“I’m Doing Research at the University”; or, In Which We Solemnly Contemplate the Prospect of Adulthood 17 July 2011
Posted by Emily in Blog, Personal Life, Thesis.4 comments
“I’m doing research at the University” is what I told a well-meaning, very English, middle-aged priest who asked me what I was doing at Evening Prayer at Bristol Cathedral on a particularly sparsely-attended Sunday. Well, he didn’t put it like that; he said, “Are you visiting Bristol for the weekend?” But the subtext to the 21-year-old in jeans and sweater who had just spent the past hour realizing that she has managed to memorize an awful lot of Anglican liturgy in the past six months of church tourism and trying not to laugh at a sermon packed with unwitting phallic imagery was definitely, “What, in an age of declining church attendance, and on a day when there is not even a choir in residence, are you, casually-dressed young woman, doing in church?”
Well, “I’m doing research at the University” was my own delicate way of telling the priest, “I’m here for John Addington Symonds.” Because I have spent the past couple years knowing that the first boy with whom Symonds fell in love was a Bristol Cathedral chorister, and knowing that in his Memoirs he wrote that on one childhood visit to his local cathedral, “Some chord awoke in me then, which has gone on thrilling through my lifetime and has been connected with the deepest of my emotional experiences.” And here I am in Bristol for the next three weeks, preparing to dive in, tomorrow, to seventy boxes, ten linear feet, of the John Addington Symonds Papers, Department of Special Collections, Bristol University Library. And it was Sunday today, and so, absence of the choir and my complicated relationship to religious observances notwithstanding, of course I was going to the cathedral. Since there was no choir, the usher sat the dozen-strong congregation in their seats, and I found myself wondering if Willie Dyer, the teenager with whom Symonds, the spring before he went to Oxford, fell so deeply in love that for the rest of his life he gave his birthday as the date of their meeting, had ever sat in my seat—just as I always wondered, in Oxford, which luminaries had sat in the college pews from which I heard evening services there.
Symonds grew up, and sweet blossoming adolescent passion turned into a frustrated and often depressed life of failed attempts to sublimate his desire for Swiss peasants and Venetian gondoliers into Petrarchan sonnets or a biography of Michelangelo or problems in Greek ethics. But these efforts—although they did not extinguish impossible desires—took him deep into scholarship: in the British Museum; as the first foreigner granted access to the Buonarroti archives in Florence; writing to friends around Europe from his Swiss “exile” with plaintive requests for references and books. Isolated in Switzerland—and feeling himself, psychologically, even a world apart from the wife, daughters, and other English expats who populated the health resort of Davos—Symonds helped to shape the anglophone thread of modern cultural history.
One hundred and fifty years later, give or take a few, we come full circle: for here I sit in a dorm room at the University of Bristol, about a mile from the house where Symonds was born, and ready to walk down the road to the university library tomorrow morning and present myself on the strength of my Princeton ID as a visiting scholar. Here I sit, a professional historian on a grant-funded research trip, where the calming intonations of Radio 4 combined with the prospect of what I will find in 70 boxes of Symondsiana help to forestall the pressing sense of loneliness that must accompany this life. When I scramble, before I have so much as an undergraduate degree to my name, for a professional identity, it explains why I have consigned myself, alone, to a strange city for three weeks. I am a visiting scholar, a historian, on a research trip. What is there then so odd, so deviant, in living a monastic life in a beautiful English city where the sounds of seagulls and church bells mingle? After all—as I learned in the British Library last week—in eccentric academism, talking to yourself is the name of the game.
I don’t mean to sound bleak, here—because I certainly don’t feel it. I wish, instead, to carve out alternative avenues of fulfillment, of personally-validating it-gets-bettering—to celebrate how, whether we are Victorian gentlemen or modern young women, we can find in books or in Bristol Cathedral unorthodox and unpredictable ways of giving our lives purpose and meaning and of making the impossible possible. I wish to smile with satisfaction to think how adulthood brings with it the freedom to realize the lives we seek to have, in which we propose “to live in steady purpose with the Whole, the Good, and the Beautiful.”
Here’s the thing: kids, when you’re a grown-up, you don’t get everything you want. It doesn’t get perfect: sometimes you grow tired of Radio 4 or conversations with Symonds, and wish you had an interlocutor who could answer back. But it gets better. It always gets better—as you realize what you need to make you happy, to help you muddle through, to feel as if you’re doing some good in the world. And it gets better as you find that there are people in your life who believe in you, and who will give you their time and their money to help you do the things you know that you need to do. “I’m doing research at the University”: I have a vocation. And with that sense of purpose comes—well, not so much the faith, but at least the hope—that other things will follow too.
Bristol Cathedral, 17 July 2011
Saying Au Revoir to the City of Dreaming Spires 22 June 2011
Posted by Emily in Academia, Blog, Oxford, Personal Life.1 comment so far
It is just gone 6pm on an uncharacteristically beautiful summer day, and I have been distracting myself from the discombobulation of leaving by leaning out my window and watching the people hustle and bustle up and down Broad Street. There are tourists in big hats and sunglasses, and there are students in subfusc or dressed for formal halls and Schools dinners, and there is everyone in between, town and gown alike. The sun casts shadows across the storefronts and Exeter College across the road, and I have spent much of today pacing this room, thinking about how much has changed since I first leaned out this window six months ago, jetlagged and disoriented, when the sun set at 4:30 and I was newly arrived, just another American abroad.
The past six months for me have been in all respects about the seductive power of this city. As the days have lengthened, I have felt its hold grow on me, even as my emotions towards it become ever more complicated. In the past six months I have wrestled with eye-to-eye confrontations with privilege and elitism, and as I have become inured to formal dinners so have I spent many hours trying to teach, pushing gently against the current of classism, sexism, and homophobia that has characterized too many of my interactions here. I have spent hours sitting in the Upper Reading Room, hours walking in the Parks or in Christ Church Meadow, hours in this room on Broad Street, hours in the Ashmolean, hours in the chapels of my own and other colleges, constantly feeling past and present collide in uncanny ways. I wrote a 45-page essay about one Oxford-educated Victorian historian who had some things to say about sexual identity, and I got to know people in this city whose secondary education and Oxford degree course mirrored his, who lived where he did and walked the routes he did and felt the things he did. And I spent hours writing essays about the latest developments in historiography; and I spent hours, particularly those of the early morning, drinking and dancing in the ways that I thought people only did in books, before I came to this city.
Oxford is a small world, a tiny enclosed space where you run into in the reading room people with whom you went to secondary school (or who know people with whom you went to secondary school) and people whom you met when you were out dancing the previous weekend. It is a tiny enclosed space in which, you have to think, those who have never left it cannot be blamed for not always remembering that there is a world outside it. For a bona fide city, some number of times the size of the Princeton campus, it can sometimes feel smaller, more insular, more suction-y. Princeton may be its own little world—the Orange Bubble—but for me Princeton has never seduced the way Oxford does. I miss my friends at Princeton, and I miss the Rocky dining hall. But I have never felt its buildings call to me. I have never felt lucky that it is a place whose streets it is my habit to walk. I have never felt it stir the promise of transhistorical connection deep within me that, before I came to Oxford, I had never felt from a place—only from books.
