"Thou met'st with things dying, I with things new-born": On Seasons and Genres in The Winter's Tale

I found a flower in the snow

The last play I taught in my Shakespeare class this semester was, appropriately to the season,  The Winter's Tale. A strange play that few of my students had read or seen before, Winter's Tale spends its first three acts as a tragedy and then makes a surprising and bittersweet comeback by the end. The play begins with King Leontes's unfounded jealousy over an imagined relationship between his wife Hermione and best friend Polixenes. This jealousy serves to tear apart his family and friendship and country. His heir dies, his wife dies, and his newborn child, whom he wrongly believes to be illegitimate, is left out in the cold and bear-filled landscape to face the elements. Antigonus, the man sent to leave the baby, receives one of the most famous stage directions in history: Exit, pursued by a Bear. Perhaps Antigonus is punished by nature for abandoning the child, perhaps this is a lesson in conflicting loyalties (loyalty to the king's orders vs. loyalty to personal morality), or perhaps he is a scapegoat figure. In any case, the last we see of Antigonus he is running for his life. Offstage, he dies a terrible death (while the bear, presumably, gets a good meal). Also offstage, a young man observes the violent mauling, while onstage the man's father, a shepherd, finds the baby. And here, at the end of act three, we get the first moment of real hope in the play. The play has been filled with jealousy and despair and death and cold and darkness, but the baby lives. At this time of year, when days are short and temperatures are cold and it feels like spring may never return, a glimmer of hope can mean life. (I never really understood this when I lived in California, but I certainly get it in upstate New York.) To survive winter, we need something to look forward to. A celebration. A winter holiday. A candle or a sprig of holly. And, of course, the shortest day of the year means that each subsequent day will be longer. The play, tied to seasonal change, is rooted in such inevitable cycles. A tragedy or a comedy, the play suggests, is only a matter of where you stop the tale. And this play keeps going into spring.

The shepherd is amazed by his discovery of the helpless child, and his son is horrified by the violence he has witnessed, and their conversation brings despair and hope, death and life, into contact. It is no accident that it is the old man who finds the new life. The pivotal moment of the play is this one of life and death, beginnings and endings. At the same time as father saves a new life, the son can do nothing to stop a life from ending. Hope, it seems, comes at a price.

I won't go into lengthy summary or analysis (though I have much more to say on the play), nor will I give away the ending. Instead, I just want to say a few words about the play in terms of this holiday season. In keeping with my Christmas posts from the past two years (one on Gawain and the Green Knight and another on The Second Shepherd's Play), I want to think here about how The Winter's Tale might help us contemplate this time of year. It's a play in which hope comes just as things seem the most tragic. Death is everywhere and we are sure this must have been mislabeled as comedy or romance. Surely it's a tragedy. In Act 2, the doomed little heir Mamillius explains to his mother that "A sad tale's is best for winter" (II.i.25). And what we get is indeed a seasonally-appropriate sad tale. But then something miraculous happens. A baby is born; a baby lives. Time passes, and it is winter no longer.

One of the many things I love about this play is that it manages to bring together genres in the way that seasons come together, not as separate entities but as parts of a larger, interconnected cycle. Even the play's ending, which allows for resolution, reconciliation, and even joy, is not completely free from the sorrow of the first three acts. Time has passed, bodies once young are now wrinkled. The years cannot be regained anymore than the wrongs can be forgotten. People have died, people have been slandered and exiled. And though some wrongs can be righted, others never can. Leontes regrets and learns and gets some redemption, but none of this erases what he's done. His happy ending is truly happy, but also bittersweet. The characters value their happiness because they know how dearly-bought it is. Likewise, we can always do better and the world can always do better for us, but what we've done and experienced won't just go away. It makes us who we are. The baby grows into a woman, but this doesn't eliminate the fact that her father intended her death. Her name, Perdita, means "the lost one," indicating that if she's found she will nonetheless represent that which has been lost. It is in this lost one, this Perdita, that we find hope, and the hope is real, but that doesn't disconnect it from the circumstances that required hope in the first place. This looking forward as well as backward, this Janus posture fitting to the new year, helps us to see that joy and sorrow are not always distinct, nor do they need to be. As redemption is only possible after a fall, hope only means anything in times of despair. This holiday season, as we move to a new year, let's think on the fact that looking for joy and hope and goodness in the world need not mean that we've forgotten the bad and the sad. Instead, let us try to see the bigger picture, to learn from mistakes and to understand that sometimes our gain comes from another's loss. And as the happiness found at the end of Winter's Tale is more meaningful to the characters in that they've known such sorrow, perhaps we can remember that life has no simple happy endings. Happiness is tangled and complicated, and life very often continues even after marriages or deaths that would make such neat conclusions to comedies or tragedies. And even the times of year we associate with joy can be filled with loss as well. I shine with love for those around me, but I also ache with fresh grief for those I have lost. I know I am warm and safe inside, but others are stuck in the cold. Part of being in the spirit of the season, I think, is in realizing what it means to celebrate light in the middle of the winter. In the spirit of The Winter's Tale, then, I wish for more joy and compassion for you all this holiday season. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

The Proof is in the Plotting: Stratford, Cymbeline, and Much Ado About Nothing

A photo I snapped of the Avon River
(Yes, this means that Canada
has its own Stratford-upon-Avon)

I recently spent a weekend in Stratford, Ontario for the Shakespeare Festival. Each Fall the University of Rochester English department makes a theater pilgrimage to Stratford led by the indomitable Russell Peck and his equally incredible wife Ruth. The trip is, for me, wrapped up in the changing season, the new school year. As leaves turn and new courses begin, the trip cements old bonds and creates new ones. Returning each year to the same small town to see very different plays helps create for me a sense of both the cyclical and the ever-new. The trip also encapsulates what I love about my program. Not only do I adore a chance to see such wonderful theater, but I treasure the kind of community fostered by the trip. The last night always ends in the Pecks taking everyone out to dessert, and professors, grads, undergrads, family, friends, significant others all crowd around pub tables to discuss the plays and gorge on chocolate and meringue. The connections made across horizontal and vertical lines through the shared experience of theater remind me of what a vibrant community the university can be.

