Archive - Carolyn Gage

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Published on

June 10, 2021

Rachel J. Fenton on the Trail of Charlotte Brontë’s Best Friend

Interviews Lesbian History Women's History

Rachel J Fenton is a working-class writer from Yorkshire. She lives in Aotearoa where she is also known as Rae Joyce and received a Creative New Zealand Arts Grant to research, write and draw a graphic biography of Charlotte Brontë’s best friend Mary Taylor. Her recent research trip to New York City inspired her to write a chapbook of poems titled Beerstorming with Charlotte Brontë in New York.

CG: So, Rachel Fenton, welcome to my blog!

RF: Kia ora, hello and thank you, Carolyn Gage, thanks so much for having me! I’m a huge fan of your blog and your brilliant work, as you know.

CG: For those of you who may not be familiar with Rachel, she collaborated with me on a charming and dangerous booklet titled “Sexual Textual Tennis” as the “Graphic Poet Rae Joyce.” I encourage everyone in the world to buy this patriarchal atom-splitting work of amazing art. BUT… today I am talking to Rachel about another aspect of her brilliant career. Rachel and I belong to a small but mighty, extremely elite group I like to call “The Lesbian History Detective Agency.” Rachel, perhaps you would like to share with blog readers the subject of your latest investigation…?

RF: I just want to say, first off, “Sexual Textual Tennis” was a champion collaboration and an important one, for me personally it was a pivotal moment in my understanding of what my feminist politics are and what my art can do, so thank you for giving me that wonderful opportunity. And also, “The Lesbian History Detective Agency” would be a great title for a play! OK. I think it’s fair to say that I’m obsessed with a woman named Mary Taylor. For those of your readers who don’t know about her (and five years ago, that was me), she is probably best known as the friend of Charlotte Brontë.

A page from "Sexual Textual Tennis"

CG: Just to set the record straight—so to speak: We don’t really know if Charlotte was lesbian or bisexual. There are mixed opinions on this. Her friendship with Ellen Nussey produced a romantic correspondence in with both women admitted they would marry each other if they could. And if you Google "Jane Eyre" and "lesbian," you will encounter all kinds of essays on the "deep lesbian currents" of the novel. But Charlotte did end up marrying (a man) relatively late in life. The evidence for Mary’s lesbianism appears stronger. For one thing, she wrote, “The first duty – is for every woman to protect herself from the danger of being forced to marry.” And Mary took that duty seriously, emigrating to New Zealand for better prospects of supporting herself. Later, her cousin emigrated to join her and the two women lived together and ran a successful shop for many years. Also, Mary wrote a novel of her own, Miss Miles, or a Tale of Yorkshire Life 60 Years Ago, about three young women and their struggles to find independence and happiness, and self-published it at the age of 73. She died in 1893, aged 76... never married.

"Rose Yorke" was the character based on Mary in Bronte's novel Shirley.

RF: There are several reasons I became so fascinated with Taylor… Since early 2016, following the launch of Three Words, An Anthology of Aotearoa Women’s Comics (Beatnik) which I’d co-edited, I was looking to reconnect with my Yorkshire roots in a way that would simultaneously anchor me to Aotearoa, where I’d lived for about a decade at this point. I’d had a discussion about the Brontë sisters with my partner who said to me “Didn’t Charlotte have a friend in New Zealand?” And that’s what pushed me down the trail of Mary Taylor. I felt Mary Taylor was a figure who could hold my interest for a large, book-sized project. And I wasn’t mistaken; however, what I wasn’t seeing – wasn’t able to at that point – was why I was really drawn to her; what my psychological drivers were for pursuing her. I need to make that distinction, that my interest in her is only clear in [almost] hindsight, because I was running blind at the time of my research.

CG: I think that can often be part of the process about researching and writing about historical figures. I just finished a play about the geneticist Barbara McClintock. I had been thinking about this play for thirty years, researching it for ten, and then writing it for three years. Weeks after I finished it, I began to understand myself as autistic. After I got the diagnosis, I was doing an internet search to find out who else was autistic… and McClintock’s name turned up over and over again. Maybe on some deep subconscious level I had been searching for my own story in the history of McClintock.

RF: Taylor had found herself adrift of her family and in need of financial security and she wanted better for herself but also, crucially, for all women. Unlike Taylor, I’m working-class – a group she admired because she saw working-class women as having achieved something like equality with their men through the division of labour and their ability to earn, whereas middle-class women eschewed work because it was considered degrading for women to work in Victorian society. Of course, it wasn’t so much degrading as a means for women to escape patriarchal control at that time… If women could not be controlled by the church or by the financial hold of husbands, they were a threat to the patriarchy. Mary wasn’t just a trailblazer, she was a danger to society. I had been labelled a “rabble-rouser” by one of my co-editors on the anthology in the first interview we gave. It irked. It’s a form of class discrimination in the UK. Working-class people are frequently given such labels as angry, aggressive, intimidating, because middle-class people are afraid of poverty, afraid of people who have touched poverty. I wrote in the story that won the University of Plymouth Short Fiction Prize that perhaps middle-class people think they can catch poverty by association with working-class people. Certainly, that’s been my experience. The label stuck.

CG: That brings to mind Jane Goodall's quotation: "It actually doesn't take much to be considered a difficult woman. That's why there are so many of us." So, let's get back to your "beerstorming..." Tell us where you went on the trail of Mary Taylor...

RF: I had intended to visit Te Whanganui a Tara first, then New York’s Public Library Berg Collection, and finally the Brontë Parsonage Museum and Library in my native Yorkshire. I was overjoyed when I was awarded a $20,000NZ grant that meant I could do the research.

CG: Ah...New York...

