Revista de la AsociaciÃ³n EspaÃ±ola de Estudios Anglo - Atlantis

Revista de la Asociación Española de 

Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos 

This issue is dedicated to the 

fond memory of 

CARMELO CUNCHILLOS JAIME 

(1949-2010) 

Vol. 32, núm. 1 Junio 2010

32.1 (June 2010) 32.1 (Junio 2010) 

Assistant Editor: Ludmila Urbanová 

University of Brno 

Book Reviews Editor: Clara Calvo 

Universidad de Murcia 

Andrew Blake 

University of Winchester 

Martin Bygate 

Lancaster University 

Teresa Fanego 

Universidad de Santiago de Compostela 

Fernando Galván 

Universidad de Alcalá de Henares 

Ana Antón-Pacheco 

Universidad Complutense de Madrid 

Joan C. Beal 

University of Sheffield 

Jesús Benito Sánchez 

Universidad de Valladolid 

Marcella Bertuccelli Papi 

Università di Pisa 

Nilufer E. Bharucha 

University of Mumbai 

Anita Biressi 

Roehampton University 

Maggie Ann Bowers 

University of Portsmouth 

EDITORS 

Editores 

General Editor: Angela Downing 


Copy Editor: Jorge Arús Hita 


EDITORIAL BOARD 

Consejo de Redacción 

BOARD OF ADVISORS 

Consejo Asesor 

BOARD OF REFEREES 

Consejo Científico y Evaluador 

Kris Van den Branden 

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven 

Mario Brdar 

Josip Juraj Strossmayer University 

Laurel J. Brinton 

University of British Columbia 

Manuel Broncano 

Texas A & M International University 

Jorge Luis Bueno Alonso 

University of Vigo 

Christopher S. Butler 

Swansea University 

Graham D. Caie 

University of Glasgow 

Managing Editor: Carmen Méndez 


Editor’s Assistant: Juan Rafael Zamorano 


Universität Bremen 

Heinz Ickstadt 

Freie Universität Berlin 

J. Hillis Miller 

University of California at Irvine 

Susheila M. Nasta 

Open University 

Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza 

Universidad de La Rioja 

Gordon Campbell 

University of Leicester 

Isabel Carrera 

Universidad de Oviedo 

Shirley Chew 

University of Leeds 

Robert Clark 

University of East Anglia 

Thomas Claviez 

University of Bern 

Tom Cohen 

University of Albany 

Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre 

Universidad de Murcia

Francisco J. Cortés Rodríguez 

Universidad de La Laguna 

Isabel de la Cruz Cabanillas 


Pilar Cuder 

Universidad de Huelva 

Daniela Daniele 

Università di Udine 

Rocío G. Davis 

University of Navarra 

Denise deCaires Narain 

University of Sussex 

Celestino Deleyto 

Universidad de Zaragoza 

Balz Engler 

University of Basel 

Charles Forceville 

University of Amsterdam 

Javier Franco Aixelá 

Universidad de Alicante 

María del Pilar García Mayo 

Universidad del País Vasco 

Cristina Garrigós 

Universidad de León 

Dirk Geeraerts 

University of Leuven 

Lincoln Geraghty 

University of Portsmouth 

Vincent Gillespie 

University of Oxford 

Cristina Giorcelli 

Università di Roma Tre 

Manuel José Gómez Lara 

Universidad de Sevilla 

José Luis González Escribano 


Francisco Gonzálvez García 

Universidad de Almería 

Agnieszka Graff 

Warsaw University 

Leighton Grist 


Adolphe Haberer 

Université Lumière-Lyon 2 

Felicity Hand Cranham 

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 

Pilar Hidalgo 

Universidad de Málaga 

Juan Carlos Hidalgo 

Universidad de Sevilla 

Ton Hoenselaars 

Utrecht University 

Jacqueline Hurtley 

Universitat de Barcelona 

David Johnson 

The Open University 

Stephan Kohl 

Julius-Maximilians-Universität 

Würzburg 

Zoltán Kövecses 

Eötvös Loránd University 

Manfred Krug 

Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg 

Merja Kytö 

Uppsala University 

Alberto Lázaro 


Ursula Lenker 

Catholic University of Eichstätt 

María José López Couso 

Universidad de Santiago de 

Compostela 

Dámaso López García 


María Losada Friend 

Universidad de Huelva 

Ricardo Mairal Usón 

UNED 

Ana María Manzanas Calvo 

Universidad de Salamanca 

Javier Martín Arista 


John McLeod 

University of Leeds 

Lavinia Merlini 

Università di Pisa 

Silvia Molina Plaza 

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid 

Rafael Monroy 


Carmen Muñoz 

Universitat de Barcelona 

Jo Anne Neff Van Aertselaer 


Heather Nunn 

Roehampton University 

Begoña Núñez Perucha 


James Ogude 

University of the Witwatersrand 

Ana Ojea 


Mohamed-Salah Omri 

University of Exeter 

Klaus-Uwe Panther 

Universität Hamburg 

Pedro Javier Pardo 

Universidad de Salamanca 

Ruth Parkin-Gounelas 

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki 

Javier Pérez Guerra 

Universidad de Vigo 

James Procter 

University of Newcastle upon Tyne 

Victor J. Ramraj 

University of Calgary 

David Richards 

University of Stirling 

Caroline Rooney 

University of Kent 

Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza 


Dianne F. Sadoff 

Rutgers University 

Jürgen Schlaeger 

Humboldt-Universität Berlin 

Elena Seoane 

Universidad de Santiago de 

Compostela 

María Josep Solé Sabater 

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 

Alasdair Spark 


M. S. Suárez Lafuente 


Juan Antonio Suárez 


Henry Sussman 

University of Buffalo / Yale University 

Justine Tally 

Universidad de La Laguna 

Paloma Tejada Caller 


Geoff Thompson 

University of Liverpool 

I. M. Tieken-Boon van Ostade 

University of Leiden 

Harish Trivedi 

University of Delhi 

Carmen Valero Garcés 


Boris Vejdovsky 

University of Lausanne 

Ruth Wodak 

Lancaster University 

Pilar Zozaya 

University of Barcelona

Revista de la Asociación Española de 

Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos 

32.1 (June 2010) 32.1 (Junio 2010) 

Table of Contents • Índice 

Remembering absent friends • Recuerdos de amigos ausentes 

Carmelo Cunchillos Jaime (1949-2010) ...................................................................... 9 

Articles • Artículos 

Decentring Discourse, Self-Centred Politics: 

Radicalism and the Self in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway 

Cristina Delgado García 

Aberystwyth University ................................................................................................... 15 

The Word Made Flesh: 

Law, Literature and Ethical Responsiveness in Daniel Berrigan’s The Trial of 

the Catonsville Nine 

Bárbara Arizti 

Universidad de Zaragoza ................................................................................................. 29 

“. . . in ecstatic cahoots”: Nick’s Authoring of Gatsby 

Winifred Farrant Bevilacqua 

Università degli Studi di Torino ....................................................................................... 45 

Banned in Spain? 

Truths, Lies and Censorship in Kate O’Brien’s Novels 

Marisol Morales Ladrón 

University of Alcalá ......................................................................................................... 57

A Narrative of the Life of Mrs Mary Jemison: 

Rhetorical Drag and the Defiance of Hegemonic Cultural Models 

Elena Ortells Montón 

Universitat Jaume I de Castelló ........................................................................................ 73 

Ilan Stavans’s On Borrowed Words, Jewish-Latino/a Writing and 

Transnational Autobiography 

Markus Heide 

Humboldt University Berlin ............................................................................................ 87 

The Inflection-Derivation Continuum and the Old English 

Suffixes -a, -e, -o, -u 

Elisa González Torres 

Universidad de La Rioja ................................................................................................... 103 

A Multimodal Analysis of The Tale of Peter Rabbit within 

the Interpersonal Metafunction 

A. Jesús Moya Guijarro 

University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain ........................................................................... 123 

The Age of The Diamond Age: 

Cognitive Simulations, Hive Wetwares and Socialized Cyberspaces as the 

Gist of Postcyberpunk 

Rafael Miranda Huereca 

Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona ............................................................................... 141 

Reviews • Reseñas 

David Levey 2008: 

Language Change and Variation in Gibraltar 

reviewed by M. Teresa Turell .................................................................................. 157 

Bullón-Fernández, María, ed. 2007: 

England and Iberia in the Middle Ages. 12 th -15 th century. 

Cultural Literacy and Political Exchanges 

reviewed by Paloma Tejada Caller ......................................................................... 165 

Sarah Harriet Burney 2008: 

The Romance of Private Life 

reviewed by Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez .............................................. 173

Muñoz-Calvo, Micaela, Carmen Buesa-Gómez and 

M. Ángeles Ruiz-Moneva, eds. 2008: 

New Trends in Translation and Cultural Identity 

reviewed by Jorge Braga Riera ................................................................................. 179 

David Savran 2009: 

Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class 

reviewed by Barbara Ozieblo ................................................................................... 185 

Marisol Morales Ladrón, ed. 2007: 

Postcolonial and Gender Perspectives in Irish Studies 

reviewed by Inés Praga Terente .............................................................................. 191 

Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................ 197 

Editorial policy and Instructions to contributors ........................................................... 199

REMEMBERING 

ABSENT FRIENDS 

RECUERDOS DE 

AMIGOS AUSENTES

CARMELO CUNCHILLOS JAIME 

(1949-2010) 

Carmelo Cunchillos Jaime was Full Professor of English and American Literature at 

the University of La Rioja. He was born to a family of farmers in Calahorra, La Rioja, 

but he had the occasion to spend part of his childhood years first in France and then 

in England, which probably contributed to shaping his vocation in the study of 

foreign languages and literatures. After obtaining degrees in English and in Romance 

Languages at the University of Zaragoza, he started his teaching career in 1975 at the 

University College of La Rioja, which was a local branch of the aforementioned 

University. 

His initial steps in research were focused on the North-American writer J. D. 

Salinger, but soon after he took a different path by devoting his main efforts to the 

study of the English translations of Don Quixote. These efforts culminated in his 

1984 PhD thesis, entitled Traducciones y Ediciones Inglesas del Quijote (1612-1800). 

Estudio Crítico y Bibliográfico, supervised by Dr. Julio César Santoyo. In 1987 he 

became senior lecturer in English and English Literature at the University College of 

La Rioja. Six years later he obtained his full professorship at the brand new University 

of La Rioja, founded just one year earlier. 

At the same time as he was working towards his full professorship, Carmelo 

Cunchillos, as the Head of the University College of La Rioja, played a leading role in 

the consolidation of the academic structure of the so-called La Rioja campus and in 

the foundation of the new University, which was a particularly challenging venture in 

the political and social context of those years. This provided him with ample 

experience that would later become instrumental in his widely acknowledged 

achievements as a member of the executive boards of the Spanish Association of 

Angloamerican Studies (1992-1998) and of the European Society for the Study of 

English (1996-2002). 

The late 1980s and the 1990s were a fruitful period during which Professor 

Cunchillos supervised several research projects that resulted in a number of PhD 

dissertations mainly centered on narrative studies and on such literary figures as 

Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis and Alice Munro. 

However, he always had a special interest in the problem of the demarcation between 

Modernism and Post-Modernism, which connected Professor Cunchillos’s literary 

research with some central concerns of literary theory. 

In the early 1990s, Professor Cunchillos became part of a European research 

project, directed by Professor Wolf Paprotté (Münster University), which involved 

six different European universities. The project, which dealt with the application of 

the new language and communication technologies to the field of humanities, was 

one of the first attempts to facilitate the use of computer tools that are now part of 

everyday life but which at that time were in a very incipient stage of development. It 

should be noted that this project started at a moment when the World Wide Web was 

not open to the general public.

Professor Cunchillos founded and gave shape to the fledgling Department of 

Modern languages during the early stages in the creation of the University of La 

Rioja. He then served as its first Head from 1992 to 1994 and then again from 1995 to 

2000. He was the brain behind the first English Philology official academic 

curriculum in La Rioja and its main driving force all through its implementation 

process in the ensuing years. However, despite this impressive academic and 

scientific record, those who knew Professor Carmelo Cunchillos will always stress his 

personal influence on his disciples, his collaborators and his peers in academic and 

scientific circles. Many would agree that Carmelo, our dear Carmelo, like his beloved 

and deeply studied Don Quixote, was a Spanish “knight-errant” at heart. He was 

noble, enterprising, and generous. He never feared the challenges of life. Nobody 

who came to him for help went unheeded. With the same courage with which he 

broke grounds for the coming generations in all his spheres of activity, he also faced 

illness, suffering and pain, which beset him during his last years. Yet he never lost any 

of his gentleness, his moral strength, his lucidity, and his zest for life. Very sadly, 

Carmelo has left us, but many tender memories soften our grief. 

Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez 

Pedro Santana Martínez 

University of La Rioja

ARTICLES 

ARTÍCULOS

ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 32.1 (June 2010): 15–28 

ISSN 0210-6124 

Decentring Discourse, Self-Centred Politics: 

Radicalism and the Self in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs 

Dalloway 

Cristina Delgado García 

Aberystwyth University 

ccd09@aber.ac.uk 

The present article analyses the narrative devices by which the Woolfian, anti-essentialist 

notion of subjectivity is produced in Mrs Dalloway. This analysis aims to critically assess 

the novel’s decentring discourse on selfhood in a political light. Focusing on the selfdefinition 

of the characters at the time of the fiction, the first section examines the 

discursive production of Clarissa Dalloway’s diffused and connective self. The second 

section of this article considers the politics of memory within the production of identity 

in the novel, taking the Bergsonian notions of élan vital and open morality as a theoretical 

framework. The analysis of the production of selfhood in Mrs Dalloway at a synchronic 

(self-definition in the diegetic present time) and diachronic level (definition through 

memory) uncovers strong phallogocentric and conservative tensions in the novel, 

tensions that may have been overlooked as a result of Virginia Woolf’s own progressive 

politics. 

Keywords: Virginia Woolf; Mrs Dalloway; radicalism; selfhood; language; Henri Bergson 

Discurso descentralizador, politica egocéntrica: radicalismo e 

individualidad en Mrs Dalloway, de Virginia Woolf 

Este artículo analiza las estrategias narrativas a través de las cuales Virginia Woolf elabora su 

noción anti-esencialista del sujeto en Mrs Dalloway. Este estudio tiene como objeto valorar el 

discurso descentralizador que la novela construye sobre la idea del sujeto desde un ángulo 

político. La primera sección examina la auto-definición de los personajes en el momento en 

que se desarrolla la acción de la novela, centrándose sobre todo en la producción discursiva de 

la identidad difusa e interconectiva de Clarissa Dalloway. La segunda sección considera la 

política de la memoria en la producción de identidad en la novela, tomando como marco 

teórico los conceptos Bergsonianos de élan vital y moralidad abierta. Este análisis sincrónico 

(auto-definición en el presente) y diacrónico (definición a través de la memoria) revela 

tensiones falogocéntricas y conservadoras en la novela, tensiones que han podido quedar 

eclipsadas en la crítica debido a la política progresista de la escritora. 

Palabras clave: Virginia Wolf; Mrs Dalloway; radicalismo; individualidad del sujeto; 

lenguaje; Henri Bergson

16 Cristina Delgado García 

1. Introduction: Questioning the weapons of a ‘Guerrilla Fighter in a Victorian Skirt’ 

Virginia Woolf’s persona has been construed as a controversial “guerrilla fighter in a 

Victorian skirt” (qtd. in Helal 2005: 79) whose oeuvre more or less explicitly, but 

invariably, is allied with the progressive politics of feminism, socialism and pacifism. 

However subtle it may be, Woolf’s “radical critique of ‘the fabric of things’” (Bradshaw 

2000: 191) is rarely contested in relation to her fiction. Woolf’s anti-didacticism, as 

expressed in her attacks on D. H. Lawrence and George Meredith (Zwerdling 1997: 69), 

has often been used to explain why her radicalism is less explicit in her novels than in A 

Room of One’s Own or Three Guineas (Bradshaw 2000: 191; Zwerdling 1997: 69). Such 

contention poses the question of whether the critic could be imposing already-made 

ideological assumptions on authorship and intentionality, which may have been 

retrieved from other texts and construed as truth and as reading guidelines. Focusing 

on Mrs Dalloway, Margaret Blanchard’s account on the novel’s “glimpse into the effects 

of socialization” (1972: 295) acknowledged but failed to incorporate two crucial features 

of the text. The first is Clarissa’s passivity; the second is the decisive admission that 

“what ‘unites’ Clarissa, Septimus and Peter is not shared activity but how they perceive 

each other and themselves in relation to the other” (1972: 305). Whilst Blanchard 

acknowledges that their union is perceptual rather than factual, this is not held as an 

argument against considering Woolf’s text as a portrait of socialisation. 

As regards gender relations, Woolf’s fictional narration of female experience and 

foregrounding of the complexities of feminine identity, sexuality and creativity have 

been heralded as feminist statements, despite their “inconsistencies” (Marcus 2000: 

211). Woolf’s celebration of “the domestic woman as a version of the artist” (Mullin 

2006: 144), and her elitist concern with the upper classes are the two most frequent 

sources of controversy regarding her feminism. Bang Wang and Toril Moi have recently 

readdressed the debate on Woolf’s radicalism and feminism by focusing on questions of 

identity and the liberal-humanist subject. For Wang, Mrs Dalloway conveys a “psychic 

resistance to the symbolic order” (1992: 190), a resistance that is highly political in the 

sense that it expresses the social creation and imposition of identity on a consciousness 

that is fluid. Moi attempts to restore Woolf’s feminism from Elaine Showalter’s 

criticism by pointing out that Woolf’s “non-essentialist form of writing” (2002: 10) 

represents a revolt against “God, the Father or the phallus as its transcendental 

signified” (2002: 9). However, Moi’s account is tangentially interested in Woolf, as her 

main focus is feminist literary theory, and this calls for a re-evaluation of the issue from 

a textual perspective. 

It is within the debate on the self and radicalism that this article will approach Mrs 

Dalloway, addressing issues on the subject raised by Wang and Moi whilst redirecting 

the attention to the text. This article aims to critically discuss whether Woolf’s aesthetics 

regarding the self in Mrs Dalloway is accompanied by a parallel engagement with radical 

politics. More specifically, this article will question whether the Woolfian self allows or 

hinders a progressive positioning of the text, and will consider to what extent 

unperformed dissidence can be read as radically-compelled. Essential to this article is to 


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Decentring Discourse, Self-Centred Politics 17 

position the use of the term radical. It will be used throughout in its broad sense, 

namely “believing or expressing the belief that there should be great or extreme social 

or political change” (‘Radical’, def. 1a), and not in reference to an alliance with any 

particular political party or organisation. Likewise, conservative will refer to a tendency 

“not to like or trust change, especially sudden change” (‘Conservative’, def. 1a). Thus, 

this article does not intend to analyse whether Mrs Dalloway advocates the necessity of 

governmental change in the post-war, conservative-ruled and still imperialist Great 

Britain of 1923. Instead, it will assess the ways in which Woolf’s devices to create 

character either allow or disallow a socially aware, non-masculinist envisioning of the 

self and of otherness which may epitomise the possibility of social challenge and change 

in the characters’ past, in their 1923 present time of the fiction or in an alleged future. 

This article will analyse the devices by which the anti-essentialist self is produced in 

Mrs Dalloway and their implications in terms of radicalism. It will be argued that the 

main characters are created in relation to two axes – synchronically, by seeking selfdefinition 

while expressing a desire to communicate with other individuals; 

diachronically, by oscillating between the time of the diegesis and a past recalled by 

constant memories. The discussion on these axes on representation will constitute the 

two main sections of this article. The first part will begin by examining how Clarissa’s 

diffused and connective self is created in the novel and what its relationship to 

phallogocentrism and conservatism is. The second part will question the relationship 

between radicalism and the constant reference to past memories, not only from the 

point of view of the lack of an alternative future but also as a mechanism to suffocate 

the élan vital and the open morality that would allow progressive politics. This will lead 

to the conclusion that Woolf’s techniques to construct the self promote subtle but 

strong conservative tensions in the novel. 

This examination will allow for the incorporation of aspects of the novel that were 

overlooked in previous critical analyses, such as the purely narrative validity of the 

connections between characters. It will also prevent the use of Woolf’s personal 

sympathies as a pre-assumed and biased interpretative basis. Finally, this debate will 

prove useful to open alternative readings of the politics of the self in the novel, such as 

that on the Bergsonian élan vital and the incorporation of a close morality. 

2. Untangling the fiction of connectedness: alienation, self-centredness and 

phallogocentrism 

Woolf’s technique to construct the self can be read through Saussure’s synchronic and 

diachronic axes. In relation to the synchronic, Mrs Dalloway claims to receive meaning 

from her relation to coexisting selves, exactly as the linguistic sign is given value on the 

synchronic axis “from the simultaneous presence of other terms” without considering 

here “the intervention of time” (Saussure 2004: 64). Indeed, Woolf’s protagonist rejects 

the closure and definiteness of an essentialist understanding of identity and refuses to 

ever affirm of anybody “that they were this or were that” (Woolf 2000: 7). Mrs 

Dalloway’s reluctance to self-definition relies on her connection to those “coexisting 

things” (Saussure 2004: 64) unfurled on the synchronic level: 


ISSN 0210-6124


Somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she 

survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees 

at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people 

she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted 

her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her 

life, herself. (Woolf 2000: 8) 

The passage above illustrates how Clarissa views her selfhood not as a non-transferable, 

inherent essence, but as a ubiquitous relation between her and immediate places, 

objects and animate beings that are “here, now, in front of her” (2000: 8). Jean M. 

Wyatt has compared Clarissa’s views on a merging identity to Kristeva’s idea of the 

semiotic self and to Lacan’s pre-mirror and mirror stages of development (1986: 119- 

23). Bringing this into the realm of politics, Moi has interpreted Woolf’s use of a non 

self-contained subjectivity as a radical feminist position since it challenges “the malehumanist 

concept of an essential human identity” (2002: 7), allowing for a re-reading 

Woolf from a feminist perspective. 

However, the subversive possibilities of Clarissa’s anti-humanist disintegration can 

actually be contested, since her challenge remains subjected to male-centred 

dichotomies. Clarissa’s choice of habitable spaces – the streets of London, a derelict 

house – as partial recipients and preservers of her subjectivity suggests that her self is 

perceived as yet another receiver awaiting to be occupied, walked on or possessed. Later 

in the text she describes herself again as being “a meeting point, . . . a refuge for the 

lonely to come to” (Woolf 2000: 32). In addition, the comparison of her life to a mist 

that is lifted by her relations not only conveys the idea of Clarissa’s self being 

incorporeal, boundless and rootless, but it also highlights the lack of agency already 

announced by the previous images of herself as a habitable space. As such, she identifies 

with nature as opposed to culture, with habitable receptacles versus its inhabitants and, 

finally, with an inanimate object rather than an active agent – the old male-centred 

dichotomies. This is further reinforced by Clarissa’s fantasies of self-creation and the 

description of her homosexual desire. When imagining a hypothetically alternative 

identity, she chooses to select, on the one hand, the physical features of Lady 

Bexbourough and, on the other, to be “interested in politics like a man” (2000: 9; 

emphasis mine). The description of her same-sex desires is still dominated by the 

masculinist language of erection, penetration, ejaculation and deflation; she describes it 

as a “a match burning in a crocus”, a revelation that “rushed to the farthest verge”, that 

“felt . . . the world swollen”, that “poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the 

cracks and sores” and, when the excitation is over, “the hard softened” (2000: 27). 

Again, this expresses the problematic nature of a feminist reading of Clarissa’s antiessentialism, 

since the nature of her fragmentation and connection relies on the 

integration of phallogocentrism. 

Clarissa’s discourse on the intensity of a relational self has been interpreted as a 

synecdoche of the whole novel, as if in Mrs Dalloway “Woolf . . . suggests the 

uncanniness of connection, between words, things and people” (Marcus 2004: 74). 

However, a close analysis of the text reveals that both the ‘uncanniness’ and the 

‘connection’ are an effect of certain narrative strategies since, in the diegesis, all 

characters except for Mrs Dalloway are portrayed as isolated selves, unable to 


ISSN 0210-6124


communicate and connect with those around them. Richard Dalloway struggles and 

subsequently fails to verbalise his romantic feelings for his wife, despite acknowledging 

that “it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels” (Woolf 2000: 98). Likewise, 

Peter Walsh also fails to realise Clarissa’s discourse on connective identity. His is a 

double alienation: that of the outsider who, newly arrived from India, is overwhelmed 

by the “strangeness of standing alone, alive, unknown, at half-past eleven in Trafalgar 

Square” (2000: 44); and also by the “impenetrability” (2000: 52) of a Mrs Dalloway 

who ironically believes herself in everyone, and with whom he feels he once shared a 

“queer power of communicating without words” (2000: 51). Peter’s disconnection is 

reduplicated in the figure of “the solitary traveller” of his dreams in Regent’s Park, an 

alter-ego for whom “nothing exists outside us except a state of mind . . . ; a desire for 

solace, for relief, for something outside these miserable pigmies, these feeble, these ugly, 

these craven men and women” (2000: 48). Thus, Peter’s symptomatic dream is actually 

the photographic negative of Clarissa’s envisionings: for him there is no unifying and 

uplifting mist between subjects, but rather atomisation and yearning for an impossible 

human contact. Lucrezia’s isolation in dealing with her husband’s post-traumatic stress 

disorder is repeatedly expressed, for instance: “I am alone; I am alone! she cried” (2000: 

20), and: “she was very lonely, she was very unhappy!” (2000: 76). Lucrezia’s feelings 

rule out the feminist argument that has interpreted Clarissa’s anti-essentialism as a 

voice of universal female experience. 

The most acute lack of connection with other selves is found in Septimus. Clarissa 

interprets his suicide through her own ideological framework, construing it as “an 

attempt to communicate” (2000: 156) and a vehicle for their connection despite their 

being strangers. However, the text portrays Septimus’s death as the result of a repeated 

failure to communicate. Suffering from shell-shock, the addressee of his musings is 

more often than not either himself or his dead friend Evans. Septimus’s redemptive 

message about trees and universal love is coded in such a way as to prove 

incomprehensible for any recipient. Like the words written in the sky by the advertising 

aeroplane, Septimus’s message blurs in his mind and fades away as he is trying to 

convey it to Dr Bradshaw. Mrs Dalloway thus shows the impossibility of 

communicating, of connecting. Clarissa’s overarching and all-absorbing view of 

subjectivity is actually not applicable to any of the other characters in the novel, whose 

isolation and lack of connection is overtly expressed in the text. 

Nevertheless, the text creates the illusion that an underlying link exists between 

these alienated selves that coexist on this day. Gillian Beer has suggested that the 

readers, like Clarissa, make these connections “partly through our assumed familiarity 

with these same places and history, partly through the lateral entwining of the narrative 

and its easy recourse to the personal pasts of memory, the communal past of an 

imagined prehistory” (1996: 53). Certainly, the collective memory of the First World 

War, being in London on a summer day in 1923 or witnessing the royal car constitute 

experiences that the characters share, and the news of Septimus’s death at Clarissa’s 

party indeed brings their existences closer together despite their being strangers. 

However, Beer’s account fails to consider the use of intertextual red herrings as the 

most important device to create links at the level of the narration, while individuals 

remain unconnected at the level of the story. 


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With this particular connecting function, two intertexts are drawn upon in order to 

establish these links in the narration. The first intertext is external, that is, the dirge 

from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline: “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,/Nor the furious 

winter’s rages” (Woolf 2000: 8). Wyatt has noted the structural role of the allusions to 

Cymbeline, which provide “the most important death and rebirth symbols [that] 

Clarissa and Septimus share” (1973: 445). This argument could be expanded beyond the 

overarching symbolic motifs it generates. It can be argued that the use of allusions to 

Cymbeline generates and supports Clarissa’s discourse on the relational self. By 

repeatedly quoting and modifying Shakespeare’s lines (2000: 8, 25, 34, 158), Clarissa 

appropriates them to the extent that they become an indicator of her subjectivity, rather 

than of the Shakespearean intertext. Thus, by incorporating among Peter’s thoughts the 

sentence “still, the sun was hot” (2000: 55); and by using it again amid Septimus’s 

suicidal musings (2000: 127), the narration is providing scattered signs of Clarissa’s 

identity for the reader to retrieve and create these uncanny links between characters. 

The second intertext that creates such connections is internal, since it draws upon 

Septimus’s undelivered message: “Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. . . . 

Change the world. No one kills from hatred” (2000: 21). The uncanny repetition of the 

tree-motif throughout the novel works in this case to scatter Septimus’s subjectivity. If 

the readers are the only actual recipients of his message, they are the only ones who can 

identify the traces in the narration that justify Mrs Dalloway’s discourse on the 

relational self. Given this knowledge, the “curious pattern like a tree” (2000: 13) that 

Clarissa spots on the motor-car blinds, or her comparison of some moments to “buds 

on the tree of life” (2000: 25), it all brings the reader back to Septimus’s ideas. In short, 

these two intertexts allow the narration to fragment and disperse Clarissa’s and 

Septimus’s identities throughout the novel in such a way that their identification by the 

readers creates a net of connections between the characters that is inexistent in the 

diegesis. 

It can be argued therefore that the fragmented, ubiquitous and relational self is an 

illusion created by two narratives: that of Clarissa’s inner discourse about identity, and 

that of the novel and its connective devices. Uncovering this narrative artifice 

compromises the political radicalism of the novel and the space left for endorsing social 

reform. As regards gender politics in particular, this article has already shown how Mrs 

Dalloway’s discourse on the dissolving self proves problematic as a fictional feminist 

alternative to masculinist essentialism, since its rewriting of identity is still embedded in 

patriarchal dichotomies and it fails to represent any other experience beyond that of 

Clarissa. With regards to social politics, this twofold narrative has lead scholars to claim 

that the novel is a celebration of communal bounds beyond social barriers, so that 

“instead of isolated individuals there is the convergence of one person’s conscious 

moment with another’s through simultaneity of experience” (Blanchard 1972: 299). 

However, this can hardly be so when the ‘simultaneity of experience’ provided by living 

in London or attending Clarissa’s party does not prevent characters from being isolated, 

as the representation of their thoughts reveals. I would argue that the effect of these two 

narratives is precisely an illusion of connection between individuals which conceals the 

existence of social alienation, inequality and tension, and consequently naturalises the 


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existent order instead of promoting change. Clarissa’s narration of connectedness has 

the counter effect of turning her identity into a totality from which she cannot step out 

and fully recognise other people’s needs and wants in their own right, without drawing 

them back to herself. For instance, Clarissa’s cathartic identification with Septimus 

when she hears of his suicide highlights her sheer renewal through his death, but their 

connection is purely unidirectional and narrative. More importantly, Clarissa’s 

narration obscures the fact that the state is ultimately responsible for Septimus’s 

participation in the war and his resulting shell-shock, as well as his social isolation and 

suicide, given that the stranger cannot be integrated coherently and productively into 

the social fabric. 

The illusion of connectedness activated by narrative devices also eclipses the 

existence of a society where there are alienating, reifying and oppressive forces in 

operation, specifically controlled by Clarissa’s social group. From this perspective, there 

are untold links between characters which the narration obviates. The untold 

parallelism between Clarissa and sir Bradshaw is an example. Both share a careless 

alienating stance towards those outside their immediate high-societal circle. Sir 

Bradshaw “made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, . . . made it impossible for the 

unfit to propagate their views” (Woolf 2000: 84) without considering those “lunatics” 

as individuals. Likewise, Clarissa “cared much more for her roses than for the 

Armenians” (2000: 102) or Albanians whose suffering is known to her through her 

husband, and she is able to rejoice in the news that Septimus had “thrown [his life] 

away while they went on living” (2000: 158). If “the disclosure of some such patriarchal 

narrative of femininity is the sine qua non of feminist agitation” (Rooney 2006: 73), it 

can be argued that, by extension, the exposure of the narratives that naturalise social 

exploitation and alienation is another condition for social radicalism. In this respect, 

Woolf’s double narrative of the relational self works by concealing alienation, the lack 

of social ethics within the centres of power, and the pervasiveness of masculinist 

discourses and practices, and does so under a guise of common experience and 

unconscious connections. 

3. Memory, Radicalism and Social Ethics: a Bergsonian reading of Mrs Dalloway 

The second section of this article will focus on Woolf’s construction of characters on 

the diachronic axis and the possibilities this construction allows in terms of radicalism 

and social ethics. Parallel to its relation to coexisting selves in the novel, the subject is 

also defined upon the diachronic axis or “the axis of successions” (Saussure 2004: 64), 

in the sense that the past experiences of Clarissa, Sally, Peter, Septimus and Lucrezia are 

brought into the present by means of what Woolf described in her diaries as her 

“tunnelling process”: “I tell the past by instalments, as I have need of it” (qtd. in Dick 

2000: 51). The novel starts in media res, irrupting in the midst of a June morning in 

1923 when the decisive turning points in the lives of the main characters have already 

taken place. When the narrator reports that “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the 

flowers herself” (Woolf 2000: 4), Clarissa has rejected Peter and married Richard 


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Dalloway, she has not pursued the fulfilment of the homoerotic desires that she 

experienced in her youth, her rebellious friend Sally has married, and Septimus has 

fought a war that has shattered his academic aspirations, his relationship with Evans, his 

marriage and, above all, his mental health. It is only Septimus’s suicide that still awaits 

the reader in terms of plotline. Thus, the novel chronologically covers a short-spanned 

but linear forward movement, from the morning preparations to the party that will 

physically reunite all the characters that are present in Clarissa’s emotional, inner life. 

At the same time, the novel enacts a long-spanned backward glance – that of the 

analepses that are necessary for the reader to understand the characters’ evolution and 

their relationship in the present of the narration. 

This continuous but selective ‘tunnelling process’ has a detrimental effect on the 

envisioning of othernesses, of alternative selves and interrelations which would 

epitomise the possibility of social change or challenge in the future. Whereas the 

exploration of memory proves to be inexhaustible for Clarissa, Peter, Septimus or 

Lucrezia, the chronological movement forward finds the Dalloways’ party as its furthest 

limit. Only Lady Bruton’s ideas about migration, Miss Kilman’s political and religious 

indoctrination of Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s dreams about her future all confront the 

novel’s closed temporality and hint at the self’s capability of manipulating the present 

and building the future. However, these three characters occupy a marginal space in the 

narrative. The narration remains centred in the consciousness of Clarissa’s closest 

circle, a social circle that lives in a perpetual state of past recollection in order to reassess 

their present. Therefore, one of the unspoken conservative tensions of the narrative 

stems from its strong centripetal nature concerning the creation of the self in the 

diachronic axis. The constant recourse to memory forces the narrative to develop 

toward its already-lived centre, as opposed to stretching towards the characters’ 

outward, yet-to-be-discovered possibilities. A narration anchored in past events may be 

argued as dwelling on the characters’ past shortcomings in order to criticise their 

performance. However, by closing the temporal limits on that June day the novel 

obscures the imagining of a future, and along with it, of a possible alternative future. 

Surprising as it may seem, it is the blockage of the future time in the novel, and not 

Woolf’s recourse to memory, that brings Bergson’s philosophy into this study. 

Parallelisms have already been drawn between Henri Bergson’s durée réelle and Woolf’s 

‘moments of being’, her representation and understanding of temporality, as well as her 

emphasis on instinct versus intellect (Burwick and Douglass 1992; Gillies 1996; Kumar 

1979). However, the Bergson-Woolf debate has overlooked other possible political or 

ethical connections that go beyond discerning intertextual references from what could 

just be “a manifestation . . . of the Zeitgeist” (Kumar 1979: 68) in the early twentiethcentury 

philosophy and literature. This section will propose an alternative Bergsonian 

examination of Mrs Dalloway’s characters in the light of the élan vital and the 

distinction between closed and open morality as posed in the French writer and 

philosopher’s The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), a work that can 

retrospectively provide a new insight of politics in Woolf’s novel. 

Framed within the late nineteenth century vitalist philosophy which stood against 

the faith of the times in positivist and mechanistic discourses, Bergson’s idea of the élan 


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vital arises in Creative Evolution (1907). However, at this stage the idea of the vital 

impulse was not fully defined but just outlined as a kind of consciousness that exists 

beyond matter and which works as evolution’s propelling force. The vital impulse is 

vaguely sketched as a finite force which is “sustained right along the lines of evolution 

among which it gets divided, [and] is the fundamental cause of variations” (Bergson 

1984: 254). It is in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion that “the primal energy at 

the heart of the universe is affirmed to be love” (Goudge 1999: 19). The publication date 

of Bergson’s last work does not allow it to be an influence on Woolf’s novel. Yet, its 

view on the élan vital and questions of morality allow an alternative Bergsonian reading 

of Mrs Dalloways’s characters that may bring together the diachronic aspect of character 

construction and the unspoken political tensions in the novel. This idea of love as a 

powerful and creative force that generates dynamism and evolution will be used 

henceforth in order to reveal the status quo in the novel. 

Accordingly, from the perspective of the élan vital, Clarissa and Sally seem to have 

lost the vital force that they once had in their youth and which would have naturally 

thrust them into an evolutionary contestation of social constraints regarding class and 

gender. Instead, the passing away of their youthful sheer vitality and loving feelings is 

reflected in their mimicry and perpetuation of restrictive, status quo patterns which 

further suffocate their vitalism. In this sense, it is revealing the recurrent use of verbs in 

perfective aspect when referring to Clarissa’s former manifestations of the élan vital in 

her. When Clarissa remembers that “to dance, to ride, she had adored all that” or that 

“having cared for people” (Woolf 2000: 6; emphasis mine) was rewarded in the present 

by a lack of bitterness, she is signalling the completion of these actions or emotional 

states by means of the perfect tenses, as if the liveliness, passion and unrestrictive 

affections that she experienced in Bourton were not applicable to her present self, in 

London. 

Shannon Forbes’s argument that “the city environment provides for Clarissa a sense 

of the order, vitality and stability she lacks within her self” (2005: 40) encompasses the 

Bergsonian reading of Clarissa’s loss of her youthful élan vital. Having lost the creative 

impulse of her life in Bourton, Clarissa’s deflated self vampirises the vital energy of the 

urban, hectic flow of London. However, this vital energy cannot be fully incorporated 

into her identity, leaving her mourning for an acknowledged inner absence: “she could 

see what she lacked. It was not beauty; it was not mind. It was something central which 

permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of 

man and woman, of woman together” (Woolf 2000: 27). This lacking could be 

interpreted as the vacuum left by the loss of her vital impetus. Since, according to 

Bergson, “love . . . seems to be at the very essence of the creative effort” (1935: 78), 

Clarissa’s inability to establish a real, warm human connection as she did with Peter and 

Sally in Bourton signals the loss of her former élan vital. 

The Dalloways’ country-house is also the locus of Sally Seton’s vital impetus. Her 

overflowing liveliness was expressed there in countless ways: running naked along 

corridors, being untidy, smoking, reading and writing, kissing Clarissa, speaking about 

marriage as “a catastrophe” or wanting to “abolish private property” – significantly, by 

freeing flowers from “stiff little vases” and letting them “swim on the top of water in 


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bowls” (Woolf 2000: 28, 29). Her overt contravening of the rules of expected female 

behaviour within the heterosexual matrix was to be her overflowing vital impulse. 

Sally’s loss of her élan vital is realised through her compliance with the regulations of 

patriarchy and materialism that she had overtly questioned, which results in her 

marriage with “a bald man with a large buttonhole who owned, it was said, cotton mills 

in Manchester” (2000: 154) and her becoming the proud mother of five. In all, the vital 

energy that impulsively leads Clarissa and Sally to challenge all types of social 

constraints has to be sacrificed in their passage to adulthood. It is, echoing Peter’s 

words, “the death of the soul” (2000: 51). 

The degeneration of vital impulse from a young creative energy to middle-aged 

deflation and inertia can be further interpreted in Bergsonian terms as a movement 

from an open to a closed morality, which in the novel encompasses the characters’ 

ageing. In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Bergson establishes a distinction 

between these two kinds of morality, a distinction that is based on individuals being 

both social and human beings. Using the visual metaphor of circles, Bergson envisions 

the individual at the centre of various concentric rings which represent the different 

social groups, stretching up to the wider circle of humanity. From this point of view, 

open morality is that of the great prophets or saints, “exceptional souls . . . who sensed 

their kinship with the soul of Everyman”; this morality stems from their bearers’ “love 

towards humanity in general” (Bergson 1935: 77-78), a type of love which corresponds 

to the élan vital. Conversely, closed morality aims to safeguard not humanity but the 

social group. It is “a quasi-instinctual function that maintains the cohesion of a 

community and protects it against the threat of others” (Schwartz 1992: 300). Linked to 

this second type of morality is social duty. Since the purpose of this morality is social 

cohesion, “as the circles grow smaller, obligations are added to obligations” (Bergson 

1935: 9-10). From this perspective, it is possible to interpret the characters’ loss of their 

élan vital not just as a result of ageing, but also as a shrivelling of their love and their 

morality, and a further burdening of social duties. 

Although they are far from being the great prophets or saints of Bergson’s open 

morality, young Clarissa and Sally share a wider type of love and morality in their 

Bourton period. Their “talking about life, how they were to reform the world” (Woolf 

2000: 28), bound up with Sally’s irreverent and attractive lack of acknowledgement of 

adults’ social obligations, expresses their concern with society beyond the dictations of 

the upper-class circle to which they belong. As a consequence of their focusing on a 

narrower, social rather than human circle, both Clarissa and Sally have to meet 

obligations aimed both at the definition and the survival of their elitist social group 

from otherness. 

The consciousness of middle-aged Clarissa is punctuated by interiorised, selfpreserving 

social obligations to keep her status: to marry a well-established member of 

the governing-class, although not a Prime Minister as Peter predicts, to allow and 

expect “a little independence” (2000: 7) within marriage, to display a “gentle, generoushearted” 

(2000: 33) self and to be thankful to those who allow such performance with 

their gaze, and to refrain from showing “vulgar jealousy” (2000: 26). The duty of Mrs 

Dalloway is to be “the perfect hostess” (2000: 6) not to humanity but to a restricted 


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group of guests, that is, the close circle of her old friends and her husband’s 

acquaintances. The narrowing of her morality is also expressed in her contempt 

towards Miss Kilman’s ideological influence over Elizabeth: “love and religion would 

destroy . . . the privacy of the soul. The odious Kilman would destroy it” (2000: 107). 

Mrs Dalloway’s identification of love and Christianity with a threat to the self reveals 

the shrivelling of her morals, which once were preoccupied with social issues. In her 

mature years, the need for preserving one’s personal space is felt stronger than that of 

creating bonds of love with humanity, something posed by religion and its correlative 

open morality. 

Mr Dalloway’s position as a Conservative Member of Parliament could promote his 

engagement with social politics; a politics not easily labelled as progressive but 

nevertheless compelled to enhance the condition of England. Even Lady Bruton thinks 

that “Richard’s first duty was to his country” (2000: 94). This statement would seem to 

point to Mr Dalloway being the bearer of an open morality, although it is important to 

note that the notion of country refers both to the state and to its people, and here may 

refer to either of the two. In any case, the human circle that concerns Richard is even 

narrower than that. He “didn’t care a straw what became of Emigration” (2000: 96), 

“he had no illusions about the London police” and thought that the fault of all this 

malfunctioning was “in [England’s] detestable social system” (2000: 98). Coming from 

a politician, this contempt towards the entire social body and its institutions seems to 

express the loss of a political idealism and a will to affect the whole of society. Like Mrs 

Dalloway, Richard seems to have shifted towards the search for an inward, personal 

fulfilment that is more attached to closed moralities. 

Conversely, Clarissa’s daughter, Elizabeth, is portrayed as still maintaining the élan 

vital and the radical spirit that the older generation has abandoned. Like Sally in 

Bourton, Elizabeth is consciously unobservant of the rules of behaviour and etiquette: 

Clarissa notes how “[Elizabeth] did not care a bit” about “how she dressed, how she 

treated people who came to lunch” (2000: 10), which is a reflection on her feeling dutyless 

towards the maintenance of her parents’ social status. The homoerotic desire 

between young Clarissa and Sally is replicated in the relationship between Elizabeth and 

Miss Kilman. The bond between the latter pair is described as a “falling in love” (2000: 

10) by Clarissa, who also acknowledges her feelings towards Sally as having been, “after 

all, love” (2000: 28). Likewise, Miss Kilman and Elizabeth re-enact the roles of radical 

mentor and learning protégée that Sally and Clarissa played in Bourton. It is because of 

Miss Kilman that Elizabeth is aware that “law, medicine, politics, all professions are 

open to women of [her] generation” (2000: 111), and that allows for daydream of being 

a “doctor, a farmer, [or] possibly go into Parliament if she found it necessary” (2000: 

116). Elizabeth is portrayed as being in a stage of her life when her élan vital and an open 

morality are still alive. Peter foresees a future levelling of Elizabeth’s feelings with those 

of the older guests in the party when he says: “She feels not half what we feel, not yet” 

(2000: 164). Unlike To The Lighthouse, this novel does not provide a future time in 

which Elizabeth may be revisited so as for the reader to witness the evolution of her 

radical impulses. 


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Overall, the novel seems to epitomise the vital impulse that Bergson identifies with 

love, flux, creation and an open morality with the young characters in the novel, and as 

such, the novel can be seen as progressive. On the other hand, the middle-aged 

commitment to those duties that perpetuate and safeguard narrower social circles gives 

evidence of a lack of élan vital. By closing the chronological span of the novel at the end 

of that summer party, Mrs Dalloway prevents the fiction from revealing whether the 

movement from an open to a closed morality is a generational question that will also 

affect Elizabeth’s vital impetus. 

4. Conclusion: decentred discourse, self-centred politics. 

By studying the construction of the self upon a synchronic and diachronic axis, this 

article has unveiled conservative tensions that underlie Mrs Dalloway and which have 

been hitherto overlooked in the scholarly debate, possibly as a result of assumptions of 

intentionality based on Woolf’s personal progressive politics. Analysed from this dual 

perspective, the free-flowing and relational self in Mrs Dalloway turns out to be a 

construct of language. Far from being the lauded precocious feminist dissent that the 

literature would have us believe, Woolf’s alleged anti-essentialism and connectedness of 

the self is shown to be a fiction created both by Clarissa Dalloway and the narration. 

Once these devices are dismantled, the boundless and relational self proves to be more 

conservative than its seductive discourse claims: it remains steeped in phallogocentrism, 

conceals characters’ alienation under a narrative of communion and veils 

unacknowledged bonds such as the common lack of social ethics between Mrs 

Dalloway and Sir Bradshaw, which can be extended to Clarissa’s closest circle. 

Moreover, further essential conditions for the generation of social change are 

obliterated from the diegesis in the configuration of the self upon the diachronic axis. 

Rather than unfurling towards the future, the present time cyclically recurs to an untold 

past, so that the reader is able to construe and refigure the here and now. However, by 

framing the recurrent analepsis within the contained temporality of a single June day in 

1923, the narrative prevents the present time from being portrayed as the raw matter of 

a future time that is malleable, still to be created, and whose makers can only be the 

individuals themselves. The present time in Mrs Dalloway is then void of its potential as 

a trigger for activism. It could be argued that, by limiting temporality within the 

confines of the characters’ lifetime up to that very June day, Woolf is presenting their 

failures as an obsolete past which can no longer reproduce itself and, therefore, requires 

change. However, this hypothesis of the unspoken radicalism of the text is problematic, 

since it forces the reader to stretch the radicalism of the text to the realm of unexpressed 

dissidence on the basis of authorial intentionality. From a Bergsonian point 

of view, change is further prevented by the characters’ lack of a vital impetus that would 

have propelled creation, rather than involution. Bound up with the adoption of a 

narrower social ethics that perpetuates their belonging to an elitist social circle, this 

results in a final celebration of individualistic ethics – of which, the allegedly 

fragmented self turns out to be central. 


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In all, the conservative tensions that stem from the construction of the self in Mrs 

Dalloway cannot be said to encapsulate the politics of the entire novel, but they surely 

interplay with other aspects of the text and should be taken into account. That Clarissa 

claims the loss of the centredness of the self through her discourse on a disperse, 

relational and boundless identity should not overshadow the fact that subjects may have 

been connected in the past, but that they remain unattached to each other in the novel’s 

present and disengaged from altering the future – in short, that behind a decentring 

discourse on the self lies a conservative, self-centred politics. 

Works Cited 

Beer, Gillian 1996: Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. 

Bergson, Henri 1984 (1907): Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. Lanhan: UP of America. 

Trans. of L’Evolution Créatrice. 

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Cloudesley Brereton. London: Macmillan. Trans. of Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la 

Religion. 

Blanchard, Margaret 1972: ‘Socialization in Mrs Dalloway’. College English 34.2: 287-305. 

Bradshaw, David 2000: ‘The Socio-Political Vision of the Novels’. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers, eds. 

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 191-208. 

Burwick, Frederick and Paul Douglass 1992: Introduction. The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and 

the Vitalist Controversy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1-11. 

‘Conservative’. Cambridge Dictionaries Online. 2007. Cambridge UP. (Accessed 28 Nov, 2009) 

Dick, Susan 2000: ‘Literary Realism in Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves’. 

Sue Roe and Susan Sellers, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: 

Cambridge UP. 50-71. 

Forbes, Shannon 2005: ‘Equating Performance with Identity: the Failure of Clarissa Dalloway’s 

Victorian “Self” in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway’. Journal of the Midwest Modern Language 

Association 38.1: 38-50. 

Gillies, Mary Ann 1996: Henry Bergson and British Modernism. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP. 

Goudge, Thomas A 1999: Introduction. An Introduction to Metaphysics. By Henri Bergson. Trans. 

T. E. Hulme. Indianapolis: Hackett. 9-20. 

Helal, Kathleen M. 2005: ‘Anger, Anxiety, Abstraction: Virginia Woolf’s “Submerged Truth’’’. 

South Central Review 22.2: 78-94. 

Kumar, Shiv 1979: Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel. Westport: Greenwood P. 

Marcus, Laura 2000: ‘Woolf’s Feminism and Feminism’s Woolf’. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers, eds. 

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 209-44. 

––––– 2004: ‘Writing the City: “Street Haunting” and Mrs Dalloway’. Virginia Woolf. 2nd ed. 

Plymouth: Northcote House. 61-83. 

Moi, Toril 2002: Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Taylor & Francis. 

Mullin, Katherine 2006: ‘Modernisms and Feminisms’. Ellen Rooney, ed. The Cambridge 

Companion to Feminist Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 136-15. 

‘Radical’. Cambridge Dictionaries Online. 2007. Cambridge UP. (Accessed 28 Nov, 2009) 

Rooney, Ellen 2006: ‘The Literary Politics of Feminist Theory’. Ellen Rooney, ed. The Cambridge 

Companion to Feminist Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 73-96. 


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Saussure, Ferdinand de 2004 (1916). ‘Course in General Linguistics’. Julie Rivkin and Michael 

Ryan, eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. 59-71. Trans. of Cours de 

linguistique générale. 

Schwartz, Sanford 1992: ‘Bergson and the Politics of Vitalism’. Frederick Burwick and Paul 

Douglass, eds. The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy. Cambridge: 

Cambridge UP. 277-305. 

Wang, Ban 1992: ‘“I” on the Run: Crisis of Identity in Mrs Dalloway’. MFS: Modern Fiction 

Studies 38.1: 177-91. 

Woolf, Virginia 2000 (1925): Mrs Dalloway. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford UP. 

Wyatt, Jean M 1986: ‘Avoiding Self-Definition: in Defense of Women’s Right to Merge (Julia 

Kristeva and Mrs Dalloway)’. Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 13.1-2: 115-26. 

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Zwerdling, Alex 1977: ‘Mrs Dalloway and the Social System’. PMLA 92.1: 69-82. 

Received 13 January 2010 Revised version accepted 19 February 2010 

Cristina Delgado García holds a BA in Journalism and a BA in English and Linguistics from the Universitat 

Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain), as well as an MA degree in Post-1900s Literatures, Theories and Cultures 

from the University of Manchester (UK). She is a PhD candidate at Aberystwyth University (UK), where she 

has been awarded a TFTS Doctoral Studentship to conduct research on radical epistemologies of the self 

in British theatre of the 1990s and 2000s. Her interests include modernist and postmodernist narratives and 

theatres, contemporary European drama, gender and sexuality, performance politics and critical theory. 

Address: Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies. Aberystwyth University. Parry-Williams 

Building. Aberystwyth, UK. SY23 3AJ. Tel.: 44 (0)1970622828. Fax: 44 (0)1970622831. 


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The Word Made Flesh: Law, Literature and Ethical 

Responsiveness in Daniel Berrigan’s The Trial of the 

Catonsville Nine 

Bárbara Arizti 

Universidad de Zaragoza 

barizti@unizar.es 

The aim of this article is to analyse Berrigan’s play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine in the 

context of the Law and Literature movement, a field of studies that underlines the textual 

character of the law and the role of literature in interrogating the legal. Particular 

attention will be paid to the intersection between a certain literary representation of the 

legal and the tenets of a deconstructive mode of ethics inspired by Levinas and Derrida. 

By privileging the spirit over the letter of the law, the Saying over the Said, Infinity over 

Totality, Berrigan’s work exposes the deconstructible nature of legality and opens up a 

space in which the law can aspire towards justice. I will also draw on Gibson’s ethics of 

sensibility both in its personal and textual sides in order to investigate the role of excess 

and vulnerability in this plea against the Vietnam War. 

Keywords: Berrigan; Derrida; Levinas; law; justice; deconstructive ethics; Vietnam War 

La palabra se hizo carne: derecho, literatura y sensibilidad ética en 

El juicio de los nueve de Catonsville de Daniel Berrigan 

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar El juicio de los nueve de Catonsville en el contexto de 

la corriente Derecho y Literatura, que pone de relieve el carácter textual de la ley y el papel de 

la literatura en el cuestionamiento de lo legal. Se prestará especial atención a la intersección 

entre un tipo de representación literaria de lo legal y la ética deconstructiva inspirada en 

Levinas y Derrida. Al privilegiar el espíritu sobre la letra de la ley, el Decir sobre lo Dicho, lo 

Infinito sobre la Totalidad, la obra de Berrigan pone al descubierto el carácter deconstructible 

de la legalidad y posibilita un espacio en el que la ley puede aspirar hacia la justicia. Recurriré 

también a la ética de la sensibilidad de Gibson, en su faceta interpersonal y textual, para 

estudiar el papel del exceso y la vulnerabilidad en este alegato contra la Guerra del Vietnam. 

Palabras clave: Berrigan; Derrida; Levinas; ley; justicia; ética deconstructiva; Guerra del 

Vietnam

30 Bárbara Arizti 

1. Introduction 

For me and for many, Daniel Berrigan is one for whom 

the word becomes flesh…. A paralyzing cynicism about 

the organized violence of our time continually whispers to 

us: “Be real. What can anyone do?” Daniel provides a 

reply to the voices of despair and violence out of his pithy, 

fey wisdom: a consistent, poetic, brave and faithful “No”. 

(Rush 1996: 59) 

Catholic priests play by the rules. Why did those priests 

go break the law? (Sachs 2001) 

The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It 

does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. 

(Levinas 1991: 22) 

Daniel Berrigan’s play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine is a privileged site for the 

analysis of literature’s critical engagement with the law. The questioning of the legal by 

the literary in this anti-war play is reinforced by its promotion of a kind of ethical 

responsibility based on the philosophical work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques 

Derrida. The ethics of sensibility or affect, derived by Andrew Gibson from Levinas’s 

theory of alterity, will be also drawn upon in order to stress the importance of 

vulnerability and excess in the play. Besides engaging with the literary text, the article is 

concerned with the historical act of civil disobedience on which it is based, as well as 

with contemporary and later reactions to the real event. My analysis intends to expose 

how Berrigan’s work promotes ethical responsibility while at the same time falling short 

of the heavy demands placed by Levinasian ethics. 1 

The Trial of the Catonsville Nine recounts an event that took place more than forty 

years ago in Catonsville, Maryland. On May 17, 1968, a group of two women and seven 

men, two of them Catholic priests, entered Local Selective Service Board number 33, 

seized 378 draft files and burned them in a nearby car park after having poured 

homemade napalm on them. While waiting for the police to come and arrest them, the 

nine activists, all Catholic, held hands, said the Lord’s Prayer and gave speeches in 

justification of their action. Theirs was a protest act against the Vietnam War, 

prompted by their religious convictions and by their disagreement with the imperialist, 

war-mongering policy of the US Administration. “The act was pitiful”, says Berrigan in 

his autobiography, “a tiny flare amid the consuming fires of war” (1987: 220). For the 

contemporary reader, the play resonates with more recent but similarly appalling 

instances of war, especially war in Iraq, the chain of events that led to it, and the acts of 

protest it triggered in the States and all over the world: “We wash our hands in the dirt 

1 This essay is a revised and extended version of a paper presented at XXXI International 

AEDEAN Conference held in A Coruña in November 2007. The research carried out for the 

writing of this paper has been financed by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and the 

European Regional Development Fund (FEDER), in collaboration with the Aragonese 

Governement (no. HUM2007-61035/FIL. Proyecto Eje C-Consolider). 


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The Word Made Flesh 31 

of others/ pointing to the invasions or atrocities of others/ certain that our own 

invasions and atrocities/ are more excusable because more subtle/ though indeed far 

more devastating” (Berrigan 1971: 60). 2 The arrogance of leaders present and to come is 

also pointedly alluded to: “what of the fantastic arrogance of our leaders/ What of their 

crimes against the people the poor and the powerless/ Still no court will try them no jail 

will receive them” (1971: 30). 

Lynn Sachs’s 2001 documentary Investigation of a Flame relives the moment and 

reflects on the significance of the Catonsville Nine act from a contemporary standpoint. 

This experimental documentary, which dispenses with some of the typical techniques 

such as voice-over narration, offers a multi-perspective account of the draft burning 

through home movies, archival footage, snapshots, letters and interviewing. Among 

those interviewed are six of the nine activists, Selective Service staff, Catonsville 

residents and the prosecutor and defence in the trial that followed. The conversations 

deal with the rights and wrongs of civil disobedience and the (im)morality of the 

Vietnam War. Combining a shaky camera, fast travelling shots, extreme close-ups of 

interviewees and long shots of military parades, pacifist demonstrations and scenes in 

Vietnam, Sachs manages to call attention to the complexity of the event. The 

soundtrack – some catchy, thematically to-the-point pop songs of the sixties and 

seventies like ‘CIA Man’ and the ‘White House Blues’ – provides a marked contrast to 

the solemnity and austerity of the protest act. 

According to the participants, this act of “indirect civil disobedience” (Gustainis 

1990: 166) continued the tradition of nonviolent resistance to authority that has 

characterised the US since its origin. In the words of Herbert Mitgang, “Political protest 

by individuals against the power of the state is as American as apple pie and handguns”. 

And he moves on to explain the case of Thoreau, who spent a night in jail in 1846 for 

not paying several years’ poll tax because he “didn’t want his money to go to a 

government that supported the Mexican War”. “He was not alone”, Mitgang adds, 

“Lincoln was a Mexican War dove, too” (1991: 2). 

But the protest of the Catonsville Nine did not end with the burning of the files. The 

trial, which took place in Baltimore, in October that same year, was planned as an act of 

propaganda, a means of further advancing the pacifist cause. As some of the protesters 

admitted during the trial, their primary intention was to communicate with the 

audience both inside and outside the courtroom in order to speak to the conscience of 

the American people and convince them of the illegality of the war. According to Justin 

Gustainis, the oral proceedings “allowed the full meaningfulness of the act to be 

articulated in words”, since “the act itself was essentially gestural, and was articulated 

only by the necessarily truncated texts of a press release and a prayer” (1990: 178). 

Legally, the trial was a failure: the nine defendants were found guilty of destroying US 

property and interfering with the Selective Service System and received sentences that 

ranged from two to three and a half years. However, the impact of the trial as an antiwar 

protest was considerable. Media coverage granted the defendants nationwide 

attention and encouraged direct action protests among radical Catholics. “In the 

2 The speeches of the nine defendants before the judge are rendered in short sentences with 

no punctuation which have the appearance of verse. 


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following years”, says Berrigan, “some seventy draft boards were entered across the 

land. Their contents variously shredded, sacked, hidden out of sight, burned, scattered 

to the wind” (1987: 221). The Catonsville Nine became role models for the Catholic 

Left, “an informally organised but highly influential group of resisters” (Mollin 2004: 

29), who resorted to draft file burning as part of their struggle against the Vietnam War. 

In fact, the Catonsville process has been analysed as an example of a “popular trial”, a 

“judicial proceeding that gains the attention of a general audience, usually through 

sustained coverage by the mass media” (Hariman 1990: 2). The trial was surrounded by 

a weeklong “festival of support” that “brought hundreds of antiwar protestors to 

Baltimore for a series of rallies and demonstrations” (Gustainis 1990: 165). As Robert 

Hariman has pointed out, one of the most outstanding characteristics of popular trials 

is their thoroughly rhetorical nature, since they function as “forums for debate, as 

symbols of larger constellations of belief and action, and as social dramas used to 

manage emotional responses to troubling situations” (1990: 5). 

It is precisely the dramatic quality of the legal action that Daniel Berrigan emphasises 

in his play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. This plea against the Vietnam War, published 

in 1970, joined the long list of North-American anti-war literary pieces. 3 As Andrés García 

states in the introduction to the Spanish edition: “el caso de los nueve se comprende 

mejor cuando no se percibe – o no sólo – como un asunto legal, político o moral, sino 

como un drama literario en el que los actores serían los acusados y el coro griego las cerca 

de dos mil personas que tomaron las calles de Baltimore durante los días del juicio” 

(Berrigan 2008: 13)[The case of the Catonsville Nine can be better understood when 

perceived not only as a legal, political or moral matter, but also as a literary drama in 

which the actors would be the defendants and the Greek choir the nearly two thousand 

people that took to the streets in Baltimore during the trial. (My translation)] 

Berrigan, a Jesuit priest and one of the nine who had taken part in the destruction of 

the files, is also a very prolific writer who has published more than fifty books to date. 

Although he is perhaps more highly regarded as a lyrical poet – his first collection of 

poems, Time Without Number, won him the prestigious Lamont Poetry Award (1957) 

and was nominated for the National Book Award – Berrigan is the author of numerous 

essays, travel books, journals, pacifist manifestoes, theological treatises and an 

autobiography (Dear 1996: 9-10). The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, his only dramatic 

piece, is Berrigan’s best-known work. The play, translated into several languages and 

3 David Krasner points out that the “early 1970s and even into the 1980s observed the rise of 

antiwar books and films, such as Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July, inspired by Dalton 

Trumbo’s 1939 novel Johnny Got His Gun, as well as The Dear Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Coming 

Home, Platoon, Casualties of War, and Full Metal Jacket” (2006:88). The anti-establishment 

tendencies that characterised the late sixties and early seventies also reached the American 

theatre. Despite their diversity, Krasner affirms, the plays produced in these decades present “a 

common iconoclasm summed up in the popular phrase ‘polymorphously perverse’”: “Beat 

poetry, rock ‘n’ roll, Motown, pop art, abstract expressionism, experimental drugs, disability 

rights, feminism, Civil Rights movements, anti-Vietnam War protests, and the deep social 

fissures of American politics were watershed events” (2006: 64). Among the plays attacking the 

establishment he mentions Megan Terry’s Viet Rock, “a fast-paced drama shedding light on the 

propaganda machine that led to Vietnam” (2006: 85). 


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still being performed, has become a symbol of resistance to war. But, why write a 

drama? Perhaps, like W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot before, in turning to the theatre Berrigan 

was aiming at a larger audience. He was willing to voice the group’s opposition to the 

Vietnam War, spread their pacifist ideas and urge others to join them in saying no to 

any form of violence. Perhaps the actual trial, with its particular mise en scène – 

witnesses stepping on and off the stand, the defendants’ long and passionate speeches 

and a devoted public – easily lent itself to the dramatic mode. 

Berrigan wrote his play taking as a basis the trial records. As he explains in the 

introduction, the work was written in the manner of the factual theatre, a form that 

requires “essential adherence to the letter of a text” (1971: vii). His main concern was 

then to be “as faithful as possible to the original words, spoken in the heat or long haul 

of the trial, making only those minute changes required for clarity or good sense” (1971: 

vii). Berrigan’s play is not, however, a straightforward reproduction of the data of the 

trial record, but a literary piece in which qualitative changes occur. In Berrigan’s own 

words, he hoped “to induce out of the density of matter an art form worthy of the 

passionate acts and words of the Nine” (1971: viii). In his essay ‘Notes on Contemporary 

Theatre’, published in 1971, Peter Weiss – the playwright and painter – addresses the 

subject of documentary theatre, a label under which Berrigan’s play can be considered. 

Weiss defines this kind of drama as “theatre of reportage”: documents of contemporary 

life, like trial records, dossiers, letters, etc, provide the foundation of a performance 

whose main aim is the criticism of the manipulations of the powerful. The element of 

protest is very prominent: “Like the spontaneous rally with posters, banners, and 

chants”, it “demonstrates a reaction to contemporary conditions and a demand that 

they may be revealed to the public” (Weiss 2008: 382). Documentary drama takes sides. 