My co-blogger Kate flew back from California to make the trip, and it was good to spend quality time with her in pursuit of our favorite hobby -- trying to cram as many plays as possible into one weekend (we saw five plays in three days). I'll focus in this post on the first day, when we saw both Cymbeline and Much Ado About Nothing, because seeing those two together really called my attention to interesting aspects of each play. Though I have seen Much Ado many times and know the play well, I had never before seen Cymbeline, nor have I studied it much or taught it before. I'll admit that, aside from reading it in a youthful effort to read all of Shakespeare, I hadn't given Cymbeline much thought. But this particular production was so engaging that it made me want to take another look at the play. Both of these plays feature a man's misplaced jealousy against an innocent lady, so that connection was immediately clear, but I started to notice other connections as well. Each play has an intriguing focus on misunderstood evidence, on bodies themselves misrepresented and misread. A striking scene from Cymbeline features Imogen weeping over the headless body of her enemy, who had dressed in the clothes of Imogen's husband Posthumus before getting himself killed. We the audience realize that the body doesn't belong to her husband, but she reads the body based upon its clothing, and her grief is terrible to behold. The most startling part of this scene to me was when Imogen dissected the body with her words, saying that she recognized the calves, arms, chest of the corpse as those of her own husband, when in fact all that she recognized was the textile exterior of shirt and breeches. This corporeal misrecognition comes after we have already seen a corporeal misrepresentation of Imogen herself. The scheming Iachimo, unable to seduce the virtuous lady, sneaks into her bedroom and takes note of the features of her chamber and, more disturbingly, of her sleeping body. This production maximized the tension in the scene, having Iachimo literally crawl over the inert body of the unconscious lady like the ghoul from Fuseli's The Nightmare. The violation involved in his actions were readily apparent, and I had a visceral reaction which I thought was exactly the right feeling for such a scene. In many parts, the production played up the comedic potential of the play, and this scene could have been funny or even ridiculous, but I felt they made the right choice by making it instead terribly uncomfortable. So details of Imogen's body related to her husband cause him to think her unchaste, while details of her husband's clothing cause her to think him dead. The evidence in each case seems strong, physical, tangible, and yet in each case it proves false. Compounding such bodily misreadings, when Imogen arrives dressed as a boy, her husband doesn't recognize her. In fact, no one but her servant realizes that it is she in boy's clothing. As his clothing made her believe a strange body to be his, strange clothing made him believe her body was not her own.

The production made even more of this focus on clothing in that it combined various historical eras of costume. Some characters seemed from the 12th century, while others seemed from the 16th or even 17th. When the Roman soldiers arrived, they were dressed as centurions. The Roman costumes complicated matters, since the Italian characters from the play are also from Rome, and therefore Romans, and yet their dress was from a much later period. During the battle scenes at the end, these Italian characters joined the Roman forces and slowly merged into the visual homogeny of the Roman troops. Kate and I wondered if the varying costumes were connected to the fact that the many-stranded plot is itself pieced together from a variety of sources. Part Geoffrey of Monmouth, part Holinhshead, part Boccaccio, Cymbeline partakes of stories from other times and places and combines them all, as Shakespeare tends to do, with Elizabethan England. The costumes may therefore represent the different narrative threads, and the changing and merging costumes at the end might show how all of these threads come together to give the play its satisfying, if someone ridiculous, conclusion. It's to the production's credit that the entire audience was so moved by the ending, which could easily have lapsed into the absurd. I heard delighted sounds and chuckles and sighs all around me at the end, and we all jumped to our feet as soon as the lights dimmed.

The Much Ado that we saw was enjoyable, though not my favorite version of the play. The overall concept of the production didn't always come together for me. There were insertions of singing and dancing which could have been charming, but seemed a little disjointed. But the witty lines and a strong Benedick made it still a fun performance. The physical comedy in the scenes where Benedick and Beatrice overhear their friends discussing them was, I thought, quite effective. I was most interested, however, given my musings on Cymbeline from that afternoon, in the fact that the play didn't feel the need to show us Margaret and Borachio at the window. So many versions of the play include the mis-viewing at the window, and I feel that it actually does make a huge difference whether we as the audience have seen the "evidence" or not. Since the play didn't include that scene, we not only know that the evidence is false, that it's not really Hero at the window, but we are only told of any of it secondhand. The misunderstanding of physical evidence, the misrecognition of Hero's body and voice, exists at an extra remove from us. And yet the misrecognition of the faithful woman occurs firsthand for Claudio, who believes Margaret to be Hero, whereas Posthumus only hears about his wife (and receives her bracelet), but never sees any misconduct with his own eyes.

So much of Much Ado is about the way in which narratives can be used constructively (to bring Benedick and Beatrice together) or destructively (to tear Claudio and Hero apart). I've had wonderful conversations before with Russell Peck and Russ McDonald about the fact that “nothing” may have been pronounced “noting,” a fact which opens up my interpretation of reading and misreading and fiction and truth. The play is so much about listening, overhearing, and reading people and situations. The characters, like the audience, bare the burden of interpretation, and much of the plot hinges on how they choose to interpret. There are many lines in the play about reading evidence or noting something, and Benedict even says that he doesn’t want Beatrice to see his bad rhymes. Even the comic relief with lower class malapropisms make more sense to me in this context of noting, since malapropisms call attention to the importance of effective communication. And let us not forget that it is the malaprop-wielding Dogberry, in all his ridiculous comic presence, that stumbles upon the truth of Don John's deception -- the learned and witty characters can't untangle that knot on their own. It is the character with the least command of language who is able to apprehend the truth in the form of Borachio and Conrade.

The protagonists of Much Ado spend their days creating deceptions, whether simply for fun (the masque, which leads to several cases of mistaken identity), or for redefining the community (the verbal games to bring Benedick and Beatrice together, the near-deadly game to convince Claudio of Hero's betrayal/unchastity). The image of the second wedding, in which Claudio believes the veiled woman he's marrying to be Hero's cousin, brings together the elements of disguise and misunderstanding in the play. Whereas before Claudio assumed a woman was Hero without seeing her face, he now assumes that a woman is not Hero when he can't see her face. In either case, he believes what he is told about the female body before him without actually looking at the evidence for himself. This production gave us a Claudio who seemed perfectly fine with marrying another woman in place of Hero, as if Hero herself really were interchangeable (as the fact that he twice mistakes her for someone else suggests). The multiple ways that evidence is uncovered at the end, both in the confessions from the villains and in the literal unveiling of Hero's face, allow for ultimate clarification even as the play makes us uncomfortably aware of the limitations of evidence to reveal truth.