RF: I spent two days researching without breaks in New York Public Library’s Berg collection, and another in The Morgan Library and Museum’s Sherman Fairchild Room. Reading Bronte’s rough slant in contrast to Taylor’s immaculately controlled handwriting was an experience I will never forget. Taylor’s hand was like fine ironwork in a continental city until her beloved sister Martha’s death, when the line tremors and the first sign of emotional weakness shows like the ink on a Richter scale. I thought I felt her pain because I was in pain. I carried this knowledge to my illustrations. When Taylor tells Brontë she is leaving England for New Zealand, I allowed my emotions to bleed into my pen, distorting the line with real as opposed to imagined feeling. On the fourth day, I met up with my online friend Lori. Throughout the previous decade, she had been a constant support to me. Never judgemental, though always truthful. Blunt, even, at times. Loyal. She accepted me for myself. Her letters to me are written in the finest wrought iron cursive, back-leaning, whereas mine to her are a roughshod gallop. Just like the poems I wrote in New York. My friendship with Lori gave me some insight into the importance of Taylor’s friendship, a friendship that was predominantly epistolary

Mary Taylor on the left, with a group of women mountaineering in Switzerland, 1874

CG: That whole subject of literary women’s friendships is fascinating. I remember how much I enjoyed reading A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. I sometimes think with regret about how many of these friendships today will be lost from history, because nobody writes long, thoughtful letters anymore. It’s all internet tweets and facebook posts. And I include myself in that. I do write blogs… that’s where I’m thoughtful, but a blog post is not personal. But back to the beerstorming... What would you like to tell us about Beerstorming with Charlotte Brontë in New York?

RF: I think you’ve as much as said it with your observation about the future documentation, or lack of it, of women’s friendships, and the need, still, to actively keep our herstories from being erased. Beerstorming with Charlotte Bronte in New York is a sequence of 18 poems structured around the archive of Taylor and Bronte’s correspondence that helped me access their friendship in a way that felt immediate and relevant, and in such a way that I was able to carry that research modality into Betweenity, my graphic biography of Taylor. My friendship with Lori mightn’t be of the likes of Taylor’s and Brontë’s, we are not landed gentry or genteel parsons’ daughters, we may not “astonish” with our antics as Mary and her cousin Ellen did, but in Beerstorming with Charlotte Brontë in New York, I found a way into the archive. I guess all history is like this; we put in as much as we take out, right?

CG: I very much look forward to the publication of your graphic biography of Mary Taylor. Can you share with us a page from it?

A page from Betweenity.
Published on

May 27, 2021

Review of Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature

Lesbian Feminism Lesbian History Reviews The Environment Women's History

In 1999 I reviewed Linda Lear's biography Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature for publication in The Lesbian Review of Books. Twenty-one years later, this review was cited in a new anthology titled Literature, Writing, and the Natural World, edited by James Guignard and T.P. Murphy and published by Cambridge Scholars.

My review had been centered on the biography's failure to apply the word lesbian to any of the intimate and well-documented relationships that Carson had with women throughout her life. Because I thought these relationships would be of interest to my readers, I am republishing this review:

The word "lesbian" is not in the index to Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature. This is because the word "lesbian" is not in the text of what has been hailed by The New York Times as "the most exhaustive account so far of Carson's private, professional, and public lives."

This omission is peculiar in light of the fact that the author, Linda Lear, had access to the correspondence between Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman --- a correspondence that documents the two women's lesbian passion and commitment during the last ten years of Carson's life. In fact, three years ago, a collection of the letters was published in Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952--1964.

To Lear's credit, she does not withhold the details of Carson's relationships with women, even when these details indicate lesbian attachments. In fact, she has done a considerable amount of detective work in uncovering them. What she fails to do is establish a context for understanding the significance of these lesbian relationships and how Carson's orientation as a lesbian shaped her career and her ideas.

Carson, author of the ground-breaking exposé of the risks of pesticides, Silent Spring, is remembered now as the founder of the ecology movement, but she might also be considered the first ecofeminist. Through the network of connections she made with women during her lifetime, she evolved her philosophy of the interconnectedness of all forms of life.   Because of the censorship she imposed on herself, a censorship that her biographers have perpetuated, the significance of Carson's world of female relationships has not been explored for its impact on her career and on her writing.

This censorship, ironically, may be read by some as a mark of Lear's scholarly detachment, an index of her professionalism --- that she refuses to speculate or overlay interpretation on incidents and documents for which there may be alternative explanations.

Lear's predicament is not unique. In fact, it parallels the situation of Lorena Hickok's biographer, Doris Faber, who insisted that the romantic language in the Hickok-Roosevelt correspondence "does not mean what it appears to mean." Fortunately, her homophobic treatment of Hickok has been countered in recent years by Blanche Wiesen Cook's biography of Eleanor Roosevelt and by the publication of Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok. Similarly, the publication in 1998 of Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, poses a serious challenge to the assumptions of previous biographers about Dickinson's heterosexuality. One irate male academic has characterized the publication of these letters as "an utter distraction from her outstanding intellect and her talent."

But is it? There are some of us who would argue that it is the presumption of heterosexuality that is the "utter distraction."   Just what, exactly, are the academic criteria for determining the sexual orientation of a historical figure? At the present time, a homophobic academy prefers the "innocent-until-proven-guilty" approach, in which the biographer must make her case for queerness beyond a reasonable doubt. But gay and lesbian scholars do not consider homosexuality to be a crime, and our concerns lie more with understanding a politic, an aesthetic, a social orientation that potentially informs the body of work produced by men or women whose sexual orientation, however individual the form of expression, may nevertheless provide a perspective that is unique and distinct from that of heterosexuals.

In addition, what appears to be "reasonable doubt" in the minds of biographers like Lear and Faber reads like homophobic panic and denial to scholars who find it unreasonable to explain away an obvious constellation of lesbian or gay relationships on a case-by-case, or even word-by-word, basis.

Hear the words of Rachel Carson, 47, written to her lover Dorothy Freeman, 56, in 1954:

"... I have been remembering that my very first message to you was a Christmas greeting. Christmas, 1952. I knew then that the letter to which it replied was something special, that stood out from the flood of other mail, but I don't pretend I had any idea of its tremendous importance in my life. I didn't know then that you would claim my heart --- that I would freely give you a lifetime's love and devotion. I had at least some idea of that when Christmas came again, in 1953. Now I know, and you know. And as I have given, I have received --- the most precious of all gifts. Thank you darling, with all my heart." (pp. 66-67, Always, Rachel)

Or the words of Dorothy Freeman:

"How sweet to find your clothes mixed in with mine, dear --- that brought you near. I've wanted you so when I looked at the moon, when the tide was high; when the water made wild sounds in the night; when we went tide-pooling; when the anemones were exposed for a few seconds as the water rushed away from the cave; but most of all, darling, when I went back to the veeries ---" (p. 117, Always, Rachel)

On the eve of a long-awaited rendezvous in a Manhattan hotel, Dorothy wrote this note to Rachel:

"New York --- darling --- a week from this moment I shall be with you if all goes well -- and it must! Yes, I think we can be casual if we meet at the desk --- just a chilly glance I'll give you and say, 'Glad you made it...'" (p. 69, Always, Rachel)

What is to made of the humor in this note, if the subtext is not lesbian?