I finished my last Oxford academic obligation a week ago, and since then I have lounged desultorily through my daily routine, going to the library and eating in hall and spending time with my friends. I have floated disorientatedly through my life, not ready to realize that come this Sunday morning, I will have folded my life back up into two suitcases and I will be on a train away from here. I do not do change well, and I do not do leavings and losings well. I have never found it easy to leave Princeton. I am finding it harder to leave here, in a bizarre way that is new, and difficult for me to understand quite yet. When I moved across the Atlantic, I took one step closer to living a transient academic life, and the number of transatlantic connections I have made since then have reminded me that this is what academia is. Thanks to Facebook and the vagaries of academic nomadism, I know that when I say goodbye to my Oxford friends this weekend, I will do so completely confident that I will see them again. I am a historian of Anglo-American intellect and culture, and therefore there is no question that I will be back to England—and to Oxford—by necessity time and again for the next several decades. And yet. There is something about this city—just being in it, knowing it, working with and against its strange customs—that inverts your expectations of what is normal, making it so challenging to return to the real world. This is not like when you leave Princeton and mourn the loss of the embarrassment of riches that is its constant offerings of free food and t-shirts. This is something like how when you leave what Evelyn Waugh called the “city of aquatint,” the rest of the world seems drained of color by comparison.
And so rather than readjusting your sensibilities, being the better person and realizing Oxford’s flaws, knowing that this city’s life is no healthy thing to accustom oneself to, you find yourself drawn inexorably back. What I think I have learned more than anything in the last six months is why Oxford carries the power of image that drew me to it in the first place. It seduces you with the promise that you can still do good things even when you’ve placed style over substance. It is only in this city of strange ways of teaching, learning, and living that “burn[ing] always with this hard, gem-like flame” can be made truly to seem like the only way to achieve “success in life.” I have worked hard, here. But I have also every day averted my eyes from the homeless people whom this city does so little to help, have in the absence of classroom settings neglected to pay my dues at teaching others, have lived for the sake of pleasure as much as, if not more than, for the sake of bettering. All my life I have worked hard. But I have never until this term played hard as well. Oxford has wormed into my consciousness until it has given me permission to do so. And while this may be cathartic, it is not necessarily healthy.
And so when I get on a train early Sunday morning, and I leave the only place I have ever lived where on Sunday morning I wake up to church bells, I wonder if I will cease to hear the siren song that seduces me into a world of surfaces I once only knew through the written word. But somehow—and particularly as my thinking and writing about Symonds evolves over the course of this next summer, year, and academic lifetime—I suspect that I will continue to detect its echo, even a continent away. And I know in my soul, just as I know that I have fallen in love with this otherworldly place, that I will be coming back. The only question that remains is when—and what sort of person I will have become when next I set foot to pavement in the shadow of the dreaming spires.
Universalizing the Pride Message: A Modest Proposal 12 June 2011
Posted by Emily in Blog, LGBT, Nerdiness, Personal Life.1 comment so far
A century and a half ago or so, John Addington Symonds took his Victorian culture from a point at which same-sex desire was an inconceivable, inchoate longing that could only be expressed in Greek and Latin or with the French phrase l’amour de l’impossible, to a point at which there existed an entire historical, literary, and philosophical tradition that both validated same-sex love and relationships and provided an English-language discourse in which to study and express them. Symonds was an undergraduate in Oxford in the years 1858-1862. He studied Plato with Jowett, and astonished his tutors by not only getting one of the best Firsts of his year, but also winning the Newdigate Poetry Prize and the Chancellor’s Essay Prize. On a chance visit to a friend in Cambridge in 1861, he heard someone read aloud some excerpts from “Calamus.” When Symonds was 21, the seeds were sown for the framework he would build up over the course of the next thirty years through which to describe the way he felt when he went to Bristol Cathedral to listen to, and look at, the choristers.
In 2011, I am 21. In two weeks, I suppose you’ll be able to call me a quondam junior member of Trinity College, Oxford. I won’t have any exam results or university prizes to show for my time here. I do a modern subject. But I have read Plato (in translation), and Whitman. I have made friends here in this world across the Atlantic who did in the 21st century the same course that Symonds did in the 19th. This is the puzzling Oxford palimpsest. This is life in this strange city of dreaming spires, where on Saturdays you can go out to gay bars and dance, and on Sundays you can choose from two dozen different services of choral evensong and follow it up with formal hall. A century and a half or so ago, Oxford undergrads next-door in Balliol would have studied for their Greek prose composition papers and sat up till all hours debating about their Master’s article about Biblical interpretation in Essays and Reviews. Today, they can do these things too. But they can also celebrate Pride.
Oxford’s Pride festival was yesterday. I didn’t go. I worked and I socialized and I paced my room on Broad Street listening to Radio 3 while wondering, as I always do, how well Symonds would recognize this city now. I think I was just as happy for it. Why? Because the repurposing of cultural compasses works all ways, and because I am growing older, and because I believe the best way to rescue the message of Pride from commercialization and “homonationalism”—the best way to give “It Gets Better” and “Born This Way” the benefit of the doubt instead of simply getting angry—is to universalize, and essentially to reclaim, the message.
And so I didn’t go to Pride yesterday. But when a friend emailed me yesterday afternoon with an expression of sadness and uncertainty about hir future, I replied that with the careful practice of coping mechanisms and management of self-expectations and self-doubt, it can “get better.” And when another friend self-deprecatingly called hirself a “freak” for doing hard academic work on a Saturday night, I channeled my inner pop star, and said, “You were born this way, baby.” I said it with a raised eyebrow and a sarcastic tone of voice, the double camp that comes from grad students in jeans and woolly sweaters talking about their work through the language of a wildly successful surrealist diva. But, at the same time, I meant it with all my heart.
Because, you see, if there is anything that the long transhistorical (and ahistorical) narrative of cultural reclamation stretching from Plato to Gaga has taught me, it is that fabulousness comes in many forms, and that we all have a right to pursue it where we see it and use it as a way of enriching our own lives. The things in which we take Pride can be sexual liberation and the thudding bass of a disco beat, but they don’t have to be. I think that they can be anything and anyone we love, any work that we do. So many people deserve the chance to celebrate their survival, their learning of self-reliance, their community spirit, and the ways that they are able to make spaces for themselves in the world. There are many kinds of love that seem impossible, inexpressible.