I would like to teach a class one day with Cymbeline, Much Ado About Nothing, and Othello. (Now that I think of it, I could include some great medieval stuff as well -- rewritten letters and mistaken identities as false evidence in "The Man of Law's Tale" and The Roman de Silence, for example.) In each of these plays, evidence, even strong evidence, proves insufficient. Characters read evidence through the lenses provided for them by other characters with various motives. I think it could be instructive to think about the ways in which we rarely can see evidence objectively. It could be interesting to even talk about objectivity itself and if/when objectivity is desirable. We necessarily bring our own interests and experiences to texts, and I have argued elsewhere that this is not a bad thing. (And, hey, Benedick and Beatrice find happiness because the false rumors of love for one another they overhear match with their own actual desires to be together.) Perhaps the important thing is to be aware of our own subjectivity. To try to examine our influences as well as we can. Characters in these plays hear with their own ears and see with their own eyes (or see with the eyes of others who have some token or proof to back up their stories -- a bracelet, a handkerchief), and yet they are wrong again and again, sometimes with disastrous results. Their fault is in believing themselves to be objective receivers of fact rather than active interpreters. Teaching a class about the reception of evidence itself could call attention to the very processes of close-reading and writing that take place in such a class, could call attention to the fact that I want the students to think for themselves even as I, the instructor, lead discussion and provide context. I may choose the texts, but the students have a responsibility for their own ideas and writing, and I think a discussion of such texts could lead to some fascinating dialogue about the act of interpretation itself.

One foot in the sea and the other on land

What it looks like between coasts when I fly

As I transition from one coast to another, one school year to another, and one season to another, I think a lot about thresholds. I try hard to think of each phase or moment or experience in my life as a thing unto itself instead of a place between. Graduate school, for example, could be a liminal space between college and career, but it seems a shame to think of such an extended period of my life as simply a means to an end (especially in this uncertain market). Sometimes I sit in a coffee shop, reading or writing, and I really reflect on how privileged I am to be able to spend some years of my life learning and thinking and growing as a person and a scholar. How amazing it is to sit in the afternoon sunlight, reading a book and learning even more about the things I love. How incredible it is to work with students and to see them really think about literature and the world around them. Even the struggle to come up with new ideas, the intensity of teaching, the insecurities which come with grad school -- those are a part of my life, a part of all that's good in it and all that makes it worthwhile to me. These years, I must remind myself, are valuable unto themselves.

An overflowing border

As a medievalist, the struggle against the idea of middles is constant. Though the term "Middle Ages" is certainly less pejorative than "Dark Ages," it still gives a sense of a period between the glory of Rome and the Renaissance. A placeholder in history. It seems doubtful to me that people woke up on New Year's Day of 1500 (or 1495 or 1450 or 1350 or 1300 …) and felt suddenly reborn. Even midnight on New Year's, which seems to be a crystal-clear liminal point, shatters when we consider all of the time zones of the world. Watching through a television set in the United States as the ball drops in Australia, I can't help but feel a bit unsettled about our privileging of that particular moment. Nor can I fail to notice when I reach the new year in New York before my friends in California do. And this is not to mention the fact that there are different calendars in the world that have different New Year's, and the fact that even our Gregorian calendar has been used with different New Year's in mind. In the Middle Ages there seem to have been several possible dates, and people in the Early Modern period celebrated on March 25th. How are we to find the point of transition if it keeps moving? And what do we do with a transition period, a middle, that takes up a thousand years? It's interesting that we often think of middle as center, as central. We often see those things on the periphery as less important. Yet in history as in our lives it's easy to see moments or years or centuries as simply between the real thing. Not only does this kind of thinking ignore realities of connection and continuity, but it denies the importance of the individual dots on the timeline.

Fleeting traces of our threshold presence

On my trip home I spent some nice afternoons at the beach, visiting my much-missed Pacific Ocean, and I thought about how hard it often is to pinpoint a precise spot where one time or space ends and another begins. I walked through that tricky line on the shore where dry feet and wet feet are only moments apart, and I examined that strip of sand. What was above water one moment was below it the next, and even the extent to which the water reached was always different. The curved border between dry sand and wet sand (and even wetter sand) shifts constantly, and must be slightly different each day. Indeed, it must change throughout the day as well, and in more subtle ways than just the changing tides. As I rolled up my jeans and moved closer to the water, I noticed that the way the water moves over the sand is new each time, that the ripples of water are ever-changing and that they leave an imprint both of their shape and their substance on the sand behind them. As I tried to discern the line between the realms of ocean and sea, I found that there really is no simple answer. There is no line and there's always a line and there are a million different lines. I spoke in my paper at the recent NCS conference on the Man of Law's Tale about how the realms of land and sea are never as separate as they appear on the map, and it was good to actually look at the space between and in those realms. So often I find myself getting caught up in the theoretical. Of course I am a literature person -- examining texts is what I do. And I'm a medievalist -- thinking about things long ago is my job. But after writing so much about concepts of time and space and the ocean, it's good to get reacquainted with the ocean itself. To get my feet wet again, as it were.

The waves leave behind remnants of sea, land, and air

On my trip I was reading Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us, and was struck by a passage from the preface to the 1961 edition describing how the floor of the deep sea "receives[s] sediments from the margins of the continents" such as "bits of wood and leaves, and … sands containing nuts, twigs, and the bark of trees" (x).The abyssal plains, therefore, include tangible pieces of the coast. And it is also the waters of the world that have carved out valleys and canyons now well above ground. Water has in many ways shaped our landscapes, just as the land provides the floor of our oceans and rivers. Carson explains of the ocean's formation that water wore away the land to create the ocean, while the minerals from these worn-away continents gave the sea its saltiness in "an endless, inexorable process that has never stopped" (7). In other words, the water continually shapes the land, while the land ceaselessly gives the ocean its salty form. Over the long history of the earth, land and sea have merged, shifted, and forged one another. Geological time, it seems, has its own ideas about topographical and temporal boundaries. To try to think of any particular space or time as its own separate entity really only works in a single instant. Even in that instant the lines are fraught, but only in that instant are lines really visible. Boundaries and borders are shifting, fleeting, intersecting. I played with this notion by snapping pictures of the space where ocean meets shore in order to try to capture some of those threshold moments. And even in my photographs, I cannot really tell for sure where water ends and sand begins. Can you?

