SARS has hit the Middle East:
shit
Archive for September, 2012
Haunted: Syphilis and Corruption
The corruption from Oedipus Rex and Arthur Mervyn follows us to Ibsen’s Ghosts…
The Alving household is built on corruption and lies. These constituents do not simply subside and die with Captain Alving. Instead, they lead to the appearance of ghosts who inhabit the house and prevent the past from being forgotten. Therefore the ghosts are a symbol of punishment for the overflow of corruption, which is portrayed in Captain Alving’s iniquitous behavior of philandering and drinking and in Helene’s buildup of lies as she tries to protect her son from his dad’s wickedness and to maintain her family’s decent reputation. Helene’s corruption is also shown through her investment in building an Orphanage with all of her husband’s money, which is deceiving since one might think it is an act of altruism when in fact her sole motive was to protect her son from his father’s money.
According to Helene, the whole country of Norway is filled with ghosts since ghosts reside within the sinners and the sinners constitute the whole country.
“I’m inclined to think that we are all ghosts, Pastor Manders, every one of us. It’s not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunt us. It’s all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that. It’s not that they actually live on in us; they are simply lodged there, and we cannot get rid of them.” (Ibsen, II pp.126)
One of the ghosts’ ways of punishment is by taking the form of an inherited disease. Apparently, Oswald suffered from constant headaches as a child. When combining all the symptoms of Oswald’s disease, such as neck stiffness, disorientation, and temporary paralysis, it was found that his most probable disease is congenital neurosyphilis, especially since in the 19th century, during the time the play was written, syphilis had become widespread. Oswald, according to “one of the leading doctors” in Paris, is “vermoulu” since birth.
“The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children.” (Ibsen, pp.138)
Oswald inherits syphilis from his father as he bears the consequences of the latter’s wicked behavior in the past. This situation is parallel to Oedipus’s inevitable fate of killing his father and coupling with his mother as he also has to suffer from his parents’ corruption.
In addition, the ghosts of the story contribute to the gloomy setting of the play. Oswald despises Norway since it is always dark and there is incessant rain. He also mentions that he does not remember ever seeing the sun there, whereas in Paris, away from his family’s corruption, it is always sunny. After the last memory of Captain Alving, the Orphanage, is burnt to the ground and Helene discloses her husband’s true identity to Oswald, the sun finally begins to rise and the weather clears. By then, however, “Oswald shrinks in his chair [and] all his muscles go flaccid”. His last request is to be given the sun. He repeats, over and over:
“The sun… the sun…” (Ibsen pp.163,164)
By the time the Alving household becomes free of corruption and lies, it is too late…
Christy Connor Caroline
Poetry and Delirium
I felt there was a neat connection between some of the poems found here and the Second Part to Arthur Mervyn, (shades of Arthur Mervyn and his being shot)
“Doctors raving and disputing, death’s pale army still recruiting–
What a pother
One with t’other!
Some a-writing, some a-shooting.”
– Philip Freneau Philadelphia, 1793
however what is more revealing are the discrepancies between Arthur Mervyn and some of these works that illustrate a more intense scene of chaos and despair than in Arthur Mervyn where often plague takes a back seat to character conflict.
Hot, dry winds forever blowing,
Dead men to the grave-yards going:
Constant hearses,
Funeral verses;
Oh! what plagues—there is no knowing!
– Philip Freneau Philadelphia, 1793
Also, with an eye to the medical aspect of the plague and the passage where Arthur journeys to Baltimore, it is interesting to note the actual symptoms of yellow fever which include “brain dysfunction, including delirium, seizures and coma” but also that there are two distinct stages of the disease in between which there is a brief respite where all the symptoms all but disappear, a bizarre ‘eye of the storm’, if you like.
Black(s) Coffee
Here is a link to Historical Views on Contagion… in this case, Yellow Fever in Philadelphia.
It outlines some of the beliefs surrounding the disease at the time, for example Benjamin Rush thought that the origin of the disease was a pile of rotting coffee beans and that Blacks were immune to yellow fever… neither of these are true.