When I use the Pride metaphor to make sense of my life, it stretches back 21 years through a string of confusions and evolutions of identity: from preschool when I wore frilly party dresses but took the boys’ side in the Boy-Girl War, to kindergarten when I stopped the battle, first grade when I first started to hear that I was going to Hell for being an atheist, fifth grade when I started to refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance, seventh grade when I wore my wool cape to school and ninth grade when I dressed up as Thomas Jefferson, tenth grade when I joined a rock band and the following summer when an orchestra mother walked up to me and said “Stay away from my daughter,” twelfth grade when I fought for the right to wear trousers instead of a dress under my graduation regalia, and the long hard process of adjusting to university and accepting myself and my right to be there. All the way through I had Lewis Carroll and L.M. Montgomery and Brian Jacques and Robert Louis Stevenson and a raft of fantasy and historical fiction books about the girl-warriors who disguised themselves as boys to join the Royal Navy or fight in the American Civil War; all the way through I had dead languages and living ones, Ovid and Shakespeare, the Children’s Bible and D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths. When I use the Pride metaphor, I celebrate that I now live in a world filled with people who dressed weirdly and rebelled esoterically, and who sought in fiction and in history the kindred spirits who would keep them from going mad from loneliness. When I talk about how “it gets better,” or more accurately how we can better ourselves through a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress, I think about how all of us (and I know there must be lots of us) who all too recently experienced the exciting moment when real friends started to replace a social life lived entirely in the imagination owe it to those who haven’t quite got there yet to be there for them; how we all owe each other help at assuaging the feared inevitability of dying alone. And when I talk about being “born this way,” I mean when I started to realize that having friends didn’t mean pretending not to care about school. It makes me remember my third semester of university, when I started to remember that I had never stopped being the constantly-pontificating three-year-old who loved Aladdin and the solar system and tap-dancing and whose party trick was reading the New York Times aloud to her easily-impressed grandmother.
Pride is a time of year when we celebrate the Stonewall drag queens who stood up and fought back. But it is also a time of year when we celebrate difference of all kinds, and particularly, perhaps, the kinds that don’t fit so easily into an identity-politics box. It’s a time when we remember those who died alone, making their spirits less lonely in our memories, and when we try to make sure we are creating a world in which mental survival is not always so very difficult. And yes, I believe that at this time of year, as at all others, it is not quite so important to hold a banner in a parade as it is to be there for a lonely kid who needs her world widened. But if you know a kid, and you think she will be startled into self-acceptance by a chance encounter with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, by all means get on your nearest source of public transportation and high-tail it down to your local Christopher Street Day Parade. Sometimes, what you really do need is a drag act and a disco beat.
Late last night, after my friends and I all went back to our respective homes under the constant drizzle of English June, my downstairs neighbors were having a party, and as I lay in my bed trying to fall asleep all I could hear was loud music, drunken shouting, and a lot of words I don’t like to hear: “bitch,” “twat,” “cunt.” When your personal space is being invaded at two in the morning by the culture of juvenile sexism whence you’ve spent all your life running, it’s awfully hard to marshal the courage to go outside and try to tell a lot of drunk kids that what they’re saying is wrong (though I did eventually ask them to please turn down the music, though fat lot of good it did). But what you can do is you can drown out their shouting with a podcast of RuPaul being fabulous on National Public Radio. It’s all about the coping strategies. It’s all about survival. It’s all about Pride.
Culture Shock, Class Consciousness, and the Weather Girls 7 May 2011
Posted by Emily in Blog, LGBT, Oxford, Personal Life, Princeton.add a comment
The week after I arrived in Oxford, months ago now (gosh, that’s strange to say!) I attended the first formal dinner of this whole strange experience, and a couple weeks afterward I found myself writing a long post that attempted to puzzle through and come to terms with the culture shock that dinner occasioned. As your average American academic brat, I grew up attending dinner parties and reading the kinds of books and watching the kinds of movies where the etiquettes of attire, successive courses, and too many forks are deployed. When I came to Princeton, I attended the odd awards dinner or some such thing where I put what I’d learned into practice, making small talk, using my forks and knives correctly, and agonizing too much over the ambiguities of gender-specific dress codes. But as much as I thought I knew how to navigate academic dinners, I found myself stupefied by the performance of pretentious formality that gets carried out every Friday night in Trinity’s dining hall, by sparkly dresses and port and being waited on at table by young women my own age who I felt certain loathed the posh-accented people getting drunk around them. As I processed the experience of that first “Guest Night,” as this production is known, I felt ashamed, ashamed of the fact that I had been complicit in the perpetration of the remnants of the English class system.
Time went on—a term passed—and I got to know more people in Trinity who felt the way I did, left-wingers who greeted these productions with an embarrassed ironic distance and yet managed to take them for what they were and have a good time. I went to another formal dinner, for all the history students hosted by the college history fellows; and when my father came to visit I took him to my second Guest Night. I paced myself, feat-of-endurance-like, through four-course meals; I learned to do the same for massive, by my standards, quantities of red and white and port and sherry. And I went several times a week to normal formal halls, wearing my gown and standing for the Latin grace and turning the alienating thing into something I could value, something that put me closer to understanding Symonds’ Oxford and something that got me out of the library and talking to the people sitting near me for at least an hour a day. I’d look at the portrait of John Henry Newman in Trinity hall and think about another time, another Oxford, and wonder where I as a woman academic stand in relation to it—like Guest Night itself, wanting to understand and yet feeling an irreconcilable distance all the same.
Last week, my friend told me she had an extra ticket for the MCR Gala, Trinity’s annual black-tie banquet for the graduate student body, and would I like to go? I leapt at the chance, and in the days leading up to the event, which was yesterday, I could hardly contain my excitement. I’ve been working hard; I was longing for a celebration; and parties with good friends are always fun. I went out and bought a dress, the first dress I have bought since my high-school prom—ready to play the black-tie game properly, to act the role (with appropriate sense of irony, of course) of one of those Bright Young Things in the costume dramas I’ve always salivated over. I bought my “Big Issue” magazine from the homeless man in front of Blackwell’s on Friday afternoon, and on Friday evening I dressed for dinner. The epithet “champagne socialist” couldn’t possibly have been more apt, I realized, as I started the evening by drinking a glass of champagne and spent the third course bonding with my friend over the large-looming role of the socialist musical and cultural tradition in our upbringings. We talked about how it had made us feel a bit nostalgic, a bit homesick, to see a little May Day trade-unions rally in front of the Bodleian last weekend, and we shared in a sense of outrage about how much sexism there still is in academia. But the ugly juxtaposition of this political sentiment with what we were doing while we said it didn’t really strike home until the President of our college made a rambling after-dinner speech that made several bad jokes at the grad students’ expense, but no reference to the idea that what they do is intellectually important and worth doing; and which in an instance of tastelessness that frankly fills me with disgust and I think is absolutely inexcusable in a retired senior British diplomat, made not only a joke about the death of Osama bin Laden, but a joke whose apparent humor rested on said retired senior British diplomat “accidentally” confusing the names “Obama” and “Osama.” I gaped, speechless and outraged, at my friends while the room erupted into laughter around us. A few minutes later, when someone in the room was, honest to God, “sconced” for supposed “offenses” including speaking in a foreign language, the compartments I’d built in my mind to rationalize my enjoyment of the idea of a black-tie dinner came crashing down. I could see, clearly, why events like these are a big part of the access and equality problems Oxford and Cambridge continue to have. I was embarrassed at myself for being complicit in this sort of nonsense, and embarrassed on behalf of a college and to some extent (though less so) a university that should really, in this day and age, know better.
