Homeward Bound

For May, bomb shelters exemplify the "containment" metaphor, showing how public fears intersected with (created?) domestic ideologies of the hothouse nuclear family.

Title: Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988)

Author: Elaine Tyler May, history, University of Minnesota (PhD, UCLA, 1975). She writes: "I am a historian of the United States in the twentieth century, with a particular interest in the intersections of politics and private life. My research and teaching focus on the areas of women's history and history of the family, exploring the ways in which gender and sexuality reflect and express American political, cultural and social values." Her other books include Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (1980) and Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (1997), which I really, really want to read.

Argument: Dominant historical and cultural narratives have normalized the 1950s way of marriage and family life, but in reality, the 50s paradigm (early marriage; rigid gender roles; nuclear family) was different from anything before or after - and, of course, the social relations of the time period were constructed, like those of any other. May asks why, after the Depression and WWII, when women worked outside of the home in large numbers, the pendulum swung so far toward the other, more traditional configuration during the 1950s. The larger theoretical point here has to do with the way that political ideology, or national political "direction", can be reflected/refracted in ideas of domestic relationships. Specifically, during the postwar years, ideas of "containment" (on the international level) manifested themselves in the domestic sphere.

Chapter-by-chapter:
1. Containment at Home: Cold War, Warm Hearth: Beginning with the story of the Nixon/Khruschev "kitchen debates", May describes what deeper meanings or usefulnesses the domesticity of the 1950s had for the society: "The appliance-laden ranch-style home epitomized the expansive, secure lifestyle that postwar Americans wanted. Within the protective walls of the modern home, worrisome developments like sexual liberalism, women's emancipation, and affluence would lead not to decadence but to a wholesome family life. Sex would enhance marriage, emancipated women would professionalize homemaking, and affluence would put an end to material deprivation..." (19-20) Also, this lifestyle, when available to (or idealized for!) many people, would make Communism look unattractive and unnecessary to the majority of Americans. Here, May also introduces the Kelly Longitudinal Study, the survey of married couples begun in the 1930s which will serve as an important part of her evidence for the book.


Nixon v. Khruschev, 1959 Kitchen Debates. But why did Moscow allow an exposition of American culture in the first place? Anybody know? (Also, Khruschev said, when Nixon showed him a TV, "This is probably always out of order...Don't you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down? Many things you've shown us are interesting but they are not needed in life...they are merely gadgets" [quoted on page 163]. And then Nixon proceeded to go see about inventing that food-pusher...)

2. Depression: Hard Times at Home: Context for the 1950s model of domesticity includes the Depression years, during which many more women went to work, but which, May says, also "created nostalgia for a mythic past in which male breadwinners made a decent living, and homemakers were freed from outside employment" (38). May discusses Depression-era Hollywood depictions of working women, which always managed to emphasize flexibility and problem-solving in marriages strapped for cash, without proposing a fundamental shift in the way marriages worked.

3. War and Peace: Fanning the Home Fires: Again, during WWII, women worked in greater numbers; however, this "emergency suspension" of gender roles (see Gail Collins, who probably got this idea from May) is revoked at the end of the war. May returns to Hollywood to show how women working in the film industry were depicted as domestic (and includes an awesomely memorable picture of Joan Crawford washing the floor in full eyebrowed splendor). The emphasis on domesticity during a time when many women worked was due to a desire to contain the female sexuality which was seen as being "on the loose" during the wild wartime years (see: paintings of bombshells on planes and, well, bombshells). May also writes about the real dilemmas of women who decided whether or not to work during this era, pointing out that opportunities for women - whether college-educated or not - were slim, and may have made domesticity seem like a more appetizing solution to the question "What do I do with my life?"

4. Explosive Issues: Sex, Women, and the Bomb: During the postwar years, women's sexuality was linked pervasively with the power of the bomb, "a symbolic connection that found widespread expression in professional writings, anticommunist campaigns, and the popular culture" (93). Many people in many levels of government sincerely believed that there was a "direct connection between communism and sexual depravity" (94). Male power needed to be exercised in the home as well as in the public sphere, so that the power of sex could be harnessed and channelled in positive directions: men would be fulfilled, and not subject to temptations of pornography, homosexuality, and prostitution; women would be fulfilled, and would raise healthy kids, like good republican mothers. Here May talks about the bomb shelter and its meanings for idealized family "togetherness" and insularity.

Marilyn Monroe, she of the totally uncontrollable sexuality, in Niagara (1953).