Injustice and inequality “cry out for immediate redress” (2008: 384). The attacks of the 

US against Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Vietnam are presented as “unilateral 

crimes”: “There is nothing wrong with depicting genocide and predatory war in blackand-white 

terms, denying the butchers any endearing traits whatsoever and resolutely 

siding with their victims in every possible way” (2008: 385). “Documentary theatre”, 

Weiss affirms, “abstains from any kind of invention, it adopts authentic material and 

presents it in the stage without any modifications of its content, but with definite 

formal modifications” (2008: 382). But faithfulness to the original texts alone does not 

make documentary drama. If a dramatic work is to become an effective instrument of 

political persuasion it must not renounce artistic achievement (2008: 383). Otherwise, it 

would become a sterile surrogate for practical political action. A typical technique in 

shaping documents into art is the interruption of factual material by “reflections, 

monologues, dreams, retrospections, contradictory behaviour”. These “breaks in the 

action” produce the effect of personal and textual insecurity that draws attention to 

“the many-layered complexity of the event” (2008: 385). The tendency to present things 

in black and white is, thus, somewhat nuanced. The Trial of the Catonsville Nine proves 

Berrigan’s craftsmanshift. The play is interspersed with fragments of language that 

include Berrigan’s own poems, newspaper cuttings, a poem by Neruda, a piece of the 

actual court record and quotations by authors such as Jefferson, Hitler, Sartre, Brecht 

and Kafka, among others. It further complies with documentary theatre in the sense 

that this can often take the form of a tribunal, “making a new kind of testimony out of 


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those questions and points of attack that were voiced in the context of a real inquest” 

(Weiss 2008: 385). 

2. The legal and the literary 

The fact that Berrigan’s work is concerned with the depiction of a trial makes of it a 

privileged site for the study of the interconnections between the legal and the literary. 

The Law and Literature movement is an emerging field of studies that stresses the 

textual character of laws and the influence of fictional representations of the law in the 

understanding of legal structures. Literature, Julia Chryssostalis says, “plays with the 

law so as to reinforce or subvert or amend or destroy as occasion warrants” (2004: 158). 

Some literary texts appear as alternative forums for justice. Read as a supplement to the 

actual legal proceedings, Berrigan’s play adopts a critical tone towards the institution of 

law in an attempt to expose the gap that sometimes separates law from justice. The 

openendedness of equitable justice is set against the rigidities of legality. Two kinds of 

strategies – the legal and the rhetorical – overlapped in the trial (García in Berrigan 

2008: 16). The major legal tactic employed by the defence was the doctrine of 

nullification, according to which “a jury may refuse to convict defendants … even if its 

members believe those defendants did commit the acts with which they are charged”. 

The jury “has the right to say that the law violated by the defendants was an unjust law 

… and may ‘nullify’ that law” (Gustainis 1990: 167). The nullification of the law at the 

Catonsville trial would have had a huge impact, since the legality of the Vietnam War 

might itself have been called into question (1990: 168). The defendants are perfectly 

aware of this: 

GEORGE MISCHE 

Change could come if one judge would rule on the war. If one judge would act, the war 

could not continue as it does. (Berrigan 1971: 118) 

But the judge explicitly forbade the jury “to make their decision on the basis of 

conscience” and urged them instead to decide the case “only on the basis of the facts 

presented by both sides” (Berrigan 1971: 105). 

As a literary artifact, Berrigan’s play is more interested in the rhetorical strategies of 

this unusual trial in which the accused usurp the role of the prosecution (Berrigan 

2008: 14). The central part of the work, entitled ‘The Day of the Nine Defendants’ is 

made up of “a series of vignettes” in which “each defendant speaks movingly about … 

the experiences that inspired moral disobedience to the law” (Shepard 1981). The first 

to be summoned to the stand is Philip Berrigan, Daniel’s brother and one of the leaders 

of the burning of draft files in Catonsville, who recounts his personal history of 

conversion, from his enthusiastic participation in the Second World War to his 

commitment to civil rights and his non-violent opposition to the Vietnam War. He also 

mentions the long tradition of civil disobedience in the US, which the act of the 

Catonsville Nine continues. In the words of Michael True, although the language of the 

nine defendants “reflects their common Christian background, they speak from broad 

concerns and experience: Thomas and Marjorie as former Maryknoll missionaries in 

Guatemala; George Mische as a former worker with the Alliance for Progress; Thomas 


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Lewis as a civil rights activist in the inner city”. “The testimonies of Brother David Darst 

and John Hogan”, he adds, “serve, in their simplicity, as counterpoints to the 

sophisticated statements by the previously-named participants” (True 1988: xxv). The 

defendants’ resort to civil disobedience is presented as evincing “the failure of formal 

justice” (Pabón 2003: 221) when dealing with the phenomenon of war. “This is wrong 

This is immoral This is illegal”, states defendant Thomas Lewis (Berrigan 1971: 42). “I 

wasn’t concerned with the law”, he adds (1971: 48), “I was concerned with the lives/ of 

innocent people … A person/ may break the law to save lives”. 

The Trial of the Catonsville Nine highlights the conflict between the letter and the 

spirit of the law. It was the letter of the law – represented by the judge, the prosecution 

and the members of the jury – that won the day in the actual trial. Berrigan’s emphasis, 

however, is on the spirit of the law and the defendants’ right to renew the law with 

questions of conscience. “Your honor”, says defendant David Darst to the Judge, “the 

instructions you gave to the jury bound them to the narrow letter of the law. And a 

verdict according to the spirit of the law was strictly prohibited. It is my feeling that the 

spirit of the law is important, particularly in American legal tradition and in American 

life” (1971: 117). Berrigan’s play questions the ‘already inscribed’ nature of the law, 

reveals the tensions that underlie legal discourse and advocates a law ruled by the 

principles of equity. Concerned with the corrective function of equity, Dieter Paul 

Polloczek has affirmed: “Equity may supplement the letter of the law in order to ensure 

that a given interpretation of the ‘letter’ will express the ‘spirit’ of the law”. In other 

words, equity, “a maxim applied and instituted in the majority of Western legal 

systems”, allows a fair judgement in special cases where the law proves inadequate. It 

reminds us of “the judicial discretion to interpret the law according to rules and 

precedents that can change over time” (Polloczek 1999: 5). 

3. Derrida, Levinas, Gibson and the demands of ethical responsiveness 

The Law and Literature movement has not remained alien to the ideas of critical theory. 

Drawing on thinkers like Bakhtin and Derrida, its proponents have laid bare the 

necessary porosity of the law and the conversational nature of law making. The Trial of 

the Catonsville Nine is a polyphonic artifact which exposes frictions between 

authoritative and alternative discourses of the law, thus counteracting the court’s 

attempt “to limit … communal law-making, to suppress the multiplicity of voices 

claiming the sanction of the state for their visions” (Dolin 1999: 14). The propositions 

of Jacques Derrida can also throw light over Berrigan’s undoing of legal discourse. His 

re-examination of Western thought from an anti-essentialist position led to the 

formulation of the theory of deconstruction: meaning is always already subjected to the 

play of différance; there is nothing inherently stable in it; everything is in a state of flux 

and thus permanently open to revision. The concept of undecidability, central to 

deconstructive thought, proves useful at this point. Contrary to what it may seem, 

undecidability highlights not so much the impossibility of deciding as the need to open 

the field of the decision. In the words of David Campbell: “the very notion of 

undecidability is the condition of possibility for a decision. If the realm of thought was 


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preordained such that there were no options, no competing alternatives, and no 

difficult choices to make, there would be no need for a decision” (1999: 43). What 

Berrigan denounces in his play is the already-made nature of the decision taken by the 

jury. If the central point in the trial is the burning of the files – a crime the defendants 

admit to having committed – it is clear that the Catonsville Nine deserve to be punished 

by the law. There is, in this sense, no decision to make. This is the philosophy of the 

accusation. This is the intention of the judge too. But, for Berrigan and his companions, 

the crime is not an end in itself but a starting point that allows them to push against the 

limits of the law. What is at stake for them is the illegality of the Vietnam War. And it is 

in this respect that the need to make a decision becomes crucial. 

In his essay ‘Force de loi’ Derrida affirms that “Deconstruction is justice” (1992: 14). 

In order to elaborate on this topic he explicitly tackles the relationship between justice 

and the law and reveals a critical tension: Justice always already exceeds the law. 

Deconstruction can help distinguish between these two key concepts: the law remains 

essentially deconstructible while justice is essentially undeconstructible and is always 

differing from the law (Ieven 2006: 207). This is again the work of undecidability, whose 

“ghost”, Derrida states, is present in every decision, deconstructing “from within any 

assurance of presence, any certitude or any supposed criteriology that would assure us 

of the justice of the decision, in truth of the very event of a decision” (1992: 24-25). 

Undecidability, Derrida defends, must be present in the decision of the judge, who can 

call into question the “mystical foundation of authority” on which laws rest. The 

decision of the judge must not simply involve applying the rule. The straightforward 

application of the law on the part of the judge would make his verdict legal but, 

perhaps, not just. Through a “reinstituting act of interpretation”, he may decide not to 

follow a rule of law but to make the law in every single case, transforming and 

ameliorating the existing principle. This will bring the law nearer justice: “In short, for a 

decision to be just and responsible, it must, in its proper moment if there is one, be 

both regulated and without regulation: it must conserve the law and also destroy or 

suspend it enough to have to reinvent it in the reaffirmation and the new and free 

confirmation of its principle” (Derrida 1992: 23). According to Bram Ieven, 

deconstruction performs a hygienic function with respect to the law: “The law can be 

read and re-read, it can be interpreted and reinterpreted, while each time trying to 

make it more just, that is to say, to bring it closer to the demands of justice” (2006: 

201). Berrigan’s play, I believe, encourages the deconstructibility of legality and 

advocates a move back to the basics of justice, which is always a justice-to-come: “It will 

always have it, this à-venir, and always has. Perhaps it is for this reason that justice, 

insofar as it is not a juridical or political concept, opens up for l’avenir, the 

transformation, the recasting or refounding of law and politics. ‘Perhaps’, one must 

always say perhaps for justice” (Derrida 1992: 27). “I [Daniel Berrigan] wish to ask 

whether or not reverence for the law does not also require a judge to interpret and 

adjust the law to the needs of people here and now. I believe that no tradition can 

remain a mere dead inheritance. It is a living inheritance which we must continue to 

offer for the living” (114-15). The play demands the creation of an intermediate space 

“in which it becomes possible to do justice to the absolute singularity of things – even if 

just for a moment” (Ieven 2006: 207). “Lead us in justice/ and there will be no need to 


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break the law” (Berrigan 1971: 30), states Philip Berrigan. And he adds, “Let lawmakers 

judges and lawyers/think less of the law more of justice/less of legal ritual more of 

human rights”. 

I will now take a closer look at the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, perhaps the 

most influential thinker in the current turn to ethics of deconstruction. Despite the 

voices that charge the latter with the demise of ethical criticism in the sixties and 

seventies of the past century, the Levinas-Derrida tandem has demonstrated that ethics 

and deconstruction are perfectly and fruitfully compatible. What Levinas seems to find 

problematic, however, is the application of ethics to the field of aesthetics, a point that 

needs to be discussed before setting Berrigan’s play in dialogue with his theory of 

alterity. Unlike contemporary moral philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum and 

Alasdair MacIntyre, for whom literature, with its emphasis on concreteness and 

particularity, is the perfect vehicle for the abstract concepts of ethics, Levinas defends 

the untranslatability of ethics into literature. The eternal present in which the latter 

lives, he says, cannot but freeze the diachronic logic of the former. In art in general and 

literature in particular, time turns into fate. Characters in a book “are committed to the 

infinite repetition of the same acts and the same thoughts”, Levinas states in ‘Reality 

and Its Shadow’ (2003a: 139). The openness of the ethical encounter with the other is 

thus lost in its literary representation. The Saying is inevitably arrested by the Said. The 

question, then, seems to be, in Thomas Claviez’ apt words: “Can Levinas’ philosophy 

teach us anything about an ethics of literature that would allow us to regard certain 

texts in a new light?” (2008: 144). After revising Levinas’s ideas on literature in relation 

to his view on language and unmasking his somewhat reductive conception of the 

aesthetic, Claviez convincingly clears the way for an approach to the ethical encounter 

with the other in literature: “Levinas’ distinction between philosophy and art as 

concerns ethics is questionable, since it is based on an equally questionable reduction of 

art to myth and thus ‘lie’” (2008: 155). Claviez’ own interpretations along Levinasian 

lines of four classic works of American letters prove the point, as do several other works 

like Andrew Gibson’s Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas, which 

cast light on the intricacies of the literary text by resorting to Levinas’s ethical 

metaphysics. It is not so much a question of approaching works as exemplifications of 

ethical theories as of exploring some of the dilemmas these theories pose within the 

frame of literature. As Claviez says of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “the life-giving, but deepfreezing 

potential of a fictive Said …, at certain sublime moments, lets the Saying shine 

through” (2008: 283). 

Translated into Levinas’s terms, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine stages the conflict 

between the Saying and the Said. It is my contention here that the judge’s insistence on 

the letter of the law privileges the Said over the Saying. The Saying and the Said stand 

for two different ways of being in the world and relating to our neighbours. In the 

words of Levinas, Saying is “the proximity of one to the other, the commitment of an 

approach” (2004: 5). It is “to respond to another, … to find no longer any limit or 

measure for this responsibility, … which is responsibility for the free initiatives of the 

other” (2004: 47). In the Said, Levinas maintains, the world as becoming is arrested, the 

“otherwise than being” is “immobilized and fixed” (2004: 5-7, 23). In his opinion, the 

ethical relationship should be articulated around the Saying, understood as “a verbal or 


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non-verbal ethical performance, whose essence cannot be caught in a constative 

proposition. It is a performative doing that cannot be reduced to a constative 

description” (Critchley in Gibson 1999: 136). Levinas’s distinction between the Saying 

and the Said is echoed by Geoffrey Harpham’s oft-quoted definition of ethics as “the 

strictly undecidable”, that which “suffers determination by morality” (1995: 56). It also 

underpins the differentiation between justice and the law as conceived by Derrida. 

Ethics, justice and the Saying thrive in undecidability but need their counterparts in 

order to reach the realm of the decision. Like the symbol for Yin and Yang, the Saying 

and the Said do not stand in clear-cut opposition, but interpenetrate each other: the 

Said threatening to congeal the Saying and the Saying unwriting the already given 

nature of the Said. Levinas equates the Saying to exposition to alterity, an exposition 

that precedes being, is always already there and has direct consequences for the Self: 

Saying is a risking or uncovering of the self.… Saying is never indifferent. It is the 

declaration ‘Here I am’ [Me voici] answering ‘for everything and everyone’ … and it is 

disinterested, for, in it, the bases of any position for or fixity to the self are consumed. 

Saying is ‘otherwise than being’. But it is also the ‘extraordinary everydayness’ of my 

responsibility to and for the others. (Gibson 1999: 137) 

Emmanuel Levinas opens his preface to Totality and Infinity with a reference to the 

devastating effects of violence and war on morality. The “ontology of totality issued 

from war” (1991:22) runs counter to the infinity of being that rules over the moral. It is 

not only that violence contravenes the most basic commandment emanating from the 

Face of the other – “Thou shall not kill” – but that it makes people play roles “in which 

they no longer recognize themselves” and “betray not only commitments but their own 

substance” (1991: 21). The arms employed at war always “turn against those who wield 

them” since they destroy the identity of individuals, reducing them to “being bearers of 

forces that command them unbeknown to themselves” (1991: 21). Levinas rejects the 

ontology of totality, which rules out singularity, in favour of infinity, the basis of peace 

and justice: “Justice would not be possible without the singularity, the unicity of 

subjectivity” (1991: 246). Proof of the individuality of the subject is his “aptitude for 

speech”. Levinas pictures existents “called upon to answer at their trial”, able to speak, 

“rather than lending their lips to an anonymous utterance of history”. His vision 

“breaks with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not speak” (1991: 23). 

At this trial Levinas alludes to, the individual is placed under the judgement of God, 

who exalts his subjectivity and calls him to “moral overstepping beyond laws” (1991: 

246). It is precisely the judgement of God that concerns the Catonsville Nine. It is with 

reference to his higher law that they defy man-made laws at the trial: “The one law [that 

overrides all laws]/ is the primary law of love and justice/ toward other men”, declares 

Thomas Lewis (Berrigan 1971: 43). It is their impressive ‘aptitude for speech’ that marks 

them as morally creative individuals against the silent totality of war and the empire. 

The burning of the draft files in Catonsville was carried out by a group of Catholics. 

Their act of civil disobedience has been studied in the light of the life of Jesus as 

narrated in the Gospels. Clearly, the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount – ‘Blessed are 

the Peacemakers’ – informs the group’s non-violent stance, as does the Christian ethics 

of sacrifice and martyrdom. I will nonetheless argue that the reading of The Trial of the 


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Catonsville Nine through the ethics of alterity put forward by Levinas can reinforce the 

play’s message and uncover new meanings. Both Levinas and the Catonsville Nine are 

inspired by the values of the Jewish-Christian tradition, but while the Nine favoured 

action over intellectual reflection, Levinas provides the critic with a complex analytical 

tool with which to cast some extra light on Berrigan’s play. There are no references to 

Levinas in Berrigan’s rendering of the act in his autobiography. There are no direct 

references in his play either. The emphasis in both is placed on the Christian 

motivation. “As a Christian/”, states defendant Thomas Lewis in the play, “I am 

obligated to the primary law of brotherhood/Men have responsibilities not only to their 

immediate family/but to the world” (Berrigan 1971: 43). This quotation shows that it is 

in The Trial of the Catonsville Nine that the connections with Levinas come through. 

The impulse to answer for one’s neighbour that the defendants put down to the 

condition of being a Catholic, is for Levinas the most basic marker of humanity and 

defines us even before we are constituted as beings. As a composite of the testimonies of 

the nine, the play reverberates with the Levinasian imperative of infinite and 

inescapable responsibility for the other, a demand that transcends any religious creed. 

An exhortation, Simon Critchley affirms (2007: 11) that usurps my autonomy and holds 

me hostage to the other’s needs. Daniel Berrigan puts it in the following terms in his 

play: “We could not … do otherwise/For we are sick at heart” (1971: 93). Molly Rush 

recalls his words in a later trial. They had been arrested and thrown into jail for 

hammering on nuclear weapons: “We could not not do this.… With every cowardly 

bone in my body … I wished I hadn’t had to do it. That has been true every time I have 

been arrested. My stomach turns over. I feel sick. I feel afraid. I hate jail” (Berrigan in 

Rush 1996: 58). Elsewhere, Berrigan again, defines his life as a “double negative” (1987: 

307). Beckett’s motto “I must go on. I can’t go on. I will go on” is appropriately evoked 

by Critchley (2007: 44) in an attempt to apprehend the nature of Levinas´s formidable 

demand. Berrigan’s double negative and Beckett’s aporia are potent appeals to action: 

“‘Nothing can be done!’ How often we had heard that gasp: the last of the human, of 

soul, of freedom. Indeed, something could be done; and was. And would be” (Berrigan 

1987: 221). They pose an invitation not to give up in the face of trouble: “I keep trying 

and failing and trying again” (Berrigan 1987: 165). Even, or more so, if our actions 

prove ineffectual. Even, if what we do fails to mitigate the war: “We go on, we go on…. 

We see nothing happening (indeed we see only worsening of the ills we dare object to)” 

(Berrigan 1987: 304). Out of sheer endurance. 

Levinas’s theory of alterity, which revolves around the encounter with the Face of 

the Other, has a very clear physical component that Andrew Gibson takes as a starting 

point for his ethics of sensibility or affect. The Face of the Other is for Levinas “the 

original site of the sensible”: “The Other becomes my neighbour precisely through the 

way the face summons me, calls for me, begs for me, and in so doing recalls my 

responsibility…. Responsibility for the Other, for the naked face of the first individual 

to come along” (Levinas 2003b: 82, 83). Sensibility as an ethical faculty is characterised 

by openness, attentiveness and receptiveness. It is “the power of being affected rather 

than affecting” (Gibson 1999: 161) and privileges feeling over thought. Drawing on 

Levinas, Gibson further defines it as “‘uncovering’ … exposure to wounds, vulnerability 

… not as a passive reception of stimuli, but as a positive ‘aptitude’ …, the nakedness of 


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a skin presented to contact, to the caress, which always … is suffering for the suffering 

of the other” (1999: 165). Gibson finds important similarities between Levinas’s concept 

of sensibility and George Bataille’s concern with “expenditure without reserve”, 

generosity and excess (1999: 166). 

In line with Gibson’s ethics of affect, the peaceful protest of the Catonsville Nine 

emerges out of compassion and encourages extreme generosity and active vulnerability. 

It shows “a preference for suffering rather than for inflicting suffering” (Berrigan, in 

Dear 1996: 13). At the heart of their non-violent resistance lies the Levinasian Saying, 

“the most passive passivity … inseparable from patience and pain” (Levinas 2004: 50). 

Notice the terms employed by Daniel Berrigan in his autobiography for describing his 

gradual commitment to non-violence: “When the offended party yields to contempt 

and counterviolence, I came to understand, both sides are demeaned, no light is shed, 

wounds are exacerbated. There must be another way. I came on the other way, 

gradually and with clumsiness, through friends: Dorothy Day, Merton, my brother 

Philip, certain Jesuits. These in person. And Dr. King and Gandhi and others, my noble 

ancestral teachers” (1987: 144). The years spent in prison for this and other acts of 

resistance are a proof of their ‘expenditure without reserve’, as are the problems met by 

those belonging to religious orders that were often punished by their superiors for 

exceeding their roles. The Berrigans were in fact the first priests in the US to spend time 

in jail for civil disobedience. 

The centrality of the corporeal to both the action and the play can also be read in 

terms of the ethics of sensibility or affect. This is David Darst’s explanation of why they 

chose homemade napalm for their protest: “We felt it was fitting that this agent/which 

had burned human flesh in the war in Vietnam and in many other places/should now 

be poured on the records/which gave war and violence/their cruel legitimacy” (Berrigan 

1971: 34). In a previous action of a similar nature, two of the Catonsville Nine had 

poured their own blood on the draft files. There are also allusions in the play to the selfimmolation 

of a Syracuse student in protest against the war. Daniel Berrigan had access 

to him and describes the experience in the following dramatic terms: “The boy was 

dying in torment/his body like a piece of meat/cast upon a grille …/I felt that my senses 

had been invaded in a new way” (1971: 91-92). Berrigan’s experience of ministering for 

the terminally ill – mainly patients with cancer or AIDS – further testifies to his 

exposure to the suffering of the flesh. 

Gibson’s ethics of sensibility has a further textual side with which Berrigan’s play 

also complies. This textual ethics of affect implies discursive practices characterised by 

openness and instability. The Trial of the Catonsville Nine opens up the dramatic to the 

poetic and the essayistic. Besides the fact that most of the play is written in a very poetic 

style, silences and pauses are marked typographically and further contribute to the 

play’s resistance to closure. Besides, the attempts by the judge and the accusation to 

keep to the facts and exclude the world are partly neutralized by Berrigan’s quotations, 

all in italics, particularly abundant in the play’s third act, ‘The Day of the Nine 


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Defendants’. 4 As mentioned above, the speeches by the accused are interrupted by a 

pastiche of fragments from fiction and non-fiction that let in reality in various ways. 

They point at texts outside Berrigan’s text: Texts, like Sartre’s The Condemned of Altona, 

which stress Levinasian responsibility – “I have taken the century upon my shoulders 

and have said: I will answer for it. This day and forever” (1971: 25); Camus on the role 

of Christians in “The Unbeliever and the Christians” also reverberates with Levinas – 

“The world expects that Christians will get away from abstractions and confront the 

blood-stained face which history has taken on today” (1971: 56); or the words by Bishop 

Defregger of Munich asking for understanding and forgiveness for his wartime role in 

the execution of Italian villagers: “I do not want to defend myself. I can only abandon 

myself to God’s judgement” (1971: 35); a short fragment by the US Court of Appeals, 

reversing the conviction of Dr. Spock on the grounds that “the right to be tried by a 

jury of one’s peers … would be meaningless, if the judge could call the turn” (1971: 

105), which is precisely what judge Thomson did in the Catonsville trial; also, pacifist 

manifestoes like that of Kipphardt’s Oppenheimer – “I will never work on war projects 

again.… We cannot do better than keep the world open in the few places which can still 

be kept open” (1971: 47). 

4. Conclusion: Too heavy a demand 

In the final section, ‘The Day of the Verdict’, the play includes the reaction to the 

conviction of the defendants of those present in the courtroom: 

A MEMBER OF THE AUDIENCE 

Members of the jury, you have just found Jesus Christ guilty. 

(Commotion in court. Similar outbursts from other member of the audience) (1971: 121) 

Even the judge himself admits in an unusual conversation with the defendants before 

the clerk takes the verdict, that he sympathises with them on moral grounds: “I am not 

questioning the highness of your motive. I think that one must admire a person who is 

willing to suffer for his beliefs” (1971: 112). The burning of the files and the attitude of 

some of the defendants, however, elicited reactions of an altogether different nature 

that Berrigan alludes to in his play as well. “We have been accused of arrogance”, 

admits Philip Berrigan (1971: 30). The accusations came not only from the powers that 

be, as was to be expected, but also from some fellow pacifists who disapproved of the 

dominant role played by the Fathers Daniel and Philip Berrigan. Marian Mollin (2004) 

reads the Catonsville act along gender lines. In her opinion, the two brothers received 

“a disproportionate amount of media attention, giving the actions a visibly masculine 

tinge”. Daniel, she explains, “typically depicted the protests as highly masculinized rites 

of passage that would, in his words, remove ‘the bars to manhood’. Philip similarly 

described involvement in the resistance as part of the process of ‘becoming a man’” 

4 DANIEL BERRIGAN: “Your honor, we are having great difficulty in trying to adjust to the 

atmosphere of a court from which the world is excluded, and the events that brought us here are 

excluded deliberately, by the charge to the jury” (1971: 113) 


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(2004: 41). Mary Moylan, one of the two women resisters from the Catonsville Nine, 

showed her disagreement with such dynamics: 

for Mary, her membership in the Catonsville Nine became increasingly enraging. She saw 

rampant clericalism and patriarchalism in the way the Berrigan brothers were the center 

of attention. She was angered by the lack of equal regard for others, especially women like 

herself, who had taken the same risks but who remained in the shadows. (Rosemary 

Radford Ruether, in Mollin 2004:47) 

Apparently, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, a faithful rendition of the actual records, 

leaves little room for male chauvinism on the part of its author. However, significantly 

enough, not a single one of the quotations chosen by Berrigan to contrast and 

complement the speeches of the nine defendants is authored by a woman. Not even the 

one that closes Mary Moylan’s testimony, which is about a woman, Antigone, but 

authored by a man, Sophocles: “In dark corners I have heard them say/ how the whole 

town is grieving for this girl/ unjustly dealt, if ever woman was/ for glorious action 

done” (1971: 66). The accusations of arrogance that Philip Berrigan mentions also seem 

to rest on the attitude of the two brothers towards those that did not share their views 

or their radical commitment to the pacifist cause. Anne Walsh, a former nun who took 

part in a number of draft boards, remembers the pressure to commit to an action: “we 

each … put friends under a lot of pressure … which was uncomfortable for me. But I 

think it’s the only way you got people to act, to really say … ‘well, this is the only way to 

take a stand” (in Mollin 2004: 39). The question the prosecution asks Thomas Lewis in 

the play – “Did you consider that others like you might hold a view about Vietnam that 

was contrary to yours?” (1971: 47) – further stresses this idea of one-sidedness. The 

Christian invitation to ‘love thy enemies’ and ‘bless them that curse you and persecute 

you’ does not seem to have been taken in by the resisters. Daniel Berrigan’s allusion to 

Buddhism in his introduction to the play reads as merely ornamental: “My brother 

Philip said …: ‘There is no one way, there are as many ways as there are men or 

communities …’. His remark had a Buddhist flavour” (1971: x). In Buddhism, nonviolence 

stems from non-hatred and both lead to the dissolution of one’s ego rather to 

its consolidation. “It is difficult to imagine this man dwelling in peace”, says Walter 

Goodman (1988) in his review of Daniel Berrigan’s autobiography, To Dwell in Peace, 

for the New York Times. The review, tellingly entitled ‘Amid Avowals of Love, Bursts of 

Hate’, criticises Berrigan’s certainty of his own righteousness together with his scorn for 

those who hold different views. In the play, the anonymity of entries such as judge, 

prosecution, defense, witness, always referred to by their function in the trial, contrasts 

with the particularity of the names and surnames of the nine defendants. The Christian 

ideal of loving one’s enemy is as demanding as Levinas’s infinite responsibility for the 

other. I am responsible for all the others, including those that persecute me. I am 

accountable for the very faults of another. The Trial of the Catonsville Nine falls short of 

the Levinasian imperative since the other worthy of the resisters’ compassion refers 

exclusively to those suffering from the rigours of war or fighting to eradicate them, 

neglecting those figures of the other that question the legitimacy of their acts. 

Despite Berrigan’s failure to fully comply with the exorbitant requests of Christian 

and Levinasian ethics – or perhaps, precisely, because of it – I would like to end my 


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analysis by quoting W.B. Yeats’s refrain for his ‘Easter 1916’, a poem dedicated to the 

leaders of the failed Easter Rising against the British in Dublin. Notwithstanding the 

radical difference between the two events, one violent, the other non-violent, 

notwithstanding the effectiveness of the act by the nine resisters, we can say with Yeats 

that in Berrigan’s The Trial of the Catonsville Nine “[a] terrible beauty is born”. 

Works Cited 

Berrigan, Daniel 1971 (1970): The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. Boston: Beacon. 

––––– 1987: To Dwell in Peace: An Autobiography. San Francisco: Harper & Row. 

––––– 2008: El juicio de los nueve de Catonsville. Ed. and intro. Andrés García Inda. Trans. 

Bárbara Arizti Martín. Hondarribia: Editorial Hiru. Hiru Teatro. 

Campbell, David 1999: ‘The Deterritorialization of Responsibility: Levinas, Derrida, and Ethics 

after the End of Philosophy’. David Campbell and Michael J. Shapiro, eds. Moral Spaces: 

Rethinking Ethics and World Politics. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P. 29-57. 

Chryssostalis, Julia H. 2004: ‘Beyond Otonomy, or Beyond the Law of Law’s Ear’. Patrick Hanafin, 

Adam Geary and Joseph Brooker, eds. Law and Literature. Oxford: Blackwell. 149-58. 

Claviez, Thomas 2008: Ethics and Aesthetics: Otherness and Moral Imagination from Aristotle to 

Levinas and from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to House Made of Dawn. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag 

Winter. 

Critchley, Simon 2007: Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London 

and New York: Verso. 

Dear, John 1996: ‘An Introduction (of Sorts)’. John Dear, ed. Apostle of Peace: Essays in Honor of 

Daniel Berrigan. Maryknoll: Orbis. 1-19. 

Derrida, Jacques 1992: ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundations of Authority”’. Drucilla Cornell, 

Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson, eds. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. 

New York: Routledge. 3-67. 

Dolin, Kieran 1999: Fiction and the Law: Legal Discourse in Victorian and Modernist Literature. 

Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 

Gibson, Andrew 1999: Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas. London and 

New York: Routledge. 

Goodman, Walter 1988: ‘Amid Avowals of Love, Bursts of Hate’. Rev. of To Dwell in Peace, by 

Daniel Berrigan. New York Times 11 March: C36. 

Gustainis, Justin J. 1990: ‘Crime as Rhetoric: The Trial of the Catonsville Nine’. Robert 

Hariman, ed. Popular Trials: Rhetoric, Mass Media and the Law. Tuscaloosa and London: U 

of Alabama P. 164-78. 

Hariman, Robert, ed. 1990: Popular Trials: Rhetoric, Mass Media and the Law. Tuscaloosa and 

London: U of Alabama P. 

Harpham, Geoffrey Galt 1995: ‘Ethics’. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds. Critical 

Terms for Literary Study. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 387-405. 

Ieven, Bram 2006: ‘Legitimacy and Violence: On the Relation between Law and Justice According 

to Rawls and Derrida’. John T. Parry, ed. Evil, Law and the State: Perspectives on State Power 

and Violence. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 199-210. 

Krasner, David 2006: American Drama 1945-2000. An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. 

Levinas, Emmanuel 1991 (1969): Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Dordrecht: Kluwer 

Academic Publishers. 

––––– 2003a (1948): ‘Reality and Its Shadow’. Seán Hand, ed. The Levinas Reader. Oxford: 

Blackwell. 129-43. 


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––––– 2003b (1984): ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’. Seán Hand, ed. The Levinas Reader. Oxford: 

Blackwell. 75-88. 

––––– 2004 (1974): Otherwise than Being Or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburg: 

Duquesne UP. 

Mitgang, Herbert 1991: ‘Shifting Causes: Updates From the American Left’. New York Times 26 

June, late ed. East Coast: C. 16 

Mollin, Marian 2004: ‘Communities of Resistance: Women and the Catholic Left of the Late 

1960s’. The Oral History Review 31.2: 29-51. 

Pabón Arrieta, Juan 2003: ‘La desobediencia civil: expresión del derecho fundamental al derecho de 

la resistencia a la opresión en Haanah Arendt’. Domingo García Marzá and Elsa González, eds. 

Entre la ética y la política: Éticas de la sociedad civil. CD-ROM. Castellón: U Jaume I. 221-32. 

Polloczek, Dieter Paul 1999: Literature and Legal Discourse: Equity and Ethics from Stern to 

Conrad. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 

Rush, Molly 1996: ‘We Are Filled with Hope: Beating Swords into Plowshares with Daniel’. John 

Dear, ed. Apostle of Peace: Essays in Honour of Daniel Berrigan. Maryknoll: Orbis. 52-60. 

Sachs, Lynn 2001: Investigation of a Flame: A Documentary Portrait of the Catonsville Nine. A film 

by Lynn Sachs. First Run. Icarus Films. 

Shepard, Richard F. 1981: ‘Catonsville Nine’. A Review. New York Times 14 May: 1.12. 

True, Michael 1988: Daniel Berrigan: Poetry, Drama, Prose. Maryknoll: Orbis. 

Weiss, Peter 2008 (1971): ‘Notes on the Contemporary Theatre’. David Krasner, ed. Theatre in 

Theory 1900-2000. An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell. 381-87. 

Received 23 March 2009 Revised version accepted 5 February 2010 

Bárbara Arizti (PhD University of Zaragoza) is Senior Lecturer at the University of Zaragoza, where she is 

currently working on the literary representations of ethics and trauma. Her publications include the 

collective volume On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English, co- edited with 

Silvia Martínez-Falquina and the chapter ‘Narrative Freedom and Déjà Lu in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso 

Sea’, in Margarete Rubik, Elke Mettinger-Schartmann (eds), A Breath of Fresh Eyre: Intertextual and 

Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre. 

Address: Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de 

Zaragoza. C/ Pedro Cerbuna 12, 50009 Zaragoza, Spain. Tel.: +34 976 761522. Fax: + 34 976 761519. 


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“. . . in ecstatic cahoots”: Nick’s Authoring of Gatsby 

Winifred Farrant Bevilacqua 

Università degli Studi di Torino 

winifred.farrant@unito.it 

After pointing out how, in The Great Gatsby, Nick presents three artistic visualizations of 

Jay Gatsby – as a young man from the provinces, as a would-be carnival king and as a 

romantic character (in the Bakhtinian sense) – I narrow my focus to the third of these 

visualizations. I argue that Bakhtin’s theories in ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ 

(1924-1927) give us the concepts and patterns that best enable us to understand Nick’s 

strategies in the strand of his narrative that traces the process by which he achieves and 

gives form to his understanding of Gatsby’s inner self. 

Keywords: Fitzgerald, F. Scott; The Great Gatsby (1925); Bakhtin, Mikhail; “Author and 

Hero in Aesthetic Activity” (1924-1927); novel 

“... en extático acuerdo”: Gatsby inventado por Nick 

Tras señalar cómo, en The Great Gatsby, Nick presenta tres visualizaciones artísticas de Jay 

Gatsby – joven provinciano, aspirante a rey del carnaval, y personaje romántico (en el sentido 

de Bajtín) – me centro en la tercera de estas visualizaciones. Sostengo que las teorías de Bajtín 

en ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ (1924-1927) nos marcan las pautas para 

comprender las estrategias de Nick en el hilo de su relato sobre el proceso conformador de su 

percepción de la personalidad más profunda de Gatsby. 

Palabras clave: Fitzgerald, F. Scott; The Great Gatsby (1925); Bajtín, Mijaíl; “Author and 

Hero in Aesthetic Activity” (1924-1927); novela

46 Winifred Farrant Bevilacqua 

And, since you know you cannot see yourself 

So well as by reflection, I, your glass, 

Will modestly discover to yourself 

That of yourself which you yet know not of. 

William Shakespeare Julius Caesar Act I, Scene ii 

Many a man has cherished for years some vague shadow 

of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false; he has 

nevertheless, passionately loved it, has made it his 

companion by day and by night, and has given to it his 

strength and his life, leaving all other occupations for its 

sake, and in short has lived with it and for it, until it has 

become, as it were, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; 

and then he has waked up some morning to find it gone, 

clean vanished away like the beautiful Melusina of the 

fable, and the essence of his life gone with it. I have myself 

known such a man. 

Charles S. Peirce, ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’ (1878) 

Right at the heart of his search for a deeper understanding of Gatsby, while Gatsby and 

Daisy are getting reunited in his bungalow, Nick steps outside and for half an hour 

stares at Gatsby’s mansion “like Kant at his church steeple” (Fitzgerald 1992: 93). 1 With 

this reference, Fitzgerald figures Nick as a contemplating consciousness and situates his 

deepening search for an understanding of Gatsby’s personality in a philosophical 

context. This context happens to be the same one that inspired Mikhail Bakhtin in 

‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’, which combines a phenomenology of the 

relationship between the self and the other with a study of the creative process. With a 

theoretical framework drawn from Bakhtin and focusing mainly on one strand of the 

narrative in The Great Gatsby, this essay aims to elucidate the process by which Nick 

achieves and gives form to his understanding of Gatsby’s inner self. 

Bakhtin’s ideas derive from Kant’s model of how the mind understands the world, 

especially his claim that the mind of the knower plays an active role in constituting the 

features of the objects before it. As Clark and Holquist explain, he also follows Kant in 

insisting on “the necessary interaction – the dialogue . . . between mind and world” and 

in arguing that “thought is a synthesis of two sources of knowledge, sensibility and 

understanding” (Clark and Holquist 1984: 58). Bakhtin makes clear that the author in 

question is not the author-as-person but the author/creator (a role assumed during 

aesthetic activity) or a character upon whom that authorial role has been self-reflexively 

1 Fitzgerald is referring to the anecdote about Kant’s habit of meditating while gazing at the 

steeple of the Löbenicht Parish Church, first reported by Ehregott Andreas Christoph Wasianski 

in 1804. Besides clarifying the source of this anecdote, Horst Kruse proposes that Nick’s thoughts 

about Gatsby’s mansion in the scene where Kant is mentioned constitute “a deliberate discourse 

on Time and the inability of Man to escape its inexorable rule” (2003: 76) thus forming part of 

the novel’s series of reflections on time. 


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“. . . in ecstatic cahoots”: Nick’s Authoring of Gatsby 47 

conferred and that the hero is not simply the protagonist but an image of a personality 

seen as a totality. 

In order to create this whole, the author must assume a standpoint that enables him 

to see what is inaccessible to the perception and consciousness of the hero from his 

standpoint within his own life. Both perspectives must be present, for together they 

form the architectonic structure of the text. Bakhtin’s point of departure for his analysis 

is the fact that each of us occupies a unique place in being: an I cannot be where an 

other is or see itself as the other sees it. For a self, the space around it is a horizon seen 

from its personal point of observation and every element in these surroundings assumes 

a specific meaning determined by its own ends. From the perspective of the other, that 

self exists in an environment where it figures as one given element among others and 

can be seen as part of the whole. In terms of its existence in time, a self feels that it is 

constantly evolving as a result of new events, experiences or knowledge; it sees itself as 

always striving after an ideal which may someday be actualized in a particular object or 

situation. The other, instead, can see that self as limited in time, bound by a beginning 

and an end, whole and complete. Similarly, from the point of view of meaning, a self 

cannot perceive its own axiological boundaries precisely because it is so immersed in 

the flow of life with its objectives, imperatives and possibilities. Yet those boundaries 

can be traced by a special other who deliberately tries to discern and interpret the self’s 

repeating rhythms of behavior. Therefore, from the position of outsidedness, and 

relying on the spatial, temporal and semantic surplus of vision this position permits, the 

special other (other as author) can fashion various aspects of the self (self as hero) into a 

conceptual whole with a coherent meaning termed finalization or consummation. 

Subsequently, during the process of reading, as Brandist says in his remarks on 

authoring, “it is this aesthetic judgement that the reader as external spectator co-creates. 

The author and reader thereby adopt a position akin to Kant’s theoretical reason, sitting 

in judgement” (2001: 216). 

In The Great Gatsby, Nick responds valuationally to each of the other characters but, 

save for Gatsby, his responses are concerned with a few aspects of their personalities of 

particular interest to him. He ponders on Tom’s reactionary ideas and infidelity, on 

Jordan’s androgyny and presumed dishonesty, on Myrtle’s vitality and doomed 

aspirations, on Wolfshiem’s lawlessness and lack of loyalty to Gatsby. He would like to 

go beyond his contradictory impressions of Daisy as either unfortunately limited by her 

milieu or insincere and self-serving, yet he never quite resolves his ambivalence, so the 

initial reason for his impasse – “I had no sight into Daisy’s heart” (1992: 10) – remains 

true at the end of the story. His reactions to Gatsby, instead, are intense and profound 

and he eventually seems to recognize that he possesses a many-chambered inner realm 

and that the core characteristic of his selfhood metamorphoses according to the room it 

inhabits. As a matter of fact, Nick devises at least three conceptualizations of Gatsby, 

each of which is developed in a different set of scenes characterized by a different 

relationship between author and hero. 

In the section of ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ devoted to ‘The Whole of 

the Hero as a Whole of Meaning’, Bakhtin describes the possible interrelationships of 

author and hero as they are manifested in confession, autobiography, biography, lyric, 


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as classical or romantic ‘character’, as type and in hagiography. He concludes his 

discussion by specifying that: 

These forms do not coincide, of course, with the concrete forms of particular works; we 

have formulated them here as abstract-ideal forms or utmost limits toward which the 

concrete moments of a work tend. For it is difficult to find pure biography, pure lyric, 

pure character, and pure type. What we usually have is the union of several ideal forms, 

the action of several ultimate limits, with the predominance now of one, now of another. 

(Bakhtin 1990: 186) 

Two of Bakhtin’s ideal forms coexist in Fitzgerald’s representation of the different ways 

Nick relates to Gatsby as author relates to hero. These are the biographical form and 

that of the romantic character. The biographical hero’s “value”, or life-organizing force, 

“is grounded in the will or drive to be a hero – to have significance in the world of 

others; in the will to be loved; and, finally, in the will to live life’s ‘fabular’ possibilities” 

(Bakhtin 1990: 155). What this hero strives for originates outside himself; he chooses it, 

assimilates it into his consciousness and attempts to mold his life in accordance with it. 

The author’s understanding of this hero is an extrapolation of what is inherent in his 

behavior and his externalized thoughts while his value-defining position is alongside 

the hero, either in conflict or in agreement. 

This form is present in two versions. The variant Bakhtin terms adventure/heroic 

focuses on what Gatsby has lived through and what he has done, how he has attempted 

to become the hero of his own life by achieving fame and glory. This Gatsby is 

conceptualized as a “young man from the provinces” who loses sight of his ideals as he 

fights for a share in the privileges and power of a capitalist social world which refuses 

him (Trilling 1950; Chanda 1981). Nick traces his transformation from a provincial 

idealist into an egotistical predator in scenes which show him as a youngster planning 

to attain wealth and social status while adhering to small town notions of virtue and 

chivalry, as an ambitious youth under the tutelage of Dan Cody, who educates him in 

ruthlessness, and as an associate of Meyer Wolfshiem, whose underworld activities help 

him amass the fortune needed to purchase his fabulous mansion. Clearly, his values are 

chosen from those proffered by his culture, namely the self-made man and the frontier 

hero as they exist on both sides of the moral-ethical divide, and he strives, to borrow 

Bakhtin’s phrase, “to grow in and for others, and not in and for [himself] . . . to assume 

a place in the proximate world of [his] . . . contemporaries” (Bakhtin 1990: 156). 2 

2 This conceptualization of Gatsby, which I associate with the biographical hero, assumes 

centrality in Michael Holquist’s analysis of The Great Gatsby in the final chapter of his volume 

Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World. Grounding his discussion in Bakhtin’s views about how 

perception and language work, Holquist argues that Gatsby’s story “dramatizes the central role of 

stereotyping in formation of the individual subject on the one hand, and on the other, the role of 

stereotyping as a dynamic in social and historical formation. Gatsby is the story of his career; in it 

we can see how history uses stereotypes, the formulaic categories of what might be called a poetics 

of the social, to form the subject as a link in the discursive chain” (1990:175). He stresses how 

James Gatz consciously chooses to forge his new social identity as Jay Gatsby according to the 

American stereotype of the self-made man and he proposes that what Gatsby “seeks in particular 

is a biography that will be free of changes” (1990: 177-178). 


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In another set of scenes, Gatsby is conceptualized as the kind of hero in biography 

who engages in “playing with life as a ‘fabular’ value, freed of any answerability within 

the unique and unitary event of being” (Bakhtin 1990: 158). This value pervades the 

scenes in which Nick envisions him as a Trimalchio in West Egg who, like his 

predecessor in Petronius’ Satyricon, is a nouveau riche, eager to emulate his social 

superiors and given to a conspicuous display of wealth (MacKendrick 1950). Seen in 

this guise, Gatsby carnivalizes reality in his magnificent parties, assumes masks which 

blur his identity, ardently desires and almost achieves a carnivalistic shift of position 

and destiny from lowly farm boy to a prince worthy of marrying “the king’s daughter, 

the golden girl” (1992: 127). Here too, his desire to attain an absolute reversal of his 

fortunes is not determined by his innermost I-for-myself but by something in the world 

which he has allowed to possess him and which he pursues with amoral intelligence 

(Farrant Bevilacqua 2003/2004). 

The other ideal form arising from Nick and Gatsby’s author-hero relation is that of 

‘Romantic character’. In contrast to the biographical hero, this hero’s life-organizing 

force is an intensely personal, interior truth which arises from his I-for-myself and is 

kept hidden from the world of others: 

Acting from within himself in accordance with various purposes, the hero actualizes that 

which has validity from the standpoint of meaning and objects, and, in doing so, he 

actualizes, in reality, a certain idea, a certain necessary truth of his life, a certain archetype 

of himself, the design God has conceived for him. The result is that the course of his life, 

its various events and constituents, and often its objective surroundings as well are 

somewhat symbolized. . . . and all of the moments that constitute his quest for meaning 

and value (he wants, he loves, he considers something to be true, etc.) find their 

transgredient determination as the symbolic stages of a single artistic course, the course of 

actualizing a certain idea. It is inevitable that lyrical moments occupy a prominent place 

in the Romantic hero . . . The attitude or position with respect to meaning that is 

deposited in the Romantic character has ceased to be authoritative and is only reexperienced, 

lyrically re-experienced. (Bakhtin 1990: 180) 

The scenes relating this visualization are referred to in the prologue when Nick 

announces that one essential part of the story he is about to tell will trace the 

evolution of his stance toward Gatsby through various moments of authoring when 

he interpreted his “series of successful gestures” (1992: 6) and that he is now in a 

position to offer his finalized image. To accomplish the task of creating such an image 

an author must be animated by “aesthetic love” for, Bakhtin cautions, “[l]ovelessness, 

indifference will never be able to generate sufficient power to slow down and linger 

intently over an object, to hold and sculpt every detail and particular in it, however 

minute. Only love is capable of being aesthetically productive” (Bakhtin 1993: 64). As 

if presenting his credentials, Nick draws attention to his reflective nature and his 

tendency to reserve judgements which, he says, is a matter of infinite hope in the 

essential value of people and their experiences. He likewise anticipates that he will 

present himself as intensely engaged in aesthetic activity even though those moments, 

he subsequently explains, “were merely casual events in a crowded summer and, until 

much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs” (1992: 60-61). 

Also in the prologue, Nick’s emphasis on qualities such as Gatsby’s “heightened 


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sensitivity to the promises of life . . . extraordinary gift for hope . . . romantic 

readiness” (1992: 6) indicates that, in this conceptualization, his hero’s core 

characteristic is his sense of unlimited possibilities and that this self-conception 

functions independent of the finite reality of concrete experience. Finally, Nick is 

careful to differentiate his aesthetic understanding of Gatsby as having “turned out all 

right at the end” from his ethical evaluation of him as having “represented everything 

for which I have an unaffected scorn” (1992:6), the evaluation that permeates his 

portraits of him as a predator and as a clown. 

During Nick’s aesthetic activity, Gatsby is invariably figured as standing at a real 

or metaphorical threshold which marks his separation from a world beyond his 

immediate possession and simultaneously promises him a point of access to it so that 

he always seems suspended between an unsatisfactory past and the illusion of a 

desirable future and in communion with a secret longing for something that can 

never be achieved. This figuration combines the intense interiority Bakhtin and 

Fitzgerald emphasize in the Romantic hero with the threshold viewed as “a ‘point’ 

where crisis, radical change, an unexpected turn of fate takes place, where decisions 

are made, where the forbidden line is overstepped, where one is renewed or perishes” 

(Bakhtin 1984: 169). 

In the course of his narration, Nick generally signals the start of his aesthetic 

reactions, opens a space in his narrative for his speculations and alerts the reader that 

he does not assume there is an absolute correspondence between his and Gatsby’s 

views with phrases like “I suppose he smiled” (106), “I gathered that he wanted” (117), 

“he had probably discovered” (106), “possibly it had occurred to him”(98) and “I 

have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe” (1992: 169). His aesthetic reactions to 

his hero evolve in precisely the three phases of authoring. After mentally projecting 

himself into Gatsby in an attempt to see the world as he perceives it, he returns into 

himself and, resuming his authorial surplus of vision vis-à-vis his hero without 

forgetting his hero’s worldview, he ponders on some newly-discovered or newlyintuited 

feature of Gatsby’s inward realm of experience. Thanks to the process of 

identification and separation, he achieves the outsidedness necessary to see and know 

“more not just in the same direction as the hero looks and sees, but also in a different 

direction which is in principle inaccessible to the hero” (Bakhtin 1990: 12). Next, he 

extracts what he imagines to be Gatsby’s abstract ideals from their material 

embodiment and interprets them by means of judgement and commentary that 

textually manifest his surplus of vision. These meditations are often cast in the form 

of a segmented sentence or paragraph in which what is expressed simply or 

objectively in the first instance is then reformulated lyrically. 

From Bakhtin’s point of view, it is not usually easy for an author to initiate a 

productive aesthetic relationship with a hero because “[b]efore the countenance of the 

hero finally takes shape as a stable and necessary whole, the hero is going to exhibit a 

great many grimaces, random masks, wrong gestures, and unexpected actions, . . . 

through the chaos of which [the author] . . . is compelled to work his way in order to 

reach an authentic valuational attitude” (Bakhtin 1990: 6). When Nick first glimpses 

Gatsby, he is standing alone in the moonlight in front of the bay behind his mansion 

with his arms stretched out towards a distant green light. Gatsby seems so absorbed in 


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what he is doing that Nick turns away without disturbing him and when he looks back 

again, his mysterious neighbor has vanished. During their initial encounter at one of 

Gatsby’s parties, Gatsby seems to actively elicit his interest with “one of those rare 

smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five 

times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole external world for an instant, and 

then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor” (1992: 52). 

However, this flash of intimacy, which Nick experiences as a moment of communion 

with Gatsby above and beyond their present spatial and temporal situation, comes to an 

abrupt halt as the smile vanishes and Nick finds himself looking at a young rough-neck 

whose elaborate formality of speech was almost absurd. 

His confusion is increased by the rumors about Gatsby whispered by the party 

guests, and by Jordan’s lack of belief in Gatsby’s self-description as an Oxford man. 

Nick is also perplexed by Gatsby’s air of detachment from his immediate environment: 

he takes no active part in the merriment and at the end, oblivious to the cacophony of 

the departing guests, he stands in “complete isolation, . . . his hand up in a formal 

gesture of farewell” (1992: 60). Their first extended conversation, during their ride to 

New York City, opens with Gatsby blurting out “Look here, old sport . . . What’s your 

opinion of me anyhow?” (1992: 69) – a question which seems to express a desire, 

perhaps a need, for Nick’s active contemplation of his inner self. Without waiting for an 

answer, Gatsby launches into a fantastic personal history which he says is intended to 

counteract the rumors Nick has certainly been hearing but which actually constitutes a 

self-parody of his attempt to invent himself as a person of consequence. Obviously, as 

long as Nick’s knowledge of Gatsby remains so partial and his ideas are in such a state 

of flux, he cannot begin to relate to him as author/creator developing a stable evaluative 

position, nor can Gatsby be more than a potential hero. 

Only when Jordan reveals Gatsby’s youthful romance with Daisy and his longing for 

a reunion, which he wishes to take place in Nick’s bungalow, does Nick get beyond his 

impasse and find a tentative key into his enigmatic friend: “Then it had not been merely 

the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered 

suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor” (1992: 83). His field of vision 

expands, bringing into focus things that were not heretofore perceptible, enriching his 

view of Gatsby’s environment, opening an avenue of approach to his consciousness, 

suggesting aspects to be considered in formulating ideas about his life-organizing force. 

Eventually, Gatsby begins to trust Nick and makes a few intimate disclosures which 

further facilitate his aesthetic activity. 

To designate how a particular lived experience can be ordered in time through the 

gaze of an other, Bakhtin uses the term rhythm. Rhythm overcomes the boundaries 

between past, present and future, changing the future into the present or the past into 

the future. Most crucially, an inner situation that is rhythmicized is removed from 

the epistemologically and axiologically unbounded region of life as experienced by 

the hero and is consolidated aesthetically by the author with elements that are outside 

the range of the hero’s consciousness. It retains a “gleam” of the meaning it had for 

the hero but becomes part of a whole which exists independently of that meaning 

(Bakhtin 1990: 116-18). 


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Observing Gatsby responding to Daisy’s presence in his bungalow on the day of 

their reunion, Nick remarks on how he “literally glowed; without a word or gesture of 

exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the small room” (1992: 94). 

Watching him in his mansion re-evaluating his possessions and himself through her 

reactions, he notes how he “passed visibly through . . . embarrassment . . . unreasoning 

joy . . . wonder” until the climactic moment when, standing beside Daisy watching the 

evening sky from his bedroom window, he experienced the thrill of having his dream 

come true (1992: 94, 97). After vicariously participating in his hero’s fluctuating 

emotions, Nick steps back and, while Gatsby is still immersed in this particular moment 

of the ongoing event of his being, he tries to perceive it as part of a whole which unites 

past, present and future in some pattern of overall development. As a future-oriented 

hero whose lived experience is an attitude assumed in relation to some object or goal, 

Gatsby merely tells Daisy that, except for the rain and mist, they would be able to see 

the green light that burns at the end of her dock; as an author viewing his hero as 

bound and determined, and organizing his experiences rhythmically, Nick adds: 

“possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had vanished 

forever” (1992: 98). Nick’s conviction that Gatsby, after five years of never having had 

to measure his vision against reality, will inevitably feel a sense of loss as well as 

fulfillment, leads to his first portrait of his hero’s inner countenance: 

Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy 

tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal 

vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself 

into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright 

feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire and freshness can challenge what a man 

can store up in his ghostly heart. (1992: 101) 

During his meditations on Gatsby’s adolescence, Nick’s relationship to his hero 

deepens into “sympathetic understanding” which “is not a mirroring, but a 

fundamentally and essentially new valuation, a utilization of my own architectonic 

position in being outside another’s inner life. Sympathetic understanding recreates the 

whole inner person in aesthetically loving categories for a new existence in a new 

dimension of the world” (Bakhtin 1990: 103). As far as the reader can understand from 

Nick’s summary of Gatsby’s recollections, as a farm boy from South Dakota, he refused 

to settle for his obvious and immediate horizons and after a few weeks of college 

became a drifter along the shores of Lake Superior. Supplementing and interpreting 

these facts, Nick arrives at an idea of Gatsby’s inner life at that time as so intense and 

self-absorbed, making the world pivot on his ego, that only verbs of passionate action 

and nouns denoting a fervid imagination can effectively depict it: 

. . . his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits 

haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his 

brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his 

tangled clothes on the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until 

drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. (1992: 105) 


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Nick imagines Gatsby’s encounter with Cody as taking place on a borderline where 

space is bifurcated into here and there and time stands still: “To young Gatz resting his 

oars and looking up at the railed deck, that yacht represented all the beauty and 

glamour in the world”, the materialization of his universe of ineffable gaudiness (1992: 

106). Then he elevates the change of name with which Jimmy Gatz celebrates his good 

fortune in meeting Cody to the status of a ritual of self-definition – “his Platonic 

conception of himself” (1992: 104) – and transforms his aspirations into pursuit of an 

ideal which transcends ordinary reality. Nick articulates this quest, as he sees it 

animating Gatsby's soul, in his own elevated style and with allusions to myth and 

religion that are congenial to him. 

Within himself, the hero lives in the open present, looking for meaning from an 

anticipated future and sometimes using the past to look forward. After the party Daisy 

attended but did not enjoy, Gatsby, looking around “as if the past were lurking here in 

the shadow of his house, just out of the reach of his hand”, discloses that his intentions 

regarding Daisy hinge on his determination to “repeat the past . . . to fix everything just 

the way it was before”. Intrigued by his desire to enter a realm where he can defy time, 

deny mutability, transform regret for what never could have been into determination to 

reinstate an idealized version of his past, Nick ceases to report his words and switches 

into a doubly-marked speculation – “I gathered that he wanted to recover something, 

some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy” – then trails off in an 

ellipsis (1992: 116-17). Unwilling to accept either the finality of Daisy’s marriage or how 

the events of her life over the past five years have affected his fate, Gatsby expresses the 

self’s “insanity of faith and hope” that the meaning of his life has not yet been realized: 

“In the deepest part of myself, I live by eternal faith and hope in the constant possibility 

of the inner miracle of a new birth” (Bakhtin 1990: 128, 127). 

At this point, their author-hero relationship changes into one in which Gatsby’s 

words, his feelings and desires, his very sense of himself as yet-to-be are encircled and 

enclosed by Nick’s consciousness. Nick’s authorial stance now involves not only spatial, 

temporal and axiological separateness but also the act of aesthetic consolidation 

whereby he encapsulates the quintessence of Gatsby’s existential experience. Hence the 

richness of his meditation on the kiss that sealed Gatsby’s relationship to Daisy. 

Building less on his few bits of information about the courtship than on his previous 

ideas about his hero, Nick envisions this as a moment of romantic ecstasy during which 

Gatsby projects on Daisy qualities more appropriate to his dream of transcendence than 

to her actuality. Nick sees this moment as Gatsby’s major crisis, the turning point which 

will determine his fate. Situated on the boundary between the ideal – “his unutterable 

visions” – and the material – “her perishable breath” – Gatsby hesitates for an instant 

and listens to “the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star”. Then he makes his 

choice and “at his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation 

was complete” (1992: 117). In this act of consummation, Nick simultaneously 

anticipates “the inevitable nonrealization or failure of his [hero’s] entire life in respect 

to meaning” as he hoped to achieve it and seeks to vindicate his life with “forms of 

justification that he is in principle incapable of finding from his own place”. Gatsby’s 

“miracle” thus occurs, but beyond the bounds of his own world, in Nick’s outsidedness, 


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where Nick “gives birth to [his] soul on a new axiological plane of being” (Bakhtin 

1990: 130, 129). 

On the morning after Myrtle’s brutal death, Gatsby spoke at length about his 

feelings for Daisy during his courtship and after. From Nick’s report, it seems that 

Gatsby saw himself as an outsider longing to cross the material and social gulf – the 

“indiscernible barbed wire” – that divided him from Daisy’s world; determined to step 

over the forbidden line, he “took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously” 

(1992: 156). Unexpectedly, he found himself intensely in love and although the war 

separated them and she eventually married Tom, he never gave up on reclaiming her. 

For Nick, this backward glance balances not only the story told by Jordan which had led 

to his breakthrough regarding Gatsby but also his memory of Gatsby outside Daisy’s 

home the evening before “standing in the moonlight – watching over nothing” (1992: 

153). Gatsby’s defeat prompts Nick to console him as an individual and to assert the 

value of his emotions and desires without endorsing all aspects of his vision and actions. 

Empathy followed by an act of authoring thus characterizes what turns out to be their 

last exchange of words, gestures and attitudes: 

We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I remembered 

something and turned around. 

“They’re a rotten crowd”, I shouted, across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn 

bunch put together”. 

I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I 

disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face 

broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we’d been in ecstatic cahoots on that 

fact all the time. (1992: 161, emphasis added) 

Nick and Gatsby have had an extraordinary relationship going far beyond a simple 

encounter of two selves and reaching the sphere of aesthetic intersubjectivity. Nick has 

attempted to formulate a sense of Gatsby’s inner world while he, as indicated by his 

understanding smile, has welcomed Nick’s gaze, has assumed an unfinalized subject 

position with regards to his authorial consciousness and has seemingly accepted 

elements of his artistic completion. 

Nick’s final act of authoring is an imagined reconstruction of the thoughts in 

Gatsby’s mind just moments before he is murdered. Relying wholly on his surplus of 

vision and on his memory of his previous interactions with his hero, he focuses on the 

disintegration of the idea which, he has come to believe, constituted the essence of 

Gatsby’s inner life. The sky toward which Gatsby had thought he could climb to “suck 

on the pap of life” (1992: 117) is now seen as distant and frightening. Daisy’s blossoming 

at his kiss has metamorphosed into a grotesque rose with meaningless beauty destined 

to wither. The moonlight so congenial to his fertile imagination has been overwhelmed 

by the pitiless glare of raw sunlight. His illusions about the unreality of reality, which 

had authorized him to clothe the world in his own ideas, have collapsed, leaving him 

with “a new world, material without being real” (1992: 169). 

Having completed his aesthetic activity, an author relinquishes his creative role and 

his work becomes the object of his contemplation. When he speaks about the heroes he 

has endowed with the gift of aesthetic form, 


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he voices his present relationship to them as already created and determined: he conveys 

the impression they produce on him now as artistic images and gives utterance to the 

attitude he now maintains toward them as living, determinate persons from a social, 

moral, or other point of view; they have already become independent of him, and he 

himself has become independent of himself as their active creator, that is, has become a 

particular individual, critic, psychologist, or moralist. (Bakhtin 1990: 7) 

On the evening before he returns to the Midwest, Nick meditates on some possible 

larger meanings of his finalized image of Gatsby. Thoughts of Gatsby and his dreams, as 

Nick has fashioned them into an image of his soul, get linked with thoughts about the 

dream that animated the imaginations of the first Dutch sailors on reaching America 

when, in Nick’s speculation, “for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held 

his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation 

he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with 

something commensurate to his capacity for wonder” (1992: 189). Dreams, 

enchantment, wonder experienced for the last time – elements integral to his image of 

Gatsby – are extended to the sailors who, suspended between their aspirations and 

reality, imagined that the New World ‘flowered’ for them and held out the promise of 

regeneration. Considering Gatsby in connection with the fate of the American Dream, 

Nick next conflates his hero’s disorientation and failure with the betrayal of the ideals 

that were to have shaped the Republic and to have accompanied the pioneers of the 

westward movement. Then, in his mind, Gatsby’s pursuit of infinite possibilities and his 

desire to rescue something he deemed precious from the flow of time become emblems 

of universal longings, illusions and disappointments. 

Works Cited 

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1984: Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. 

Minneapolis: U Minnesota P. 

––––– 1990 (1924-1927): ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’. Art and Answerability: Early 

Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Eds. Michael Holquist and 

Liapunov. Austin: U of Texas P. 4-256. 

––––– 1993 (1920-1927): Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Eds. Liapunov 

and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P. 

Brandist, Craig 2001: ‘The hero at the bar of eternity: The Bakhtin Circle’s juridical theory of the 

Novel’. Economy and Society 30: 208-28. 

Chanda, A. K. 1981: ‘The Young Man From the Provinces’. Comparative Literature 33: 321-41. 

Clark, Katerina and Michael Holquist 1984: Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge: Harvard UP. 

Farrant Bevilacqua, Winifred (2003/2004). ‘‘. . . and the long secret extravaganza was played out’: 

The Great Gatsby and Carnival in a Bakhtinian Perspective’. Connotations: A Journal for 

Critical Debate 13: 111-29. 

Fitzgerald, Francis Scott 1992 (1925): The Great Gatsby. New York: Collier. 

Holquist, Michael 1990. Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World. London: Routledge. 

Kruse, Horst 2003: ‘The Great Gatsby: A View from Kant’s Window – Transatlantic 

Crosscurrents’. The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 2: 72-84. 


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MacKendrick, Paul 1950: ‘The Great Gatsby and Trimalchio’. The Classical Journal 45: 307-14. 

Trilling, Lionel 1950: The Liberal Imagination. New York: Viking. 

Wasianski, Ehregott Andreas Christoph 1902: Immanuel Kant in seinen letzten Lebensjahren: Ein 

Beitrag zur Kenntnis seines Charakters und häuslichen Lebens aus dem täglichen Umgang mit 

ihm. 1804. Immanuel Kant: Ein nach Darstellungen seiner Zeitgenossen Jachmann, Borowski, 

Wasianski. Ed. Alfons Hoffmann. Halle: Hugo Peter. 288-432. 

Received 21 December 2009 Accepted 2 March 2010 

Winifred Farrant Bevilacqua, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and a D.Litt. from the Università 

degli Studi di Milano, is Associate Professor of American Literature at the Università degli Studi di Torino. 

She is the author of Josephine Herbst and of Images of the Past: Essays on the American Novel and the 

editor of Fiction by American Women: Recent Views. Her essays have appeared in American Literature, 

Centennial Review, Revue Française d’Études Américaines, Journal of the Short Story in English, 

American Studies in Scandinavia, Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate, Op. Cit.: Uma Revista de 

Estudos Anglo-Americanos, RSA: Rivista di Studi Anglo-Americani and Books at Iowa. 