Mervyn’s men and women
As you’re wrapping up the second volume of Arthur Mervyn this week, I want you to mull over a couple paragraphs from Norman Grabo’s early and influential book The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown (1981). In his chapter on Mervyn he notes that
the whole second part … turns on [Mervyn’s] relationship with women — Mrs. Wentworth, Mrs. Althorpe, Mrs. Villars, Mrs. Fielding, Clemenza Lodi, Miss Carlton, Eliza and Susan, Fanny and Mrs. Maurice, and Mrs. Watson. Stevens the authority figure has effectively disappeared from the foreground in this part, and the extent of his absence is thrown into significant relief when we remember who most strikingly occupied our attention in the first part — Stevens, Wortley, Wallace, Watson, Welbeck, Medlicote, Thetford, and Estwick. We realize that Brown, intentionally or not, has given us Arthur in two kinds of education: the first into the possibilities of fatherhood, the second into the possibilities of mothers and wives. Part one is a book of masculine cunning, deceit, and sickness; part two the exposure to forces of healing and wholeness. Sons and lovers? Exactly. (116-17)
What do you make of Grabo’s summary? He follows up later in the chapter by citing a few paragraphs from Brown’s essay “Walstein’s School of History,” which includes what seems to be an early outline of Arthur Mervyn‘s plot, with a few significant variations. (It’s included in full in the volume we’re reading.) These are the key paragraphs for Grabo, taken from what he and many other critics take to be one of Brown’s key statements of his theory of fiction:
The relations in which men, unendowed with political authority, stand to each other are numerous. An extensive source of these relations, is property. No topic can engage the attention of man more momentous than this. Opinions, relative to property, are the immediate source of nearly all the happiness and misery that exists among mankind. If men were guided by justice in the acquisition and disbursement, the brood of private and public evils would be extinguished.
…
Next to property the most extensive source of our relations is sex. On the circumstances which produce, and the principles which regulate the union between the sexes, happiness greatly depends. The conduct to be pursued by a virtuous man in those situations which arise from sex, it was thought useful to display. (337)
Can we talk these issues through this week? Is this an anticipation of Jane Austen’s famous opening to Pride and Prejudice?
IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
[Illustration: Charles Brockden Brown, attributed to Ellen Sharples, after James Sharples Senior, circa 1810. I always imagine Arthur Mervyn as looking a little like this.]
decipi frons prima multos
Never judge a book by its cover. This popularly overused proverb never ceases to lose its relevance; it is, indeed, hard to argue against. Appearances often can be deceiving. Can anyone claim that when meeting new people he/she does not pay attention to their appearances and the notorious ‘social status’? Everyone has a snapshot evaluation instinct. Nonetheless, many try to argue that they do not take this into account.
Physiognomy, the assessment of one’s personality or moral characteristic by appearance, is a recurring topic throughout the novel. Physiognomy grew popular throughout the 18th and the 19th century and was even discussed seriously in the academics. From the beginning of the novel, an application of physiognomy made Doctor Stevens decide to rescue Mervyn.
Stevens’ physical description of Mervyn, and in particular his “youth, unspoiled…uninured”, allow us to justify the “claim to affection”, on a physiognomic level. Based on his clothing alone, Stevens is able to infer a ‘manlike beauty…so powerful’, he can make definitive statements about Mervyn’s fortunes and ‘misfortunes’. The sense of innocence of character that Stevens acknowledges even before conversing with Mervyn illustrates this physiognomic attitude of the era.
Mervyn is not an exception to applying these norms. However, he goes further, metamorphosing outward-in; his personality, thoughts and beliefs evolve with each new facade. After going through his own Welbeck-endorsed transformation, Mervyn is in fact committing his ‘original sin’ in the book. The initial exterior transformation soon enough develops into the interior transformation, or perhaps self-reconstruction. To put in more metaphorical terms, Mervyn initially wears a Mask, and he becomes the Mask itself.