Where does the sea end and the land begin?

When I consider how my light is spent

It's been a while since I've posted. Although the summer is the time in the academic calendar when the teaching load subsides and writing can take place, I've had some trouble writing so far this summer. I took on too many side projects in June. Meant to be small jobs to earn some summer income, these projects ended up sapping up my time and creative energy. As I enter July, I'm trying to refocus. I'm trying to capture some quite moments. I'm trying to figure out what I think and what I want to say. I need to make significant progress on my dissertation this summer, and I need to learn to allow myself that time. For now, I'm posting some pictures I've taken this summer of light(s) in various forms.

A Trip to the Zoo (or, Is it still called sailing if you don't have a sail?)

(In)famous Kalamazoo Swan

I just returned from Kalamazoo, Michigan, where I attended this year's fabulous International Congress on Medieval Studies. Kalamazoo (or, as we medievalists fondly call it, "the zoo") has become an annual pilgrimage for me, a time of year as sure as spring, when a caravan of cars from Rochester heads across the midwest to a magical place where people who study the Middle Ages feel for a few days a year like we might actually make up a significant portion of the population. This was my sixth year going and my fifth year presenting; I've enjoyed it each time, but this year I really felt at home. I'm becoming increasingly relaxed at this conference, which can be a bit overwhelming at first. Made up of scholars from a variety of disciplines, around 3,000 people from around the world attend the congress. I saw some great papers, had some wonderful conversations, and got to catch up with friends old and new. My panel, on "Women and their Environments: Real and Imagined" and sponsored by the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, worked beautifully as a whole. The papers moved us from cityscape to forest to ocean in the course of the panel. (For a fascinating discussion of female bodies and landscape, see Kate's recent post on Perceval of Galles.) I came back with pages of notes to fuel my chapter, and am feeling reinvigorated after a long semester/year. Once again, I feel lucky to be in a field with such smart and engaging and generous scholars.

Since I just gave a paper on Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale at Kalamazoo, and I'll be giving another paper on the same tale for the New Chaucer Society later this summer in Portland, Oregon, I thought I'd write a little about the tale and my experience of it. This post combines random musings with pieces from the paper I just gave, the one I'll give this July, and the chapter in progress. For those of you who need a little refresher, the tale is about Custance, a saintly Roman Princess. She first travels east to marry the Sultan of Syria, who's converted for her love, but her new mother-in-law isn't pleased with the plan and sets her to sea in a rudderless ship. Finally reaching Northumbria, she manages to convert and marry the king there (she has a real talent for looking pretty enough to convert any world leader she encounters). But she once again lands herself an evil mother-in-law. This mother-in-law also sends our heroine on a rudderless ship, but this time she makes it back to Rome. Her royal husband also travels to Rome on pilgrimage, and a happy reunion can occur. This brief summary leaves our many important details, but it will do for now. The tale is part of a larger tradition of Constance narratives which feature the same basic story line, though with important distinctions.

Tiny Boat in a Big Ocean

The Man of Law's Tale is the most famous Middle English iteration of the rudderless ship tales, and also the most famous of the tales in the so-called Constance-Cycle, so I knew that I would have to tackle it in my dissertation. I found this task daunting for multiple reasons. First, it's Chaucer. There's just so much criticism to contend with. At least it's not the Wife of Bath or the Pardoner but it's still breathtaking to consider how many people have read and written on this story and on The Canterbury Tales more generally. Second, I really didn't know what to do with this tale. I had already figured out my arguments about Gower's version, which features a much more assertive Constance. The Man of Law seems intent on downplaying Custance's free will and in giving her as little agency as possible. I just didn't know what I was going to say beyond contrasting this Constance with other, spunkier Constances, and that didn't seem particularly interesting or original. So I put off this chapter as long as I could.

Last year I included the Man of Law's Tale in my course on Medieval travel, and teaching the tale helped me to see it in a new way. Re-reading a text in order to teach it and discussing it with students who've never before encountered it always helps me to see it anew. I was also really fascinated by the reactions my students had to Custance. I've taught the Wife of Bath's Tale several times now, and I've come to expect strong responses from students to the Wife. I really didn't expect Custance to elicit those kinds of emotions. But the students did respond, to both the story and to its heroine. There were students who, like me, were annoyed by Custance's passivity. But others found in her a role model, a person strong and confident in herself and her beliefs. It was quite a diverse group, especially the first semester I taught it, with people from a variety of countries and religious backgrounds, and there were about the same number of males and females in the class. Two of the students who identified most strongly with Custance, who found in her a role model for themselves, were male. They were both people of faith, but people from very different religious backgrounds, and they saw in her characteristics that they felt all people should strive to possess. These passionate responses made me take a step back and reassess the character. This is not to say that I don't think Custance's faith is gendered or that it doesn't take on specific meanings in the context of the period or of The Canterbury Tales, but rather that there might simply be aspects of it that I hadn't considered. I began to think about other features of the tale that I might have missed.

Map as Text: Psalter Map with Commentary, c. 1260

During this time, I was developing my overarching argument about the ocean in the mappae mundi (which you can find more on here and here), and increasingly noticing how blank and marginal a space it was in these maps, on the fringes of the text-covered landscape. The land is history, both linear and cyclical, while the ocean shapes history and yet remains outside of it. Given these features of the mappae mundi, I began to notice something about the oceanic moments of the tale. On Custance's rudderless voyages, the Man of Law makes sense of her survival by comparing her to a litany of Biblical figures. If we wonder how she survives, we might ask who saved Daniel in the lion's den, who saved Jonah from the Whale, and a quite extensive number of similar questions. These long digressions of comparisons to Biblical figures, which I had found frustrating before, suddenly took a new meaning for me. I had really only thought about how they downplayed Custance's free-will, and that's certainly true, but perhaps something else is going on as well in these lengthy interruptions. If the ocean is extrahistorical, then what do we make of all of these comparisons to figures and events who belong in the historical, landed realm?