5. Brinkmanship: Sexual Containment on the Home Front: Following the paradigm set up in the previous chapter, May returns to the Kelly data, attempting to see how postwar couples were affected by ideologies of containment. Discussing ideas of the acceptability of premarital sex, she writes that many couples got married early to avoid the disasters that were supposed to happen when you did engage in intercourse before getting hitched. May outlines the paradox of expert advice on sex and marriage in this time period: the recommendation was for complete virginity before marriage, and then mutual bliss within - a combination which didn't really seem to work in the real world, or at least the real world as reported by Kelly. All in all, sexual containment had an "ambiguous legacy" (134) - it did not guarantee security or fulfillment, but the consequences of non-adherence (loss of status, stigma, "the economic hardship of divorce") were too great for many people to risk.

6. Baby Boom and Birth Control: The Reproductive Consensus: During the Cold War, having babies was a way to exercise civic values. Pronatalism, rampant during these years, held that having children was the number one way to be happy, and to contribute to the growth of the nation. To this end, ideas of maternity being the ultimate sexual fulfillment for women were widely held, but also (and this is interesting) people thought that men should be fathers - as May contends, fatherhood was seen as an antidote to an office life that might be overwhelmingly depersonalized. For the first time, the family was supposed to fulfill all human emotional needs - a microcosm unto itself. Again, May returns to H'wood to describe how these ideas grew in movie-world.

Still from the pronatal film "Penny Serenade", starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne (1941)

7. The Commodity Gap: Consumerism and the Modern Home: Returning to the kitchen debates, May shows how consumerism was tied with stability and anti-Communism, and how investing in the home became the best way of "planning for the future" (even if it put financial burdens on the family in the present). May writes that part of the way Americans, still adhering to a Puritan model of pragmatism and guilt, justified spending as much as they started spending was that if it was the home they were investing in, consumerism was seen as unselfish (it's for the kids, not for me!) Good point.

8. Hanging Together: For Better or for Worse: Returning to the Kelly couples, May goes straight to the heart of some bad marriages, asking why the couples in question stayed together, and finding that the answer was usually status, stability, and security.

9. Epilogue: The Baby Boom Comes of Age: Starting with Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), May writes about responses to the domestic ideal, beginning with those who lived it (women who wrote to Friedan after the publication of the book) and moving into the responses of their children. She eventually concludes that domestic containment moved out of fashion after the Cold War political conditions changed, and that there was, after the 1950s, no "consensus" idea of how family life would be lived - at least, not the way there was back then.

Reviews: Joseph Hawes, writing in the Journal of American History, wrote that May used the "perfect" data set provided in the form of the Kelly survey to great effect, comparing her work to that of Nancy Cott in Bonds of Womanhood (1977). Hawes also liked May's use of the Civil Defense images in chapter 4. The only possible quibble: May seemed to focus on unhappy couples, but, Hawes wrote, "the 60s rebirth of feminism fully justifies her emphasis". In Signs, Susan Ware wrote that the use of the Kelly data was the strength and the weakness of the book - the data's concentration in the white middle class, for example, was a drawback (but one of which, as Ware admits, May is fully aware). More important, Ware wrote that the somewhat imperfect chronology of the Kelly survey - which began in the late 30s - meant that many of the 50s ideologies described in the book could not be said to apply directly to the experiences of these couples. Overall, though, Ware appreciated May's interest in placing these 50s experiences in a chronology which included the 30s and 40s.

Sources to follow up on: Primary: Movies: "The Atomic Cafe"; "Niagara".

Secondary: Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (1976); Robert J. Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (1979); Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (1983); Ellen Peck and Judith Senderowitz, Pronatalism: The Myth of Mom and Apple Pie (1974); Ellen Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (1984); Leila Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939-1945 (1978); Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (1985).

War Without Mercy

View of the Hiroshima bombing.

Title: War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986)

Author: John W. Dower, professor of Japanese history at MIT. Holds a PhD in history and Far Eastern languages (Harvard). His other books include Empire and Aftermath (1979) ("a study of the life and times of the diplomat and prime minister Yoshida Shigeru"); Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (1999); and most recently Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999), which won the Pulitzer, the Natl Book Award, and the Bancroft Award. He's also executive-produced a doc called "Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima", which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1988.

Argument: During the Pacific War, racism on the part of both the Americans and Japanese made it easier to prosecute a conflict which was notable for its bloodiness and severity. The reason why the Japanese and Americans were able to slip into a friendly postwar relationship even after such carnage is that the stereotypes employed on both sides were multifaceted, mutable, and almost universal in their historical experience. Thus, rather than believing that the postwar years spoke to the possibility of elimination of past historical racism, Dower proposes that the most frightening thing about these kinds of racist ideologies is that they can be stowed away and applied to whatever conflict comes up next, even if the enemy is not of the same race or nationality.

