Part 2 of 2 of 5 of 6. We’re losing our minds at this point. If it’s Tuesday, this must be episode Belgium. We don’t get to any questions this time. Weirdly, though, we talk about porn a lot, because of William. Enjoy!
QUESTIONS:
None. I told you that already.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Wow… I was really upset with pseudoscientists and their backwards little helpers in this episode. It was because a news source that I really like had let me down that day. And the harder it is to find decent news sources, the more this kind of thing frustrates me.
I mostly kept thinking about word origins in this episode….
But before getting to that, I was reminded that y’all talked about silent movies last week, and there’s a great silent movie of “The Scarlet Letter” (which is such a powerful, ironic, fit–I mean, silence and “The Scarlet Letter”) with Lillian Gish.
Cannibals-Barbecue-Treasure Island: I’m not sure I remember cannibals or a discussion of cannibals in the novel, but I do think Long John’s Silver’s name is an allusion to Long Pig. “Barbecue” is, in origin, a Caribbean word that refers to the way the Caribs cooked meat. “Cannibal” is based on a mishearing of Colombus and his men of the word “Carib” which actually means human being, and then took on the meaning of someone who eats human beings based on racist assumptions about the Carib tribes.
I was just teaching a section on British Imperialism in the Victorian Age and found that my students were very surprised that derogatory terms used to refer to people of African origin were also used to refer to East Indians and Asians. I guess I was surprised that that wasn’t widely known. Maybe it would be a useful way to point to the fact that in the U.S. similar terms were used to talk about immigrants that today are considered “white”–like Germans and Italians. (One of the epithets used against Italians, for instance, refers to a country in West Africa.) It kind of makes clear that this whole “race” thing is a construct.
Also, even though the words used to describe slaves objectifies them, as Tony said. It’s pretty clear that the people of the time knew they were dealing with people, and not with objects or animals. It’s clear actually because a valuable object or animal would not be treated as harshly as slaves were. That violence is an attempt to deny common humanity.
William – we listened to The Scarlet Letter on “tape” on vacation this summer. There’s an intro (that takes 90 minutes on “tape”) about how the author got the idea for the book (which I don’t think was even true) before the actual book begins. Might be useful in your research, but is completely unnecessary in becoming familiar with the story of The Scarlet Letter.
Also, I found it stretching credibility that Hester Pryne would stay in Salem where she’s completely ostricised, basically ruining her and Pearl’s lives rather than moving to say, Boston. I didn’t think Hawthorne sufficiently told the story why she’d want to stay in Salem with her label when she could move anywhere else and have far more opportunity for herself and her child.
I don’t remember ever learning the term Long Pig, and didn’t think I had ever heard it before this podcast.
Robinson Crusoe was also a rough read/listen, although maybe isn’t technically a pirate book. Poor guy is stranded on an island for years (feels like the story is moving along in real time) and he FINALLY gets off the island and the book was only half over! I think I’m not a very good consumer of classic literature.
Beth, I love that intro. section.
My favourite pirate story is Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini. It’s also good as historical fiction (the Monmouth Rebellion is the starting point). And good female characters as well. (Treasure Island basically having none.) There’s a good audiobook version read by Michael Maloney.
In 1838 (or thereabouts) Hawthorne published a short story entitled “Endicott and the Red Cross” that was his fictional take on an event that, supposedly, actually happened, Endicott defacing an English flag in 1634. Hawthorne describes many onlookers, in particular those observers who were under some sort of persecution (Hawthorne’s aim being, I think, to point out the hypocrisy of Endicott lamenting English tyranny when Endicott was a tyrant himself). Among the crowd of the persecuted was a woman wearing a scarlet letter, but the letter was embroidered in such a fine and somewhat ostentatious way that Hawthorne suggests one would be forgiven for thinking it stood for “Admirable” rather than “Adulteress”. I made a mental note of this for whenever I read The Scarlet Letter, in case his imagined backstory for the woman in this short story in any way informed his 1850 novel. So… did she stay in Salem out of defiance? Maybe?
In 1844 (or thereabouts), Hawthorne published the short story “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, where he starts the story with a rather long commentary filled with fabricated, self-deprecating details. The commentary starts with a critique of the alleged original author of the tale, “Aubepine”, who is, of course, actually Hawthorne himself (Aubepine is French for “hawthorn (tree)”), with all of the criticisms of Aubepine being popular criticisms of Hawthorne (like Hawthorne’s over-enthusiasm for allegory — I think Poe leveled that criticism particularly hard) and the listed book/story titles attributed to Aubepine being titles of Hawthorne’s work translated into French. I thought it was pretty funny. 🙂
“Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at large purge her soul and work out another purity than that which she had lost; more saintlike, because the result of martyrdom.”
There are several reasons why she stays, I think. One of them is not exactly defiance, but self-authorship. By staying, she works to revise the meaning she’s been assigned.