There is some precedence for seeing Custance's story in terms of medieval cartography. V.A. Kolve notes in Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative that "the tale creates a residual image that is geographical: a map of Europe with a boat moving upon its waters" (319). Kathy Lavezzo expands this notion in Angels on the Edge of the World by arguing that "since Custance's journey begins in Syria, the cartographic territory evoked in the tale in fact extends beyond Europe and [. . .] suggests a map of the world" (95). David Raybin (who was actually at my talk and who gave me extensive and helpful feedback) joins Custance's geographical marginality with history and time in "Custance and History: Woman as Outsider in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale." He notes that "[s]he is exiled from the temporal world and thus unconstrained by time, bound to her faith and thus spiritually free, existing in an emblematic position largely outside of human contact, outside history" (69). All of these scholars have made fascinating and apt arguments about Custance, about her placement in the world. I would like to combine the cartographic discussions of Kolve and Lavezzo with Raybin's ideas about Custance's temporal marginalization, and put all of these in terms of the oceanic spaces of the tale. I want to consider the ocean in the tale as a complex kind of narrative space.

Custance's initial voyage to Syria is barely described. She has a clear destination and a clear purpose (and, presumably, a mode of steering). This trip seems to occur squarely in the historical realm. Her subsequent sea voyages are quite different. Pushed into a rudderless ship and sent into the sea, Custance enters a different kind of narrative space, once in which her prayers and her constant faith can serve her well. Unlike the voyage to Syria, her latter travels occur in a zone outside of history and narrative control. The "salte see" becomes a realm dominated by fate. Only Custance, constant as she is, could survive such a voyage in the oceanic realm. She sails without destination or control. The narrator explains that her boat goes "Som-tyme West, som-tyme North and South,/ And som-tyme Est, ful many a wery day" (948-949). Each cardinal direction is given its turn, making this journey one that can be mapped and yet also one that cannot. We know that the ship takes each direction, so directions are available, which seems more like the real ocean than the circle around the mappae mundi. Yet the fact that the boat takes each direction at will and we never know quite where we are leads us to that metaphorical realm. Nor is time less fluid than location. The ship is carried back and forth across the ocean for "Yeres and dayes," a time that seems specific, with the addition of days, and yet is nonetheless vague (463). How many years? How many days? Time, it seems, is hard to quantify on the waves. The precise way in which the events of the tale up to this point have been recounted gives way to a rise and fall of detail in keeping with the movement of the ocean itself. On our heroine's second "stereless" voyage the time is somewhat clearer -- "Fyve yeer and more" (902). We do get a number of years this time, but the "and more" undoes that specificity. Temporalities and teleologies and cycles are all lost amid the waves.

Jonah and the Whale (who, terrifyingly, has teeth!)
Ranworth Antiphonal, c. 1460-1480

Yet the Man of Law must somehow narrate this "stereless" section of the tale, and he does so by connecting Custance's situation with biblical figures who also survived certain death in the form of natural adversaries. As soon as Custance is afloat at sea, outside of the historical realm and in that blank space off the charted map, the Man of Law begins to make connections between our heroine and the sort of men and women who routinely show up on the landed areas of the map. The Man of Law can only make sense of Custance's foray outside of the historical realm by relating it back to that realm in every way possible. He tells us about how Daniel survived the lion's den, Jonah made it out of the whale's belly, the Hebrews passed through the water thanks to the parting of the waves. The comparisons go on for some time, but I would like to consider the fact that these last two, Jonah and the Red Sea, are watery comparisons. While the ocean comparisons may seem fitting to the ocean realm, I would argue that they remain a part of the historical narrative, the kind that was not written into the oceans of the mappae mundi. By mentioning them here, the Man of Law is simultaneously pulling Custance back into the historical realm and marking the ocean as a space that has contained human history. It is a means of inscribing these events onto the ocean, as so many events were written onto the landscape in medieval world maps.

I argue that these comparisons, extensive and disruptive as they are, serve to reconnect the ocean and land, to renegotiate the tensions involved in a narrative outside of the historical realm. Custance, passive as she is, makes a central and historical narrative out of a blank marginal space. Her story doubles back on itself in the course of her tale; everything occurs more than once, indicating a kind of cyclical history, and yet, as Suzanne Conklin Akbari has noted in a recent talk at the University of Rochester, the story denies us either a complete cycle or a complete teleology. It is both cyclical and linear and it is neither. It moves in and out of historical time, and never allows Custance, or the reader, a clear footing in either realm. The heroine's movements around the earth in her rudderless ship unsettle boundaries and binaries of time and space even as they assert them. The ocean is both vital and distant, encompassing land masses but existing beyond and outside of those realms. It serves as a threshold to other lands, and yet is a distinct conduit, unlike a road, which is built into the land itself.  As a conduit not created by humans, it is far more threatening and unpredictable.  Because of its placement on mappae mundi, it also exists outside of history, functioning as an extrahistorical realm. Custance’s oceanic travels thus represent a new kind of storytelling that is – like the ocean – a threshold, a liminal space between kinds of narratives. The realms of land and sea, and the types of narratives embodied by each, are not as separate as they might appear on the map; likewise, modes of narrative production intersect in dynamic ways throughout the tale and allow for the passive Custance to reshape the religio-cultural contours of her world.

Tales of Land and Sea: More on Medieval Mappae Mundi

1472 Print of T and O Map by Günther Zainer

To continue my earlier post on maps, I thought I would go into some of the details of the mappa mundi. As many of you may know, the basic form for these maps is called the T-O map, since the main structure is a "T" inside an "O." The T and O are formed by water, so that the water bounds and shapes and encloses the land, even though the land takes up most of the space and is the focus of the map. The T is the Rivers -- the Mediterranean, the Nile, and the Tanais (i.e. the Don). The O is the ocean, a nameless circle that surrounds the land. The T also separates the continents, with Asia on top, Europe on the bottom left, and Africa on the bottom right. You can see in the above map that each continent is associated with one of Noah's sons: Asia with Sem (Shem), Europe with Iafeth (Japheth), and Africa with Cham (Ham). Jerusalem is at the middle of these maps, where the rivers and continents meet. This location means that Jerusalem was literally the center of the world, the most central and important location available. Move further from that center and things get . . . stranger. On the edges of the map are the so-called monstrous races. Human-like creatures with single feet, or with no heads, or with dog heads, populate the margins of the earth, far from Jerusalem and yet still part of the landed realms. An early (and still very informative) work about the monstrous races is John Bloch Friedman's The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. There's also much interesting work being done on the placement of Great Britain on these maps, and more still to do. Both Asa Simon Mittman and Kathy Lavezzo have discussed the meaning for England, and English map-makers, that Great Britain is also on the edge of the world in these maps, and I suggest their work to those interested in the topic.