In the early years, the correspondence itself was carried on in a clandestine fashion, with each woman writing a letter to the other woman's family, "for publication," with the private love letter hidden surreptitiously inside.

In the case of Carson and Freeman, it is not even necessary to resort to Lilian Faderman's argument for the inclusion of non-genital love relationships in the category "lesbian." In light of the women's own writings, it is unreasonable to conclude that the relationship was platonic. One does not need to disguise a platonic same-sex relationship from the desk clerk at a hotel!

Lear's conscientious research into Carson's early years reveals another significant lesbian attachment, one which was to determine the direction of Carson's professional life.

Mary Scott Skinker, 36, was a professor of biology at the Pennsylvania College for Women, where Carson was studying to become a writer. Under Skinker's mentorship, Carson began to focus her creative energies on biology. Carson's correspondence to friends at this time indicate that she was deeply infatuated with her teacher. When Skinker took a leave-of-absence to attend Johns Hopkins University, Carson attempted to follow her, but was unable to raise tuition money. Instead, she founded a science club she named Mu Sigma Sigma --- Miss Skinker's initials in Greek. After graduation, Carson rendezvoused with her former professor in Skinker's family cabin in the Shenandoah Valley. As Lear coyly notes, "There were no longer any boundaries between mentor and protégée." (pp.56-57) (Shades of Radclyffe Hall's "... and that night they were not divided"!) Skinker and Carson maintained contact with each other for two decades, and when Skinker, 57, became hospitalized with cancer, she gave Carson's name as the person to be contacted. It was Carson who stayed with her until she lost alertness, and only then was her care taken over by members of her family.

Carson found companionship and mentoring with another powerful woman, Marie Rodell, who became her agent. Although Rodell had been married briefly, Lear notes "she kept the details of her marriage locked in a closet." (p.153) The relationship between the two women advanced quickly beyond a professional one, and when Carson was denied passage on a research ship, because of the impropriety of a lone woman joining an all-male crew, Rodell agreed to accompany her as a "chaperone." According to Lear, "Ten days on the Albatross III voyage had deepened their friendship, and they now closed their letters to each other with love." (p. 172)

Because of her failure to provide a lesbian context for Carson's experiences, the reader must read between the homophobically elided lines to understand her relationship to Marjorie Spock and Mary Richards. These two socially-prominent, single women had bought a house and were living together. We are told that they became members of Carson's inner circle of friends.

Mary Richards, described as a "digestive invalid," required organic food, and Spock, who had studied organic farming, obliged her partner with a two-acre vegetable garden. In 1957, state and federal planes sprayed the property repeatedly with DDT mixed in fuel oil --- spraying as much as fourteen times in one day. Spock and Richards sued the government in a trial that lasted twenty-two days. They lost on a technicality, but not before Spock had sent out her daily account of the ordeal to her friends and supporters, including Carson.

This was a lawsuit sparked by one woman's desire to protect her disabled life-partner. Carson, whose first love had been mercilessly harassed out of her career as a college professor and later out of a career in the government, was again faced with a situation where the survival of a lesbian she loved was being threatened. This time Carson was in a position to do something.

What did the Spock-Richards relationship mean to Carson, who was still living with her mother --- who had never been able to live openly with the women she loved? How did the passionate crusade of a woman devoted to protecting her partner affect Carson's own interest in the issue of pesticides?   Did the security and nurturing she received from the maternal Dorothy Freeman influence her decision to write a book that she knew would raise a fire-storm of controversy? How did the persecution of Skinker influence Carson's own career decisions, as well as her decisions to live a deeply closeted life? Did her oppression as a woman in a male-dominated field and as a lesbian in a heterosexual world influence her advocacy for respect for the diversity of life on the planet?

It will take a biography with an entry for "lesbian" in the index before we can begin to reconcile the serious mind-body split that has been and is still being historiographically imposed on Rachel Carson, lesbian biologist.
Published on

January 31, 2021

The Walls of Silence: A Survivor's Museum

Child Abuse Incest Rape

About 35 years ago, I got the idea of building a museum to commemorate and honor women who are victims of rape. I was inspired at the time by the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. I eventually published "The Women's Rape Museum" as a blog on this site.

Because of this blog, two architecture students from the University of San Carlos in the Phillippines reached out to me, asking me to be a consultant on their thesis project, which was to design a museum for survivors of sexual violence. The two students were Allen Celestino and Fairyssa Biana Canama... and they did an incredible job with their project, titled "Walls of Silence: A Survivor's Museum." It was designed for a site in Cebu City, but it could and should serve as a model for similar museums in any city.

Celestino and Canama studied a range of Holocaust and war memorial museums, and came up with a design that would take visitors on a healing journey through the different stage of assimilating the trauma of rape. To aid in the presentation of their thesis, they made a beautiful short video that takes the viewer on a graphic tourof the various passages and chambers of this architectural journey.

Their video journey is only 3.5 minutes long... and well worth the viewing! They have broken down the chaotic and inchoate process of healing from post-rape trauma, helping the victim access an experience that too often is an internal and unassimilated secret.

The genius of their project is that this is also a healing and integrating experience for the friends and families of survivors, who often have no idea what their loved one is going through. In this museum experience, they can literally accompany them through these externalized stages, offering enormous opportunity for dialogue and empathy.

For those who are interested in the process behind their choices, their half-hour thesis presentation is fascinating and also available online. (It includes the shorter video of the museum tour.) Both Celestino and Canama come out as survivors in their video, and their design process reflects their constant engagement with their own experiences.

