look at the Prince Regent. He may do very little that is strictly necessary, but he dresses for the role and shows up where he’s expected. The monarchy and its customs remain, and so does the sense of order. The hunt is no different and is surely a ritual that must continue.”

Miss Samson tilted her head, half-smiling. “So we ride in circles for no purpose and call it continuity?”

“If it keeps the country from turning upside down,” Knightley said gently, “then perhaps the circle is the point.”

Eloise, unpersuaded, lifted her chin slightly. “No,” she said, her voice calm but firm. “The Prince Regent may be custom embodied in person, but what he preserves is the appearance of continuity, not its substance. Behind him stands a king who cannot rule and a Parliament too paralyzed to lead.”

She continues to double down, “He will surround himself with flatterers and tailors, mistaking this counsel for reflection. The continuity you consider is concealment. The monarchy persists, yes, but in a form so hollow it risks forgetting what it was meant to uphold. A pageant without principle is not order, it is deceit and distraction. And distraction, when power is misused or absent altogether, is dangerous.”

“It is a necessary illusion,” came Captain Adleigh’s voice, softened but unmistakable. Miss Samson, who had seated herself beside him under the claim of draftiness, turned slightly in her chair to observe Captain Adleigh more fully.

“To rule is not to act,” Adleigh continued. “It is to be seen. The Prince sustains calm because he is visible, dining and parading about. Then the nation draws in this parade without riot. That, Miss Cartwright, is rule in practice.”

Eloise, unflinching, met his gaze. “And what will the people do when they grow hungry for more than calm? Bread cannot be replaced by this pageantry nor is gilded deceit governance.”

“But it reflects beautifully in candlelight,” Miss Samson murmured, smiling at Adleigh as his face shown brilliantly. “Perhaps that’s why we trust it.”

“The people do not trust the Prince,” Eloise said. “They tolerate him. A regency of theatre rots from the inside while the act plays on.”

Captain Adleigh, swirling the last of his brandy, replied with a bit of weariness, “Governance is not the only requirement of government, Miss Cartwright, only that the people fear it enough not to prod it, and admire it just enough to leave it standing. The French, poor souls, attempted improvement and ended up with a beheading. We, at least, still have ceremonies and titles if not strong policies.”

“How exhausting to think in this manner!” Eloise was incredulous at Adleigh’s remarks.

Knightley, observing the gentle curve of Miss Samson’s cheek as she turned again toward the Captain, felt some part of himself drawn to Miss Samson’s serenity, which was in much contrast to Miss Carwright’s abruptness.

“Miss Cartwright,” Mr. Knightley inserted himself yet again, “the sovereign may falter, but the institution endures. That endurance is a kind of victory.”

“Endurance is not victory,” Eloise returned. “It is stagnant survival without the decency to do anything new or better for its people.”

Miss Samson chimed in, “Captain….Mr. Knightley, you make inaction and appearances sound almost admirable.”

“Only because you mistake inaction for idleness,” Adleigh replied. He did not look at her, though his voice inclined in her direction with the courtesy of a bow. “To appear calm while others are afraid, to appear constant while all else alters, are not small accomplishments. The hallmarks of a behemoth; we know full well that half of government is performed in the imagination of those governed.”

Knightley watched them a moment longer, then turned away, not jealous with the conversation between Captain Adleigh and Miss Samson, but faintly disquieted about the course of the discussion. Men truly are burdened by women who think and even more so by women who voice their thoughts.

“You are all too quick to excuse inaction,” Eloise said, her voice gentler now. “This will all end in tragedy. We’ve had kings who mistook the crown for a costume, and the kingdom paid the price.”

“Then let us be certain to remember the names of these actors,” Adleigh said, rising to refill his glass. “In England, we are less governed than we are staged. So long as the lines are spoken clearly and the entrances properly timed, no one will question whether the play still deserves its audience.”

Later that night, Captain Adleigh sat at the writing desk in Mr. Knightley’s study, backlit by the remains of the fire. A single candle cast a wavering gold pool over his page. The ink flowed quickly and he moved with dexterity.

He was folding a letter neatly and twice for extra measure when the door creaked open.

Eloise Cartwright stepped into the room. “Captain!” she said in surprise.

He did not startle. But, she noticed, the way his hand slid the folded paper into the inside pocket of his coat, an action done with more of a learned, quick instinct than forethought.

“Miss Cartwright,” he said, looking down at her with a measured smile. “I was just on my way out if you need to peruse the bookshelves with some privacy.”

“I…am…sorry Captain Adleigh for the intrusion,” she replied. “I thought the servants left a candle on and I was prepared to snuff it out.”

She looked suspiciously at Adleigh who, seemingly aware of this suspicion, added, “I’ve a habit of recording thoughts before sleep…a soldier’s custom.”