Like so many things I have been part of since coming to Oxford, all this is not really unique to Oxford, Oxbridge, or England. Elite universities are elite universities wherever you go, and there are unquestionably people in Princeton who behave the way some of the people in Trinity did last night. I have often said that it may be better to be served at table rather than having the kitchen staff hidden away behind servery counters and kitchen walls as they are in the halls at Princeton, just as it may be better to have your bins emptied by someone who comes into your room, whom every morning you need to have a conversation with and whose name you need to know—in Princeton, where the bins are emptied at six in the morning, I have never been awake to ask the name of the person who empties mine. And just because at Trinity displays of wealth and privilege are events that anyone can attend does not mean that the ones that occur at Princeton behind the walls of eating clubs or in the rooms of fraternity, sorority, and certain student organization members are any less insidious. I have been fortunate in finding friends at Princeton who don’t buy into this nonsense, just as I have at Trinity, but the absurdities of last night’s dinner, and the culture shock of my first Guest Night, take me back to the inferiority I felt in my first semester at Princeton, when I was acutely aware that I was not as suave or as smooth-talking as my fellow members of certain student organizations who came from money and had been to prep school. Elite universities are elite universities wherever you go, and if on the one hand that means that once you’ve learned the rules of academia you’re set, it also means that you will find these ugly underbellies wherever you go too. The best thing I can say for the rest of the halls of privilege is that I have never in my life heard anyone who holds academic power say anything as tasteless while speaking in an official capacity as what the President of Trinity said last night, nor do I come from a university culture where faculty and administrators are so obviously complicit in and present at their students’ excesses.
But where does that leave us? Well, it leaves me having to make the awful confession that for all this, I still get a kick out of dressing up like a woman and drinking champagne, and that I would do it again, especially if it were in an environment where I could more readily forget about the ugliness of the display of wealth and privilege. And it also leaves me thinking back to a late, humid New Jersey night a year ago, at the end of the weekend of Reunions that is Princeton’s most grandiose display of money and privilege, when I sated the nausea produced by the parade of alumni classes and their mass consumption of the second-largest annual alcohol order in America by dancing to Madonna in a dark basement with my friends. After Reunions, I got my Princeton back by going to the LGBT alumni’s party, the last event of the weekend. And it wasn’t so much that it was teh gayz, as it was people I knew and loved, and songs that a cultural tradition I adore and respect has adopted as anthems of not-belonging, of survival, and of pride. I will never forget the glowing realization on the face of one of my friends, newly come out, as he realized that he was in a room full of people who, like him, knew all the words to “Like a Prayer”—that, for reasons greater than this, he wasn’t alone. Whether I myself ever participate in Reunions as an alumna, the Princeton that can do that is the Princeton I want to remember.
And so it was late last night, after the MCR gala, when my friends and I with a sense of escape betook ourselves to a gay bar and danced until after 3 in the morning. The air humid after the first rainfall in weeks, all of us dancing as if for our lives in a dimly-lit room permeated by flashing colored lights, gave me back my university experience, my sense of what it means to be a young person, my self-constructed, adopted cultural compass. The DJ played “It’s Raining Men” that night, a song that recalls for me the youthful glee of dance-party protests against the National Organization for Marriage, of road trips up and down I-95, of seeing Martha Wash perform it at Pride that fateful summer in Washington, DC. There are no gay bars in Princeton. There is no reason I would ever have to wear black tie there. But turning my face to the ceiling and laughing aloud while shouting the words to my favorite gay anthem, still in my ankle-length dress and my jewelry and my high-heeled pumps, I felt a powerful sense of continuity. We make our own worlds, our own communities, our own senses of ownership and control. We adopt our own anthems—whether the solidarity stems from the sentiments of the Internationale or those of “I Will Survive.” Like drag queens, like the great Harlem ball culture, we can, if we wish, all make opulence and glamor into something we can understand, own, and be part of.
And really, I suppose that’s the point: there is nothing evil in wearing a dress, in having a fancy meal, in playing game-like by the rules of a kind of class culture that shouldn’t properly have a place in modern-day Britain (or America). Because simply by doing and living we can all invert, subvert, and parody these conventions until they are something which we find ourselves capable of delighting and glorying in. I had my stereotypically Oxonian debauched formal evening. I played the game. But it is the sight of half a dozen of my friends, faces glowing, bowties undone and dresses askew, all of them shouting “Hallelujah, it’s raining men!”, that I hope to remember for years to come.
Autobiographical Interlude; or, In Which We Continue to Complicate the It Gets Better Narrative 30 April 2011
Posted by Emily in Blog, Oxford, Personal Life.4 comments
I have been wanting to write a very academic post about the so-called “uncensored” Dorian Gray, an essay by Carlo Ginzburg from a 1980 issue of History Workshop Journal, Freud, postmodernism, the AIDS crisis, and the homoerotic literary tradition. There’s an outline sitting on my desktop, but I have been tired from churning out essays and painstakingly revising the present iteration of the Symonds project, and haven’t been able to marshal my resources. But I have, of course, as always, been thinking. I watched the new episode of Doctor Who tonight, and so I have been thinking about timelines, and my own timeline, and past and present and historical moments and change over time. Maybe I have been thinking about those things because I am a historian, too. Hey, maybe that’s why I feel so drawn to Doctor Who.
But I have been thinking about the strange colliding time-collapsing feeling I had when I saw Symphony in White, No. 1 in the V&A a couple weeks ago, and I have been thinking that term, officially, starts tomorrow, and I find myself realizing that two years ago, the last time I spent some number of weeks reading and writing and thinking on my own outside of an academic term, it was in Washington and I was learning how to believe in beauty. I grew so much that summer—I spent my days with myself, but I grew outside myself. So, too, do I find myself looking back on the past seven weeks spent mostly with my interior monologue (which has developed a disconcerting habit of impersonating Symonds), and being grateful for how I saw the daffodils and the crocuses bloom, and how I took long walks by the river, and how I came to love Oxford with a hurting feeling I know does not wrench my gut for just any love. In these seven weeks I went to Ireland and Scotland, and I went to London, and I made some awesome new friends, and spent time with some awesome old ones (academia: small place), and some of my favorite people in the world came to visit me from the other side of the Atlantic. Yet all the same, how have I grown? I have grown in eight- or nine-hour days in the Upper Reading Room, locked in passive-aggressive fights about whether to keep the window open with the English dons who sit near me in the southeast corner by the nineteenth-century literature reference collection, and reading my way into the mentalité of Oxford 150 years ago. I have grown in the heady enthusiasm of making discoveries, of cutting pages and discovering folios of manuscript material. I have grown in the meals of ever-increasing complexity and variety I have cooked for myself, and in the late nights when I ask the Symonds in my mind what it would mean to him to know that there are gay bars in Oxford today. (I still don’t know how he would react to this information, and I think that if I did I would have a much better JP than I do now.) I have grown because spending so much time alone is always an experiment: when I was in Washington, the interior monologue that led me to bookshops and to Pride and finally, pivotally, to the National Gallery shifted my sphere away from politics, and found for me the compass that guides my life today. I came back to Princeton and I picked a major. I came back to Princeton and I applied to Oxford. I came back to Princeton and I started to talk to my mentors about grad school. I wrote my Oxford application and I saw in it, with its personal statement and writing sample and recommendations, the echo of a grad school application. I went to the information sessions and talked to my friends who know from Oxford and heard how few class hours there are, how much of the work is my own. I learned I would have seven weeks between terms to put to good use on my own. I said to myself that I would cross the ocean, and then I would know whether it would be safe to leave me to my own anxieties, aspirations, and interior monologue for six to eight years, and perhaps the rest of my life.