Chapter-by-chapter:

Part One: Enemies
1. Patterns of a Race War: An overview of the racist ideologies at play in the American and Japanese understanding of each other. Dower points out that these ideologies must have made it easier for each side to commit atrocities and carry out full scale war; he also writes that racisms of this kind are mutable and constant conditions of human interaction. The fact that stereotypes and ideologies of the war era were easily adapted to peacetime conditions (instead of being a menacing, base simian, the Japanese were seen as pets; instead of incubating xenophobia, the Japanese ideology of purity led to a desire to purge the nation of the recently failed regime).

2. "Know Your Enemy": An analysis of Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" installment on Japan serves as the centerpiece for an explication of American stereotypes about Japan, as well as background material for an understanding of why the Allies treated Japan as they did in the postwar era. Meanwhile, a parallel description of the pamphlets and manifestos read by Japanese soldiers and citizens shows that inside Japan, America and the West were viewed as aggressors possessed of a traitorous history of empire - aggressors whose downfall was essential to the health of the world. Dower uses these two sources to show how stereotype worked on either side: these types "followed patterns of contrariness", in which the type was seen as the opposite of the favorable national ideal; "the positive self images of one side were singled out for ridicule and condemnation by the other"; both sides espoused surprisingly similar ideologies of "liberation, morality, and peace"; images of the enemy as "incorrigibly evil, base, or mad" led to genocidal policies or practices; and finally, "there was a free-floating quality to portrayals of the enemy - a pattern of stereotyping particular to enemies and 'others' in general, rather than to the Japanese foe or Western foe in particular" (29) (see Richard Drinnon).

3. War Hates and War Crimes: Dower begins with two questions: why were Japanese seen in the US as being so much worse than the Germans in the atrocity department? And why did Japanese propaganda portray the Allies as "the real barbarians of the modern age" (34)? Answers to the first include the idea that the Japanese, unlike the Germans, were "suicidal" or irrational; that the incomplete defeat of the Japanese would only, in the history of such a long-standing nation, mean that the Japanese would begin to build up forces for a revenge blow; and finally, the idea that Japan required a "psychological purge" to free it of its "madness" - we should inflict pain and suffering on all of the citizens, this argument went, as a necessary method of ridding the Japanese of their abnormal psychology (56). Meanwhile, the Japanese saw us as having had a long-term ambition to gain supremacy over Asia; having interfered militarily in Japanese affairs in the past; and having a current plan to commit atrocity in order to send Japan back into the class of "slave state" (58).

Part Two: The War in Western Eyes
4. Apes and Others: Representation of Japanese people as subhuman or inhuman took several forms: representation as animals (monkeys, bees, snakes); representation as madmen; representation as children. Dower uses cartoons, official propaganda, etc., as examplars. These attached representations, Dower writes, "blocked seeing the foe as rational or even human, and facilitated mass killing" (89). Dower points out that while these stereotypes remained somewhat constant and translated from earlier eras, the United States became availed of stronger and stronger technological methods of extermination, resulting in a deadly combination (93).

5. Lesser Men and Supermen: Even ethnographers and anthropologists who were supposedly more sympathetic to the Japanese ended up reinforcing these ideologies of supremacy by espousing condescending or ethnocentric views about Japanese "national character". Before the war, Japanese were seen on the whole as "lesser men", incapable of achieving Western levels of technological dominance; as they began to achieve victories, not the least of which was their strike on Pearl Harbor, their status slid into that of "superman", which was nonetheless not necessarily an upgrade ("subhuman and superhuman were not mutually exclusive...but complementary" [116]).

6. Primitives, Children, Madmen: More coverage of social-science's contributions to Japanology during the war, which often consisted in diagnosing the "problem" of the Japanese character (one theory: they were toilet trained too early and too strictly, which meant that they were control freaks who could not compromise or surrender). The diagnoses generally separated into three categories of primitive, childlike (or adolescent - often the Japanese were compared to teenage gangsters), or mentally ill.

7. Yellow, Red, and Black Men: Dower associates racism against the Japanese with that against the Indians and African-Americans of the United States, specifying that this racism saw the Japanese (or Asians in general) as "the yellow horde", set to invade American shores. The "Yellow Peril" was made all the more perilous by the mass' growing adoption of American and Western technology (Dower uses Fu Manchu novels starring a mad Asian scientist to make this point). Here Dower also includes information about black American sympathies for the Asian nations beset by US racism.