I encourage survivors and those who love us to take the short tour of Walls of Silence, and then the longer tour of the thesis presentation. I encourage all of us begin to think more deeply about the needs of survivors in our culture and ways to bring this tangible, visible proof of caring to our communities.

Before the visitor begins the descent into the survivor's journey, they pass through the exhibit of Rape Myths, to clear their thinking of popular and oppressive misconceptions.

The post-trauma journey begins...

The Descent to Darkness

This is the Path of the Silenced.

In the early stages of recovery, the survivor often masks their pain and adopts an attitude of silence about their experience.

The Dome of Inner Thoughts... again, giving voice to the shame and self-doubt.

Entering the Hall of Judgement

In the Hall of Judgement

The Debriefing Room... for processing these earlier passages.

The Maze of Decisions as the trauma begins to become unfrozen.

In the Hall of Empowerment, the visitor has an opportunity to ritually dispose of artifacts associated with the trauma.

Leaving the fire and entering the second part of the Hall of Empowerment

Giant statues of healed survivors in the Hall of Empowerment
Published on

December 21, 2020

Ruminations on Octopuses and Autism

The Environment

I have been thinking a lot about autism, and what it means to be defined as “neurodivergent” in a “neurotypical” world. Even those "politically correct" labels reflect the biases of those for whom autism is "other." Anyway, this week I was watching a video about octopuses, and it opened up a new lens on autism... and I wanted to share some of my thoughts.

First, some facts about the octopus: It's everywhere... all over the world--in the deep sea, in the kelp forests, in the coral reefs, along the rocky shorelines. It's massive, and it's tiny. It's been around for millions of years. And it's wicked smart, especially when you consider the other members of the mollusk family: clams, oysters and snails.

An octopus carrying two halves of a coconut which will become a home.

The octopus can perform all kinds of learning tasks… including ones that involve object perception and short-term and long-term memory. It can make plans, which means it remembers past events, imagines future needs, and analyzes the ways that current actions can relate to both. It uses composite tools. It takes things apart. It invents games. It problem-solves. It explores the environment like a curious child.

What does this have to do with autism? Trust me, I'll get there. (I'm autistic.)

So, all the other species (dogs, cats, humans, dolphins) that are considered forms of "intelligent life" are vertebrates. In fact, most of them are mammals, and primates at that. These “intelligent life” vertebrates trace their common ancestors back 320 million years, probably to some kind of lizard. But when we go looking for the common ancestor that we share with the octopus, we have to go back more than twice as far... 600 million years, in fact. And the common ancestor was... wait for it... a flatworm.

What's my point?

My point is that, in the history of this planet, intelligent life actually evolved twice, in widely separated (vertebrate and invertebrate ) trunks of the family tree. And the point of this observation is to explain why the intelligence of the octopus is so insanely different from the intelligence of the vertebrates.

An inaccurately titled graphic, unless humans are considered monkeys. But the point here is that only one of these is an invertebrate.

And HERE is where it relates to autism: Our theories of intelligence have historically been derived from our studies of vertebrates, especially mammals, and especially primates. All these vertebrate forms of “intelligent life” have been very social creatures that travel in pods, packs, herds, or tribes. Not surprisingly, our theories about intelligence have been shaped by this fact. These theories have assumed that intelligence evolved in certain species in response to social needs for communication, for bonding, for collective action, for establishing and maintaining social hierarchies, and so on.

But… then there is the octopus, a form of intelligent life that is notoriously anti-social. The octopus does not bond with other octopuses, does not live or travel with them, and does not observe any kind of social hierarchy. It is a real loner. According to our theories of intelligence, it should actually be quite stupid... dumb as a snail, in fact. But the octopus has 500,000 neurons and the snail has only 20,000. The octopus is right up there with the pig, the dog, and the dolphin. Clearly there is a problem with our theories about the evolution of intelligence. Being social has no bearing on the development of intelligence.

And here we are. Autism is "characterized by difficulty in social interaction and communication." We are wired for resistance to social pressure. We are said to lack empathy, to have difficulty reading social cues, are oblivious to social hierarchies. We don't travel in packs. Are we missing out on evolutionary forces that generate intelligence? Or are we developing intelligence along a completely different axis, like the octopus?

How did the octopus come to be so much smarter than the snails and clams? If it wasn't social pressure, what was it? Apparently, it's all about the shell... or lack thereof.

One hundred and forty million years ago the lineage that produced the octopus lost its shell. This shell-less proto-octopus was way more nimble, way more mobile, and way more vulnerable than the other shell-encased members of the mollusk family. With all the predators in the ocean, one might have expected this new branch of the family tree to become extinct in a generation or two. But that’s not what happened.

The octopus got very smart very fast. It became a master/mistress of disguise. It developed the ability to change not only color, but also texture in 200 milliseconds. That’s faster than the blink of an eye. It’s way faster than a lizard that takes 20 seconds to change color. And the octopus can change camouflage up to 177 times per hour. How can it do this? Because most of its 500,000 neurons are not in its brain, but in its eight arms. The stimulus/response thing bypasses the brain completely. It takes a shortcut that enables the arm to "read" the environment and send appropriate signals directly to the special camouflage cells i the arm. These camouflage cells are incredibly complex, with highly specific functions. Some control for red, black and yellow coloration. Some reflect blue and green light, others reflect white light. Another layer of specialized cells can change the texture from smooth to rough, and back again.

What does this have to do with autism? Well, so… let’s go back to losing that shell, that protection. Kind of like losing one’s armor. Yes, it makes one vulnerable, but it also drives the evolution of a different kind of intelligence, an intelligence that is rooted in highly complex and subtle interactions with one's physical environment. If the octopus lacks the social intelligence that comes from belonging to a pack, it has evolved an exquisitely fine-tuned relationship to the natural world around it.

If an autistic person is lacking in social intelligence, have we evolved compensatory sensitivity to our surroundings? Without the kind of protective armor that non-autistic people develop in their social interactions, have we developed a different form of perceptual/conceptual mobility, a nimbleness of spirit? Could it be that our "special interests" are part of this protective disguise? Without the rigid shape associated with a social role, are we not able to slip ourselves into the secret nooks and crannies of a rich inner life that appear irrelevant or inconsequential to those who have never had to develop alternative resources?