When I teach these maps, I try to get the students to discover the ways in which modern maps are constructed as well. We look at modern maps and discuss the things that aren't directly representative of the geography the maps depict. We talk about those things we've naturalized to the point of thinking they're just true. Since the aspect that surprises the students the most about medieval maps is that Asia is on top, I like to show them an Australian map which flips our normal sense of north as up. I ask why north is on top other than the fact that we've always seen it that way. Who decided? Maybe the fact that compasses point north (for now) had something to do with it, but it still has become the normal depiction to the point that most people think it's somehow natural. The "upside-down map" looks strange, the shapes of the continents unfamiliar, and this defamiliarization is useful for a number of reasons. One is that it helps us to see the geography anew, to attend to the details, since we rarely look as closely at the familiar (like the art assignment where students draw the human face upside-down). Another is that it allows us to think through the implications of the choices the mapmaker has made. What does it mean for north to be on top? What does it mean for Europe to be in the center? What does it mean to choose a projection which contracts and expands different parts of the world? I'm reminded of an episode of West Wing in which "The Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality" take their case to C.J. Cregg. At first, she laughs at the idea of maps having anything to do with social justice. But they show her how different projections alter the image of the earth, and her jaw drops as she realizes that they have a point.

Hereford Mappa Mundi, c. 1300

Maybe I'll show that clip next time I teach this material.In any case, looking at different projections and different versions of world maps is a useful exercise, and we're all more ready to discuss the mappae mundi when we return to them. Yes, they're strange, but they're not stupid. And there's nothing inherently wrong with putting east on top. The verb orient comes from the fact that maps were originally oriented to the East (the Orient).

There is much to say about all of this, but I want to focus here on what is barely apparent on the maps: the ocean. Though the ocean forms the "O" and bounds the circle of the land, it nonetheless takes up very little space on the maps. We moderns, used to maps that depict the ocean as more than 70% of the earth's surface, may be surprised to see just how little ocean there is on these medieval world maps. I argue that this is not because medieval mapmakers misunderstood the ocean's vastness, but rather because their maps were ideological, encyclopedic, and aesthetic creations, and the ocean's place around the edges suited these purposes. It left the map symmetrical, but also left the land, and therefore those things that had happened on land, as the primary focus. The land in these maps is covered in classical and biblical and historical details associated with the various spaces on the earth. Humans are at the center of this narrative, and the land is humanity's realm.

Portolan Chart by Jorge de Aguiar, 1492

There were other kinds of maps for navigating the ocean, and portolan charts helped seafarers from the 13th century on. The fact that mappae mundi and navigational maps were being produced simultaneously indicates that neither was meant to supersede or replace the other; they were simply for different purposes. The mappae mundi did precisely what they were meant to do -- they gave order to geographical and historical and spiritual information. And the land, and all of the things that had happened there in human history, was the focal point. The ocean is an unmarked space surrounding and outside of the land, more marginal indeed than the monsters that populate the edges of the world. The story is on the land, not the ocean, and thus the ocean depicts nothing; it is simply there to gird the earth. Unlike land, the ocean's topography cannot be marked or altered. It's both vast and unaffected (unaffectable) by humans. The contours of the ocean are ever-changing waves. How can you point to a historical location on the shifting contours of the water? How do you make your presence known to later people when you're floating on the sea? Humans may venture out onto the waters of the world in little wooden vessels, but these vessels will either be brought back to harbor or they will sink into the deep. (See my last post on Titanic for more about that.) No man-made contraptions can stay on the ocean's surface, none can leave a trace of human presence except in the depths of the ocean floor, subsumed by the ocean itself.

So the ocean is a blank space on these mappae mundi. It does not partake in the narrative domain of the land, nor does it participate in the historical or ideological aims of the land. It is a realm apart.

Making Our Way in the World: Musings on Medieval and Modern Maps and GPS

As my dissertation deals in many ways with medieval travel and medieval maps, I've been thinking a lot about my own travels and use of maps. Perhaps some of these musings will make their way into the introduction of my dissertation eventually. For now, I will begin to sketch out some of my thoughts here. Please let me know what you think.

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I've been on two different road trips across the United States. The first was when I moved from California to Rochester, and my old roommates travelled with me across the middle and north of the country. The second was when my mother moved to Rochester, and she and I drove her car down the west coast, across the south, and up the east coast. Both trips were beautiful and serious and silly, just as road trips should be. The topography and company was obviously different, but our mode of navigating was also quite different. My first trip was before I owned a GPS, and we made our way with an atlas, various state and regional maps, and (when Internet access allowed) google maps to help us out. My second trip was with a GPS in tow. We had a US atlas for good measure, but our days were spent following the green line across the screen of the GPS as we followed the highways through the windshield. Each trip was successful, both in the quality of the experience and in the fact that we arrived at our destination, but I can't help but think of the ways in which having a GPS on that second trip changed our relationship to the land around us. I have always felt that driving to a new home helps to make the move, and the distance, real. When my family moved from Alaska to California in my seventh year, we drove our truck from campground to campground, through the Yukon and down the 101. I had flown back and forth many times before that, but that drive lent a gravity to the move that those flights never did. But on that trip Mom and I let my father deal with navigation. He attempted to interest me in his various, haphazardly folded maps, but I was more interested in what was outside the windows than what was on those complicated pages. On my later grown-up trips, I had a more direct relationship with the planning and the map-looking. And thus I noticed the ways in which locating our own position in the country was different due to the different navigational methods.