Address: Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Università degli Studi di Torino, Via Sant’Ottavio 20, 10124 Torino, 

Italia. Tel.: + 39 011 670 3704. Fax: + 39 011 670 3495. 


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Banned in Spain? 

Truths, Lies and Censorship in Kate O’Brien’s Novels 

Marisol Morales Ladrón 

University of Alcalá 

marisol.morales@uah.es 

This paper tries to shed some light on the reception of Kate O’Brien’s works in Spain 

during Franco’s dictatorship. As a lover of Spain, the Irish writer spent long periods of 

her life in that country and some of her experiences were later fictionalised in her novels. 

Characterised by her portrayal of strong female heroines who did not respond to social or 

gender expectations, it does not come as a surprise that some of O’Brien novels were 

banned in Ireland and Spain. Although both countries shared a strong Catholic 

background and a protectionist censorship system, the censor’s spotting of the subversive 

and dangerous passages that were to be banned differed greatly. Besides, in the Spanish 

case, O’Brien was allegedly forbidden to enter the country until 1957, an affirmation that, 

up until now, has never been questioned. Bearing these aspects in mind, the present study 

focuses on a thorough analysis of the author’s censorship files stored in Spain and on the 

research carried out to contest the undocumented assumption related to her expulsion 

from the country. 

Keywords: Kate O’Brien; censorship; Catholicism; protectionist policies; reception; gender 

¿Prohibida en España?: 

Verdades, mentiras y censura en la obra de Kate O’Brien 

Este artículo trata de arrojar algo de luz sobre la recepción de la narrativa de Kate O’Brien en 

España durante la dictadura franquista. Amante de España, la autora pasó largas 

temporadas en el país y algunas de sus novelas recogen muchas de sus experiencias vividas 

aquí. De la obra de O’Brien destacan los retratos femeninos de heroínas que no encajan en las 

expectativas sociales y en los roles de género que la sociedad tradicional les había asignado, 

por lo que no sorprende que algunas novelas fueran censuradas tanto en Irlanda como en 

España. Aunque ambos países compartían una fuerte tradición católica y un sistema censor 

proteccionista, la identificación de los pasajes subversivos o peligrosos que debían ser 

eliminados fue muy distinta. En el caso de España, además, la crítica especializada sigue 

manteniendo que se le prohibió la entrada en el país hasta el año 1957, a pesar de no existir 

ningún documento que avale este hecho. Partiendo de las mencionadas circunstancias, el 

objetivo de este estudio se centra en el análisis de los archivos de censura que existen sobre 

Kate O’Brien en España, así como en la investigación llevada a cabo para poner en tela de 

juicio la supuesta expulsión de la autora del país. 

Palabras clave: Kate O’Brien; censura; catolicismo; políticas proteccionistas; recepción; género

58 Marisol Morales Ladrón 


... the damning, unforgivable 

evidence that society’s greatest joy 

was to part a writer from her words. 

‘Look at Kate O’Brien’, I thundered, 

‘Banned! Banned! Banned’ 

Mary O’Donnell 1 

The reputation of Kate O’Brien (1897-1974) as a writer has been unanimously 

acknowledged by general readers and critics alike both within and outside Ireland. 2 A 

prolific novelist, playwright, essay writer and journalist, she developed a strong 

attachment to Spain. From the time of her first visit to the country when she was in her 

twenties to work as a governess in a Basque household, she became fascinated by a place 

that bore many similarities with her own hometown, Limerick, or Mellick, as she liked 

to call it. 3 During the 1930s and until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, O’Brien 

spent her summers in Spain and later fictionalised some of these experiences in her 

novels. 4 Her work has been generally praised for the unconventionality and openness of 

the themes dealt with and especially for the frank portrayal of female heroines that had 

to confront the constraints of a morally narrow society, for which reasons some of her 

books were banned in Ireland and Spain. However, although both Catholic and very 

conservative, the two countries differed greatly in their appreciation of the apparently 

subversive and dangerous passages that were to be expurgated from some of her texts. 

Mary Lavelle (1936) and The Land of Spices (1941) were censored in Ireland on 

grounds of immorality. 5 At the same time, in her travel book Farewell Spain (1937), 

O’Brien positioned herself against General Franco and his supporters, and it has been 

generally assumed that the book was censored in Spain and that she was barred from 

the country for more than twenty years. However, a thorough reading of the Spanish 

1 

Extracted from O’Donnell’s poem ‘Kate O’Brien Weekender Meets La Leche Leaguers’ 

(2005: 88). 

2 

The research carried out for the writing of this paper has been financed by the Spanish 

Ministry of Education (DGICYT, research project HUM2007-63296/FILO). I would also like to 

acknowledge the funding received from the University of Alcalá, through its programme Becas 

para la ampliación de estudios José Castillejo, which granted me a research stay at the NUI 

Maynooth in July 2009, where I carried out part of this research. 

3 

See Peter Gunning (2008) for the social and political similarities between the two countries, 

in terms of Catholicism, poverty, isolation and lack of female freedom. 

4 

As Lorna Reynolds has explained: “She fell in love immediately with the Spain she found, 

not the tourist Spain of red geraniums, clicking castanets and blazing sun, but northern, Basque 

Spain, of hardworking men and women, with a climate rather like that of Ireland, much given to 

rain and mud, where the ‘strange sky gleamed with a familiar tenderness’; and later on with the 

Spain of austere Castile, of the great gold plain and the high, immaculate sky” (1987a: 97). 

5 

The exact dates that figure on the prohibition orders are: 29 December 1936, in the case of 

Mary Lavelle; and 6 May 1941, in the case of Land of Spices. The latter went through a revocation 

order and succeeded in its appeal to the Censorship of Publications Appeal Board (Adams 1968: 

242-43). 


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Banned in Spain? Truths, Lies and Censorship in Kate O’Brien’s Novels 59 

censorship files reveals a different outcome. The Censorship Board approved the 

translation of The Last of Summer (1943) after many amendments and banned Mary 

Lavelle. But there are no existing records of any attempt to translate either The Land of 

Spices or Farewell Spain. Besides, the assumption that her entrance to the country was 

forbidden has never been questioned, in spite of the fact that no public document 

appears to exist that certifies the prohibition. Bearing these premises in mind, the 

purpose of this article will be, firstly, to provide detailed material of the kind of 

excisions required in the case of Kate O’Brien’s novels and the reasons for their being 

censored in Spain; and, secondly, to discuss the circumstances within which the 

statement regarding her being banned from entering the country was made. 

2. Censorship in Ireland and Spain 

Spain and Ireland share many historical similarities that need to be pointed out as 

regards their procedure to censor books. From the thirties to the seventies, large 

numbers of works published at home and abroad were banned in the two nations. The 

result was an impoverishment of their respective cultural development since, in order 

to guarantee a strict sense of morality among the population, repressive and 

paternalistic measures were applied. In Ireland, Clair Wills explains that: “The official 

ideology of the state expressed a concern to preserve the supposed purity of a mainly 

rural and Catholic society from the corrosive effects of liberal individualism and social 

modernization”, and it was not until the early nineteen sixties, with Taoiseach Sean 

Lemass, when the country “began to shift towards a new path of development” (2002: 

1124). 6 Therefore, the Irish Censorship of Publications Act of 1929 could ban any 

material on three grounds: indecency or obscenity, unjustified talk on crime, and 

“unnatural prevention of conception or the procurement of abortion or miscarriage” 

(Carlson 1990: 3-4). 

Similarly, the Franco regime established a severe censorship system that was in 

charge of regulating the entrance and translation of any published material into the 

country, which had to comply with the moral, political and religious codes of the 

regime. Thus, the period between 1936 and 1983 was characterised by a firm and rigid 

censorship system that obliged publishing houses to ask the authorities for permission 

to publish any kind of written or visual material. 7 This system had been established and 

regulated initially by the Servicio Nacional de Propaganda, a protective institution 

pertaining to the regime. Nowadays, the censorship files are held at the Archivo General 

de la Administración (hereto after, AGA), within the Fondo de Cultura section, placed in 

Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), which is open to researchers. 

6 Maurice Harmon calls the time span from the 1920s to the 1960s, the Era of Inhibitions, 

since for him: “Conditions in post-revolutionary Ireland were so uncongenial for the writer that 

it is remarkable, not so much that there was a decline in the quality and the volume of the literary 

output, but that any literature was even written. Seldom in the history of any country can so 

many forces have combined to inhibit the creative processes” (1966: 18). See also Ó Drisceoil 

(1996). 

7 Although its allegedly strict procedures became more and more flexible in later decades. 


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Nonetheless, the implementation of censorship in the two countries for more than 

four decades was uneven, always determined by the laws that were passed as a result of 

the new policies adopted. The Spanish censorship system was particularly strict. The 

first press laws – the Ley de Prensa e Imprenta, passed by Minister Ramón Serrano Súñer 

in 1938 – were especially judgemental on writers due to the international isolation of 

the country, the consequence of which was the application of a protectionist policy. 

Thus, in Spain, the censorship board distributed the receipt of any material that could 

be published among readers, most of them priests, although there were also lay men, 

who filled in a questionnaire and reported on any subversive passage either asking for 

its excision, change into rephrasing or banning, or simply giving their consent for 

publication. The censors had to answer questions based on the morality of the text, on 

its religious dogma, and on whether it incurred in any offence to the Regime, the 

Church or any of their institutions. Significant differences between the two systems 

should also be pointed out in this regard. On the one hand, the Irish Board was not 

expected to justify the reasons for its decisions and sometimes it was difficult to know 

what exactly had displeased them (Walshe 2006: 67). And, on the other, while in 

Ireland the Board was constituted by five members, 8 who would be in charge of reading 

and evaluating the work after it had been published, in Spain the censor was just one 

person, who decided whether the book would eventually be either published or 

imported. All in all, both systems protected the anonymity of their censors and their 

secret decisions. 

In the case of Ireland, the strict regulations that were made effective from the late 

1920s became more flexible two decades later until they gradually began to fade away. 

In 1949 a new law was passed which introduced an alternative committee, the Board of 

Appeal, to which publishers and authors could direct their requests for the revocation of 

the decisions (Carlson 1990: 4). The result was visible in the nineteen-sixties when, as 

Wills notes, “a relaxation of the law in 1967 made as many as five thousand suppressed 

titles available” (2002: 1127). Likewise, in the case of Spain, in 1966 a new press law – 

the promulgation of the Ley de Prensa de Imprenta, passed by Minister Manuel Fraga 

Iribarne – granted more freedom of expression and changed the consultancy of books 

from being obligatory to voluntary. A third stage in the history of censorship can also 

be distinguished in both countries. In 1967 in Ireland, a limit of twelve years was 

established during which time a ban on grounds of indecency or obscenity could be 

lifted (Carlson 1990: 5). In Spain, after Franco’s death in 1975 and the passing of the 

Constitution in 1978 these regulations became more flexible, until the practice of 

censorship had virtually disappeared by the early eighties. 9 

On the whole, the literature produced in the past or during the abovementioned 

decades was not received and/or translated in its entirety in either of the two countries. 

Concerning Spain, in some cases this was the result of a lack of interest in certain 

8 According to section 3, Part II, the board “consist[s] of five ‘fit and proper persons’ 

(including a Chairman) appointed by the Minister for Justice for a term of three years and eligible 

for reappointment” (Adams 1968: 238). 

9 For a more detailed account of the effects of Spanish laws on censorship, see Beneyto (1977), 

Abellán (1980) or Cisquella, Ervity and Sorolla (2002), among others. 


ISSN 0210-6124


subjects or authors. In others, it was due to the subversive potential of the text, which 

would be seen as a danger to the minds of Spanish readers, especially women. And in 

still others, it was because the political agenda of the time tried to keep the country 

internationally isolated, so that the maintenance of an ignorant population could be 

secured. As regards Ireland, it should be pointed out that although De Valera’s role as a 

politician cannot be compared to that of Franco, both aimed at isolating the two 

countries, keeping them away from perceived foreign dangers: “The rhetoric by which 

the majority of people were swayed was that of Ireland’s priests and politicians, who 

believed that by purging Ireland of all ‘indecencies’ and foreign influences, they could 

shape it into a spiritual model for the world…. The cultural isolationism that Shaw 

feared was, in effect, de Valera’s ideal” (Carlson 1990: 8). 

3. Kate O’Brien’s Spanish censorship files 

The presence of Spain in many of O’Brien’s works has been unanimously acknowledged 

by critics. Thematically, the country was central in Mary Lavelle, Farewell Spain, That 

Lady (1946) and Theresa of Avila (1951). 10 But apart from the obvious subject matter or 

setting employed, it was also common in O’Brien’s novels to introduce quotes, 

expressions and even the headings of some of the chapters in the Spanish language. This 

is the case of Mary Lavelle, which opens with a quote in Spanish, and uses Spanish 

phrases as titles for certain chapters, such as: ‘Don Pablo’, ‘A Corrida’, ‘Hasta luego’, or 

‘A Matador’s Cape’. Similarly, in Farewell Spain she follows in the same fashion 

introducing chapters under the headings ‘Adiós, turismo’, ‘La montaña’, ‘Santa Teresa’, 

‘No pasarán’ and ‘Arriba, España’. 

Although there has been a prominent interest in the censorship process of O’Brien’s 

novels in Ireland, to my knowledge nobody has attempted yet to offer a thorough 

analysis of the history of the censorship of her work in Spain. The only exception to this 

is Éibhear Walshe’s recent biography on the writer, which includes a brief research 

conducted in the AGA in Alcalá by Sheile Quinn, to whom he thanks for the 

information that she was able to extract from some of the files. However, from her 

conclusions one can easily infer that she must have been able to see only a minor 

selection of the twelve O’Brien’s files. As a result, Walshe ends up stating that The Last 

of Summer (1943), The Ante-Room (1934) and Without My Cloak (1931) were translated 

into Spanish and published in the country, having encountered no problems with 

censorship. He even adds that the only restriction that was applied to her work was the 

rejection of the jacket of Without My Cloak, on the grounds of immorality. Therefore, 

he concludes that: “Far from being outlawed, her fiction was available in Spain as in any 

10 Mary Lavelle recounts in an autobiographical manner the experiences of the protagonist, 

who worked as a ‘Miss’ in a Basque household, through the subgenre of the Bildungsroman. 

Farewell Spain is a travel book set in different parts of Spain, as much as a collection of memories 

about O’Brien’s time spent in the country. That Lady is set in the sixteenth century and recounts 

the political intrigues of Philip II and Ana de Mendoza, Princess of Éboli. Finally, Theresa of Avila 

is a short biography of the Spanish nun. Interestingly, according to Reynolds, the setting of Spain 

in That Lady could well have been O’Brien’s strategy for avoiding censorship (1987b: 186). 


ISSN 0210-6124


other country. Even the Hollywood film version of That Lady in 1955 was granted 

permission to be screened throughout Spain, despite what Kate described as ‘the initial 

fuss with Franco’” (2006: 75). However, a detailed look at the complete set of files 

stored at the AGA offers an entirely different picture, since The Last of Summer could 

only be published after a long list of emendations were made, as I will prove later. On 

the other hand, I should underline the fact that Walshe is probably the first scholar who 

has argued that, contrary to received interpretations, there is no evidence in the AGA 

which proves that Farewell Spain was censored in the country, since there were no 

requests for publication of this book during the Franco regime (2006: 75). 11 

O’Brien’s first novel, Without My Cloak (1931), was translated into Spanish as early 

as 1943 with the title Sin mi capa. There are three files in the AGA that contain the 

details of the authorization of this translation by Fernando Calleja, and of the two 

reprints corresponding to the years 1951 and 1966 (Files 5119-43, 4919-51 and 1167-66). 

Interest in the book seems to have been notable since the publishing houses involved – 

Ediciones La Nave, Planeta and Plaza y Janés – signed for print runs of 5,000, 2,000 

and 3,000 copies, respectively. In the report written by the censor in 1943, he 

emphasised its great literary merit even though he described the plot in terms of the 

adventures of an English gentleman in the mid nineteenth century, during Victorian 

times. Although Spanish censors were usually learned people, sometimes their reports 

revealed flaws and often a lack of specific knowledge on certain writers and literatures. 

This one in particular was apparently unable to distinguish between England and 

Ireland, considering that the novel portrays three generations of an Irish bourgeois 

family. The third file, corresponding to the year 1966, is the only one that includes a 

comment on the novel’s jacket. However, contrary to Walshe’s suggestion that it was 

rejected on grounds of immorality (2006: 75), according to the censor’s report, it was 

approved without modifications. This time, the form had been filled by a 

knowledgeable reader, who made more accurate comments on the plot and added that 

the novel had been awarded two literary prizes – the Hawthornden and the James Tait 

Back – which attested to its literary quality. 

O’Brien’s second novel, The Ante-Room (1934), was translated into Spanish as La 

antesala in 1943 by José Marín de Bernardo, and there are also three files stored at the 

AGA that register the history of the acceptance of its reception and final publication in 

the country in 1944. The first censor who judged the novel does not seem to have 

understood the transgression of the Catholic and moral values embodied in the torrid 

and impossible love between a young woman and her brother-in-law. Instead, he 

praised the novel for its fervent Catholicism and for the protagonist’s final victimised 

decisions to devote her life to taking care of both her sick brother and mother, and to 

seek solace in religion (File 7329-43). The publishing house La Nave, which had taken 

11 One of the reasons that could explain why this research was incomplete is that in the 

computer database program at the AGA, there are different entries for the name of Kate O’Brien, 

which is spelled in three different ways: Kate O’Brien, Kate O Brien and Kate Obrien. A doublecheck 

was certainly necessary before one could offer a thorough and valid analysis on the existing 

censorship files stored at the archive. 


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the initiative of introducing O’Brien’s first novel into Spain, was again in charge of this 

publication, ordering a print run of 5,000 copies. 

The second file, which dates back to 1950, is a second permission to publish the 

novel again, this time by the publishing house Dédalo, signing for a print run of 3,000 

copies, which adds a revision of the previously banned cover of the book. The most 

significant information contained in this file is the inclusion of some quotes from a 

letter that Kate O’Brien herself had sent to the Spanish publishers of Without My Cloak. 

In it, she affirmed that it had been an enormous pleasure for her to have witnessed the 

publication of her novels in Spain, a country that she loved and admired more than any 

other, that she had visited on a number of occasions and to which she wished she could 

go back (File 1282-58). This statement is the first public admission on the part of the 

author to having been banned from entering the country, as I shall discuss later. 12 The 

third file, dated in 1958 (File 1282-58), constitutes further permission to reprint the 

novel, this time with a print run of 10,000 copies – which was a large figure for the time 

– by the well-known publishing house Plaza y Janés. The short report written by the 

censor describes La antesala as a novel of love and conflict, written by an expert author 

in her attempt to portray the violent passions of the Irish peoples, for which reasons she 

is described as the last authentic English Romantic writer. 

Following the favourable reception of O’Brien’s two previous novels, the 

publishing house La Nave made a new request in 1943 to publish Mary Lavelle in 

Spain, translated by María Isabel Butler de Foley, this time with no success (File 8102- 

43). Unfortunately, the file does not contain the censor’s record with the reasons for 

the prohibition of this autobiographical novel, which had been previously banned in 

Ireland on grounds of immorality. Mary Lavelle was based on the author’s 

experiences as the governess of an affluent Basque family in Portugalete, teaching 

English to their two children. 13 Although Lorna Reynolds has insisted that there was 

nothing obscene in the novel (1987a: 62), it seems reasonable to understand that 

neither of these two Catholic countries would easily accept the adulterous 

relationship that takes place, the lesbian undertones, or the protagonist’s ultimate 

motif to abandon her homeland in order “to cease being a daughter without 

immediately becoming a wife” (O’Brien 1984: 34). 14 In this regard and, according to 

Heather Ingman, what Spain gave Mary was the possibility of attaining another 

identity, “that of lover of a married man. It is an identity which puritanical Irish 

society will not allow her. She has become excluded from her nation’s construct of 

womanhood which denies unprompted sexual passion in females” (2007: 106). 

12 The exact words, as they were published later in the Nota Preliminar that opened the novel, 

were the following: “Es para mí una gran satisfacción y placer saber que mis libros pueden ahora ser 

leídos en España. Pues amo profundamente a España y la visité siempre que pude durante los años 

1930 y 1936 y posteriormente he pensado continuamente en su amable país, siempre anhelando volver 

a él. ¡Ah! ¡cómo me gustaría eso!” (O’Brien 1944: 5). 

13 See Legarreta (2009) for a recent study on the autobiographical elements related to the 

Basque setting and on the presence of Spanish politics in the novel. 

14 See Katherine O’Donnell (2007) for a recent study on sexuality from the insights of lesbian 

and queer theory with a view of challenging received feminist interpretations of Mary Lavelle. 


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O’Brien’s next publication, Farewell Spain (1937), constitutes a particularly 

interesting case because there are no existing records at the AGA of any request for the 

importation, translation or publication of this travel book during the decades of 

censorship, as Walshe has also noticed and in contrast to many received assumptions. 

At the same time, presupposing that O’Brien’s prohibition to enter the country was 

related to the publication of this travelogue, many critics – including the previous Irish 

Ambassador in Spain – have been driven to the conclusion that the book was also 

banned (De Areilza 1985: 9; O’Neill 1987: xii; Gunning 2008: 152) when, curiously 

enough, it was never translated into the Spanish language. Although the text is a 

mixture of a memoir and a travel account of the author’s visits to different parts of 

Spain, she also introduced subtle comments on the Franco regime, on Fascism and on 

the lack of freedom that was made effective in the country. Consequently, according to 

Aintzane Legarreta, O’Brien was “declared persona non grata by the Franco regime” for 

her defence of the Republic (2009: 71). On the other hand, Walshe has suggested that 

rather than directly attacking the nationalist cause, O’Brien takes certain icons of 

Castilian culture, and makes them her own through subversion. What she achieves is an 

“informed attack from within” (1993: 8). Since the controversy surrounding the 

publication of this text still needs to be unearthed, I will return to this issue later. 

O’Brien’s next novel, Pray for the Wanderer (1938), in which she criticised Ireland’s 

narrow-minded Catholicism and overtly attacked censorship, was never published in 

Spain although, surprisingly, it was not banned in Ireland. Matt Costello, the 

protagonist, is a novelist whose reputation abroad clashes with the censorship of his 

publications in Ireland and with what he sees as an attack on his freedom. His words are 

very direct: “Too many negative regulations are a symptom of weakness in any 

authority…. I am not prepared to be saved on Ireland’s dictated terms” (O’Brien 1938: 

191). For whatever reason, however, the novel encountered no problems with the Irish 

Censorship Board. 

Conversely, O’Brien’s next novel, The Land of Spices (1941), was censored in Ireland 

a few months after it was published on the grounds of indecency and obscenity 

(Dalsimer 1990: 3). 15 Apparently, the Board’s resolution was based on one single 

sentence: “She [Helen Archer] saw Etienne and her father, in the embrace of love” 

(O’Brien 1941: 175), which alluded to a homosexual relationship between the 

protagonist’s father and another man. This scene produces such a shock in the young 

Helen Archer that she decides to become a nun. Nevertheless, according to Mary Brenn, 

the protagonist’s choice becomes in many ways utterly ironic. The irony lies in the fact 

that the censors were right in judging the novel dangerous although they focused on the 

wrong target since O’Brien presents this relationship as the source of Archer’s religious 

vocation and eventual perturbation (1993: 169). As was the case with the previous two 

novels, there was no request to publish this one in Spain and, consequently, it was not 

accessible in the country during the decades of censorship. 

15 

For a brief analysis on censorship, nationalism and patriarchy within the novel, see 

Jacqueline Hurtley (2000: 289). 


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The Last of Summer (1943) is another interesting case. It was translated into Spanish 

in 1943 as Final del verano, by Diego Pedrosa and Juan Luis Camino, and there are two 

files stored in the AGA that record the history of the novel’s reception. The first (File 

3852-43) contains a long report that approves the publication of the text as long as 

major changes are made. Once again it was the publishing house La Nave which had 

requested permission, signing for a print run of 5,000 copies. The amendments that the 

censor demanded were those shown in table 1: 

Original text Amendments for the new version 16 

“Like Hitler” (17) “Tal vez fuera la culpa suya” / ‘Perhaps it was 

his own fault’ 

“He’s very keen on old Molotov all of a Esta frase se suprimirá / ‘This sentence shall 

sudden” (26) 

be deleted’ 

“Hitler and Mussolini are teetotallers” “Algunos que no beben pueden hacer mucho 

(29) 

daño” / ‘Teetotallers can cause a lot of 

damage’ 

“Hitler permitting” (31) “Si la guerra no empieza antes” / ‘If war does 

not start before’ 

“With the Germans up to no good “Con la guerra, que puede estallar en 

again, as usual” (49) 

cualquier momento” / ‘With war, which can 

break out any moment’ 

“He’ll take Danzig and Poland any day “Los alemanes entrarán en Danzig y Polonia 

now. When he does…” (50) 

cualquier día de estos. Cuando lo hagan…” / 

‘The Germans will take Danzig and Poland 

any day. When they do...’ 

“When Czechoslovakia was taken” (50) “Cuando lo de Checoeslovaquia” / ‘When 

that happened with Czechoslovakia’ 

“All crossed out passages should be Se suprimirá lo que aparece tachado 

deleted” (99) 

17 / 

‘Whatever is crossed out shall be omitted’ 

“Nazis” (186) alemanes / ‘Germans’ 

La frase que aparece tachada a continuación 

se suprimirá / ‘The following sentence, 

which has been crossed out, shall be 

omitted’ 

“What had happened in Czecho- “lo que estaba ocurriendo en el mundo” / 

Slovakia in March, or on Good Friday in 

Albania, what was happening every day 

in Germany, and all day, and all night 

year out and year in, in China” (195) 

‘What was happening in the world’ 

“every vestige of appeasement rope has Esta frase se suprimirá / ‘This sentence shall 

petered out” (201) 

be omitted’ 

“No civilized country is ready” (202) Esta frase se suprimirá / ‘This sentence shall 

be omitted’ 

16 

All translations of the amended passages included in this table are mine. 

17 

Unfortunately, the galley proofs were not included in this file, making it impossible to 

identify the passages that were to be deleted. 


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“And if England likes to make a pretext 

out of a mere frontier dispute between 

Germany and Poland” (203) 

“Yesterday morning Germany had 

invited Poland and taken Danzig” (227) 

Esta frase se suprimirá / ‘This sentence shall 

be omitted’ 

“La mañana anterior Alemania había 

ocupado Danzig” / ‘The previous morning 

Germany had taken Danzig’ 

“in Poland” (228) Estas dos palabras se suprimirán / ‘These two 

words shall be omitted’ 

“And you are not a breeder. Every time “Un niño, y otro niño, y otro, y otro…” / ‘A 

you slept with Tom, you’d have to child, and another child, and another one, 

chance another litter” [sic] (231) and yet another one’ 

Table 1: Censorship Amendments to El final del verano 

The list of necessary amendments is accompanied by a note in which the censor 

adds that, although Final del verano is a good psychological novel, it contains many 

political references that are unnecessary and that, since they function as mere 

ornaments – for him, obviously – they should be deleted. He comments that the setting 

of the novel takes place ‘incidentally’ some time before the outbreak of the Second 

World War and that O’Brien shows the beauty of Ireland, its romanticism and the 

Catholic milieus. A detailed analysis of the censored passages marked for excision, 

together with the emphasis placed on the romanticised features that apparently 

characterise Ireland – later recalled by the publisher of Ediciones La Nave in the 

Preliminary Note that opened the final publication – clearly reveal his intention to 

divert the focus of attention and to obscure other political matters that are addressed in 

the novel. 18 

The second file concerning this novel consists of an application made by the 

publishing house Dédalo, which requested a reprint of the book in 1950 and which had 

signed for a print run of 3,000 copies. This was approved without any further 

hindrance, although the interesting aspect to note here is the censor’s report. In it, 

O’Brien is described as a prize-winning writer who needed no presentation in the 

country and whose work had been acknowledged by critics and the general public alike, 

especially after the success of Sin mi capa, which is presented as a masterpiece. Again, 

emphasis is placed on the beauty of Ireland, on the romanticism of the author and on 

the significant connections between Ireland and Spain (File 2947-50). 

18 In the Nota Preliminar included in the first edition of Final del verano, the publisher brings 

to light the author’s descriptions of “la bellísima Irlanda” and goes on to emphasise: “las 

maravillosas costas de Irlanda, esa isla panorámica y subyugadora, en que los españoles hallamos 

mucho que nos recuerda a nuestra península. La tranquilidad bucólica de Irlanda se ve alterada por 

la amenaza de un espantoso conflicto” (O’Brien 1943: 5-6). 


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Finally, That Lady (1946) 19 was translated in 1946 under two different titles: Esa 

señora, by Fernando de Diego and Esa dama by María José Rodellar. There are three 

files at the AGA corresponding to the publication of this novel. The censor involved in 

the assessment of the first translation (File 3154-46) alleges that the book could only be 

published on condition that it be accompanied by a note explaining that the novel was 

not a historical account but a mere invention. 20 He even recommended that those who 

wished to know more about the political intricacies of Ana de Mendoza and Philip II 

should not take this book seriously. He finally adds that O’Brien’s unfaithful record of 

historical truth is admissible only because this is pure fiction created to entertain. 

Moreover, the report includes a further note in which the Spanish publisher of the 

novel announces that were he not to distribute it, the copyright of the translation would 

immediately pass to an Argentinean publisher, who would be allowed to publish the 

novel without the preliminary note and the polished aspects that could upset a 

perceptive Spanish reader. For that reason, the note reads, it is preferable to publish it 

in Spain with the required clarification. 

The second file (File 5009-52), presented six years later, is another request for 

permission to publish it again by the well-known publishing house Planeta with a print 

run of 2,000 copies, which is approved without comment. The third file (File 6827-54) 

introduces a variation on the Spanish title – señora for dama – which seems more 

accurate, and again constitutes another request for permission to publish the novel by 

the publishing house Germán Plaza, with a print run of 5,000 copies, which is also 

accepted. One should only add that it is utterly ironic that the novel was published in 

Spain without any emendation considering that, according to Walshe, in That Lady 

O’Brien directly confronts censorship rather than evades it (1993: 7). 

4. Kate O’Brien’s expulsion from Spain 

Having analysed the existing Spanish censorship files concerning O’Brien’ works, I 

would now like to shed some light on her alleged expulsion from the country until 1957. 

Apparently, the first person that made this claim was the author herself, first in the 

19 Two of the last oeuvres written of the author, Theresa of Avila (1951) and The Flower of May 

(1953), were never translated into Spanish. Her last novel, As Music and Splendour (1958), is still 

out of print. Tina O’Toole has explained in this regard that O’Brien became a stigmatized author 

after the ban of some of her publications (2005: 234). See also Anne Fogarty for a discussion of 

the lesbian subtext in this novel, “defy[ing] the social conventions that surround it in taboos and 

prohibitions” (1997: 171). 

20 This note has been included in all Spanish editions under the title Nota de la autora, where 

in fact we can read the following: “No es este libro una novela histórica. Es una invención inspirada 

en mis reflexiones acerca de la curiosa historia externa de Ana de Mendoza y Felipe II de España. No 

pueden los historiadores explicar el episodio y no he ensayado a hacerlo en esta obra imaginativa. 

Todos los personajes de esta historia vivieron, y he conservado la silueta histórica de los sucesos en que 

tomaron parte; pero todo lo que dicen o escriben en estas páginas es inventado, y, naturalmente, 

igualmente inventados son sus pensamientos y emociones. Con objeto de conservar la unidad de la 

invención me he abstenido de insertar en la novela cualquier parte tomada de sus cartas y 

observaciones” (O’Brien 1946: 5). 


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abovementioned letter that she had sent to the publisher of her novel The Ante-Room 

when it was first published in Spain (File 2949-50), and, secondly, to the Association of 

Professional and Business Women, in Canterbury, when she affirmed that she had never 

been welcome during the Franco regime and that all her novels had been banned for 

that reason: “It’s the only feather in my cap that all my works have been long ago 

banned in Spain and so remain” (qtd. by Walshe 2006: 75). As I hope to have proved in 

my discussion, this statement cannot be taken as a token of truth. Walshe has also 

explained that on several occasions O’Brien mentioned the efforts that had to be made 

to lift this prohibition and the lies that the current Ambassador of Ireland in Spain at 

that time had to provide: “He had to tell a lot of lies, I was a reformed character, a High 

Class Convent Girl” (qtd. by Walshe 1993: 13). A third source of information was 

provided by John Jordan, a critic and friend of the author, who in an article published 

in 1973 insisted on the truth of her expulsion, since it was the writer herself who had 

given him this information (Walshe 2006: 74-75). 

Although there is no apparent public evidence of such a veto on the author, this 

assertion was taken for granted by critics and general readers alike. Reynolds, for 

instance, asserts that in Farewell Spain “she expressed such anti-Fascist views that 

Franco banned her from the country for over twenty years” (1987b: 181). Geraldine 

Meaney affirms that the publication of this novel “resulted in her exclusion from Spain 

for two decades by the Franco regime” (2002: 1080), and likewise Tina O’Toole states 

that: “Because of her outspoken criticism of the regime of Franco in Farewell Spain, she 

was barred from Spain until 1957” (2005: 234). Many others have also shared the view 

that her anti-Franco position and her comments on the Spanish dictator and his 

supporters led to the ban on entering the country until 1957 (O’Neill 1987: xiii; 

Reynolds 1987a: 97 and 104; Walshe 1993: 13; Michael O’Toole 1993: 131; Giménez Bon 

1994: 175). In Kate O’Brien’s biography, Walshe even adds that “Kate was deprived of 

any contact with her Spain for the next twenty years and censorship had the effect of 

making her impulse towards Europe suspect within her own country” (2006: 76). And 

further on, he states again that “In May 1957, she was granted permission to return to 

Spain and so she rented out The Fort again and travelled to Madrid, revisiting a country 

she had last seen more than twenty years before” (2006: 127-28). 

Very recently, in 2008, the then Ambassador of Ireland in Spain, Mr. Peter 

Gunning, published an article on Kate O’Brien in which he explained that it had been 

the former Ambassador of Ireland in Spain during the fifties, Dr. Michael Rynne, who 

had lifted the prohibition since he was also a relative of O’Brien (2008: 152). 21 In a 

conversation that I maintained with Gunning and with his First Secretary, Sonja 

Hyland, he actually admitted that the only evidence he had was a telephone 

conversation with Etienne Rynne – Michael Rynne’s son – who had told him the story 

21 In his own words: “Farewell Spain fue prohibido en España durante la época de Franco por su 

retrato solidario con la Segunda República y, desde luego, a la propia Kate O’Brien se le prohibió 

viajar a España a raíz de su publicación. La prohibición duró hasta 1957 cuando, aparentemente, 

intervino uno de mis ilustres predecesores como embajador de Irlanda en España: el Dr. Michael 

Rynne, embajador en Madrid durante los años cincuenta y pariente político de Kate O’Brien” 

(Gunning 2008: 152). 


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of the supposed intervention with the Spanish government to rescind the ban and allow 

the author back into Spain. Since there was no other documentary evidence, I was given 

information about those places where I could find the files of the Embassies abroad 

(after thirty years they are sent back to Ireland, to the Department of Foreign Affairs, 

and are then stored at the National Archives) so that I could research into them hoping 

to shed some light on this matter. 

Carrying out this research in the National Archives of Ireland, in Dublin, was not 

unproblematic, to say the least. Although there were only three files that I needed to 

verify (on Dr. Michael Rynne’s personal correspondence, on the expulsion of Irish 

citizens from Spain, and on the censorship of publications) 22 I was only allowed to look 

through the last one, which actually included no information of any use for the present 

purpose. Curiously enough, I went through other files, one of them called ‘Regulations 

affecting Irish citizens in Spain (1935-75)’, which held the procedures all Irish citizens 

had to go through when entering or leaving the country and contained a necessary 

certificate of ‘good conduct’. Surprisingly, in the abovementioned file or in others, 

including File CON 2/1/1, dedicated to the issuing of General certificates (1956-75), 

there was not one single note that included any of Kate O’Brien’s visits to the country, 

either before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil war or after it, which is to me sufficiently 

suspicious. This can only perhaps be explained because, since O’Brien was a cousin of 

the Ambassador, her application forms went directly to him. As the report ‘Formalities 

affecting Irish Citizens entering or leaving Spain’, dated August 11 th , 1939 included in 

this file states: “the mere fact that a passport is endorsed with a Spanish visa is not in 

itself sufficient to enable an Irish citizen to leave Spain; it is also necessary to obtain a 

safe-conduct from the Military Governor at the frontier before being able to cross later” 

(File CON 2/1). 

The reasons I was not granted access to the other two files were based on the fact 

that, according to the members of staff at the National Archives, they were protected by 

their privacy legislation, meaning by this that they could not be released for public 

access, as the files might contain information that could be considered sensitive by 

other parties. They finally suggested that the Archive Unit would review the files on my 

behalf and let me know in due course if the material I required was contained within. 

As regards the file on Dr. Michael Rynne, the Archive Unit reported that it included 

nothing other than correspondence of a personal nature between the Department of 

Foreign Affairs and the Ambassador and that there was no correspondence on Kate 

O’Brien. As regards the last file, the Archive Unit reported that it dealt with the 

expulsion of a named individual from Spain, who was not O’Brien. 23 Adding to this, I 

should also note that in the National Library of Ireland, in Dublin, there is a folder 

which is missing and that corresponds precisely to the letters that Kate O'Brien sent to 

her friend, the critic John Jordan. 

22 The file numbers that figured in the records of the Irish Embassy in Madrid are the 

following: File OA 3/2/1, File CON 4/1/20, and File ES 9/18, respectively. 

23 I would like to express my gratitude to Maureen Sweeney and Jean McManus, both 

members of staff in the archive unit, for their efforts trying to provide an answer to all my 

queries. 


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Apart from the National Archives and the National Library, the largest Kate O’Brien 

archive is located in a Special Collection in the library of the University of Limerick, 

where O’Brien’s godson, Austin Hall, deposited the papers in 2002. Although the six 

sections into which it has been arranged cover a wide array of subjects, including 

personal correspondence and official documentation to her literary letters, diaries, 

media coverage, printed and photographic material, travel plans, financial matters and 

reports of her sickness and final death, none of the documents stored there registers any 

kind of information on this issue. Besides, and in order to revise all the possible 

resources that might lead me to either confirm or reject the existence of the official 

alleged ban, I have also checked the Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, in 

Salamanca, the Police files stored at the Archivo Histórico Nacional, and the Archivo 

General del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y Cooperación, these two in Madrid, again 

finding no textual evidence. 24 

5. Conclusion 

To conclude, I should like to emphasise the fact that a thorough research into the 

Spanish censorship files concerning O’Brien’s oeuvre was needed since the information 

that has circulated so far is either partial or wrong. The analysis of the files stored at the 

AGA reveal that, although Ireland and Spain have historically shared a Catholic status 

and a protectionist censorship system, the two countries differed in their procedures 

and final resolutions that led to the banning of some of O’Brien’s novels. Furthermore, 

as I hope to have dominstrated, there is so far no existing textual evidence of the 

expulsion of the author from Spain. Quite to the contrary, a large part of the 

information spread by O’Brien herself, and which has never before been contested by 

scholars, contradicts the truth that lies behind the absence of written proof. Finally, as 

regards the unveiled information stored in the files of the National Archives of Ireland, 

I find it very appropriate to refer to Julia Carlson, who began her study Banned in 

Ireland by affirming that the censorship of publications had “been a fact of life in 

Southern Ireland for sixty years.... the paternalism that perpetuates Irish censorship 

succeeded for many years in blocking the interchange of ideas between Irish society and 

its writers” (1990: 1). Now, more than twenty years later, some kind of censorship still 

exists, not granting access to existing files that could reveal new insights into their own 

writers and, ultimately, into their own cultural heritage. Leaving aside the impossibility 

of trying to find textual evidence of O’Brien’s alleged prohibition to enter Spain, with 

this discussion I hope to have been able to shed some light on the history of the 

reception of Kate O’Brien’s oeuvre in this country. 

24 I would like to thank Pilar Casado, chief archivist of the Archivo General del Ministerio de 

Asuntos Exteriores y Cooperación, and Mª del Rocío Sánchez, archivist technician of the Centro 

Documental de la Memoria Histórica, for their kind and helpful assistance in this matter. 


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Works Cited 

Abellán, Manuel Luis 1980: Censura y creación literaria en España (1939-1976). Barcelona: 

Península. 

Adams, Michael 1968: Censorship: The Irish Experience. Dublin: Scepter. 

Beneyto, Antonio 1977: Censura y política en los escritores españoles. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés. 

Brenn, Mary 1993: ‘Something Understood? Kate O’Brien and The Land of Spices’. Éibhear 

Walshe, ed. Ordinary People Dancing. Essays on Kate O’Brien. Cork: Cork UP. 167-90. 

Carlson, Julia, ed. 1990: Banned in Ireland: Censorship & The Irish Writer. London: Routledge. 

Cisquella, Georgina, José Luis Ervity and José A. Sorolla 2002: La represión cultural en el 

franquismo: diez años de censura de libros durante la Ley de Prensa (1966-1976). Barcelona: 

Anagrama. 

Dalsimer, Adele M. 1990: Kate O’Brien: A Critical Study. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. 

De Areilza, José Mª 1985: ‘Mary Lavelle’. El País 13 August: 9. 

Fogarty, Anne 1997: ‘The Ear of the Other: Dissident Voices in Kate O’Brien’s As Music and 

Splendour and Mary Dorcey’s A Noise from the Woodshed’. Éibhear Walshe, ed. Sex, Nation and 

Dissent in Irish Writing. Cork: Cork UP. 170-201. 

Giménez Bon, Margarita 1994: ‘Kate O’Brien: An Irish Voice in Spain’. Federico Eguíluz et al., 

eds. La Europa (cultural) de los pueblos: Voz y forma. Vitoria: U of País Vasco. 175-81. 

Gunning, Peter 2008: ‘Kate O’Brien, una Mirada gaélica’. Nueva Revista 119: 149-53. 

Harmon, Maurice Spring 1966: ‘The Era of Inhibition: Irish Literature 1920-60’. The Emory 

University Quarterly XXII: 18-28. 

Hurtley, Jacqueline 2000: ‘Sugar and Spice: The Censorship of Kate O’Brien’. Javier Pérez 

Guerra, ed. AEDEAN Select Papers in Language, Literature and Culture. Proceedings of the 17 th 

International Conference. Vigo: U of Vigo. 289-91. 

Ingman, Heather 2007: Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women: Nation and Gender. Ashgate: 

Aldershot. 

Legarreta Mentxaka, Aintzane 2009. ‘Politics and Feminism: The Basque Contexts of Kate 

O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle’. IUR 39.1 (Spring/Summer): 65-75. 

Meaney, Geraldine, ed. 2002: ‘Aesthetics and Politics, 1890-1960’. Angela Bourke, ed. The Field 

Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Vol. 5 of Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions. Cork: Cork 

UP in association with Field Day. 1069-101. 

O’Brien, Kate 1936 (1984): Mary Lavelle. London. Virago. 

––––– 1937: Farewell Spain. Boston: Beacon P. 

––––– 1938: Pray for the Wanderer. London: Heinemann. 

––––– 1941: The Land of Spices. New York: Doubleday. 

––––– 1943: Final del verano. Trans. of Last of Summer, by Diego Pedroso and Juan Luis Camino. 

Madrid: Ediciones La Nave. 

––––– 1944: La antesala. Trans. of The Ante-Room, by José Marín de Bernardo. Madrid: La Nave. 

––––– 1946: Esa señora. Trans. of That Lady, by Fernando de Diego. Madrid: La Nave. 

O’Donnell, Katherine 2007: ‘“But Greek ... usually knows Greek” Recognizing Queer Sexuality in 

Kate O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle’. Patricia Boyle Haberstroth and Christine St. Peter, eds. Opening 

the Field: Irish Women, Texts and Contexts. Cork: Cork UP. 74-91. 

O’Donnell, Mary 2005: The Place of Miracles: New and Selected Poems. Dublin: New Ireland. 

Ó Drisceoil, Donal 1996. Censorship in Ireland 1939-1945: Neutrality, Politics and Society. Cork: 

Cork UP. 

O’Neill, Mary 1987: Introduction. Farewell Spain. By Kate O’Brien. Boston: Beacon P. ix-xxi. 

O’Toole, Tina, ed. 2005: Dictionary of Munster Women Writers 1800-2000. Cork: Cork UP. 

O’Toole, Michael 1993: ‘The Art of Writing Kate O’Brien’s Journalism’. Éibhear Walshe, ed. 

Ordinary People Dancing. Essays on Kate O’Brien. Cork: Cork UP. 128-36. 


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Reynolds, Lorna 1987a: Kate O’Brien: A Literary Portrait. Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Colin 

Smythe. 

––––– 1987b: ‘The Image of Spain in the Novels of Kate O’Brien’. Wolfgang Zach and Heinz 

Kosok, eds. Literary Interrelations: Ireland, England and the World’. Vol. 3 of National Images 

and Stereotypes. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. 181-87. 

Walshe, Éibhear 1993: Introduction and Biographical Note. Éibhear Walshe, ed. Ordinary People 

Dancing. Essays on Kate O’Brien. Cork: Cork UP. 1-14. 

––––– 2006: Kate O’Brien: A Writing Life. Dublin: Irish Academic P. 

Wills, Clair, ed. 2002: ‘Contemporary Writing 1960-2001’. Angela Bourke, ed. The Field Day 

Anthology of Irish Writing. Vol. 5 of Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions. Cork: Cork UP in 

association with Field Day. 1123-29. 

Received 6 January 2010 Accepted 19 February 2010 

Marisol Morales Ladrón (PhD University of Alcalá) is Senior Lecturer in contemporary English and Irish 

literature at the University of Alcalá (Madrid, Spain). Her main area of research is Irish literature and she 

currently chairs the Spanish Association for Irish Studies (AEDEI). She is also interested in gender studies 

and in the interrelationship between literature and psychology. She has written the books Breve 

introducción a la literatura comparada (U of Alcalá 1999) and Las poéticas de James Joyce y Luis Martín- 

Santos (Peter Lang 2005). She has recently edited the volume Postcolonial and Gender Perspectives in 

Irish Studies (Netbiblo 2007) and has also co-edited two volumes on feminist criticism. 

She has published articles on a variety of English and Irish authors including James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, 

Emma Donoghue, Fay Weldon, Angela Carter, Bernard Mac Laverty, Brian Moore, Benedict Kiely, Roddy 

Doyle and Julia O’Faolain. Some of these have appeared in peer-reviewed journals, such as Papers on 

Joyce, Irish University Review, Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, Atlantis, Exemplaria, BABEL Afial, 

EJES, Estudios de Filología Moderna, Bells, Estudios irlandeses and Odisea. 

Address: Universidad de Alcalá, Dpto. de Filología Moderna, Colegio S. José de Caracciolos, C/ Trinidad, 

3, 28801 Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain. Tel.: +34 91 885 53 45. Fax: +34 91 885 44 45. 


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A Narrative of the Life of Mrs Mary Jemison: 

Rhetorical Drag and the Defiance of Hegemonic 

Cultural Models 

Elena Ortells Montón 

Universitat Jaume I de Castelló 

ortel@ang.uji.es 

In 1758, Mary Jemison was captured by a party of Indians and adopted by two Seneca 

sisters. She progressively accommodated herself to Indian life, married two Indian 

warriors and bore them several children. Sixty-five years after her abduction, the woman 

agreed to tell James E. Seaver the story of her life. My goal is to use Lorrayne Carroll’s 

rhetorical drag as a hermeneutic to analyze authorial impersonation in A Narrative of the 

Life of Mrs Mary Jemison, to underline the failure of the white male impersonator to 

marginalize the speaking voice of the narrative and to highlight the capacity of the I 

object/subject to destabilize canonical readings of the text and to offer a revisionist 

history of cross-cultural encounters. Thus, it is my intention to present this account as an 

instrument of defiance of hegemonic cultural models and as an example of how 

intercultural manifestations negotiate and hybridise fixed paradigms. 

Keywords: Mary Jemison/Dehgewanus; rhetorical drag; captivity narratives; Indian 

autobiographies 

Relato de la vida de Mary Jemison: La máscara retórica y el 

desafío de los modelos culturales hegemónicos 

En 1758, Mary Jemison fue capturada por un grupo de indios y adoptada por dos hermanas 

Seneca. Poco a poco, Mary se fue adaptando a la vida india y acabó casándose con dos 

guerreros indios con los que tuvo varios hijos. Sesenta y cinco años después de su secuestro, la 

mujer accedió a contarle a James E. Seaver la historia de su vida. Mis objetivos son: analizar 

El relato de la vida de la señora Mary Jemison mediante el concepto de máscara retórica 

acuñado por Lorrayne Carroll; destacar el fracaso del imitador hombre y blanco para 

marginalizar la voz narrativa; y subrayar la capacidad del yo objeto/sujeto para 

desestabilizar lecturas canónicas del texto y ofrecer una historia revisionista de los encuentros 

interculturales. Es mi intención presentar este relato como un desafío a los modelos culturales 

hegemónicos y como ejemplo de cómo las manifestaciones interculturales negocian y 

combinan paradigmas establecidos. 

Palabras clave: Mary Jemison/Dehgewanus; máscara retórica; relatos de cautiverio; 

autobiografías indias

74 Elena Ortells Montón 

a girl of only twelve years old, 

Of whom a tale of sorrow will be told,— 

Her life was spared, and by them treated mild, 

And in their mode adopted as their child… 

At length, she lov’d the Indians’ style of life, 

And soon by one, was treasured as a wife… 

She children had … 

And there she liv’d among her tawny kin 

Secure from harm, and from the battle’s din, 

Until the white men came and settled there, 

And welcom’d her unto their willing care: 

But with the red man’s race she spent her days, 

But sought the truth of God, and righteous ways… 

From Gordon M. Fisk’s ‘The Female Captive’ 

“‘All these years’ – He [Seaver] hesitated. ‘All these years … you have been 

drinking the nauseous dregs of the bitter cup of slavery’ … She [Mary] considered and 

her eyes seemed to flash. ‘Some should no doubt have their lives described this way, but I 

hardly recognize myself in what you say” 

1. Introduction. 

Deborah Larsen’s The White 

“It is in telling our own stories that we give ourselves an identity” 

Paul Ricoeur 

On a spring day in the year 1758, Mary Jemison together with her family and some 

neighbours were captured by a party of six Indians and four Frenchmen who had 

launched an attack against the frontier settlement they inhabited. 1 Soon after entering 

the wilderness with all their captives, the war party tomahawked them all except the 

fifteen-year-old Mary and a little boy who were stripped of their shoes, shod in a pair of 

moccasins and conducted into Fort Duquesne. Clothing and identity were extremely 

conflated at this time and the act of making white prisoners wear native footwear had a 

symbolic dimension. Most of the time, the exchange of shoes for moccasins was a sign 

that the captive’s life was to be spared (Axtell 1975; Castro 2008). The young girl was 

then given to two Seneca sisters to replace a lost brother and in what she later learned 

was a ceremony of adoption was given the name Dickewamis (“a pretty girl, a handsome 

girl, or a pleasant, good thing” [Seaver 1998: 143]). 2 She progressively accommodated 

herself to Indian life, married two Indian warriors - Sheninjee and Hiokatoo- and bore 

1 Acknowledgements: The research presented in this article has been funded by Fundació 

Universitat Jaume I-Caixa Castelló-Bancaixa (Research project P1 1A2007-10). 

2 Some ethnographers have claimed that such a construction does not exist in Seneca and 

have suggested Dehgewanus or Deh-he-wä-mis – ‘Two Falling Voices’ or ‘The Sound of Two 

Voices Falling’ – as Jemison’s Indian name (Seaver 1998: 119). 


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A Narrative of the Life of Mrs Mary Jemison 75 

them several children. In accordance with an attitude commonly held by many white 

captives, Dickewamis repeatedly refused repatriation 3 and sixty-five years after her 

process of cultural assimilation had started, the then eighty-year-old Seneca woman 

agreed to tell a local doctor, James Everett Seaver the story of her life. Thus, in 

November 1823, attired with Indian clothes “not as matter of necessity, but from 

choice” (1998: 128) and accompanied by Thomas Clute, whom she considered her 

protector, Dehgewanus walked four miles from her home to meet her interviewer. 4 For 

three days, the man was “busily occupied in taking a sketch of her narrative as she 

recited it” (1998: 127) and a year later, in 1824, he published A Narrative of the Life of 

Mrs Mary Jemison. 5 The book’s elaborate textual apparatus consists of a preface and an 

introduction written by the male editor, the woman’s first-person narrative account of 

her life as told to Seaver, and an appendix which contains historical and ethnographical 

information about Iroquois and Seneca life. Whereas the (seeming) voice of the woman 

(subject) narrating her own captivity experience (object) provides the reader with the 

3 Ebersole quotes several examples which are testimony to this situation in frontier territories. 

In 1747, Cadwallader Colden, the surveyor-general and a member of the King's Council of 

New York, described the circumstances that surrounded attempts to return captives to 

civilization in the following terms: “No arguments, no Intreaties, nor Tears of their Friends 

and Relations, could persuade many of them to leave their new Indian Friends and 

Acquaintance; several of them that were by the Caressings of their Relations persuaded to 

come Home, in a little Time grew tired of our Manner of Living, and ran away again to 

the Indians, and ended their Days with them”. The situation was much the same in 1753 

when Benjamin Franklin contrasted the different behaviours observed by Indian and by 

whites when being restored to their respective peoples: “When an Indian Child has been 

brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes 

to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no persuading him 

ever to return. When white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the 

Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with 

all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short 

Time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are 

necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the 

Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them”. This explains Crèvecoeur’s reflections 

about the superiority of the Indian life in Letters from an American Farmer (1782): “[Life 

among the Indians] cannot be, therefore, so bad as we generally conceive it to be; there 

must be in the Indians’ social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to 

anything to be boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, as we have 

no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!” 

(Ebersole 1995: 191-92). 

4 From this point onwards I will use the name Dehgewanus to refer to the Native woman who 

lived for sixty-years years among the Seneca and Mary Jemison to refer to the woman of European 

ancestry. 

5 A Narrative of the Life of Mrs Mary Jemison, Who was taken by the Indians, in the year 1755 

when only about twelve years of age, and has continued to reside among them to the present time. 

CONTAINING An Account of the Murder of her Father and his Family; her sufferings; her marriage 

to two Indians; her troubles with her Children; barbarities of the Indians in the French and 

Revolutionary Wars; the life of her last Husband, &c.; and many Historical Facts never before 

published. Carefully taken from her own words. 


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illusion of an emotional, authentic and direct account of events, Seaver’s authoritative 

figure enhances the ethical dimension of the text by bringing to it the prerogatives 

traditionally associated with socially dominant masculine figures. 

A Narrative of the Life of Mrs Mary Jemison has been traditionally classified either as 

a captivity narrative (see Vanderbeets 1972; Kolodny 1984, Derounian-Stodola and 

Levernier 1993; Namias 1993; Castiglia 1996; Strong 1999) or as an Indian 

autobiography (see Walsh 1992; Oakes 1995; Sayre 1999; Kilcup 2000; Burnham 2003; 

Buss 2008). 6 However, the story of the white woman who ‘went Native’ and never 

returned to civilization can also be revisioned as a rhetorical ruse of the patriarchal 

hierarchy to circulate a biased perception of American national history. During the 19th 

century, white Americans looked back to their past in an attempt to find the defining 

traits of a national identity, since, as Ernst Renan stated in his legendary 1882 

conference, a nation’s heroic past could unify much more than race or language (Brown 

2004: 30). For a long time the stories of helpless white women victimized by ruthless 

Indian warriors were used to justify the extermination of Native populations and to 

confine women to the domestic realm (Castiglia 1996: 37). Through the appropriation 

of these women’s voices and experiences, the patriarchal and imperialistic stratum 

circulated a historiographical project based on a hegemonic cultural model that relied 

on the superiority of the white race and the male gender. 

Lorrayne Carroll’s Rhetorical Drag. Gender Impersonation, Captivity and the Writing 

of History offers new grounds for the re-examination of A Narrative of the Life of Mrs 

Mary Jemison as an example of “authorial gender impersonation, an act of imposture 

that begins with the male writer assuming the female captive’s voice” (2007: 1). In her 

introduction, Carroll invites us to use the expression rhetorical drag to reflect upon “the 

practices of authorial impersonation and its cultural effects” (2007: 2) in the popular 

genre of women captivity narratives. With this phrase she refers to “the performance of 

female-gendered subjectivities by men to ‘sell’ a particular historical view” (2007: 185). 

In her words, “rhetorical drag appropriates the body and voice of the captive woman 

and explains how her experience should be understood with the historical vision of the 

impersonator” (2007: 5). As Carroll argues “through rhetorical drag they could write 

history as male authorities and live that history as the women who experienced it … 

Rhetorical drag provided … a powerful doubled position of subject and object, the 

vantage from which to inhabit gender as writing male and speaking female, the means 

to decide ‘what counts as an object’ and to form that object as well” (2007: 188). 

6 In his For Those who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography, Arnold Krupat 

distinguishes between autobiographies by Indians and Indian autobiographies. Whereas the 

former would include autobiographies by civilized or christianized Indians and traditional Native 

American literature in textual forms among other manifestations, the latter would involve “[the] 

collaborative efforts, jointly produced by some white who translates, transcribes, compiles, edits, 

interprets, polishes, and ultimately determines the form of the text in writing, and by an Indian 

who is its subject and whose life becomes the content of the ‘autobiography’ whose title may bear 

his name” (1985: 30). 


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After analyzing the narratives of Hannah Swarton, Hannah Dustan, Elizabeth 

Hanson, Mrs Johnson and Mrs Jemima Howe through the lenses of rhetorical drag, 

Carroll refers to Mary Jemison’s and Olive Oatman’s accounts as “good candidates for 

elaborating and extending critical methods for the interpretation of instances of 

rhetorical drag because they provide ‘speaking’ women whose voices readily reveal the 

artifice of their rhetorical forms” (2007: 191). Whereas the life of Mary Jemison 

constitutes “the contribution of the nominal subject of the autobiographical book”, 

Seaver is sanctioned as the “culture-bearer who contributes with [the text’s] 

artifactuality, grammar and writing” (Krupat 1985: 43). Hence, my goal is to use 

Carroll’s rhetorical drag as a hermeneutic to analyze authorial impersonation in A 

Narrative of the Life of Mrs Mary Jemison, to underline the failure of the white male 

impersonator to marginalize the speaking voice of the narrative on the basis of gender 

and ethnicity and to highlight the capacity of the I object/subject to subvert and 

destabilize canonical readings of the text and to offer a revisionist history of crosscultural 

encounters. Thus, it is my intention to present this account as an instrument of 

defiance of hegemonic cultural models and as an example of how intercultural 

manifestations negotiate and hybridise fixed paradigms. 

2. “Rhetorical drag”: gender impersonation in Jemison’s narrative. 

As Carroll has persuasively argued, gender imposture, or rhetorical drag, was initially 

affected to control readers’ interpretations of U. S. history (2007: 6). By using the 

discourses of domesticity and sentiment and standardized models of femaleness, Seaver 

constructs a woman’s first person voice that authenticates the experience narrated, thus 

imputing to the text “the power of the female captives’ empirical knowledge of both the 

events of captivity and the cultural practices of the people who captured her” (2007: 7). 

As much as in the initial paragraphs of the preface Seaver dwells on the moral 

dimensions of the story, the final lines of the foreword draw attention to the veritable 

intentions of his project, those being “to increase our love of liberty; to enlarge our 

views of the blessings that are derived from our liberal institutions” (Seaver 1998: 124). 

An exemplary instance of his commitment to this historiographical project is to be 

found in the following declaration: “Many gentlemen of respectability, felt anxious that 

her narrative might be laid before the public, with a view not only to perpetuate the 

remembrance of the atrocities of the savages in former times, but to preserve some 

historical facts” (1998: 126; my italics). 

According to June Namias, the editor of the narrative “wished to frame the past to 

show the march of progress – of rising Anglo-American dominance, domesticity, 

industrial expansion, and Christian piety over a savage but receding Indian presence” 

(1993: 159). It is for this reason that in the initial pages of his introduction to the 

narrative, Seaver, as a self-conscious editor 7 already articulated the polarized ideological 

7 Brumble distinguishes between absent editors, who pretend that the narrative is the Native 

informant’s and self-conscious editors who acknowledge their own shaping of the story but try to 

preserve the Native’s perspective and narrative style (Wong 2005: 133). 


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and political agenda privileged by the white patriarchal sphere that was going to inform 

the text and that seemingly distinguished between the idyllic Arcadia of civilized white 

settlers (to whom he curiously refers as Native Americans [Seaver 1998: 125]) and the 

untamed wilderness of savage Indian warriors: 

The Peace of 1783, and the consequent cessation of Indian hostilities and barbarities, 

returned to their friends those prisoners, who had escaped the tomahawk, the gauntlet and 

the savage fire, after their having spent many years in captivity, and restored harmony to 

society. The stories of Indian cruelties which were common in the new settlements, and 

were calamitous realities previous to that propitious event; slumbered in the minds that 

had been constantly agitated by them, and were only roused occasionally, to become the 

fearful topic of the fireside. (1998: 125; my italics) 

Thus, in order to sustain the prefatory aims and to present the narrative as history – 

the history of Dehgewanus/Jemison – from the initial lines of the first chapter, the 

captive woman becomes the “historical informant” (Carroll 2007: 7) but only through 

authorial impersonation. With the aim of authenticating the woman’s voice, Seaver 

adopts the language of melodrama which characterized contemporary sentimental 

fiction: “But alas! how transitory are all human affairs! how brittle the invisible thread 

on which all earthly comforts are suspended! Peace in a moment can take an 

immeasurable flight; health can lose its rosy cheeks; and life will vanish like a vapour at 

the appearance of the sun! In one fatal day our prospects were all blasted; and death, by 

cruel hands, inflicted upon almost the whole of the family” (Seaver 1998: 133). 

Emotionally charged passages such as this fragment plague the story. Moreover, 

textual markers such as apostrophes, exclamations and certain types of tropes are 

employed to highlight female sensibilities and to extend “[the] representation of 

expressive female discourse” (Carroll 2007: 180). Standardized models of femaleness 

and the typical discourse of victimhood that characterizes most women captivity 

narratives tinge significant passages of the narrative: 

It is impossible for any one to form a correct idea of what my feelings were at the sight 

of those savages, whom I supposed had murdered my parents and brothers, sister, and 

friends, and left them in the swamp to be devoured by wild beasts! But what could I 

do? A poor little defenceless girl; without the power or means of escaping; without a 

home to go to, even if I could be liberated; without a knowledge of the direction or 

distance to my former place of residence; and without a living friend to whom to fly for 

protection, I felt a kind of horror, anxiety, and dread, that, to me, seemed 

insupportable. (Seaver 1998: 137) 

Seaver’s impersonation of the female voice in the text becomes then a rhetorical 

gambit to circulate his own interpretation of historical events and enhance the 

pervasive power of a dominant ideology. As Carroll reminds us in the closing lines of 

her epilogue to Rhetorical Drag, by examining the textual formation of captivity 

narratives, “we gain critical insights into the ways people used gender formations to 

control and contain the meanings of a ‘speaking’ subject. An impersonated female 

captive represents not only an object of history but also an advertisement for a 

particular version of what her impersonator imagines history to be” (2007: 194). 


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3. Mary Jemison and the defiance of hegemonic cultural models 

Nevertheless, and although the initial chapters of the narrative attest to the rigid binary 

hierarchies – man/woman, public space/private realm, white/Indian, 

civilized/uncivilized – that structure Seaver’s ideological discourse, soon we commence 

to suspect a dissonant voice struggling to escape control, a voice that contemporary 

scholars find “resistant” or “counterhegemonic” in the narratives (Carroll 2007: 189), 

and that clearly departs from Seaver’s political rhetoric. The disjuncture between both 

discourses is first seen in the manipulation of the traditional rhetoric of captivity 

narratives: 

Frequently, I dream of those happy days: but, alas, they are gone: they have left me to be 

carried through a long life, dependent for the little pleasures of nearly seventy years, upon 

the tender mercies of the Indians! In the spring of 1752, and through the succeeding 

seasons, the stories of Indian barbarities inflicted upon the whites in those days, 

frequently excited in my parents the most serious alarm for our safety. 

The next year, the storm gathered faster; many murders were committed; and many 

captives were exposed to meet death in its most frightful form, by having their bodies 

stuck full of pine splinters, which were immediately set on fire, while their tormentors, 

exulting in their distress, would rejoice at their agony! (Seaver 1998: 132) 

Although Jemison’s dissertation is originally reminiscent of Mary Rowlandson’s or 

Elizabeth Hanson’s bigoted speeches, we soon learn that, contrarily to what happened 

in those cases, expressions such as the tender mercies of the Indians are devoid of ironic 

tinges and are to be interpreted literally in the discourse of the Seneca woman. 

There is a further vital point that evinces the clashing of voices here and this is the 

depiction of female fortitude and resilience versus male weakness and vulnerability as 

when Jemison speaks of both her parents’s attitude towards their captivity: 

Mother, from the time we were taken, had manifested a great degree of fortitude, and 

encouraged us to support our troubles without complaining; and by her conversation 

seemed to make the distance and time shorter, and the way more smooth. But father lost 

all his ambition in the beginning of our trouble, and continued apparently lost to every 

care – absorbed in melancholy. Here, as before, she insisted on the necessity of our eating; 

and we obeyed her, but it was done with heavy hearts. (1998: 136) 

Not only that but also the lack of homogeneity in time measurement is testimony to 

the dissenting voices in the text. Formulae such as “I had a child at the time that the 

kernels of corn first appeared on the cob” (1998: 147) or “Thomas … was a few moons 

over fifty-two years old” (1998: 183) coexist with more conventional forms of measuring 

time i. e.: “In the month of April, or first of May, 1817” (1998: 199). 