Bugs Bunny cartoon satirizing Japanese culture, using many race stereotypes described by Dower.

Part Three: The War in Japanese Eyes
8. The Pure Self: A major component of Japanese racism against Westerners was situated in the "impurity" of the Westerner or the foreigner, as opposed to the superiority of the Japanese "stock". Dower points out that the concept of Japanese "purity" was rooted in religious practice and mythohistory. The Yamato race, Japanese ideology held, could be traced back to a celestial origin. Purification as an active prescription, Dower writes, "was understood to mean: 1. expunging foreign influences 2. living austerely and 3. fighting, and if need be, dying for the emperor" (228). Late-war developments such as the training of kamikaze pilots were associated with this fundamental idea. The flip side of this iconicity of purity was the essential corruption of the Westerners in opposition to Japan - Japanese belief in this corruption/egotism/weakness, Dower writes, led the Japanese to misread American commitment to the Pacific War, in the early years of the conflict (260).

9. The Demonic Other: Here Dower explicates the role of the "stranger" in Japanese culture, which is an ambiguous and sometimes threatening one. During the war, Westerners were seen as the dark side of the stranger, which would manifest itself in beastly or atrocious behavior. (Dower cites multiple examples of Japanese stories about American war atrocities.) Dower also tells the story of Momotaro, a Japanese folk hero who, as an exceptionally bright and strong young lad, exorcises multiple demons. This story influenced many Japanese ideas about heroism and military service (see: the kamikaze pilot). Dower points out that although Japanese cartoons did depict Japan as Momotaro and the Allies as the demons to be defeated, the fact that specific Allies (Churchill, Roosevelt) were identified as enemies gave them a human identity that was denied the Japanese in the analogous position (256).

10. "Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus": The story of the idea of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, an entity intended to establish Asia as an imperial holding of Japan. Examining an official report which survived the purge of such paperwork after V-J Day, Dower writes that the racism which saw Japan at the middle of this Pan-Asiatic world "reflected Western intellectual influences as well as Western pressures", and that the "patterns of supremacism" embedded in Japanese writing about other Asian races was "analogous" to Western racisms (265).

The USS Saratoga after hits by a series of kamikaze pilots, February 21, 1945.

Kamikaze pilots.

Part Four: Epilogue
11. From War to Peace: Transformation of racist ideas about the Other happened surprisingly rapidly on both sides of the Japanese/American divide. Japanese people employed the alternate vision of "the stranger" - the more positive permutation - in order to facilitate increased acceptance of the American occupying forces. Americans re-cast their "simian" enemies as pets, or saw themselves as "parents" or "doctors" to the Japanese "children" or "patients". However, in later years, Japanese business ascendency has been seen in the West as another indication of Japanese "superhumanity" - shades of old stereotypes continue.

Reviews: In the Pacific Historical Review, D. Clayton James wrote that Mercy was one of the standout books on the Pacific War, called it relevant and provocative, but wished that Dower had not been so obsessed with linking happenings of the Pacific War to later foreign policy interactions: "his thesis might have been more closely reasoned" if he had not tried to do so. In Reviews in American History, Robert Rosenstone called the thesis of racism-as-motivating- factor "simple", but then writes that the inclusion of the Japanese intellectual history complicates what could have been a well-worn argument. Rosenstone also believed that a pile of evidence about racism, such as Dower presents, cannot attach an attitude to a deed - a fault which he attaches not just to this book, but to any so-called "attitudinal history". Moreover, he pointed out, no matter how many historians write books about racism, racist stereotypes still retain a frightening power over human events.

Vocab words: "shibboleth" (a cultural marker of some sort, as "a custom, habit, mode of dress, or the like, which distinguishes a particular class or set of persons"); "ratiocination" ("the process of reasoning").

The burned back of a victim of the Hiroshima bombing.

Books to follow up on: Secondary: Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968); David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-45 (1984).

Dominion

Title: Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (New York: St. Martin's, 2002)

Author: Matthew Scully, who, in an alternate universe, used to be a "special assistant and senior speechwriter" for George W. Bush. That George W. Bush. Apparently he wrote the post-9.11 presidential addresses - and, what's more, is proud of that fact. He's also involved with the National Review, and writes for other pubs including the NYT, the WaPo, and the WSJ.