Today was the last day before the start of the second, and last, term. Today the weather could not have been more perfect, and today I set out bright and early on a charity-shop crawl in search of a dress, because this is Oxford and I am going to a black-tie dinner next weekend, and if I am going to play the part of someone who goes to black-tie dinners, I am going to play by the rules. But before I found a great dress, some hours later, I happened by serendipitous accident into the best secondhand bookshop, and perhaps the most secret bookshop, in all of Oxford. It’s no Oxfam—you won’t find a book there for under £5. But you will find the third volume of Symonds’ Renaissance in Italy, the one on The Fine Arts. And you will find W.H. Mallock’s The New Republic, in lovely early-twentieth-century leather binding. And you will tell yourself that it is simply absurd to spend too much money on the collected works of Pater when the collected works of Pater will not fit in your suitcase. And you will ask for the first time in your life to please see that book behind the locked glass door, because you read the word “Ionica” on the binding and you know it’s one of of a very rare edition of William Johnson Cory’s “Uranian” verse, which was for Symonds a key pinpoint in the homoerotic literary tradition. And the shopkeeper will watch eagle-eyed as you flip through the gilt-edged pages and take in the details; and as your eyes widen when you realize that the label with the Eton crest identifying the Ionica as a prize book is inscribed to someone with the same name as the name on the flyleaf of the Symonds you’re anxiously clutching. And you will buy the Symonds and the Mallock and step out into the sunshine, wondering if you can justify charging the £65 Ionica to your research grant.
For after all, dear reader, it is the last day of seven weeks spent talking to Symonds. And (before finally going back to shopping just at the end of business hours and finding an ideal dress at the last possible minute) I spent hours trying to discover the identity of the man who wrote his name on the flyleaf of my new possession (no fruit has been borne yet, but I haven’t given up). And I spent the rest of the day in a café making my cappuccino last for hours and marking up a JP draft. In the long-shadowed, golden-glowing evening, I mixed fresh vegetables in with my pasta sauce out of a jar, and I watched the new Doctor Who, and wrote a blog post in which I, appropriately, sent tense consistency all to hell. And now I find myself called to reflect. What did I learn over my Easter vacation, dear reader? I learned that the world’s great college towns defy the expectations of minor nineteenth-century men of letters and grow up to have gay bars. And I learned that little girls defy their own self-sabotaging, anguished expectations and grow up to have research grants.
It Gets Better: brought to you by long, hard days of writing an 11,500-word essay in the sweet spring air of the city of dreaming spires. By dint of work and purpose, we make our lives into the very things we dream of inhabiting.
Things You Can Say in Oxford, Where You Live in a Palimpsest 23 April 2011
Posted by Emily in Blog, Personal Life, Thesis.add a comment
Was there a boy (chances are it was a boy) who lived in this room decades ago before me, and sat like me at this desk (or one like it) in the heat and sunshine and the springtime sounds of Broad Street, with half a cup full of tea gone cold and Bach crackling on the radio, and pored over the pages of Calamus, seeking in himself the words to do justice to “the tender love of comrades”?
It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if there were an anonymous boy whom history has forgotten, whose name was not Symonds or Pater or Wilde, who was a member of this college which has not lent its name to anything particular in the history of homoerotic Oxford, but who thought all the same about who he was and what he was reading.
I wonder what he’d think if he could imagine 2011. I wonder what he’d think if he knew there was a girl now sitting at his desk.
The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particular, to you; and here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met—maybe even someone long-dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.
On “It Gets Better,” Briefly 21 April 2011
Posted by Emily in Blog, Ethics, LGBT, Personal Life.1 comment so far
Yesterday came the news that Dharun Ravi, the roommate who videotaped Rutgers student Tyler Clementi’s hookup last fall immediately before Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge, is being charged with a hate crime. Those who grope, when a suicide happens, for someone to blame it on will I suppose have their closure, though as my friend Katherine wrote when I posted the news story on Facebook, “Nobody wins.” Clementi is still dead, and Ravi’s life is probably not going to go too well from now on. For this teenager, unlike (we might assume) the many LGBT teenagers who have been targeted by Dan Savage’s viral campaign in the wake of Clementi’s suicide, it will not “get better.”
Though a woefully poignant note, this seems an appropriate one on which to take a moment to reflect on what “It Gets Better” means. The immense popularity of the campaign, in which thousands of people all over the world—from these sweet older men to President Obama—have posted videos on YouTube, has led to the elevation of teen suicide as one of the causes les plus célèbres of the LGBT rights movement. It is a cause which has demanded the attention of not only the representatives of several departments of the U.S. government and the employees of several major international corporations, but also of pop stars such as Lady Gaga, whose “Born This Way” was written to be marketed as a gay anthem, and to encourage the positive-thinking, neatly-packaged Pride attitude that seems to have worked so well for the “It Gets Better” stories. When the Fox TV show Glee, which has also focused a lot of attention on what it is like to be a white gay male teenager in a school environment, premieres a 90-minute special episode written around “Born This Way” next week, it will become the latest addition to this mega-narrative promising salvation to LGBT teenagers that has responded with such commercial—as well as heartfelt—force to Tyler Clementi’s, and other young people’s, suicides.
Ostensibly, it is a narrative which offers so much hope and promise—stay alive; everything’s gonna be okay—but as the months have ticked by, my feelings about it have gotten ever more complex. My acceptance of it as something which I can both relate to and believe in has faded since I wrote my first response to Clementi’s death, and since I contributed to Princeton’s “It Gets Better” video. As I go to Holy Week services this week and get hung up on the degree to which the words, and the acts of devotion they demand, make no sense since I was raised without a promise of salvation as part of my worldview, so do I hesitate more and more to hurtle headlong for “It Gets Better.” Justification by faith is no more sensible to me whether we’re talking about how God sent his Son to die for us or whether we’re talking about a telos in which anonymous gay (yes, usually gay) kid from flyover country realizes he (yes, usually he) was “Born This Way,” and therefore has the impetus to move to a city and go to Pride and dance to Gaga at the clubs and eventually get gay-married and live happily ever after. I speak facetiously, of course, but this is not to elide the comparison between religious faith and “It Gets Better” faith. I’m getting a sense now that this is what’s been lying behind my hesitation to embrace the IGB narrative over the course of the past several months. I think I’m just not a person who has faith.