The tensions between both voices are ultimately manifest near the conclusion when 

we listen to the subject in the text – supposedly Mary- speaking of a “reduction from a 

civilized to a savage state” (1998: 207; my italics). In addition to this, echoes of Seaver’s 

initial discourse much in consonance with the Puritan tradition of captivity narratives 

can be heard in the last chapter: “It is the recollection of what we once were, of the 

friends, the home, and the pleasures that we have left or lost; the anticipation of misery, 

the appearance of wretchedness, the anxiety for freedom, the hope of release, the 


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devising of means of escaping, and the vigilance with which we watch our keepers, that 

constitute the nauseous dregs of the bitter cup of slavery” (1998: 207). 

The clashing of voices at this stage in the narrative is so evident even for Seaver 

himself that when the narrating voice – i.e. Mary’s – refers to how the use of alcohol 

among the Indians “threatens the extinction of our people” (1998: 208), the speaking 

subject considers necessary to clarify who those people are and inserts their identity (the 

Indians) in a parenthetical aside. 

Under the oppressive shadow of a patriarchal society the story of this valiant woman 

attests to challenges unique to her epoch. Following the example of Mary Rowlandson 

in the seventeenth century and foretelling the means later used by Native storytellers, 

Jemison’s/Dehgewanus’s story manages to challenge orthodox readings of the text and 

to offer a revisionist history of cross-cultural encounters since from the very beginning 

and, contrarily to the slanted historiographical approach Seaver attempts to enact, the 

female object/subject appears as a woman unwilling “to aggravate the vices of the 

Indians”, someone who “seemed to take pride in extolling their virtues”, a woman with 

“a kind of family pride [that] inclined her to withhold whatever would blot the 

character of her descendants” (1998: 129). In fact, Dehgewanus’s affiliation with the 

Indian race and her empowerment of Native mores lead us to consider this text as the 

first female Indian autobiography. Actually, whether this narrative is considered as an 

example of a captivity narrative or as an Indian autobiography depends on the 

categorization of the object/subject of the story either as a white woman captured by the 

natural inhabitants of the new territories or as a Native American woman, that is, on the 

reconsideration of the object/subject’s identity. 8 

As historical and ethnographic documents attest, white integration into Indian 

tribes was not hard to achieve since “Indians did not typically reject persons because of 

the color of their skin but focused rather on the learnable and acquirable ethnic 

qualities such as ‘language, culturally appropriate behaviour, social affiliation, and 

loyalty’” (Dyar 2003: 823). 9 In his Injun Joe’s Ghost, Brown conjures up 20 th c. 

8 Although the captivity narrative was the formal model that initially patterned Jemison’s 

story, a detailed examination of the text unveils its resistance to being classified into this genre 

and underscores its similarities with the tradition of the Indian autobiography. As Sayre asserts: 

“In the nineteenth-century US virtually any story of a white person who had lived with Indian 

tribes and returned was touted as a captivity narrative, for it was a kind of social betrayal to admit 

that these individuals preferred Indian life … The captivity narrative genre and its criticism have 

been slow to recognize that most captives were adopted into tribes and families and that native 

kinship, unlike Euro-American custom, regarded such adoptees as real kin and did not define 

identity phylogenetically” (1999: 486). 

9 Reports of the positive treatment of captives taken to replace family members abound in the 

literary tradition and in Jemison’s text in particular. Thus, the woman describes her adoption 

ceremony in the following terms: “They first undressed me and threw my rags into the river; then 

washed me clean and dressed me in the new suit they had just brought, in complete Indian style; 

and then led me home and seated me in the center of their wigwam” (Seaver 1998: 142). 

Followingly, the women of the tribe verbalize their feeling regarding Mary: “His spirit [the dead 

warrior’ Jemison is to replace] has seen our distress, and sent us a helper whom with pleasure we 

greet. Dickewamis has come: then let us receive her with joy! She is handsome and pleasant! Oh! 


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anthropologists’ and writers’ redefinition of the Indian as “a cultural rather than a 

biological entity” and elaborates on its immediate effects on the definition of hybridity, 

“previously understood as a measurable combination of blood and bone, to encompass 

the blending of more immensurable qualities like language, belief, and education” 

(2004: 11). Therefore, if we dissociate race from biology, 10 A Narrative of the Life of Mrs 

Mary Jemison can be also understood as A Narrative of the Life of Dehgewanus, the fullyfledged 

Seneca woman who managed to circulate a long history of white prejudices and 

Euro-American encroachment. Occupying a liminal position between two worlds and 

moving between fixed identities, Dehgewanus, this “culturally hybrid female 

informant” (Burnham 2003: 141), made use of the literary conventions available to 

Euro-American women at the time to orchestrate an ingenious design which allowed 

her to subvert not only gender- but also race-established hierarchies. As Tawil states, 

she is the emblem of “accommodation between cultures” (2006: 66), benefiting from 

the advantages offered by each of them. On the one hand, she is the white woman 

moving from cultural liminality into integration in the indigenous world attracted by 

the powers upheld by Seneca women. 11 On the other hand, she is also the Indian woman 

who became naturalized and was offered land allotment whereas her family and friends 

were forced to live in reservations as part of the Westward expansion. 

Hence, the editor’s presentation of the subject of his composition as a woman who 

was illiterate in English, dressed after the Indian fashion, familiar with indigenous 

habits and beliefs, whose “bosom companion” was “an ancient Indian warrior” and 

whose “children and associates were all Indians” (Seaver 1998: 126) clearly evinces her 

alignment with the descriptive labels noted above and underscores her Indianness. As 

June Namias explains, “work, a system of mutual obligations, family relationships, 

white prejudice, and her experiences with land bound her [Mary] to the Seneca 

community, defining her as an Indian woman [Dehgewanus]” (1993: 186). Therefore, if 

we circumvent the permanence of racial categories (Buss 2008: 12) and consider race as 

“a social construct with no natural or biological quality” (Pérez Torres 2005: 373), we 

could seemingly reformulate the ethnic identity of the subject of the discourse and 

definitely consider Dehweganus’s account as the first Indian autobiography much in the 

tradition of Black Hawk’s, Black Elk’s or even Sarah Winnemuca’s 12 (Brown 2004: 74), 

She is our sister, and gladly we welcome her here. In the place of our brother she stands in our 

tribe. With care we will guard her from trouble; and may she be happy till her spirit shall leave 

us” (1998: 143). 

10 This approach also articulates Sayre’s (1999) and Buss’s (2008) respective considerations of 

John Tanner and Frances Slocum/Maconaquah (Young Bear) as Native Americans. 

11 “These included the ‘power of life and death over prisoners of war’; the designation of male 

members to sit in the councils of war to the point of control over a declaration of war; the power 

to unseat such representatives; the selection of leaders of spiritual life, many of whom were 

women; the passing of property and titles through the female line; the arrangement of marriages; 

and the authority over the extended and extensive household, the longhouse” (Namias 1993: 191). 

12 It is interesting to see how Sarah Winnemucca recalls in her Life Among the Piutes, Their 

Wrongs and Claims (1883) the terror she felt the first time she saw whites: “My aunt overtook us 

and said to my mother: ‘Let us bury our girls, or we shall all be killed and eaten up’. So they went 


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in clear response to the new meanings of hybridity created by Native American writers 

in the 21 st c. 13 As Mary Jemison affirms, “just as we feel, we are” (Seaver 1998: 207). It is 

surely no accident that Karen L. Kilkup already included, in her 2000 anthology of 

Native American Women’s Writings, selections from Jemison’s text and that Michael 

Burnham vindicated the inclusion of the story within the tradition of Indian women’s 

writings such as Mourning Dove’s and Pretty Shield’s (2000: 152), a view that had 

previously been bolstered by Karen Oakes (1995) when she employed Gretchen Bataille 

and Kathleen Sand’s set of criteria for Native American women’s autobiography to 

fathom Jemison’s account as such. For her, “Mary Jemison’s narrative threads across 

and connects such qualities of Native American women’s autobiography as emphasis 

on event over emotion, attention to the sacredness of language, emphasis on 

community, and concern with the landscape” (1995: 45). 

As a result, although Carroll only speaks of the problem of how to use the 

experiences of conventionally marginalized persons – marginalized by their gender – as 

the problem that lies at the heart of rhetorical drag, Jemison’s/Dehgewanus’ narrative 

provides “different lenses for the understanding” not only of “gender formation” 

(Carroll 2007: 191) but also of race formation. The Indian female subject of Seaver’s text 

transforms the indigenous figure into something “worthy of textualization” (Krupat 

1985: 5) and her literary account into a righteous attempt to complete and correct 

unsympathetic readings of Indian history and Native cultural practices. Thus, 

Dehgewanus manages to subvert and challenge the achievements of Seaver’s gender 

impersonation and finally control the presentation of the empirical, natural, and 

historical ‘facts’ of her life. To such an end, firstly, she purposely selects incidents and 

individuals to show an Edenic portrait of woman’s life in the wilderness and to honour 

and exalt the values and beliefs of the indigenous society. As a woman who knew how 

“to take [her] children and look out for [her]self” (Seaver 1998: 166), she stands for the 

emblem of female agency in a community whose women’s domestic tasks – “nursing 

the children, and doing light work around the house” (1998: 144) - are “not harder than 

[those] of white women” but also “not half as numerous, nor as great” (1998: 149). 

Secondly, as a woman who, after having lived with the Indians “four summers and 

four winters” asserts that “with them was [her] home; [her] family was there, and there 

[she] had many friends to whom [she] was warmly attached” (1998: 148), she 

conspicuously epitomizes the idea of cultural assimilation. So much so that after the 

Revolution she turned down another opportunity to return to civilization using the 

following argumentation: “I had got a large family of Indian children, that I must take 

with me; and that if I should be so fortunate as to find my relatives, they would despise 

them, if not myself; and treat them as enemies; or, at least as a degree of cold 

indifference, which I thought I could not endure” (1998: 178). Degehwanus’s remark 

to work and buried us, and told us if we heard any noise not to cry out, for if we did they would 

surely kill us and eat us” (Snodgrass 1997: 375). 

13 These new meanings “abandon both biology and culture as signifiers of racial identity in 

favour of the individual will: a choice to define oneself as Indian according to one’s own terms, 

reflecting the contemporary sense of Native self-determination and the refusal of substitute 

identities … mandated by the dominant culture” (Brown 2004: 221). 


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clearly evinced the discourse of scientific racism that dominated American thought at 

this time (Krupat 2008: 105) according to which “a Euro American woman could 

become a Seneca, but a Seneca woman, even a physically white Seneca woman, could 

never ‘become’ European American. Nor, for that matter, could her ‘Indian’ children” 

(Oakes 1995: 50). As Laural Mielke argues, with these words Jemison emphasized that 

“unlike the Seneca, Euro-Americans allow race to overwhelm family ties” (2008: 80). 

This rendering of Dehgewanus´s paradisiacal life among the Indians belies the values 

Seaver seeks to endorse the text with since it offers the white woman “physical, 

matrimonial, and economic space” and consequently enables her “to alter [her] racial, 

national, and gender identities” (Castiglia 1996: 36, 37): 

No people can live more happy that the Indians did in times of peace, before the 

introduction of spirituous liquors among them. Their lives were a continual round of 

pleasures. Their wants were few, and easily satisfied; and their cares were only for to-day; 

the bounds of their calculations for future comfort not extending to the incalculable 

uncertainties of to-morrow. If peace ever dwelt with men, it was in former times in the 

recesses from war, amongst what are now termed barbarians. The moral character of the 

Indians was (if I may be allowed the expression) uncontaminated. Their fidelity was 

perfect, and became proverbial; they were strictly honest; they despise deception and 

falsehood; and chastity was held in high veneration, and a violation of it was considered 

sacrilege. (Seaver 1998: 160) 

Finally, Dehgewanus’s most daring challenge consists of praising the Indian character 

and of defining the race as “strictly honest … temperate in their desires, moderate in their 

passions, and candid and honorable in the expression of their sentiments” (1998: 160). 

Not only that; she also made the whites responsible for some of the indigenous moral 

flaws and wrongful deeds: “The use of ardent spirits amongst the Indians and the attempts 

which have been made to civilize and christianize them by the white people, has 

constantly made them worse and worse; increased their vices and robbed them of many of 

their virtues; and will ultimately produce their extermination” (1998: 149-50). For 

Dehgewanus the hideous abuses committed by civilized people in their Western expansion 

totally justified the Indians’ hostilities and barbarities perpetrated against frontier 

settlements since “it is a fact that they are naturally kind, tender and peaceable towards 

their friends, and strictly honest; and that those cruelties have been practised, only upon 

their enemies, according to their idea of justice” (1998: 150, my italics). 

4. Conclusion. 

Hence it is no wonder that set in times of social and political upheaval, the story of 

the woman who undertook such a “cultural metamorphosis” (Sayre 1999: 88) 

captivated a wide popular audience and underwent twenty-three editions ranging from 

32 to 483 pages. As Carroll states, “a key concern of Rhetorical Drag is the dialogue, 

which articulates the captive woman’s voice with the authoritative and interpretive 

apparatus of introductions and annotations” (2007: 10). This explains the “machinery 

of cultural appropriation” (Wickstrom 2005: 177) that has been working for years on 


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this narrative. Later editions slightly modified the title of the first one and added a series 

of data and documents intended to soften its revolutionary message. 

The 1842 edition was titled Deh-he-wa-mis; Or, A Narrative of the Life of Mary 

Jemison: Otherwise Called the White Woman and was revised and extended with several 

episodes, among them a conversion episode. The account of her death-bed spiritual 

reformation helped place the story in the tradition of eighteenth and nineteenth century 

accounts of conversion to Christianity by Indians such as Samson Occom’s sermon 

(1768), William Apes’s Son of the Forest (1829) or George Copway’s Life, History, and 

Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (1847). However, in spite of the editor’s attempts to 

testify her return to civilization and to Christianity, the truth is that Dehgewanus died 

on the Buffalo Creek Reservation in 1833. The 1856 edition included geographical and 

explanatory notes and a Publisher’s note, which did not appear in the first edition and 

which emphasized the passivity of the acculturated object: 

it was her sad destiny to become lost to the race from which she sprung, and affiliated 

with the one she had most reason to abhor. Her transformation, the reverse of the order 

of nature, was perfected by her becoming the wife of an Indian, and the mother of Indian 

children. As if in punishment of this unnatural alliance … she was forced to fulfil her 

destiny by dying as she had lived, a Seneca woman (7-8). 

Fascinated with Indian life and particularly with the figure of ‘The White Woman of 

the Gennessee’, in 1877, ironworks tycoon William Pryor Letchworth complemented 

the new edition of the narrative with illustrations showing samples of Indian attire and 

adornment. Not only that, he commissioned Henry K. Bush-Brown with a bronze 

sculpture that memorializes Mary Jemison and which can be found in Letchworth State 

Park, near New York. 

As Wickstrom stated, for decades “the true nature of her [Jemison’s] relationships 

with Indian men, as well as her power as a person, were eclipsed by the words of 

influential white men helping to shape the norms of a burgeoning imperial civilization” 

(2005: 178). Only by submitting to Euro-American discursive forms, only by accepting 

the conventional presence of a white male editor/author who impersonated her to 

legitimize her revolutionary message, could Mary/Dehgewanus present her own history 

as a woman and as an Indian and definitely circulate her own voice as a female Native 

subject. Thus, this narrative becomes an example of how marginalized figures – both in 

terms of race and gender – apparently abiding by the established laws of the hegemonic 

white patriarchal system actually challenge and subvert it, creating new forms of selfexpression 

and opposition. By avoiding victimry and emphasizing “the ongoing agency 

and activity of the Native” (Krupat 2008: 103), Dehgewanus becomes an example of 

native survivance (Vizenor and Lee 1999: 93) and her story an example of an active 

presence, one that can “undermine the literature of dominance” (Vizenor 1994: 12). 

Nowadays, Dehgewanus/Mary Jemison is much more than simply a figure of 

history. In 2008, celebrations around the United States marked the 250 th anniversary of 

Mary Jemison’s abduction. In 2009 visitors to Letchworth State Park in New York 

continued retracing her steps on the Mary Jemison Trail. Her story still fascinates 

generations of American readers. However, modern retellings of the story – i. e. Lois 

Lenski’s Indian Captive. The Story of Mary Jemison (1941), Rayna M. Gangi’s Mary 


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Jemison. White Woman of the Seneca (1996), Deborah Larsen’s The White (2002) and 

Susan Bivin Aller’s Living with the Senecas. A Story about Mary Jemison (2007) – still 

emphasize its reading as a captivity narrative and highlight the whiteness of the 

protagonist. In her 2007 book The Terror Dream, Susan Faludi (2008) interprets the 

reaction to the 9/11 attacks as a re-enactment of America’s traditional myth of the 

avenging rescuer and the damsel in distress. Thus, as the acculturated woman’s living 

presence in American land and culture attests, Americans are still coming to terms with 

their past, revising myths form yonder. Nevertheless, her presence as Mary Jemison 

rather than as Dehgewanus reveals that readers of all ages have resisted Dehgewanus’s 

reading as an Indian woman and have decided on Jemison’s reading as a white woman. 

This is just another example of how we continuously miss the opportunity of using the 

past to reverse negative modes of the present. 

Works Cited 

Aller, Susan B. 2007: Living with the Senecas. A Story about Mary Jemison. Minneapolis: Millbrook P. 

Axtell, James 1975: ‘The White Indians of Colonial America’. The William and Mary Quarterly. 

Third series. 32.1: 55-88. 

Brown, Harry J. 2004: Injun Joe’s Ghost. The Indian Mixed-Blood in American Writing. Columbia: 

U of Missouri P. 

Burnham, Michelle 2003: ‘The Periphery Within. Internal Colonialism and the Rhetoric of U. S. 

Nation Building’. Malini Johar Schueller and Edward Watts, eds. Messy Beginnings: 

Postcoloniality and Early American Studies. New Jersey: Rutgers UP. 

Buss, Jim J. 2008: ‘They Found and Left Her an Indian: Gender, Race, and the Whitening of 

Young Bear’. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 29.2-3: 1-35. 

Carroll, Lorrayne 2007: Rhetorical Drag. Gender Impersonation, Captivity and the Writing of 

History. Kent: The Kent State UP. 

Castiglia, Christopher 1996: Bound and Determined. Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White 

Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst. Chicago: The U of Chicago P. 

Castro, Wendy Lucas 2008: ‘Stripped: Clothing and Identity in Colonial Captivity Narratives’. 

Early American Studies. Spring. 104-36. 

Derounian-Stodola Kathryn Zabelle and James Arthur Levernier 1993: The Indian Captivity 

Narrative, 1550-1900. New York: Twayne. 

Dyar, Jennifer 2003: ‘Fatal Attraction: The White Obsession with Indianness’. The Historian 65.4: 

817-36. 

Ebersole, Gary L. 1995: Captured by Texts. Puritan to Post-Modern Images of Indian Captivity. 

Virginia: The UP of Virginia. 

Faludi, Susan 2008 (2007): The Terror Dream. What 9/11 Revealed about America. London: Grove 

Atlantic. 

Fisk, Gordon M. 1844: ‘The Female Captive. A Poem’. James Levernier and Hening Cohen, eds. 

The Indians and Their Captives. Westport: Greenwood P. 122-23. 

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Berkeley: U of California P. 


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––––– 2008: ‘William Apes. Storier of Survivance’. Gerald Vizenor, ed. Survivance. Narratives of 

Native Presence. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. 103-22. 

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Mielke, Laural 2008: Moving Encounters. Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum 

Literature. Amherst U of Massachussetts P. 

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The U of North Carolina P. 

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Derounian-Stodola, ed. Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives. London: Penguin. 117-210. 

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Explanatory Notes. New York and Auburn: Miller, Orton and Mulligan. 

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548-62. 

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England. 

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of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison’. American Literature 64.1: 49-70. 

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Received 12 July 2009 Revised version accepted 23 January 2010 

Elena Ortells Montón (PhD Universitat de València) is a tenured lecturer in the Department of English 

Studies at the Universitat Jaume I of Castelló, where she currently teaches 18 th century English Literature 

and Academic Writing. Her main research interest is American literature, with particular attention to captivity 

narratives. She has published articles in Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, Revista de Estudios 

Norteamericanos, Academic Exchange Quarterly and Culture, Language and Representation among other 

journals. Recent publications include La verdadera historia del cautiverio y la restitución de Mary 

Rowlandson. Traducción, estudio crítico y notas (2008) and Truman Capote, un camaleón ante el espejo 

(2009). 

Address: Departament of English Studies, Facultat de Ciències Humanes i Socials, Universitat Jaume I of 

Castelló, Av. de Vicent Sos Baynat, s/n. 12006 Castelló de la Plana, Spain. Tel.: +34 964729606/9532. 

Fax: +34 964729261. 


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Ilan Stavans’s On Borrowed Words, Jewish-Latino/a 

Writing and Transnational Autobiography 

Markus Heide 

Humboldt University Berlin 

Markus.heide@rz.hu-berlin.de 

The article examines Ilan Stavans’s On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language (2002) in 

the light of transnational approaches to American literature and to Latino writing in 

particular. As a transnational autobiography that not only reflects and comments on 

experiences in different nations, On Borrowed Words is intertextually linked to different 

literary traditions of American writing. Stavans’s memoirs trace a journey from growing 

up in a Jewish family and neighborhood in Mexico City to life as a scholar of Latin 

American Literature at Amherst College. The memoirs use a multilingual textuality in 

order to express the simultaneity of being at home in different nations, communities and 

cultures of the Americas and of the globe. The essay places Stavans’s memoirs at the 

crossroads of these traditions: American autobiography, Chicano/a literature and Jewish- 

American writing. 

Keywords: Ethnicity; Autobiography; Latino/a Writing; Chicano/a Literature; Jewish- 

American Literature: Transnational American Studies 

On Borrowed Words, de Ilan Stavans, la literatura judeo-latina 

y la autobiografía transnacional 

Este artículo examina la obra de Ilan Stavans On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language 

(2002) desde el prisma de la literatura transnacional estadounidense, en general, y de 

escritores latinos, en particular. Como autobiografía transnacional que no se limita a reflejar 

y comentar experiencias en diferentes naciones, On Borrowed Words engarza 

intertextualmente con distintas tradiciones literarias de los Estados Unidos. Las memorias de 

Stavans llevan al lector de viaje desde la infancia del autor en el seno de una familia judía 

establecida en Ciudad de México hasta la vida académica desarrollada en Amherst College 

como profesor de literatura latinoamericana. Las memorias emplean una textualidad 

multilingüe con el fin de expresar la simultaneidad de sentirse en casa en diferentes naciones, 

comunidades y culturas de las Américas y del globo. Las memorias de Stavans se sitúan en 

este ensayo en un cruce de caminos donde convergen las siguientes tradiciones: la 

autobiografía estadounidense, la literatura chicana y la tradición literaria 

judeoestadounidense. 

Palabras clave: Etnicidad; autobiografía, escritores latinos; literatura chicana; literatura 

judeo-estadounidense; estudios transnacionales estadounidenses

88 Markus Heide 


In the past two decades, scholars in American literary and cultural studies such as 

Kaplan and Pease (1993), Pease (1994) and Rowe (2000, 2002) have emphasized the 

necessity of transnational approaches to American history and literatures in order to, 

firstly, overcome the residues of American exceptionalism and, secondly, become aware 

of American specificities in a comparative framework. 1 In addition to these revisionist 

aims, a transnational approach to American writing opens up new perspectives on the 

history of immigration and immigrant literature. The more recent transnational 

explorations of the literary and cultural history of the Americas are aligned with other 

discourses of pan-identities that have resulted from the history of colonialism and 

globalization (e.g. Atlantic history, transnational migrant communities, border theory 

and diaspora studies) brought forward by such authors as Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), 

Stuart Hall (1990), Paul Gilroy (1993) and Joseph R. Roach (1996). In the United States, 

Latino/a Studies as an academic field and intellectual discourse has been influential in 

the formation of transnational approaches to American writing. For example, Cuban- 

American critic and performance artist Coco Fusco’s self-reflective ‘Pan-Latino 

performances’ are exemplary for the diasporic and postmodern turn of Cuban culture’s 

contributions to a hemispheric notion of American Studies (see Fusco 1995). From a 

Mexican-American perspective, José David Saldívar (1997) speaks of a distinctly Pan- 

American consciousness among Latinos in the USA (‘Pan-Latino consciousness’). 

The following sections will investigate Latino writing from a perspective that not 

only focuses on inter-American border crossings, but also highlights the international 

and crosscultural entanglements of US-Latino writing beyond the Americas. In view of 

the debate on transnational approaches to American literary history and the particular 

contributions of Latino/a writers, I read Ilan Stavans’s On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of 

Language (2002) as transnational autobiographical writing that not only reflects and 

comments on experiences in different nations but is also intertextually linked to 

different literary traditions of American writing. The memoirs use a multilingual 

textuality in order to express the simultaneity of being at home in different nations, 

communities and cultures of the Americas and of the globe. 

Stavans’s memoirs trace a journey from growing up in a Jewish family and 

neighborhood in Mexico City to a life as a scholar of Latin American Literature at 

Amherst College in Western Massachusetts. Stavans was born in Mexico in 1961 into 

a Jewish-Mexican family. He came to the USA as a young adult to study at Columbia 

1 Keywords here are what Pease (1994) refers to as Post-national and post-Americanist 

narratives. John Carlos Rowe writes about the implications of “new regionalisms” (2002: 59) that 

cross national borders, for example, Southern California’s relation to Asia and Mexico, the 

southeastern United States’ relation to the Black Atlantic, and Miami’s relation to Cuba, Haiti and 

Latin America. In this context he speaks of the “western hemisphere” (2002: 53) as a conceptual 

model for looking at such transnational communities in the Americas. In general the New 

American Studies, according to Rowe, asserts that local conditions should be studied in a “larger 

understanding of the United States in the comparative contexts” (2002: 60) of western 

hemispheric and global studies. 


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Ilan Stavans’s On Borrowed Words 89 

University and later started teaching Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst 

College. In recent years Stavans has become known as author of an extraordinary 

number of publications in two academic fields and literary discourses: US-Latino/a 

Literatures and Yiddish writing. Among his many scholarly publications are The 

Hispanic Condition: Reflections on Culture and Identity in America (1995a) and 

Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language (2003a). He edited Growing Up 

Latino: Memoirs and Stories (Augenbraum and Stavans 1993), The Oxford Book of 

Jewish Stories (1998), The Scroll and the Cross: 1000 Years of Jewish-Hispanic Literature 

(2003b), and is editor of a series of Jewish writing from Latin America published by 

the University of New Mexico Press. In addition, Stavans has also written two books 

of short stories: The One-Handed Pianist and Other Stories (1996) and The 

Disappearance (2006). 

On Borrowed Words, the prolific author’s memoirs – at the time of its publication 

Stavans was just forty years old – could simply be dismissed as a pretentious 

employment of the genre for self-promoting purposes. However, reading them in the 

context of transnational autobiography appears particularly promising as it not only 

underscores the diversity within the community of Latinos in the US but, even more, 

illustrates a contemporary literary positioning ‘in-between’ and ‘beyond’ national 

frames of identitfication. In fact, the exceptional character of the depicted immigrant 

experience seems to legitimize the memoirs of this middle-aged man. The reader learns 

about immigrant experiences that are usually seen as part of diverse, not overlapping, 

histories: Mexican immigration to the US on the one hand and Jewish immigration to 

the US on the other. The reader is confronted with a multiethnic and multilingual 

voice. At times the narrative is culturally coded (e.g. moving from ‘Mexican’ to ‘Jewish’ 

to ‘American’ to ‘intellectual’) when it comes to such very different topics as Jewish 

New Yorkers and Zionism, or Mexican malinchismo, mariachi music and Jorge Negrete. 

At other points, the narrative, true to the conventions of autobiography, is highly 

personal and presents information concerning intimate personal conflicts and family 

matters. Seen in terms of literary traditions, the memoirs tender an account of 

individual experiences framed in terms of the American immigrant autobiography 

tradition. Within this generic frame, Stavans’s memoirs are intertexually linked to the 

history of two subgenres: Chicano/a autobiography and Jewish-American immigrant 

autobiography. 

The narrative voice affords insights into occurrences that do not match with the 

common categories of ethnic identities and distinctions in America. Although written 

and marketed within the paradigm of ethnic writing through its use of cultural codes, 

On Borrowed Words offers a textual contact zone that performs transculturation in 

Fernando Ortiz’s (1995) sense of a reciprocal exchange across cultural boundary lines. 

Although the narrative portrays Stavans’s migration from Mexico to the US, the 

author’s cultural identification is concurrently presented as multiple, mixed, in 

constant transformation as well as holding on to distinct and singular roots. The fact 

that throughout the memoirs the narrative voice and the patterns of identification 

remain situated simultaneously at different national locales adds a transnational quality 

to this immigration narrative. The transnationalism of the memoirs consists of the 

simultaneity of living in different worlds and of writing from the perspective of these 


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different nations, cultures, traditions and languages: the Mexican, the Jewish, the 

American, the intellectual, the middle-class academic. 

2. Historical genealogies: immigration and Jewish-Latino writing 

As an autobiographical narrative, On Borrowed Words spans the second half of the 

twentieth century, the period covering the author’s life up to that point. However, 

Stavans’s Jewishness, Mexicanness and Americanness, as well as his family history, link 

the memoirs with a much older history of Jewish and Hispanic life in the US. In 

American literature, the transatlantic and inter-American history of Sephardic Jews was 

most prominently taken up by the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his 

nineteenth-century poem ‘The Jewish Cemetery at Newport’, considered the most 

famous literary reference to colonial Jewish American history. The fourth stanza reads 

as follows: 

The very names recorded here are strange, 

Of foreign accent, and of different climes; 

Alvares and Rivera interchange 

With Abraham and Jacob of old times. (1988: 361) 

The lyrical I speaks of a foreign accent that had once found its way to New England. In 

this stanza, the names on the tombstones are perceived as traces of a combination of 

Iberian and Judaic tongues. From the poet’s nineteenth-century perspective, the 

tombstones lead back to the first Jewish migration to North America. The tombstones’ 

inscriptions are an aide-mémoire that this migration consisted mainly of Sephardic 

Jews who had left the Iberian peninsula in the late fifteenth century. It is a reminder 

that this migration was not only trans-Atlantic but also inter-American. The first Jews 

came from the Caribbean to New Amsterdam in 1654. Many, as Longfellow’s lyrical I 

observes, had Spanish names and spoke Spanish. 2 The cemetery and the synagogue 

(built in 1763) to which Longfellow refers are remnants of one of the first Jewish 

communities in colonial British America. 

When Longfellow visited the Jewish Cemetery at Newport, Ashkenasic Jews from 

Central and Eastern Europe had already arrived in the United States and outnumbered 

the Sephardic Jews. In fact, as early as 1730 Jews of Central European origin were more 

numerous in British North America than were Iberian Jews (cf. Sachar 1992: 9-37). By 

the late nineteenth century, Sephardic traditions had been completely marginalized by 

Russian- and Yiddish-speaking Jewish cultures. The two aspects of Longfellow’s foreign 

2 In his diary Longfellow writes that he found Hebrew and Portuguese inscriptions on the 

tombstones (cf. Nina Baym 2003: 671). For Longfellow the cemetery is merely a reminder of 

“dead nations” (1988: 363) that once, briefly, set foot on American soil. In the 1850s no Sephardic 

community existed anymore in Newport, once a major center of the very small Jewish life in 

colonial British America. Longfellow wrote the poem decades before the onset of Jewish mass 

immigration from Eastern Europe to America. For the history of Jewish migration to colonial 

British North America and Jewish American history of the nineteenth century, see Howard M. 

Sachar (1992) and Jabob Rader Marcus (1970, 2004: 116-26). 


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accent, the Iberian and the Judaic, have since split and are usually viewed as belonging 

to two different experiences of immigration and of becoming American: that of Latin 

Americans and that of Jews from Europe. In the United States, although Hebrew and 

Yiddish have gained recognition in the cultural and literary productions that followed 

the Yiddish-speaking mass immigration of the late nineteenth century, Spanish and 

Portuguese have, in general terms, always been regarded as the language of Catholic 

migrants from the Iberian peninsula, Latin America and the Caribbean. 

More recently, however, quite a few autobiographical texts have been published 

that, from a late twentieth-century perspective, take up elements from these different 

histories of migration: autobiographical writing by Jewish authors from hispanophone 

Latin America and the Caribbean. For example, Rosario Morales and Aurora Levins 

Morales, a mother and daughter originally from Puerto Rico, coauthored Getting Home 

Alive (1986), a collection that includes autobiography, poetry and fiction with an 

explicit feminist twist. Levins Morales’ Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics 

of Integrity (1998), a collection of autobiographical essays, poetry and engaged, antiracist 

and feminist historiography of Puerto Rico, contains many passages on Jewish 

Puerto Ricans and their history. Marjorie Agosín’s A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a 

Jewish Girl in Chile (1995) interweaves her childhood memories with the history of the 

Holocaust and the fate of family members. 3 The anthropologist Ruth Behar, who grew 

up in a Jewish family from Cuba, produced and directed an autobiographical TV 

documentary, Adio Kerida (2002), and published interviews and poetry that focus on 

her Cuban-Jewish-American identity. 4 And Ariel Dorfman, the émigré intellectual from 

Chile, best known to a broader public for his play Death and the Maiden (1992), 

published an autobiography, Heading South, Looking North, in 1998. This 

autobiographical American Jewish-Latino/a writing is located in at least four major 

literary traditions of (ethnic) writing in the USA: Latino/a literature, Jewish American 

literature, immigrant literature and the American autobiography. 

Some of the authors of contemporary Jewish-Latino autobiography and fiction in 

the US position themselves and their writing in the traditions of Latino/a literatures 

that have flourished in the last fifty years in the United States. Mexican American, 

Chicano/a, Cuban-American and Nuyorican are the major identity markers in this 

literary production. To emphasize the common ground of these literatures, the terms 

Latino and Latina have increasingly come into use. The intimate relation of Spanish and 

intertextuality to Latin American literature are characteristics of much Latino/a writing 

in the USA. Jewish-Latino writing is part of this literary tradition, but it also sheds light 

3 More recently Agosín published Always from Somewhere Else: A Memoir of My Chilean 

Jewish Father (1998), Uncertain Travelers: Conversations with Jewish Women Immigrants to 

America (1999) and The Alphabet in My Hands: A Writing Life (2000), which make her the most 

prominent Jewish-Latina literary and intellectual voice in the United States. See also Stavans 

(2003a: 296-97). 

4 See, for example, her autobiographical ethnographic essay ‘Writing in My Father’s Name: A 

Diary of Translated Woman’s First Year’ (1995), her ethnography and memoir The Vulnerable 

Observer (1996), particularly chapter 5, and Behar (2003). Agosín (1999: 194-208) contains an 

interview with Ruth Behar. 


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on less discussed and underrepresented aspects of inter-American as well as 

transatlantic literary history. 

On Borrowed Words articulates a particular transnational literacy that challenges the 

binary oppositions that often pervade ethnic writing. Although the distinction between 

the Jewish world and that of the goyim is a marker throughout the text, additional 

identifications split and shift seemingly homogeneous national, cultural and ethnic 

categories. Multilingualism plays a major role in this kind of literary expression. 

Multilingualism here is understood both literally, as the employment of different 

languages, and metaphorically, employing diverse forms of identity constructions that 

are anchored in different literary and cultural traditions. The autobiographical writing, 

in a variety of ways, negotiates multilingualism as part of the history of family 

migration and of authorial world-making. We find multilayered references to ‘minority 

positions’, historical narratives and identity markers. In Stavans’s memoirs 

multilingualism functions as a strategic device within the discourses of ethnic and 

national identity construction. While the text often addresses questions of national 

identity, it avoids definite positionings. In this sense, the narrator exposes the reader to 

a textual contact zone of multiple cultural differences. 

While the memoirs are written in English, other languages (Yiddish, Spanish and 

Hebrew) are incorporated via quotes from other literary texts, in remembered and 

imagined dialogues and in the form of singular words or terms. In addition, Polish and 

Russian are characterized as languages of origin. The memoirs are divided into six 

chapters, each of which addresses certain issues that are significant to, and 

representative of, particular moments in the author’s narrated life. In each chapter 

language is somehow connected to a relative, a friend, or to the country of residence of 

the author at the time of the narrated event. The author brings the reader with him on 

his journeys from Mexico to Israel, to Spain, Cuba and the US. Here, the genre of travel 

writing becomes an explicit search for identity. While this search does not reach an end, 

it does at least find a stopping point in the description of the public ceremony in which 

Stavans adopts American citizenship. In the fifth chapter, titled ‘Amerika, America’, 

Stavans touches upon topics such as his reciting the Pledge of Allegiance (to the United 

States) and giving up his Mexican passport. 

Stavans’s style and structure borrow from, take up, appropriate, comment on and 

rewrite other ethnically marked traditions of American autobiographical writing. In the 

following, I will first introduce the function of Yiddish, then I will discuss the text’s 

relation to three autobiographies that are pertinent references for illustrating the 

literary transnationalism imagined and performed by Stavans’s memoirs. 

3. Yiddish in Latino writing 

While in the Jewish-Latino autobiographical texts mentioned earlier – as in most 

contemporary Jewish American literature (cf. Hana Wirth-Nesher 2003) – Yiddish 

serves mainly as an ethnic marker, reminiscent of earlier generations, in Stavans’s 

memoirs the reader encounters a contemporary author who speaks Yiddish and finds 

longer sentences and quotes in Yiddish. Most of these quotes are references to authors 


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of the late twentieth century. In addition to such references, however, the use of Yiddish 

acquires a central symbolic function in the narrative’s complex discussion of identity. 

In fact, one of the most important characteristics that thematically sets Stavans’s text 

apart from other anglophone Jewish-Latino autobiographical writing is his description 

of the Yiddish-speaking community in Mexico City. The narrative uses the biographies 

and idiosyncrasies of individual family members to broach such culturally specific 

topics as the Yiddish theatre, in which Stavans’s father acted and directed, the Jewish 

School (2002: 81), the Eastern European background of his grandparents, his own 

intellectual inclinations, as well as more distant topics such as Sephardic history of the 

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (2002: 74). The autobiographical narrator stresses 

how his family and the Jewish community in Mexico – after Brazil and Argentina the 

third largest in Latin America – were split in their affiliations: 

Bela [the grandmother] kept her children close to her. She trained them to be first Jewish 

and then Mexican, and exhorted them to embrace Spanish as their mother tongue but 

keep Yiddish as “the Jewish – i.e., intimate – language.” As was common, they met 

Gentiles only in the neighborhood, for kids were sent to Jewish schools and after-school 

programs. This seperation created in them – and in their entire generation – an 

ambivalent sense of identity. What made them Mexican? And how did they distinguish 

themselves from other Jews? This duality was, and still is, much more accentuated among 

Mexican Jews than in their counterparts in the United States, and I daresay, even in Brazil 

and Argentina. Yiddish, among Ashkenazim, was the umbilical cord with Europe, and 

was never fully cut. Spanish made them native citizens with full civil rights, but mixed 

marriages were few, and contact with Catholics and other immigrants was minimal. In 

short, it was an insular mentality. (2002: 79-80) 

Almost halfway through On Borrowed Words, in the ‘Amerika, America’ chapter that 

describes a longer search for national and cultural identification and the desire to aquire 

American citizenship, Stavans quotes, from memory, the words of one of his former 

teachers in Mexico City. This scene, I want to suggest, functions as a key moment in the 

narrative. It contains a leitmotif of the memoirs: searching for images and languages for 

expressing concepts of home and belonging. The narrator’s voice, in the rendition of 

direct speech, switches to Yiddish: “Mexique is ver ich choib myn shtibele. Es is shoin 

main cheim” (2002: 187). The reader of the predominantly English text here is 

confronted with a transcribed Yiddish (which the narrator leaves untranslated). In the 

direct speech the teacher justifies his life in Mexico when claiming: “Mexico is where I 

have my small room. By now it is my home” [my translation]. The Yiddish sentences 

express an emotional attachment to Mexico. 

The Yiddish sentences, in the simplest understanding, remind the American reader 

that Yiddish-speaking populations migrated not only to the United States but also to 

Mexico and many other countries in the Western hemisphere and established Yiddishspeaking 

communities in the urban centers of Latin America. However, it is interesting 

that it is precisely – and paradoxically – the language originating in Central and Eastern 

Europe, a language comprising Hebrew, German and Slavic influences, and written in 

Hebrew letters, that is used to articulate the feeling of being ‘at home’ in the 

predominantly Spanish-speaking, predominantly Catholic country that is culturally 

marked by another, very different cultural and linguistic mix: mestizaje, i.e., the mixture 


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of indigenous and Spanish elements in the Mexican people, culture and nation. 

Mestizaje, however, is not addressed explicitly in the memoirs. But the conceptual 

frame of this Mexican and Latin American cultural characteristic is transferred to 

Stavans’s specific Jewish-Latino-American experiences. By employing code-switching 

the narrative performs the specific mixture (‘mestizaje’) of Stavans’s family. When read 

in the context of various syncretisms of the Old and the New World, the teacher’s 

words provide a textual moment of linguistic, symbolic and cultural intersections, 

crossings and disseminations. The description of the encounter contains a multitude of 

histories, allusion to migratory movements, conflicts and contacts in which different 

regions and nations are involved: Mexico, Central Europe, Israel and the US. 

Analogous to James Clifford’s (1997) exploration of the central status of mobility in 

the construction of culture and cultural identity, the teacher’s words and his function in 

the narrative illustrate how cultural identity consists not only of rootedness in 

traditions but just as much in exchanges of cultural practices and knowledges. As 

Clifford puts it, cultural identity emerges within a dynamic of “roots” and “routes”, an 

interplay between being attached to inherited customs and – at the same time – being 

attracted by transformation, an interchange between embeddedness and mobility. In 

contrast to “roots”-oriented notions of culture, Clifford stresses that “practices of 

displacement” should be seen as “constitutive of cultural meanings rather than as their 

simple transfer or extension” (1997: 3). In this sense, Stavans’s narrative shows 

identities as being constructed in reference to the history of not just one culture and 

nation but many. Thus the code-switching in Stavans’s narration – exemplified in the 

rendering of the encounter with his former teacher – illustrates and symbolically 

negotiates the effects of displacement. This depiction of migratory and diasporic 

identity should not be misunderstood as a naïve celebration of cultural mobility or 

nomadic subjects. Rather, the code-switching carries very different implications, such as 

nostalgia, pain, sadness, joy and humor, being, in fact, strategic or erudite. Hana Wirth- 

Nesher (2003) outlines similar uses of Yiddish and Hebrew in Jewish American 

literature, from the early twentieth century up to contemporary post-Holocaust poetics. 

What sets Stavans’s Jewish-Latino writing apart, however, seems to be the additional 

use of Spanish and the symbolic meaning the linguistic triangular relation of Yiddish, 

Spanish and English acquires in his immigration narrative. 5 Stavans’s multilingualism 

expresses both the joy and grief of life in the diaspora, as well as that of the feelings 

engendered by the act of migration and of being ‘rooted’ in different nations. 

The teacher’s words, untranslated, interrupt the English narrative flow. This creates 

a disruption in the communication between the non-Yiddish-speaking reader and the 

narrator/author. The teacher’s Yiddish sentences are an ambivalent statement, 

expressing the feeling of being ‘at home’ (‘cheim’) while, at the same time, when 

considering the broader context, expressing the feeling of ‘homelessness’. The Yiddish 

in Stavans’s English narrative fulfills a similar and related function. It establishes an 

exclusive textual space, indicating ambivalence toward, or uncertainty about, the 

acquired tongue, English – after all, Stavans only acquired fluency in English 

5 

An excellent illustration in this context is Stavans’s novella ‘Morirse está en hebreo’, included 

in his collection The Disappearance (2006). 


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postadolescence, when he came to the United States to study in New York City. In the 

narrative Yiddish expresses a refusal of ‘English only’-textuality. The code-switching of 

the text, between English, Yiddish, Spanish and Hebrew symbolically imagines and 

establishes a ‘multilingual home’ while, at the same time, speaking of histories and 

memories of ‘homelessness’, and therefore creating a multilingual textuality. 

Thus, in terms of multilingualism and immigration Stavans’s memoirs are a success 

story. The memoirs take up characteristics of the American autobiography, which in the 

tradition established by Benjamin Franklin is structured as a success story, displaying 

the US as the land of personal freedom and opportunity. Stavans’s memoirs in many 

respects structurally correspond to this pattern (successful career as a scholar and 

author; religious, cultural and intellectual freedom). However, by providing a space for 

Stavans’s multilingualism and transnational identification, On Borrowed Words 

constitutes a breach with the conventions of the American autobiography and with the 

concept of assimilation. 

In the narrative, Stavans, himself having grown up as second generation Mexican 

Jew in Mexico City, uses the quote by his former teacher for illustrating his own 

struggle with aliyah, the migration of diaspora Jews to Israel. The teacher’s words are 

introduced at a moment when Stavans is discussing the question of “[n]ormality, 

normalidad” for Mexican Jews: “Where do I fit in modern Mexico? Is there a way to 

link my Hebraic ancestry to my day-to-day life?” (2002: 186). The teacher, only 

sporadically ‘a fervent Zionist’, tries to convince Stavans to give up living in the 

diaspora. When Stavans, as he remembers the scene, asks why the teacher did not 

himself move to Israel, the above quoted sentences are the response. When reading the 

Yiddish words embedded in the English narrative, it becomes obvious that Stavans 

employs Yiddish in order to distance himself from the Mexican-Jewish community of 

his youth and from his family, both of whom he describes as leading artificial lives, 

largely excluded from, and themselves disinterested in, the broader Mexican society: 

I asked him [the teacher] why he hadn’t made aliyah. His answer was sheer evasion, of the 

sort most Mexican Jews indulged in daily. “Mexique is ver ich choib myn shtibele. Es is 

shoin main cheim,” he announced. “I’m an adult, fully settled, with a job. But you, Ilan, 

are still a young man. Your life is ahead of you. Individual decisions are easier to make 

when no one else’s life is in question. (2002: 187) 

The Yiddish here is used, from the narrator’s perspective, to illustrate the “[daily] sheer 

evasion” practiced by Mexican Jews. The statement, as Stavans indicates, a common 

Mexican-Jewish reference to ‘home’ in the diaspora, has a rather sentimental tone to it. 

It functions as an expression of longing for ‘home’: in this conversation with Stavans, 

from an ideological and religious standpoint, the teacher locates home in Israel; 

however, in his Yiddish words – as it is implied, the more intimate and private language 

– he locates ‘home’ – “shtibele” (‘small room’) – in Mexico. Even though he lives in 

modest circumstances in Mexico, even if this Mexican home is always threatened by 

anti-Semitism and exclusion from Mexican society, and even if its enjoyment is always 

accompanied by a persistent feeling of insecurity as a minority subject in a 

predominately Catholic society, this small room – a substitute for the ‘real home’ to 


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which he wants to send Stavans – seems to suffice. And this ‘home’ is embraced by the 

implied familiarity and tenderness of the Yiddish words. 

However, the use of Yiddish at this juncture in Stavans’s narrative, serving a 

function comparable to the teacher’s statements, can be read as an expression of 

nostalgia. While dissociating himself from his community of origin, the narrator at the 

same time embraces this Mexican-Jewish community and his own past. Quoting 

teachers, relatives and other Yiddish speakers, and also presenting himself as one, 

Stavans makes use of a language that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the period 

during which Stavans received his primary education in Mexico City, was only spoken 

by a rather small community; a result of the destruction of Eastern European Jewry in 

the Holocaust. Ongoing assimilation among Ashkenasim in the Americas turned 

Yiddish into what has been referred to as a dying language, and is thus used as a 

language of origins. Hence, similar to much of contemporary Jewish American 

literature, as Wirth-Nesher writes, Yiddish is interwoven in texts “as a memorial to the 

dead” (2003: 119). This is particularly the case when considering the ‘The Rise and Fall 

of Yiddish’, the chapter about his grandmother, Bela Stavchansky. The chapter 

introduces Stavans’s own upbringing and language acquisition and his intimate relation 

to both Yiddish and Spanish. Both languages are shown as being ‘his own’ and at the 

same time ‘not his own’. References to these two ‘mother tongues’ are embedded in an 

English narrative that highlights Stavans’s ‘coming to’ the English language. English is 

repeatedly described as being most ‘his own’ because it is a consciously acquired and 

chosen language. Considering the correlation between the topics of migration and 

language use in On Borrowed Words, the memoirs can be read as responding to the 

Mexican teacher’s Yiddish: With Stavans’s migration, Spanish and Yiddish, as well as 

Mexican culture and Judaism, were transported beyond the Mexico-USA border al otro 

lado (‘to the other side’), and they are shown as ‘living on’ in the new American cheim 

(‘home’). 

4. Chicano/a autobiography, Jewish autobiography, American autobiography 

In light of his many publications on Mexican American literature, 6 Stavans is extremely 

knowledgeable about the different positions that Chicano/a authors have taken 

concerning the question of assimilation. In the last few decades, two of these authors, 

Cherríe Moraga and Richard Rodríguez, have articulated two very opposite opinions. In 

each case, language plays a pivotal role in the literary identity construction. Like other 

minority literatures, Mexican American writing, whether fiction or nonfiction, 

introduces the motif of searching for – as Moraga puts it – your own language. While 

Moraga longs for the Spanish mother tongue that she did not learn to speak as a child 

growing up in a family keen on assimilating, Rodriguez embraces the English language 

as ‘his own’ after having been raised and educated in this tongue. 

6 

Among them is a book-length study of the life and work of Chicano writer Oscar Zeta 

Acosta (Stavans 1995b). 


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Stavans’s experience of becoming an American citizen differs from that of both 

Moraga and Rodriguez, who were each born to Mexican parents. 7 Stavans immigrated 

on his own, not as a Mexican seeking work in the low-wage sector, but as a middle-class 

Mexican, and he is very open about this rather uncharacteristic immigration experience 

and way of becoming American: 

My emigration was carefully planned. I was not a bracero, a wet-back running away from 

poverty, whose swim across the Río Grande was the chance of a better future, filled with 

that magical American word “opportunity.” My admiration for the wetbacks is 

enormous. Could I have undergone a similar adventure? I doubt it. I was a spoiled 

middle-class, educated child. I always had a shower, a bowl of soup, handsome clothes to 

wear. My move was motivated by freedom: I wanted to live in a land of free speech, where 

words and arguments mattered; a place where my Jewishness was valued; I wanted to 

have inexhaustible, labyrinthine libraries around me, where I could get lost. (2002: 22) 

In this kind of ‘middle-class’ immigrant autobiography, multilingualism acquires a 

different meaning than in the influential Mexican American autobiographies by 

Moraga and Rodriguez. 

In Moraga’s Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó por sus Labios (1983) we 

find romanticized references to Mexico and the Spanish language, references that are 

fully entrenched in identity politics: “In returning to the love of my race, I must return 

to the fact that not only has the mother been taken from me, but the tongue, her 

mother tongue. I want the language, feel my tongue rise to the occasion of feeling at 

home, in common. I know this language in my bones...and then it escapes me ... ‘¡You 

don’t belong. Quítate!’” (1983: 141). 

Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982) 

occupies a position polar opposite to that of Loving in the War Years when it comes to 

questions of identity politics, bilingualism and the symbolic significance of Spanish. On 

the first pages we find an embracing of Anglo-America in an affirmative tone: “I write 

this book as a middle-class American man. Assimilated” (1982: 3). And, in a passage 

that has become quite well-known, Rodríguez goes on: “Consider me, if you choose, a 

comic victim of two cultures. This is my situation: writing these pages, surrounded in 

the room I am in by volumes of Montaigne and Shakespeare and Lawrence. They are 

mine now” (1982: 5). 

The middle-class background and the interest in Old World literary and intellectual 

history obviously positions Stavans closer to Rodríguez than to Moraga. Stavans’s 

description of his first impressions of New York assumes a similar literary and educated 

tone: “From the first moment I stepped out into New York, it appeared to me like a 

huge book, a novel-in-progress perhaps, filled with anecdotes, with a multilingual 

poetry impossible to repress” (2002: 11). 

It is not surprising that Stavans and Rodríguez, as we learn in On Borrowed Words, 

know each other and have had longer conversations on matters of being American and 

on assimilation, to which almost the entire last chapter, ‘The Lettered Man’, is devoted 

(247-59). However, when it comes to language, Stavans’s memoirs go d’accord neither 

7 Although Moraga’s father was not Mexican, cf. Moraga (1983). 


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with Moraga nor Rodríguez. On the one hand, the intimate, emotionally bound 

relation to Spanish as the language of his childhood seems in fact to come closer to 

Moraga’s longing for her ‘lost’ mother tongue. On the other hand, English is 

represented as an acquired language, free from any family connection, in which, similar 

to the country where he learned to speak it, the narrator feels very much at home. 

Stavans takes up both forms of Mexican American autobiography, the roots-oriented 

Chicana autobiography (Moraga) and the assimilationist autobiography (Rodriguez), 

and intertwines them in a new way by highlighting the significance of Yiddish in his life. 

Stavans ‘triangularizes’ the binary logic of the language policy usually dictated for the 

Chicano/a autobiography. 

Apart from the Latino/a autobiography, Stavans establishes links to the history of 

the American immigrant autobiography, particularly the Jewish American 

autobiography. In the ‘Amerika, America’ chapter the narrator approaches the US 

through the long tradition of Jewish American writing. Here we find sentences, images 

and references that resonate with any reader familiar with American literary history: e.g. 

“What does it mean to be an American?” (2002: 184), and “I came in search of the 

Garden of Eden” (2002: 185). Another biblical reference, ‘the Promised Land’, is 

employed for describing the intellectual and political phases in Stavans’s earlier life: it is 

first mentioned as a reference to Israel (2002: 190), then, when describing his 

temporary period of Marxist activism, to Mexico (2002: 209), and finally to the USA 

and its intellectual and literary tradition (2002: 221). Mary Antin’s The Promised Land 

(1912), the most famous autobiography of a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe to 

the USA in the early twentieth century, is introduced as a topic in the conversation with 

Richard Rodriguez in the final chapter of the memoirs (2002: 253). On the first pages of 

The Promised Land, Antin goes so far as to claim that her life in America feels 

completely detached from her earlier life in the Old World: “I was born, I have lived, 

and I have been made over. Is it not time to write my life’s story? I am just as much out 

of the way as if I were dead, for I am absolutely other than the person whose story I 

have to tell” (2001: 3). 

She then recounts the hardship, discrimination and persecution she experienced in 

Russia during her childhood. She presents her autobiography, contrary to the assumed 

memory work of the genre, as a lesson in forgetting. For the author herself, writing and 

transmitting knowledge of the past is supposed to help draw a terminal line between her 

American life and the Old World past. Thus writing is presented as both an attempt to 

forget and a tool to enable forgetting: “I can never forget, for I bear the scars. But I want 

to forget – sometimes I long to forget. I think I have thoroughly assimilated my past – I 

have done its bidding – I want now to be of to-day. It is painful to be consciously of two 

worlds” (2001: 6). 

While there are numerous parallels between Antin’s and Stavans’s embrace of 

America as the promised land of freedom, Stavans seems to be less pessimistic about his 

‘split identity’. Writing almost ninety years later, Stavans – as a ‘white’ middle-class 

Mexican American – offers a perspective on the United States and on American culture 

in which alternatives for ‘making yourself’ exist next to each other, and even within one 

person: the mixing of different cultures and languages, simultaneously living in 


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different worlds and holding on to ethnic traditions. These options, although part of 

‘split identities’ and often painful, are shown as opening up a new freedom and new 

opportunities. 8 

5. Conclusion: transnational autobiography 

Stavans’s memoirs seem to accept, even to embrace the in-betweenness, the undecided 

status, the continuous flow: “I am married and have two children, all American. 

Though I remain loyal to Spanish and to a lesser extent to Yiddish, I have switched to 

English. Which of these languages is truly my own? I no longer know” (2002: 32). 

His transcultural and transnational self, the simultaneity of home and homelessness 

in three languages, find different ways of expression in the narrative, through either 

descriptive modes, metaphoric language or the structure of sentences and paragraphs. 

The close attachment to the languages and cultures of his upbringing, Yiddish and 

Spanish, Jewish and Mexican culture, is particularly stressed in the sections dealing with 

his grandmother: “She has lost her hearing, so Abremele [Stavans’s uncle] must shout 

on the phone for her to understand – ‘What? I don’t understand’ – and he tries again, 

but she doesn’t register. ‘Zog es mir in Yiddish?’ – ‘Switch to Yiddish?’ – she suggests, 

for Yiddish is der mame-loshen, the language of stomach and soul. It is also the 

language of the dead” (2002: 49). 

Tellingly, it is his grandmother’s imagined direct speech in the narrative that puts 

Stavans’s three languages most effectively side by side: “‘Abremele, zug mir, main liebe 

kind: ¿Y qué con Ilán? Has he written back?’” (2002: 49). 9 The English in this direct 

speech, however, is Stavans’s addition, his translation of the grandmother’s spoken 

words. This translation seems most significant, as it symbolically expresses the ‘cultural 

work’ of the entire memoirs. He translates and transports the experience of his 

ancestors and of his own Mexican American ‘becoming’ into the discourses of 

American autobiography, the Chicano autobiography and the Jewish immigrant 

autobiography. The narrator writes about his grandmother’s Yiddish and Spanish, and 

he does so in English, just as he writes about his family’s Eastern European roots and 

their Mexican life in parameters set by the conventions of the American autobiography: 

Her Spanish is pidgin all right – broken, ungrammatical – but it is hers all the same: it has 

style, it has pathos, it has power. It is the tongue of an immigrant – embryonic, wobbly, in 

constant mutation. It came to her at age nineteen, when, alone, scared to death, she 

crossed the Atlantic and settled in Mexico. She appropriated the language so that I, thirty 

years later, could make it my own. ... for Bela is a natural polyglot: besides Yiddish, she 

was fluent in Polish and Russian, and with time she learned a broken English and a bit of 

Hebrew as well – six languages, including Spanish. She was born in 1909, in Nowe 

8 

These options come close to what sociologist Mary Waters (1990) terms the “ethnic 

options” of those who pass as ‘white’ in the USA. However, the persistence of life in different 

languages and cultures differentiates Stavans from most of those assimilated ‘white’ Americans of 

European descent whom Waters interviewed. 

9 

The transcribed Yiddish means: ‘Abremele, tell me, my dear child’; the Spanish: ‘And what 

about Ilan?’ [my translation]. 


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Brodno, now a suburb of Warsaw. When she emigrated to Mexico in 1929, she made a 

conscious decision never to use Polish and Russian again. (2002: 52) 

The narrator foregrounds the grandmother’s paradoxical identifications: similar to 

Mary Antin’s early twentieth-century positioning, she steadfastly abandons elements of 

her former Old World identity (Polish and Russian); at the same time, however, unlike 

Antin’s embracing of assimilation, Stavchansky refuses to fully enter the New World. 

From Stavans’s perspective, his grandmother – as well as the rest of his family and the 

entire Jewish community of Mexico – is less characterized by ‘being’ European than by 

a persistent denial of ‘becoming’ American (in the hemispheric sense): “At the heart of 

her rebirth across the Atlantic was a negation: Thou shall not be American. Whatever it 

was, I cannot avoid describing it as ain tzufal, un accidente: the enigma of arrival as an 

accident of fate” (2002: 71, emphasis in original). 

Stavans’s memoirs, however, seem to perform what his grandmother had to face 

all her life but refused to accept: ‘Amerika, America’ and the Mexican culture of 

mestizaje: “She disembarked from the Sparndam [the ship that took her over the 

Atlanic ocean] and was exposed, for the first time, to a different type of muzhik: the 

mestizo” (2002: 72). 

On Borrowed Words mixes different conventions of autobiographical writing and 

transforms them into a transnational format in which traditional national and cultural 

identifications and categories of narrative framing are shifted, questioned and 

transcended. The category of the transnational is explored and imagined in 

contemporary terms of identification beyond national borders, citizenship laws and 

literary customs. The transnational is also examined and envisioned in light of the 

history of immigration, which links the narrator’s voice back to the seventeenthcentury 

Sephardic migration to colonial North America, the nineteenth- and early 

twentieth-century Jewish immigration from Central and Eastern Europe to the US, and 

the Chicano/a history of more recent decades. In Stavans’s transnational 

autobiographical writing, the past, the present and the future are shown in terms of a 

complex mobility – either enforced or chosen of one’s own free will – that challenges 

self-contained national patterns of identification. 

Works Cited 

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Feminist P. 

––––– 1998: Always from Somewhere Else: A Memoir of My Chilean Jewish Father. New York: The 

Feminist P. 

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Hanover and London: UP of New England. 

––––– 2000: The Alphabet in My Hands: A Writing Life. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers UP. 

Antin, Mary 2001 (1912): The Promised Land. Ed. Jules Chametzky. New York: Modern Library. 

Anzaldúa, Gloria 1987: Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. 

Augenbraum, Harold and Ilan Stavans, eds. 1993: Growing Up Latino: Memoirs and Stories. 

Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. 


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Baym, Nina, ed. 2003: The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter 6th ed. New York 

and London: Norton. 

Behar, Ruth 1995: ‘Writing in My Father’s Name: A Diary of Translated Woman’s First Year’. Ruth 

Behar and Deborah A. Gordon, eds. Women Writing Culture. Berkeley: U of California P. 65-82. 

––––– 1996: The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon P. 

––––– 2003: ‘The Hebrew Cemetery of Guabanacoa’. Ilan Stavans, ed. The Scroll and the Cross: 

1000 Years of Jewish-Hispanic Literature. New York: Routledge. 298-300. 

Clifford, James 1997: Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge 

and London: Harvard UP. 

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Straus and Giroux. 

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The New P. 

Gilroy, Paul 1993: The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP. 

Hall, Stuart 1990: ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’. Jonathan Rutherford, ed. Identity, Community 

and Cultural Difference. London: Sage. 222-37. 

Kaplan, Amy and Donald E. Pease, eds. 1993: Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham and 

London: Duke UP. 

Levins Morales, Aurora 1998: Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity. 

Cambridge: South End P. 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 1988 (1854): ‘The Jewish Cemetery at Newport’. Lawrence Buell, 

ed. Selected Poems Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. New York: Penguin. 

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Jewry. Ed. Gary Phillip Zola. Hanover: Brandeis UP. 

Morales, Rosario and Aurora Levins Morales 1986: Getting Home Alive. Ithaca: Firebrand Books. 

Moraga, Cherríe 1983: Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios. Boston: South 

End P. 

Ortiz, Fernando 1995 (1947): Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Trans. Harriet de Onís. 

Durham and London: Duke UP. 

Pease, Donald E., ed. 1994: National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives. Durham and 

London: Duke UP. 

Roach, Joseph R. 1996: Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia UP. 

Rodriguez, Richard 1982: Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. New York: 

Bantam. 

Rowe, John Carlos 2000: Post-Nationalist American Studies. Berkeley: U of California P. 

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Saldívar, José David 1997: Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley: U of 

California P. 

Sachar, Howard M. 1992: A History of the Jews in America. New York: Vintage Books. 

Stavans, Ilan 1993: Growing Up Latino: Memoirs and Stories. New York: Houghton Mifflin. 

––––– 1995a: The Hispanic Condition: Reflections on Culture and Identity in America. New York: 

Harper Perennial. 

––––– 1995b: Bandido: Oscar “Zeta” Acosta and the Chicano Experience. New York: Harper 

Collins. 

––––– 1996: The One-Handed Pianist and Other Stories. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P. 

–––––, ed. 1998: The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories. New York and Oxford: Oxford P. 

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–––––, ed. 2003b: The Scroll and the Cross: 1000 Years of Jewish-Hispanic Literature. New York and 

London: Routledge. 

––––– 2006: The Disappearance. Evanston: Triquarterly Books. 

Waters, Mary C. 1990: Ethnic Options – Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: 

U of California P. 

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Received 15 September 2009 Revised version accepted 3 March 2010 

Markus Heide is assistant professor in the Department of English and America Studies at Humboldt 

University Berlin. He holds an M.A. in American Studies from J. W. Goethe University Frankfurt and a Ph.D. 

from Humboldt University Berlin. In 2007 he was a Fulbright Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard University 

and in 2008 and 2010 a postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University in Hamilton (Ontario). His areas of 

specialty include Latino and Latina Studies, Cultural Studies and Early American Literature. His publications 

in these fields include a monograph on Cultural Contact in Chicano/a Narrative (2004), a co-authored book 

on the History of Canadian Film (2006) and ‘From Zorro to Jennifer Lopez: US-Latino History and Film for 

the EFL-Classroom’ (2008). He is co-editor of Eating Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food (2003) and 

The Americas in the Nineteenth Century: Inter-American Perspectives on U.S. Literature, a special edition 

of American Studies/Amerikastudien 53.1 (2008). He is currently working on a book-length study of The 

National Imagination in Travel Writing of the Early Republic. 

Address: Humboldt University Berlin, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 

Berlin, Germany. Tel.: +49-30-2093-2318. Fax: +49-30-2093-2244. 


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The Inflection-Derivation Continuum and the Old 

English Suffixes -a, -e, -o, -u 

Elisa González Torres 


Elisa.gonzalez@unirioja.es 

This article addresses the question of the continuity between inflection and derivation as 

posed by the Old English suffixes -a, -e, -o and -u. On the structural side, the 

morphological analysis that has been carried out focuses on the overlapping of 

inflectional and derivational phenomena. On the functional side, affixation is analysed in 

the constituent projection and inflection in the operator projection of the Layered 

Structure of the Word (LSW), where the derivational affix constitutes a morphological 

pivot and the inflectional affix a morphological controller. The conclusion is reached 

that, whereas the LSW allows for a unified treatment of derivation and inflection in the 

synchronic axis, it requieres further attention in the area of inflection as a Word/Complex 

Word operator. In this line, this article demonstrates that the insertion of gender, 

number and case operators in the top layer stresses the morphological character of the 

LSW, while it is more consistent with the grammatical nature of gender in Old English. 

