A person who “thinks disobediently” can be invigorating, maddening, or both. The life and writings of Henry David Thoreau have provoked just such mixed reactions over time, scorned by some; cherished by others. What seems bracingly invigorating can ...
‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

OUPblog » Literature


Thinking disobediently?

Thinking disobediently?

A person who “thinks disobediently” can be invigorating, maddening, or both. The life and writings of Henry David Thoreau have provoked just such mixed reactions over time, scorned by some; cherished by others. What seems bracingly invigorating can also seem an off-putting mannerism.

That’s also a significant reason why Thoreau lingered in provincial obscurity during his life but rose to iconic status after death to become one of the few figures in American literary history besides Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway to achieve something like folk hero status—at least for many. Against-the-grain thinkers are often easier to take from a distance than upfront. Socrates, Nietzsche, and Gandhi are some others who come to mind.

Thoreau’s mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that “first instinct upon hearing a proposition was to controvert it.” Emerson usually found this cantankerousness energizing, but he also wearied of it; and so, to a much greater extent, did more conventional-minded folk, especially if they’d never seen Thoreau’s sweeter and more vulnerable side, as Emerson had. His author-physician friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had little time for willful idiosyncrasy, dismissed Thoreau as an Emerson clone who “insisted in nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end.” In Thoreau’s writing as well, we often find him insisting on the importance of such gestures as rejecting the gift of a doormat for his Walden cabin because “it is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.”

This dogged staunchness repelled even some who were closer to him, like one neighbor who quipped that she would no more think of taking Thoreau’s arm than the arm of an elm tree. Never mind that still others who knew him more intimately disagreed, especially among the younger generation of Concord like Louisa May Alcott and Emerson’s son, who remembered him as a kindly playfellow and guide. Standoffish resistance, with a satirical bite, was the face he tended to present to the adult world.

This side of Thoreau, however, is also key to the special force and bite of his writing, which for many latter-day readers has made his writing seem more vibrant and provocative over time than Emerson’s more abstract prose. Judged by their writings alone, Thoreau emerges as the far more memorable flesh-and-blood figure, Emerson by contrast as a kind of recording consciousness. Even Thoreau’s cranky niggling can seem like lovable eccentricity. When I put the question, “Which of the two would you rather room with?” to students who’ve read them both extensively, their first impulse is to choose Thoreau, although, on second thought, they grant that Emerson would have been easier to get along with.

Thoreau scholars also face a version of this problem. Many of us, myself included, were first drawn to Thoreau in years past by his ringing idealistic denunciations of the social and political status quo (“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the only place for a just man is also a prison,” etc.) In addition to their sheer charismatic vehemence, such pronouncements may ignite a feeling of special kinship in those who also feel themselves on the margins of society, as aspiring academics often do. The autobiographical persona in Thoreau’s writing evokes the sense of being invited into a select circle of intimacy above or apart from the ordinary herd, such as what e. e. cummings conjures up in the preface to an edition of his collected poems: These poems “are written for you and for me and are not for mostpeople [sic].” 

Only later does one realize that Thoreau might have scorned most who write articles and books about him as obtuse pedants. But that awakening may also have the salutary effect of making a scrupulous Thoreauvian less addicted to his or her pet theories about who the real Thoreau was, and more wary of making “authoritative” claims about the essence of his personhood or writing.

That said, the defining arenas of Thoreau’s disobedient thinking are unmistakable. Individual conscience is a higher authority than statute law or moral consensus. True wildness can be found at the edges of your hometown. Scientific investigation of natural phenomenon is formulaic without sensuous immersion in the field. Religious orthodoxies of one’s time or any time are tribalistic distortions of the animating energies whose epicenter lies, if anywhere, in untutored intuition or the natural world, not human institutions.

What gives these and other Thoreauvian heterodoxies their special bite is not so much how he lived but how he wrote. Many have practiced a more rigorous voluntary simplicity than Thoreau did during his two-plus years at Walden, often for far longer stretches of time and in places far more wild. Many have suffered for conscience’s sake far longer and far more agonizingly than his one-night incarceration for tax refusal. But no such heroes of nonconformity managed to write the likes of Walden and “Civil Disobedience,” which since Thoreau’s death have become classics of world literature and have helped inspire many more thoroughgoing acts of conscientious withdrawal, political resistance, and environmental activism.

In order to make sense of how these—and other—Thoreau works have had such impact, a good place to start is Thoreau’s talent for arresting assertions, often directed as much to himself as to others, that set you back, make you think, urge you on. Such as: “Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already”; “If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior”; “For the most part, we are not what we are, but in a false position”; or “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” This, however, is only a starting point for a deeper understanding of the motions of this disobedient thinker’s mind. For that, there’s no substitute for a careful examination of the works themselves. That’s what I’ve striven to do in Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently.

Feature image by Chris Liu-Beers via Unsplash.