He made a show of straightening the blotter. One corner of the parchment shifted under his touch, and his fingers stilled for the briefest moment before he replaced the candle snuffer.

“I shall retire,” he said. “The room is yours, should you wish it. Do enjoy the fire, Miss Cartwright. “Goodnight.” And with a polite bow, he left.

The door closed behind him and at last the room exhaled.

Eloise waited precisely five heartbeats before moving. She crossed to the desk, eyes already narrowing at the blotter. A stack of papers, underneath the top parchment he had taken, remained. But on the top of this stack, faint as breath on glass, a ghost of his letter remained.

The ink had bled into the parchment below. Carefully, she read the imprint, the blotting of a military mind stupidly confident in his discretion.

To: Monsieur Davout

Local levies active east of Canterbury, rotations observed near Nonington and Ash. Coastal line between Hythe and Folkestone reinforced; all towers appear manned. Canal line fully cleared and patrolled. Roads west of Tilmanstone remain unguarded at dusk, traffic sparse.

– W.A.

Eloise’s face did not change and carefulness stood where shock should have been. She folded the stained parchment in half, tucking it into her sleeve. Eloise wondered about this trail left behind and so carelessly.

So, Adleigh was a fox in disguise. In England, we are less governed than we are staged….a front to the masses.

She turned back toward the dying fire, her expression smooth and her mind, two steps ahead, already writing a new letter bound for her friends at Whitehall.

For Previous Chapters

I would like to remind you that I am still thinking about the Crimean War, but have decided to hold off until I got my hands on more primary sources which have been very difficult to obtain. But now, after some digital trench work, library hopping, research requests, pleading/groveling, and other means of obtaining information, I have at least gathered British soldier letters and diaries of real substance. Which means I can begin doing what I wanted to do in the first place: bring the rank-and-file soldier perspectives into the critical analysis of the Crimean War. But first I would like to fold in Lord Byron who wrote the following lines:

“Many are poets who have never penn’d

Their inspiration, and perchance the best:

They felt, and loved, and died, but would not lend

Their thoughts to meaner beings; they compress’d

The god within them, and rejoin’d the stars

Unlaurell’d upon earth, but far more bless’d

Than those who are degraded by the jars of passion

and their frailties link’d to fame

conquerors of high renown, but full of scars.

Many are poets but without the name,

For what is poesy but to create

From overfeeling good or ill: and aim

at an external life beyond our fate

And be the new prometheus of new men, [...]” (Byron Poetical Works, 378)1

This, the bedtime reading that scratches the brain (a jab by Byron right in the Wernicke’s area) with lines like they compress’d the god within them because they are pleasing and wispy and uncomfortably true. As far as poetic phrases go though, that compression line may be among my favorites. It is beautiful, but Byron is trying to say something that genuinely frightens me: the thought that I/you/we may live an entire life surrounded by extraordinary minds and never know them. Minds passing you in the street, standing behind you in line, sitting across from you in waiting rooms, flipping you off as you drive the speed limit in the fast lane, carrying whole unwritten worlds inside, wearing floaties in the deep end of their pools of cerebrospinal fluid. And for lack of life’s greater privileges (time, money, education or ability to write without negative consequence), those minds are obliged to fold inward, and inward again, tighter and tighter into cerebrospinal silence and then, at last, into death.

But Byron, in this excerpt, compares these poets who have never penn’d with two other figures worth noting: first, the conqueror of high renown, whose thoughts and ambitions are known everywhere, and often to the ruin of many; and second, the ordinary man without the name, whose voice may be heard, but is dismissed because he is an ordinary man.

Why do I mention this excerpt at all? Because for a very great number of men and women in history, and certainly for a very great number of those who have gone to battle, the first category is the most abundant one: they are among the majority who “compress’d the god within them.” Their letters do not survive nor do their diary entries. Then there is the very small minority, the conquerors, about whom history is positively gluttonous. Napoleon, that supreme example of the famous mind too emotionally-available, left behind an immense correspondence (roughly 40,500 letters have been identified in the Fondation Napoléon’s general correspondence project2) so that his every little whim and thought has been catalogued and annotated. Then there remains the last category of man: the soldier at the front, the ordinary body upon whom all the elegant theories of war finally descend. So who was this soldier? What did these poets without the name have to say?

In upcoming posts I will explore soldier primary sources. I am really excited to dive into some of these.