Keywords: functionalism; lexicology; Old English; affixation; derivation; inflection 

El continuo flexión-derivación y los sufijos 

del inglés antiguo -a, -e, -o, -u 

Este artículo trata de la continuidad entre flexión y derivación tal y como se presenta en los 

sufijos del inglés antiguo -a, -e, -o y -u. Desde el punto de vista estructural, el análisis 

morfológico llevado a cabo se centra en el solapamiento de los fenómenos flexivos y 

derivativos. Desde una perspectiva funcional, la afijación se analiza en la proyección de los 

constituyentes y la flexión en la proyección de los operadores de la estructura jerarquizada de 

la palabra (EJP), donde el afijo derivativo constituye un pivote morfológico y el afijo flexivo 

un controlador morfológico. La conclusión es que, aunque la estructura jerarquizada de la 

palabra permite un tratamiento unificado de la derivación y de la flexión en el eje sincrónico, 

ésta requiere una especial atención en el área de la flexión como operador de palabra/palabra 

compleja. En esta línea, este artículo demuestra que la inserción de operadores de género, 

número y caso en la capa superior enfatiza el carácter morfológico de la EJP y es más 

coherente con la naturaleza gramatical del género en inglés antiguo. 

Palabras clave: funcionalismo; lexicología; inglés antiguo; afijación; derivación; flexión

104 Elisa González Torres 

1. The limits of inflection and derivation in Old English 

This study focuses on the limits between the morphological phenomena of inflection 

and derivation or, more specifically, on the ways in which these processes overlap in 

Old English nouns which contain the suffixal morphemes -a, -e, -o and -u. 1 To isolate 

the object of study and describe it clearly, it is necessary, in the first place, to identify 

the area of derivation that is in contact with inflection in Old English and, secondly, to 

define the derivational phenomena under scrutiny in a principled way. In this line, the 

periphery of derivational morphology is undoubtedly zero-derivation, given that this 

morphological process involves derivation without explicit derivational morphemes. At 

the same time, zero-derivation constitutes the borderline of derivation with inflection 

because the zero-morpheme is not incompatible with the presence of an inflectional 

morpheme. For these reasons, zero-derivation has been a controversial question in the 

area of word-formation, as Beard and Volpe (2005: 190) remark. There are probably 

two reasons for this controversy: the existence of functions carried out by no explicit 

form (as, for instance, in cook noun from cook verb) and the apparent overlapping of 

zero-derivation and conversion in Present-Day English (as in the previous example, as 

well as in book noun vs. book verb, etc.). Bauer provides the following definition for 

conversion: “conversion is the presumed derivational process which takes place when a 

word which normally occurs in one word-class takes on the characteristics of a different 

word-class without any change of form” (2004: 36). Regarding zero-derivation, Bauer 

(2004: 115) refers the reader to conversion and illustrates the phenomenon of zeromorph 

or zero-morpheme by means of the genitive plural of a feminine noun in 

Russian, which, unlike any other form in the paradigm, has the form of a bare stem. 

Bauer goes on to say: 

Zero morphs ... are always controversial, and a proliferation of zeroes is usually a sign of a 

poor analysis. In any case, a distinction should be drawn between a zero morph and the 

lack of any morph because a particular category or property is unmarked [emphasis in 

the original]. (2004: 115) 

Since Bauer (2004) does not propose an overall solution for this problem I draw on 

Martín Arista (forthcoming d, e), who holds that zero derivation takes place when the 

derivative belongs in an inflectional paradigm. If this is not the case and the derivative 

is a member of an invariable class such as the adposition and the conjunction, the 

morphological process in point is conversion. As illustration, consider the following 

instances of conversion into adverb, adposition and conjunction in Old English, 

respectively: 2 a:bu:tan (adverb) > a:bu:tan (adposition) ‘on, about’, e:ast (adjective) > 

1 This research has been funded through the project FFI2008-04448/FILO. 

2 The evidence provided by this article has been gathered from the lexical database of Old 

English Nerthus (www.nerthusproject.com). For the theoretical and methodological aspects 

relevant for this lexical database, I refer the reader to Caballero González et al. (2004-2005), 

Torre Alonso et al. (2008) and Martín Arista (forthcoming a, b). 


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The Inflection-Derivation Continuum 105 

e:ast (adverb) ‘eastwards’ and for∂æ:m (adverb) > for∂æ:m (conjunction) ‘therefore’. 3 

When the derivative belongs in an inflectional paradigm, a further distinction must be 

established between the absence of any morpheme and the absence of any derivational 

morpheme while an inflectional morpheme is present. For example, fær, which is a bare 

stem, represents an instance of zero-derivation proper whereas bryce, with a final -e 

morpheme, is a case of overlapping of inflection and derivation, given that the 

morpheme performs an inflective and a derivational function simultaneously. Neither 

fær nor bryce contain any purely derivational morpheme: fær ‘calamity, sudden danger’ 

< faran ‘set forth; happen, exist, act’ and bryce ‘breach’ < brecan ‘break’. Leaving aside 

zero-derivatives proper such as fær and given nouns like de:ma ‘ ‘judge, ruler’ < de:man 

‘judge’ wk.1, wita ‘sage, philosopher’ < witan ‘know, understand’ str. 1 and stapa 

‘grasshopper’ < steppan ‘step’ str. 6, Pilch (1970) considers them derivational whereas 

Kastovsky (1968) regards the words displaying the same affixes as the product of 

inflection. Kastovsky (1968) gives two arguments for considering inflective a morpheme 

such as -a in de:ma ‘judge’. Firstly, nouns like sarga ‘trumpet, clarion’, nama ‘name’ or 

forca ‘fork’ show the inflective ending -a and they are clearly non-derived nouns; 

secondly, Kastovsky (1968) notices that, whereas derivative suffixes appear throughout 

the inflectional paradigm (like the suffix -ere in bæcere ‘baker’: nominative, accusative 

singular bæcere, nominative, accusative plural bæceras), the suffix -a does not. As I see 

it, however, -a clearly affects the meaning of the base as in ridda ‘rider’ from ri:dan 

‘ride’ or drinca ‘cup bearer’ from drinca ‘drink’, and the analysis of the words ending in 

-a allows one to consider it a generalised and recurrent phenomenon. I discuss the 

question in more detail in the remainder of this section. 

The ending -a has been treated as an inflective suffix marking the nominative 

singular of masculine nouns. However, along with words in which this ending is 

exclusively inflectional, such as those in (1a), there are others in which, along with the 

inflectional function, -a establishes a morphological relation with another word, the 

base of derivation. This can be seen in (1b): 

(1) 

a. adela ‘mud’ 

tosca ‘frog’ 

asce ‘ash’ 

b. andetta ‘one who confesses’ < andettan ‘confess’ 

fulwa ‘fuller’ < fulwian ‘baptize’ 

byrele ‘cup-bearer’ < byrelian ‘give to drink’ 

There are 298 nouns ending in -a in Old English. Of these, 170 are of the type 

represented by (1a), that is, nouns in which -a is an inflectional morpheme; the other 

128 are of the type represented by (1b), that is, they contain the inflectional as well as 

derivational morpheme -a. For each of these, there is at least one morphologically 

3 Long vowels are represented with a colon. The following abbreviations have been used 

throughout this article: Adj (Adjective), ARG (Argument), f. (feminine), LSW (Layered Structure 

of the Word), m. (masculine), masc. (masculine), mf. (masculine and feminine), N (Noun), n. 

(neuter), nom. (nominative), NUC (Nucleus), sing. (singular), str. (strong), V (Verb), wk. (weak). 


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related word. If these words are not analysed as derivatives, the fact is neglected that 

they are morphologically related to other more basic words, as is the case with the 

nouns in (1b), which hold a morphological relation with the verbs given. The analysis 

on inflectional grounds is based on the form of the paradigm of the Old English weak 

noun given in figure 1. Historically, the ending -a is a remnant of the old form -ena 

(Hogg 1992). In classical Old English, it corresponds to the nominative singular 

masculine of the weak declension of the noun: 

Singular Plural 

Nominative guma guman 

Accusative guman guman 

Genitive guman gumena 

Dative guman gumum 

Figure 1. Masculine paradigm of n-stems (based on Campbell 1987) 

Taking the opposite line, Martín Arista (2006b) has given three reasons why -a is a 

derivational suffix in Old English. Firstly, although -a can simply express gender 

contrast, as in (2a), it often expresses meaning contrast, such as between agent and 

patient, as in (2b): 

(2) 

a. myr∂ra (m) ‘homicide, murderer’ ~ myr∂re (f) ‘homicide, murderer’ 

ti:∂a (m) ‘sharer in, receiver’~ ti:∂e (f) ‘sharer in, receiver’ 

b. cuma (mf) ‘stranger’~ cyme (m) ‘coming’ 

ierfa (m) ‘heir’ ~ ierfe (n) ‘heritage’ 

gilda (m) ‘member of a brotherhood’ ~ gilde (n) ‘membership of guild’ 

secga (m) ‘sayer, informant’ ~ secge (f) ‘speech’ 

steora (m) ‘steersman’ ~ steore (f) ‘direction’ 

Secondly, a- causes meaning change between verbs and nouns like those in (3): 

(3) 

runan ‘whisper, murmur’ ~ runa ‘counsellor, confidant’ 

fulwian ‘baptize’ ~ fulwa ‘fuller’ 

dægian ‘dawn’ ~ dæge ‘(female) bread maker’ 

hyrdan ‘make hard’ ~ hierde ‘keeper’ 

And, thirdly, the presence of final -a brings about meaning contrasts with nouns 

containing agentive suffixes, as is shown by (4): 

(4) 

drinca ‘cup-bearer’ ~ drincere ‘drinker, drunkard’ 

witega ‘wise man, lawyer, prophet, soothsayer’ ~ witegestre ‘prophetess’ 

winna ‘enemy, adversary’ ~ winnend ‘fighter’ 

steora ‘steersman, pilot’ ~ steorend ‘corrector, director’ ~ steorere ‘steersman’ 


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The same analysis is applicable to -e, -o and -u: 

(5) 

hierdan ‘protect’ > hierde ‘keeper’ 

fullian ‘fill up ‘> fyllo ‘fillness’ 

giefan ‘give’ > giefu ‘gift’ 

To these arguments, one more can be added regarding the contrast between the 

presence and the absence of the morphemes under scrutiny. Beginning with ø/-a, 95 

instances have been found in which the presence of the suffix triggers meaning change, 

as in (6a). The case with ø/-e and ø/-u is similar: there are 25 instances of the former 

and 4 of the latter. Examples (6b) and (6c), respectively, illustrate the phenomena in 

question: 

(6) 

a. andsæc ‘denial, refusal’/andsaca ‘adversary’, forebod ‘prophecy, preaching’/foreboda 

‘messenger, crier’, selfdo:m ‘independence’/selfde:ma ‘monk living subject only to his 

own rules’, wordloc ‘art of logic’/wordloca ‘speech’, mu:∂ ‘mouth’/mu:∂a ‘mouth of a 

river, estuary’, lid ‘ship’/lida ‘sailor’ 

b. æ: 1 ‘law, ceremony’/æ:we 1 ‘married woman’; blæc 2 ‘ink’/blæcce ‘black matter’; cyning 

‘king’/cyninge ‘queen’; nett ‘net’/nette ‘the net-like caul’; smi∂ ‘smith’/smi∂∂e ‘smithy, 

forge’ 

c. framfær ‘departure’/framfru ‘excess’; getog ‘tuggin, contraction’/getogu ‘traces (of a 

horse)’; goldsmi∂ ‘goldsmith’/goldsmi∂u ‘goldsmith’s art’; weg ‘way’/wegu ‘vehicle’; 

wæ:gfær ‘sea-voyage’/ wæ:gfaru ‘track in the sea’ 

The evidence is not definitive, however. In the first place, no instance of a semantic 

contrast ø/-o has been found. Rather, the analysis encounters pairs like 

misbyrd/misbyrdo ‘abortion’ and wælfill/wælfyllo ‘fill of slaughter’. And, more 

importantly, along with the instances of meaning contrast, other pairs show up that do 

not display any meaning contrast in spite of the attachment of one affix of the series -a, 

-e, -u, such as sce:at/sce:ata ‘corner, angle’, gle:d/gle:de ‘glowing coal’ and trod/trodu 

‘track, trace’. At this point, two remarks are in order so as to assess the data here 

presented accurately. The first is that, although evidence supporting the contrastive 

nature of the morphemes under analysis have been furnished for -a, -e and -u, no 

instances of morphological contrast have been found of the type ø/-o (which might be 

the result of the low type frequency of -o with respect to -a, -e, and -u). The second 

remark concerns two well-attested changes that Old English is undergoing while the 

morphemes in question are still operational: the replacement of grammatical gender 

with a gender system in which considerations of animacy and sex play a more central 

role (Curzan 2003); and the decline of inflections (Allen 2005), which has a derivational 

counterpart consisting in a certain degree of interchangeability of the affixes (Horgan 

1980; Hiltunen 1983). 4 It has to be borne in mind, however, that such 

4 

See Martín Arista and Martín de la Rosa (2006) on the typological characteristics of Old 

English. 


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interchangeability is displayed more frequently by the Germanic prefixes no longer 

productive in English, such as a- and be-, than by the suffixes, many of which are still 

productive. 5 In this context, the morphemes discussed in this article disappeared along 

with the full inflection of nouns. This does not mean, however, that they did not 

express morphological contrast when they were in use. These morphemes established 

morphological relatedness between a more basic and a less basic lexical item. The 

evidence provided demonstrates that the morphological relation holding between the 

more basic and the less basic lexical item was not only inflectional, but also 

derivational. Indeed, a significant number of cases display the sort of meaning change 

between the more basis and the less basic item associated with derivational 

morphology. It remains true, on the other hand, that, whereas the derivational 

relationship is often present, the inflectional relationship is a constant. For these 

reasons, in the following sections I take the line that the endings -a, -e, -o and -u 

constitute inflectional means that serve the additional function of expressing 

derivation. Consequently, they turn out derivation by inflectional means and represent 

continuity between inflection and derivation in the Old English noun. 

2. Derivation by inflectional means in Old English 

To speak of continuity between inflection and derivation is tantamount to accepting 

the existence of derivation by inflectional means in the synchronic dimension, and 

inflection by derivational means on the diachronic axis, which, ultimately belongs in 

the Sapirean tradition, which holds that all grammars leak. Instead of an analysis based 

on discrete categories, such as those I have surveyed in the previous section, I opt for 

one that benefits from this concept of continuity, as in the functional and cognitive 

schools of linguistics, according to which there is continuity rather than discrete 

opposition between linguistic categories. In this respect, it is necessary to point out that 

until quite recently the continuity between the morphological phenomena of inflection 

and derivation has not been accepted. On the contrary, it is a central notion of 

structuralism – as represented, for instance, by Kastovsky (1968) and Marchand (1969) 

– that there is a strict separation between inflection and derivation. 6 This means that if 

a morpheme is inflectional, it cannot be derivational at the same time, and vice versa. 

Taking the opposite view, and despite the criteria for distinguishing inflection and 

derivation proposed by authors such as Stump (1998; Stump 2005), other authors, such 

as Bybee (1985), Shopen (1985) and Dressler (1989), among others, claim that there is 

continuity between inflection and derivation and, in a more radical stance, Beard (1995) 

and Beard and Volpe (2005) have put forward 44 universal grammatical functions that 

can be used for both for grammatical derivations (inflection) and lexical derivations 

(derivation). To put it in Shopen´s words: 

5 

See de la Cruz (1975) on the Old English pure prefixes. See also Martín Arista (2006a) on 

the prefixes a- and ge-. 

6 

Kastovsky (1992) admits the continuity between affixation and compounding by 

distinguishing the class of affixoids. See also Kastovsky (2005) on the Marchandean school. 


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It is now quite traditional to distinguish in grammatical description between inflectional and 

derivational [emphasis as in the original, EGT] morphology.... Though this distinction is 

quite an intuitive one, it is difficult to provide it with a firm definitional foundation. 

Derivation cannot be separated from inflection in terms of their formal realization, since 

none of the grammatical processes of prefixation, vowel change, etc. which appear in 

grammar are confined to one or the other domain. Similarly, the distinction cannot be 

made directly in terms of the grammatical categories involved, for a category which is 

inflectional in one language ... may be derivational in another (1985: 162). 

Recent studies on the continuity between inflection and derivation include, for 

example, Manova (2005), who discusses the traditional criteria for distinguishing 

inflection and derivation and draws the conclusion that in some languages some 

categories allow for two types of forms, derivational and inflectional, which reaffirms 

the notion of continuity between these morphological phenomena. Turning to Old 

English, the nominal -a, -e, -o and -u represent continuity between inflection and 

derivation in that they constitute inflectional means with the additional function of 

expressing derivation. In the remainder of this article a morphological description and 

an explanation for these morphemes is offered. Given that the inflectional component 

is always present, I focus on their derivational function. 

3. Morphological description 

To begin this section, I re-open the question of morphological relatedness by discussing 

whether affix contrast implies meaning change or not. Throughout the discussion that 

follows it must be borne in mind that it would be out of place to speak of continuity if 

all the instances of the phenomenon under scrutiny fell into either inflection or 

derivation. On the other hand, a rigorous morphological description cannot leave aside 

the relevant morphological process. In order to determine whether the terminal 

morphological process is inflective or derivational, each affix of the series -a, -e, -o, -u is 

compared with the other affixes that are attached to the same base, as well as to the 

absence of affix. Beginning with the contrast -a/-e, along with pairs such as 

a:cumba/a:cumbe ‘oakum’, in which the ending expresses gender inflection, instances of 

derivational contrast turn up such as æ:metta ‘leisure’/æ:mette ‘ant’, bita ‘bit’/bite ‘bite’, 

fe:∂a ‘foot-man’/fe:∂e ‘power of locomotion’, feorhgo:ma ‘jaw’/feorhgo:me ‘means of 

subsistence’, firenhicga ‘adulterer’/firenhicge ‘adulteress’, fyrdwi:sa ‘chieftain’/fyrdwi:se 

‘military style’, gedrinca ‘cup-bearer’/gedrince ‘drink’, gefædera ‘male sponsor’/gefædere 

‘female sponsor’, gema:na ‘community’/gemæ:ne 2 ‘fellowship’, geongra 

‘disciple’/geongre ‘female attendant’, gripa ‘handful’/gripe ‘grip’, hla:fordswica 

‘traitor’/hla:fordswice ‘high treason’, hu:sbonda ‘householder’/hu:sbonde ‘mistress of a 

house’, ierfa ‘heir’/ierfe ‘heritage’, landri:ca ‘landed proprietor’/landri:ce ‘territory’, 

ma:ga ‘son’/ma:ge ‘female relative’, ri:ca ‘influential man’/ri:ce 2 ‘rule’, secga ‘sayer’/secge 

‘speech’, selfæ:ta ‘cannibal’/selfæ:te ‘a plant’, spura ‘spur’/spure ‘heel’, sticca ‘stick’/sticce 1 

‘sticky matter’, tæppa ‘tap’/tæppe ‘strip of stuff or cloth’, wi∂ercwida 

‘contradicter’/wi∂ercwide ‘contradiction’, wicca 1 ‘wizard’/wicce ‘witch’, wlita 

‘countenance’/wlite ‘brightness’, woruldri:ca ‘great man’/woruldri:ce 1 ‘earthly kingdom’, 

wuduwa ‘widower’/wuduwe ‘widow’ and wurma ‘purple-fish’/wurme ‘a plant used for 


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dyeing’. The same is applicable to the morphological contrast -a/-u, which is of gender 

only in pairs such as banco∂a/banco∂u ‘baneful disease’ but fully derivative in ælmesgifa 

‘giver of alms’/ælmesgifu ‘alms’, be:aggifa ‘ring-giver’/be:aggifu ‘ring-giving’, e:adgiefa 

‘giver of prosperity’/e:adgiefu ‘gift of prosperity’, feorhgiefa ‘giver of life’/feorhgiefu ‘gift 

of life’, fre:otgifa ‘liberator’/fre:otgifu ‘emancipator’, (ge)re:∂ra ‘rower’/(ge)re:∂ru ‘oars’, 

(ge)saca ‘opponent’/(ge)sacu ‘conflict’, giefa ‘donor’/giefu ‘gift’, lata ‘slow person’/latu 

‘delay’, ma:∂∂umgyfa ‘giver of treasure’/ma:∂∂umgifu ‘gift of treasure’, ma:nswara 

‘perjurer’/ma:nswaru ‘perjury’, ny:dnima ‘one who takes by force’/ny:dnimu ‘rapine’, 

scea∂a ‘injurious person’/scea∂u ‘injury’, sicngiefa ‘giver of treasure’/sincgifu ‘gift of 

treasure’ and u:tlaga ‘outlaw’/u:tlagu ‘outlawry’. The contrast -a/-o, on the other hand, 

is mainly inflectional: maga 1/mago ‘son’, scipteara/sciptearo ‘ship-tar’ and 

wuldormaga/wuldormago ‘heir of heaven’ present inflectional contrast, whereas gehlytta 

‘partner’/gehlytto ‘fellowship’ only shows derivational contrast. The contrast -e/-o is 

rare. As a matter of fact, it is restricted to two pairs, one related by inflection 

(biblio∂e:ce/biblio∂eoco ‘library’) and the other by derivation (blæ:ce ‘leprosy’/blæ:co 

‘pallor’). The contrast -e/-u, although infrequent, is inflectional only, holding in the 

following pairs: ∂e:ostre 1/∂e:ostru ‘darkness’, getimbre/getimbru ‘building’, hæ:te/hæ:tu 

‘heat’, heofonware/heofonwaru ‘inhabitants of heaven’, nihtwacu/nihtwæcce ‘nightwatch’, 

ungeti:me/ungeti:mu ‘evil time’, ∂rece/∂racu ‘force’. 

Once the question of morphological relatedness has been set, I describe each suffix 

morphologically by considering the properties of bases and the properties of affixes 

(Giegerich 1999; Hay 2002, 2003; Hay and Plag 2004) as well as morphological 

recursivity. 

Derivation by means of the suffix -a is gradual, except in gefædera ‘male sponsor’ 

(fæder ‘father’) and (ge)truma ‘legion’ (trum ‘firm’), which constitute instances of 

parasynthesis. -A derivatives have mainly verbal bases, but they can also have nominal 

or adjectival bases, which is illustrated, respectively by (7a), (7b) and (7c): 

(7) 

a. geedcucoda ‘man restored to life’ ([ge]edcwician ‘revive’), u:∂wita ‘scholar’ (u:∂witian 

‘study philosophy’) 

b. gefædera ‘male sponsor’ (fæder ‘father’), beswica ‘deceiver’ (beswic ‘deceit’) 

c. a:dliga ‘sick person’ (a:dlig ‘sick’), cræftiga ‘craftsman’ (cræftig ‘skilful’) 

More than one base is available for derivation in a significant number of instances 

(49 out of a total figure of 124 different bases). The combinations of more than one 

available base of derivation include N/V, Adj/N, Adj/V, N/V/V, N/N/V, Adj/N/V, 

Adj/N/V/V and Adj/N/N/V/V. Instances in point are the following: 

(8) 

a. ge∂eahta ‘adviser’ < ge∂eaht ‘counsel’ (N)/(ge)∂eahtian ‘ponder’ (V) 

b. hre:ofla ‘leprosy’ < hre:ofl 2 ‘leprous’ (Adj)/hre:ofl 1 ‘leprosy’ (N) 

c. cu:∂a ‘relative’


f. onwealda ‘ruler’ < onweald 2 ‘mighty’ (Adj)/onweald 1 ‘authority’ (N)/geonwealdian 

‘have power over’ (V) 

g. ∂earfa 1 ‘poor man’ < ∂earf 2 ‘needful’ (Adj)/∂earf 1 ‘need’ (N)/ge∂earfian ‘impose 

necessity’ (V)/ge∂earfan ‘be in want’ (V) 

h. swica ‘deceiver’ < swice 2 ‘deceitful’ (Adj)/swice 1 ‘offence’ (N)/swic ‘deceit’ (N)/swician 

‘deceive’ (V)/ (ge)swi:can ‘deceive’ (V) 

The bases of -a derivatives do not undergo mutation, with the exception of 

(ge)camp 1 ‘combat’ (cempa ‘warrior’), (ge)sce:otan ‘shoot’ (scytta ‘shooter’) and su:l 

‘plough’ (sy:la ‘ploughman’). There are nine inflected bases only, the inflectional 

categories involved being the preterit singular, the past participle and the superlative: 

(ge)beran ‘bear’ ~ boren (bora ‘ruler’), eald ‘old’ ~ ieldest (ieldesta ‘chief’), edcwician 

‘revive’~ edcucode (edcucoda ‘man restored to life’), ne:ah 1 ‘near’~ ni:ehst (ni:ehsta 

‘closest friend’), sce:otan ‘shoot’ ~ scuton (scytta ‘shooter’), (ge)sellan ‘sell’ ~ salde (sala 

‘sale’), sle:an ‘strike’ ~ slagen (slaga ‘slayer’) and wi:gan ‘fight’ ~ wigen (wiga ‘fighter’). 

Regarding the derivational status of bases, -a derivatives come from basic words as a 

general rule, although 21 instances have been found of affixal bases and 10 of 

compound bases, given, respectively in (9a) and (9b): 

(9) 

a. a:dlig ‘sick’, a:gi:tan ‘waste’, andsacian ‘dispute’, belæ:wan ‘betray’, cræftig ‘skilful’, 

forræ:dan ‘plot against’, forwyrht ‘misdeed’, (ge)andettan ‘confess’, (ge)edcwician 

‘revive’, (ge)fulwian ‘baptize’, (ge)ha:lgian ‘hallow’, (ge)wi:tegian ‘prophesy’, gifol 

‘liberal’, inwit 2 ‘wicked’, myr∂rian ‘murder’, oferhogian ‘despise’, ræ:swan ‘think’, 

uncu:∂ ‘unknown’, unhold ‘disloyal’, u:∂witian ‘study philosophy’, wi∂ersacian 

‘renounce’ 

b. a:g ‘trouble’ (a:glæ:c ‘trouble’), a:n 1 ‘alone’ (a:nsetl ‘hermitage’, a:nwald ‘monarchy’), 

full 1 ‘full’ (fultum ‘help’), (ge)ha:l ‘whole’ (ha:lwende ‘healthy’), hand 1 ‘hand’ 

(handdæ:d ‘handiwork’), le:as 2 ‘lie’ (le:asbre:d 2 ‘cheating’), ni:ed 1 (ny:dniman), wæl 1 

‘slaughter’ (wælsliht ‘slaughter’), yfel 1 ‘bad’(yfeldæ:d ‘evil-doing’) 

-A derivatives feed derivational processes of affixation and, above all, compounding. 

Thus, these suffixal forms enter further affixal derivations to turn out/produce? the 

recursive derivatives a:ga ‘proprietor’ (una:ga ‘one who owns something’), cempa 

‘warrior’ (incempa ‘soldier of the same company’), ste:ora ‘steersman’ (foreste:ora ‘lookout 

man’), (ge)wita ‘sage’ (unwita ‘witless person’). For the derivatives that constitute 

input to compounding, see the Appendix. 

The derivation by means of the suffix -e is gradual, except in gedyre ‘door-post’ (dor 

‘door’), gefilde ‘field’ (feld ‘plain’), gefylce ‘band of men’ (folc ‘folk’), gegilde ‘membership 

of a guild’ (gield ‘service’), geme:de 1 ‘consent’ (me:d 1 ‘reward’), gemy:∂e ‘confluence’ 

(mu:∂ ‘mouth’), gety:ne ‘entrance’ (tu:n ‘enclosure’), ge∂e:ode ‘speech’ (∂e:od 1 ‘people’), 

ge∂inge ‘meeting’ (∂ing ‘thing’), gewe:de ‘fury’ (wo:d ‘raging’), gewidere ‘weather’ (weder 

1 ‘weather’), gewyrce ‘work’ (weorc ‘work’) and gewyrde 1 ‘speech’ (word 1 ‘word’), No 

instances of multiple bases have been found. -E derivatives are mainly deverbal, but 

they can also have nominal or adjectival bases, as can be seen, respectively in (10a), 

(10b) and (10c): 


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(10) 

a. ece ‘pain’ (acan ‘ache’), bite ‘bite’([ge]bi:tan ‘bite’) 

b. fi∂ere ‘wing’ (fe∂er1 ‘feather’), li∂ere ‘sling’ (le∂er ‘leather’) 

c. hæ:te ‘heat’ (ha:t 1 ‘hot’), ∂e:ostre 1 ‘darkness’ (∂e:ostor ‘dark’) 

The bases of -e derivatives undergo mutation in 63 out of 151 cases, as in dræge 

‘drag-nett’ ([ge]dragan ‘drag’) and gety:ne ‘entrance’ (tu:n ‘enclosure’). One half of the 

derivatives (75 out of 151) show inflected bases, the inflectional categories involved 

being the imperative (seohhe ‘sieve’ < se:on 1 ‘strain’), preterite singular (bearce ‘barking’ 

< beorcan ‘bark’), preterite plural (byge ‘curve’ < (ge)bu:gan 1 ‘bow’), the past participle 

(cwide ‘speech’ < (ge)cwe∂an ‘say’) and the superlative (ielde men’ < eald ‘old’). As for 

the derivational status of bases, -e derivatives usually have derived bases, that is, affixal 

bases since no compound bases have appeared. Exceptions to this general tendency 

include the following underived bases (the token number follows between brackets if it 

is higher than 1): 

(11) 

acan ‘ache’, æ:men ‘desolate’, a:gan ‘own’, bannan ‘summon’, beorcan ‘bark’, biernan (2) 

‘burn’, blæc 1 ‘black’, bli:can ‘glitter’, bru:can ‘break’, calan ‘grow cool’, eald ‘old’, fe∂er 1 

‘feather’, flo:wan ‘flow’, fricgan ‘ask’, gangan (2) ‘go’, grafan ‘dig’, gre:osan ‘frighten’, habban 

(2) ‘have’, hæ:r ‘hair’, ha:t 1 ‘hot’, ho:f ‘hoof’, le:osan ‘lose’, lesan ‘collect’, le∂er ‘leather’, lufu 

‘love’, sci:tan ‘shoot’, scu:fan ‘shove’, screpan ‘scrape’, scri:∂an ‘go’ (2), se:on 1 ‘strain’ (2), 

si:can ‘sigh’, sle:an ‘strike’, sli:dan ‘slide’, smi:tan ‘daub’, smi∂ ‘handicraftsman’, spi:wan 

‘spit’, stri:dan ‘stride’ (2), swingan ‘swing’, (ge)te:on 1 ‘pull’, ∂e:ostor ‘dark’, ∂e:otan ‘roar’, 

∂orn ‘thorn’ 

-E derivatives feed derivational processes of both affixation and compounding. In 

quantitative terms, these suffixal forms enter further affixal derivations (129 instances) 

as well as compounding processes (278 instances). See the Appendix for details. 

Derivation by means of the suffix -o is gradual, since no instances of parasynthesis 

have been identified. -O derivatives have mainly adjectival bases, such as bieldo 

‘boldness’ (beald ‘bold’), ieldo ‘age’ (eald ‘old’), gehlytto ‘fellowship’ (gehlot ‘selection by 

lot’) being the only denominal instance and mago ‘son’ (magan ‘be able’) the only 

deverbal one. Gehlot ‘selection by lot’ (gehlytto ‘fellowship’), gesund ‘safe’ ([ge]synto 

‘health’), ge∂ungen 1 ‘thriven’ ([ge]∂yngo ‘progress’), unbeald ‘timid’ (unbieldo 

‘timidity’) are the derivatives which present mutated bases. Gre:at ‘great’ ~ gry:ttra 

(gry:to ‘gratness’) constitutes the only instance in which the base is inflected, the 

category involved being the superlative. Considering the derivational status of bases, the 

figure of underived bases is similar to that of affixed bases: 9 and 8 bases respectively. 

Only one instance of compound base has appeared, namely wæstmbæ:ro ‘fruitfulness’, 

from the compound adjective wæstmbæ:re ‘fruitful’. Focusing on recursivity, -o 

derivatives partake in the feeding of both compounding and affixational processes, as is 

shown by (12a) and (12b) respectively: 


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(12) 

a. fyllo ‘fullness’ (wælfyllo ‘fill of slaughter’, wistfyllo ‘fill of food’), hyldo ‘favour’ 

(hla:fordhyldo ‘loyalty’), ieldo ‘age’ (langieldo ‘advanced age’), mago ‘son’ (mago∂egn 

‘warrior’, wuldormago ‘heir of heaven’) 

b. bieldo ‘boldness’ (unbieldo ‘timidity’), gehlytto ‘fellowship’ (to:gehlytto ‘fellowship’, 

mi∂gehlytto ‘fellowship’), hyldo ‘favour’ (unhyldo ‘disfavour’) 

Turning to -u, the derivation by means of this suffix is mainly gradual. Exceptions 

to this tendency include gebæcu ‘back parts’ (bæc 1 ‘back’), gebro:∂ru ‘brethen’ 

([ge]bro:∂or ‘brother’), gedæftu ‘gentleness’ (dæfte ‘gentle’), (ge)re:∂ru ‘oars’ (ro:∂er 1 

‘rower’), geswe:oru ‘hills’ (swe:or 1 ‘pillar’) and gewæ:pnu ‘arms’ (wæ:pen ‘weapon’), all 

of which count as instances of parasynthesis. Derivatives in -u are mainly deverbal (27 

derivatives) and deadjectival bases (31 derivatives), while 7 nominal bases have been 

identified. Examples of deverbal, deadjectival and nominal derivatives are given in 

(13a), (13b) and (13c), respectively: 

(13) 

a. giefu ‘gift’ (giefan ‘give’), scea∂u ‘injury’ (scea∂an ‘injure’) 

b. bierhtu ‘brightness’ (beorht ‘bright’), strengu ‘strength’ (strang ‘strong’) 

c. gebro:∂ru ‘brethen’ ([ge]bro:∂or ‘brother’), gewæ:pnu ‘arms’ (wæ:pen ‘weapon’) 

As regards the form of bases, 16 bases of -u derivatives have undergone mutation, 

including bierhtu ‘brightness’ (beorht 1 ‘bright’), bræ:du ‘width (bra:d 1 ‘wide’), cwalu 

‘killing’ ([ge]cwelan ‘kill’), daru ‘injury’ (durran ‘dare’), gebygu ‘a bend’ ([ge]bu:gan 1 

‘bow’), hæ:tu ‘heat’ (ha:t 1 ‘hot’), lengu ‘length’ (lang 1 ‘long’), latu ‘delay’ (læt 1 ‘late’), 

menigu ‘company’ (manig ‘many’), myr∂u ‘mischief’ (mor∂or ‘murder’), næcedu 

‘nakedness’ (genacod 1 ‘naked’), (ge)re:∂ru ‘oars’ (ro:∂er 1 ‘rower’), (ge)snyttru ‘wisom’ 

(snotor ‘clever’), (ge)stalu ‘stealing’ ([ge]stelan ‘steal’), strengu ‘strength’ (strang ‘strong’) 

and taru ‘tear’ (teran ‘tear’). Besides, 16 bases have been inflected during the 

derivational process: a:smu:gan ‘investigate’ ~ a:smogen (æ:smogu ‘slough’), biddan ‘ask’ 

~ beden (bedu ‘asking’), (ge)bu:gan 1 ‘bow’ ~ bugon (gebygu ‘a bend’), cle:ofan ‘cleave’ ~ 

clufon (clufu ‘clove’), (ge)ce:owan ‘chew’ ~ cuwon (cwudu ‘cud’), cwelan ‘kill’ ~ cwæl 

(cwalu ‘killing’), durran ‘dare’ ~ dorren (daru ‘injury’), forgiefan ‘forgive’ ~ forgifen 

(forgifu ‘gratia’), ne:otan ‘use’ ~ noten (notu ‘enjoyment’), re:odan ‘redden’ ~ rudon 

(rudu ‘red colour’), (ge)scieran ‘cleave’ ~ scoren (scoru ‘a score’), (ge)stelan ‘steal’ ~ stæl 

(stalu ‘stealing’), (ge)swi:can ‘wander’ ~ swicen (geswicu ‘cessation’), teran ‘tear’ ~ tær 

(taru ‘tear’), (ge)te:on 1 ‘pull’ ~ togen (getogu ‘traces’) and wrecan ‘drive’ ~ wræc (wracu 

‘revenge’). The inflectional categories involved are the present singular, the past 

participe, the preterite singular and the preterite plural. With regard to the nature of 

bases, -u derivatives come from basic as well as affixal nouns, although ny:dnimu 

‘rapine’ and goldsmi∂u ‘goldsmith’s art’ are instances of compound bases. The 

inventory of underived bases and affixal bases is displayed in (14a) and (14b), 

respectively: 


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(14) 

a. æ∂ele ‘noble’ , bæc 1 ‘back’, beorht 1 ‘bright’, biddan ‘ask’, bra:d 1 ‘wide’, cle:ofan ‘cleave’, 

gedæfte ‘mild’, de:af ‘deaf’, durran ‘dare’, enge 1 ‘narrow’, freme 1 ‘vigorous’, giefan 

‘give’, hæ:l 3 ‘whole’, ha:t 1 ‘hot’, læt 1 ‘late’, lang 1 ‘long’, manig ‘many’, micel 1 ‘grat’, 

mor∂or ‘murder’, ne:otan ‘use’, re:odan ‘redden’, ro:∂er 1 ‘rower’, sacan (2) ‘struggle’, 

scea∂an ‘injure’, snytre ‘clever’, strang ‘strong’, swe:or 1 ‘pillar’, swift ‘swift’, ∂e:ostor 

‘dark’, wæ:pen ‘weapon’, wi:d ‘wide’, wrecan ‘drive’ 

b. a:smu:gan ‘investigate’, bisig ‘busy’, forgiefan ‘forgive’, forlæ:tan ‘let go’, (ge)bro:∂or 

‘brother’, (ge)bu:gan 1 ‘bow’, (ge)ce:owan ‘chew’, (ge)cwelan ‘kill’, (ge)faran ‘go’, 

(ge)læ:tan ‘allow to remain’, (ge)lynde ‘fat’, genacod 1 ‘naked’, (ge)scieran ‘cleave’, 

(ge)stelan ‘steal’, (ge)swi:can ‘wander’, (ge)teran ‘tear’, (ge)te:on 1 ‘pull’, (ge)timber 

‘timber’, (ge)tredan ‘tread’, (ge)wegan ‘carry’, mennisc 1 ‘human’, ondrysne ‘terrible’, 

sincald ‘perpetually cold’, ungerisene 1 ‘improper’, unlæ:d ‘poor’, unrihtwi:s ‘wrong’, 

un∂æslic ‘inappropriate’, unwemme ‘unblemished’, ymbfaran ‘surround’ 

As far as recursivity is concerned, -u derivatives feed mainly compounding 

processes, although (ge)snyttru ‘wisdom’ (unsnyttru ‘folly’) and hæ:lu ‘health’ (unhæ:lu 

‘sickness’) constitute instances of the input of -u derivatives to further affixation 

processes. The full list of -u derivatives that take part in compounding can be seen in 

the Appendix. 

4. Explanation 

After the morphological description, in this section I offer an explanation for the 

inflection-derivation continuum as reflected by the Old English suffixes -a, -e, -o, -u, in 

terms of the Layered Structure of the Word (Martín Arista 2008, 2009, forthcoming c, 

d). The Layered Structure of the Word (hereafter LSW) is a model of word syntax and, 

as such, distinguishes categories and functions at word level and gives pride of place to 

the projection and percolation of morphological features. The key notion of this 

morphological model is the syntactic analysis of the clausal correlate, for which the 

clausal architecture of Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997; Van 

Valin 2005) is used. As in this structural-functional theory of language, the projection 

of linguistic units contains arguments (including argument-adjuncts) and operators. 

The semantic domains of the LSW are arranged in a layered structure in such a way 

that outer layers include the inner ones. Each layer has its own operators and scope over 

outer layers implies scope over the inner layers. Bottom-up, the layers of the Simplex 

Word are the Nucleus, the Core and the Word. The Complex Word displays an 

additional outmost layer. In structural terms, the node Word directly dominates the 

node Core and the node Core, in turn, directly dominates the node Nucleus. In 

functional terms, syntactically motivated derivation is represented in the constituent 

projection by means of the insertion of lexical arguments that perform the functions of 

Argument, Argument-Adjunct and Periphery. Derivation without syntactic correlate 

and inflection are represented in the operator projection by means of, respectively, 

lexical and grammatical operators. 


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The lexical arguments in figure 2 follow from the analysis of the clausal correlate 

someone finds brass, in such a way that the First Argument is assigned to the role 

Effector and the Second Argument to the role Goal. The First Argument selects the 

Figure 2. a:rge:otere ‘brass-founder’ in the LSW 


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suffixal predicate er- while the Second Argument is realized by the full predicate a:r. In 

the operator projection an important difference has been introduced with respect to the 

analysis carried out by Martín Arista (2008). Inflection is a Word/Complex Word 

operator, for two reasons: first, the insertion of gender, number and case operators in 

the top layer reinforce the morphological dimension of the proposal, whereas the 

insertion of these operators in the lower layers does not draw a clear distinction with 

the representation of the Noun Phrase; and, second, because grammatical gender is an 

inflectional phenomenon rather than a semantic property of the Old English word, 

which is consistent with the insertion of the gender operator at Word/Complex Word 

level and, moreover, in the same layer as case and number operators. Notice that the 

construction is exocentric: the morphological feature of category percolates from the 

Argument to the Nucleus. In figure 3, the analysis is motivated by the clausal correlate 

someone delivers a message, which displays an Effector First Argument realized by the 

suffixal predicate -a and a Goal Second Argument realized by the full predicate æ:rend. 

The most significant question posed by figure 3 is the double role performed by the 

suffix -a: it functions as a lexical argument in the argument projection and as a 

grammatical operator in the operator projection. In the former role, -a satisfies the 

syntactic requirement of inserting an argument into the First Argument slot of a 

transitive verb; in the latter role, -a fulfils the morphological requisite of providing the 

predicate with the paradigmatic form required by the morphological context, which 

requires nominative case and singular number. As the element around which the 

complexity of the construction revolves, -a is a morphological pivot. As the element 

responsible for guaranteeing the correference of the predicate, -a is a morphological 

controller. 

5. Concluding remarks 

In the preceding sections I have addressed the question of the continuity between 

inflection and derivation as presented by the Old Enlish suffixes -a, -e, -o, -u. Although 

the existence of continuity between the morphological processes of inflective and 

derivational nature is not a new topic of discussion, the analysis I have carried out parts 

company with previous approaches in considering the structural as well as the 

functional dimensions of the problem. I have not restricted the analysis to 

acknowledging the overlapping of inflectional and derivational phenomena. Rather, I 

have distinguished the syntactic from the morphological sides by analysing derivation 

in the constituent projection and inflection in the operator projection. Moreover, I 

have drawn a distinction between the syntactic function carried out by the lexical 

argument and the morphological function served by the lexical operator. I have also 

analysed the derivational affix as a morphological pivot and the inflectional affix as a 

morphological controller. For this analysis I have benefited from the LSW, which has 

shown other advantages. The LSW allows for a unified treatment of derivation and 

inflection in the synchronic axis, as well as a unified treatment of synchronic and 

diachronic aspects. Indeed, the double projection of the LSW combines derivational 


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Figure 3. æ:rendraca ‘messenger’ in the LSW 

and inflectional derivation, while the monostratal representation that displays all the 

relevant elements and features in a single step avoids the need for empty elements, such 

as the historical formative -en- which is no longer present in the suffix -a. On the other 


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hand, I have pointed out that there is an area in which the LSW requires further 

attention, namely inflection as a Word/Complex Word operator. It has been shown 

that the insertion of gender, number and case operators in the top layer stresses the 

morphological character of the LSW, while it is more consistent with the grammatical 

nature of gender in Old English. 

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Martin Arista, Javier 2006a: ‘Alternations, Relatedness and Motivation: Old English A-’. Pilar 

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Appendix 

-a (all derivatives, 128): a:dliga, æ:swica, a:ga, a:gi:ta, a:glæ:ca, anda, andetta, andfenga, andsaca, 

a:nsetla, a:nwalda, begenga, belæ:wa, be:na, beswica, bi:genga, boda, bo:nda, bora, brytta, bylda, 

cempa, ci:epa, cræftiga, cri:stena, cuma, cu:∂a, cy:pa 2, de:ma, ealda, egesa, fædera 1, fe:∂a, 

fle:ogenda, fli:ema, foreboda, forræ:da, forwyrhta, freca, fri∂a, fruma, fulwa, gedrinca, gæ:lsa, 

geedcucoda, gefædera, geflota, gefultuma, gefylsta, (ge)gilda, gehata, gelenda, (ge)mæcca, 

(ge)ni:ehsta, geonga, (ge)saca, (ge)spreca, gete:ama, (ge)truma, getwisa, ge∂afa 1, ge∂eahta, ge∂e:owa, 


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(ge)winna, (ge)wita, giefa, gielpna, gifola, hæ:∂ena, ha:lga, ha:lwenda, handdæ:da, hre:ofla, hunta, 

hy:ra, ieldesta, ierfa, inwidda, læ:wa, lata, le:asbre:da, lida, melda, myr∂ra, ni:ehsta, ny:dnima, 

oferhoga, onspeca, onwealda, o:retta, pæ:ca, ræ:swa 1, ri:ca, ridda, sala, se:ma, scea∂a, scytta, secga, 

slaga, ste:ora, stri:na, swica, sy:la, sylla, tilia, ti:∂a, ∂earfa 1, ∂rymma, uncu:∂a, ungeli:ca, unholda, 

u:∂wita, wæ:dla 2, wælslihta, webba, we:sa, wiga, wi:sa, wi:tega, wi∂ercora, wi∂ersaca, wi∂erwearda, 

wi∂erwinna, wlæ:tta, wo:da, wræcca, yfeldæ:da 

-a in recursive word-formation (246), source and target category noun 

Affixation (4): a:ga (una:ga), cempa (incempa), ste:ora (foreste:ora), (ge)wita (unwita) 

Compounding (236): begenga (eardbegenga, landbegenga), be:na (færbe:na, fri∂be:na, 

fulwihtbe:na), bi:genga 1 (eor∂bi:genga, feohbi:genga, ro:dbi:genga), boda (æ:boda, bry:dboda, 

gebyrdboda, e:∂elboda, he:ahboda, ny:dboda, si:∂boda, spellboda, wilboda), bora (cæ:gbora, 

candelbora, ce:acbora, feorhbora, hornbora, le:ohtbora, mundbora, ræ:dbora, ræ:sbora, ro:dbora, 

segnbora, so:∂bora, stræ:lbora, sweordbora, ta:cnbora, wæ:gbora, wæ:penbora, wi:gbora, witumbora, 

wo:∂bora, wro:htbora), brytta (berebrytta, fo:dderbrytta, hla:fbrytta, sincbrytta, wi:nbrytta), cempa 

(efencempa, fe:∂ecempa, ræ:decempa, sigecempa, woruldcempa), cræftiga (dry:cræftiga, 

galdorcræftiga, he:ahcræftiga, ri:mcræƒtiga, scinncræƒtiga, sta:ncræƒtiga, tungolcræƒtiga, 

woruldcræftiga), cuma (cwealmcuma, wilcuma 1), cy:pa 2 (mynetcy:pa), de:ma (ealdorde:ma, 

he:ahde:ma, heofonde:ma, selfde:ma, sigede:ma, unrihtde:ma, woruldde:ma, yfelde:ma), egesa 

(blo:degesa, gle:degesa, hildegesa, li:gegesa, mæ:g∂egesa, nihtegesa), fe:∂a (gumfe:∂a, herefe:∂a), freca 

(gu:∂freca, hildefreca, scildfreca, sweordfreca, wi:gfreca), fruma (dæ:dfruma, e:adfruma, hildfruma, 

landfruma, le:odfruma, le:ohtfruma, li:ffruma, ordfruma, ti:rfruma, ∂e:odfruma, wi:gfruma, 

woruldfruma), gæ:lsa (hygegæ:lsa), giefa (æ:tgiefa, e:adgiefa, feorhgiefa, goldgiefa, sincgiefa, wilgiefa), 

(ge)gilda (fri∂gegilda, hæ:∂engilda, hy:regilda, me:dgilda), ha:lga (sundorha:lga), handdæ:da 

(rihthanddæ:da), gehata (cirichata, dæ:dhata, le:odhata, mannhata, mynsterhata, scyldhata), hunta 

(he:ahde:orhunta, hwælhunta), lata (dæ:dlata, hildlata), gelenda (inlenda, u:tlenda), lida (sæ:lida, 

sumorlida 1, sumorlida 2, y:∂lida), melda (stermelda), myr∂ra (bearnmyr∂ra, mæ:gmyr∂ra, 

mæ:g∂myr∂ra, mannmyr∂ra, selfmyr∂ra), ræ:swa 1 (hereræ:swa, magoræ:swa), ri:ca (fi∂erri:ca, 

landri:ca, ∂u:sendri:ca, woruldri:ca), (ge)saca (andsaca, wi∂ersaca), scea∂a (a:torscea∂a, dolscea∂a, 

fæ:rscea∂a, fe:ondscea∂a, folcscea∂a, fyrnscea∂a, gieldpscea∂a, gu:∂scea∂a, he:ahscea∂a, hellscea∂a, 

le:odscea∂a, lyftscea∂a, ma:nscea∂a, mo:rscea∂a, ni:∂scea∂a, sæ:scea∂a, synscea∂a, ∂e:odscea∂a, 

∂e:ofscea∂a, u:htscea∂a, wamscea∂a), slaga (a:genslaga, bro:∂orslaga, fæderslaga, mæ:gslaga, 

manslaga, mo:dorslaga, mor∂orslaga), (ge)spreca (edwi:tspreca, forespreca, midspreca, oferspreca), 

ste:ora (scipste:ora), swica (fæderswica, hla:fordswica, ma:nswica), tilia (eor∂tilia), (ge)truma 

(folctruma, fyrdtruma, scildtruma), ∂earfa 1 (ofer∂earfa, woruld∂earfa), wæ:dla 2 (ni:edwæ:dla), 

webba (fri∂owebba), wiga (æscwiga, beornwiga, byrnwiga, folcwiga, ga:rwiga, gu:∂wiga, lindwiga, 

ræ:dewiga, randwiga, ri:dwiga, scildwiga, ∂e:odwiga, wæ:penwiga), (ge)winna (ealdgewinna, 

ealdorgewinna, la:∂gewinna, mo:dgewinna), wi:sa (brimwi:sa, campwi:sa, crætwi:sa, fyrdwi:sa, 

he:afodwi:sa, herewi:sa, hildewi:sa, mægenwi:sa, scridwi:sa, wordwi:sa), (ge)wita (æ:wita, burhwita, 

ealdwita, folcwita, fyrnwita, gearowita, he:ahwita, lahwita, la:rwita, le:asgewita, le:odwita, ræ:dwita, 

ru:nwita, sci:rwita, sti:wita, ∂e:odwita, u:∂wita, woruldwita), wi:tega (gebyrdwi:tega, tungolwi:tega) 

-e (all derivatives, 162): æ:menne 1, ætfele, a:ge, andfenge 2, andgiete 1, bearce, becyme, be:ne, 

bi:cwide, bi:genge, binde, bite, blæcce, blice, bræ:de, bry:ne, bryne, byge, byre, ciele , cwide, cyme, cyre, 

dræge, drepe, dryre, ece, fealle, felge, fe:∂e, fi∂ere, fle:oge, flo:de, flyge, gebæ:re, gebæ:te, (ge)bryce 1, 

(ge)bryce 3, gecwide, (ge)feohte, gefe:re 1, gefe:re 2, gefræ:ge 1, (ge)genge 2, (ge)genge 3, (ge)hilte, 

(ge)hrine, gelæ:te 1, gelege, gelise, geræ:de 1, geræ:de 2, gerihte, gesæ:te, gescipe, gescre:pe, geswo:pe, 

gewæ:ge, gewe:de, gewynde, gewyrde 1, gewyrpe, gewyr∂e, græfe, gripe, grynde, gryre, gyte, hæfe 1, 

hæ:re, hæ:te, hefe 1, hielde, hli:epe, hlyte, hryre 1, hu:fe, ielde, incyme, li∂ere, lufe, lyge 1, lyre, micge, 

myne 1, ofercyme, onhrine, onhryre, ontige, orlege 1, ræ:de, ryne, scearpe 2, scipe, scitte, scride, scri∂e, 

scyfe, scyte, scy:te, seohhe, sice 1, sige 2, slege 1, slide, slite 1, smitte, smi∂∂e, snide 1, spiwe, spræ:ce, 

stæpe, stede, stige, stræ:de, stride, swice 1, swice 3, swinge, swyle, syde, syge 1, syle, sype, te:one, ti:∂e, 


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to:cyme, tyge, ∂e:ostre 1, ∂e:ote, ∂urhfe:re 2, ∂yrne, unne, wæcce, wæ:ge 1, wæ:te, wi:te, wielle, wi∂re, 

wlite, wyrpe 1, wyr∂e 2 

-e in recursive word-formation, source and target category noun 

Affixation (129): flyge (onflyge), bryce (fullbryce, onbryce, sa:mbryce), (ge)hrine (æthrine), grynde 

(æfgryne), gyte (ingyte, ongyte), ryne (æfterryne, edryne, for∂ryne, onryne, to:ryne, unryne, u:pryne, 

u:tryne, ymbryne), scipe (arodscipe, bro:∂orscipe, burgscipe, ca:fscipe, cynescipe, dearfscipe, 

de:ofolscipe, dolscipe, druncenscipe, dryhtscipe, dwolscipe, dyrnegelegerscipe, ealdordo:mscipe, 

ealdorscipe, eargscipe, edwi:tscipe, eorlscipe, fe:olagscipe, fe:ondscipe, folcscipe, fraco∂scipe, framscipe, 

fre:ondscipe, ga:lscipe, ge:apscipe, (ge)be:orscipe, (ge)bodscipe, (ge)burhscipe, (ge)corenscipe, 

(ge)fe:rscipe, (ge)gaderscipe, (ge)gildscipe, (ge)hu:sscipe, (ge)sinscipe, (ge)si:∂scipe, (ge)∂oftscipe, 

gebedscipe, gebro:∂orscipe, gele:fenscipe, geli:efenscipe, gemæ:nscipe, gemæcscipe, geongorscipe, 

gera:dscipe, gere:fscipe, gerestscipe, ge:rscipe, gescipe, geswæ:sscipe, getalscipe, gewitscipe, glædscipe, 

gle:awscipe, go:dscipe, hæ:medscipe, hæ:∂enscipe, he:amolscipe, herescipe, hinderscipe, hi:wscipe, 

hla:fordscipe, hogascipe, holdscipe, hwætscipe, ierscipe, la:dscipe, landscipe, la:∂scipe, le:odscipe, 

manscipe, metscipe, na:htscipe, ni:∂scipe, orretscipe, or∂ancscipe, pru:tscipe, re:∂scipe, rihtgesinscipe, 

rihtsinscipe, sinhi:wscipe, snellscipe, snotorscipe, sotscipe, stuntscipe, tu:nscipe, ∂egnscipe, ∂e:odscipe, 

∂e:owtscipe, ∂we:orscipe, unarodscipe, unca:fscipe, ungle:awscipe, unwærscipe, unweor∂scipe, 

wa:cscipe, wærscipe, wæterscipe, weor∂scipe, winescipe, wo:dscipe, woruldscipe, woruldweor∂scipe, 

wræcscipe, wræ:nscipe, wro:htscipe), stæpe (instæpe 1, onstæpe), stede (wi∂erstede), stige (forestige, 

oferstige), wæ:te (inwæ:te), wielle (edwielle) 

Compounding (277): binde (wudubinde 1, wudubinde 2), bite (gristbite, la:∂bite, sweordbite), 

bræ:de (bræ:depanne, lendenbræ:de, weargbræ:de), bry:ne (fiscbry:ne), ciele (cielewearte, cielegicel), 

cwide (æ:rcwide, ca:lendcwide, cwidegiedd, folccwide, galdorcwide, gegncwide, gielpcwide, 

he:afodcwide, heardcwide, hearmcwide 1, hle:o∂orcwide, hospcwide, la:rcwide, leahtorcwide, 

le:o∂cwide, mæ∂elcwide, sa:rcwide, sealmcwide, sibcwide, so:∂cwide, spellcwide, te:oncwide, 

torncwide, wamcwide, wordcwide), cyme (ge:ancyme, ha:mcyme, he:rcyme, hidercyme, hle:o∂orcyme, 

onge:ancyme, seldcyme, ∂idercyme, ∂rymcyme), cyre (cyrea:∂, cyreli:f), drepe (de:a∂drepe), dryre 

(fæ:rdryre), ece (fo:tece, he:afodece, heortece, hypeba:nece, lendenece, si:dece, to:∂ece, ∂e:ohece), fealle 

(mu:sfealle), fe:∂e (fe:∂ecempa, fe:∂egang, fe:∂egest, fe:∂ehere, fe:∂ehwearf, fe:∂ela:st, fe:∂emann, 

fe:∂emund, fe:∂ewi:g), fle:oge (buterfle:oge, hundesfle:oge, mo:rfle:oge), flo:de (citelflo:de, mæ:rflo:de), 

flyge (flygepi:l), (ge)bryce 1 (a:∂bryce, ba:nbryce, brogbryce, burgbryce, ciricbryce, fæstenbryce, 

fre:olsbryce, gri∂bryce, ha:dbryce, he:afodbryce, hu:sbryce, lahbryce, lenctenbryce, mundbryce, 

regolbryce, scipbryce, sta:nbryce, wedbryce, woruldbryce), gecwide (wordgecwide), feohte (feohtehorn), 

(ge)genge 2 (nihtgenge), (ge)hilte (hiltecumbor, midhilte), (ge)hrine (handhrine), geræ:de 2 

(seglgeræ:de), gewæ:ge (sincgewæ:ge), gewyrpe (landgewyrpe, sandgewyrpe), gripe (fæ:rgripe, 

handgripe, mundgripe, ni:∂gripe, ny:dgripe 1), gryre (fæ:rgryre, gryrebro:ga, gryregæst, gryregeatwe, 

gryrehwi:l, gryrele:o∂, gryremiht, gryresi:∂, gryrefa:h 2, hellegryre, heortgryre, hinsi:∂gryre, le:odgryre, 

wælgryre, we:stengryre, wi:ggryre), gyte (blo:dgyte, gytesæ:l, gytestre:am, wætergyte), hryre 1 

(le:odhryre, li:chryre, ni∂erhryre, wi:ghryre), li∂ere (stæfli∂ere), lufe (eardlufe), lyge 1 (lygeword, 

lygesearu, lygespell, lygewyrhta), lyre (feorhlyre, landlyre, li:flyre, lyrewrenc), micge (cu:micge, 

hundesmicge), myne 1 (fre:ondmyne, wi:fmyne), ryne (blo:dryne, eftryne, eor∂ryne, ge:anryne, 

onge:anryne, rihtryne, rynegiest, ryne∂ra:g, rynewæ:n, sciperyne), scyfe (ni∂erscyfe), scy:te 

(be:odscy:te, hopscy:te, wæterscy:te), sige 2 (ni∂ersige), slege 1 (bro:∂orslege, de:a∂slege, dolgslege, 

e:arslege, gegnslege, hearmslege, hearpslege, manslege, mor∂orslege, sa:rslege, slegeby:tl, sweordslege, 

∂e:ofslege, ∂unreslege), slide (fæ:rslide), slite 1 (folcslite, lahslite, wyrmslite), smi∂∂e (mynetsli∂∂e), 

spræ:ce (godspræ:ce), stæpe (ordstæpe, stæpegong), stede (æscstede, bæ:lstede, bæ∂stede, beorgstede, 

burgstede, campstede, cwealmstede, de:a∂stede, ealhstede, eardstede, eor∂stede, folcstede, gle:dstede, 

ha:mstede, he:afodstede, he:ahstede, hle:o∂orstede, hle:owstede, hlo:sstede, hu:sstede, landstede, 

mæ∂elstede, mearcstede, gemotstede, mynsterstede, generstede, plegstede, stedewang, stedewist, 

sunstede, su:slstede, tre:owstede, tu:nstede, ∂ingstede, wa:fungstede, wangstede, werstede, wi:cstede), 


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stige (ni∂erstige), swice 1 (æ:swice, hla:fordswice, la:rswice), swinge (∂re:aswinge, wi:teswinge), swyle 

(fo:tswyle, handswyle), syle (tyldsyle), to:cyme (hiderto:cyme), tyge (tygeho:c, tygehorn), ∂e:ote 

(li:c∂e:ote, wæter∂e:ote), ∂yrne (bre:mel∂yrne, bre:r∂yrne), wæcce (ciricwæcce, nihtwæcce), wæ:ge 1 

(ealuwæ:ge, efenwæ:ge, sincgewæ:ge, wæ:getunge), wi:te (a:nwi:te, bisceopwi:te, blo:dwi:te, dolwi:te, 

feohtwi:te, feohwi:te, fyrdwi:te, gierdwi:te, gyltwi:te, hangwi:te, hellewi:te, hengwi:te, legerwi:te, 

ne:adwi:te, scyldwi:te, sorgwi:te, weardwi:te, wi:tebend, wi:tebro:ga, wi:tecyll, wi:tegdo:m, wi:tegeard, 

wi:tehrægl, wi:tehu:s, wi:tela:c, wi:tele:ast, wi:teræ:den, wi:tescræf, wi:testeng, wi:testo:w, wi:teswinge, 

wi:te∂e:ow 2, woruldwi:te, wræcwi:te, wundwi:te) 

-o (all derivatives, 18): bieldo, blæ:co, forhto, fyllo, (ge)fyrhto, gehlytto, (ge)synto, (ge)∂yngo, gry:to, 

hielto, hyldo, ieldo, mago, pry:to, unclæ:no, untrymmigo, wæstmbæ:ro, wi∂erme:do 

-o in recursive derivation, source and target category noun 

Compounding (6): fyllo (wælfyllo, wistfyllo), hyldo (hla:fordhyldo), ieldo (langieldo), mago 

(mago∂egn, wuldormago) 

Affixation (4): bield (unbieldo), gehlytto (to:gehlytto, mi∂gehlytto), hyldo (unhyldo) 

-u (all derivatives, 65): æ:smogu, æ∂elu, bedu, bierhtu, bisgu, bræ:du, clufu, cwalu, cwudu, daru, 

de:afu, engu, faru, forgifu, forlæ:tu, fremu, gebæcu, gebro:∂ru, gebygu, gedæftu, gelatu, gelyndu, 

(ge)re:∂ru, (ge)sacu, (ge)snyttru, (ge)stalu, geswe:oru, geswicu, getimbru, getogu, ge∂rafu 1, 

gewæ:pnu, giefu, goldsmi∂u, hæ:lu, hæ:tu, latu, lengu, menigu, menniscu, micelu, myr∂u, næcedu, 

notu, ny:dnimu, ondrysnu, rudu, sacu, scea∂u, scoru, sincaldu, strengu, swiftu, taru, trodu, ∂e:ostru, 

ungerisnu, unlæ:du, unrihtwi:su, un∂æslicu, unwemmu, wegu, wi:du, wracu, ymbfaru 

-u in recursive derivation, source and target category noun 

Affixation (2): (ge)snyttru (unsnyttru), hæ:lu (unhæ:lu) 

Compounding (63): cwalu (de:a∂cwalu, di:cwalu, feorhcwalu, ga:stcwalu, hearmcwalu, hellcwalu, 

li:gcwalu, mor∂orcwalu, ni:∂cwalu, pi:necwalu, selfcwalu, su:slcwalu, swyltcwalu), faru (a:dfaru, 

ælfaru, æxfaru, cildfaru, earhfaru, framfaru, fyrdfaru, ga:rfaru, hagolfaru, ha:mfaru, hunta∂faru, 

infaru, manfaru, ni:edfaru, stre:amfaru, u:tfaru, wæ:gfaru, wægnfaru, wolcenfaru, y:∂faru), 

(ge)re:∂ru (webgere:∂ru), (ge)sacu (woruldsacu), getimbru (boldgetimbru, he:ahgetimbru), giefu 

(e:adgiefu, feorhgiefu, hyhtgiefu, wo:∂giefu, wundorgiefu), hæ:lu (hæ:lubearn), latu (wordlatu), lengu 

(handlengu), menigu (e:oredmenigu, mannmenigu), notu (ha:dnotu, sundornotu), scamu 

(woruldscamu), strengu (woruldstrengu), ∂e:ostru (hinder∂e:ostru), wracu (blo:dwracu, cringwracu, 

gnyrnwracu, gyrnwracu, ni:∂wracu, ny:dwracu, sa:rwracu, synwracu, tornwracu, ∂e:ofwracu, 

∂e:owwracu) 

Received 24 November 2009 Revised version accepted 7 January 2010 

Elsa González Torres (PhD University of La Rioja) is a researcher at the Centro de Investigación en 

Lenguas Aplicadas de la Universidad de La Rioja. Her research interests are Old English, word-formation 

theory and functional grammars. She has published in Atlantis and Revista Española de Lingüística 

Aplicada. 

Address: Universidad de La Rioja, Edificio de Filología, C/Calasanz s/n. Tel.: +34 941299425. Fax : +34 

941299419. 