But I am not without belief, and not without causes, and not without spirituality, of a certain sort. If I am anything, I am a believer in good works, and in the quasi-Transcendentalist belief in God-as-metaphor, as a divine presence in all things that are good and virtuous that we can experience at the best of times as a shiver of pleasure. And it’s these things I think of when I think of getting better: of developing oneself to be more virtuous, and to be able to feel that shiver when confronted with beauty. My God is not externalized, in the promise of salvation nor the promise of Pride, but is something I may perceive in swift glimpses if I play my cards right, if I do my reading and practice my vocation of being a teacher. And this is something that does not happen without good works—without those of oneself and one’s daily self-fashioning, and most critically without those of the bettering influences around one, the dearest friends and most caring mentors, the families biological and adopted, and even the anonymous donor who means you get paid for doing what you love for the first time. For me, coming into this world without faith, it does nothing to believe that “it gets better” first, and then proceed from there. It is only through the daily Pilgrim’s Progress of psychological labor that I have even so much as come to appreciate the goodness of my life, how fortunate I am, how much better my life is now than it was just three years ago, and how much I now have to give that it is my duty to pass on to those whom I believe need to be told not “It Gets Better,” but how to help themselves—just as my teachers, slowly but surely, brought home to me.
Late last night, a bout of insomnia had me reflecting on what it is to be a 21-year-old Canadian-American academic brat living alone on another continent (or, well, an island in the North Sea), for whom going to work every day means going to the Bodleian Library to write about John Addington Symonds, which work is (or will be, this summer) subsidized in part by a grant because some members of her department thought what this 21-year-old Canadian-American academic brat does with her life is worth paying her for. Three years ago, when I was an 18-year-old gazing rapt at the light at the end of the long, dark, horrible tunnel of high school, and looking ahead to a summer working at the local cinema and who-knows-what to follow in September at a university I was convinced I hadn’t deserved to get into, I could never have imagined living in a room in Broad Street, writing original scholarship by sunlight in the Upper Reading Room. I could never have imagined being the one to discover Symonds’ letters to Roden Noel in the Bodleian’s English literary manuscript collections, or the one to cut the pages on nineteenth-century books no one has ever opened for a hundred years. I could never have imagined having mentees of my own. I could never have imagined having a pint at the pub with friends, or using Facebook to keep in touch with other friends on the continent I came from. I could never have imagined living in a world in which what I do, and what I value, is valued. I no longer hate myself. And if there is any evidence of bettering, surely this is it.
But I did not come to realize that my life is better because someone in a YouTube video told me; I came to realize it through dint of purpose and the gentle guidance of teachers who taught me how to read and how to write, how to love, how to teach; who took seriously what I said to them and responded in kind; and, whether eminent chaired professors or my parents, have given me guidance when I needed it. My teachers have taught me not that I will be their colleague someday, but that I am worth working towards that goal, and moreover that such a specific goal (rather like that of the gay-married coastal-city-living IGB gay, I suppose) need not define who one is or what one can contribute. My teachers have taught me that even if it doesn’t get better, we shouldn’t stop trying. And for me it’s that purpose, not the faith, that is so much worth living for.
One last thing: if things have gotten better for me, and if I remain resolved to continue my Pilgrim’s Progress, it has nothing to do with moving to a city (after all, I have nearly always lived in or near cities) or knowing the words to every song Lady Gaga has ever released (which I probably do). For me, there is no gay marriage on the horizon. And while this is in part because this narrative does not even begin to map onto my life, and its whitewashing of the queer experience strikes me as incredibly problematic, it is also because sexual orientation is not at the center of my struggle, and because my self-loathing of past years was far displaced from a closet. Gaga notwithstanding, I live in a Victorian world, before a certain Symonds set the word “homosexual” to paper, and the competing discourses with which people of all kinds struggled to express inchoate desires didn’t always cohere around sexual object choice and the mechanics of what someone then might have called “voluptuousness.” My discourse is one in which the language of passion speaks as much, if not more, to the cults of truth, of good, and of beauty as it does to the cult of the body.
And so I ask that anyone who speaks a language in common with mine feel free to reclaim the words “it gets better” from the neatly-packaged narrative that those words have been sold as. And as we labor onwards, suspecting that the Celestial City is nowhere to be found, but that we ought to keep on towards it anyway, let us please make sure that we say an atheist’s prayer for the poor lost souls of all those people who take an action like jumping off the George Washington Bridge—regardless of whether their torment was the homophobic taunts of a schoolyard bully.
… to my knowledge, nobody professes to doubt that, so far forth as we possess a power of bettering things, it is our paramount duty to use it and to train all our intellect and energy to this supreme service of our kind. Hence the pressing interest of the question, to what extent modern progress in natural knowledge… is competent to help us in the great work of helping one another?”
—T.H. Huxley
Apologia Pro Studio Humanitatum 15 April 2011
Posted by Emily in Academia, Blog, Personal Life.1 comment so far
If you are one of those people who, in the wake of a transatlantic agenda to delegitimize the academic profession and the teaching and practice of “useless” subjects that profession enshrines, have struggled to find the words to suggest that maybe such delegitimization might not be such a good idea after all, Nicholas Dames’ article “Why Bother?” in the latest issue of n+1 is required reading. Reviewing three of the most eloquent and popular recent defenses of “useless” subjects and the academic profession—Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, and Terry Castle’s The Professor and Other Writings—Dames ends with this moving conclusion drawn from his words of praise for Castle’s An Academic’s Progress of a memoir:
Richard Rorty once argued that Western culture needs the novel, in order to force us to imagine lives and destinies different from our own. Perhaps the humanities, in their current plight, need to be novelistic again. Not necessarily in their fictional mode, such as the moribund campus novel genre with its essentially demystifying comedy, but the novelistic ability to marshal narratives and details that give us back some sense of why the humanities exist for individuals — how, to put it bluntly, they still rescue lives. One doesn’t enter the academy to become a disillusioned professional (although that will happen along the way). One doesn’t enter it to equip businesses with flexible analytic intellects (although that will also happen). One enters it, shamefacedly and unhappily, perhaps, but enters it nonetheless, in order to devote oneself to something greater than personal resentments — to salvational or transformational modes of thought. Because, put another way, all the grievances that take aim at higher education express real suffering, and that suffering has causes and modes of expression older than most sufferers usually know. The humanities should be, if not their solace, then their weapons of choice. Prig and cynic and naïf she may be, but the newly minted academic knows this — after all, she most likely came from their midst — and one good way of explaining as much is to explain how that knowledge feels. Without such explanations, which might soften resentment into curiosity or sympathy, there may soon be very little left to be embarrassed about.
I read this article—and am writing this post—from a crowded English train, surrounded by the remains of an issue of the Guardian (crossword puzzle completed), a train-station takeaway americano, and a book, stickered with the seal of the Oxford History Faculty Library, that I should really be reading for research purposes. Tony Judt’s words on the decline and fall of the post-privatization British rail system are ringing in my mind as I contemplate the forlorn-looking and extortionately-priced offerings of the refreshments trolley. Dressed in corduroy and herringbone, pecking away at my MacBook, my ticket for Oxford in my jacket pocket, I am nothing if not the intended audience for Dames’ slightly unorthodox answer to the “How do we defend humanists and the humanities in these strange days of declining-and-falling, neoliberal cost-cutting?” And so perhaps this is why I find his the most persuasive gesture towards an answer I have come across in many months, and the closest to articulating my own thoughts on the subject. Dames’ answer to “Why Bother?” is neither strictly utilitarian nor merely tautological. It rests on an understanding of what knowledge and intellectual curiosity are and can do, and why people undertake lives of the mind, that I share and believe with an almost religious fervor. And it comes on the heels of a compelling and compassionate review of a memoir that, as I noted when I read it, comes closer than any campus novel to mirroring my own experience of the young intellectual’s bildung—priggishness, cynicism, naïveté and all.