Psalter World Map, c. 1260

With a map, one has a sense of the larger landscape. Even when a map contains a large dot and a "you are here," there's a greater framework for the individual location. That dot is in terms of the big picture. Context may vary according to the map in question, but context is nonetheless abundant. The surrounding area is available, as is an image of how different areas and landscapes and paths connect with each other. When I teach about medieval maps, I talk about how world maps relate to worldview. Maps depict the world metaphorically as much as literally, and medieval cartographers were no less making an accurate worldview as modern ones. In medieval maps, the worldview being so carefully depicted was different from ours, and the aims of the maps are therefore different, but the fact that they give a sense of worldview is the same. If anything, medieval maps are more clear about that fact than modern ones, with the modern notion of depicting the world as it "really is." What medieval world maps can teach us is how constructed maps really are, how much they can tell us not just about how to get from one place to another but also about the cultural mindsets that went into their creation. When my friends and I planned that first cross-country trip with maps and atlases, we gained some of that sense, whether consciously or not. We noticed the shapes of the states and therefore were confronted with the historical and geographical features that forged those boundaries between the individual puzzle pieces that make up this country. We saw how sometimes lakes or mountains manage to cross those borders as well as create them. We became aware of the things that are included in these maps, and the the things that aren't. At any given point in the trip, we could envision our relation to the rest of the trip as well as to all of the areas of the country outside of our path.

When I went on my second cross-country trip, we got some of this as well. I did examine an atlas from time to time, but for fun instead of for practical reasons, since we allowed the GPS to guide us completely. My father having recently passed away, and my mother's move occasioned in response to his death, the trip was cathartic for us. Since my dad loved maps so much, having some along felt right. But, without Dad in the car, the GPS navigated for us. It was a leisurely trip, and we made lots of stops to visit relatives and see sites of historical and/or geographical interest. And our GPS guided us faithfully every step of the way. I love that GPS, and it has never failed me. Mom and I even joked that it saved our good relationship, since getting lost can wreak havoc on family members in the close quarters of a compact vehicle. Yet I began to realize, as we followed its rather insistent directions without question, that watching the GPS screen was giving me a completely different view of the country than looking at a map would have done. A GPS only shows the direct area around the vehicle, and with only the most basic place names and other such features. A large enough river or lake might merit a blotch of blue on the screen, but most topographical features are excluded totally. The most notable feature of the GPS is the green line to indicate that you're going in the right direction (or the dreaded red line to warn you that you're going in the wrong one). In some ways, a map like this might make clear how far from the actual landscape maps actually are, its stylized representation of the country bearing so little resemblance to the view outside the car windows. But there's something else that distinguishes a GPS from other varieties of maps. A GPS gives a teleological view of geography. It's purpose is not to represent the country or region or state or town or neighborhood with any kind of totality but instead to get the driver from point A to point B. Larger context is shed and only the details that serve the purpose of the final destination are included. Anyone who has used a GPS has become painfully aware of this fact when attempting to make an unexpected detour. Dare to stop for a bathroom break or for lunch or to make a spontaneous visit to a roadside attraction, and the harsh tones of a phrase like "Turn back where possible" will repeat insistently until the passengers are forced to turn the sound off until back on the original path. As useful as the device is, it really is about the destination rather than the journey. The people of the Middle Ages had something for this purpose as well: the itinerary. Meant for pilgrims who needed to know how to get to a specific destination, itineraries were long, unfolding maps depicting the road and roadside details needed to find one's way from one place to another.

Sections from an Itinerary to the Holy Land by Mathiew Paris, 13th century

The aesthetic differences between the mappa mundi, or world map, and the itinerarium peregrinorum, or pilgrim's itinerary, are immediately apparent, as are the differences of purpose. While mappae mundi are aesthetic creations and visual encyclopedias that tell the viewer about his/her location in terms of a larger historical and spiritual narrative, itineraries give the traveler a means by which he/she can accomplish a journey. The former is of little practical use when trying to find one's way, though it may in fact have given people a sense of finding their way in a more cultural and spiritual sense. The second may give some practical guidance to the traveller (though, looking at itineraries, I am dubious of even how much they would have helped a medieval traveller). Finding one's way and locating one's self in the world are the province of each, but in a different way. Perhaps they give a different sense of narrative as well as geography. The way in which biblical and classical and contemporary history overlap on the world maps tells us something about the view of history such maps relate. They're densely textual, but the each piece of text only has meaning in terms of its spacial relationship to other bits of text or features of the map. The visual and the textual are inextricably bound. Itineraries are often colorful and beautiful, but they still give a sense of narrative as linear. They move the viewer from a beginning point at the bottom, before which there is nothing, to an endpoint at the top, after which there is nothing. A GPS is different, of course, in that the destination can be changed on a whim, and that the traveller can enter a new destination for each portion of the journey, but it still privileges destination. The device will do nothing until a destination is entered, and it only functions for any length of time when the car is on and it can be plugged in (helpfully reminding the user not to drive and work it at the same time). It is, in that way, for no other purpose than getting from place to place. Its ever changing screen allows for no contemplative functions, and that's OK. It serves its purpose well. Yet comparing different kinds of maps and navigational tools reminds me of the different ways in which we relate to our geographies, our histories, our lives. As I play with my apps from National Geographic World Atlas and Google Earth and watch as the screen zooms in from globe to individual location, I wonder about the multiplicity of ways in which we can view the world around us.

"Do you feel different than you did yesterday?": Identity and Growing up

This past week I've turned 30, and I've been thinking a lot about age. In my culture, I've reached a new landmark. I'm now in a different category. Perhaps I'm even an adult (though it's hard to be sure). Yet I remember clearly being a child, being a teenager, turning 18 and 21. Those selves were different, and yet they were also me. I am different, and yet I am still them as well. When I look at the images of me in my prom pictures, first drivers license, or kindergarten school photo I know what thoughts lie behind the eyes of the girl in those pictures because I was the one thinking them. Since I teach and write so much about identity, I think it's perhaps useful to think a bit about how age and identity interact in ways similar to and different from other identity categories.

Aging is inevitable; as long as we're alive we continue to age. (Whether we mature or not is another story . . .) And yet I find it important to remember earlier ages, to remember what it was like to be in different positions because of age. Children are disenfranchised and vulnerable, at the mercy of those to whom fate has delivered them. I was lucky enough to have wonderful parents to care for me, but not all children are fortunate in this way. And being a child is scary even in the best of circumstances. Everything is new, and children have little power over their lives, little understanding of the world around them, and little ability to communicate their ideas.