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A Multimodal Analysis of The Tale of Peter Rabbit 

within the Interpersonal Metafunction 

A. Jesús Moya Guijarro 

University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain 

arsenio.mguijarro@uclm.es 

This study attempts to carry out an analysis of the interpersonal meanings conveyed by 

the verbal and the visual modes of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, while exploring the choices 

afforded to Beatrix Potter in creating engagement between the viewer / reader and the 

(represented) participants of the tale. The analytical tools employed in this study are 

Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar and Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Social 

Semiotics, which prove to be powerful models for the study of multimodal texts. The 

analysis of the interpersonal / interactive meaning of the verbal and visual elements in 

The Tale of Peter Rabbit reveals that both the verbiage and the illustrations combine to 

reinforce the reader’s / viewer’s identification with the main character in the story. The 

high presence of declarative clauses throughout the text demonstrates that the verbal 

component accompanying the pictures does not seem to encourage much interaction. 

However, other devices related to contact, distance and perspective reveal that the 

illustrator makes choices which do create a certain degree of affinity with the viewer. 

Keywords: SFL; Visual Social Semiotics; Multimodality; Visual/Verbal Modes; 

Interpersonal; Interactive 

Un análisis multimodal de El cuento de Peter Rabbit desde una 

perspectiva interpersonal 

El objetivo de este artículo es realizar un análisis del significado interpersonal expresado por 

los modos verbal y visual utilizados en El Cuento de Peter Rabbit, escrito e ilustrado por 

Beatriz Potter. Los marcos teóricos en los que se basa la investigación son la Gramática 

Sistémico-Funcional de Hallliday y la Semiótica Visual de Kress y van Leeuwen. El análisis 

demuestra que, aunque la imagen y la palabra escrita se combinan en perfecta simbiosis para 

favorecer la interacción entre los personajes de ficción y el niño, las imágenes, gracias a las 

técnicas de perspectiva y distancia utilizadas, logran un mayor grado de contacto 

interpersonal e identificación entre el joven lector y los personajes del cuento que la lengua 

escrita. 

Palabras clave: Gramática Sistémico-Funcional; Semiótica Visual; Multimodalidad; Modos 

Verbal y Visual; Interpersonal; Interactivo

124 A. Jesús Moya Guijarro 

1. Aims and scope of the study 

The aim of this paper is to carry out an intersemiotic analysis of the interpersonal 

meanings conveyed by the verbal and the visual components of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, 

focusing on the relations of engagement, power and intimacy established between the 

illustrator/writer, the viewer/reader, and the (represented) participants involved in the 

picture book. 1 The tale was first written by Beatrix Potter as a letter to a five year old 

child, Noel Moore, the first son of Beatrix’s governess, Annie Carter, and later 

converted into a book. Ever since its first publication in 1902, the tale has remained in 

print in order to satisfy children’s and adults’ demands (Taylor 1987). The plot is 

simple: Peter disobeys his mother and trespasses in Mr McGregor’s garden, where he 

greedily enjoys a feast of vegetables until he feels sick. He is almost caught by the owner 

and runs the risk of meeting the same fate as his father who ended up in a pie after 

being trapped within the confines of the same property. After several difficult 

encounters, he manages to escape from the garden and comes back home. There, his 

mother gives him a dose of camomile tea to relieve his pain while his sisters, Flopsy, 

Mopsy and Cotton-tail, have bread, milk and blackberries for supper. 

The tale was intended for children of the English middle class in the Victorian era, 

characterized by strict and conservative manners in court and in children’s education. 

In line with the moralising literature addressed to children that Potter was familiar 

with, the author, who also doubles as illustrator, no doubt followed the ideological 

requirements of the Victorian period. And, indeed, some moralistic values predominate 

in the verbal narrative: the good little bunnies, as Potter calls them, are rewarded at the 

end of the tale with a nice supper while Peter, after disobeying his mother, ends up with 

a stomach-ache. Notwithstanding her decision to punish Peter for his disobedience, 

Potter, as Scott (2001) states, seems to be on the side of the transgressor: 

Although Peter disobeys his mother and causes her anxiety and grief, commits trespass 

and theft, and evades paternalistic authority symbolized by Mr. McGregor …, 

nonetheless he escapes all punishment for his misdeeds, except for a temporary stomachache 

resulting from his greediness. (2001: 20) 

The tale seems to be more than a story in which a character has found himself in a risky 

situation by disobeying his mother’s advice. As has been observed in the critical 

literature, Potter’s voice seems to be that of a rebel in defence of liberty and natural 

instinct (Scott 2001: 29; Carpenter 1989: 279). This ambiguity around Potter’s stance 

towards the protagonist is a constant in the story, and I propose that this will probably 

determine the semiotic choices made by the writer-illustrator to create interpersonal 

meanings in both the verbal and visual modes. 

1 My sincere thanks to Professors Chris Butler and Gunter Kress for their advice and 

suggestions concerning the interpersonal analysis of the verbiage and the visual elements of the 

tale, respectively. I would also like to acknowledge my gratitude to the General Editor and the 

three anonymous reviewers of Atlantis for their thought-provoking comments on a previous draft 

of this paper. 


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A Multimodal Analysis of The Tale of Peter Rabbit 125 

The current study offers an innovative aspect in relation to previous analyses on 

picture books. These children’s stories have been analysed primarily from a literary 

perspective according to their themes (Feaver 1977) and also in connection with 

cognitive development (Spitz 1999; Moya and Ávila 2009). However, in these analyses, 

the intersemiosis between verbal and visual aspects has been neglected. Indeed, only a 

few researchers, among them Moebius (1986), Nikolajeva and Scott (2000), Lewis 

(2006) and Painter (2007), have studied the mapping of language against illustrations 

in this genre. In an attempt to delve into the intersemiosis of images and words in 

picture books, I will try to examine how images and words complement each other in 

Potter’s tale in order to forge the identification between the main character and the 

child reader. 

The analysis to be carried out is essentially multimodal, as it focuses on the use and 

combination of several semiotic modes within a socio-cultural domain (Kress and van 

Leeuwen (2006). In the past, representational, interpersonal and textual meanings, as 

developed in Halliday’s account (2004), tended to be organised through the traditional 

modes of speaking and writing. However, nowadays, both written and visual 

components are considered to be crucial tools in our society for the construction of 

meaning (Baldry and Thibault 2006; Ventola and Moya 2009). This is the case in 

picture books, where words and images reinforce each other without necessarily 

offering the same information; good picture books are a richer experience than the 

simple sum of their independent components (Nodelman 1988; Moya and Pinar 2008). 

The analytical tools employed in this study are Halliday’s Systemic Functional 

Grammar (2004) (henceforth SFG) and Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Social 

Semiotics (2006), as they complement each other and are powerful models for the 

study of multimodal texts. SFL approaches texts as communicative interactions in 

cultural and situational contexts and assumes that language expresses three types of 

meanings: representing our experience of the world inside and around us (ideational), 

enacting social relationships (interpersonal) and finally, creating coherent wholes of 

communication (textual). But the reality of the world is not only conceptualized 

through language. Aware of this fact, Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) expand on the SFG 

model to account for other types of semiotic meanings than those encoded by language 

and create a descriptive framework of multimodality by assigning representational, 

interactive and compositional meanings to images. 

Once the objectives and scope of this study are presented, in an attempt to delimit 

the theoretical background, reference will be made to the aspects related to Halliday’s 

interpersonal metafunction and the interactive features of Kress and van Leeuwen’s 

visual grammar. With the methodology outlined, I will proceed to the analysis of the 

semiotic choices made by Potter in the verbal and the visual components of the tale in 

order to transmit the desired message to the reader. Finally, the results will be 

expounded based on findings from the thirty-two double spreads contained in the tale, 

in which verbal and visual elements are intertwined in the verso and the recto of the 

pages that make up the story. All the images, however, cannot be inserted into the 

present contribution. Those that have been included will be referred to as figures 1 and 

2. The edition used in this study is the original authorized version of Beatrix Potter. The 

Complete Tales, revised and published in 2002. 


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2. Theoretical Background: Interpersonal and interactive meanings 

Language is not simply content that reflects and organizes our experience of reality 

through the systems of TRANSITIVITY and THEME. Language is also used to encode 

interaction with others. The interpersonal metafunction is basically concerned with 

enacting social relationships between the speaker and the hearer in a specific context of 

communication, and deals with the clause as an exchange of information and as a 

exchange of goods and services (Halliday 2004). 

Within the SFG account, at the lexico-grammatical stratum, interpersonal meaning 

includes, along with the expression of opinion and attitude, the mood of the clause, 

expressed in English by the presence/absence and ordering of subject and finite verb. In 

addition, in the semantics, interpersonal meaning includes the type of speech act 

chosen (statement, offer, question and directive), realized by grammatical options and 

encoded by means of three syntactic moods (declarative, interrogative and imperative). 

As shown in table 1, the system of MOOD organizes the clause as an interactive event in 

which the speaker adopts a speech role, essentially (i) giving or demanding information 

(by means of statements and questions) or (ii) exchanging goods and services (be the 

commodity an offer or a command), and assigns a complementary role to the listener 

which he wishes him to adopt (Halliday 2004). 

Commodity exchanged > 

and Role in exchange 

٧ 

GIVING 

DEMANDING 

INFORMATION GOODS AND SERVICES 

Statement 

Declarative mood 

Question 

Interrogative mood 

Offer 

Various realizations 

Command 

Imperative mood 

Table 1. Speech Functions and their Congruent Realizations 

Thus, in the verbal mode, writers address their readers by making statements, asking 

questions, making offers or requiring some kind of action of them. Similarly, in the 

visual mode, producers also use visual acts which are parallel with speech functions. 

Among the visual choices available to analyse interpersonal meaning are the absence or 

presence of facial expressions towards the viewer, gestures which make commands, and 

offers of information or offers of goods and services to the viewer. The interactive 

function, (also called the engagement or modal function in O’Toole’s terms [1999]), is 

reflected in the way images attract the viewer’s attention and is concerned with the type 

of relationship established between three types of participants: (i) the producers of the 

image, the artists and designers, who do something to or for their readers through their 

designs, (ii) the readers of the image, who interpret the message created by the image 

makers and are also drawn into a relationship with the Represented Participants 


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(henceforth RPs), and finally (iii) the RPs, which may be related to one another through 

vectors of motion or eyelines (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006). 

As shown in table 2, Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) distinguish three types of 

systems associated with the interpersonal function, those of (i) image act and gaze, (ii) 

social distance and intimacy, and (iii) involvement and power. The three systems work 

interpersonally, as they show the way in which what is represented in a visual 

composition interacts with the viewer (Matthiessen 2007: 20). The system of image act 

and gaze differentiates between images in which something is required of the reader 

through visual contact (demands), searching for some kind of engagement, and images 

that solely present information (offers), lacking eye-contact vectors between the viewer 

and the characters depicted. Those visuals which present information do not require 

the viewer to react to anything nor do they demand of him to carry out a particular 

action or adopt any specific behaviour; they simply offer information that can be either 

acknowledged or contradicted. In offers, the RP becomes an object of contemplation 

and presents itself for inspection to an observer without being involved in a quasipersonal 

relationship. However, in demand images, the RP looks directly at the viewer, 

requiring and establishing a strong engagement with him (Kress and van Leeuwen 

2006). 

Meaning Systems Means of Realization 

I. Image act and Gaze Offer and demand 

II. Social Distance and Intimacy Close-ups, middle-shots and long-shots 

III.a Horizontal Angle and Involvement Frontal and oblique angles 

III.b Vertical Angle and Power High, low and eye-level angles 

Table 2. Interactive Function in Images. Basic Features 

In addition to the choices related to image act and gaze, interactive relationships are 

also defined on the basis of social distance and attitude (involvement and power). The 

system of social distance relates to the degree of intimacy established between the 

viewer and the RPs depicted in a composition, determined by how close they appear to 

the viewer in an image. The scale, resulting in feelings of intimacy or distance, varies 

between close-up shots, which create intimacy between reader and the RP, as the image 

is in close proximity to the viewer, and long-shots, which express distance, and an 

intermediate level of intimacy realized by medium-shots. While in long shots 

participants are portrayed full length and, “there is an invisible barrier between the 

viewer and the object”, in close-ups “the object is shown as if the viewer is engaged with 

it. Unless the object is very small, it is shown only in part”; sometimes only the head 

and shoulders or even the face are made visible. In turn, in middle shots, “the object is 

shown in full but without much space around it. It is represented as within the viewer’s 

reach” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 127-28). 


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Finally, the choices of attitude are established by perspective techniques, that is, by 

the way the viewer and the RPs are positioned in relation to the vertical and horizontal 

planes. The choice of a particular point of view greatly affects the way we understand 

the situation depicted. While the horizontal angle determines our emotional 

involvement with the RPs (frontal angle), or detachment (oblique angle) from them, 

the vertical angle reflects relationships of power and vulnerability, depending on 

whether the RPs are looked at from a low or a high angle respectively. The vertical angle 

transmits two types of power relationships, that between the RPs and the viewer, and 

that between the RPs within an image (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006). We can be 

positioned from a high, low or eye-level angle. When the point of view is arranged 

upwards or downwards along a vertical axis, an increase or a diminution of power over 

the RPs can be experienced: the viewer has power over the RP if it is projected from a 

high angle. However, the RP has power over the viewer if seen from a low angle. Finally, 

RPs aligned at eye level angles have equal power status with their viewers (Kress and van 

Leeuwen 2006). 

Another factor to be considered in the visual mode is that of character focalization, 

which analyzes the eyes through which the narrative world is seen. The reader/viewer 

can contemplate the actions or thoughts of the characters that make up the narration 

vicariously through the point of view of a character, be it main or secondary, and not 

through his own eyes (Moebius 1986; Painter 2007). In children’s stories, this is 

achieved, Painter affirms (2007: 44-45), through the utilization of distinct techniques 

which can be applied either to images juxtaposed in two scenes (across frames) or in 

one picture (within a frame). Sometimes, the utilization of only one image offers the 

possibility of simultaneously having a reader’s perspective and a character focalization. 

This technique is known as, “viewing along with the focalizing character” (Painter 

2007: 47-48). In it, the reader is usually positioned behind the character and sees what 

is happening within the narrated world through both his own eyes and the character’s 

eyes. Double spread 11, when Peter meets Mr McGregor for the first time in his garden 

after having had a feast of vegetables, provides a good example, as we also see the farmer 

from Peter’s viewpoint, and at the same time, the protagonist has his back toward the 

observer. 

The interpersonal function not only includes interaction, but also implies evaluative 

meaning. In language, evaluative meaning is realized through the system of polarity 

(positive and negative) and essentially through the system of modality, which reflects 

the speaker’s or writer’s stance towards the content of communication, and introduces 

elements of doubt (degrees of certainty and probability and degrees of usuality and 

frequency). As in language, visual images also possess degrees of modality ranging from 

high to low levels of credibility. In the case of naturalistic modality, 2 the more an image 

2 Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) differentiate between four coding orientations of visual 

modality: naturalistic modality, scientific modality, abstract modality and sensory modality. 

Nowadays, naturalism is the leading standard by which visual realism is determined. The 

resemblance of an image to the objects or participants it represents in the real world is, in turn, 

defined by eight different modality markers which help us to describe different degrees of 

accuracy or abstraction in images: colour saturation, colour modulation and colour 


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resembles whatever it is in the real world in a specific setting, the higher degree of 

modality it is likely to have (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006). Thus, in general terms, a 

photograph of an object obviously has higher modality than just a sketch of it, as the 

first is more lifelike (Lewis 2006). However, the modality of an image is not only 

established in terms of its resemblance to reality; it is also motivated by the cultural 

standards of what is real and unreal within a specific social group (Kress and van 

Leeuwen 2006: 160-63). 

3. Analysis of interpersonal relationships in the verbiage and the illustrations 

So far the tools available to analyse the meaning transmitted by the verbal and nonverbal 

modes in The Tale of Peter Rabbit have been referred to. The interaction in 

picture books is realized by the necessary presence of three participants: the represented 

characters depicted in the illustrations or referred to verbally, the writer and illustrator 

of the tale and the receivers, either viewers or readers. Firstly, the mood structures used 

by the writer to transmit interpersonal meaning to the reader will be analysed. Next, the 

relations of contact, distance and attitude will be dealt with within the visual 

component and compared with the information that the verbiage offers regarding 

interpersonal features. The quantitative data obtained will finally be interpreted from a 

qualitative and functional perspective. 

3.1. Interpersonal options in the verbiage 

Within the SFG framework, only independent clauses are capable of distinguishing 

mood (Halliday 2004: 135, figure 4-15). This implies that major, free clauses can have a 

mood-residue structure and, in turn, can be established as either declarative, 

interrogative or imperative. However, the non-finite clauses, relative clauses, thatclauses, 

conditional and other subordinate clauses of time and cause that the story 

contains do not select for these mood types as distinguished by Halliday’s Systemic 

Functional Grammar. 

As can be seen in table 3, most clauses are declarative throughout and cover 95% of 

the cases counted. Thus, in the verbiage there is little that is of stylistic importance 

which is interpersonal and signalled through the grammar, since declarative mood 

structures do not encourage much engagement. The explanation for this lies in the fact 

that, while the utilization of imperative and interrogative modes tends to interrupt the 

thread of the story, declaratives generally contribute directly to the continuity of the 

plot. Declaratives act as statements at the discourse-semantic level. Through them, 

Potter represents the narrative world, from the first stage, when Peter is forbidden by 

his mother to enter Mr McGregor’s garden, until the end, when he manages to escape 

from the farmer. The resolution of the conflict is produced in double spread 27, when 

differentiation, articulation of background and articulation of detail, depth, illumination and 

brightness. For further information about the types of visual modality and modality makers, see 

Kress and van Leeuwen (2006: 161-63, 165-66) and Machin (2007: 57-59). 


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Peter manages to escape from the garden and finds the way back home. In this double 

spread, Peter is almost under the gate, but not quite; he is just about to slip underneath 

it. This establishes a rhythmic pattern between words and pictures, since the action 

shown by the pictures comes at some point before the completion of the action 

described by the declarative clauses used in the text. In this way, we read the text in 

some anticipation and the illustration delays the events, therefore increasing the 

narrative tension. As Nodelman (1988: 258) affirms, almost every picture in this tale 

shows a moment towards the end of the actions implied by the text, but not necessarily 

the very end. This aspect will be referred to again in the analysis of the illustrations. 

Mood Structures Absolute Values Values in Percentages 

Declarative 94 95 % 

Imperative 4 4 % 

Interrogative 1 1 % 

Total number 99 100% 

Table 3. Mood structures in ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit’ 

Out of the 94 declarative clauses identified, 4 act, at the discourse level, as 

exclamations. Indicated as such by an exclamation mark, they are signals to adults 

reading aloud to children that Potter is highlighting key passages in the narrative plot 

that make the story progress. In double spread 8, for example, through an exclamation 

“And squeezed under the gate!” the conflict starts. Peter disobeys his mother’s 

instructions and begins his adventure in the McGregors’ private garden, where his 

father had lost his life upon becoming trapped by the farmer. After enjoying the feast of 

vegetables, the inevitable happens: the protagonist and the aggressor cross paths, an 

event that Potter expresses through the only interrogative structure identified in the 

tale: “ But round the end of a cucumber frame, whom should he meet but Mr. 

McGregor!” (double spread 11). In fact, rather than a regular interrogative, this 

idiomatic structure containing a wh-element, should and but is used to express surprise 

and is signalled as an exclamation by means of punctuation. Again, Potter uses the 

mood structures punctuation to achieve special effects at the discourse-semantic level. 

There is another exclamation worthy of mention which refers to Peter’s loss of 

garments: “ … It was the second little jacket and pair of shoes that Peter had lost in a 

fortnight!” (double spread 30). At first glance, this event does not seem to be relevant to 

the development of the narrative plot; rather, it is an anecdote within the deeds that the 

protagonist has had to overcome in order to return home safe and sound. However, the 

author gives this act some special importance by using an exclamation mark. Perhaps 

this is due to the fact that Peter’s garments are a metaphor of the social repression of 

natural impulses. For Potter, clothing is synonymous with imprisonment and hostility 

to freedom (Scott 1994: 79). Notice that in Potter’s time, the Victorian Period, women 

wore corsets, which were very uncomfortable and even resulted in fainting at times. 

Women wore them, however, because if not, it created social disapproval. Peter seems 

to be torn between his rabbit-like nature and his child-like behaviour. His entrance into 

the garden, which is private property, also involves the loss of his clothing. By using 


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clothing as a motive, Potter creates the dilemma of whether Peter should act like a 

child, as his mother wishes, following the civilized codes of behaviour, or naturally, like 

an animal, following his animal instincts (Scott 1994). 

Only four commands, realized through imperative clauses, have been found in 

double spreads 2, 4 and 12, which reach the rate of 4% of the tokens identified. They are 

of special interest to us here, as they create an interactive relationship between the main 

character, Peter, and his mother, and between him and Mr McGregor: “but don’t go 

into Mr. McGregor’s garden”, “Now run along”, “and don’t get into mischief”, “stop 

thief!” These commands are not usually heeded by the protagonist. Peter trespasses in 

the garden, not because he needs food to survive, since that is provided by his mother, 

but rather for the pure joy of breaking established rules (Scott 2001). Thus, so far, it 

seems that the narrative voice reflects the events from an objective and distant 

perspective, as suggested by the sparse use of imperative and interrogative clauses and 

the high presence of declarative mood structures. The attitudes and judgments 

embodied in the text, realised by the system of modal assessment and by choice of lexis, 

are also part of the interpersonal metafunction of language (Halliday 2004: table 10 

[6]). Attitudinal lexis within nominal group and copular structures is also used by 

Potter to express evaluative meaning and to establish a boundary between the 

protagonist’s and his sisters’ behaviour. Within a lexico-grammatical framework, 

Peter’s sisters are described as “good little rabbits” while Peter is typically associated 

with the qualities “naughty” and “frightened”. Concerning modality, in the second 

double spread the modal verb may expresses permission given by the person in 

authority, Mrs Rabbit: “you may go into the fields or down the lane”, after which a 

prohibition is introduced, which restricts the protagonist’s freedom. In the 23th double 

spread the modal verb could refers to the mouse’s lack of ability to give information 

about the location of the gate that leads to the exit of the McGregor’s property (“… but 

she [an old mouse] had such a large pea in her mouth that she could not answer”). The 

most relevant expressions from a modal perspective are found in double spread 15: 

After losing them (his clothes), he ran on four legs and went faster, so that I think he 

might have got away altogether if he had not unfortunately run into a gooseberry net, and 

got caught by the large buttons on his jacket. It was a blue jacket with brass buttons, quite 

new. (2002: 13) 

The interpersonal metaphor I think, 3 the modal verb might, expressing factual 

possibility, and essentially the modal adjunct unfortunately, show Potter’s stance in 

favour of Peter. The fact that the little rabbit runs into a gooseberry net where he was 

trapped is described by the writer as unfortunate. In this specific case, Potter seems to 

support the flight of the protagonist, placing the reader of the tale on his side. Following 

3 Speech functions such as statement, command and question have both congruent and 

metaphorical realizations. With metaphorical realizations, the grammar works as a metaphor – as 

when an interrogative like Could you open the window? is used to make a request. One kind of 

interpersonal metaphor involves a first person present tense and a mental process of cognition 

such as I think. Here, the modal adjunct of probability is construed through the grammar as a 

clause in which the speaker is made responsible for the assessment (Halliday 2004). For further 

information about the concept of grammatical metaphor, see Halliday 2004: 592-93 and 634-36. 


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this line, the author leads the reader to identify with the defenceless rabbit and to wish 

for his escape from his oppressor. This clearly seems to be in opposition of the 

Victorian philosophy where children were supposed to be punished if they did not 

follow the rules imposed by their elders. Mackey (1998) and Scott (2001) support this 

and state that the tone used by Potter to describe the protagonist’s disobedience raises 

the question of whether she is on the side of conventionalism or on the side of freedom 

and natural instinct. 

3.2. Interactive choices in the illustrations 

At this point, I shall attempt to determine how the visual elements create interpersonal 

meanings throughout the tale, by focussing the analysis on the interactive features that 

Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) distinguish in their Grammar of Visual Design: (i) 

image, act and gaze; (ii) social distance and intimacy, (iii) horizontal angle and 

involvement and, finally, (iv) vertical angle and power, with their respective 

classifications. The aim is to find out whether the illustrations suggest relations of 

intimacy or whether they imply a certain level of detachment, similar to that achieved 

by the high utilization of declarative clauses with scarce modality markers in the verbal 

component. The analysis of the thirty-two illustrations, shown in table 4, sheds light on 

the visual techniques used by Potter to create engagement and possibly forge the 

identification of the young child with Peter. The aspects offer, long shots, frontal and 

eye-level angles predominate in the majority of the illustrations, with certain exceptions 

that will be commented on later. 

Image act and Gaze Social Distance 

and Intimacy 

Offer 

Close-ups 

-------------------- ----------------- 

30 tokens / 93.7 % 6 tokens / 18.8% 

Demand 

-------------------- 

2 tokens / 6.3% 

TOTAL 

32 tokens / 100% 

Middle-shots 

----------------- 

5 tokens / 15.6 % 

Long-shots 

----------------- 

21 tokens / 65.6% 

TOTAL 

32 tokens / 100% 

Horizontal angle 

and Involvement 

Frontal 

------------------- 

26 tokens / 81.2% 

Oblique 

------------------- 

6 tokens / 18.8 % 

TOTAL 

32 tokens / 100% 

Table 4. Interactive Features. Absolute and Relative Values 

Vertical Angle 

and Power 

High 

----------------- 

6 tokens / 18.7 % 

Eye-level 

----------------- 

26 tokens / 81.3 % 

Low 

----------------- 

0 tokens / 0 % 

TOTAL 

32 tokens / 100% 

Concerning Image act and Gaze, the analysis shows that there is a predominance of 

offers (93.7%) over demand images, which count for only 6.3% of the analysed cases. 

Through offers, the RPs are presented as items of information for the child, but without 


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creating affinity with him. They simply reflect the sequence of actions carried out by the 

main characters of the story, as shown in double spreads 7 and 8, when Peter is running 

straight for Mr McGregor’s garden and squeezes under the gate. Sometimes the RPs 

continually look at each other, crossing their gazes, as happens in double spread 11, 

where visual contact is established between Peter and Mr McGregor on their first 

encounter while the farmer is planting cabbages. On other occasions, the RP looks 

somewhere within the image or is just walking without looking at a specific point, as 

when Peter feels sick after eating some lettuce, radishes and French beans and looks for 

some parsley to alleviate his pain. In these cases, there is no eye contact established with 

the viewer and, consequently, there is no demand on the child to be involved in any 

way beyond accepting or rejecting the offers of information made by the illustrator. 

However, two demand images have been identified in double spreads 1 and 21, 

fulfilling two narrative purposes respectively: (i) introduce the characters to the reader, 

and (ii) encourage our empathy with the main character. In the first place, inserted here 

as figure 1, the rabbits are located near the tree trunk where they live. Mrs Rabbit, the 

mother of the litter, directs her gaze directly at the viewer, inviting him into the story 

and introducing her children as the verbiage also does through a there-construction: 

“ONCE UPON A TIME there were four little Rabbits, and their names were –Flopsy, 

Mopsy, Cotton-tail and Peter”. In this scene, although both the verbiage and the 

illustration are essential to the creation of the story, the illustration conveys more 

relevant information about Peter’s personality than do the words. Peter is represented 

through a visual metonymy (Forceville 2009), one part (his tail) for his whole, 

attracting the reader’s attention in a special way. The picture, which is a long-shot and 

has frontal and eye-level angles, clearly reflects that Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton-tail do 

not share the same personality as the main character. While his sisters show their heads 

to the reader, Peter is playing in the burrow and only his backside can be seen. He is 

absorbed in his own world and reveals a different attitude. Without the help of the 

verbiage, we possibly would not know that there are four rabbits in the story, as only 

the heads of three little rabbits are being depicted. 4 

The second demand image is identified in double spread 21. Peter looks directly at 

the recipient of the story looking for support and demonstrating a certain sadness in his 

eyes at having left the watering can in which he hid to escape from Mr McGregor. In 

picture books this type of reaction image is not common as their use usually interrupts 

the development of the narrative plot. The text that accompanies it essentially describes 

the state in which the protagonist finds himself, without contributing to the plot 

development. This demand image achieves a strong engagement between Peter and the 

child, and forges the identification of the latter with the hero of the story. 

4 Note that in the verbal component the names of the four little rabbits are displaced towards 

the left from Flopsy to Peter, so that the viewer can easily identify Peter with the rabbit whose rear 

end is seen in the illustration, represented through a metonymy. 


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Figure 1. Peter’s family 

With regard to the second feature of interactive meaning, social distance and 

intimacy, long shots predominate as characters are shown full-length and surrounded 

by a setting, although they are not necessarily located in the far distance. The 21 longshots 

identified tend to show characters against the background in which the actions are 

carried out, generally within the natural exterior settings of the protagonists (see figure 

1). Some of the long-shots, however, reflect interior settings: the tool-shed where Peter 

tries to hide after his first encounter with the farmer or even the Rabbit family’s house 

in the final three illustrations where kitchen utensils, the main character’s bed and food 

can be seen. The exterior settings, as Scott (2001) states, usually provide a high degree of 

contextual detail as evidenced in double spreads 26 and 27, where Peter is looking from 

the wheelbarrow towards the gate and later escaping from Mr McGregor; these two 

illustrations offer long-shots with the main character, Peter, in the foreground. 

Out of thirty-two plates, there are also five middle-distance shots and six close-ups. 

Double spread 20, included here as figure 2, provides a good example of a middle shot 

with an oblique angle. In it, Mr McGregor’s booted foot is about to step on Peter before 

he manages to escape from the tool shed by jumping out of a small window. To be 

more exact, I would say that the distance in this illustration is between middle and 

close. The viewer can see the flower petals falling off the geranium, also the tufts of hair 

on the rabbit and even the studs on the sole of Mr McGregor’s boots. This image may 

also suggest that we are looking from the physical perspective of a small child. Thus, as 

readers, we can assume that we are in the position of one of the Represented 

Participants, probably Peter, who is in danger. This, of course, reinforces the 

identification of the young child with the protagonist in the story. 

Finally, although close-ups are usually infrequent in picture books (Nodelman 

1988), the six identified in The Tale of Peter Rabbit generate involvement with the main 

character by showing the child reader his facial expressions and, presumably, 

communicate the way he feels. The great presence of long-shots (65.6%) gives the tale a 

sense of objectivity and distance from the reader (Nodelman 1988: 151; Kress and van 

Leeuwen 2006). However, middle-shots and close-ups suggest involvement between the 


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RPs depicted in the tale and the viewer. In addition, there are also long-shots which 

show the characters with a certain proximity to the viewer and create interaction 

between the characters, their surroundings and the young child. This is the case of the 

first double spread (see figure 1), when Peter’s family is introduced to the reader. 

Although the figure is a long-shot, Mrs Rabbit’s direct gaze towards the child may 

suggest an invitation to enter into the rabbits’ lives and their adventures. 5 

Figure 2. Escaping from the tool shed 

As for the third feature of interactive meaning, horizontal angle and involvement, 

most of the angles identified in the thirty-two illustrations of the tale are frontal (81.2% 

of the tokens counted). Figure 1 provides a good example. Oblique angles, like the one 

offered in figure 2, however, total only 18.8% of the cases identified. Unlike oblique 

angles, which show the participants from the sidelines and create a sense of detachment 

(Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 134), frontal angles generate involvement with the childreader, 

as in them the viewer stands facing the Represented Participants so that their 

facial expressions, or at least their eyes, are gazing at him. As evidenced in the last three 

illustrations (30-32), the Rabbit family is shown from a frontal perspective and the 

observer can contemplate them in the privacy of their daily household lives: cooking, 

resting in bed or dining. Here, as in figure 1, the plane of the represented objects and 

the plane of the illustrator run parallel (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 134). However, in 

figure 2, the subjects of the illustration (Peter and Mr McGregor’s boot) are not situated 

in front of the viewer, but shown from the side lines. They are marginal, at 90 degrees, 

which makes this illustration an oblique angle (Kress, personal communication). 

5 A possible reason why picture books have more long-shots than middle-shots and close-ups 

may be genre related. In a long-shot there is more for the child to see, which is an important tool 

for interaction between the mediator (reading parent, teacher, grandparents…) and the child 

who is following the story. Questions like Where is Peter in the picture? or What things do you see 

in Mr. McGregor’s garden?, prompt interaction between the young reader and the adult. 


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Finally, regarding vertical angle and power, the forth feature of interactive meaning, 

there is a predominance of eye-level angles (81.3%) over high angles, which total only 

18.7% of the cases counted. In addition, no low angles have been identified. Most 

images are represented from an eye-level angle, which implies that the viewer is at the 

same level as the main characters, and therefore feels identified with them. Figure 1, 

already described, provides a good example. Most of the high angles identified usually 

show Peter in trouble lying on the ground, as when he is caught in the net and nearly 

gives up (double spreads 15-17). In this way, the author successfully manages to make 

the reader feel compassion for the distraught rabbit and to wish him not to be trapped 

by the farmer. 

Perspective techniques also perform a fundamental role in the achievement of 

engagement and affinity between the RPs and the viewer. In double spread 11, for 

example, when Peter and Mr McGregor meet each other for the first time, Peter is 

focalized from the farmer’s gaze. This way, the illustrator shows the superiority of the 

aggressor to the main character in the story. The viewer contemplates Peter’s back and 

sees through his eyes or from a perspective close to him. The scene reveals the power of 

Mr McGregor, depicted as a big human being. In contrast, the rabbit is drawn as a small 

creature, with which the child can easily identify. Double spread 26 is also especially 

relevant from a focalizing point of view. While the verbiage presents the facts from the 

narrator’s perspective, as the use of the third person pronoun he demonstrates, the 

visual component reflects the action carried out by the farmer in the garden through 

Peter’s eyes. It is the first time, just before finding an exit, that the hero dominates the 

situation and contemplates the aggressor with a certain calmness: 

But presently, as nothing happened, he came out, and climbed upon a wheelbarrow, and 

peeped over. The first thing he saw was Mr. McGregor hoeing onions. His back was 

turned towards Peter, and beyond him was the gate! (2002: 18). 

Most pictures allow the reader to observe Peter in the foreground from almost 

touching distance, a limited perspective that favours the observer’s identification with 

the hero (Scott 2001: 22). This identification with the main character, forged from the 

illustrations, contrasts with the narrative voice adopted in the verbal text. For example, 

in the scene where Peter is trapped in the gooseberry net (double spread 15), the 

narrator’s words emphasize the remoteness of the action, taking away narrative tension 

and energy, as the danger is not imminent: 

After losing them, he ran on four legs and went faster, so that I think he might have got 

away altogether if he had not unfortunately run into a gooseberry net, and got caught by 

the large buttons of his jacket.... (2002: 13) 

However, the illustration accentuates the sense of entrapment and gives immediacy and 

actuality to the action described. Peter is lying, immobile, his gaze directed towards 

ground level, leading the viewer’s gaze into the net. Potter masterfully manipulates the 

perspective, as well as the textual and visual focalization, and depicts the main character 

always in the foreground to mould the reader’s perception and forge his or her 

identification with the protagonist (Scott 2001: 26-27). 


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Concerning modality, the tendency is to combine indicators of high and low 

modality, as is often the case in many picture books (Lewis 2006: 164). Potter shows us 

an animal protagonist, wonderfully illustrated. At the same time, she gives him qualities 

belonging to the human world, dressing him and bestowing on him the ability to speak 

and express feeling. Her illustrations are not photographs, but the main character’s 

movements and postures are detailed and naturalistic, reflecting lifelike features and 

achieving a high level of modality, according to the visual perspective defined by Kress 

and van Leeuwen (2006). Given the mastery of Potter’s illustrations, double spread 23, 

for example, offers a high level of modality. Peter is shown with his animal features but 

also reflecting his human-like nature. He adopts a human pose and expresses human 

feelings when he cries, poised at the door upon not being able to communicate with a 

mouse that was carrying a pea in her mouth. A tear can even be seen falling from his 

eye. The text and image combine in perfect harmony to bring the character closer to the 

reader. The entire scene communicates human feelings (Scott 1994), contradicting 

Nodelman’s thesis. When comparing the communicative function of words with 

respect to the images, Nodelman indicates (1988: 173) that the accompanying text is 

essential in those cases in which the writer intends to transmit emotions. However, the 

mastery of Potter’s illustrations, in part, comes from her ability to transmit not only 

actions but also feelings. Peter’s human appearance and ability to show feelings clearly 

connects him with the viewer, as he has the same feelings and postures as a human 

being. 

Other illustrations have a lower level of modality. Occasionally, the main characters 

are reflected in the illustrations through metonymy (Forceville 2009). In picture 19, for 

example, when Mr McGregor and Peter are in the shed, the metonymy, ears for Peter, 

puts the child reader in a position of dominance, as he or she knows more about what is 

going on than either Peter or Mr McGregor. The only party that does not know where 

the hero has hidden is the enemy, Mr McGregor. Despite Peter’s disobedience, Potter’s 

visual techniques bring the reader on the side of the defenceless rabbit. 

4. Conclusion 

The comparison of the verbal and visual choices made within the interpersonal 

metafunction in the multimodal text, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, reveals that both the 

verbiage and the illustrations combine to reinforce the identification of the 

reader/viewer with the main character in the story. However, the visual mode seems to 

contribute in large part to the creation of engagement between the RPs and the child. 

Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006: 163) concept of modality is, as the authors admit, 

more complex than simply its realization in language. According to their model, a 

diagram is understood as having low modality on the basis of its lack of realistic 

representation, but, in scientific contexts, it can also be considered as having high 

modality on account of its potentiality to represent content in a highly accurate 

manner. Indeed, the applications of the modality markers used by Kress and van 

Leeuwen (2006) to determine the credibility of a visual instance are not clear, and the 

categories they offer (colour modulation, colour differentiation, background 


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representation, detail representation, tonality, etc) are more a continuum between high 

and low modality than clear binary oppositions (Maching 2007: 180). In this sense, 

Forceville (1999: 168) points out that in addition Kress and van Leeuwen give little 

information about the way modality markers can be applied to different genres. 

Regarding the tale at hand, the characters are depicted, not photographed; therefore, 

they are not lifelike. In theory, within a naturalistic code, this would imply that the 

illustrations would have a low level of modality. Nevertheless, Potter’s mastery in 

drawing animals, especially rabbits, and their movements and postures gives her 

detailed illustrations a high level of realism. Kress and van Leeuwen (2006: 164) state 

that within the naturalistic criterion the degree of modality of an image is determined 

by its resemblance to reality and also by the culture and social group in which it is 

produced and is intended to be understood. In addition, there is another factor that 

deserves to be mentioned. The modality of images could also be affected by genrerelated 

issues, as happens to be the case in picture books. 

Illustrations in picture books such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit are true pieces of art, 

and reflect the objects depicted with a high level of resemblance to reality, especially if 

we consider that they are part of stories intended for children. Characters turn into real 

participants in the literary and imaginary world of the children for whom the tales are 

written and illustrated. When an image is observed, the viewer understands its meaning 

and what it represents through his knowledge of the genre conventions of 

representation, in this case the representational standards of children’s picture books. 

Thus, genre conventions may also have a direct influence on what can be considered as 

real or unreal in a specific visual instance, and also on the way images are observed and 

interpreted by the viewer. 

The above-mentioned lack of interaction is sometimes also reflected, to a certain 

extent, in the visual part, in correspondence with the declarative mood structures 

chosen by Potter, as there is a predominance of offers and long-shots. Most illustrations 

are offers since Peter and Mr McGregor keep looking at each other or at something 

within the image (a mouse, a white cat, …), without making any demand apart from 

acceptance or rejection of suggested information. In addition, the illustrations are 

mainly long shots, as the characters, except when they are depicted metonymically, are 

usually portrayed full length. According to Kress and van Leeuwen’s approach (2006), 

this seems to imply objectivity, some social distance and not an intimate relationship. 

Although the utilization of offers and long-shots may imply distance from the 

viewer, other devices related to contact, distance and perspective reveal that the 

illustrator makes choices which do create affinity with the viewer. The child reader 

usually looks at the pictures from a frontal viewpoint, which gives him the feeling of 

being involved in Peter’s world. In contrast to the horizontal axis, which reflects 

involvement, the vertical angle usually expresses power (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 

146-47). As the rabbits and Mr McGregor are seen neither from above nor below, there 

is no power difference established between them and the observer. Most images are 

represented from an eye-level angle, which implies that the child is at the same level as 

Peter and therefore feels identified with him. Finally, through high angles Peter can be 

contemplated from a position of superiority and the viewer becomes a part of the 


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difficulties the rabbit finds himself in and must save himself from, leading the child to 

feel compassion for the defenceless animal. 

These features are reinforced by the use of close-ups and middle-shots, by the 

depiction of RPs in the foreground, relatively close to the viewer, and by the two 

demand images identified in the tale. Unlike offers of information, in demand images 

eye contact is established between the RPs and the viewer, creating involvement by 

direct gazing. The utilization of demand images shows the intention of the illustrator to 

establish a strong engagement between the hero and the viewer, above all if we take into 

account that this type of image is infrequent in picture books (Lewis 2006), as direct 

visual contact with the recipient of the tale can interrupt, albeit momentarily, the 

development of the narrative plot. Furthermore, the effect of detachment achieved by 

the utilization of long-shots is diminished by the use of focalization techniques. The 

actions that involve the greatest danger for the protagonist are presented through 

Peter’s eyes, forging, in this way, identification between the hero and the reader. 

Works Cited 

Baldry, Anthony and Paul Thibault 2006: Multimodal Transcription and Text analysis. A 

Multimodal Toolkit and Coursebook. London: Equinox. 

Carpenter, Humphrey 1989: ‘Excessively Impertinent Bunnies: The Subversive Element in Beatrix 

Potter’. G. Avery and J. Briggs, eds. Children and their books: a celebration of the work of Iona 

and Peter Opie. Oxford: Clarendon P. 271-98. 

Feaver, William 1977: When We Were Young: Two Centuries of Children’s Book Illustrations. 

London: Thames and Hudson. 

Forceville, Charles 1999: ‘Educating the eye? Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Reading Images: The 

Grammar of Visual Design (1966)’. Review article. Language and Literature 8.2: 163-78. 

Forceville, Charles 2009: ‘Metonymy in Visual and Audiovisual Discourse’. Eija Ventola and A. 

Jesús Moya, eds. 2009: The World Shown: Multisemiotic Issues. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 

56-74. 

Halliday, M.A.K. 2004: An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Third Edition. Revised by 

Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen. London: Edward Arnold. 

Kress, Günther and Theo van Leeuwen 2001: Multimodal Discourse. The Modes and Media of 

Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold. 

––––– 2006: Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge, second edition. 

Lewis, David 2006: Reading Contemporary Picture Books. Picturing Text. London: Routledge, 

second edition. 

Machin, David 2007: Introduction to Multimodal Analysis. London: Hodder Arnold. 

Mackey, Margaret 1998: The Case of Peter Rabbit. Changing Conditions of Literature for Children. 

New York and London: Garland Publishing. 

Matthiessen, Christian 2007: ‘The Multimodal Page: A Systemic Functional Exploration’. D. 

Terry D. Royce and L. Wendy Bowcher, eds. New Directions in the Analysis of Multimodal 

Discourse. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. 1-62. 

Moebius, William 1986: ‘Introduction to Picture Books Codes’. Word and Image 2: 141-58. 

Moya, A. Jesús and M. Jesús Pinar 2008: ‘Compositional, Interpersonal and Representational 

Meanings in a Children’s Narrative’. Journal of Pragmatics 40.9: 1601-19. 

Moya, A. Jesús and Jesús A. Ávila 2009: ‘Thematic Progression of Children’s Stories as Related to 

Different Stages of Cognitive Development’. Text & Talk 29.6: 755-74. 


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Nikolajeva, Maria and Carole Scott 2000: ‘The Dynamics of Picture Books Communication’. 

Children’s Literature in Education 31.4: 225-39. 

Nodelman, Perry, 1988: Words about Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picturebooks. 

Athens: The U of Georgia P. 

O’Toole, Michael 1999: Engaging with Art. A New Way of Looking at Paintings. Perth: Murdoch 

University. 

Painter, Claire 2007: ‘Children’s Picture Book Narratives: Reading Sequences of Images’. Anne 

McCabe, Mick O’Donnell and Rachel Whittaker, eds. Advances in Language and Education. 

London: Continuum. 40-59. 

Potter, Beatrix 2002: ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit, 1902’. Frederick Warne, ed. Beatrix Potter. The 

Complete Tales. The Original and Authorized Edition. London: Penguin. 9-20. 

Scott, Carole 1994: ‘Clothes in Nature or Nature Clothed: Dress as Metaphor in the Illustrations 

of Beatrix Potter and C. M. Barker’. Francelia Butler, R. H. W. Dillard, and Elizabeth Lennox 

Keyser, eds. Children’s Literature 22. Hollins Collegue: Yale UP. 70-89. 

––––– 2001: ‘An Unusual Hero: Perspective and Point of View in The Tale of Peter Rabbit’. M. 

Mackey, ed. Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit: A Children’s Classic at 100. Lanham: Scarecrow. 19-30. 

Spitz, Ellen 1999: Inside Picture Books. New Haven: Yale UP. 

Taylor, Judy 1987: Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit. London: F. Warne and Co. 

Ventola, Eija and A. Jesús Moya, eds. 2009: The World Told and The World Shown: Multisemiotic 

Issues. London: Palgrave Macmillan 

Received 5 October 2009 Revised version accepted 28 January 2010 

A. Jesús Moya (PhD University of Castilla-La Mancha) is Prof. Dr. in the Department of English, Facultad 

de Magisterio, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. He researches in discourse and text analysis and 

has published articles on thematicity, topicality, and multimodality in international journals such as Word, 

Text, Functions of Language, Journal of Pragmatics and Text and Talk. He is co-editor of The World Told 

and The World Shown: Multisemiotic Issues (2009, Palgrave Macmillan). 

Address: E. U. de Magisterio Fray Luis de León, Departamento de Filología Inglesa, Avenida de los Alfares 

s/n, 16071 Cuenca, Spain. Tel.: +34 969 179170. Fax: +34 969 179171. 


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The Age of The Diamond Age: 

Cognitive Simulations, Hive Wetwares and Socialized 

Cyberspaces as the Gist of Postcyberpunk 

Rafael Miranda Huereca 

Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona 

ramihuereca@yahoo.com.mx 

Cyberpunk has been copiously studied and accurately defined, while one of its spinoffs, 

postcyberpunk, has barely been approached as an independent genre. It is my intention 

in this article to provide a ground for study of such a category by scrutinizing the 

evolution of the shapes and significances of the concepts of cyberspace, wetware, 

networking and nanotechnology as some of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age central 

concerns. Themes such as patriarchy, feminism, reproduction, education and social 

evolution are approached, according to my view, by postcyberpunk in a way classic 

cyberpunk did not. 

Keywords: cyberspace; post-structuralism; hive wetwares; cognitive simulations; 

technophilia; patriarchy 

La era de La Era del Diamante: 

simulaciones cognitivas, wetware en enjambre y ciberespacios 

socializados como la esencia del postcyberpunk 

El ciberpunk ha sido copiosamente estudiado y definido con precisión, mientras que uno de 

sus derivados, el postciberpunk, ha sido rara vez analizado como un género independiente. Es 

mi intención en este artículo el proveer un terreno para el estudio de tal categoría por medio 

del escrutinio de la evolución de las formas y significados de los conceptos de ciberespacio, 

wetware, redes (networks) y nanotecnología como algunos de las preocupaciones centrales de 

La Edad del Diamante de Neal Stephenson. Temas como el patriarcado, el feminismo, la 

reproducción, la educación y la evolución social son planteados, según mi óptica, por el 

postciberpunk de manera diferente a como lo hizo el ciberpunk. 

Palabras clave: ciberespacio; postestructuralismo; wetwares en enjambre; simulaciones 

cognitivas; tecnofilia; patriarcado

142 Rafael Miranda Huereca 


Burgeoning studies have focused intently on the definition of cyberpunk, describing it 

as the 1980’s paranoid and baleful surmise on the future of humankind among 

computers, technology and corporations, or, in Sabine Heuser’s voice “a current within 

science fiction [that] has come to mean the tension or ‘shock value’ between ‘high tech’ 

and ‘low life’ represented by a version of cyberspace or virtual reality and a 

romanticized, usually male, hacker or cowboy who fights against … corporations” 

(2003: xviii). Cyberpunk’s centerfold novum, cyberspace, turned into the most 

prominent symbol of globalization, digital capital, control and dystopia, being 

rechristened over and over as it was provided with different specs of personality and 

functions: LARPs, nets, grids, metaverses, paraspaces, matrices, cyberlinks, etc., 

different names for different (but ultimately and paradoxically the same) purposes. 

Nevertheless, these new universes showed an evident tilt towards pessimism and 

paranoia: William Gibson’s portrayal of imminent ‘body anxieties’ (“[the] flesh the 

[console] cowboys mocked” [1995: 3]), an avidity for disembodiment and a spurning of 

corporate dominance shown in the Sprawl trilogy, Bruce Sterling’s representation of 

corporate terrorism and data piracy (for instance, his 1988 novel Islands in the Net), 

John Shirley’s depiction of neo-fascist networked regimes (the Eclipse trilogy), Rudy 

Rucker’s analysis of freewill and manipulation through mind transfer-downloading 

into android systems (Software), Pat Cadigan’s milieus where the obliteration of the 

boundaries of the real and the virtual takes place (Mindplayers, Synners). Similarly, as 

well as the cluster of films that accompany this period (Blade Runner, Terminator, 

Robocop, Tron, Brainstorm, Tetsuo, Hardware [M.A.R.K. 13]) revolve around dystopias 

and paranoid oppressions, becoming the center of attention of critics due to their 

remarkable novelties and their approach to long forgotten issues that cybernetics has 

come to confront and expose. 

Postcyberpunk, on the other hand, never garnered an enthusiastic attention and, to 

date, it has been neglected as a genre, although its relevance demands a profound 

definition, especially because of its pivotal contributions to the topoi that cyberpunk 

overlooked such as reproduction, feminism, social progress, biopolitics, familial 

structures, education, ecology, psychology and health. While cyberpunk was stuck with 

classic Manichean structuralist dualisms (the oxymoron itself denotes it: cyber vs. punk, 

high-tech vs. low life), postcyberpunk suggests relativism, multisignificance, an 

unbiased assessment of the power of technology and a postructuralist-oriented 

discourse that refuses to explore the cybernetic phenomena with a binary simplicity. In 

postcyberpunk biotech, technocracies and transhumanism usually mingle with 

cyberterrorism, dystopian scenarios, disembodiment or enhanced cyborgs, thus 

including, if not departing from, cyberpunk premises, then evolving into complex 

settings. 

It is clear, however, that postcyberpunk attracted more controversy than critique, 

mainly because it was regarded as a mere variant to cyberpunk and not as an 

autonomous genre, but as a ‘shallow’ offshoot with irrelevant contributions, although, 

conversely, it has been eulogized and studied by some critics (for instance, Lawrence 


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The Age of The Diamond Age 143 

Person) as the new proposal of science fiction that assimilates more objectively the 

current state of affairs and the impact of cybernetics and technology in modern life. 

Postcyberpunk, in my view, constitutes the most important recent label that approaches 

the sensitive philosophical issues that a technologic status quo like the current one 

exposes, in which people cope with the overwhelming and advantageous properties of 

the digital and nanotechnologic realms, without the gloomy partiality of cyberpunk. 

Yet, although postcyberpunk became consciously influenced by nanopunk and 

biopunk, thus shaping the social ethos and life expectancy through their pivotal 

contributions, the evolution of cyberspace – initially depicted by cyberpunk as a 

dystopian venue for control, financial rigor, disembodiment and fragmented 

perception – was perhaps the key element in the concoction of this nascent genre, since, 

as the hypothesis for this article reflects, cyberspace became transmuted into a field in 

which biopolitics, personal growth, health-care, information and social security gain 

progress, as presented in a variety of sources such as Greg Egan’s Permutation City 

(1994), Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire (1996), and Raphael Carter’s The Fortunate Fall 

(1996) as well as Masamune Shirow’s franchise Ghost in the Shell, Katsuhiro Otomo’s 

film Roujin Z (1991) and Shinji Aramaki’s Appleseed animes. Another tepid example of 

postcyberpunk is represented by the short story collection Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk 

Anthology (Kelly and Kessel 2007), which makes a diffuse effort to provide a clear 

definition of the fledgling genre by encompassing sundry proposals and dispersing its 

focus on vague topoi such as posthumanism, postapocalyptic scenarios, virtual realities 

‘of sorts’ and depicting ambiences that appear after cyberpunk rather than as its 

evolution. 

Nonetheless, perhaps the uppermost implication of this metamorphosis relates to 

the fact that cyberspace became a series of cognitive simulations in which scientific 

experimentation and accurate simulacra take place without further repercussions. An 

example of the seminal power of cyberspace as a cognitive simulation is shown in the 

1992 cyberpunk film The Lawnmower Man, in which a virtual reality aids a mentally 

handicapped man not only to cope with his disability, but to awaken dormant 

preternatural capabilities that turn him in an uncontrollable super-being. The 

pessimistic cyberpunkish essence of this film leads to the destruction and the 

demonizing of such a technology, contrasting with the novel scope of postcyberpunk, 

which would rather ponder over diverse options before crushing technology to a pulp. 

In this regard, by 1995, Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age, or A Young 

Lady’s Illustrated Primer became the clearest example in which cyberspace reveals an 

evolution from a dystopian atmosphere to a more humane ground, serving as the basis 

for the development of useful technologies and the amelioration of the self, yet also 

including cyberpunk’s approaches such as draconian control and corporate dominance, 

and by this, the book turned into a generic paragon of what postcyberpunk should be 

like: a confrontation of old mistrustful views with refreshing ideologies and 

unprejudiced analysis. 


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2. Cognitive simulations 

A novel set in a post nation-state Shanghai in which nanotechnology suffuses its 

atmosphere and permeates the physiques and psyches of its denizens, The Diamond 

Age’s plot departs from a classic cyberpunk tenor that teems with cyborgs, 

cyberweapons and slummy characters, and soon transfigures into a complex technosocial 

intertwinement in which governmental technocracies from diverse factions (the 

Victorians, the Chinese, the Nipponese and the black community) exert biopolitical 

policies upon their communities. In this way they outline a modern-day environment 

where technology is both beneficial and oppressing at the same time. 

The novel also presents sundry complex electronic networks (cyberspaces of sorts, 

molecular assemblers, hive-mind wetwares) that acquire multiple significances and 

roles within society such as sophisticated entertainment, basic education for children, 

the exchange of privileged information, the forging of basic commodities such as food, 

medicines and clothes among others. One of these grids is the Ractive network, a 

purveyor of interactive adult entertainment and a basic Sesame-Street responsive type 

of education for children, a type of cyberspace to which people jack-in in diverse 

manners: with the aid of eye goggles (as in Stephenson’s Snow Crash), smart paper 

(flexible electronic displays), mediatrons (3D-image projector bulging from electronic 

walls), or attend specialized parlors and theaters, while ractors or interactive actors 

require ‘tat-grids’ (skin embedded nano-prod tattooed lattices), which turn them into 

actual interfaced cyborgs. 

Such a cyberspace, a vestige from classic cyberpunk, constitutes the venue where the 

anonymous avatars of such ractors entertain paying customers by fulfilling their 

fantasies through realistic theatrical interactions (as in Cadigan’s Fools), or where 

impetuous teenagers – like Harv the teenager – revive the bellicose cyberpunk spirit of 

immersive video games, a reminiscence of such films as Tron, Brainscan, Nirvana, 

eXistenZ, Gamebox 1.0 and One point Zero or episodes such as ‘First Person Shooter’ (X 

Files). Yet, the evolution of this network is propelled forward when Victorian head 

honcho, Lord finkle-MacGraw, commissions a didactic tool (the eponymous Primer of 

the novel’s title) intended to educate a selected elite to produce polymaths and leaders, 

and which would use the selfsame grid as the ractive network. Cyberpunk formulas 

dictate the presence of a rebel (John Percival Hackworth) who burglarizes and hacks 

such a device; although different from it, it is not financial data that is stolen from the 

unfathomable corporate circles, but an educational implement, a teaching device, a 

vehicle for the forging and trafficking of information, which evinces that knowledge 

and information represent highly covetable commodities. 

The enthusiasm about the Primer reaches the other rivaling ‘phyles’, and soon the 

vying for such a gadget (implying a competition for education and information) 

constitutes one of the central plots of the book. A mixture of Marxist and Feminist 

theories can describe this struggle as the ideological rivalry for the seizure of the means 

of production and the conquering of equipment as another attempt to master, control 

and subdue any ‘inimical’ minority, as Cavallaro and Deborah Lupton explain: 


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‘For their male users … computers are to be possessed, to be penetrated and overpowered 

… This masculinist urge to penetrate the system … represents an attempt to split oneself 

from the controlling mother’. Yet once the user has jacked into the matrix (which, by the 

way, means womb), the dominant feeling is not a sense of absolute control but rather one 

of ‘engulfment’, induced by the architectural complexity of the matrix as a whole and by 

the local geography of ‘the inside of the computer body’ as ‘dark, enigmatic, potentially 

leaky, harbouring danger and contamination, vulnerable to invasion’. (Lupton in 

Cavallaro 2000: 131) 

Computers and cybernetics actually allegorize a modern scuffle for survival in a 

mechanized competitive world. Yet, as we deduce from the passage above, they appear 

constantly associated with the feminine, as they provide intellectual nourishment 

(information, advice, panoramas), but represent a desired passive field that can be 

penetrated, possessed and desecrated. This stands as the fundamental reason for which 

the female circles of Stephenson’s book are given the task of exploiting and developing 

such a complex network: the male characters are depicted as ferocious entities obsessed 

with empowerment, political struggle, shallow entertainment and violent actions, 

whereas the female spheres, free from the virile competition, are assigned the roles of 

education, upbringing, guidance and intellectual nourishment, and by this, the novel 

becomes the staple of the evolution that characterizes postcyberpunk. 

A trait already hinted at in Snow Crash, cyberspace can also serve as the 

‘information highway’ (the librarian becomes an indispensable and handy tool within 

the plot of such a novel) and not only as a financial intercom, although it is education, 

or more specifically, knowledge that becomes emphasized by the data flux in the Primer 

network of The Diamond Age. Assorted techniques are utilized to push data in the users’ 

minds to become eventually processed and transformed into knowledge: heuristics, 

simulations, interactions, puzzles, riddles, revisited myths, etc., to form part of the 

virtual theatrical performances that account for the ultimate aim of the Primer 

network. 

The interaction between Nell (the protagonist) and her unacquainted governess 

Miranda, as a sample of what occurs with the Primer, is based on a series of simulations 

in which both characters must combine a myriad of resources in order to solve 

conundrums and practical situations, imitating real life in the same manner as trainingsimulators 

do. Staging is proposed in the book as one of the most effectual implements 

for affixing knowledge in learners, a method that combines classic empiricism with 

Piaget’s constructivism, in which education focuses on accommodation (reframing 

knowledge) and assimilation (incorporation of new experiences), always guided and not 

imposed by adult facilitators. 

In this way, the Primer instructors (all of them women, since such a contrivance was 

devised to be tested among them) learn to ‘weave’ their own costumes so as to fulfill 

their roles, as in ancient times when women forged their own disguises in order to 

please men by transmuting into whatever they requested. Such an innovative cybermyth 

involves a circle of characters who blend computer technology with their 

customary thespian skills to build an alternative educational retreat. A correlation 

between computer simulations and the traditional role of women’s self-woven disguises 

is a constant in cybernetics narratives, since both constitute a mimesis, a forgery of the 


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world, a Baudrillardian simulacrum, the possibility of learning from a phenomenon by 

replicating it, as Irigaray and Plant have already outlined: 

The computer, like woman, is both the appearance and the possibility of simulation. … 

Woman cannot be anything, but she can imitate anything valued by man: intelligence, 

autonomy, beauty. … Indeed, if woman is anything, she is the very possibility of mimesis, 

the one who weaves her own disguises … she fits any bill, but in so doing, she is already 

more than that which she imitates. Woman, like the computer, appears at different times 

as whatever man requires of her. … And, like the computer … she … can mimic any 

function. As Irigaray suggests ‘… she is – through her inexhaustible aptitude for mimicry 

– the living foundation for the whole staging of the world’. (Irigaray, in Plant 1995: 59) 

The characters in The Diamond Age make use of computers and nanotechnology to 

simulate entire scenarios in which defamiliarized situations (as Shklovski noted) are 

shaped to produce enhanced versions of relevant, sensitive themes, surveying the 

successful manners in which humans acquire knowledge as well as the inadequacies of 

human deportment. Such staging techniques (magnification, defamiliarization, social 

representations) constituted one of the main trends of popular thought and knowledge 

from the late Middle Ages to the Baroque, when people explored, sauntered and 

gallivanted in different social strata from theirs, wearing disguises at carnival times and 

mimicking others’ roles in order to learn from their modus vivendi, as Bakhtin states: 

“[A]ll were considered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form 

of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the 

barriers of caste, property, profession, and age” (1993: 10). Stephenson’s new version of 

cyberspace provides examples of such mimicry and techno-dramatic methods that 

efficiently expose defamiliarized situations: 

The computer morphed her [Miranda] into the face of an adorable young woman whose 

face and hair looked typical of what was current in London at the moment; she wore the 

uniform of a British Airways ticket agent. “Good evening, Mr. Oremland”, she gushed, 

reading the prompter. The computer disped (sic) it into an even perkier voice and made 

subtle corrections in her accent. (1995: 116) 

Theatrical abilities are fully employed to supply situations in which learners will 

develop skills, expertise, street-smartness and logical/intuitive thought. Moreover, as 

Freud proposed, women weave their own disguises, mainly loincloths, to camouflage 

gender gaps and physical differences (Freud 1949). Nevertheless, in The Diamond Age 

the female characters merge their costumes (always related to technology) and the 

theatrical tradition of political satire to debunk patriarchal discourses. Examples from 

the novel blend simulations of revisited traditional mythologies and real-life-derived 

situations in which the characters (Nell in this case) must apply the abilities they learn 

in the Primer to either understand the fallaciousness of an ideology or to act 

correspondingly in a specific situation, as the following children’s tale simulation 

reveals: 

There was once a Baron named Burt 

Who was so tough he couldn’t be hurt 

And could wrestle a bear; but I think 

After two or three drinks 


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Like a child he’d throw up in his shirt. 

“Who dares mock the Baron?” Bellowed Baron Burt. (Stephenson 1995: 192) 

Satirists, mockers, debunkers, lampooners, impersonators, they all expose as much 

the beneficial aspect of a discourse as its falseness and bias. The assimilation of different 

roles and their contribution to the formation of a person’s subjectivity constitutes a 

recursive mechanism that attracts the reflective construction of new perspectives and 

refreshing judgments, an autopoiesis (as Maturana and Varela observed) of memes and 

cultural references that performs as a producer of self awareness by observing the 

distinction between simulation and experience, as Sherryl Vint notes when she 

distinguishes the critical approach gained in the Primer from an autopoietic 

consciousness built by the confrontation of its advice and its application: “The Primer is 

what allows Nell to learn about things outside her day-to-day experience and thus gain 

a critical perspective on her experiences. At the same time, the gap between her 

experience and the Primer allows her to gain a critical perspective on the Primer’s 

advice” (2007: 164). 

With the simulations and mimicries from the Primer, Stephenson appeals not only 

to an information highway, but actually to a knowledge highway, a cognitive series of 

autopoietic networked simulations (namely, postcyberpunk cyberspaces), where data is 

intuitively, heuristically and empirically assimilated and transformed into intelligent 

ideologies, this being another contribution from the biopolitical policies that abound in 

the book. Its motto not only demands ‘education for everyone’ but rather ´quality 

knowledge for everyone’. The main mechanism of this simulation lies in its capability of 

teaching people how to read (decode) and write (or rather rewrite) an experience within 

the conscious self, with its entire set of implications and rules: 

The parallel between making worlds in the Primer and making changes to the material 

world is located in Nell’s insight that each world functions similarly to a Turing machine; 

each has a define set of rules that can be used to produce predictable results. Nell’s ability 

to effect change in the material world is predicated on the fact that her insight allows her 

to understand and manipulate its rules. (Vint 2007: 165) 

Such a positivist remark, i.e. produce predictable results (one of sociological 

positivism’s goals is to explain and predict), and the combination of experience and 

scientific rigor have a basis on the modification of the sense of material phenomena and 

in a more powerful assimilation in the person’s subjectivity than traditional lecturing 

education. 

As a tool designed by men (like any other contrivance), the Primer is handed out to 

women – though unintentionally – by a trickster figure (a modern Prometheus) who 

conveys the secrets of the bumptious faux gods (corporate managers) to earthly 

humans, and who undergoes banishment from the divine spheres of the imperialistic 

powers: Hackworth (as his name posits) hacks the Primer and attempts to provide his 

own daughter with a copy of it in an effort to secure a better place for her in an 

uncertain future: “What was so bad about what he was doing? He was not selling any of 

the new technologies that Lord Finkle-McGraw had paid Bespoke [a software 

company] to develop. He was not profiting directly. He was just trying to secure a 


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better place in the world for his descendants, which was every father’s responsibility” 

(Stephenson 1995: 78). 

His audacious hacking actions incarnate a cyberpunk antihero-like archetype itself; 

nevertheless a slight change of discourse can be noticed, as it is known that such a genre 

refuses to approach reproduction, since, as Kevin McCarron states, “… the really macho 

aspect of cyberpunk lies in its complete lack of interest in biological reproduction” 

(1995: 270), and Hackworth, different from cyberpunk antiheroes, holds an enviable 

job, has a family and looks after his offspring, thus being rather closer to postcyberpunk 

than to the old school, as Lawrence Person suggests: “Far from being alienated loners, 

postcyberpunk characters are frequently integral members of society (i.e., they have 

jobs)” (1998). Furthermore he will become the key element for the social 

transformation of Shanghai, as he is captured by the underground rhizome society of 

the Drummers (a manipulated community that lives in a perennial state of comatose 

sexual fantasy) and will aid the development of the Seed technology, which, different 

from the monopolized Feed, will provide the Chinese tribes with a particle-stream that 

will supply Mater Compilers (molecular-assemblers) with atoms in order to forge food, 

clothes, weapons and sundry objects by configuring their molecules. 