This series of articles on the soldier’s narrative is part of a larger research project on the Crimean War. See the most recent post here:

God forbid that we romanticize the past now and then. Of all the indulgences, it is surely among the more respectable; and if it leads one, not merely into idle fancy, but into the contemplation of Colin Firth rising, wet and solemn, from a pond, or Hugh Grant stammering through a speech: “I had hoped…uh…that is, I had not hoped, exactly, because hope is a very forward thing…but I had imagined that you might perhaps…er….no, never mind…er wait, not exactly…”1 and on and on until he floats away, then I do not know that it can be thought the very worst use of a leisure (or rather unleisurely, multi-tasking) hour. There is a sweetness in such delusions, and even a kind of recklessness that doesn’t hurt too many people, provided one does not carry them too far; though I confess that when Jeremy Northam, as Mr. Knightley, looks at Emma Woodhouse and says, with that grave softness which makes severity even more severe, “Badly done, Emma,” and then repeats it, more gently and therefore with greater force, “badly done,” I am never quite mistress enough of myself to maintain any scholarly composure2 at all.

Naturally, I would wish to be thought of as a very serious student of history in these moments. I would wish it to be believed that I sit with pen in hand, attentive to the manners, the politics, the grand architecture of feeling, the games of whist3, the excellent vulgarity of money forever circulating beneath the prettiest speeches about “character” and “noble deeds”, and the thousand minute arrangements by which a society at once elegant and merciless preserved itself. But the truth must be told, and the truth is that I have more than once fixed my attention so earnestly upon the romance that the history has gone unattended; or rather, that I have taken the romance for the history, which is a much more dangerous mistake.

Richard Holmes, writing with much greater sobriety than I can hope to command, observed in his work Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket,

“Hollywood is entertainment rather than history, though its tendency to use the past as a vehicle for story telling blurs fact and fiction so that the latter assumes, however unintentionally, the authority of the former.”4

That Hollywood is entertainment rather than history, in its habit of using the past as a vehicle for storytelling allows fiction to borrow, sometimes quite unfairly, the authority of fact, is inconvenient for a lot of us “serious history lovers”. Holmes is right, of course, and yet I cannot find it in me to be entirely severe with the thing, for if cinema has lied to many of us, it has also seduced a number of us into caring enough to learn the truth. The gateway drug to history is not always a footnote, sometimes it’s Colin Firth in a wet shirt or Gwyneth Paltrow with a questionable English accent.

Still, after a while, the first intoxication fades. After the 100th watch, the sacred hand-flex, that tiny convulsion of repression upon which modern womanhood has lavished a frankly reasonable amount of reflection, becomes at last only a hand5. One begins, perhaps reluctantly, to suspect that the pleasure of the period drama is not the whole of the period itself. But, still, there is something that Austen says that speaks profoundly to women of Regency England.

So let us look past the romance, with a little more seriousness6, at Emma Woodhouse. She is among Austen’s least admirable heroines, which is only to say that she is among the most human, holding contradictions that make us all a bit uncomfortable because “I am her, her is me” and we hate looking at a mirror. Up until things started changing in the literary tradition in the 18th-century, there were heroines who secured affection by suffering prettily (the “fallen woman” archetype), and heroines who recommended themselves by spotless goodness (the “virtuous woman” archetype), these were the heroines who were so perfectly constructed for admiration, or it’s complete opposite, that one feels no curiosity about them at all. Emma is not of that sort because she is generous and vain, perceptive and blind, affectionate and careless, very often in the same afternoon, and sometimes, I think, in the same passage. She is a person; and if that sounds obvious and an ordinary thing to say of a protagonist, and something that shouldn’t be spared a second thought, it is only because you are either 1) a wise man, or 2) an unwise man. But even by the time Austen had taken hold of the novel, character complexity in a woman seemed a little more acceptable and natural than just 30 or so years before.

Before Austen, the growing power of the novel in the eighteenth century lay bare what had severely lacked before: multi-dimensional female characters. Samuel Richardson7 entered female feeling with such persistence that inward crisis became, for perhaps the first time, the all-important matter itself; Francis Burney8 allowed her heroines embarrassment, misjudgment, social discomfort, mortification. By Austen’s day, the novel had become capable of holding contradiction without immediately resolving it into lesson or punishment. A woman might be wrong without being wicked, ridiculous without being contemptible, clever without needing to be safe. Emma belongs to that new and changing world where a woman, with natural faults, could still be lovable (at least to Mr. Knightley).

If Emma is the protected daughter of that world, Miss Bates is among its discarded women. Austen introduces her with directness and cruelty: she is “neither young, handsome, rich, nor married.”9 There, in a few words, is the inventory of female consequence in a society that measured women harshly. Miss Bates lives with her mother “in a very small way”; she labors under the “endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible”; she has lost, or never possessed, nearly every form of power her world was prepared to acknowledge in women. She has no beauty to recommend her, no money to support her, no husband to incorporate her into a household of greater security, no future from which better prospects may be expected. She has only her temper, which is good, and her speech, which is endless.

She talks to fill the space that money might otherwise have occupied or to perform gratitude before anyone could suspect resentment. She talks because she cannot command, and must therefore ingratiate; because she cannot impress, and must therefore please; because to be quiet and poor and aging and dependent would be, in such a world, to disappear almost entirely (to float away). Her conversation, her repetitions, her praises, her apologies, her reports of letters, visits, trifles, weather, ribbons, nieces, and boiled apples are what remain of her public self. The tears I have shed for this woman!!

