Sunday, April 26, 2009

National Fantasy Drives Me Actually Crazy

I will admit this first and foremost: As a student, this is exactly the type of book I struggle with the most. I often find myself lost in the author's words, constantly thinking to myself "That phrase doesn't actually mean anything recognizable." It might just be my own inability to process the language effectively, but I'd imagine I'm not the only one who finds this sort of reading challenging.

On to the text itself. I couldn't help but read this book through the lens of Sarah Vowell's recent (and excellent) "The Wordy Shipmates." Both books are concerned with the ways in which national identity is constructed through the creation of mythic figures, inter and intra community conflicts and the emotions and predilictions of a lucky few authors and leaders.

I was particularly taken with Berlant's description of the response of Puritan women to Hester's punishment when she says, "Not only do women not display a proper attitude toward the law, their very presence in the public sphere violates the narrator's sense of propriety" (107). This idea of "attitude" toward the law is actually a key part of Vowell's work, in particular her retelling of the life of Anne Hutchinson. Besides the possible delusions of grandeur she suffered from, Hutchinson's real sin in the eyes of the magistrates of the colony seems to have been her belief that the law applied equally to both men and women and that the law must be clearly explicated to be effective. Her sham trial before the magistrates highlighted that the culture envisioned by the men of the colony did not have the ideological space for a woman shrewd enough to speak back against the law itself, to challenge whether her "crimes" were crimes at all.

It is this expansion of women into the "public" sphere that seems to tie in most tightly to our exploration of the everyday. What is fascinating to me, however, is that Berlant's observation is both about women's presence in a public sphere and their attitude towards artifacts within that sphere. Yes, men were uncomfortable with the presence of women in matters of the law. More importantly (for me at least), men were uncomfortable not only with the expansion of women's bodies into the public sphere, but with the expansion of their minds into a public sphere. The very fact of their opinions on the law creates a disruption in the fabric of the Puritan everyday.
And there was nothing the Puritans feared more (Winthrop in particular) than disruption.

-Josh Zimmerman

1 comment:

  1. I loved The Wordy Shipmates SO MUCH. And, I too, generally hate this type of writing. Why use a ten dollar word when a one cent word will do? It makes me feel stupid most of the time and resentful of imperious, overly educated authors. Thankfully, the subject matter in this book enabled me to somewhat understand Berlant, despite herself.

    -Ashley

    ReplyDelete