Daryl Hannah, Darius McCollum, Dan Aykroyd, Julia (Sesame Street), Satoshi Tajiri (田尻智), Hannah Gadsby, Susan Boyle, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Talia Grant and Greta Thunberg.

I can't claim to have anything like the brilliant adaptations of the octopus. But I do feel that centering the intelligence of the octopus calls into question many of our human assumptions and theories. I have the intelligence to know that we humans have very limited understanding of intelligence, and that we may well have reached a period in our evolution as a social species, where the concomitants of our bonding, i.e. our love of conformity, our lack of authenticity, our prioritizing of congeniality, our staggering disregard for our natural environment, and our ongoing massacres of our fellow creatures are going to destroy life on the planet in less than two generations. Is it possible that autism marks an acceleration in human evolution--that our intelligence is moving in the direction of the octopus--and not a moment too soon?
Published on

December 11, 2020

When Cancel Culture Came to Broadway

Civil Rights Women And Theatre

Blacklisted Playwrights Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller

“Cancel culture (or call-out culture) is a modern form of ostracism in which someone is thrust out of social or professional circles - either online on social media, in the real world, or both.” –Wikipedia

Cancel culture is nothing new. In the 1950’s, it was called blacklisting, or Communist witchhunting. It was a political tool for consolidating support and silencing dissent, and it was especially effective in stifling writers… at least until it got to Broadway. And what happened when "cancel culture" attempted to invade Broadway is an example today for a world that is rapidly becoming more and more polarized and censorious.

It was June 22, 1950. The names of prominent Broadway playwrights Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman had just been published in Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. The brainchild of three FBI agents, this official blacklist named 130 organizations and 151 individuals—actors, musicians, writers, and broadcast journalists, and it was intended to flush out subversives in the media and, in contemporary parlance, to “no-platform” them. The question on everyone’s minds, “Would Miller and Hellman now face the same fate as the ‘Hollywood Ten?’ Would their careers be destroyed? Would they also go to prison?”

Nine of the Hollywood Ten: Robert Adrian Scott, Edward Dmytryk, Samuel Ornitz, Lester Cole, Herbert Biberman, Albert Maltz, Alvah Bessie, John Howard Lawson, and Ring Lardner Jr. Dalton Trumbo is missing. [There would have been a Hollywood Eleven, except that Bertolt Brecht left the country immediately after testifying.]

Now, bear in mind that Miller had just won both a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize for Death of a Salesman, which had opened the previous year. Two years before that, he had won a Tony for All My Sons. By 1950, nine of Lillian Hellman’s plays had been produced on Broadway, and four of these would be adapted to film, including The Children’s Hour, The Little Foxes, and Watch on the Rhine.

“Canceling” these playwrights would be a significant feather in the cap for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which was holding the hearings to investigate the so-called infiltration by Communists. HUAC had every reason to feel confident, because just a few months earlier, eight screenwriters, one film producer and one film director (the “Hollywood Ten”) had all begun serving prison sentences up to a year for their non-cooperation with HUAC in 1947. Refusing to name names, the Ten had been cited for contempt, and after two years of exhausted appeals, they faced the inevitable. Hollywood had turned its back on them.

Things were not looking good for Miller and Hellman… but what HUAC didn't understand was that Broadway was not Hollywood.

In Hollywood, it was possible to shoot an entire film and never meet most of the cast. The actors did not engage directly with their audiences. The film would be shown long after it was wrapped and the actors had moved on to other projects. In other words, the bonds of camaraderie in Hollywood were forged in social and political activities, not in the course of producing a film.

Dalton Trumbo in prison. After his release, Trumbo moved to Mexico, where he continued to write screenplays under a pseudonym (Roman Holiday and The Brave One-- which won an Oscar.) In 1960, when his name appeared in the screen credits for Exodus and Kirk Douglas publicly named Trumbo as the writer of Spartacus, the blacklist officially ended.

Broadway was another story. Stage actors formed families, rehearsing with each other for weeks and then facing their audiences together night after night, and maybe even for years if the show was a hit. Holding hands at the final curtain, the actors shared an awareness of the work as a whole and an appreciation for everyone’s part in it. Sometimes these shows would be sent out on tour, but for the most part, after a show closed, the Broadway family would scatter and then regroup at the next round of auditions for plays. There was a centuries-old history and a tradition among Broadway actors that simply did not and could not exist in Hollywood.

The prison-bound Hollywood Ten all saw their careers terminated for a decade, but the Broadway artists had an entirely different experience. The production of Death of a Salesman continued its Broadway run into the fall of 1950, five months after the publication of Red Channels. That same year producers Kermit Bloomgarten and Walter Fried sent the play out on national tour. In spite of the fact that one of the authors of Red Channels attempted to organize local boycotts of the play at every stop, the tour was a success. One month after Salesman closed on Broadway, Miller’s adaptation of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People opened. And in 1953, one of the most enduring artifacts of the McCarthy era premiered at the Martin Beck Theatre. The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witch trials, is often interpreted as a commentary on the McCarthy witchhunts. Called to testify before HUAC in 1956, Miller was asked about this, and his response was sardonic: “The comparison is inevitable, sir.” In 1955, A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays both opened on Broadway.

And what about Hellman? In 1951, her play The Autumn Garden opened at the Coronet Theatre, and in 1956, the musical Candide, featuring Hellman’s libretto, won a Tony Award for Best Musical.

In other words, Broadway continued to support Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman. Let's look at how and why this happened:

The heads of the major studios who signed the infamous Waldorf Statement supporting the blacklist: Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Harry Cohn, Barney Balaban and Albert Warner.

One of the most significant differences between Hollywood and Broadway had to do with the unions and the producers:

One month after the hearings of the Hollywood Ten, the heads of the major film studios met at a posh hotel to issue what would become known as “The Waldorf Statement.” In part, it read: “Members of the Association of Motion Picture Producers deplore the action of the [Hollywood Ten]… We will forthwith discharge or suspend without compensation those in our employ, and we will not re-employ any of the Ten until such time as he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a Communist.”