Austen herself understood this fact all too well to sentimentalize it. “Single women,” she wrote to her niece in a private letter, “have a dreadful propensity for being poor.” 10 Poverty, in this case, is not an accident of individual failure; it is the natural shadow cast by a legal and social order that made female security depend upon marriage, inheritance, male provision, or luck.

Which brings me to wit, namely the treatment of female wit here. For wit, in Austen, is seldom condemned for being sharp. Emma’s mocking joke at Miss Bates’ expense is not brutal because it travels “downward,” moving from the socially secure to the insecure, from the admired to the tolerated, from the woman whose every absurdity may be forgiven to the woman whose every absurdity is highlighted because of her station. Emma takes the only instrument Miss Bates possesses, her voice, and makes it ridiculous in public.

That, I think, is the true catastrophe of female wit in Regency England. Women, denied most of the grand and formal mechanisms of power, were left to exercise a thousand lesser ones: influence, invitation, refusal, ridicule, preference, intimacy, tone. They could not commonly legislate, command armies, or dispose of great property in their own right, but they could elevate and diminish one another within the social world, and in a culture where reputation was livelihood, and acceptance a form of sustenance, these injuries were not small. They left no visible wound; which was, perhaps, why people so often pretended they were none at all.

Mr. Knightley, to his credit, does not pretend and aims his rebuke in a memorable diatribe. See the following exchange.

“Oh!” cried Emma, “I know there is not a better creature in the world: but you must allow, that what is good and what is ridiculous are most unfortunately blended in her.”

Then Mr. Knightley, in reply:

“They are blended,” said he, “I acknowledge; and, were she prosperous, I could allow much for the occasional prevalence of the ridiculous over the good. Were she a woman of fortune, I would leave every harmless absurdity to take its chance, I would not quarrel with you for any liberties of manner. Were she your equal in situation—but, Emma, consider how far this is from being the case. She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more. Her situation should secure your compassion. It was badly done, indeed! You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour, to have you now, in thoughtless spirits, and the pride of the moment, laugh at her, humble her—and before her niece, too—and before others, many of whom (certainly some,) would be entirely guided by your treatment of her.—This is not pleasant to you, Emma—and it is very far from pleasant to me; but I must, I will,—I will tell you truths while I can; satisfied with proving myself your friend by very faithful counsel, and trusting that you will some time or other do me greater justice than you can do now.”

Emma has laughed at a woman whom poverty ought to have protected from ridicule. She has humbled one who had known her from infancy, whose notice had once been an honor, and done so before others who would take their cue from her example. Rank without mercy, wit without tenderness,….these are the true vulgarities for women in Regency England. Austen says we should scoff at this. But is this being a bit…..hypocritical?

One must say something of the men; for it will never do to pretend that wit, hardness, judgment, authority, and the right to pronounce upon others descended equally upon both sexes, like rain upon an open field, without preference and without design. Men had long been permitted a species of sharpness that, in women, must always submit to being called a fault. In men, satire might pass for discernment, severity for reason, public speech for consequence, and self-assertion for character. Did these men need to be merciful? To be tender? To fulfill higher obligations if all they were, were consequential? (or in the case of Edward Ferrars, to speak properly without stammering?)

For some answers, we can look at Austen’s treatment of the male characters: Mr. Weston, Frank Churchill, Mr. Knightley, Mr. Elton and their institutional counterparts in history.

Mr. Knightley belongs, very plainly, to the landed gentry and to that species of county authority which did little to obtain a lot. Austen introduces him as “a sensible man about seven or eight-and-thirty,” living only a mile from Highbury, and everything about him is tied, sooner or later, back to Donwell Abbey and it’s associated permanence; while the Woodhouses, being “first in consequence” at Highbury, remind us that this is a world arranged by local rank. Historically, the landed gentry stood below the peerage and above the common run, expected to live as gentlemen, to manage estates, to serve in county offices, to sit as magistrates or deputy lieutenants, to give the whole district, in short, its tone and discipline11. Knightley is the most decent version of paternal, land-based authority: a man formed by possession, steadied by responsibility, and accustomed, whether for good or ill, to having his judgment carry weight (“badly done, Emma! Badly done….” *swoon*)

Mr. Elton, bless him, stands for that peculiarly Regency mixture of church, income, and social ambition, where a clergyman’s respectability is never wholly distinct from his value on the marriage market. Austen gives him a “vicarage,” “some independent property,” and all the air of a “respectable young man,” with a vanity made worse, not better, by being tied up with the idea of God. In English law, an advowson, the right to present a man to a benefice, was treated as property, a secular right over an ecclesiastical office. He represents the beneficed clergyman produced by patronage, decorous on the surface, strategic underneath, with religion in his profession and social advancement very much in his eye because of it12.