I was now conscious of a revolution in my mind. […] Subsequent incidents, perhaps, joined with the influence of meditation, had generated new views. On my first visit to the city, I had met with nothing but scenes of folly, depravity, and cunning […] but my second visit produced somewhat different impressions…[I met] beings who inspired veneration […] If cities are the chosen cities of misery and vice, they are […] the soil of all the laudable and strenuous productions of the mind. (Brown, 221)
Mervyn, however, is not the only person to transform, or seem to transform. He too commits the error of misjudging someone based on their physical appearance and endowments, on several occasions. Priding himself on his superior analytical and deductive abilities, and taking into consideration his antiestablishmentarian stance (with regards to gender roles especially), it is thus notable that he falls into the trap of stereotype. This is particularly acute with the curious case of Eliza Hadwin. Mervyn comments:
Her total inexperience gave her sometimes the appearance of folly […] Ah! thought I, sweet, artless, and simple girl![ …] the extreme youth, rustic simplicity and mental imperfections of Eliza Hadwin (Brown, 215, 221)
Upon Eliza demonstrating a mental proficiency at par with Mervyn’s, he remarks,
I was suprized[…]I had certainly considered her sex unfitting[…]I could not deny, that human ignorance was curable by the same means in one sex as in the other (Brown 224)
Be it by sex, by clothing, by class, by appearance, eloquence or education, and through the character of Welbeck, Brown goes to lengths to show that people aren’t always who they seem to be, and that intuitively, there is something we can gain, and a lot we lose, when we use physiognomy.
By: Suel, Kee, and Kefa
Social Networks Predict Epidemics
The “gradually swelling rumors” of the future:
(I know it’s kind of long, so see approximately 5:53-13:45 for the most applicable/interesting bits if you’d like, though you’ll miss out on a little of the context/terminology)
Some Arthur Mervyn follow up
First, be sure you don’t miss Christy’s post below and the link Caroline put in comments earlier.
Second, I just wanted briefly to follow up on today’s discussion by asking for some comments from you. Anyone can chime in. (And by anyone, I even mean people who’ve read the novel who aren’t in the actual course, as well as students who may not have an official charge to comment this week.)
We spent nearly an hour today talking about the last four paragraphs of ch. 13, in which the fever rumors first arrive at the Quaker country house Mervyn has retreated to:
My thoughts were called away from pursuing these inquiries by a rumour, which had gradually swelled to formidable dimensions; and which, at length, reached us in our quiet retreats. The city, we were told, was involved in confusion and panic, for a pestilential disease had begun its destructive progress. Magistrates and citizens were flying to the country. The numbers of the sick multiplied beyond all example; even in the pest-affected cities of the Levant. The malady was malignant and unsparing.
The usual occupations and amusements of life were at an end. Terror had exterminated all the sentiments of nature. Wives were deserted by husbands, and children by parents. Some had shut themselves in their houses, and debarred themselves from all communication with the rest of mankind. The consternation of others had destroyed their understanding, and their misguided steps hurried them into the midst of the danger which they had previously laboured to shun. Men were seized by this disease in the streets; passengers fled from them; entrance into their own dwellings was denied to them; they perished in the public ways.
The chambers of disease were deserted, and the sick left to die of negligence. None could be found to remove the lifeless bodies. Their remains, suffered to decay by piecemeal, filled the air with deadly exhalations, and added tenfold to the devastation.
Such was the tale, distorted and diversified a thousand ways by the credulity and exaggeration of the tellers. At first I listened to the story with indifference or mirth. Methought it was confuted by its own extravagance. The enormity and variety of such an evil made it unworthy to be believed. I expected that every new day would detect the absurdity and fallacy of such representations. Every new day, however, added to the number of witnesses and the consistency of the tale, till, at length, it was not possible to withhold my faith.