In 1951, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) voiced their support of HUAC and sanctioned the blacklist with this warning to their members: “… if any actor by his own actions outside of union activities has so offended American public opinion that he has made himself unsaleable [sic] at the box-office, the Guild cannot and would not want to force any employer to hire him.” Two years later, SAG would go even further, requiring potential members to sign a loyalty oath as part of their application to the union. This mandatory signing was in effect until 1967, when the Grateful Dead refused to sign and the provision was made optional. In 1974, SAG finally removed it from their by-laws.

Actors' Equity’s first strike as a union came in 1919 when it joined with the American Federation of Labor (now the AFL-CIO). The casts of 12 New York productions refused to go on stage. By the end of the month, nine more New York theatres went dark and Equity members in Chicago, Boston, and Washington D.C. joined the strike. Producers caved after one month, having lost over 3 million dollars.

The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) would take a similar position to SAG. Even as they fought on progressive fronts to become the first industry union to win employer-funded health and retirement plans, AFTRA voted to suspend any member who failed to cooperate with HUAC. The Writers Guild of America (WGA), representing the screenwriters, and the Directors Guild of America (DGA) also supported HUAC and turned against their blacklisted members.

Workers in the film and television industries were frightened into silence, or worse, frightened into naming names in order to protect themselves. But three thousand miles away, on another coast and in an alternative universe, Actors Equity Association, the actors' union, took a very different course of action. They rejected the blacklist and supported their members who had been named.

To understand their decision, it’s important to look at how Actors Equity worked. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, it was a union centered in New York, but with branches in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco… but—and this is important—regional decisions had to approved by the New York council. In other words, Broadway actors ran the show. Actors Equity already had taken a progressive stand against segregation of audiences in 1947, effectively causing the closure of the National Theatre in Washington.

The actor Philip Loeb was blacklisted and also named by Elia Kazan and Lee J. Cobb who cooperated with HUAC. Loeb was fired from a hit TV series because of the blacklist. The sole support of a son with psychiatric disability, Loeb became depressed over difficulty finding work in film and television. In 1955, he took his life. Actors' Equity named an award in his honor.

In September 1951, at a quarterly meeting of Equity in New York, the members passed a strongly worded resolution against the practice of blacklisting. Because it was passed by members, it had to go before the Equity Council, where it was hotly debated for two weeks before being rejected. A committee was formed to redraft the resolution. This time, the resolution passed, but with more diplomatic wording and unfortunately omitting a clause that drew attention the fact that Black actors faced a kind of double jeopardy “as they have always been discriminated against in terms of employment.”

The final resolution was, however, unequivocal in its repudiation of the Communist witch hunts:

“Whereas the aforementioned practice of “blacklisting” is by its very nature, based on secrecy and prejudiced judgement and results in conviction by accusation without an opportunity given to the accused person to be heard and to defend himself… now therefore be it resolved: That this Association again condemns the practice of “blacklisting” in all its forms, and that this Association will act to aid its members in their rights to obtain a fair and impartial hearing of any charges that may be brought against them.”

The union stood by the blacklisted actors and offered them support, and they were the first and the only performing arts organization to do so. Following their lead, the Broadway producers joined with Equity in their condemnation of the practice. A paragraph regarding blacklisting became standard in Equity’s basic agreement:

“The Manager and Actor admit notice of the anti-blacklisting provision contained in the basic agreement between Equity and the League of New York Theatres…”

Blacklisted Broadway actor Madeline Lee Gilford and husband Jack in 1950. Madeline showed up in costume to testify with flowers in her hair and a borrowed organza dress. She evoked the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Amendments. They joked that their children's first words were "Mommy," "Daddy" and "Fifth Amendment."

So what happened when HUAC brought their scurrilous hearings to Broadway in 1955? Broadway was ready for them.

Most of the 29 subpoenaed theatre artists were actors, and they had done what actors do: they had rehearsed. Some of them literally played characters at the hearings, costumes and all—"the dumb blonde,” “the Southern belle.” They deployed time-honored, scene-stealing tactics that included stalling for time to run out the clock. They held dramatically extended conversations with their attorneys, and they infuriated their interrogators by answering questions with more questions. These subpoenaed witnesses faced an unpleasant choice between naming names, going to prison for contempt, or taking the Fifth Amendment--which sounded like an admission of guilt. But, as actors, they knew how to milk a scene, and they were experts at exactly how far they could go before losing their audience. As witnesses, they would venture dangerously close to the line of contempt, and then pull back before crossing it. They would approach it again, again pull back, and then, seconds before they were cited for contempt, they would pull out the Fifth Amendment. In other words, they put on a damn good show. After four days, HUAC threw in the towel, cancelling the fifth day of the hearings. In the end, only one witness had named names. The 22 non-cooperative witnesses went back to work at their respective theaters without any repercussions.

As an interesting footnote to the 1955 hearings, the process servers had a heck of a time serving these theater artists with subpoenas. Denied entry into their homes, these servers often tried to track down their prey at the theaters where they worked. They were met with stage managers or box office staff who insisted the actor had not yet arrived or had already left the building. Often the servers were sent on a wild goose chase, while the actor’s cast members helped them sneak out of the theatre using an alternative exit.

And so the blacklist that had ruined so many reputations, destroyed so many careers, broken up so many families, and shattered so many lives in Hollywood did not succeed in New York. HUAC returned in 1958 to try again, but this time eighteen of the nineteen witnesses refused to cooperate. The record of these hearings is comparatively meager, because the Supreme Court had handed down a ruling in 1957 that severely restricted the kinds of questions HUAC could ask. These hearings were more of a denouement. Joseph Papp was let go from his television job at CBS after his 1958 hearing, but he opted for arbitration and became the first person to win reinstatement during the blacklist. Shakespeare in the Park, which Papp had founded in 1957, continued that summer and in 1962, expanded into the open-air Delacorte Theatre where it continues to flourish.

HUAC had been thoroughly upstaged by a community whose primary commitment was to each other and to freedom of speech, thought, and association. As radio commentator Dorothy Thompson noted, “Give the actor a stage, without which he simply does not exist. Not a stage in a court room. A stage in a theater. His judge will never be a Congressional Committee. It will always be an audience.”