Next comes Frank Churchill. He belongs to that institution called “contingent inheritance,” the designated or adopted heir who is formed entirely by favour, and who learns early that pleasing is safer than earning. Austen is unusually clear about him. Frank is “more than being tacitly brought up as his uncle’s heir”; the arrangement is “so avowed” that he takes the name Churchill upon coming of age, and his motions, visits, delays, and freedoms are all constrained by Enscombe and by Mrs. Churchill’s temper. There is a real historical world behind that. Before modern adoption law, childless propertied families often brought in a nephew or other relation to preserve estate and name, but such heirs lived, not always comfortably, by continued approval13. Austen knew the shape of it from her own family in Edward Austen Knight, who was taken in by the Knights and inherited accordingly. Frank, then, is not simply frivolous, he is hollow, taught by circumstance that charm is at his command.

Captain Weston passes through the world by a route that ought, perhaps, to appear more laborious than it does, but Austen will not allow him the vulgarity of seeming to strive. He makes a brilliant marriage, loses his wife, “quitted the militia and engaged in trade,” realizes, in time, “an easy competence,” purchases “a little estate adjoining Highbury,” and establishes himself at Randalls with so much good humor that the whole business threatens to look like a series of fortunate accidents graciously accepted. But the path is not accidental for all that; it belongs very particularly to its age. The militia offers one sort of gentlemanly movement, trade another, and neither carries the old stillness of hereditary consequence; of having gone out into the world and done something in it, which is not always the most elegant origin for a comfortable man, though it is often a very effective one.

Mr. Woodhouse, my favorite, is another matter altogether, and, because he appears so harmless, perhaps the most exact of them all. One is tempted, at first, to dismiss him as merely nervous, merely elderly, merely one of those men sensitive enough to the temperature of the room and the state of the supper tray; but Austen, who is never so simple as she first appears, makes something much more pointed of him. He is the patriarchal household in its softest and therefore, in some ways, most difficult form: fatherly authority reduced in vigour, certainly, thinned out by nerves, habits, apprehensions, and long invalidism, but not in the least stripped of privilege. Emma became “mistress of his house” early, which sounds, for half a moment, like female command, until one remembers that it is still his house, his name, his consequence, his habits, his comforts, and that the Woodhouses remain “first in consequence” all the same. Mr. Woodhouse, though “a valetudinarian all his life, without activity of mind or body,” contrives to make Hartfield move to the measure of his weakness: dinners must be arranged with first preference to his digestion, visits shortened for his ease, evenings softened, marriages dreaded, hems condemned, and all of life brought, as far as possible, within the radius of his comfort. Historically, there is a whole lot to discuss here (how much more time do you have? I am wrapping it up.) The father remained household head in law and custom alike, charged with maintenance and protection, yes, but joined to those duties by real authority; and Mr. Woodhouse, for all his shawls and gruels and little terrors, is not outside that arrangement, but nestled deeply within it. The reluctance everyone feels at giving pain to a gentle invalid commands for him. And so he governs a steady domestic helplessness which makes opposition to his governance look unfeeling and escape look almost ungrateful (is he a microstic character of King George III? we can only speculate and make curious correlations here). It is patriarchy, certainly, but patriarchy that gets its own way regardless of substance, age, or health (again King George III?!!!)14

Austen, in short, is too knowing to make any of her characters just good, or just foolish, vain, or sincere. She gives each of them a little of everything, and then allows the consequences to fall according to wit, candor, or the lack of it regardless of sex, age, or class. But especially to the men who wag their wit about with wild abandon, just because they can.15

What political philosophies have underlined the US-led world order?

A political philosophy is, at its most useful, the framework that organizes ideas about power and how it is wielded. It asks the questions: Who governs? By what right? For whose advantage? Under what law? And with what limits upon the imperfect part of ourselves that require governance?

I want to be absolutely clear: political philosophy does not create a world order by mere force of thought1. Ideas do not, on their own, produce unipolarity, multipolarity, or the dynamics that serve the two. They require human agents and institutions as the vehicle for carrying out political philosophies. Now, throw in a catch all error term that incorporates the irrational, but realistic, human concoction of ambition, fear, calculation, and other unexplainable human tendencies and absurdities and you’ve got yourself something that looks like an explanation for a Political World Order.