If we’d had a little more time, we would have moved from the micro-analysis of this isolated passage to a broader analysis of the novel at large (or the portion you’ve read so far). What connections can we make between the concerns of this passage — the patterns you identified so well — and the larger story? Do issues of language/storytelling/rumor — and the almost material qualities of language — have a place in the novel at large? What about the representation of the disease as martial or violent, an invading force? Is there a larger question here to be asked about the relationship between diseases and the language we use to describe them? What about the social and familial roles discussed here? How does the disease affect them, and how does the rumors’ preoccupation with such roles relate to similar concerns in the larger work so far? Do these concerns relate at all to the comments Kefa and Suel made regarding altruism? We’ll almost certainly return to these questions on Thursday, but feel free to get the ball rolling here.
1790s Philadelphia
Here are four pictures that portray several aspects of the city during the Yellow Fever in Philadelphia. Statistics from the photo on the left shows the abundance of women in the city as “Wives were deserted by husbands” and “Men were seized by the disease in the streets” (pp.99).
These photos can be found here (for the maps), and here (for the mortality rates)
Moral Plagues on a Beachy Day
As we were reading Arthur Mervyn on the pristine sands of the Corniche, we could not help but be distracted by the azure Gulf waters and the towering skyline of Abu Dhabi. In a moment of reflection, we realized how our new life at this Arab Crossroad shared several key themes with that of Brown’s protagonist. Abu Dhabi is a city of both substantial wealth and gross socioeconomic inequalities, two ideas which shape the volatile character interactions within Arthur Mervyn.
The titular character, with his humble agricultural background, is intelligent and adaptable, but inexperienced in the norms of upper-class life. When he is exiled from his rural home, Mervyn is at the mercy of Philadelphia’s streets. Here, we find an essential theme which unites Abu Dhabi, Mervyn’s Pennsylvania, and Daniel Defoe’s London in Journal of the Plague Year. With sickness and socioeconomic inequalities against the backdrop of an urban landscape, class interactions take on contrasting forms under the influence of moralism, religion, and self-preservation.
At the first signs of plague in London, the affluent would flee the city out of panic, abandoning the poor to pestilence. Furthermore, as the epidemic seized the city, all interpersonal relationships crumbled — leaving each individual to fight for his life both isolated and despairing.
Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year is in some ways an antithesis to Brown’s Arthur Mervyn. The latter novel is introduced with a deed of altruistic charity. The narrator finds Arthur Mervyn penniless and stricken with yellow fever. Without scruple, the narrator invites Mervyn back to his house, where he is nursed back to full health. One might ask what the benefits are in risking one’s life for that of a helpless other. Inspired by a humanistic and moral obligation, nearly absent from the London populous during the 1665 visitation, the narrator quotes:
“I had more confidence than others in the vincibility of this disease, and in the success of those measure which we had used for our defence against it. But, whatever were the evils to accrue to us, we were sure of one thing; namely, that the consciousness of having neglected this unfortunate person, would be a source of more unhappiness than could possibly redound from the attendance and care that he would claim.”
This moral debt, which the narrator takes action upon, often arises when both philosophy and religion are confronted with plague. The practices of Islamic martyrdom (in the face of disease) and almsgiving are two principles highly present in modern Arabia and Justin Stearns’s examination of plague and Abrahamic faith.
But what is altruism? Defined as “selfless concern for the well-being of others,” we see in Arthur Mervyn, that like Yin and Yang, generosity is always complemented by greed. Quoting Brown’s titular character:
“…interest and duty were blended in every act of generosity.” (Brown, 27)
As yellow fever ravages Philadelphia, no good act remains unrequited. When Mervyn is most desperate, the wealthy Welbeck shows him charity, but not without its price. Bound to his benefactor, Mervyn is sucked into a world of corruption, betrayal, murder, and intrigue. The plot only thickens when Mervyn himself, and Welbeck, are confronted with yellow fever.
Under the societal pressures of a city devastated by plague, what would you do? Flee to the country in hopes of escape? Flock to the city in the hopes of some fortune? Ambivalence is inevitable, but choices necessary. What will go first, your life, your soul, or your resolution? Think about that next time you’re enjoying the beautiful waves and powdered sands of the Corniche.
“My poverty, but not my will consents.” (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, V.i.75)
Best,
Allen, Adam, and Diana