Recommended reading: Broadway and the Blacklist by K. Kevyne Baar, published in 2019 by MacFarland & Company.
Published on

November 2, 2020

Green Grow the Lilacs and Oklahoma!: The Appropriation of Native Perspective

Rape Reviews Women And Theatre

In the annals of theatre history, Green Grow the Lilacs by Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs is mostly known as the play upon which the blockbuster Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! Is based.

That’s ironic, because the musical actually subverts the radical paradigm that Riggs has so beautifully crafted. Perhaps that kind of dramaturgical subversion is inevitable any time a Native writer’s work is adapted for mainstream commercial purposes. Also, the American musical is probably not the best vehicle for exploring the moral ambiguities and contradictions that are intrinsic to Riggs’ depiction of frontier life in what he specifically designates as “Indian Territory”—in other words, not the state of Oklahoma. Finally, Riggs is not only writing about colonization of Indian Territory, but also about colonization into heteropatriarchal values through a particular community ritual called "shivaree." The musical completely subverts the nature of that ritual and its pivotal role in Green Grow the Lilacs.

But first, let's look at the appropriation of Indian Territory:

What exactly was Indian Territory in 1900, the year the play takes place? It was, according to the Encyclopedia Brittanica:

"…originally ‘all of that part of the United States west of the Mississippi, and not within the States of Missouri and Louisiana, or the Territory of Arkansas.’ Never an organized territory, it was soon restricted to the present state of Oklahoma, excepting the panhandle and Greer county. The Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, Cherokee, and Chickasaw tribes were forcibly moved to this area between 1830 and 1843, and an act of June 30, 1834, set aside the land as Indian country (later known as Indian Territory)… In 1866 the western half of Indian Territory was ceded to the United States, which opened part of it to white settlers in 1889. This portion became the Territory of Oklahoma in 1890 and eventually encompassed all the lands ceded in 1866. The two territories were united and admitted to the Union as the state of Oklahoma in 1907."

Yes, Indian Territory is on the brink of statehood in 1900, when the play opens, but Riggs makes clear this is not something about which the prairie folks are enthusiastic. Here is Aunt Eller’s speech to her neighbors from the end of the play: “Why, the way you’re sidin’ with the federal marshall, you’d think us people out here lived in the United States! It’s jist a furrin country to me. And you supportin’ it! Jist dirty ole furriners, every last one of you!”

And her neighbors are quick to respond: “My pappy and mammy was both borned in Indian Territory! Why I’m jist plumb full of Indian blood myself.” “Me, too! And I c’n prove it!”

In most productions, the characters of the play are presumed to be settlers, but Riggs tells us in the dialogue that they are, in fact, “full of Indian blood” and proud of it.

So... on to the issue of the shivaree, a traditional frontier ritual involving males in the community kidnapping, harassing, and terrorizing newlyweds on their wedding night.

The shivaree as depicted in Oklahoma! has become sanitized and civilized, so that it is little more than an extension of the wedding party… kind of like when the bridesmaids and groomsmen sneak off to tie old shoes onto the back of the newlyweds’ car. The musical has transferred the scene from the dead of night to broad daylight. Shivarees are traditionally done in the dark. In the musical, just after the ceremony, the bride tosses her flowers over her shoulder, and then exits to change into her traveling clothes. The groom leaves to pack, and the men announce that they plan to have a shivaree. There is a vaudevillian interlude featuring a henpecked husband, and then the men return with pots and pans, making a racket. As the bride and groom exit for their travels, the men hoist the groom amiably on their shoulders… but whatever good-natured hazing they have planned is interrupted by the arrival of Judd Fry, the villain of the piece. Wielding a knife, Judd goes to attack the groom and a fight ensues that ends in Fry’s death. The shivaree has been reduced to a noisy, fraternal, daytime bon voyage party for the newlyweds.

Th shivaree in Riggs play is something completely different. It is a terrifying artifact of rape culture, and it serves to traumatize and permanently alter both protagonists in ways that are resonant with the appropriation of Indian Territory. To understand its dramaturgical significance, it’s important to look at the origins of the custom:

“Charivari” dates all the way to medieval and early modern Europe, where it was a ritual used to punish members of a community who failed to conform to social norms, especially sexual norms. Targets of the charivari might include a widow who remarried, a wife who assaulted her husband, or a couple who failed to have children. In France, where the term originated, teenaged boys and unmarried men traditionally led the ritual, parading through the streets, shouting mocking insults, beating on pots and pans, and threatening violence. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, these males would also attack local brothels during Lent. If the victim paid his or her tormentors off with money or wine, the charivari might end without these threats being carried out.

Apparently, until two hundred years ago, most Europeans thought the charivari was a legitimate and effective practice for curbing social deviance. It allowed for a public venting of outrage, with the opportunity for a “peaceful” resolution of a potentially explosive situation. In other words, it served as a kind of communal vent for blowing off steam… an exorcism of deviance. The victims were shamed, but then reintegrated into the community.

Here’s the thing: It’s actually a rape culture ritual empowering young males to assert their primacy and dominance in the community, and especially with regards to widows who dare to remarry, women who most likely were just attempting to defend themselves in abusive marriages where their husbands had legal rights to rape and batter, married women attempting to salvage some degree of bodily autonomy and/or freedom from compulsory serial pregnancy by practicing birth control or abstinence, and women who were prostituted. The historical roots of the 19th century Midwest shivaree were not in a playful hazing of newlyweds, but in a sanctioned, violent policing by gangs of young men over women who, in their eyes, were not sufficiently sexually subordinate.

Even when church and secular authorities attempted to outlaw charivari, local authorities were reluctant to prosecute these gangs of young men. Possibly, they feared reprisals against their persons or their properties, as coming between young men and what they perceive as their sexual prerogatives can be dangerous. Not surprisingly, when gang rape or other forms of violent assault occurred within the context of a charivari, the sentencing would be considerably lighter than under other circumstances.

But by the mid-1600’s, some victims began to push back, lodging formal complaints against the practice. Finally, by the 1700’s, the practice began to decline—first in the cities and eventually in rural areas.

In Green Grow the Lilacs, Riggs is writing about shivaree as practiced in 1900 in Indian Territory. It’s probable that he knew people who had experienced it. In fact, in 1900, Riggs would have been two years old, and his grandparents—if not his parents—may have been witnesses, victims, and/or participants to the kind of shivaree depicted in the play.