As a former data scientist I like to start off my logical thought processes with something tangible and analytical, and I am tempted to render the whole business of political philosophies, and what-not, via a formula at some risk of redaction, that may be useful as a model going forward:

Political World Order2

=

where

Although I should be very sorry to suggest that philosophy alone creates a world order, its absence does matter and is in fact the starting point and foundation for institutions and ultimately a large part of what explains a world order, whether it be uni- or multi-polar. Without some theory of power and political philosophy, we’ve only got Agents and their errors (aka rogue humans running around in circles killing each other in their attempts to survive and nothing more; needless to say I do not believe in the Noble Savage). Also note that I do not specify whether an Agent is a moral one, but in the manner of Enlightenment thinking I assume that the rational part of ourselves is also the moral part of ourselves, and will make the assumption that Agents, in this formula, are not only rational but moral. I also want to make it known that I allow for a single Agent to be both rational and irrational, moral and amoral, principled and self-serving. Whether that Agent shows rational behavior or not, the behavior gets compartmentalized into the various components: “Agents” or “Error.”

Needless to say, I would like to argue in this particular article that the “Ideas/Philosophies” component that has constituted/explained the political world order of the last 35 years consists of the following philosophical vector (forcing the mathematical undertone):

The Unipolar Philosophy Vector =

For further reading, I will include some texts that go into detail regarding each philosophy.

For the basis of these philosophies, let’s take a quick trip back to the Enlightenment period and share a pint with some of its thinkers/philosophers:

THE ENLIGHTENMENT BASIS FOR THE UNI-POLAR PHILOSOPHY VECTOR

I want to tread very carefully here. By tying the philosophies that explain the Unipolar world order as it has existed up until recently to Enlightenment thinkers, many with a Westernized perspective may mistake my intentions. “Enlightened” carries, undoubtedly, a positive connotation, but I am not arguing that the unipolar world order is inherently more “enlightened” than a multi-polar one. We are headed down a path of change and so our philosophies must change with it, that is all; whether the Ideas/Philosophies be Enlightened does not mean that a World Order is an enlightened one (see formula). I also want to preface all this to say that there are political philosophies that exist that serve the Multipolar and the Unipolar orders and I want to make sure to highlight those when the time comes.

Anyway, let’s get into it. Every time I think of the Enlightenment, I imagine a group of white men in a candlelit room in 1750, drinking ‘round a mahogany table in the anachronistic Queen Anne style (my historical daydreams are not always historically accurate) saying things like, “Gentlemen, first we shall produce natural rights!” then the others shout “Hear! Hear!” and stomp their feet. And this continues as each idea is shouted with glee “Free property!” “Huzzah!” “Representative government!” “Oorah!”

In Alfred Cobban’s In Search of Humanity he describes what, for me, is the most beautiful passage in the entire book regarding the fundamentals of the Enlightenment:

“[...] Original Sin, the most convenient, indubitable and compendious of explanations for all human evils. It has many advantages. Since it came about once for all, and so long ago, we ourselves need not feel more than a vicarious responsibility for it. At the same time, since it is now an integral part of human nature, we can hardly be expected to change it, at least in other people, who make up the majority of the human race. Original Sin, as such or secularized as simple human nature, it is the perfect scapegoat for all the ills of society.”3

The argument goes something like this: if we are born sinners, we can simply go “well that’s just who we are.” What’s the use of acting differently or reflecting too closely at our actions if we are all sinners at the end of the day? Before Enlightenment, there was a general sense that managing the wreckage of Original Sin could be done via religious channels (charity, being a good husband/wife, going through the sacraments, sign of the cross before committing sin ensuring that the sin came at a discount, etc.). Human nature was damaged; the task was to restrain it, humble it (in a kneel before Zod manner, but 24/7), and save what could be saved from the ruin that happened a long long time ago.

But with the Enlightenment you had something different: the concept that the individual’s actions mattered, that a human being was not simply trapped inside sin, nature, class, or destiny, but possessed the power, however imperfectly, to change the direction of their own life. What a thought. But agency also created a wee bit of a problem. If individuals had power over themselves and the world around them, then there needed to be reassurance that this power could be explained as something more than appetite, ambition, or selfishness. Enlightenment thinkers needed a way to show that imperfect, self-interested individuals could still act in ways that were rational, predictable, and even politically useful.

This is where Rational Self-Interest became so important. It characterized self-interest as more than just a vice, it was as a force that could be ordered by reason, law, markets, and institutions. His (deepest, darkest) desires could be managed, his choices anticipated, and his private ambitions turned, at least in theory, toward public order. This is essentially what Adam Smith had in mind in his famous formulation that we do not get dinner from “the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker,” but from “their regard to their own interest.”4

Talk of the Individual matters because the unipolar philosophy vector often starts with a very big assumption: the individual is the basic unit of politics. Philosophers like Kant, Locke, Montesquieu assign the liberal Individual the characteristics of rationality, self-interest, rights-bearing, property-holding, consent-giving and deeply suspicious of too much unilateral authority. He is free enough to act selfishly and dangerously, but also important enough to be protected.

Let’s take a look at some tenets of Individual that the Unipolar philosophical vector relies on:

Enlightenment Tenets of the Individual

Rationality

The individual can reason, calculate, compare costs and benefits, and choose accordingly.