But what sits uncomfortably about Dames’ answer is that it could not be more ideologically opposed to an argument like Nussbaum’s, defending the humanities for the sake of the good they can bring to society at large. As Nussbaum defines it, this good is tangible, almost quantifiable, and the problem therefore (as those more qualified than I to dispute claims made by Martha Nussbaum have noted) is that her argument doesn’t counter the assumption that value must be tangible, discernible, measurable, or that it can consist (even in measurable terms) of intellectual and spiritual fulfillment. But it is a good that is general, that speaks to the need for the humanities of those outside the university walls as well as in. It explains why those doing the defunding and the devaluing need those whom they are trying to devalue and to defund, and why humanities education and research can be beneficial to those who don’t stay in the academy all their lives. Dames, by contrast, seems rather not to get the joke of Castle’s elegant pastiche of the eighteenth-century novels she studies. It seems as if he invests the role of the plucky young protagonist whose life is changed by books and whose angst is managed by the order of an academic career with heroic importance—and one has to wonder, as it seems one always does, if the psychological satisfaction of those who make lives in the academy is really worth so much as to be the backbone of a humanities-justification argument. One wants to believe that the professor, or even the cynical graduate student, has as much right to love what she does as the member of a state legislature voting for or against her continued employment, and one knows from lived experience that only a teacher who believes in the goodness, and the changing power, of what she teaches is capable of passing that love onto her students. I for one would like to be able to say that Dames resolves the question that still keeps me awake at night: whether it is not just purely selfish to follow a calling which gives me so much pleasure, when I am plainly only one of a few who will benefit from my putative academic career.
We can resolve this dilemma—at least temporarily—but only if we make recourse once again to our battered “for its own sake” tautology. The thing is that I don’t believe in dismissing out of hand any ideas, expressed in expressive language, that I find moving enough to peck out a couple thousand words about on the train. And so I feel inclined to say that Dames’ ideas are valuable to this ongoing conversation—that they humanize the humanists. But the conversation can’t stop with a validation of the motives and the psychological struggles of the privileged few. It needs to find language with which to relate the cosmology of those who think for a living, and those who teach as a vocation, to anti-profit-motive values that involve those in the real world as well.
I’d posit that the humanities offer not just the Terry Castles of this world, but everyone, the chance to decide for themselves what it means to live a good life, and to act in accordance with the principles they have devised. The humanities offer all of us alternative epistemological paradigms, that don’t require an output or an end or a profit. They offer doubt, but they also offer possibility. What they don’t offer is empiricism, equations, or the assumption that there are answers. But for all that, they are no less admitting of possibilities—for a good humanist will recognize the necessity of scientific methods to fill in the gaps in her worldview. The humanities allow us to make ourselves, and our world, as we would have them be. And they do, in the end, promise a place for the seekers after knowledge and the people whose calling is to expand those possibilities of thought and action still further.
Making the case for the humanities and those who teach them today involves preaching the value not just of those apparently special individuals for whom humanistic inquiry lies at the root of existence, but also of those for whom it plays any part, however small. Those who seek to impart their evangelical message to those in the halls of power can couch their requests in the rhetoric of outcomes and utility, or they can do what primary-school teachers—and parents—are doing right now all over the world, and assign their students Harry Potter in an effort to encourage them to read and to recognize not just the benefits but also the joy of reading. They can start small, they can meet their students (first-graders and members of Congress alike) where they are, and then—oh then!—guide them one step forward towards realizing that they had the right answers, the reading-comprehension but also the literary-critical, key inside them all along. Infinite patience and infinite kindness are as impossible things for us to ask of the world’s intellectuals public and private as they are of ourselves (or of our children’s first-grade teachers), but we can certainly start small—with the conviction that what we do, as Dames argues, matters—and from there become slowly and surely better.
On Continuity and Change; or, In Which I Make a Motivational Speech 8 April 2011
Posted by Emily in Blog, Personal Life.6 comments
Just under two years ago, my life changed when I looked at a painting. It was the summer of 2009 and I was a frustrated editorial intern in the office of a progressive 501(c)3 in Washington, DC, groping my way through nine lonely-making weeks of hardening cynicism about what DC is for and how little power anyone in it has to make it a less messed-up place. I began the internship thinking I wanted to be a journalist, and by the sixth week, I knew that as laudable as the people who use their pens for good in DC are, it wasn’t my calling. I was looking for a way out—and so I went to the National Gallery.
My visit to the National Gallery was the first time I chose on my own to go to an art museum. I knew virtually nothing about art, how to look at it, how to appreciate it, what it meant to look at a painting. I roamed from room to room, seeing for the first time paintings by artists from Watteau to Eakins to Cassatt. And I stopped dead when I happened by chance across an enormous painting by James McNeill Whistler, perfectly framed in an archway so as to stand out amidst all the other 19th-century offerings in the National Gallery. Called Symphony in White, No. 1, the painting is a full-length, life-size picture of a woman—not so much a portrait as a depiction of something unreal and ethereal, the rough brushwork unlike the hyperrealism of many of Whistler’s contemporaries, the vacant expression in the woman’s eyes deflecting attention from her face and in turn towards the folds of her white dress, and to her shoe, peeking out from under its hem, as she points her toe at the head of a grotesque bearskin rug. It’s an awe-inspiring image: two years ago, without yet having the words in me to describe what I was seeing, I sat down and looked at that painting for solid minutes. I had never done such a thing before, but I stared at the Symphony, it stared back, and the vacant stare looking down on me seemed to assume a cosmic significance. It sounds trite to say this now, but it was at that moment that my life changed. Struck as I was by the painting’s beauty, I resolved to work to increase the number of beautiful things in the world, and decrease the number of ugly things. I wanted to think about things that were good, and I wanted to do things with my life that would not make me cynical.
As I walked out onto a sunny, humid National Mall, I knew I was going to be an academic, not a journalist. When I found myself telling this story to a stranger in a coffeeshop the following week, I knew it was true. And I haven’t wavered since. The hold Whistler and his contemporaries (artistic, literary, and otherwise) have maintained on me since that day is a big part of what has driven me headlong into the nineteenth century as my period of study, and as I have learned more about their historical context I have modified quite a bit the juvenile creed of aesthetic hedonism with which I began. Instead of reading the Symphony in White goddess’s (for so I came to think of her) stare as an exhortation simply to seek beauty, I came to see it as an invocation of duty: a call to better myself and the world around me, to believe in my power to do good on my own terms, to (in the words of the very Victorian man, himself no aesthete, who has become the center of my life) “live with steady purpose in the whole, the Good, the Beautiful,” and to always aim not just to be and to do good, but (in the words of a much-admired mentor and friend) to be and to do “better.” In an 1890 essay “On the Relation of Art to Science and Morality,” John Addington Symonds wrote that “art is able to assert man’s moral nature at moments when it seems in other spheres to have been paralysed or vitiated.” So it was with me in the National Gallery in the summer of 2009. I looked at a painting by the artist most famously derided by Ruskin, whose blank-eyed model bespeaks the painter’s lack of interest in giving his painting a moral, and imbued that painting with all the meaning I could muster out of all a young adult’s desperate search for purpose and ethical paradigm.