3. Hive wetwares and socialized cyberspaces 

The book also presents two vast hive-bodies that embrace the purpose of exchanging 

compressed information conveyed by millions of nanosites swarming in the 

individuals’ bloodstream, passing from person to person by means of sexual 

intercourse: 

… the most important swarm system remains the nanosites introduced into the human 

bloodstream in the Drummers’ tunnels, which become the wetware of a biological 

computer. In the immense exchanges of information brought about through orgiastic 

and anonymous sex, it is hoped that self-organizing processes will provide the conditions 

in which an altogether new kind of Seed technology can emerge. (Johnston 2001: 235) 

More than an organic computer, such interlaced wetware (the Drummers’ network) 

plays the very role of a cyberspace, in which pieces of information are accreted and 

transformed to build up a massive intelligence or awareness, which, as the 

Neuromancer/Wintermute AI, exists as a suspended ghost-in-the-shell, although 

endorsing a social (not self-centered) purpose, thus becoming the key for the 

development of socialist inventions such as the Seed. 

The other hive body presented by the book, CryptNet, bears a resemblance to 

arcane, secret organizations, a type of Freemasonry or infiltration agency that once 

constituted a tribe of its own, and whose purpose is similar to that of the Drummers: 

the transmission of information-laden nanosites from member to member via sex 

exchange. While the Drummers live in a perennial reverie, a resemblance of the 

mechanical, unconscious labor of the enslaved people connected to the Matrix in the 

Wachowski brothers films, CryptNet members are conscious and possess freewill. 

On a first plane, this would present an inextricably link to the basics of cyberpunk, 

i.e. globalized controlling networks, which The Diamond Age refreshes by pushing these 


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wetware webs into the domain of socialist and cognitive fields. Andy Clark has also 

been aware of the potential of networks as agents in the complex process of selfcontrolled 

social evolution: “These external structures [symbolic and socialinstitutional] 

function so as to complement our individual cognitive profiles and to 

diffuse human reason across wider and wider social and physical networks whose 

collective computations exhibit their own special dynamics and properties” (1998: 179). 

What Stephenson and Clark (as well as Thomas Foster, as we’ll see later) attempt to 

describe by these implications is a series of posthuman processes of the mind as it 

becomes an autopoietic, webbed hive being that, to an extent, controls its own evolutive 

and self-cognitive processes. 

Thus, after Hackworth is sentenced to a ten-year reclusion for the theft of 

intellectual property (a process that forced him to become a double agent against the 

Victorians and to decrypt the Primer for the Chinese so that this phyle can educate a 

myriad of orphan girls) he is dispatched to the Drummers’ world. Such an action 

represents a patriarchal punishment which banishes him from the spheres of corporate 

power and deprives him of his most valuable attribute, his conscious, polymathic mind. 

As a sanction, he loses his identity and personality, becoming a faceless pawn (an 

allegory of fear of communism) in a gargantuan complex, stringently controlled by 

abstruse powers, thus incarnating a classic motif of science fiction and cyberpunk in 

which the cybernetic manipulation of a proletariat stands as the chief element of a 

‘healthy economy’, as David Tomas posits, a wired relationship between the powerful 

and the powerless: 

The human body is [, in the digital context,] reimaged and reimagined to be an 

inconsequential historical residue, a kind of chimera, or puppet, an automatonic image 

which is subject to almost infinite manipulation. Thus the ‘basic job’ of cyberspace 

technology, besides simulating a world, is […] to supply a tight feedback loop between 

patron and puppet. (1995: 38, emphasis original) 

From such a mechanized-labor and oblivion Hackworth will emerge after ten years 

only to realize he is a modern messiah who has unconsciously manipulated the mind of 

the Drummers in order to optimize their performance. He becomes a classic savior, 

initially dispossessed of freewill or choice, discovering in himself an unavoidable guide 

to his people, accepting his kismet, his karma (like Matrix’s Neo, Jesus or Buddha), and 

by doing so, he acquires a sense of meaning not for himself or his kin, but for a larger 

social body. He personifies the leader (a shepherd) of an unconscious mass of people 

programmed to carry out automated duties, but who will eventually re-attain freewill 

since Hackworth himself will negotiate a change of policy within Dr. X’s control-room 

(the Drummers’ master mind) by restoring their volition, for their task can only be 

thorough when they regain their free conscious lives. 

On the other hand, Hackworth enters such a shamanic trance, similar to the logging 

into to cyberspace, in which his body will remain passive while his mind brims with 

information, only to end up developing a patriarchal weapon, since the creation of the 

Seed technology will allow the elaboration of sophisticated weaponry (the most 

prominent tool of patriarchies) for the liberation of the Chinese phyle. The books 

depicts such a stratagem as an attempt to dissolve the Victorian monopoly, but by 


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doing so, it only magnifies the fierce competition among patriarchal forces, since it is by 

means of opposition and challenging that such a feud is intended to end, turning the 

situation in an endless and relentless strife that is repeated throughout history. It is not 

accidental that the Boxer Rebellion is carbon-copied in The Diamond Age in the shape 

of the conflict between the Victorians and the Chinese, becoming a pattern that exposes 

the inevitable struggle between oppressors and dominated, repeating itself over and 

over throughout time. 

In addition, the issues related to Matter Compilers accentuate the perpetual concern 

of science fiction about male domination and arrogation of women’s role in the 

creation of life by means of technology; as Huysen states: “The ultimate technological 

fantasy is creation without the mother” (Huyssen, in Doane 1990: 164). Though a 

biopolitical measure (these devices provide food, clothing and health), the presence of 

public Matter Compilers and molecular streams within people’s homes stand as the 

paramount desire for comfort and modernity; these appliances represent the 

quintessence of Marxian alienation, since the products no longer belong to craftsmen 

or to workers, not even to humans. The question of the correlation between technology 

and its circumstantial ideology is approached in the novel by a subplot in which 

estranged Chinese peasants will regain their ruling position in Shanghai when they are 

given the control of the new technologies that substitute the production of rice: the 

Seed technology will restore the link with the product and erase any trace of 

exploitation or dispossession. Dr. X, a philanthropist enmeshed in an unsolvable 

patriarchal dilemma, claims for the control on the Seed to counter the loss of 

spirituality once the West introduced its cryptic technology, and, unlike cyberpunkish 

technophobia, he does not demonize technology (an indispensable property in 

postcyberpunk narratives), but attempts to absorb its benefits by understanding its 

spiritual essence: 

Dr. X said [to Hackworth…] “Yong is the outer manifestation of something. Ti is the 

underlying essence. Technology is a yong associated with a particular ti that is Western, 

and completely alien to us. For centuries, since the Opium Wars, we have struggled to 

absorb the yong of technology without importing the Western ti [… and] we could not 

open our lives to Western technology without taking the Western ideas. … The result has 

been centuries of chaos. We ask you to end that by giving as the Seed. … Rice was the 

basis for our society. Peasants planted the seeds and had highest status in the Confucian 

hierarchy. … When the Feed came in from Atlantis, from Nippon, we no longer had to 

plant, because rice now came from the matter compiler … But under the Western ti, 

wealth comes not from virtue but from cleverness. So the filial relationships became 

deranged. Chaos”. (Stephenson 1995: 432) 

Stephenson’s anti-imperialistic inclinations attempt to include, not exclude, the 

spirit of technology and, through Eastern models, assembles a showcase for the West to 

assimilate the cybernetic advances that cyberpunk so intently tried to annihilate, 

especially when the innovative gadget (a cloning machine, a ghost in the machine, an 

android, a cyber-weapon) runs amok, malfunctions, is given the wrong use or turns 

incomprehensible (as happens in M.A.R.K. 13), becoming an escape-goat for the 

frustrations of humanity and a candidate for destruction. Nevertheless, the technophilia 

shown in The Diamond Age stands closer to an unconscious apology of patriarchal 


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schemes than to egalitarianism, since the main purpose of technology remains the 

defense of capitalistic interests, especially when the first uses of science and knowledge 

aim always, in futuristic narratives (and real life as well), at the exploitation and seizure 

of potential markets and resources. Nevertheless, by whatever means this novel may be 

analyzed, it becomes clear that Stephenson’s intention is focused at safeguarding the 

essence of technology (as a prop to modern welfare), and refusing to sabotage the 

evolution of machineries. 

This is the reason why CrytpNet turns into such a relevant element – even though 

the novel refuses to underline its importance – for it represents the conscious side of the 

innate perpetual correlation between technology and capitalism. It incarnates the 

chosen elite that manipulates ideologies, philosophies and propaganda, steers the reins 

of control, and whose illusion of choice resembles that of Neo’s clique in The Matrix. In 

such films the Merovingian, a disparaged version of a paranoid, controlling institutions, 

(e.g. the Catholic Church), states it clearly: “Choice is an illusion created between those 

with power and those without” (Wachowski and Wachowski 2003). CryptNet members 

contrast with the Drummers, as the former appear to control their own actions and the 

interconnection between affiliates, although the momentous project looming around 

them (the development of the democratized Seed) dictates their actual moves and 

dispossesses them of any real decision. While the Drummers represent mechanization, 

CryptNet embodies rationalization; neither of them stands any closer to freewill or 

choice, as they are both obliged to carry out their respective tasks. 

In addition, if the people connected to the Matrix (in the Wachowski’s franchise) 

symbolize a blind, motionless working mass who exchanges its force of labor for an 

illusion of happiness based on consumerism, the Drummers’ society might represent an 

alienated proletariat ordained to perennial sexual activity as an allegory of their 

accelerated, inevitable penchant for consumption, showered with sexual 

advertisements. As in The Matrix Trilogy anthology by Stacy Gillis in which 

postindustrial schemes are exposed as macho logic through “the subjugation of human 

being to the control of the machine master – the military leader (or factory owner)” 

(Cranny-Francis 2005: 104), Charles Leary’s analysis of The Matrix via Marxist theories 

also casts light on the type of relationship that the Drummers and CryptNet hold with 

the circles of power: 

The machine society gets its power (or “value”, rather) from the kinetic energy produced 

by the human mind. In order to keep the mind at work, with the mind or body having no 

chance to revolt, humans spend their lives unknowingly in the virtual reality of the matrix 

(6). So the matrix is the ideological apparatus, the artifice of reification – the 

superstructure, seen from the outside to be the evidence of the alienation of man's 

labour-power. The matrix code perhaps facilitates the means of accelerating circulation 

and consumption. The human bodies in stasis in the real world are the market, where the 

extraction of surplus value has approached perfection. The machines simply buy the 

labour-power of the human race with the dead remains of other workers. (Leary 2004) 

The entire focus of such films is on choice, apparently stating that the people 

enslaved by the Matrix have none of it. Nevertheless the rebels outside, apparently 

wielding freewill, have no choices other than to accomplish their role: Neo cannot 

choose to stay alive but only to sacrifice himself in behalf of humanity, and cannot 


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liberate humankind but only call on a truce with machines. Similar to this franchise, 

The Diamond Age purports to be a struggle between those with consciousness and those 

without, in which the bestowing of awareness on the dormant enslaved proletariat is 

the solution to the optimization of their performance: 

Dr. X said […] “The Seed is almost finished. When you left, the building of it slowed 

down very much […] But there is something in your mind that you have gained through 

your years of scholar studies that the Drummers, if they ever had it, have given up and 

cannot get back unless they come out of the darkness and live their lives in the light 

again” (1995: 430). 

With this, consciousness becomes no longer a safeguard for freedom or rebellion 

but another mechanism of control and subjugation, depicting CryptNet as the 

prototype of productivity and efficiency, although its performance, through not being 

subliminally mechanized as the Drummers’, lacks their fast pace and capabilities. 

Nevertheless, the Drummers’ awakening represents an actual and indubitable 

achievement of postcyberpunk, for the picture of an invulnerable patriarchal system is 

apposed to a potential vast cultivated proletariat (allegorized by the diverse hivewetwares 

and cognitive cyberspaces) who receive uncensored information and 

knowledge, leaving behind its traditional stamp of unenlightened class, yet 

simultaneously performing the task of corporate cannon fodder. 

Thus, postcyberpunk acknowledges multiple approaches to social standards, like the 

unsolvable conundrums of corporate capitalism and the benefits the masses obtain 

from patriarchal resolutions, all in a single narrative. Yet it continually deconstructs the 

meaning and purpose of every layer of the social stratification and shakes the 

significance of conventional roles to the point of debunking their appearance and 

intentions, leaving behind traditional Manichean depictions. Dr X Chinese, for 

instance, appears as a ‘benefactor’, though simultaneously as a controller of masses, a 

reimaged version of a Mao Zedong, who provokes a cultural revolution in China by 

awakening the dormant proletariat and by providing an army of orphan girls with 

cybernetic education, yet at the same time governs their destinies and ideologies on a 

large scale. 

The hive minds that would eventually spawn from the massive, educated working 

classes is portrayed in The Diamond Age as the possible source of the panacea or the 

philosopher’s stone, two abstractions so intently sought by the alchemists. It is not 

accidental that Hackworth’s main task is to locate a mysterious character known as the 

Alchemist who will render the ultimate impulse for the final development of the Seed, 

the democratized source of raw material that can transform atoms into actual objects, 

being this a representation of such longed panacea, a tool that will dole out welfare and 

stability to the masses. What these characters represent, along with their cognitive and 

socialist networks, is the idea of the modification of a social Darwinism by modifying 

the inner structure of a bio-social hive mass, what Thomas Foster signals when he 

defines posthumanism as the need to modify human nature so as to cope with a 

modified environment (in Wiener’s terms); by this he claims that bio-technology and 

mind-technology can act as the prime sources of such evolution: “[…] contemporary 

posthumanism impulses to intervene in and direct what would once have been a 


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process of natural selection, in order to accelerate humanity’s potential for 

differentiation and (self)modification, do tend to contest that boundary” (2005: 6). 

In other words, cyberpunk’s representation of cyberspace remains the oppressive 

field that obfuscates the users and provides illusions and chimeras, always an allegory of 

an implacable corporate domination, whereas postcyberpunk’s hyperbolic depiction of 

the virtual presents two facets, one showing a ground that resembles the dystopias of 

cyberpunk, the other, more in accordance with our era, attempts to display both the 

benefits and the drawbacks of current technology, on the one hand allegorizing the 

excruciating, iniquitous, enslaving power of the higher spheres (e.g. by means of the 

Drummers’ society and the Ractive network) and, on the other, a proposal for the 

apportioning of information, education and awareness among the masses (e.g. 

CrypNet, the Primer network) that will create a field for an autopoietic evolution. 

4. Conclusion 

Thus, finally, postcyberpunk, as a generic structure, must not only derive from 

cyberpunk but also include its essence in its own entrails, as a confrontation and a 

contestation, transforming it into a more appropriate view for the current times. 

Different from authors of the 1980s who had scarce means to study the influence of 

technology in day-to-day life, artists from the 1990s onwards had a broader scope of 

analysis, since technology was not only accessible to them but suffusing the globe: 

“Postcyberpunk possibly emerged because SF authors and the general population began 

using computers, the Internet, and PDAs to their benefit, without the massive social 

fragmentation of this Information Revolution predicted in the 1970s and 1980s” 

(‘Postcyberpunk’ 2007). 

In this manner, Stephenson’s depiction of the modern shapes and functions of 

cyberspace comprise a series of ambivalent approaches to cognitive and socialist 

technologies that, paradoxically, appear always within the control of ambiguous 

abstruse patriarchs who, on the one hand become aware of their role as large-scale 

social leaders, and on the other promote the hyperconsciousness of the complex mind 

of hive wetwares as the basis of self-controlled social evolution. Yet, it might not be the 

role of a single cyberpunkish cyberspace to be the center of such a socio-cybernetic 

search, but of sundry networks that observe their own intricate laws and which, in the 

long run, will construct a gargantuan mesh that encompasses the contributions of the 

other fields, thus building a complex meta-network based on cognition and an unaware 

clockwork of automat entities who become suffused by either conscious or unconscious 

cognitive processes. 

Works Cited 

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1993 (1941): Rabelais and his World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: 

Indiana UP. 

Cavallaro, Dani 2000: Cyberpunk and Cyberculture. London and New Brunswick: The Athlone P. 

Clark, Andy 1998: Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. London: MIT P. 


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Cranny-Francis, Anne 2005: ‘Moving the Matrix: Kinesic Excess and Post-industrial Being’. Stacy 

Gillis, ed. The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded. London: Wallflowers P. 101-13. 

Doane, Mary Anne 1990: ‘Technophilia: Technology, Representation and the Feminine’. Mary 

Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller and Sally Shuttleworth, eds. Body/Politics: Women and the 

Discourses of Science. New York and London: Routledge. 23-32. 

Foster, Thomas 2005: The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory. U of 

Minnesota P. 

Freud, Sigmund 1949: New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Trans. W.J.H. Sprott. 

London: Hogarth P. 

Gibson, William 1995 (1984): Neuromancer. London: Harper Collins. 

Heuser, Sabine 2003: Virtual Geographies: Cyberpunk at the Intersection of the Postmodern and 

Science Fiction. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 

Johnston, John 2001: ‘Distributed Information: Complexity Theory in the Novels of Neal 

Stephenson and Linda Nagata’. Science Fiction Studies 84.28: 223-45. 

Kelly, James Patrick and John Kessel 2007: Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology. San 

Francisco: Tachyon Publications. 

Leary, Charles 2004: What is the Matrix? Cinema, Totality and Topophilia. 

(Accessed 28 November, 2008) 

McCarron, Kevin 1995: ‘Corpses, Animals, Machines and Mannequins: The Body and 

Cyberpunk’. Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, eds. Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk: 

Cultures of Technological Embodiment. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage 

Publications. 261-74. 

Person, Lawrence 1998: ‘Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto’. Slashdot 

(Accessed 12 October, 2006). First published in Nova Express 16. 

Plant, Sadie 1995: ‘The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics’. Mike Featherstone and 

Roger Burrows, eds. Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological 

Embodiment. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage Publications. 45-64. 

‘Postcyberpunk’ 2007: Indopedia (Accessed 12 

November, 2007). 

Stephenson, Neal 1995: The Diamond Age or A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. New York: 

Bantam Books. 

Tomas, David 1995: ‘Old Rituals for New Space’. Michael L. Benedikt, ed. Cyberspace: First Steps. 

London: MIT P. 31-47. 

Vint, Sherryl 2007: Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity and Science Fiction. U of Toronto P. 

Wachowski, Andy and Larry Wachowski 2003: The Matrix Revolutions. Warner Brothers. 

Received 11 May 2009 Revised version accepted 21 November 2009 

Rafael Miranda Huereca graduated in Latin-American Literature at the UAEM [Universidad Autónoma del 

Estado de México] and in Music Composition at the Conservatory of the State of Mexico. He also gained an 

MA in Music Composition and Electronic Music at the Rotterdams Conservatorium, Holland and is a PhD. 

candidate at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona within the English Philology Department. He taught 

for five years at the UAEM and has lectured on microtonalism and music composition in diverse universities 

in Mexico, Holland and Spain. His current interests centre on multimedia projects, including video, 

electronic music and performance arts. 

Address: Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Departamento de Filología Inglesa y de Germanística, 

Edificio B Campus UAB 08193, Bellaterra (Cerdanyola del Vallés), Spain. Despatx: B11/118. Tel.: +93 

5812330. Fax: +93 5812001. 


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REVIEWS 

RESEÑAS

David Levey 2008: Language Change and Variation in Gibraltar. Amsterdam 

/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. xxii + 192 pp. ISBN: 978 90 272 

1862 9 

M. Teresa Turell 

Universitat Pompeu Fabra 

teresa.turell@upf.edu 

Model-building linguistic inquiry into language variation and change began with three 

seminal works, among several others, which contributed to the birth of a new linguistic 

paradigm in the late sixties and early seventies of the 20th century: one is Weinreich, 

Labov and Herzog’s ‘Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change’ (1968), 

further developed by Labov’s, “Building on Empirical Foundations” (1982), and the 

other is Labov’s What is a Linguistic Fact? published in 1975. In my view, they all set the 

foundations for the development of what linguistic historiography now refers to as the 

Theory of Language Variation and Change, but also for the development of several other 

linguistic models, probably impressionalistically referred to as functionalist, in the 

context of which the then outstanding generativist paradigm that identified form and 

referential meaning gave way to the consideration of the interplay of other types of 

meanings (social, stylistic) and functions to explain language behaviour, as Hymes 

pointed out as early as 1970 in the introduction to the first issue of Language in Society. 

The proposal of this new paradigm, geographically centred in North-American 

linguistics and further developed in Europe during the seventies and eighties, was 

motivated by intricate epistemological and methodological criteria. Up until then 

linguists had been engaged in the understanding of the human capacity to construct a 

linguistic system, rather than the external evidence behind that system. There was a 

general consensus on the nature of linguistic facts in order to optimize the Saussurian 

paradox and the study of the social aspect of language (langue) from the intuitions of 

one or two individual speakers within a homogeneous speech community, which 

allowed data collection from a great variety of languages. 

Thus, it could be said that it is the uniformity of the analysed linguistic facts and 

phenomena that forced a general agreement on the linguistic method used and the 

scarce interest for empirical phenomena. In their approach to what constitutes a 

linguistic fact there was controversy among linguists over the existence of variable 

versus invariant phenomena. On the one hand, Bloomfield’s disciples gradually develop 

the notion of the idiolect in order to exclude variable phenomena, so that each scholar 

would end up with a different set of linguistic facts and phenomena, which was an 

obvious attack on the Saussurean notion of langue as a general property of the speech 

community; on the other hand, the generative school ignored the problems raised by 

the existence of linguistic variation and excluded from their analysis any data which 

would compete with the linguists’ own idiolect, and this again represented an attack on 

Chomsky’s attempt to develop a theory of language from the clear cases. 


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158 M. Teresa Turell 

This new linguistic paradigm was proposed as an alternative to 50 years (between 

1925 and 1975) of language description based on the native speaker’s intuitions, which 

at the time turned out to be more and more limited and erroneous, to back up the 

linguists’ theoretical constructs, in order to be able to consider new perspectives in the 

relation between language and speech. The new paradigm proponents argued that 

linguistic explanations and analysis have to be correct since, as Labov (1975) affirms, no 

linguist should be interested in a universal grammar which is incorrect. As an 

illustration of the kind of debate that was taking place at the time, it is relevant to 

remember that the studies conducted by introspective generalizations demonstrated 

that language variation was extensive, uncontrollable and chaotic, whereas results 

derived from social and geographical dialects confirmed the opposite patterns, in the 

sense that all members of a speech community have access to the same interpretative 

norms even if they do not all use the same forms, and that language variation is less 

chaotic and more systematic than what idiolectal analysis has shown. 

Almost 40 years later, the results obtained through the application of this new 

paradigm can be integrated in a body of generalisations and principles which developed 

into what is nowadays known as the Theory of Language Variation and Change, which 

incorporates: (1) a set of premises on approach to a) language and language structure, as 

configurated by universals of cognition, memory and human logic, and also by its social 

use; b) language function, understood as the social effect involved in certain forms and 

usages, and c) language variety, that is, the vernacular, the most spontaneous variety of 

an individual which he/she shares with other members of his/her heterogeneous speech 

community, a linguistic construct proposed by Labov (1972) - further commented on 

by this scholar in Turell (1990) - which is not without its flaws (Romaine 1982) and 

further interpretations (Santa Ana and Parodi 1998); (2) a set of theoretical and 

methodological principles (the principle of structured heterogeneity, the principle of the 

grammar of the speech community (that is, the communication system used in social 

interaction) and the principle of uniformity in language behaviour, with elements of 

systematic linguistic variation, and social and stylistic stratification; (3) clear objectives to 

attain (the description of language variation); (4) discrete data to analyse (the 

vernacular) and (5) scientific methods of observation and description. 

From this conceptual and analytical context, it became clear that it was no longer 

possible to understand language change from homogeneous structures and that 

linguistic heterogeneity had to come into play; as a result, this new paradigm was born 

to view linguistics as an empirical science and its method as data-oriented. It set forth to 

ask and answer questions related to the mechanisms that cause linguistic variation and 

the routes taken by linguistic change, and it showed that although it is possible that 

certain linguistic facts are constrained only by internal linguistic factors, the majority of 

linguistic units, facts and phenomena are sociolinguistically based and so both internal 

and external factors have to be taken into account. 

An important token of this new parading has been the notion of integration: a) 

integration of internal and external sociolinguistically constrained variation, by searching 

who the innovators of language variation and change are through the analysis of six of the 

most relevant independent social variables: gender, age, social class, ethnicity, race and 

community size, and also the speaker’s status within the speech community and his/her 


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Reviews 159 

relations with members of other communities, together with supplementary information 

on the patterns of language behaviour, the homogenising effects of social networks and 

the transmission of variable elements from generation to generation and throughout 

historical periods; b) integration within the matrix of linguistic forms, in the sense that 

variation and change would be restricted, redirected and accelerated by their relations 

with other linguistic forms; c) integration within the speech community structure to 

know more about the social innovators of variation and change, how this variation and 

change extends to other groups and which groups are more resistant to these phenomena, 

in order to understand the causes of variation and change; and finally, d) integration in a 

multivariate framework - because language variation and change are constrained by a 

variety of internal and external factors - which has allowed scholars to come up with 

interesting results and a new body of generalisations. 

These results and generalisations are both conceptual and methodological and have 

been poured into a number of specialised linguistic journals, in particular, Language 

Variation and Change, which was founded in 1989 and in the Proceedings of NWAVE 

(New Ways of Analysing Variation in English and Other Languages), before the setting of 

the journal just mentioned, and in the Proceedings of ICLaVE (International Conference 

on Language Variation in Europe) since its establishment in 2000, in addition to the 

seminal literature that these 40 years of model and theory-building have foreseen: 

Labov (1972a), Labov (1972b), Bayley (1973), Chambers and Trudgill (1980), Sankoff 

(1980), Romaine (1982, 1994), Trudgill (1983), Sankoff (1986), Silva-Corvalán (1989), 

and in particular the three masterpiece volumes on internal (volume 1), social (volume 

2) and cognitive and cultural (volume 3) factors that Labov has published during the 

last two decades: Labov (1994), Labov (2001) and Labov (forthcoming). 

Among several, the most important generalisations proposed by this paradigm have 

to do with a) the observation of structured linguistic variation in all languages, b) the 

nature of factors, that is, that internal factors are independent among them, while 

external factors are interactive, and that the consequences of cognitive factors in 

linguistic change cannot be disregarded any longer; c) the relations between synchrony 

and diachrony and d) the nature of linguistic change (its beginnings, stabilisation and 

consolidation; who the leaders and innovators are, with the observation and description 

of the curvilinear pattern and the routes taken by change itself; furthermore, one of the 

main strengths of this paradigm is the body of conceptual and epistemological 

principles developed (changes from above, changes from below) and methodological 

approaches and techniques (aparent/real time data collection contexts, panel/survey 

studies, a multivariate framework of analysis with the use of probabilities and not mere 

percentages). These premises, principles and methods corroborate that it is a theory and 

model-building paradigm and that substantial developments in the discipline will 

occur, in particular through the more recent understanding of the effects of cognitive 

and cultural factors (how individuals evaluate variation and change, the status of 

variable rules in synchronic grammar, the study of dialectal inter-comprehension, the 

acquisition of variation patterns by children, and the study of syntactic variation in long 

periods and also of syntactic variation in progress, detected in emerging creoles). 

David Levey’s Language Change and Variation in Gibraltar offers a useful overall 

view of several aspects that characterise the sociolinguistic situation in the British 


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colony, particularly in relation to language shift and “language contact in Gibraltar” 

(Anderson 2008), useful as well because the territory and population chosen “are so 

small that it is easy to carry out detailed research” (Nuessel 2009). Anderson (2008) 

and Nuessel (2009) reviewed this monograph – the former both descriptively and 

critically; the latter merely descriptively – and detailed its contents by chapters. My 

review of Levey’s volume is preceded by a long summary of the theoretical and 

methodological principles of the Theory of Language Variation and Change because, 

although in the introduction to Language Change and Variation in Gibraltar the author 

anticipates that the “study adopts a variationist sociolinguistic approach” (2008: 8) and 

the title indeed includes the terms change and variation, I hope to be able to show that 

this book has to do with the variationist sociolinguistic model only very partially. 

The book title misleads the reader in three ways. The title is misleading in scope, 

since in order to be able to account for whatever the object or objects of study are, it 

would have been necessary to consider the impact of Spanish on the English of the 

whole population of Gibraltar, stratified by other age groups, and not only on the 

English usage of the adolescents and pre-adolescents living in the British colony; it is 

also misleading vis-à-vis the real content of the book. There is a terminological 

inadequacy between the title and the contents. Levey refers to language change when he 

supposedly means to refer to language shift, that is, the steady substitution of one 

language, or variety of language, by another, as the usual means of communication. By 

the analysis of the first four chapters the real content of the book seems to deal with 

language contact, language choice, language shift (wrongly named as language change, 

hence the title) and language attitudes, rather than with language variation and change 

in the variationist sense; finally, the title is also misleading in terms of focus since, if its 

contents really had to do with a variationist view of the sociolinguistic situation in 

Gibraltar, one would have expected a different word order in the title key words, that is, 

language variation should have been phrased before language change since, as Labov 

says, there is no change without variation; variation precedes linguistic change and not 

the other way round; in fact, variation is an index of change, even if many changes 

never make it through the linguistic system. 

The main strength of this volume could have been the proposal phrased in the 

introduction (chapter 1) of an analysis in real time (that is, counting on the recent data 

included in the book (real time data) and similar evidence collected 10-15 years before 

in apparent time (apparent time data) of the three language varieties involved in 

Gibraltar: the varieties of the English and the Spanish spoken in the colony and the 

mixed variety known as Yanito, thoroughly described in the literature (Moyer 1993; 

Levey 2006); however, this anticipation is not pursued in the following chapters and the 

book is reduced to a partial description of language choice and language contact in two 

very specific segments of the population: adolescents and pre-adolescents. Chapter 2, 

with a description of the speech communities of Gibraltar, both diachronically and 

synchronically, is very useful and highly relevant as is chapter 3, where the fieldwork 

and the methodology, not without its own weaknesses, are described. This chapter will 

be commented on together with chapters 5 and 6. As to chapter 4, on language choice, 

competence and attitudes, I agree with Anderson (2008) that these three topics are very 

superficially considered; moreover, it is surprising that competence in particular is not 


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investigated by means of methods derived from census linguistics and other approaches 

within the tradition of socio-demography of language; in fact, the use of demolinguistic 

projections (Casesnoves, Sankoff and Turell 2006) could have shed some light on the 

prospects of English and Spanish in terms of competence and real use. 

The comments that follow refer to chapters 5 and 6, by far the most interesting in 

terms of the aims stated in the book and the variationist standpoint anticipated by the 

author. These two chapters characterise the variable nature of the vocalic and 

consonant make up of Gibraltar English and investigate the areas of potential Spanish 

transfer by looking at several minimal pairs, mergers and other phonetic phenomena 

and by contrasting their behaviour with the one observed in in situ analyses of other 

British English varieties that are very well documented. One theoretical issue which this 

contrastive viewpoint raises but for which it still does not offer a clear answer is whether 

these variable contexts are solely motivated by language contact with Spanish or also by 

the evolution of the internal structure of English. 

Both chapters reflect theoretical and methodological flaws, on which I will comment 

in the first place and then mention how one methodological decision may have affected 

the theoretical contribution that the results could have involved, since decisions on 

speech community sample, its stratification, its collection method and the methods and 

techniques used have a direct effect on the results obtained and thus on the evaluation 

and further confirmation of the hypotheses and premises that are at play in variationist 

sociolinguistic analyses of language variation and change. 

The sample used to study the vocalic and consonant system of Gibraltar English is 

more than sociologically representative (72 Gibraltarians) within the margins of the two 

age groups considered (38 adolescents and 34 pre-adolescents), although I also agree 

with Anderson (2008) in that there was no need to introduce the social variable of 

ethnicity (Indian and Moroccan) given the scarce representation of their population in 

the sample chosen; however, if the author wished to say anything relevant in relation to 

who the leaders of linguistic change in Gibraltar are and to the real direction taken by 

language change in this speech community, then the notions of apparent and real time 

should have been considered in the studies conducted by Levey and one or both of the 

two types of experimental design studies usually applied in sociolinguistic variation 

should have been chosen: a) trend studies, where there is a choice of a very similar 

population sample several years (10-15) after the first data collection took place, the 

instruments and the same analytical techniques, and b) panel studies, in the context of 

which the same individuals are traced down also several years later (10-15) and the same 

instruments and techniques are used. 

More importantly, in the present study this methodological decision should have 

also involved the consideration of other age groups which stratify present day Gibraltar 

population, and not only by comparing the results to previous studies (Cal Varela 2001) 

but rather, at least when the same sounds are being analysed, by collecting data from all 

age groups and not simply adolescents and pre-adolescents. In fact, what seems an 

innocuous methodological decision of not going back to the past sociolinguistic 

situation and the scenario observed 10-15 years ago, could involve that the distribution 

in use of a specific sound variable across different age groups would be reflecting a 

characteristic patterns of age gradation repeated in each generation rather than a 


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linguistic change in the variety of a particular speech community, as Labov (2001) 

illustrates in many of the communities observed throughout the years of consolidation 

of the variationist paradigm. 

My second methodological objection has to do with the techniques used to analyse 

the data. It is more than surprising that given the fact that Levey pretends to adopt a 

variationist sociolinguistic viewpoint with four social variables under analysis (age, 

gender, ethnicity [really unnecessary] and class), he then uses quantitative methods that 

only yield percentage results and does not take advantage of the several techniques 

contained in multivariate statistical packages (Goldvarb for McIntosh, Varbrul 2 and 3, 

Goldvarb for Windows 2001, 2006) and in packages that analyse linguistic variance 

(Rietvelt and van Hout 2005), the long-run application of which has shown that in 

correlational sociolinguistic variation studies percentages can be misleading and that 

probabilities and cross-tabulation allow the researcher to come up with more refined 

and reliable results. 

Levey’s Language Change and Variation in Gibraltar shows strengths and 

weaknesses. It is hoped that the discussion on some of the weaknesses raised may have 

clarified why the author’s anticipation that his study adopts a variationist sociolinguistic 

approach is unprincipled. One of the strengths of the book is that it considers a small 

speech community, which could have been highly relevant to the ongoing debate on 

language variation and change in progress in non-stable sociolinguistic communities 

such as Gibraltar; however, there are too many topics considered, none of these topics is 

fully addressed and some of them “are simply treated in cursory evaluation” (Anderson 

2008); furthermore, there is some terminological confusion and no clear focus on the 

fundamental issues contained in a real variationist sociolinguistic approach. Finally, 

although the book makes an interesting contribution to a general characterisation of 

English usage by youth in Gibraltar, it seems that a variationist sociolinguistic study of 

the use of Spanish and Yanito, the mixed variety extensively used by Gibraltarian 

society, should have also deserved some research scrutiny. 

Works Cited 

Anderson, Tyler K. 2008: Rev. of Language Change and Variation in Gibraltar, by David Levey. 

LINGUIST List 19.3842. 

Cal Varela, Mario 2001: Algunos aspectos sociolingüísticos del inglés gibraltareño: Análisis 

cuantitativo de tres variables en el nivel fónico. Santiago de Compostela: Servicio de 

Publicaciones de la U de Santiago de Compostela. 

Casesnoves, Raquel, David Sankoff and M. Teresa Turell 2006: ‘Linguistic Shift and Community 

Language: The Effect of Demographic Factors in the Valencian Region, Balearic Islands and 

Catalonia’. Clare Mar-Molinero and Miranda Stewart, eds. Globalization and Language in the 

Spanish-speaking World. Macro and Micro Perspectives. Palgrave: MacMillan. 197-219. 

Hymes, Dell 1970: Introduction. Language in Society 1: 1-14. 

Labov, William 1975: What is a Linguistic Fact? Lisse: The Peter de Ridder P. 

Labov, William. 1982: ‘Building on Empirical Foundations’. Winfred P. Lehmann and 

Yakov Malkiel, eds. Perspectives on Historical. Linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. 17-92. 

Labov, William 1994: Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal Factors. Vol 1. Oxford and 

Cambridge: Blackwell. 


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Reviews 163 

Labov, William 2001: Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors. Vol 2. Oxford and 

Cambridge: Blackwell. 

Labov, William (forthcoming): Principles of Linguistic Change: Cognitive and Cultural Factors. Vol 

3. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell. 

Levey, David 2006: ‘Yanito’. Keith Brown, ed. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 2 nd ed. Vol 

3. Oxford: Elsevier. 724-25. 

Moyer, Melissa 1993: Analysis of Code-switching in Gibraltar. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis. U de 

Barcelona, Spain. 

Nuessel, Frank 2009: Rev. of Language Change and Variation in Gibraltar, by David Levey. 

Language Problems & Language Planning 33.3: 269-71. 

Rietveld, Toni and Roeland van Hout 2005: Statistics in Language Research: Analysis of Variance. 

Berlin ad New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 

Romaine, Suzanne 1982: Socio-historical Linguistics: Its Status and Methodology. Cambridge: 

Cambridge UP. 

Romaine, Suzzane 1994: Language in Society: An introduction to sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford UP. 

Sankoff, David 1986: Diversity and Diachrony (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 53). 

Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. 

Sankoff, Gillian 1980: The Social Life of Language. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P. 

Santa Ana, Otto and Claudia Parodi 1998: ‘Modeling the Speech Community: Configuration and 

Variable Types in the Mexican Spanish Setting. Language in Society 27.1: 23-51. 

Schiffrin, Deborah 1984: Meaning, Form and Use in Context: Linguistic Applications. GURT 1984. 

Washington D.C.: Georgetown UP. 

Silva-Corvalán, Carmen 1989: Sociolingüística. Teoría y práctica. Madrid: Alhambra. 

Trudgill, Peter 1983: On Dialect: Social and Geographical Perspectives. New York and London: 

New York UP. 

Turell, M. Teresa 1990: ‘Interview to sociolinguist William Labov’ (U. de Pennsylvania), Revista 

Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 19-20: 277-88. 

Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov and Marvin Herzog 1968: ‘Empirical Foundations for a Theory 

of Language Change’. Winfred P. Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel, eds. Directions for Historical 

Linguistics. Austin: U of Texas P. 95-188. 

Received 12 December 2009 Accepted 30 January 2010 

M. Teresa Turell is Professor of English Linguistics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain). She 

received a Ph.D. in Catalan Philology from Universitat de Barcelona (1981), an M.A. in Linguistics and ELT 

from the University of Leeds (1974) and an M.A. in Forensic Linguistics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra 

(2008). She has conducted extensive research on Catalan, Spanish and English sociolinguistic variation, 

qualitative and quantitative studies of language contact and, more recently, analysis of forensic authorship 

attribution, plagiarism detection and trademark litigation. Results of this research have appeared in 

Language Variation and Change, Language in Society, Treballs de Sociolingüística Catalana and The 

International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law. Her most recent publications as an editor include: 

Lingüística Forense, Lengua y Derecho. Conceptos, Métodos y Aplicaciones (Barcelona: Publicacions de 

l’IULA, 2005), El Plurilingüismo en España (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’IULA, 2007) and Dimensions of 

Forensic Linguistics (Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2008), co-edited with John Gibbons. She 

is the head of the UVAL group (Unitat de Variació Lingüística), Director of ForensicLab at Institut 

Universitari de Lingüística Aplicada (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Academic Director of the Master’s 

programme in Forensic Linguistics (IDEC-IULA) in this same university. 

Address: Institut Universitari de Lingüística Aplicada, Campus de la Comunicació, Universitat Pompeu 

Fabra, c/ Roc Boronat, 138. 08018 Barcelona, Spain. Tel.: +34 93 5421392. Fax: +34 93 5422321. 


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Bullón-Fernández, María, ed. 2007: England and Iberia in the Middle Ages. 12 th -15 th 

century. Cultural Literacy and Political Exchanges. New York and Houndmills: 

Palgrave McMillan. xiv + 250pp. ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-7224-8, ISBN-10: 1-4039-7224-9 

Paloma Tejada Caller 


ptejadac@filol.ucm.es 

As an area of research, medievalism has seemed institutionally marginal, although we 

may now be attending a ‘medievalist turn’. The essays in this volume examine the 

literary, historical, artistic and religious interactions between England and Christian 

Iberia from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. 

The book is divided into 10 chapters, to which an extensive Bibliography, an Index 

and 6 figures are added. After Bullón’s ‘Not all roads lead to Rome’, which serves as an 

introduction to the volume, Jennifer Goodman’s ‘Medieval England and Iberia: A 

Chivalric Relationship’ explores the circulation of chivalric poems and narratives 

between England and Iberia and traces the most important exchanges among historical 

knights and royal family members before the rival empires of England, Spain and 

Portugal had actually emerged. In Chapter 2, ‘British influence in Medieval Catalan 

Writing’, Lluís Cabré reasseses the established English connection of Tirant lo Blanc and 

Martorell’s command of English. For Cabré “the English connection of Tirant is 

evident: some of its roots in British writings are not” (40). In ‘The Shrine as Mediator: 

England, Castile, and the Pilgrimage to Compostela’ (Chapter 3), Ana Echevarría 

explores the importance of pilgrimage routes and their links to the political and 

economic interests of the countries involved. Rose Walker contributes chapter 4, 

‘Leonor of England and Eleanor of Castile: Anglo-Iberian Marriage and Cultural 

Exchange in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, where she compares two similar 

Anglo-Iberian marriages: that of Henry II’s daughter, Leonor, to Alfonso VIII of Castile 

with that of Eleanor of Castile and Edward, Henry III’s son. Cynthia L. Chamberlin’s 

chapter 5 ‘A Castilian in King Edward’s Court: The Career of Giles Despagne, 1313-1327’ 

investigates “the great regard Edward II had for his Castilian heritage and how he used 

the dynastic links … to strengthen his position” (89). Chapter 6, ‘Anglo-Portuguese 

Trade during the Reign of João I of Portugal, 1385-1433’, by Jennifer C. Geouge, 

highlights “the problems encountered by merchants and the vicissitudes of [Anglo- 

Portuguese] trade relations during the reign of João I” (119). Joyce Coleman’s ‘Philippa 

of Lancaster, Queen of Portugal – and Patron of the Gower Translations?’ argues that it 

was the Queen who promoted the Iberian translation of Gower’s Confessio Amantis. In 

‘Os Doze de Inglaterra: A Romance of Anglo-Portuguese Relations in the Later Middle 

Ages?’, Amelia P. Hutchinson adds to our understanding of the poem as a combination 

of oral traditions subjected to considerable literary treatment and establishes it as an 

icon of Anglo-Portuguese relations in the later Middle Ages. Last, in his ‘Chaucer 

Translates the Matter of Spain’ a witty and insightful R.F.Yeager complains about the 


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166 Paloma Tejada Caller 

absence of recognized Spanish influences on Chaucer (189). Yeager defends the idea 

that there are abundant reasons to seriously consider the “Matter of Spain” in Chaucer 

studies and suggests that Chaucer’s first taste of Italian literature may quite likely have 

occurred in Iberia. (202). 

After this brief description of the book’s contents, the most obvious finding to 

emerge from the project is that “the past is a different country” (Hartley 1953:1). It 

becomes clear that the inhabitants of the collectivity called Iberia and those of England 

did things differently from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Not only are readers 

carried into a different historical, political and social setting, but also, and most 

importantly, they are encouraged to reflect seriously on conventional historiography. 

In England and Iberia a politically, socially and identitarianly bizarre world is 

unveiled: one of dynastic warfare and royal marriages; of crusading and pilgrimage, of 

an unstable Roman Pontificate and schism. In such a world, Europe’s distribution of 

political and naval power greatly differed from today’s, treaties were constantly issued 

and reissued and trade took place within continental borders. On the horizon, France 

and the 100 Years’ War dominated the scene, severely influencing both Iberian dynastic 

conflicts and the habits and social lives of the European peoples. 

However, acknowledging ‘the past is a different country’ does not only imply the 

recognition of a different state of things. The reader is invited to think about 

conventional historiographical practices. And this may be said to be the book’s major 

contribution. 

Very often history and historiography have conditioned our twenty-first-century 

vantage point, limiting our view to the glory of successful structures, behind which 

interesting intermediate stages of development are hiding. These stages, though 

secondary and marginal to that ‘history of success’ (after Aarsleff’s [1983] linguistic 

history of success), remain perfectly stable and complex until they are superseded by 

others, and although essential to a proper understanding of reality, they can only be 

defined through dynamic reinterpretations of history. From our contemporary 

standpoint, the Middle Ages described in the volume under review should probably be 

thought of as marginal to the general course of history and to constitute a sociopolitical 

system which eventually failed. But as such, it must be reconstructed. 

There is no doubt that development in an interdisciplinary area of studies has 

helped to write these unconventional histories. A stronger cultural receptivity 

towards the synchronic otherness of past societies has become central to the historical 

approach and particular attention is now being paid to what people said, did and 

wrote in their own historical context. Planned according to this well-established line 

of studies, England and Iberia surpasses nineteenth-century theoretical constructions 

and their closely related prejudices – some of them unfortunately still alive, as proved 

by Coleman’s complaint (157). Firstly, the book overcomes so-called evolutionism, 

prone to link temporality with linear sequence, to build the past from its outcomes 

and mechanically establish a direct relation between results and their causes. And 

secondly, it opts for the social side of history, where individuals, their points of view, 

their will and conscience are paramount. As a result, a more complex interpretation 


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of history emerges: a non-linear, dynamic representation of events, bringing to light 

peripheral themes and characters, rejecting essences and moving beyond fact. All this 

is found in England and Iberia as I shall attempt to sketch. 

The non-linear nature of history is insistently confirmed by the description of a 

complex political situation defined by its inner dynamicity. England, Spain and 

Portugal do not stand out as the three isolated, full-fledged countries of our age. 

Contrarily, we attend a failed stage in which a changing collection of kingdoms 

(Portugal, Castile, León, Navarre, Aragon, Catalonia) interact with one another, 

somewhat apart from the territories in the south still held by the Moors. This unusual 

world is neatly described by Yeager (203-04). 

In contemporary approaches to the past, social issues take precedence over political 

ones. In this respect, Bullón states that “English and Iberian people who may or may not 

have had significant political power also engaged with each other for religious, economic, 

intellectual and literary reasons” (7), and she adds that the authors set out “to examine 

the different ways in which peoples and nations interacted and influenced each other, 

even when it seems that they did not” (8, my italics). The purpose of fulfilling this goal 

yields the description of unexpected intermingling between peoples: Goodman brings 

to light English and Spanish chivalric exchanges; Yeager depicts the active living 

together of the English and the Spanish at John of Gaunt’s court; Coleman carefully 

evokes the interaction between the English and the Portuguese during the reign of João 

I. On an individual level, Cabré traces Joannot Martorell touring England, Yeager tracks 

Chaucer’s travels about Spain and Goodman describes Felip Boil and John Astley’s 

encounter in fifteenth-century England. Furthermore, contrary to naïve expectations, 

the Spaniards did not act in unison. In the late 1300s “Spanish knights (and kings) 

[were] fighting on both sides” of Iberian dynastic conflicts (19). 

The social bias of historical studies often implies a focus on peripheral themes and 

characters, marginal to conventional histories. Consequently, special emphasis is given 

throughout the book to queens, to whom several chapters are devoted, such as Walker’s 

or, more ardently, Coleman’s. This author openly complains that up to now the 

historians’ emphasis has been on Gaunt. She credits Philippa with the initiative of 

having Gower’s work translated and comes to suggest that the rejection of her thesis 

might be due to a desire “to avoid having to acknowledge a female as instigator of an 

important literary event” (157). Borderline characters to the narration of the medieval 

course of events have also been yeomen and friars, to whom particular regard is also 

paid in the book. Chamberlin highlights the figure of Giles Despagne, a yeoman in the 

service of Edward II and Cabré elaborates on the role played by Aragonese friars in the 

early Catalan reception of British works. 

On the unnoticed margins of history lies also the Castilian court in exile. The reader 

is offered the description of John of Gaunt’s household centered at the Savoy as a 

cultural melting pot. Apparently, Gaunt and Constanza “promoted Spanish styles…, 

encouraged a number of Castilian-English marriages and formalized tutoring for native 

speakers of both languages” (193). This current finding will help to tie up loose ends 

and initiate new paths of research. 


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Not least surprising are Chaucer’s wanderings as a tourist. Yeager traces the most 

revealing Spanish references in The Canterbury Tales and notes that the English author 

departed from his sources to identify the landmarks of Iberian geography, which 

suggests “familiarity born of remembrance” (197). The author encourages further 

research on The Hous of Fame, remarking that there are in it “allusions to things 

Spanish, characteristic not of a bibliophile but of a sharp-eyed tourist” (199). 

Literary margins are also brought to the fore in most chapters. Let me simply draw 

attention to Cabré’s pioneering research in notarial archives, Chamberlin’s careful 

handling of records and letters, or Yeager’s effort to rescue little-known books, such as 

Petrus Alfonsus’ Disciplina clericalis, representative of “an especially Iberian subgenre of 

collected exempla in which the sources are openly Oriental”, in order to speculate on 

Chaucer’s involvement with Spanish literature (200-01). 

Similarly, knowledge of language has been thought of as a key factor in the 

reconstruction of medieval exchanges. Cabré reasseses Martorell’s command of 

English, stressing the fact that the Catalan writer transliterated toponyms and title 

names most exactly. Yeager, in turn, elaborates upon Chaucer’s competence in 

Spanish. He suggests that he “may have picked some Spanish amidst the mercantile 

world of his boyhood and then added a bit to his knowledge while in the Peninsula”, 

concluding that Chaucer’s Spanish connections “at home are more extensive than is 

often thought” (194). 

The emphasis laid on social and individual issues has increasingly forced historians 

to dive into emotions as necessary clues to understand reality. And this book does not 

ignore them. Thus, Chamberlin stresses Edward II’s predilection for things and people 

associated with his mother, and his “quality of devoted loyalty to his personal friends” 

and subjects (90). Chamberlin’s research on feelings allows her to partly explain 

Edward II’s behaviour, as well as that of his yeoman’s, Giles Despagne. 

Particularly relevant to the emotional side of history are perceptions of self – and 

other identity. In that respect, Bullón’s volume contributes to a better understanding of 

stereotypes as changing patterns of identification. So, for the Spanish reader England 

will no longer be that nation of bárbaros fieros, disdained by Rubén Darío; or those 

isolationist, pragmatic people, of outlandish dress, occasional drunkards, pirates and 

aggressive, as built in the Spanish twenty-first-century popular imagination; or the 

utmost symbol of freedom and ideological tolerance, as conventionally held by 

nineteenth-century scholars (For a more detailed description, see Tejada [2005, 2006]). 

In the case of Portugal, the Spanish reader will overcome the stereotyped idea of their 

neighbours as sentimental and indecisive people, a ‘country of poets’ or of heroic 

explorers and cartographers. Correspondingly, the Portuguese will no longer see in the 

Spaniards the upstart and arrogant "big brother” (Berdichevsky 2007), proud and 

exalted, tragic and ardent. And as for the English, the Iberian people will no longer 

correspond to those rude, ignorant and ridiculously ceremonious folk. Spain and 

Portugal will not just represent places of extreme otherness, “cut loose from England” 

and rendered unimportant after the Industrial revolution (190). 


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Very much the contrary. Although we are told that the medieval two-way traffic of 

peoples resulted in stereotyped images (25), 1 new and surprisingly positive components 

are to be added to the current representation of the Other. A new image of 

collaboration between British and Iberian citizens emerges from the present study: 

“knights and aristocrats of the British Isles and Iberia built up a tradition of 

…collaboration” (11). English and Scottish crusaders would fight Islamic opponents 

alongside Castilians and Portuguese (12-14), and Philip II supposedly tried to use 

tournaments to encourage friendships between the “white, pink and quarrelsome” 

English and his Spanish knights (22). Moreover, this research provides further details to 

our national portrayals. Medieval Iberia, associated with crusading, became appreciated 

as a place of opportunities; Britain was portrayed as “a kind of nursery or training 

ground for knights” (24), and English heroes were apparently most admired in the 

Middle Ages, according to fifteenth-century Iberian romances (23). 

From a wider point of view, the articles in Bullón’s edited volume may be said to 

confirm a clear interest in the symbolic nature of events. History moves beyond fact. In 

this respect, the reader will discover that Gaunt’s carefully planned visit to Santiago 

turns symbolically important, since Santiago was “the figure chosen to ratify newly 

anointed kings” (56). Similarly, Coleman’s interpretation of Philippa’s policy of anglophilia 

reveals the queen’s desire to promote a sense of Portuguese identity (149, 154). 

Symbolic power and wealth of earthly kingdoms serve as a base for Walker’s research. 

And it is also the symbolic power of a poem that is highlighted in Os doze de Inglaterra: 

the poem crystallizes an ideal moment of glory for Portugal (168), by portraying the 

Portuguese as superior to their English allies. 

The determination to explore the symbolic meaning of events assists in our 

understanding of reality, as does the desire to unveil what is hiding behind mere fact. 

Bullón’s book makes us aware that things are not exactly what they seem. Its authors 

strive to explore the political and economic interests of the countries involved in 

pilgrimage routes (47, 48, 55); “national sanctuaries” after the ninth century were 

actually meant to legitimate emerging powerful monarchies (48); the visits to shrines 

“provided an excuse for exchanges that would never have been possible in the 

battlefield” (62) and the traditionally good relations in Anglo-Portuguese trade were 

but unstable, intriguing and turbulent at best (121). 

What has been said up to now confirms that the book fulfills its first two aims: 1) 

‘to turn the tide’ of the scanty information about England and Iberia in the Middle 

Ages, and 2) to prove that “[n]ations emerge out of complex processes of formation 

that are never pure” (7). However, one of the most important assets of Bullón’s 

collection of essays concerns the opening of new lines of research, planned as the 

book’s third aim (3). Between the lines, future researchers will find explicit mention 

of unexplored areas deserving scholarly attention. Cabré demands a stronger effort to 

unearth “the hidden background of Llul’s more popular writings” (31). He also 

invites researchers to carry out “a comprehensive study of schooling at the Faculty 

1 From that date, the Spanish saw the English as “different from all other nations” (15) and the 

English complained about the Spaniards’ lack of courtesy (16). 


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schools in the crown of Aragon” (31), to investigate the “involvement of England in 

the politics of the continent, in as much as it was reflected in literary works” (38), or 

even to carry out “an account of travels with no literary outcome… for a better 

understanding of Martorell’s stay in England” (38). Finally, he warns about the need 

to check Martorell’s first-hand acquaintance with English society by comparing his 

transliterated toponyms and title names against Middle English (46, note 83). 

Echevarría, in turn, notices that the connections to the inland route to Santiago have 

not been traced (49). She also encourages further study on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to 

discover a possible relationship between the English textile sector and Santiago (54). 

Geouge complains that the role of Portugal in the late medieval period has been 

overlooked; that we still lack an adequate study of the Anglo-Portuguese alliance 

signed at the Treaty of Windsor (120) and that there is no adequate general text for 

the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century period available in English, or recent works on 

the reign of João I. (131). Last, but not least, Yeager advocates the rethinking of 

Chaucer’s work along the avenues suggested in his research (194). 

It is encouraging to see that María Bullón and the contributors to the present 

volume have done a real service to the field of medieval studies and to the delicate 

flower that still constitutes Iberian cooperation and our European common heritage. 

Scholars and students interested in England and Iberia will want to read this carefully 

edited book, 2 full of questions, highly and attractively speculative, persuasive at times 

and honestly open to further discussion. Let me end this review by contributing two 

Spanish references that might enrich this lively dialogue. First, I would like to mention 

Emilio Lorenzo’s several lectures and articles on the Spanish translation of Gower’s 

Confessio Amantis (Lorenzo 1984, 1986, 1987). Secondly, Martín de Riquer’s lecture 

‘Vida caballeresca en la España del siglo XV’ (Real Academia Española 1947) offers 

interesting comments on the wanderings of fifteenth century Spanish knights in English 

lands (Miguel d’Orís, Messire Francois l’Arragonois, Felip Boyl or Pedro Vázquez de 

Saavedra) that might prove illuminating. 

Works Cited 

Aarsleff, Hans 1983: The Study of Language in England, 1780-1860. London: Athlone P. 

Berdichevsky, Norman 2007: ‘The Iberian Case of Sibling Rivalry’ (Accessed 3 September, 2009) 

Hartley, Lesley P. 1953: The Go-Between. London: Penguin Books. 

Lorenzo, Emilio 1984: ‘Una traducción histórica’. ABC 20 September: 3. 

––––– 1986: ‘Sobre las malas traducciones’. M. López Folgado, ed. Actas de las jornadas de 

Traducción. Ciudad Real: UCLM. 9-18. 

––––– 1987: ‘La primera traducción del inglés’. José Luis Chamosa González, Julio César Santoyo 

Mediavilla, Trinidad Guzmán and Rosa Rabadán Alvarez, eds. Actas de las I Jornadas 

nacionales de historia de la traducción. León: Servicio de Publicaciones. 354-66. 

2 With few misprints: conuntries (10); Martí de Riquer and Martín de Riquer (40) 


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Real Academia Española 1947: Discursos de recepción. Serie Segunda. 1881-1898. Madrid: 

Gráficas Ultra. 

Tejada, Paloma 2005: ‘English Consciousness in 19 th c Spain’. Christopher Butler, ed. The 

Dynamics of Language Use. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 369-92. 

––––– 2006: ‘La naturalización de lo ajeno’. Marta Carretero, Laura Hidalgo Downing, Julia 

Lavid, Elena Martínez Caro, JoAnne Neff, Soledad Pérez de Ayala and Esther Sánchez-Pardo, 

eds. A Pleasure of Life in Words. A Festschrift for Angela Downing. Madrid: Cersa. 155-84. 

Received 16 November 2009 Accepted 8 March 2010 

Paloma Tejada is currently Tenured Lecturer in the English Language and Linguistics Department of the 

Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where she obtained her PhD. Her research interests are: History of 

the English Language; Spanish Reception of Englishness, Culture, Language and Ideology, English- 

Spanish Contrastive Linguistics. Recent publications include ‘La naturalización de lo ajeno. en Carretero, 

M. et al. eds. (2006). A Pleasure of life in words. A Fetschrift for Angela Downing. (pp. 155-184), 

‘Construcciones cambiantes de la identidad ajena: hetero-imagen inglesa en la RAE.’. III Congreso 

Internacional sobre Lengua y Sociedad’. En Blas Arroyo, J.L. et al. eds. 2008. Discurso y sociedad II. 

Nuevas contribuciones al estudio de la lengua en un contexto social. Castellón de la Plana: Universidad 

Jaume I, pp. 415-428. 

Address: Departamento de Filología Inglesa I, Facultad de Filología, Edificio A. Universidad Complutense 

de Madrid. Avda. Complutense s/n, 28040 Madrid, Spain. Tel.: +34 91 3945392. Fax: +34 91 39454 78. 


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Sarah Harriet Burney 2008: The Romance of Private Life. Ed. Lorna J. Clark. Chawton 

House Library Series. London: Pickering and Chatto. xxxv + 403 pp. ISBN: 978 1 

85196 873 2 

Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez 

IES Moncho Valcarce 

cfernandezr@udc.es 

New editions of eighteenth-century texts are always welcome, especially when they are 

of outstanding women writers scarcely known today. Pickering and Chatto have 

embarked in this venture through the Chawton House Library Series with the aim of 

making available certain rare texts in new scholarly editions. The series itself, which is 

organised into three areas (‘Women’s Memoirs’, ‘Women’s Travel Writings’ and 

‘Women’s Novels’), has as its fourth title, within the area of Women’s Novels, The 

Romance of Private Life (henceforward TRPL) (1839) by Sarah Harriet Burney (1772- 

1844). The scholar responsible for this edition is Dr. Lorna J. Clark, a Research Adjunct 

Professor at Carleton University (Ottawa), who has already edited Sarah Harriet’s 

letters (Clark 1997). 

Sarah Harriet Burney (1772-1844) was the half-sister of the acclaimed Frances 

(Fanny) Burney or Mme. d’Arblay (1752-1840). The time has come to re-evaluate the 

literary merit of a woman who is sometimes simply mentioned by the biographers of 

Frances as the daughter who had a supposedly incestuous relationship with her brother 

James. Sarah Harriet collaborated with her father, the musicologist Dr. Charles Burney, 

and her travels to Switzerland and Italy found a place in her four novels: Clarentine 

(1796), Geraldine Fauconberg (1808), Traits of Nature (1812) and TRPL, the culmination 

of her literary career and the object of the present review. TRPL is comprised of two 

tales, The Renunciation and The Hermitage, written between 1830 and 1839. The first 

deals with the experiences of Agnes Danvers, a girl who is kidnapped to lead the life of 

an aristocrat until she decides to support herself as an artist in Italy and the mystery 

surrounding her existence is unravelled. The Hermitage represents a quite different tale 

hinging on love, fear and murder, much in the line of Anne Radcliffe’s well-known 

Gothic productions. 

Though Sarah Harriet Burney was popular in her day, it must be recognised that the 

number of books and articles devoted to Frances shows that the former has remained in 

the shadow of a literary icon cherished by male authors and reviewers since the 

publication of Evelina (1778). Nowadays, Frances’s status as a classic in women’s 

literature in English has been affirmed by different critics. Following Joyce Hemlow’s 

(1958) and Margaret A. Doody’s (1988) biographies presenting a picture of the Burney 

household, Tracy Edgar Daugherty (1988) offered the first structural approach to 

Frances Burney. It was then that feminist criticism – splendidly represented in Burney’s 

case by Julia Epstein (1989) and Katherine Rogers (1994) – took up the cause of 

vindicating her craft. Later critics, such as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1984) 

studied the relationship between father and daughter in their influential work. In recent 


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174 Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez 

years, the researchers’ interest has focussed on biographical work (Kate Chisholm 1998; 

Hester Davenport 2000), the edition of Frances’s early journal (Steward J. Cooke and 

Lars E. Troide 1994), her merit as a dramatist (Barbara Darby 1997) and contacts with 

other cultures. For instance, the upcoming conference of The Burney Society (TBS) – 

an affiliate of The American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) with about 

one hundred members from all around the world – will be held in Paris, 10-11 June 

2010, under the title Women and the Revolution to examine Frances’s years as Madame 

d’Arblay, the wife of the French chevalier Alexandre Jean-Louis Piochard d’Arblay, and 

more generally, focussing on women as journalists, witnesses and victims of the 

Revolution. Still, Sarah Harriet’s work remains apart. 

This new edition of Sarah Harriet’s TRPL is faithful to the original edition and 

worth praising in many respects. After the Acknowledgements (vii-viii) and a brief 

explanation of the abbreviations used (ix), the Introduction (xi-xxvii) is divided into 

three sections devoted to highlighting biographical information and the most 

remarkable features of the tales, which had originally appeared in three volumes. In The 

Renunciation, the editor focuses on the meaning of names (Emily/Agnes), images and 

plot structure, and, when she deals with The Hermitage, Clark pays attention to the 

heroine’s suffering and the sensationalist elements in the story. There follow other 

paratexts: a Select Bibliography (xxix-xxxii), also classified in Works by Sarah Harriet 

(xxix), Primary Material (xxix-xxxi) and Secondary Material (xxxi-xxxii), together with 

a Note on the Text (xxxiii-xxxv) which contains information on the stages of writing, 

the dealings with the publisher Henry Colburn and the literary responses in The 

Gentleman’s Magazine, The Athenaeum and The New Monthly Magazine. 

The editor makes clear her intention to preserve as far as possible the spelling, 

punctuation, capitalisation and italicisation of the first and only English edition (xxxv). 

The page endings in the original are indicated, and, after the text itself (3-370), we find 

a section of many pertinent and illuminating Endnotes (371-98) referring to literary and 

historical allusions, as would be expected in a critical edition. It is worth remarking that 

Sarah Harriet loved Shakespeare, the eighteenth-century poets (William Cowper, John 

Gay and William Collins, among others), as well as playwrights (Francis Beaumont and 

John Fletcher); hers is a work full of intertextual references duly annotated, together 

with the quotations of other famous authors (Chaucer or Voltaire) which open the 

chapters, and the translation of numerous French expressions and words with 

particular connotations in English at that time; such is the case of protégée (15) or rouge 

(187). There is an extensive use of secondary sources, and any philologist will greatly 

appreciate the list of Silent Corrections (399-403) grouped into three categories and 

placed at the end of the volume as Substantive Corrections (399-400), Corrections to 

Punctuation (400-01) and Hyphenated Forms at Line-Ends (401-03). 

One of the issues faced by the editor when she prepares such an edition is whether 

or not to draw parallelisms between Frances’s and Sarah Harriet’s work, since 

comparison with Frances is unavoidable. It is worth remembering that during the 

nineteenth century both sisters were mistakenly taken to be the same person. In 1831, 

for instance, M. Chasles thought that the authoress of Evelina also produced Cecilia, Les 

Voisins de Campagne, Ma Tante Anne, La Femme Errante (French translation of The 

Wanderer), Clarentine and Miss Fauconberg. An anonymous novel in French, Seraphina 


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(published in 1809), was also attributed to Sarah Harriet Burney, who was always 

concerned with woman’s place in society and handled her themes very subtly. Feminist 

critics have stressed the value of women’s writing, and one of Clark’s merits is precisely 

that, while in the Introduction she makes occasional reference to Frances’s oeuvre, she is 

more concerned with those features of Sarah Harriet’s writing which establish her 

separate identity. Any perceptive reader will notice that in Sarah Harriet the love plots 

are not prominent – she even wrote “I never insert love but to oblige my readers” (qtd. 

xvi) – and that there is neither didacticism nor references to the historical and political 

events of the time, such as the Napoleonic wars, but there is a critique of the 

establishment. From the point of view of narrative technique, instead of facing a 

moralising omniscient narrator typical of many eighteenth-century narratives, what we 

have is a more direct access to the character’s mind through free indirect speech. It is no 

coincidence that Sarah Harriet was an enthusiastic reader of Jane Austen and an 

admirer of Maria Edgeworth and Sir Walter Scott. A focus on woman in the family 

group recalls previous women writers, such as Elizabeth Haywood or Elizabeth 

Inchbald, but we are confronted with a more modern writer who uses intrigue and 

“focuses on the family, with various aspects refracted as in a kaleidoscope” (xxi). A new 

picture of the Burneys appears before us. 