Self-interest

The individual pursues advantage, security, prosperity, and preservation.

Agency

The individual’s actions matter; he is not merely trapped by fate, sin, class, or destiny.

Rights-bearing status

The individual has claims against power: liberty, property, security, conscience, consent.

Consent

Legitimate authority depends on the governed accepting or authorizing it.

Moral equality

Individuals possess equal moral standing. I like to think of Locke’s Second Treatise here.

Capacity for improvement

Individuals and societies can be educated, reformed, modernized and improved.

Market behavior

The individual can act as consumer, producer, owner, trader, worker, investor.

Institutional legibility

The individual can be made predictable through law, incentives, contracts, markets, and rules.

Aversion to arbitrary power

The individual needs protection from tyranny, coercion, domination and unaccountable authority.

Again, the focus on the Individual is an important one because not only did the Individual become the political base unit for our unipolar philosophical vector, but it also got extrapolated to characterizations of power and the State. Let’s take a look at a snapshot of this across Enlightenment philosophers. Hobbes calls the commonwealth an “artificial man,” with laws as its “reason and will,” already treating the State as a constructed public person rather than a mere collection of subjects. Locke, more gently, says that when men consent together they “make one body politic,” so that individual consent generates a collective actor able to act for the whole. Rousseau pushes further: association creates a “moral and collective body” receiving from that act its “unity,” “life,” and “will.” Vattel carries this language into the society of states, calling nations “moral persons” and even “free persons living together in the state of nature.” Kant then gives the State juridical dignity, arguing that to absorb one state into another is to destroy it as a “moral person” and reduce it to a “thing.” The pattern is plain enough: qualities first attached to persons do not stay there, but are projected upward onto the State.5

Today many scholars go, “oh, Individuals behave rationally. States are a sum of the Individuals it governs, therefore, States act like the Rational Self-Interested Individuals on the world stage and the rules that govern the Individual or those that govern the behavior of the State.” WRONG!!! Wrong wrong wrong!

The traits first granted to the Individual, those of reason, will, consent, self-interest, agency, do not stay with the Individual. They are gradually projected onto the State, until the State is no longer treated as a vehicle of power but as a kind of person: one that thinks, chooses, consents, calculates, preserves itself, and bargains with others. That is how the State acquires the semblance of personhood and how later theories begin speaking of States as though they were simply individuals writ large. Which they are, in a manner of speaking, but only if one forgets the crucial difference: the State is not a person with a body to wound or a life to mourn. It is an apparatus with the power to organize, command and survive. Which means that sooner or later, despite the better side of liberalism, we have to speak not only of the rights of the Individual but of the psychology of this strange artificial being we have made that acts differently than you and me. And maybe this means that, unlike an earlier promise, we need to talk about the psychology of the State.

I argue that it’s a mistake to think of the State as a pure sum of the Individuals it governs. The State may borrow the language of the person, but treating it as a rational individual on the world stage is a crude anthropomorphism with dire consequences, especially in a multi-polar world with States interacting with each other in ways we haven’t seen in this nuclear age. We will get to this more later, but I do want to get into the philosophy vector in a little more detail.

LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM & AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

Some scholars would be tempted to reduce the entire philosophical vector of the American-led order to one master idea: American Exceptionalism6. But as an analytical claim, this reduction is not sufficient. American Exceptionalism explains the self-conception of American power; it does not explain all the instruments through which that power operates in relation to other powers. In other words, you can have BOTH American Exceptionalism and Multipolarity and so American Exceptionalism cannot be the only philosophy that explains Unipolarity.

A philosophy that prescribes how a State views itself needs to be paired up with philosophies that frankly do more than just that. Let’s start with Liberal Internationalism.

In the 19th century, the idea of imperialism and “empire” was often direct, territorial, racial, and administrative. But in the 20th century, and in the liberal internationalist order, empire became indirect, legalistic, institutional, financial, military, and under the guise of “morality”. The older empire said: we rule you because we are stronger and supposedly more civilized. The newer order said: we are not ruling you; we are helping stabilize a free world of sovereign states. And this switch from old to new seems to have occurred somewhere in response to President Wilson’s Fourteen Points.

The Fourteen Points imagined a world of “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at,” freer trade, freer navigation, reduced armaments, and a “general association of nations,” all arranged with the confidence that publicity and administration might succeed where old diplomacy had behaved like a drunk aristocrat with a map. Yet Wilsonian liberalism was never free of rank. It could speak grandly of principle while preserving a quiet hierarchy beneath the phrases. The League’s mandate language exposed the thing with almost comic frankness: peoples “not yet able to stand by themselves” were declared a “sacred trust of civilisation,” and their “tutelage” was to be exercised by “advanced nations.” One begins with self-government in theory and ends with guardianship in practice. The doctrine had elegance in its phrasing and command in reserve. It spoke of peace among nations while preserving for the powerful the privilege of deciding which nations had quite ripened into full political adulthood.