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

 

Conversations with Dostoevsky

Conversations with Dostoevsky

The first time I visited St Petersburg, nearly thirty years ago, I stayed not far from the area in which Dostoevsky set the action of Crime and Punishment. The tenement blocks were, for the most part, those that Dostoevsky himself would have seen—indeed, one friend lived at Grazhdanskaya 19, a possible location for the coffin-like garret inhabited by Raskolnikov, the novel’s homicidal anti-hero. The area borders the Griboedov canal, along which Raskolnikov frequently walked and where the house in which he murdered the miserly old pawnbroker and her innocent sister is situated—I could even imagine that the dark figure emerging from the dingy entrance was the pawnbroker herself. Further away was the Haymarket, still crowded with gypsies, peddlers, beggars, and cheap food stalls, and—despite the old Church of the Assumption having been pulled down by the Soviet authorities to make way for a Metro station—still an atmosphere heavy with poverty and the crimes of poverty.

During those long walks, it was easy to feel that ghosts of Dostoevsky’s city lingered on in the mostly unvisited and run-down streets of the late twentieth century. There wasn’t so much traffic back then, and in the late afternoon sun, with only the distant shouts of some unseen workmen breaking the silence, there was a sense of timelessness, as if this is what it had always been like.

Sheer imagination, of course—and much more important is what Crime and Punishment and Dostoevsky’s other great novels (Notes from Underground, The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov, and more) can mean for us today. We live in a material and social world very different from that of Dostoevsky’s characters but, like them, we still have to struggle with the challenges of finding a place in a competitive society that is endlessly generating economic insecurity, social injustice, family breakdown, and the fragmentation of religion and other value systems—as well, of course, as the eternal questions as to who and how to love, and whether, in the end, there is a God who cares.

The historical study of Dostoevsky addresses these questions by taking us back to Dostoevsky’s world—less to the canal-side streets and back-alleys of St Petersburg and more to the literary and intellectual culture of his time, placing him in the context of contemporary debates about literature, politics, faith, and, not least, the future of Russia itself. Historical scholarship goes a long way towards reconstructing Dostoevsky’s world and showing the detail of his involvement in contemporary issues of art and society and his approach to fundamental questions about the ultimate purpose of human life—and what a lot of detail there is! Even apart from the dramatic events of his mock execution, his imprisonment and exile in Siberia, his gambling addiction and often chaotic love life, Dostoevsky was extraordinarily active in the literary world of his time, editing a succession of journals that published both Russian and foreign literature, from Mrs Gaskell to Edgar Allan Poe (he admired both). He was interested in philosophy and at one point planned on translating Hegel, while Russian identity and the fate of Russia in the modern world elicited some of his most intemperate and controversial statements—and, of course, there was God! As Dostoevsky himself put it, the question of belief plunged him into a ‘crucible of doubt’ as he confronted the seemingly irresolvable clash between the Christian God of love and the reality of a world scarred by poverty, injustice, gratuitous cruelty, violence against women, child abuse, and much more—all addressed in his novels.

Historical study is one way of exploring these questions, but Conversations with Dostoevsky attempts the opposite approach. Instead of going back to Dostoevsky’s world, the Conversations bring Dostoevsky into ours, specifically into a series of conversations with a mid-career academic going through a rather average mid-life crisis—‘average’, that is, until, while he is reading one of Dostoevsky’s short stories, the writer himself appears. Thus begins a series of conversations that cover many of the themes of Dostoevsky’s fiction and non-fiction, focussing especially on the ‘eternal questions’ of God and that mysterious creature we call the human being.

History cannot be ignored, of course, and the Conversations are accompanied by a set of commentaries that explore the issues raised in a more conventional manner. Nevertheless, a fictionalizing approach can help to profile the existential questions at issue in his work and to help us reflect on how we, as readers, bring our own concerns and—inevitably—biases into what we read. In the century and a half since his death, Dostoevsky has been read in many ways—as a prophet of the Russian Revolution, as a spokesman for protest atheism, or as representative of Orthodoxy Christianity, and more. Today, his work is necessarily exposed to the critical rereading of the Russian literary and intellectual tradition provoked by the invasion of Ukraine that is taking place across Russian Studies. More than ever before, it is important to be conscious not just of what Dostoevsky wrote but of how we are reading him.

Featured image credit: Portrait of Fedor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

 

How well do you know your ancient Greek literature? [Quiz]

How well do you know your ancient Greek literature? [Quiz]

From Homer to Euripides, ancient Greek literature has an abundance in poetry, prose and plays—but how well do you think you know these works? Test your knowledge with our short, fun quiz and don’t forget to let us know how you did!

Feature image by Hert Niks via Unsplash.

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

 

Alice Mustian’s scandalous backyard performance

Alice Mustian’s scandalous backyard performance

The year 1614 was an eventful one for the London theatre world. Shakespeare’s Globe playhouse, rebuilt after having burned to the ground during an ill-fated performance of Henry VIII, was reopening its doors. Playgoers across the city could see performances of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. However, ninety miles away from London, in Salisbury, another play was performed that year, which was quite different from all of those: it was written by a middle-class woman, and it was staged in a temporary theatre in her backyard. Like much of the evidence about early modern performances in England, the story of this backyard performance was hidden away in archives for centuries; however, a recently reexamined lawsuit reveals the sensational tale of adultery, slander, and revenge behind this remarkable event.