Thanks to her knowledge as a scholar, Clark draws contrasts and parallelisms with 

other works by the same authoress, while emphasising that Sarah Harriet turned to the 

bildungsroman, where alienation is a central theme. Frances’s half-sibling felt it 

personally and was somewhat isolated from the family circle (xii). In her oeuvre there is 

also a sense of rebellion against Charles Burney’s favourite, Frances. Another point that 

the editor stresses is that Sarah Harriet’s protagonists tend to be practical, selfdisciplined 

and unsentimental (xix). For Clark, Sarah Harriet portrayed woman’s 

identity and the fragility of woman’s psyche, a point which makes her fiction of 

particular interest for eighteenth-century studies. This is precisely what Clark 

highlighted in an article as one of the main themes in The Hermitage: “her [Ella’s] 

silence and immobility, the wide-eyed stare, is a powerful image for passive female 

suffering” (Clark 2004: 173). In addition, Sarah Harriet’s handling of traditional motifs 

(the lost child, the journey), classical references, shades of the Gothic and twists of the 

plot craftily used to create suspense make us realise how well she understood the 

novelistic genre towards the mid- nineteenth century. Far from linking Sarah Harriet to 

the Fathers of the English Novel, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, the editor 

perceptively places Sarah Harriet in the mainstream of literature in English, and relates 

her to later authors: “Burney is a pivotal figure who builds on the conventions of the 

eighteenth century novel and carries them forward; with echoes of Austen, her work 

points towards Hardy, Dickens and Eliot” (xxi). Thus, The Renunciation is related to 

George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), while The Hermitage is considered the first detective 

story in English before Wilkie Collins and Edgar Allan Poe (xxii). 

There are some remarkable passages in Sarah Harriet’s work, which is packed with 

irony and lively dialogues at the beginning of her stories, as in The Hermitage. Here, she 

builds up tension when Ella approaches her brother to kiss his forehead (finding it 

unnaturally chill) and makes a painful discovery in a scene which suggests a 

psychoanalytic interpretation (286). In The Renunciation, Agnes’s thoughts after 


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176 Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez 

reading Lucy de Vere’s mysterious letter are represented in direct speech, and the 

character directly addresses the unfortunate heiress by using archaisms, such as thy or 

ye (46). An important scene takes place when Agnes resolutely states before Lady 

Glenfield her desire to be economically independent, which turns into a powerful 

defence of working women: 

“Have I any choice?” […] “it is by no means indispensable that I should become a shopwoman. 

I have no pride that would revolt against such an exercise of the talents I may 

have acquired; – on the contrary, a maintenance thus earned would re-animate and cheer 

me; and I should be still in possession, and applying to honourable use the only 

advantage resulting from Mr. Wharton’s profusion which it would not be disgraceful to 

retain”. (80-1) 

Clark’s enterprise contributes to open new paths for literary researchers because 

Sarah Harriet’s merits are not restricted to renewing the feminocentric romance with 

sensationalist elements and satire. Many points have not been properly assessed so far, 

such as her positioning towards the novel when women writers still struggled to be 

authoresses. It is striking that Sarah Harriet never used self-effacement as a strategy to 

vindicate the novel and her craft, for instance, and that generosity and feelings occupy a 

major role in her stories. A Clark points out with regard to Agnes in The Renunciation, 

“she has won their [her family of origin’s] affection on her own merits” (xx). On the 

other hand, TRPL offers an interesting insight into how men and women approached 

art and, likewise, a glimpse into the aesthetic debate on ‘the Sublime and the Beautiful’ 

from the privileged point of view of an artist’s daughter. Sarah Harriet also depicted 

urban life in pre-Victorian Great Britain and how different European cultures 

contemplated each other in novels set outside England. Likewise, her vision of the 

British Empire and defence of Englishness coincided with a moment of intense 

Gallophobia in the British Isles after the French Revolution. This needs revision and can 

be compared with the views of other British novelists who also wrote on the topic. 

Finally, we must notice that Sarah Harriet always regarded the father as an instrument 

of oppression in the line of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature by women. In 

The Renunciation, Agnes Danvers resembles Antigone in the Greek tragedy; Sarah 

Harriet delineated woman’s mind with unusual delicacy, offering a memorable account 

of the protagonist’s mixed feelings towards her father which is difficult to be found in 

other authoresses: 

The affection with which he spoke of her, bore all the appearance of sincerity, and for 

ever put an end to the most distant idea of foul dealing. When she was mentioned herself, 

it was done with so much temper, that considering the catastrophe she had brought upon 

him, his moderation and placability [sic] surprised and touched her. She had hated him, 

no doubt; but less at the moment when by her flight, she effected his ruin, than at most 

other periods of her life; the knowledge of what he would suffer, had then mollified her 

aversion, and it had been with true regret she came to the conclusion, that his prosperity 

and her sense of right could never be made compatible. (123) 

All in all, the rediscovery of Sarah Harriet Burney is worthwhile and interesting, 

contributing as it does to the project of rescuing from oblivion some part of women’s 

unacknowledged history as authors. In this sense, the reader misses a contextualisation 


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of Sarah Harriet within the framework of women’s literary pursuits at that time. Apart 

from this minor aspect, we find before us an impeccable edition for scholars which will 

certainly draw the attention of those concerned with women’s literature and its 

evolution during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. TRPL is an outstanding 

narrative based on woman’s experiences in modern England that any reader interested 

in the Burney saga in particular or the period in general should know. Undoubtedly, 

Sarah Harriet Burney is another name to take into account in the development of 

English literature. 

Works Cited 

Chisholm, Kate 1998: Fanny Burney: Her Life 1752-1840. London: Chatto and Windus. 

Clark, Lorna, ed. 1997: The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney. Athens and London: U of Georgia P. 

Clark, Lorna 2004: ‘The Hermitage: Late Gothic or Early Detective Fiction’. Lumen 23: 165-78. 

Cooke, Stewart J. and Lars E. Troide 1994: The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney. 

Oxford: Clarendon P. 

Darby, Barbara 1997: Frances Burney Dramatist: Gender, Performance and the Late Eighteenth- 

Century Stage. Kentucky: UP of Kentucky. 

Daugherty, Tracy Edgar 1988: Narrative Techniques in the Novels of Fanny Burney. New York: 

Peter Lang. 

Davenport, Hester 2000: Faithful Handmaid: Fanny Burney at the Court. Gloucestershire: Sutton 

Publishing Ltd. 

Doody, Margaret Anne 1988: Frances Burney: the Life in the Works. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 

Epstein, Julia 1989: The Iron Pen. Bristol: Bristol Classical P. 

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar 1984: The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and 

the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale UP. 

Hemlow, Joyce 1958: The History of Fanny Burney. London: Oxford UP. Gloucestershire: Sutton 

Publishing Ltd. 

Rogers, Katherine 1990: Fanny Burney: The World of Female Difficulties. New York: Harvester 

Wheatsheaf. 

The Burney Society: (Accessed 30 November, 2009) 

Received 24 June 2009 Revised version accepted 27 March 2010 

Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez teaches English and French in IES Moncho Valcarce, (A Coruña). 

She obtained her PhD at the University of A Coruña in 2007 with a dissertation on Frances Burney's and 

Maria Edgeworth's narrative work. She is a member of The Burney Society and has published articles in 

The Burney Letter. She has taken part in the research network "Rede de lingua e literatura inglesa e 

identidade" (2007/000145-0), funded by the Galician Government and the European Regional Development 

Fund (ERDF), and in the research Project "O papel da muller na prensa inglesa no inicio da idade 

moderna: estudio sincrónico e diacrónico" (PGIDTOPXB212149PR) funded by the Galician Governement 

(Xunta de Galicia). Her article entitled ‘The Cervantine Influence in Burney's Works’ is soon to appear in a 

volume of essays on world literatures edited by Dr. Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal (Jaipur: Bookenclave, 2010). 

Address: IES Moncho Valcarce. Rúa José M. Penabad López s/n. As Pontes de García Rodríguez. A 

Coruña, Spain. Tel.: +34 981 451351. Fax: +34 981 440748. 


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Muñoz-Calvo, Micaela, Carmen Buesa-Gómez and M. Ángeles Ruiz-Moneva, eds. 

2008: New Trends in Translation and Cultural Identity. Newcastle upon Tyne: 

Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ix + 459 pp. ISBN: 9781847186539 

Jorge Braga Riera 


jbragariera@filol.ucm.es 

The appearance in the 1980s of the term culture as a key concept in Translation Studies 

supposed an important shift of direction in the theories postulated until then. The 

translation process could no longer overlook those extra-linguistic features that 

constitute an integral part of a text, that is, the translator could not ignore the culture of 

the source language, much less that of the target language. Indeed, the latter became the 

prime reference in the practice of translation, which is, therefore, “culture bound” 

(Álvarez and Vidal 1996: 2). 

Thirty years later, this ‘cultural turn’ (Bassnett-McGuire 1985) has given way to 

notions of culture and identity that seem more blurred than ever, probably as a direct 

consequence of the revolution in technology and communications which has fostered 

cultural exchanges so rapidly. It is in this globalised context that the publication here 

reviewed is embedded: an approach to the new tendencies in the field of translation and 

to what extent, if any, these have contributed to the making of a more universal, 

homogeneous world. As editor Micaela Muñoz-Calvo clearly states in her Introduction 

(1-7), this stimulating four-part volume is the result of a minute selection of papers 

presented at the Susanne Hübner Seminar entitled ‘Translation and Cultural Identity’ 

(Zaragoza, November 2005), an academic gathering attended by prestigious scholars 

from twenty-two different countries. Obviously, notions of culture and identity 

frequently appear throughout the thirty articles that constitute this work. 

The first part of the book is made up of twelve articles that, as suggested by the title 

(‘Cultural Identity, Ideology and Translation’), tackle translation as a powerful tool in 

the transmission of identity and ideology in the most varied contexts: Michaela Wolf’s 

‘Interference from the Third Space? The Construction of Cultural Identity through 

Translation’ (11-20) goes a step beyond in the notion of culture and, following Homi 

Bhabha’s theory, proposes a new dynamic space in which both origin and target texts 

cease to be a source of conflict, as they merge into one that is far from being 

homogeneous. This ‘Third Space’ – which has inspired translation conferences such as 

one recently held in Prague under the title ‘Translating Beyond East and West’ – is 

considered to be a means to reach a better understanding of the world. This is precisely 

what Isabel Alonso-Breto and Nancy L. Hagedorn try to prove in ‘Translating English 

into English in a Case of Symbolic Translation: Language and Politics through the Body 

in Marlene Nourbese Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks’ (21-34) 

and in ‘“With the Air and Gesture of an Orator”: Council Oratory, Translation and 

Cultural Mediation during Anglo-Iroquois Treaty Conferences, 1690-1774’ (35-45), 

respectively. The former shows how standard English can be ‘translated’ into Creole 


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180 Jorge Braga Riera 

English in such a subtle way that, though invisible, it makes the text totally 

comprehensible in the target culture; the latter reveals the way in which an interpreter’s 

positive manipulation can ‘soften down’ the speech, thus leading to higher levels of 

compromise, in this case between the Iroquois Indians and the English in mideighteenth-century 

America. Manipulation, however, can result in totally disrupted 

visions of identity. At least, this is what Beatriz Penas maintains in ‘The Identitarian 

Function of Language and the Narrative Fictional Text: Problematizing Identity 

Transferral in Translation per se’ (47-65). More specifically, she reflects on the effect 

that both censure and mistranslation have had in the (wrong) reception of 

Hemingway’s work in Spain. Mistranslation is also a key issue in Elif Daldeniz’s 

‘Expectations for Translators and Translation in the Present-Day EU’ (67-77), though 

emphasis is shifted from literature to the translator’s everyday activity in the EU 

institutions. Tired of what these practitioners describe as plain ‘bad’ English, some of 

them, as Daldeniz points out, have decided to take action and “fight the fog” (68) 

contained in the style of source texts, thus claiming both their right to criticize authors 

and their own visibility – to use a term coined by Venuti (1995) – in a context where 

“contemporary theoretical approaches and the practice seem to be oceans apart” (76). 

This call to attention hopefully may foster more union in the EU institutions within 

their obvious cultural diversity. This fifth chapter links with Chapter 8: ‘Shifts of 

Involvement in Translation: the Case of European Parliament’s Proceedings’ (105-15), 

in which Elpida Loupaki studies how involvement strategies in the treatment of 

metaphors, rhetorical questions, etc. are governed by universal principles rather than by 

the peculiarities of the target language, in this case Greek. 

A somewhat diverse border from that of the ‘Third Space’ is the one experienced by 

Chicano writer Gloria Anzaldúa, as presented by Assumpta Camps in Chapter Six under 

the title ‘Translating from Cultural Borders’ (79-94). In this extraordinary article Camps 

points out multiple points which are still the object of attention by contemporary 

translation scholars, such I as self-translation, collaborative translation, source language 

interference, the notion of untranslatability and, again, the translator’s (in)visibility. Her 

analysis revolves around a writer-translator whose geographical position – the Mexican 

border – makes her constantly shift to and from English, and in the process create a kind 

of bilingual and bicultural writing with obvious levels of source language interference. 

This poses serious challenges for the translator, to the point that the writer herself defines 

her production as “untranslatable” unless in the hands of what she terms a “creative 

translator” (84), who inevitably must call for the cooperation of the writer if the target 

text is expected to function in the recipient culture. No doubt the translator of her works 

defined her own task as “the reverse of the embroidery” (88), using the same metaphor 

that Cervantes employed in Don Quijote to describe his ideal concept of translation. Spain 

during the Second Republic is the focus of Franco Aixelá’s ‘Ideology and Translation. The 

Strange Case of a Translation which was Hotter than the Original: Casas Gancedo and 

Hammett in The Falcon of the King of Spain (1933)’ (95-104). Franco Aixelá proves that 

the power of the translator’s hand can once again attenuate, preserve or intensify the 

source text in the new communication context, in this case using sex and swearwords as 

the object of analysis. His words show how ideology and extralinguistic elements impose 

themselves over other considerations. 


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The four remaining articles that constitute this first block all deal with different 

aspects of translation during the Franco era in Spain. Elena Bandín pays attention to 

Shakespearean drama in the early years of the dictatorship, with interesting conclusions 

on the censors’ tolerance. The novelty of her approach in ‘Translating at the Service of 

the Francoist Ideology: Shakespearean Theatre for the Spanish National Theatre (1941- 

1952). A Study of Paratexts’ (117-28) is precisely the study of the Shakespearean 

production through written material other than the mere play script. Cristina Gómez 

focuses on Franco’s last years but, unfortunately, her ‘Translation and Censorship 

Policies in the Spain of the 1970s: Market vs. Ideology?’ (129-37) lacks profundity and 

hands-on examples. Marta Rioja, in ‘Research Design in the Study of TRACEn under 

Franco’s Dictatorship (1962-1969). Brief Comments on Some Results from the Analysis 

of Corpus O’ (139-50) is in line with the ambitious and fruitful TRACE project and 

rigorously provides data on the authors and works translated into Spanish during the 

1960s, setting the basis for future descriptive and comparative analyses. Finally Ibon 

Uribarri, in ‘Ideological Struggle in Translation: Immanuel Kant in Spain’ (151-61), 

rounds off this section by informing us of the irregular reception of German 

philosophers in this specific historical period. 

Part II focuses, as the title reads, on ‘Popular Culture, Literature and Translation’. 

The two first articles of this second compendium link the translating task to gender 

studies and feminist issues, two ever-controversial topics in translation since the 70s 

that have given rise to a great bulk of literature. In ‘Proto-feminist Translation 

Strategies? A Case Study of 19 th Century Translations of the Grimm Brothers’ “Sleeping 

Beauty”’ (165-84), Karen Seago asserts the recognition of women translators at this 

particular time and place, making female identity visible. Some of the strategies used by 

these female practitioners, such as decision-making in the titles to be rendered or the 

introduction of feminist terminology, are discussed in Silvia Molina’s ‘Missed 

Connections: Re-writing Anglo-American Feminism into Spanish’ (185-93). 

As expected, the following contributions address issues connected with ideology and 

culture, among them religion, humour and self-translation, but always in the literary 

sphere. In ‘Religious Ideology and the Translations of Robinson Crusoe into [Ottoman 

and Modern] Turkish’ (195-216), Ayşe Banu Karadağ points at religion as one of the 

aspects that makes a translator more visible and, taking Dafoe’s novel as a means for 

exemplification, pays special attention to the extent to which publishing houses and 

translators can naturalize a text and impose their own (Islamic) religious ideology, 

while questioning their manipulative ethics at the same time. Manipulation is also a key 

concept to ‘A Reflection on Adaptations of Gulliver’s Travels for Children and 

Teenagers in Spain during the Last Half of the 20 th Century’ (217-36). Comparing four 

adaptations of this classic intended for young readers, Mª Isabel Herrando verifies how 

texts can be manipulated for various purposes, among them simply for economic 

reasons. Maurice Frank O’Connor, in ‘Translating Western Canon from the Diaspora’ 

(237-47) 1 , changes the scenario to Britain and to the role of Ben Okri as a cultural 

translator when rendering African works into English, using the term hybridization to 

1 

At this point I must draw attention to what seems to be a misprint, as the table of contents 

presents this chapter with a different title. 


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refer to a new form of post-colonial, literary discourse. Back to Spain, Javier Muñoz- 

Basols explores the intrinsic difficulty in translating sound-based humour into Spanish, 

though also resorting to translations into other languages for comparative purposes. 

His ‘Translating Sound-Based Humour in Carol Weston’s With Love from Spain, 

Melanie Martin: A Practical Case Study’ (249-66) makes a difference by talking about 

his actual experience as a translator, thus giving a first-person perspective of the real 

difficulties faced in the process. Some of his strategies lead to ingeniously naturalised 

examples that fit into the culture of Spanish children, and creativity and collaboration 

with the author come again to the fore as basic for the target text to be successful. 

Carmen Valero takes us to the universe of African literature and its presence in Spain. 

In ‘Foreign African Identity through Literature and Getting to Know it through 

Translation’ (267-87) she resorts to Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theories and 

Translation in an attempt to show the journey of English-written African culture when 

put into Spanish words, with conclusions that call for the use of footnotes, glossaries 

and additional information as a means to make an alien culture understood. Finally, 

poetry is the field handled in the last two articles of this section. In Chapter 20, ‘Seating 

at the Head of the Literary Table: Seamus Heaney’s Countercultural Redress in Beowulf: 

A New Translation (1999)’ (289-98), Juan Ráez studies the transformation of the 

popular Old English poem into Irishized verse by the hand of Heaney. Not much scope 

is given to the typical problems of the translation of verse, that is, rhythm, syntax, 

metrics, pronunciation and vocabulary choice, but the author has no reservations in 

labelling a highly-appraised resulting text as “cultural appropriation” (296). Juan 

Miguel Zarandona’s ‘Silver Shadow (2004): The Arthurian Poems by Antonio Enrique 

or the Different Reception of a Translation and a Self-Translation’ (299-309) explores 

the reception of an Arthurian myth pervaded with ‘Spanishness’ by Andalusian poet 

Antonio Enrique. His condition as self-translator of Silver Shadow – this being a 

practice surely deserving more attention by the literature – provides him with more 

creative freedom at times, while on other occasions the usually frowned upon word-forword 

method is boldly applied in his typically free verse compositions. 

Part III (‘Translating the Media: Translating the Culture’) tackles two translation 

modalities (publicity and audiovisual) which are currently booming, not only 

professionally but also as a more than productive target for research. Natàlia Izard 

opens this section with dubbing (‘Translating for Dubbing: A Third Degree Equation. 

An Analysis of Dubbings in Spain’ [313-23]), though her emphasis rests more on the 

complexity of the process rather than on the translating fact per se. In ‘Advertising Texts 

– A Globalised Genre: A Case Study of Translation Norms’ (325-36) Antonia Montes 

discusses how publicity constitutes a genre in itself, and consequently Toury’s norms 

(1995) for the process of translation can be perfectly applied here. However, and despite 

the homogeneity of advertising in this globalised world, Montes has discovered various 

differences in such norm application between Spain, on the one hand, and Britain and 

Germany on the other. Fernando Repullés claims that this homogeneity can also be 

applied to humour, not so much linguistically but to the cognitive effect it has. Hence, 

after a detailed analysis of bits of the film Shrek and its translation into Spanish, he 

concludes, as clearly stated in the title of his article (‘Shrek: When Audiovisual Humour 

Becomes a Lingua Franca [337-56]), that despite linguistic barriers audiovisual humour 


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Reviews 183 

“is sometimes as international as a lingua franca” (353, emphasis in the original), thus 

challenging traditional concepts of culture and identity. María Rox’s chapter ‘How 

“Marujita Díaz” became “Julie Andrews”: Idiosyncrasies of Translating Cultural 

References into the Filmography of Pedro Almodóvar’ (357-67) deals with curious 

English translations of culture-related terms present in Almodóvar’s films. In Chapter 

26 María Milagros del Saz and Barry Pennock-Speck bring us back to advertising and 

stereotypes and uncover significant differences in gender treatment in Great Britain and 

Spain, especially those of a non-linguistic nature. Their joint article ‘Male and Female 

Stereotypes in Spanish and British Commercials’ (369-82) connects with the abovementioned 

issue of gender. 

Part IV (‘Scientific Discourse as Cultural Translation’) takes a close look at science 

and culture in two very different areas. Chapters Twenty-seven and Twenty-eight deal 

with specialised language but, far from falling into technicalities, place culture as a key 

concept in decision-making. In ‘From “Stem Cell” to “Célula Madre”: What Metaphors 

Reveal about the Culture’ (385-96), Elena González works hand in hand with cognitive 

linguistics and resorts to the Spanish translations of stem cell as an excuse to 

demonstrate how the translator’s final choice carries ideological connotations, thus 

proving the enormous potential of metaphor to influence human attitudes and 

ideology. Her interesting study undoubtedly opens up paths to further research in this 

line within the realm of what is referred to as scientific translation. In ‘The Language of 

Wine Tasting: Specialised Language?’ (397-411) Gloria Martínez wonders why 

translations of tasting notes into both English and French are so poor, and so blames 

the translator’s lack of sensitivity when rendering into another language something so 

Spanish as the vocabulary of wine. 

No less interesting than the previous articles, the last two provide an attractive end 

to the collection. Ian Williams (‘Translation Strategies and Features of Discourse Style 

in Medical Research Articles: A Corpus-Based Study [413-32]), on the one hand, and 

Celia Florén and Rosa Lorés (‘The Application of a Parallel Corpus (English-Spanish) to 

the Teaching of Translation: ENTRAD Project’ [433-43]), on the other, demonstrate 

once again that the traditional lack of cooperation between Translation Studies and 

Contrastive Linguistics has finally – and, as perceived by some scholars (Grammenidis 

and Nenopoulou 2007; Rabadán 2007), fortunately – come to an end, especially after 

the boom of computerised language corpora. Williams resorts to corpus-based analyses 

in order to dissect discourse in translated medical research articles, with results that 

reveal how strategies applied in the rendering process are not always sufficient; given 

the excesses and deficits found, especially after comparing these texts with Spanish 

native corpora, corpus-based studies emerge as an ideal tool in order to improve the 

style of these translations. Celia Florén and Rosa Lorés add a positive contribution to 

the still scant literature in translation methodology and explain how their ENTRAD 

project, or storage of texts in English translated into Spanish by students of Philology at 

the Universidad de Zaragoza, has proved to be beneficial for the correction and 

assessment of the students’ own work, fostering self-study and also providing wide 

possibilities for the researcher interested in this particular matter. 

The thirty chapters in this publication undoubtedly make a significant contribution to 

Translation Studies as a growing discipline. Its heterogeneous nature inevitably implies 


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that some of the topics lack the desired profundity, whereas others are totally absent. The 

disposition of the articles into different blocks is a little disconcerting at times (for 

example those dealing with European Union institutions), but it is equally true that topicdiversity 

makes organization an enduring task. In addition, the individuality of the 

proposals also brings a personal, uneven interpretation of concepts such as culture 

throughout the 459 pages of the book, although it is equally true this independence also 

enables the reader to open the volume at any chapter, since each represents a study on its 

own. All in all, New Trends in Translation and Cultural Identity is a work in which every 

contributor has a say. Indeed, the reflections and conclusions drawn from their studies do 

not constitute an end in themselves, but rather emerge as a starting point for translation 

practitioners and researchers interested in the newest paths forged by this fascinating 

discipline. Hopefully, the editors will set an example and upcoming international 

conferences (such as ‘The Author-Translator in the European Literary Tradition’ or ‘The 

Limits of Literary Translation’, to be held in England next year) will also produce quality, 

thought-provoking publications like this one. 

Works Cited 

Álvarez, Román and Carmen África Vidal, eds. 1996: Translation, Power, Subversion. Clevedon: 

Multilingual Matters. 

Bassnett-McGuire, Susan 1985: Translation Studies. London and New York: Routledge. 

Grammenidis, Simos and Tonia Nenopoulou 2007: ‘The Relevance of Utter-centered Linguistics to 

Translation Studies’. Gambier, Yves, Miriam Shlesinger and Radegundis Stolze, eds. Doubts and 

Directions in Translation Studies. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 297-308. 

Rabadán, Rosa 2007: ‘Divisions, Description, Applications: the Interface between DTS, Corpusbased 

Research and Contrastive Analysis’. Gambier, Yves, Miriam Shlesinger and Radegundis 

Stolze, eds. Doubts and Directions in Translation Studies. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John 

Benjamins. 237-52. 

Toury, Gideon 1995: Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: 

John Benjamins. 

Venuti, Lawrence 1995: The Translator’s Invisibility: a History of Translation. London and New 

York: Routledge. 

Received 20 December 2009 Accepted 25 February 2010 

Jorge Braga Riera (PhD University of Oviedo) is a member of the Department of Filología Inglesa I, 

Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He also teaches at the School of Translation and Interpreting (CES 

Felipe II-UCM). His research interests centre on Translation Studies, Drama Translation and Contrastive 

Stylistics. His recent publications include: Classical Spanish Drama in Restoration English (1660-1700), 

Amsterdam & Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 2009 and ‘The Non-verbal in Drama Translation: Spanish 

Classical Theatre in English”, in Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense, 15, 2007, pp. 119-137. 

Address: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Filología, Departamento de Filología Inglesa I, 

Ciudad Universitaria, 28040 Madrid, Spain. Tel.: +34 91 394 53 70. Fax: +34 91 394 54 78. 


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David Savran 2009: Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New 

Middle Class. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. 328 pp. ISBN: 978-0-472- 

11692 

Barbara Ozieblo 

Universidad de Málaga 

ozieblo@uma.es 

It is virtually impossible to do justice to David Savran’s recent volume Highbrow/ 

Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class in a brief review, for it 

is a veritable quilt of information on all the topics included in the title, and more. 

Savran brings a sociological and cultural focus to his interpretation of the relationship 

of jazz and theater in America, a focus he has used in previous publications such as 

Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism and American Culture (1998) or A 

Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theater (2003). This new volume 

makes for a captivating read for anyone interested in the reception of jazz in the USA 

and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, although it is also about the 

development of ‘serious’ American theater – so called by British critic William Archer, 

who located its conception and birth on the sand dunes of Provincetown in 1915, and 

which, unfortunately, Savran almost willfully ignores. The other area that this volume 

attempts to cover is that of the audience and their reaction, the sociology and cultural 

economics of the phenomenon of entertainment. Such an original juxtaposition of jazz 

with the serious or legitimate theater in America will not be found in any other 

comparable study on theater, although sociological themes are explored in volumes 

such as Culture Makers: Urban Performance and Literature in the 1920s by Amy Koritz 

(2008), who links dance, drama and literature to the changes in society, or Dennis 

Kennedy’s The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audience in Modernity and Postmodernity 

(2009), a study that extends well beyond the Broadway audiences of the twenties into 

Europe and the late twentieth century. David Savran defines his aim and methodology 

as “using jazz as a kind of lever to prise open relations between and among the 

producers and consumers of a wide range of theatrical genres, the shifting class 

relations that were so deeply implicated in the rapidly changing shape of the cultural 

hierarchy, and the relationship between a revolution in music and a revolution in 

modes of industrial production” (5-6). Jazz, which Savran identifies as the music of the 

machine age, was rejected or welcomed in the same measure that the machine age was 

by the population at large as also by those concerned with the cultural output of the 

United States of America. Culture was fast becoming a consumer product, and Savran 

stresses this by dividing the audience into upstairs and downstairs and by focusing on 

the variations produced in such seating niceties by financial as much as cultural 

fluctuations. 

Savran’s analysis of consumer culture, jazz and theater is based on Raymond 

Williams’s theory of structure of feeling, but also on the social and political economies of 

culture as a site of struggle for power as expounded by Theodore W. Adorno and by 


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186 Barbara Ozieblo 

Pierre Bourdieu. These theoretical notions are applied to the history and development 

of jazz as it engaged the minds and creative efforts of numerous critics and artists of the 

twenties, the period that F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the Jazz Age. The ways in which 

critics reacted – thereby controlling the fate of specific works of art – is meticulously 

traced and offers an invaluable introduction to the state of the theater in America in the 

twenties. The reviews published by men such as Brooks Atkinson, Gilbert Seldes, Walter 

Prichard Eaton, John Tasker Howard, George Jean Nathan, Van Wyck Brooks or D. W. 

Griffith are analyzed, and their lives and personalities illumined. Even more 

importantly, the reader is made aware of how these men maneuvered jazz into a 

‘lowbrow’ category for both racial and elitist reasons, and how ‘legitimate’ theater was 

displaced into the position of a ‘middlebrow’ enterprise. The many, well-chosen 

quotations also introduce us to a handful of earlier cultural historians of American 

theater and the twenties, such as Joan Shelley Rubin, Janice Radway, Michael Kammen, 

Paul Gorman and Paul Di Maggio. 

Chapter one, ‘America’s Music’, attempts to define both jazz and legitimate versus 

illegitimate, or serious versus popular, theater, and shows how the influence of jazz 

pervaded the whole cultural scene. The complexity of jazz was recognized as early as 

1924 in The Seven Lively Arts by Gilbert Seldes, who began his discussion of the 

phenomenon with the following statement: “The word jazz is already so complicated 

that it ought not to be subjected to any new definitions, and the thing itself so familiar 

that it is useless to read new meanings into it” (81). And yet Savran takes on the 

challenge not only of defining jazz but also of separating the intertwined strands and 

relating them to the development of the American theater of this period. Savran makes 

a point of establishing the racial and elitist reactions to jazz from the start: it could be 

‘hot’ or ‘sweet’, depending on who was playing for whom. He also makes clear that jazz, 

with its mix of styles such as “ragtime, coon songs, and military marches” (31), although 

African-American in inception, was quickly assimilated into Euro-American traditions, 

absorbing on its way popular rhythms of European origin. Thus, Savran argues, cultural 

purity does not exist, although jazz was welcomed as a truly American cultural 

manifestation, albeit frequently considered to be Jewish because its dissemination was 

largely in the hands of Jews. The indisputably popular roots of jazz threatened the new 

literary or serious theater that the Little Theater movement of the nineteen tens had 

stimulated and which then had to struggle against the rapid advance of the movies. 

In the second chapter, ‘The Struggle for Legitimacy’, Savran strives to answer some 

of the questions related to the phenomenon of jazz and the creation of a legitimate 

theater and audience reception that his first chapter had posed. However, he quickly 

moves on to an analysis of Gilbert Seldes’s The Seven Lively Arts, crediting the critic who 

had previously written for the highbrow magazine The Dial with the creation of a 

positioning of the ideal audience of a theater that appeals neither to the boorish masses 

nor to the sophisticated elite as definitively ‘middlebrow’. 

Three of the seven chapters chart the development of jazz and its influence on the 

growth of what is today recognized as American music. Savran likens jazz to minstrelsy 

in that the form was so readily taken over by white artists (frequently Jewish) who made 

it their own, converting both into popular entertainment typically scorned by even the 

most discerning critics, whom Savran berates for their conservative lack of vision. 


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Chapter three, ‘Fascinating Rhythm’, is devoted in large part to Ira and George 

Gershwin, and shows how the all-black musical Shuffle Along (Eubie Blake and Norbie 

Sissle 1921) that introduced the Charleston to Broadway and took the social elite by 

storm, was one of the most important influences on George Gershwin, spurring him to 

compose music of comparable variety and vitality for musicals such as Tip-Toes (1925). 

These pieces, as so many of their period, as Savran points out, were, in one way or 

another, about the conflict between high and low that was being played out on the field 

of American culture. Savran uses contemporary reviews – in most cases the only source 

available to researchers of audience response or of the entertainment world, both low 

and highbrow – to offer summaries and insightful commentary, particularly on the 

racial prejudices revealed by white critics, but also, in the case of Shuffle Along, on the 

attitudes of the African-American audiences and artists who, although rejecting 

stereotypes imposed on them by white society, needed to conform in order to gain 

acceptance. Savran berates critics such as George Jean Nathan, Oliver Sayler and Walter 

Prichard Eaton for their uncompromising attitude to the musical, which Nathan 

defined as “as alcohol to art: a convivial moment of forgetfulness” (93). Musical 

comedy threatened the ‘seriousness’ of American theater – the literary theater that the 

Theatre Guild, O’Neill and Theatre Arts were promoting, having taken this task over 

from the Provincetown Players. Savran, who interprets Gershwin’s music as modernist, 

praises him for legitimating jazz in the theater, and compares Gershwin's stand to that 

of the exponents of serious drama who rejected jazz, creating a high modernist theater. 

According to Savran, such a theater is inconsequential in American culture, in spite of 

the plays of Djuna Barnes or Gertrude Stein and the latter’s undeniable influence on the 

Living Theater, the Worcester Group, or playwrights such as Suzan-Lori Parks. 

‘Pandering to the “Intelligent Minority”’, the fourth chapter, the most sociologically 

orientated, relies on the statistics and surveys carried out, among others, by Robert S. 

Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, authors of the well-known Middletown, an account of 

the typical American Main Street of the early twentieth century. It is in this chapter that 

Savran looks at audience numbers, at what he calls the “hierarchy of theatrical 

entertainments” (105), and at the hierarchies of audiences and the social classes they 

were made up of. Again, the reader discerns a rigorous research methodology – here 

frequently anecdotal, as Savran readily admits – based on data culled from newspaper 

and magazine articles on theaters and their audiences. We learn, for example, that the 

movie palaces which replaced the nickelodeon in the second decade of the twentieth 

century were more expensive, and yet, in Buffalo, where four showings were offered per 

day, were all full. The audiences, which before had been of the working class, rose on 

the social scale as the venues became more luxurious and ticket prices came close to 

equaling those of theaters. And so, as Savran assures us, it was the lower theater forms 

such as vaudeville that suffered most from the rise of the movies. The literary or 

legitimate theater became a minority interest, yet this minority did not hail from the 

sophisticated upper strata of society but from the more discerning, educated new 

middle class who were “neither time killers nor sensation seekers” (130) as Walter 

Prichard Eaton put it. 

The Theatre Guild, as an example of a theater that tried to combine both artistic and 

commercial concerns, and its interest in expressionism, gives Savran his topic for 


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188 Barbara Ozieblo 

chapter five, tellingly entitled ‘Human Cogs and Levers’. The playwrights to whom 

Savran dedicates most space are Elmer Rice, John Howard Lawson and, in the last 

chapter, Eugene O’Neill. His analysis of Rice’s The Adding Machine (1923) allows Savran 

to expand the social commentary on the twenties and, in particular, his theory that 

expressionism and jazz, manifestations of modernism, were, if not a result, certainly a 

reflection of the ascendancy of the machine. He posits that expressionism expressed the 

fear of the machine age and creates a canon of expressionistic American plays, in which 

he includes Machinal (1928) by Sophie Treadwell (one of the few women mentioned in 

this volume) but not Susan Glaspell’s The Verge (1921). However, rather than limit his 

analysis of Rice’s play to expressionism on the American stage, Savran is true to his 

social/cultural focus and positions The Adding Machine as a parody of the Marxist class 

struggle. This is an interesting approach which gives unity to a play that has frequently 

been criticized for its two-part structure, highlighted by the expressionist and surrealist 

devices used. Savran shows how the surreal section of the play offers a criticism of the 

upper classes that produce nothing worthwhile as contrasted with the artists – who, 

Savran wryly points out, resemble the board of the Theatre Guild, people who worked 

to elevate their theater’s productions into the sphere of high art, although the legitimate 

theater of the time was clearly the province of the new middle class. As Savran reminds 

his readers, the Elysian Fields of The Adding Machine are not home to any theatrical 

activities. The history of the reception of Lawson’s Processional: A Jazz Symphony of 

American Life in Four Acts (1925) allows Savran to shore up his thesis of the divide 

between popular and elite entertainment. 

Chapter six, ‘Jazz Cosmopolitanism’, returns to the concern with the music of the 

Jazz Age to focus on two composers, John Alden Carpenter and George Antheil, and on 

their differing fortunes in the history of the American musical canon as well as on the 

reception of jazz in Europe. Carpenter’s Skyscrapers (1926) was acclaimed by critics 

while Antheil’s Ballet méchanique (1926), when performed in New York in 1927, was 

derided as non-comprehensible mechanical noise. Savran analyzes the success of the 

one and the failure of the other, as also the reversal of their fortunes at present, for 

Antheil is today recognized as the precursor of John Cage, Merce Cunningham or the 

Living Theatre, while Carpenter’s fortunes have waned: he is seen as a conservative 

modernist of little interest to the development of the American avant-garde. 

Eugene O’Neill merits a chapter to himself, chapter seven, entitled ‘The 

Canonization of Eugene O’Neill’, part of which Savran had already published in 

Modern Drama and which, through the theme of canonization, links it to the previous 

chapter on the composers Carpenter and Antheil. The focus of this chapter is more on 

the agents of the process of canonization than on O’Neill himself for Savran devotes a 

large section to George Jean Nathan and his biographer Isaac Goldberg and shows how 

Nathan too became canonized as the theater critic of his times. Perhaps because O’Neill 

disapproved of jazz in his commitment to creating a ‘serious’ theater for America, 

Savran, while managing to sustain his position as founder of American theater, does not 

seem to value too highly his contribution as a playwright. In this at times tongue-incheek 

analysis of how O’Neill was ‘beatified’ and then made into a saint or messiah of 

the American drama, three names are missing: those of Susan Glaspell and George 

Cram Cook (mentioned but once), the founders of the Provincetown Players who 


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believed in O’Neill and gave him his start on the non-commercial art stage, and 

Kenneth Macgowan, the critic who first took up O’Neill’s cause. The canonization of 

O’Neill is the climax of the tenuous thread that holds the volume together: the theme of 

the creation of the new middle class that sought serious entertainment. 

Highbrow/Lowdown is an academic book that examines the anthropological, 

sociological and cultural elements that go into the making of social class but written 

without any unnecessary excess of theoretical language or concepts and is therefore 

accessible not only to the academic reader but also to those who are interested in the 

history of jazz and theater in the USA. For an academic reader, there is, however, one 

serious flaw, and that is the lack of a bibliography to facilitate locating references, which 

are indicated in the usual shorthand form in the notes. Neither this, nor the fact that 

many sections had been published previously in academic journals and anthologies of 

essays, detracts from the general interest of this volume, which throws light on the 

development of serious theater in America and, in its imaginative viewing of theater 

through the lens of jazz, offers an innovative way of analyzing social classes and their 

desire to be entertained. 

Works Cited 

Kennedy, Dennis 2009: The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audience in Modernity and Postmodernity. 


Koritz, Amy 2008: Culture Makers: Urban Performance and Literature in the 1920s. Champaign: U 

of Illinois P. 

Savran, David 2003: A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theater. Ann Arbor: 

U of Michigan P. 

⎯⎯⎯⎯ 1998: Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism and American Culture. 

Princeton: Princeton UP. 

Seldes, Gilbert 1924: The Seven Lively Arts. New York: Harper & Brothers. 

Received 14 January 2010 Accepted 8 April 2010 

Barbara Ozieblo (PhD Salamanca) is Professor of American Literature at the University of Málaga, Spain. 

Her research interests are American women writers, theatre, women dramatists, and most specifically, 

Susan Glaspell. She is now working on the strategies used by women dramatists to re-present/re-enact 

violence to women during peace and wartime. She has also researched and written on Gamel Woolsey and 

Alice Gregory. Her recent publications include Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell (with Jerry Dickey; 

Routledge in 2008), and “’The fun that I had’: The theatrical gendering of Suzan-Lori Parks’s figures“ in 

Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. and Alycia Smith-Howard, Suzan-Lori Parks: A Casebook (Routledge 2007). She has 

published in, among others, the Journal of American Theatre and Drama, Theatre History Studies, 

Twentieth Century Literature and the Powys Journal. 

Address: Dpto. De Filología Inglesa, Francesa y Alemana, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Campus de 

Teatinos, Universidad de Málaga, 29071, Málaga, Spain. Tel.: +34 952 131795. Fac.: +34 952 131843. 

Fax.: +34 952 131843. 


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Marisol Morales Ladrón, ed. 2007: Postcolonial and Gender Perspectives in Irish 

Studies. A Coruña: Netbiblo. xxx + 240pp. ISBN: 978-0-9729892-6-8 

Inés Praga Terente 

Universidad de Burgos 

ipraga@ubu.es 

Despite the fact that Ireland’s intricate, and occasionally convulsed, history has always 

been the object of international attention and the island’s extraordinarily rich literary 

output has been duly acknowledged and praised, for a long time interest in Irish culture 

tended to be emotionally charged and guided by instinctual rather than scholarly 

parameters. However, the last two decades have seen a remarkable surge of academic 

interest in Irish studies, leading to the publication of a profusion of critical material and 

the setting up of Irish studies programmes in universities across the globe, as well as 

national and transnational associations for the study of Irish literature and culture. 

The current fruitful deployment of theoretically informed approaches within the 

field of Irish studies can be traced back to the publication, in 1991, of the landmark 

Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Apart from making a large number of canonical 

and obscure literary and political texts available, the annotations and critical 

introductions of academics and cultural theorists Terence Brown, Luke Gibbons, 

Declan Kiberd and W.J. McCormack sparked off an intense debate over the question of 

Ireland’s colonial/postcolonial status and stirred up the contentious arena of gender 

politics, which hitherto had lain dormant as a result of the persistent and overriding 

focus on the ‘national issue’. 

The essays that make up Postcolonial and Gender Perspectives in Irish Studies, edited 

and introduced by Marisol Morales, the current Chairperson of AEDEI (Asociación 

Española de Estudios Irlandeses), and handsomely published in the Amergin Irish 

Studies Series of Universidade da Coruña, were solicited from eleven Spanish scholars, 

with a view to taking stock of the state of Irish Studies at the start of the twenty-first 

century, and to contributing to the ongoing critical discussion within this thriving area 

of study. As the editor states in the preface, the starting point lies in the lack of 

agreement regarding the postcolonial status of Ireland. Whereas critics like Declan 

Kiberd consider Ireland “a laboratory in which to conduct experiments, and a fantasyland 

in which to meet fairies and monsters” (1996:1), the geographical proximity of the 

island to Great Britain, as well as its small dimension and the affinity of language, 

culture and race, have been said to confer uniqueness on Ireland and have nurtured a 

controversy that defines it as a “different” state (Boehmer 1995), “anomalous” (Lloyd 

1993) or “atypical” (Graham 1994; Said 2003). On its part, the well known study The 

Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post Colonial Literature (Ashcroft, Griffiths 

and Tiffin 1989) had no hesitation in putting Ireland, Scotland and Wales on the same 

level and stating that “while it is possible to argue that these societies were the first 

victims of English expansion, their subsequent complicity in Britain’s imperial 


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192 Inés Praga Terente 

enterprise makes it difficult for colonized peoples outside Britain to accept their identity 

as postcolonial”(33). 

From the very beginning Morales also makes clear the main purpose of the book: to 

collect different approaches to the matter and, above all, to open a critical debate on the 

different contributions to the so much questioned ‘Irish postcolonial condition’ over 

the last four decades. She argues that this publication has covered a critical vacuum in 

Spain, intertwining (Northern) Irish postcolonial and gender studies. The editor’s aim 

to put together both approaches is adequate, each of them being traditionally analyzed 

in a separate and individual way. And the book undoubtedly achieves its aims: the 

postcolonial-cum-gender critical approach that underlies each contribution acts as a 

unifying factor and provides the close readings of particular texts with illuminating 

insights. 

Prefaced by a chapter entitled ‘Postcolonialism, Language and Gender’, which maps 

out the state of the question in Irish critical thought in connection to issues of language 

and gender in the postcolonial context, the rest of the contributions are organised 

around generic clusters such as Poetry, Fiction, Drama and Cinema. The contents are 

wide-ranging but not scattered. They are deftly connected by the essays’ ascription to a 

number of guiding assumptions: they are informed by feminist concerns, they focus on 

Irish texts as cultural expressions of postcolonial sensitivities and worries, and all the 

texts discussed have been produced in the last four decades, a momentous period of 

change and reassessment for Irish society. The organization of the contents does not 

contemplate any division between the literary output of Northern Ireland and that of 

the Republic, though separate chapters are devoted to Northern Ireland poetry, novel 

and short story. We miss some debate on this matter, since the concept of literary 

northern–ness has proved another controversial issue that critics hardly confine to the 

limits of the province. Quite the opposite, the cultural continuity of the island and the 

interaction between North and South hold many important contributions to the 

subject, blurring the barrier delimitation between both, (Foster 1974; Pelaschiar 1998; 

Jeffers 2002; Peach 2004). In this reader’s opinion, a brief survey of the North-South 

relations and the position of Northern Ireland as a part of the United Kingdom would 

have provided a clarifying frame for the matter. 

Opening the collection, Isabel Carrera, in ‘La teorización postcolonial de Irlanda’, 

provides a well informed and multi-angled survey of the increasing refiguration of Irish 

writing in postcolonial terms, and regrets the long-standing asymmetry in Irish culture 

between the elevation of Irish women to national icons and the narrow construction of 

family and sexuality within the normative discourse of Irish nationalism. Carrera calls 

for the productive integration of feminist theory and the postcolonial paradigm, in line 

with the recent work of Elizabeth Butler-Cullinford (Ireland’s Others: Gender and 

Ethnicity in Irish and Popular Culture, 2001), Claire Connolly (Theorizing Ireland, ed. 

2002) and Claire Carroll and Patricia King (Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, eds. 2003). 

In fact, the postcolonial-cum-gender critical approach will underlie the work of the 

remaining contributors and invest their close readings of particular texts with 

illuminating insights. 

For his part, Asier Altuna addresses the linguistic dimension of Irish culture in ‘The 

Irish Language and Issues on Postcolonialism: An Approach’. In the present context of 


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Reviews 193 

increasing globalisation – in which English, seen as the former hegemonic aggressor in 

the anti-colonial struggle and early postcolonial nation-building has long been nativised 

while the use of the indigenous language, Irish, has greatly receded – Altuna encourages 

individuals to take an active role in the preservation and revival of Irish rather than 

leaving the issue to the government and institutions. Furthermore, he advocates a 

threefold perspective: bilingualism, hybridity and translation as a sensible, viable way to 

safeguard the Irish language and the culture embedded in it. To support his views 

Altuna resorts to authors Cathal Ó Searcaigh and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill as examples of 

adaptability to the new circumstances and of cultural and linguistic confidence. 

The essays ‘Northern Ireland: the Poetry in Between’, written by Manuela Palacios, 

and ‘Acts of Union: El discurso del amor en el texto poético de autoras irlandesas (1980- 

2005)’, by Luz Mar González Arias, constitute the poetry section in the volume and 

provide highly-nuanced interpretations. Drawing on the notion of borderland as 

evoking both division and the possibility of encounters, while eschewing the pitfalls of 

monolithic binarisms, Palacios considers poems by Northern Irish Seamus Heaney, 

Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian, as well as southerners such as 

Paula Mehan or Eavan Boland, focusing on geographical, political, religious, class and 

gender divisions, but avoiding any Manichean polarities. González Arias looks at the 

work of female poets of the Republic from the prism of the discourse of love – as 

theorised among others by philosopher Umberto Galimberti, psychoanalyst Erich 

Fromm, and critical theorist Linda Hutcheon – as an ideologically charged social 

practice rather than as the a-cultural and a-historical feeling portrayed in traditional 

poetry. The marked gender asymmetry that has traditionally prevailed in Ireland – 

encapsulated in the recurring metaphor of the feminisation of the land, whose 

possession and rape act as a correlate for the plight of the colonised subject – recurs as a 

subtext in many of the poems written by Eavan Boland, Eithne Strong, Katie Donovan, 

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Paula Meehan, Dorothy Molloy, Anne Hartigan and Leanne 

O’Sullivan, and analysed by González Arias, who calls for a thorough contextualisation 

in order to grasp the public reverberations intertwined in the private musings of the 

poems. 

The section devoted to fiction is, quite appropriately, the longest, as it takes stock of 

novel writing in the Republic and in Northern Ireland, as well as the island’s distinctive 

contribution to short prose fiction. Irish writers’ special propensity for the short story 

has been variously accounted for by critics and practitioners of the form. Early 

complimentary assertions arguing for the existence of a distinctly Irish short story 

tradition – which was largely attributed to the length and strength of the island’s oral 

tradition, as well as a supposed weakness for writing novels (Bates 1941; Mercier 1964; 

Kilroy 1984; Rix 1988) – have been qualified, eschewing judgmental pronouncements 

about the status of the genre in relation to the novel (Bolger 1993) and highlighting the 

fact that since “the short story frequently deals with marginal figures on the outskirts of 

society [it constitutes] a subtle means for submerged population groups – in Frank 

O’Connor’s phrase – to address and challenge a dominant community” (González 

1994: 161). As Margarita Estévez Saá shows in her fine essay ‘The Seanchai: Short Fiction 

by Irish Women Writers from the Republic’, Irish women writers, emerging as they are 

from a long silence in Irish social and cultural life, have revived the traditional art of 


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storytelling, adapting it to new realities and to their own personal predicaments. 

Moreover, refuting the oft-repeated claim that women writers confine themselves to 

realistic and autobiographical modes, Estévez Saá draws our attention to a number of 

texts published in the last decade. Insofar as they display “a wide spectrum of narrative 

forms and styles, stories set in rural and urban landscapes of Ireland and abroad, told 

from the perspective of adults and of children” (148) and supersede, both formally and 

thematically, “regional and national concerns and circumstances” (152), they could and 

should, according to Estévez Saá, be read and interpreted in the broad frame of the 

postmodern condition. 

For her part, in ‘The Anti/postcolonial trace in Some Stories of the Northern Irish 

Troubles’, Tamara Benito de la Iglesia dwells on short story writing in Northern 

Ireland, a genre she deems to be particularly apt to voice anti-colonial and post-colonial 

concerns. She considers how four male writers from different backgrounds – Gerry 

Adams, William Trevor, David Park and Bernard MacLaverty – address the Troubles, 

from overt denunciation of abuses on the part of the security forces to the inevitable 

dehumanisation brought about by the protracted sectarian violence. Esther Aliaga’s 

contribution, ‘Glenn Patterson and Robert MacLiam Wilson: Two Contemporary 

Northern Irish Writers and the Question of National Identity’, also focuses on the 

literary portrayal of the conflict in Northern Ireland, this time using the medium of the 

novel and optimistically stressing the genre’s potential for social intervention. She 

undertakes a close reading of Burning Your Own (1988) and Fat Lad (1992) by 

Protestant novelist Glenn Patterson and Ripley Bogle (1989) and Eureka Street (1996) by 

Catholic Robert McLiam Wilson. Aliaga highlights the authors’ distinctly non-sectarian 

approach to Northern Ireland in the post-ceasefire phase of the Troubles, by steering 

clear of monolithic notions of communal identity in order to adopt a stance that 

transcends the notion of the parochial to embrace the universal. 

The fourth essay in the fiction section, ‘Espacios Femeninos en la novela de la 

República escrita por mujeres’, is authored by María Amor Barros del Río, who 

discusses novels by women writers from the Republic from a post-colonial and gender 

perspective. In a wide-ranging survey that includes, among others, Edna O’Brien’s The 

Country Girls (1960-64), Kate Cruise O’Brien’s The Homesick Garden (1991), and Éilís 

Ní Dhuibhne’s The Dancer’s Dancing (1999), Barros del Río traces the novelists’ search 

for strategies to voice their own identity outside social and historical constraints, in 

particular the debasing consequences of the persistent colonial ideological identification 

of women with the land. 

Irish drama from Northern Ireland and the Republic is respectively dealt with by 

María del Mar González Chacón and Rosana Herrero. The former’s ‘La compañía 

Charabanc (Marie Jones), Ann Devlin y Christina Reid: Estudio postcolonial del teatro 

norirlandés contemporáneo’ assesses the contribution of the Charabanc Theatre 

Company, created in Belfast in 1983 by five actresses, in the highly surveilled and 

censored panorama of Northern Ireland during the Troubles. González Chacón focuses 

on eight plays by women playwrights Marie Jones, Anne Devlin and Christina Reid, 

which she sees as literary expressions of postcolonial worries, variously dramatised in 

the guise of trauma, exile, or the search of the lost voice of the subaltern. 


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Reviews 195 

Adhering to a politically informed postcolonial agenda that views performance “as 

vindication and exploration of identitarian and cultural pluralities” (181), Rosana 

Herrero’s ‘Infantilising Staging of Postcolonial Adulthood: A Study of Tom Murphy´s A 

Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer´s Assistant and Sebastian Barry´s Boss Grady´s Boys’, 

offers a remarkably lucid analysis of modern Irish theatre, taking as guiding motif the 

nation-child equation, which serves as a metaphor of the prolonged childhood of the 

Irish State under De Valera. Herrero attends to formal and conceptual aspects, from the 

vignette-like dramatic structure that enables the integration on stage of peripheral 

discursive forms such as dreams, dance and story-telling, to the author’s concern to give 

voice to the dispossessed, forgotten in the so-called Grand Narratives of history. 

Part five, ‘Postcolonial Ireland on Screen’, written by Rosa González Casademont 

and wholly devoted to postcolonial Ireland on screen, is an excellent contribution both 

for its comprehensiveness and its valuable discussion. Although the popularity of the 

cinema as one of the foremost expressions of popular culture remains uncontested, the 

crucial role of films in the construction of the Irish imaginary has received little 

attention, and remains notoriously under-theorised. However, as González 

Casademont points out, “meanings circulated in mainstream films are frequently 

dismissed as stereotypical and manufactured, nevertheless they enter into the discursive 

arena where issues of gender, identity and power relations are being contested and 

transformed” (208). This is fully substantiated in her exhaustively-documented 

discussion of the ways in which filmmaking in the Republic and Northern Ireland has 

engaged with, and negotiated, areas strongly inflected by the colonial encounter such as 

gender roles, rurality, Catholicism, political violence and the Gaelic language. 

In conclusion, one must congratulate the editor on the overall high standard of the 

publication and on having brought to fruition her stated aim of enriching the ongoing 

critical debate in Irish studies with analyses that draw on the intersection between 

postcolonial and gender studies and that encompass the two geographic and political 

spaces that make up the isle. The fact that the volume is a multi-authored project 

inevitably leads to occasional reiteration, in particular in the authors’ vindication of the 

appropriateness of the postcolonial and feminist paradigms in their respective analyses. 

Still, the insights provided in the eleven essays are consistently original and well argued. 

Postcolonial and Gender Perspectives in Irish Studies bears witness to the thriving state of 

Irish Studies in Spain, and at the same time makes an outstanding contribution to this 

academic discipline. 

Works Cited 

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Hellen Tiffin 1989: The Empire Writes Back: Theory and 

Practice in Post Colonial Literature. London: Routledge. 

Bates, Herbert Ernest 1941: The Modern Short Story: A Critical Survey. Boston: The Writer Inc. 

Boehmer, Elleke 1995: Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford: Oxford UP. 

Bolger, Dermot. ed. 1993: The Picador Book of Irish Contemporary Fiction. London: Picador. 

González, Rosa 1994: ‘The Irish Short Story. A Naturalized Literary Form’. Federico Eguiluz et al, 

eds. La Europa (Cultural) de los Pueblos: Voz y Forma. Vitoria: John Moores U and U del País 

Vasco. 157-63. 


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Foster, John Wilson 1974: Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction. New Jersey: Rowman and 

Littlefield. 

Graham, Colin 1994: ‘Liminal Spaces: Post Colonial Theories and Irish Culture’. The Irish Review 

16: 29-43. 

Jeffers, Jennifer M. 2002: The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century. Gender, Bodies and 

Power. London: Palgrave. 

Kiberd, Declan 1996: Inventing Ireland. The Literature of the Modern Nation. London: Jonathan 

Cape. 

Kilroy, James F., ed. 1984: The Irish Short Story. A Critical History. Boston: Twayne Publishers. 

Lloyd, David 1993: Anomalous States : Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment. Dublin: 

Lilliput. 

Mercier, Vivian 1964: ‘The Irish Short Story and Oral tradition’. Ray B. Browne, ed. The Celtic 

Cross: Studies in Irish Culture and Literature. Purdue: Purdue U Studies. 98-116. 

Peach, Linden 2004: The Contemporary Irish Novel. Critical Readings. New York: Palgrave, 

MacMillan. 

Pelaschiar, Laura 1998: Writing the North: the Contemporary Novel in Northern Ireland. Trieste: 

Edizioni Parnaso. 

Rix, Walter T. 1988: ‘Irish Oral Tradition and the Narrative structure of the Anglo-Irish Short 

Story’. Birgit Bramsback, ed. Anglo-Irish and Irish Literature. Aspects of Language and Culture. 

Uppsala: Uppsala U. 149-63. 

Said, Edward 2003: ‘Reflections on Ireland and Postcolonialism’. Clare Carroll and Patricia King, 

eds. Ireland and Postcolonial Theory. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P. 177-84. 

Received 29 July 2009 Revised version accepted 3 November 2009 

Inés Praga Terente is Full Professor of English at the University of Burgos. She has been devoted to Irish 

Studies over the two last decades and was Chair of the Spanish Association for Irish Studies (AEDEI) from 

2001 to 2007. Her latest publications include La novela irlandesa del siglo XX (2005), ‘Ways of 

Remembering: Musical Reveries over Childhood and Youth’ (2007) and ‘“I Made the Iliad from such a Local 

Row”: Revisiting the City with Roddy Doyle’s Paula Spencer’ (2008). 

Address: Facultad de Humanidades y Educación,Universidad de Burgos, C/Villadiego, s/n, 09001 Burgos, 

Spain. Tel.: +34 947258788. Fax: +34 947258059. 


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Acknowledgements 

The Editors wish to thank all those members of the Editorial Board of Atlantis who 

have given their time and expertise to this journal. Likewise, we thank Clare Painter 

(University of New South Wales, Australia), Javier Valenzuela Serrano (Universidad de 

Murcia) and Esther Sánchez-Pardo (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) for their 

willingness to collaborate with us in assessing certain submissions. 

197

Editorial policy, Instructions to contributors and abridged Guidelines 

What we publish 

Atlantis publishes articles, reviews and interviews in the field of Anglo-American 

studies. Contributions submitted to Atlantis should meet the following criteria: 

• Suitability for the aim and scope of the journal. 

• Originality and interest in relation to subject matter, method, data or findings. 

• Relevance to current research in the field. 

• Revision of previously published work on the topic. 

• Logical rigour in argumentation and in the analysis of data. 

• Adequate use of concepts and research methodology. 

• Discussion of theoretical implications and/or practical applications. 

• Command of recent bibliography. 

• Linguistic appropriateness, textual organisation and satisfactory presentation. 

• Readability and conciseness of expression. 

Concurrence: Authors are expected to know and heed basic ground rules that preclude 

simultaneous submission, duplicate publication or any other kind of self-plagiarism. 

Prospective contributors to Atlantis commit themselves to the following when they 

submit a manuscript: 

• That no concurrent consideration of the same, or almost identical, work by 

any other journal and/or publisher is taking place. 

• That the potential contribution has not appeared previously nor is about to 

appear within two years, in any form whatsoever, in another journal, 

electronic format or as a chapter/section of a book. 

• If, after two years, a contribution first published in Atlantis is to be reprinted 

elsewhere, permission is not required but the author should credit Atlantis for 

the contribution’s first appearance. If in doubt about any of the above, the 

author should consult the General Editor. 

What to send 

The recommended length for articles and interviews is between 6,000 and 8,000 words. 

Book reviews should be between 2,500 and 3,000 words. Manuscripts should be 

double-spaced with wide margins. The first page of each article must include a 100-200 

word summary written in English, followed by a list of six to ten keywords. A similar 

summary and keywords are required in Spanish, on a separate file. These will be 

provided by the Editors for those contributors who do not handle Spanish. 

Your contribution should reach the Editor in TWO double-spaced, point 12 clear 

computer printouts with wide margins. Additionally, please send the General Editor an 

electronic version (MS Word for Windows) as an e-mail attachment. Please see the 

inside front cover for the Editor’s addresses. 

199

200 

Anonymity policy. All details of personal identification, including your name in 

citations and references, must be absent from both the hard copy and the electronic 

manuscript, as well as from the file properties. The author's name should be replaced by 

‘author’ throughout the paper. If the submission contains any element of identification 

of the author, it will not be sent to referees. 

The author must submit the following information on a separate sheet. Personal 

details should be absent from the manuscript itself. 

• Title of the manuscript 

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• Institutional affiliation and full postal address 

• Home address 

• Telephone numbers (both home and office) 

• Fax number and e-mail address (if applicable) 

• Word processor and version used to format the document 

• Total number of words, including works cited and notes 

Assessment policy 

Submissions to Atlantis are evaluated anonymously (double-blind) by three specialists 

from the journal's international Board of Referees. Acceptance by at least two specialists 

is a condition for publication. 

Conventions and style 

Titles of contributions. For articles, type the title at the top of the page on which the 

text begins. Do not italicize your title or capitalize it in full. Italicize only a published 

work in the title or a cited word in a linguistic study. Capitalize only the first letter of 

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there are quotes within an indented quotation, the double quotation marks are used. 

Single quotation marks (‘ ’) are used in the following ways: a) to enclose titles of articles, 

essays, short stories, short poems, songs, chapters and sections of books, lectures and 

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c) (usually called ‘scare quotes’) to indicate that the word or phrase is being used 

deliberately in an unusual or arguably incorrect sense, as well as for not yet wholly 

standard terms; d) for English or Spanish translations of words or phrases from a 

different language (agua ‘water’) 

Section headings. The inclusion of section headings should be kept to a minimum. 

Section headings must begin from the left margin, with no period at the end. Headings 

may be numbered. The use of Arabic numerals is recommended. Centred Roman

numerals may be used when there is no heading title. If absolutely necessary, further 

division within a section should follow the same format used for section headings. They 

must be preceded by Arabic numerals separated by full stop (e.g. 1.1). Do not capitalize 

headings in full. 

Punctuation. In general, make your usage as consistent as possible. Although the finer 

points of punctuation are often a matter of personal preference, the main purpose is 

clarity, and here it is wiser to follow established convention. Do not use commas (,) 

before “and” and “or” in a series of three or more. Never use a comma and a dash 

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this), if required by the context. A dash (–) is not the same as a hyphen (-). The former 

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the latter joins words in a compound such as twenty-four. Do not confuse them. 

Question marks (?) and exclamation marks (!) should not normally be used in scholarly 

writing. Periods (.) close notes and bibliographical citations as well as complete 

sentences in text and notes. The period is placed within the parenthesis when the 

parenthetical element is independent: “. . . the language is both subliterary and 

transpersonal (in contrast, allegory, for example, is transpersonal but not subliterary)”. 

but “. . . the language is both subliterary and transpersonal. (On the other hand, 

allegory, for example, is transpersonal but not subliterary.)” Square brackets ([]) are 

used for an unavoidable parenthesis within a parenthesis, to enclose interpolations or 

comments in a quotation or incomplete data and to enclose phonetic transcription. 

(Slash marks [/] are used to enclose phonemic transcription.) 

Note that a period or comma is placed before a superscript indicating a note, for 

example: “…with whose king he has negotiated the monopoly of the sugar trade with 

England. 14 ” 

Works Cited. In the titles of books and articles each main word is capitalized, i.e. 

nouns, adjectives verb and proper nouns. The first names of authors and editors should 

be given in full, rather than as initials. Publisher’s names are appropriately abbreviated 

in the list of works cited. For example, Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc. becomes 

simply Macmillan. Any university press will be abbreviated according to one of two 

patterns: U of Miami P or Toronto UP. 

Bibliographical references should follow the following style: 

201 

Danby, John F. 1961: Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear. 

London: Faber. 

Carnero González, José 1982: ‘Calipso y Penélope en Ulysses’. James Joyce: A New 

Language: Actas/Proceedings del Simposio Internacional en el Centenario de 

James Joyce. Ed. Francisco García Tortosa, et al. Sevilla: Depto. de Literatura 

Inglesa de la Univ. de Sevilla: 167-74. 

Kastovsky, Dieter 1986: ‘The Problem of Productivity in Word-formation’. 

Linguistics 24: 585- 600. 

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