Unwelcome statehood looms over Indian Territory in Riggs’ play, as the final stage of a relentless and brutal colonization of the West. The shivaree looms over the protagonists of the play as a final and brutal stage of initiation into their expected gender roles in patriarchal rape culture.

Significantly, the shivaree scene opens at night. It opens as the newlyweds are attempting to sneak back into the farmhouse. Expressing the hope that nobody knows they have gotten married, they are desperate to avoid a shivaree. Laurey, the fearful bride, asks, “… if they ketch us, whut’ll happen? Will it be bad?” Her anxious groom responds, “You know about shivorees, honey. They get purdy rough.” He then assures her that they have outsmarted their would-be tormentors, but as they exit the stage, the gang of men enter in excited anticipation of capturing their prey. Their comments reflect their envy of Curly for having scored a bride who comes with “grazin and timber and plowed land,” as well as physical appeal. Their prurient excitement mounts as they note a light coming on in the bedroom, the lace curtains blowing, and the shadows passing in front of the window. As the men attempt to scale the walls of the house with a ladder, a drunken farmer appears and salaciously shouts, “No time to wait now. Time to git goin’. See that there bride a-glimmerin’ there in her white! Waitin’ fer you. Been standin’ there with her hair down her back and her lips a-movin’. Git next to her, brother! Gonna be high ole times, gonna be Jesus into yer heart!”

The men drag the groom Curly from the house. He is angry and yelling at the men to leave his wife alone. They agree to stop manhandling her as they bring her in. Laurey enters, “pale and shaken” in a nightgown with her hair down.

The men have leaned a ladder up the side of a haystack and they force Laurey to mount it. Then they force Curly to climb up after her, amid lascivious catcalls. When both are at the top, they pull the ladder down. The men have urged the bride to “Make out it’s a bed, why don’t you!” They begin coaching the couple to kiss and for Curly to bite her shoulder and “eat her alive.” As the men’s “orgy of delight” (Riggs' description) increases in its frenzy, one of the men calls out “Ain’t no right to be in no nightgown!” Another man taunts the bride, “How’s it feel to be married, Laurey, sugar, all safe and proper, to sich a fine purty man with curly hair and a dimple on his chin! Whee! Got you whur I want you—” The men begin to toss straw babies up to the top of the haystack, counting them out as they mock the couple.

Suddenly Curly cries out that the haystack is on fire. He begs for the ladder to be replaced, but the men ignore him as Jeeter (the Judd Fry character in Oklahoma!) enters with a torch. Curly jumps down and a fight ensues. Laurey climbs down from the haystack in time to witness the death agony of Jeeter. The scene ends with Laurey in shock, repeating “He laid there in the stubble, so quiet, th’ his eyes open, and his eyeballs white and starin’! He laid there in the stubble—th’ his eyes open—!

The shivaree is not gratuitous violence. It is the pivot of the play, in which Riggs has initially depicted the community as wholesome and even puritanical, counterposed against Jeeter’s solitary indulgence in pornography. But with the shivaree scene, the black-and-white moral world of the play is turned inside out. Under cover of darkness, the upstanding citizens of the town transform themselves into rapists and terrorists. What is Riggs telling us here? And how does it fit with the context of an indigenous territory about to become annexed as a state?

In the subsequent scene, three days later, Curly is in jail awaiting a form of prairie justice that may or may not honor his plea of self-defense. Laurey, sleepless, has been hiding in her room since the shivaree. She emerges in the lamplight, “looking very pale and changed, years older, a woman now.” Her speech indicates that she is distracted and dissociated, dwelling on the events of the shivaree:

When her aunt attempts to comfort her, Laurey insists that she can never forget what she’s seen: “Over and over! The way the men done. The things they said. Oh—why’d it have to be that-away!”

Finally, Aunt Eller admits the futility of attempting to forget. This is the pivotal speech of the play: “They’s things you cain’t get rid of—lots of things. Not if you live to be a hundred. You got to learn. You got to look at all the good on one side and all the bad on the other, and say ‘Well, all right, then!’ to both of ‘em.”

And with that, and a few more speeches about how hard a woman’s life is, Laurey admits she’s been “sich a baby” and becomes, what the playwright intends us to understand as an adult woman. Here is her transformative speech:

“I’ve thought about that awful night, too, until I thought I’d go crazy… Looked at it time and again, heared it—ringin’ in my ears! Cried about it, cried about everything! A plumb baby! And I’ve tried to figure out how it would be if sump’n did happen to you. Didn’t know how I could stand it. That was the worst! And nen, I tried to figger out how I could go on. Oh, I’ve went th’ough it all...from the start. Now I feel shore of sump’n, anyway—I’ll be growed up—like everybody else. I’ll put up with everything now. You don’t need to worry about me no more.”

Laurey has accepted her annexation into the role of wife and mother. She will forget what she has experienced at the hands of the town’s citizens. She will put up with everything now.

Riggs was a gay Cherokee playwright, born in Indian Territory in 1899. He was a disappointment to his father, a banker and a rancher. Photographs of Riggs show him to be a man of slight build, something of an “egghead” with his glasses and premature balding. What was his experience with the hypermasculinity and heteronormativity of the West? Did he experience hazing and bullying as a rite of passage? Did he learn to “stand it” in order to become an adult? Is he telling us something about the survival of his people, as each new generation has had to face a heritage of ongoing violence, denigration, and theft?

The musical adaptation has appropriated Riggs’ deeply disturbing play in order to generate a post-war celebration of America, and especially of American expansionism. (Hawaii and Alaska were still territories when the musical opened.) Male violence, which Riggs characterizes as central to the enforcement of "family values," is relegated to the perverted outsider (Jeeter), who can be easily exorcized. In fact, Oklahoma! tells a colonizer's fanciful story--personal and politcal.

Green Grow the Lilacs is an Indian play, and its significance far outweighs its role as appropriated source material for Oklahoma! The play stands on its own merits and occupies a critical place in Native American drama, documenting a pivotal time in history. Riggs' treatment of the shivaree as a paradigm for colonization/annexation is still ahead of its time.

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Green Grow the Lilacs and Oklahoma!: The Appropriation of Native Perspective