Today I took a break from the exhausting enterprise of organizing my Symonds source material and headed into London, because this is the first weekend of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s special exhibition on the aesthetic movement and I couldn’t wait to see it. I now spend my days, and my thoughts, with a circle of intellectuals who all engaged in some way with the questions the aesthetes raised about the relationship between ethics and art, and I am preoccupied above all with trying to understand what it meant to be someone to whom such questions mattered so much. This afternoon, I had already spent an hour and a half or so in the exhibition, soaking up material culture and fun facts and beautiful Kelmscott Press books and more Burne-Jones and Rossetti than I could even begin to process, when I rounded a corner and let out an audible gasp: there she was. My goddess. And for the first time, I believe, since Whistler first exhibited his series of three Symphonies in White, she was flanked by her companions, who usually live at the Tate and at a museum in Birmingham—though none is as majestic as she. She dominated the wall in the V&A as she had in the American National Gallery. Just as I was two years ago, I was struck by her size, by her majesty, by the ability of her stare to be at once vacant and to contain multitudes. I wanted to do something to tell her what it meant to me, to see her again. I wanted to cry, or possibly to genuflect. I wanted to say, thank you. Thank you for changing my life.
Two years ago I was a lost kid whose sense of home was rapidly being destabilized by the culture shock occasioned by living 3,000 miles from home in (DC and Princeton alike) another world. Two years ago, I was an anxious kid who cried a lot because I was convinced Princeton had only admitted me for being the child of an alumna, because I failed to live up to the impossibly high standards I set for myself, and above all because I couldn’t imagine any way to do good in the world that would allow me also to preserve my sense of self, my sense that it is okay (and in fact necessary) to be myself. I didn’t know that I had to help myself before I could help others. When I saw Symphony in White, No. 1 again today, I looked her in the eye—as a historian, as a student and a teacher, as someone who, as often as I fail at living the virtuous life to which I aspire, wakes up every morning willing to try again. I am someone who finds the question “Where are you from?” impossible to answer, but call the University—qua idea—my home. I am someone who believes I have a right to exist, that I am important, that my life has a purpose, and that I am capable of fulfilling it to the best of my ability. It is no coincidence that it was after I came back from Washington that I started to recognize I have the capacity to make a difference in the lives and the minds of those around me; after all, it would be a mortal sin to my white-clad goddess not to act upon one’s calling.
Recently, I’ve been evincing a lot of skepticism of the Dan-Savage-constructed “It Gets Better” narrative: the uncomplicated teleological happy ending, and the notion that simply crafting such a narrative can be a solution to awful, scary, stomach-turning things like teenage suicide. But I have also recently been evincing a desire to move beyond mere skepticism, and so here I am. I am sitting in a room on Broad Street, dreaming spires visible from my window, buried in a mass of notes from which I’m going to make an original contribution to my field. And it’s from here that I look up to the National Gallery postcard of Symphony in White, No. 1 over my desk and ask: does it get better?
Yes, dear reader. Yes it does.
QOTD (2011-04-06); or, Why I Will Not Be Using the Word “Hermeneutic” in My Thesis 6 April 2011
Posted by Emily in Blog, Personal Life, QOTD, Thesis.add a comment
Twenty years before Freud published his famous analysis of the Schreber case, arguing that Schreber’s extraordinary fantasies were a result of paranoia stemming from repressed homosexuality, John Addington Symonds published his A Problem in Modern Ethics. Therein, he highlights these lines from a case study of an anonymous “Urning” in Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis:
… when he first becomes aware of the sexual stirrings in his nature, and innocently speaks about them to his comrades, soon finds that he is unintelligible. So he wraps himself within his own thoughts…. He imagines that he alone of all the people in the world is the subject of emotions so eccentric…. How many unexplained cases of suicide in young men ought to be ascribed to this cause!
Those who have studied Freud in his historical context will be aware that, although his role in the formation of modern psychoanalysis was pivotal, he wasn’t the only person at the turn of the twentieth century thinking about the mind and mental health in relation to desire. Scientists like Krafft-Ebing who collected and edited personal narratives about individuals’ sexual histories (something which Symonds was himself very actively involved in in later life, though thanks to Edmund Gosse none of his research has survived) no doubt had specific pathological narratives in mind which they sought to highlight through their selection and organization of the case studies. The case study Symonds presents us with in Modern Ethics is no exception, but what’s striking is how this narrative maps onto the model of homosexual desire that Freud (in)famously gives us in Schreber. In the Krafft-Ebing case study, a severe mental-health risk (suicide) is instigated by the idea that someone would “wrap himself within his own thoughts”—in modern psychoanalytic terms, repress his sexual identification, covering it over with conscious thoughts—and that this coping mechanism would cause him to believe—as the paranoiac does—that he is the only person who feels as he does, and that therefore he is at risk of persecution from everyone. It’s the link between repression and paranoia that emerges in the Krafft-Ebing case study (and, in particular, in the bits Symonds highlights from it, performing his own editorial work!) that seems so strikingly to prefigure Freud. For we historians, this is an interesting muddling of the timeline: we whose scholarly duty seems to be to warn other critics against applying critical frameworks to historical moments prior to their invention need to keep in mind that critical frameworks do not suddenly come into being with the jolt of electric current that accompanies the flipping of an “on/off” switch. Rather, they develop—as all ideas and paradigms do—gradually over time, thanks to the contributions of many individuals. Freud may loom large in the history of psychoanalysis and indeed of sexology, but to a certain extent he is also affected by the way that people think and express their thoughts in the period at which he starts to think and write about the mechanisms of sexual desire. I haven’t done the reading to be able to do more than speculate, but I wonder in what ways Freud’s immersion in the genre of the case study, which has its narrative conventions just like any other genre, affected the nature of the frameworks he extrapolated from his own case studies!
These all may seem like very elementary points to be making, and I don’t need to do the JSTOR search to make an educated guess that they’ve been made before by readers of Freud more sophisticated than I. But the bottom line that any given intellectual figure is both shaped by his or her historical context and yet exists as an individual apart from it seems too often forgotten by scholars of all stripes. Every day I read secondary literature about Symonds and his circle which believes it appropriate to refer to Symonds as a gay liberationist (in the framing of one ’90s queer theorist I was reading yesterday, a sort of Foucault avant-la-personne) or for that matter to dismiss him as a “minor man of letters” whose form somehow camouflages into the prized Morris wallpaper of his drawing-room. For scholars whose discipline is all about questioning categories, I find that queer theorists aren’t always as perfect as they might be at distancing themselves for the categories they in turn have created, and the world-historical figures—the Freuds and the Foucaults—they have elevated. Of course, no one is perfect, nor should they be. It is rather the lack of interest in trying to see the world from their subjects’ point of view that irritates me.
But then, I suppose, that’s why I’m a historian, not a queer theorist. From each according to her abilities, to each according to her needs.