On 4 September 1614, a Salisbury woman named Alice Mustian erected a stage in the backyard of her house on Catherine Street. Neighbours trickled in, paying a small admission fee (pins or pieces of ribbon) as they gathered in front of the make-shift stage constructed on top of tubs and barrels to watch a play that Mustian herself had written. The cast for the performance was a group of local children, including Alice’s ten-year-old son Phillip. The subject of the play, however, was hardly juvenile. Instead of a fictional tale, Mustian’s backyard play dramatized a very real piece of local gossip: that Mary Roberts, the wife of a joiner, had been caught having an adulterous affair with a baker named Robert Humphries. In some ways, Mustian’s astonishing decision to stage this salacious real-life story for her neighbours represented a kind of vigilante justice. When the townspeople of Salisbury had learned two years prior that Roberts was caught in a compromising situation with Humphries, some expected that the adulterous pair would be subjected to the traditional shaming ritual known as “carting,” in which the two would be paraded through the streets in a cart. This, however, never happened. Alice Mustian, thinking that their punishment was long overdue, took it upon herself to shame them both. In her backyard play, the troupe of local children, at Mustian’s direction, enacted the precise moment that Mary Robert’s husband, accompanied by a town constable, caught his wife with the undressed Robert Humphries, thereby exposing the affair. It wasn’t long before news of this backyard play reached the real Mary Roberts. Fiercely maintaining her innocence and furious that Mustian would try to shame her so flagrantly, Roberts immediately sued for defamation.

While the story of Mustian’s scandalous backyard play is remarkable, it is in one respect highly representative of early modern drama: the play itself does not survive and we only know anything about it through secondhand accounts, namely, the witness statements prepared for the ensuing defamation trial. Indeed, the majority of plays written and performed in the time of Shakespeare were never published and, in most cases, no complete scripts survive today in any form. Instead, theatre historians know about these plays through a wide range of types of evidence, such as playgoers’ diaries and letters, financial accounts, professional records, and manuscript fragments. This evidence might include titles, descriptions of performances, translations or quotations, backstage playhouse documents, payments to playwrights, or expenses for costumes and properties. As editors of the Lost Plays Database, a collaborative digital resource for compiling historical evidence and scholarly insights, we are dedicated to discovering as much as we can about these lost works of drama by examining the original documentary evidence.

The case of Alice Mustian proves to be a perfect example of just how much can be uncovered by locating and analyzing these primary archival sources directly. The six witness statements prepared for Mustian’s defamation trial are preserved in a single handwritten volume, a so-called “deposition book” prepared for ecclesiastical court cases, currently held at the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre in Chippenham. The first scholar to discover these records was the historian Susan J. Wright, who mentioned them briefly in her doctoral dissertation about the social life of seventeenth-century Salisbury; a few years later, Martin Ingram cited the same case in the context of early modern English shaming rituals. While these brief early references were enough to alert later scholars to the name of Alice Mustian, no one had returned to the original legal sources of evidence to learn more about her. The amusing anecdote remained an anecdote and wasn’t investigated further.

In recent decades, however, scholars have increasingly turned their attentions to the fascinating body of dramatic writing by early modern women, including such plays as Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (printed in 1613), or Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory (c. 1617) and Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley’s The Concealed Fancies (c. 1645), both preserved in manuscript. In light of this scholarly work, a more complete story of Alice Mustian’s backyard play demanded to be told. Even though her play itself does not survive, the legal records that do provide clear evidence that a woman from a very different social world than Cary, Wroth, Cavendish, and Brackley could write a play—and indeed that, like the professional dramatists of the London stage, a woman could write a play for the express purpose of public performance. The story of Mustian’s backyard play, in other words, underscores Ramona Wray’s claim that “Early modern women’s drama was restricted neither by social status nor by site of activity” and that “the extraordinary richness of kinds of performance […] sensitise us to women who purposefully engaged in playing actions across of range of institutional and informal, licensed and unlicensed, settings.” For us, the case of Mustian reminds us that the evidence awaiting discovery in the archives might very well change our understanding not only about the kinds of plays that were written in early modern England but also of the kinds of voices who once wrote those plays and poems that may not have survived into the present. It exemplifies the kinds of stories that have yet to be discovered in the archives, stories that can profoundly change what we think we know about the drama of Shakespeare’s time. In the case of Alice Mustian, we find a powerful revision to our ideas about who could be a playwright.

Feature image by Joanna Kosinska via Unsplash.

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

 

How well do you know fantasy literature?

How well do you know fantasy literature?

Do you know your orcs from your elves, and your witches from your warlocks? Are you a J. R. R. Tolkien or C. S. Lewis aficionado? Have you read everything by Diana Wynne Jones and Ursula Le Guin? Test your knowledge of the varied world of fantasy literature with this quick quiz!

Feature image by Cederic Vanderberghe via Unsplash, public domain.

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

 

Contact UsPast IssuesJoin This ListUnsubscribe

 

Safely Unsubscribe ArchivesPreferencesContactSubscribePrivacy