After 1945, the United Nations Charter proclaimed “equal rights and self-determination of peoples” among its purposes and grounded the organization upon “the sovereign equality of all its Members.” The colony, at least in principle, gave way to the state; self-government acquired the dignity of a universal claim rather than a European indulgence. Yet the Charter’s universalism did not dissolve power differentials; it placed them within a legal society whose forms were equal and whose capacities most certainly were not. A weak state might possess a flag, a vote, and an anthem, then discover that markets, credit, security guarantees, and the temper of stronger states still governed the practical uses of its independence/sovereignty.

In After Victory G. John Ikenberry argues that leading states, after war, may seek a durable settlement by overcoming weaker states’ fears of “domination or abandonment”; he describes the postwar institutional turn as a form of “strategic restraint,” and notes that such institutions serve as “mechanisms of political control” through which the leading state can lock others into a favorable set of relations while limiting, to some degree, its own arbitrary freedom. That is an unusually candid description of liberal order at work whereby institutions bind the strong and reassure the weak; they also preserve an order congenial to the strong. Consent enters the arrangement, though never in a condition of perfect equality.

Given these characterizations of Liberal Internationalism we must identify the modes in which this philosophy help explain a Unipolar world:

1. LI created a method of strategic restraint and cooperation between powers by which the leading power limited the visible arbitrariness of its supremacy in order to secure cooperation from others.

2. LI allowed for a hierarchical bargaining in which weaker states retained formal sovereignty while trading portions of practical autonomy for security, recognition, and order.

3. LI legitimized discourse around deep asymmetries teaching all of us that unequal power was a byproduct of law and responsibility

CONCLUSION

I am tempted to reframe the new world order formula (from the beginning of this article) to something more like this, who knows?:

Political World Order

= Error (where the irrational part of us lives, aka unexplainable or unpredictable human behavior and their consequences)

UP NEXT

Hegemonic Stability Theory & Democratic Peace Theory

Some teaser thoughts: Machiavelli would have absolutely loved the idea of a pluralistic world order. “Only conflict keeps a city alive.”

WORKS CITED

Adler-Nissen, Rebecca, and Ayşe Zarakol. “Struggles for Recognition: The Liberal International Order and the Merger of Its Discontents.” International Organization, vol. 75, no. 2, 2021, pp. 611–634. Cambridge University Press, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-organization/article/struggles-for-recognition-the-liberal-international-order-and-the-merger-of-its-discontents/2CA314390EAC48EA619D7834C3A71CA4.

Cobban, Alfred. In Search of Humanity: The Role of the Enlightenment in Modern History. George Braziller, 1960.

Cox, Robert W. “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 1981, pp. 126–155.

Finnemore, Martha. “Legitimacy, Hypocrisy, and the Social Structure of Unipolarity: Why Being a Unipole Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be.” World Politics, vol. 61, no. 1, 2009, pp. 58–85.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. 1651. Edited by Richard Tuck, Cambridge UP, 1996.

Hunt, Michael H. Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy. Yale UP, 1987.

Ikenberry, G. John. After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars. Princeton UP, 2001.

Ikenberry, G. John. Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order. Princeton UP, 2011.

Kant, Immanuel. Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. 1795. Translated by H. B. Nisbet, in Kant: Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss, Cambridge UP, 1991.

Lake, David A. Hierarchy in International Relations. Cornell UP, 2009.

Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. 1689. Edited by C. B. Macpherson, Hackett, 1980.

McDougall, Walter A. Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776. Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de. The Spirit of the Laws. 1748. Translated and edited by Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone, Cambridge UP, 1989.

Restad, Hilde Eliassen. “Old Paradigms in History Die Hard in Political Science: U.S. Foreign Policy and American Exceptionalism.” American Political Thought, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 53–76.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. 1762. Translated by Maurice Cranston, Penguin, 1968.

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776. Edited by Edwin Cannan, Modern Library, 1937.

United Nations. Charter of the United Nations. 1945, https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text.

Vattel, Emer de. The Law of Nations; or, Principles of the Law of Nature Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns. 1758. Translated by Joseph Chitty, T. & J. W. Johnson, 1852.

Wilson, Woodrow. “Address to a Joint Session of Congress on the Conditions of Peace.” 8 Jan. 1918. The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-joint-session-congress-the-conditions-peace-the-fourteen-points.

The Covenant of the League of Nations. 1919. The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_Century/leagcov.asp

Wendt, Alexander. “The State as Person in International Theory.” Review of International Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, Apr. 2004, pp. 289–316. Cambridge University Press, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210504006084 (probably MY ABSOLUTE FAVE PEER REVIEWED ARTICLE)

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