I remember learning to write my name with my grandma. I must have been about three. I felt terribly unjust providing the "i" with dots and leaving the other letters dotless, so I took a bold and unprecedented step and dotted every letter. My grandmother, a wonderful teacher and very patient person, erased the extra dots and explained to me once again how to spell my name. I tried to explain to her that I did understand how to write my name, that I hadn't made a mistake but instead had made a difficult choice in the name of justice. As you might imagine, I simply didn't have the words. Though this is a silly example, I still understand that struggle to express my opinions and beliefs to others. In fact, much of grad school has been about learning to put into words those things that I've always cared about. Dissertation-writing is so painful at times because it's an attempt to think things that haven't yet been expressed and find a way to express them.

I also remember my first day of pre-school. I was thrilled to be entering a world of learning, but I was also painfully timid. I sat at playtime doing nothing. I wanted to go across the room and get the play-doh, but I wasn't sure whether or not I was allowed to play with the play-doh. That distance between my chair and the toy cabinet was too perilous to cross, so I sat alone while other children laughed and played. Yet that day I came home and announced to my parents that I would be a teacher one day. In the safety of my own bedroom, I grew bold in my newly attained school-wisdom. I lined up my dolls and stuffed animals and taught them everything I'd learned. Over the years, I have worked hard to bring out the assertive teacher-self in me. Most of the time, I have succeeded, but sometimes the scared little child in the big and frightening classroom of the world returns without warning. Not only do I remember what it's like to be her, but sometimes I am her again.

I could write endless examples of such moments in my life, both meaningful and mundane. I could write about the sense of desperate grief and dismay and terror when my friend was stolen from her bedroom at night when I was 11 while her mother slept down the hall. I could talk less seriously, and explain my feelings of righteous validation when it was discovered that my first car was stolen (and totaled) by a bunch of 30-somethings rather than by "stupid teenagers," as all the adults had assumed. I could talk about my first breakup or about my cross-country move or the moment I discovered that my father had died. All of these represent different moments of my life. I can neither fully exist in those moments again nor be fully detached from how I felt in them. They work together to make up me.

Time is funny that way. Age is funny that way. We all move inexorably from childhood to adulthood, whatever those terms mean. In fact, age might be the only way in which everyone, without fail, drastically changes identity categories. All one must do is stay alive. At different ages, we exist differently in the world, and the world treats us differently based on how long we've been in it. Of course there are countless factors making up our identity position at any one moment. Our race, class, sex, religion, etc. all impact identity position, as does individual personality. And different times and places define ages differently, as they do these other factors. But age is unique in that any given age is fleeting. We all move from one age to the next and can make the choice of how to treat those people younger than we (or, for that matter, older than we). Perhaps if we can consider how it felt to be in a different identity position because of age we can go a step further and think about how it might feel to be in a different position for other reasons. Perhaps if we learn some compassion for our younger selves, we can extend that to compassion for other people as well. Perhaps it's clear that, while I've grown more cynical with each year, I'm also still the same idealist who wanted to give every letter a dot.

"Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou Art Translated!"

Hi everyone! I'm excited to join In Romaunce as We Rede, and I thought I would start with some musings I had thanks to teaching. As so often happens, the collective process of discovery in class has led me to see a text I've read many times in a fresh way. I've been teaching A Midsummer Night's Dream, and my students have been especially interested in the mythological background of Theseus (probably because they were excited to connect Ariadne to Inception). While we were talking about the minotaur, labyrinth, etc, it occurred to me that I could look at Bottom's transformation as a kind of perversion of the minotaur image. Instead of a frightening bull-man, Bottom becomes a silly mechanical with an ass's head. He's been attempting to play every role in one Ovid story, and has somehow found himself in a different Ovid story altogether. Translation here means transformation, certainly, but I also think that Bottom's transformation becomes synecdochic for the multiple kinds of translation that are going on here (linguistic, cultural, generic, chronological, imagistic, etc.). His hybrid body, part man and part ass (and I do think it's important that the animal aspect is his head, traditionally the seat of reason) is both man and beast, as the stories he performs mingle tragedy and comedy, literal and metaphorical, etc. In each case, the story Bottom represents becomes ridiculous with him as the protagonist, and he is the butt of our jokes throughout.

Yet if Bottom is a sort of ridiculous stand-in for the minotaur, that seems to increase both his centrality to the play and his alterity. He has certainly fascinated audiences, and most of the artistic representation of the play I've seen have been of Bottom and Titania in her bower. Such an image, indeed, often adorns the cover of editions of the play. Bottom therefore becomes an image for the play itself. He's a defining figure, at the center of the labyrinthesque dreamscape of the play. His freakish aspects and eagerness to take on every role make him an object of fun and pity. And it may be with some anxiety that we realize that he is, for Titania, a representative of mortality, of those creatures who connect with the earth itself, unlike her ethereal and supernatural immortality. A creature, therefore, very much like us. My students found the play-within-the-play, often performed to such hilarious effect, troublesome. They pointed out the class problems with the play; they lamented the fact that the mechanicals, who had worked so hard and been so excited when their play was chosen, were mercilessly and unanimously ridiculed. Perhaps they, as new college students whose work is being judged constantly, who work hard without always understanding what the end result should be, who are eager to please and to learn a variety of subjects, perhaps they saw something of themselves in Bottom and the mechanicals. Bottom attempts to be a learned man, a man of authority, and yet is unaware that everyone can see his ass's head. As a graduate student, this may encapsulate my own fears as well.

Many critics, from what I have seen thus far, find Bottom's transformation to be a literalization of what he already is -- a visual pun on the fact that he's an ass (and the play's use of dramatic irony when he claims that the others are trying to make an ass of him backs up such a reading). With some supernatural intervention, his physical form does grow to match his behavior. And in a play the ass's head must be performed literally -- an animal head is actually placed on the actor's body. It is such a literal rendering, however, that I find both fascinating and troubling. It may be a joke about Bottom playing an ass's role, but it also indicates that he is not quite human, not quite worthy of the noble class's empathy. We are meant to laugh along with the Duke and Duchess as Bottom plays the fool (and I have often done exactly that when I've seen the play performed). Like the minotaur, he's not as human as we are; he's both at the center of the puzzle and permanently marginalized. And the fact that my students stepped back and worried about what he was thinking and feeling made me proud as an instructor. Far from being only concerned with their own experiences, they were able to empathize even when to do so was to read against the text of the play.

I'd like to know what others think about this play, about Bottom's hybridity, about moments in teaching or reading that bring hope or empathy like this one did for me. So, what do you think?