Argument: Arguing from Scripture, Scully holds that because God put humans in "dominion" over the non-human world, we are obligated to exercise "stewardship". This means that we must not treat animals as though they are there for our pleasure and our pleasure alone. Scully believes that our motivations towards animals could be called "love", and that this speaks well of our humanity - and that cruel actions toward animals, on the other hand, indicate that some part of our morality has been lost. (This is very similar to the arguments of early animal rights activists, who thought that animal cruelty would lead a human down the road to worse and worse crimes against their own Christian nature.) Scully sometimes veers close to making a critique of consumer culture and capitalism as a whole (!), but always somehow steers clear.

Chapter-by-chapter:
The Things That Are: An exploration of the phenomenon of fellow-feeling between men and animals. Scully looks back at previous Christian thinkers who have spoken out against cruelty, and wonders why today's church doesn't have a stance on the issue. In a section called "Practical Ethics", he points out that "traditional" animal rights activists seek to place animals on a level with humans, but that his own thought is based on the idea that animals are "less" than humans - weaker, more vulnerable - but that this must require more care from us for their welfare, not less. He then makes the case for his inclusion of farm animals in the book (even though, as he says, he feels like it'll lose him readers). Looking at animals and deciding "right action" toward them, he says, "requires discernment and care and humility before Creation...it means understanding that habits are not always needs, traditions are not eternal laws, and the fur salon, kitchen table, or Churchill Room are not the center of the moral universe" (45). In other words, refraining from animal cruelty is, for him, an act of rational morality.

The Shooting Field: Scully gains access to safari club conventions, and interviews several safari club outfits and patrons. (This is a good example of a reporting situation in which I bet it really helped to have the Republican connections and credentials.) Lots of details about the fetishization of particular animals, the masculine society, the money it costs, the videos they watch of "greatest charges" or "chases", etc. Scully goes OFF on the "canned hunts", in which animals who are fenced in and unable to get away are shot. Describing one patron of the canned hunts, Scully writes, "These are his needs, his demands as a paying customer, and of course all things of the earth must be reordered to meet them - whatever creature Ray Baxter desires located, seized, trucked to Arkansas, and brought before him for a quick and convenient shot" (65). This is one of those places where Scully is almost, almost, almost anticapitalist. Sort of. I like the way Scully ends the chapter by interviewing professional hunters - the men who take the customers out, find the animals, and arrange the kill.

Matters of Consequence: Returning to "the beginning" (this he means biblically), Scully looks at the concept of "dominion" and asks "where on earth they [the people at the Safari Club, etc] got this idea of dominion as a relentless, merciless merchandising and pillaging of our forests and their inhabitants" (90). Scully faces right up to the inherent contradiction of his being a conservative who supports animal rights, saying "habits, customs, and impulses, just because they are ancient, are not necessarily venerable" (doesn't sound very conservative to me!) (101)

Riches of the Sea: What better place to explore the ethics of "resource harvesting" than when it comes to fishing? Whaling is where Scully focuses most of his energy here, going into International Whaling Commission business and into issues of indigenous whale hunting rights (he's not for them). But he also has some interesting things to say about the WTO, which he writes creates a "kind of mania" for fair trade, which becomes "not just a good but the highest good", stripping us of our ability to have moral standards (184). Yeah, it does.

The Laws: Here Scully looks at the current research on animal "thinking" and "feeling", asking how, if at all, this research has an impact on our understanding of what animal cruelty laws should entail (for he now believes that our system of laws doesn't go far enough, because as it is, "the creatures under our dominion thus inhabit a moral void of subjective human desires and situational ethics" [192]). Some theorists of animal intellect, like Stephen Budiansky, are actively trying, according to Scully, to prove that animals can't think, and therefore that we should not have laws to keep them from being killed. "I am not sure which is the worse evil, the kill or the theory," he writes (229).

Deliver Me From My Necessities: Here we have an unusual thing: Scully actually manages to get inside a pig farm in North Carolina, where he writes vividly about the physical experience of entering the place where all the pigs are kept, and also about the people he meets who work in the industry ("Gay embodies in her ample frame all of humanity's contradictions about animals, capable of touching solicitude one moment and staggering disregard the next" [266]).

Nature and Nature's God and Justice and Mercy: "When our own fundamental interests are at stake, in short, and our suffering in the balance, we are moral absolutists, and with animals and their suffering we are moral relativists," Scully writes, pointing out the hypocrisy of humanity in his final appeal to change (298). He writes that if we need to find a moral basis for defining our approach to animals, we should look at the plan of "the nature of things" for a guide, striving not to transgress against what would seem to be the program of each organism by torturing it into a "machine of our own invention" (303). "For me," he writes, "it comes down to a question of whether I am a man or just a consumer" (325).

Reviews: The book won the PETA award for "Book of the Year", after it came out, though this fact is not on the book jacket! Positive reviews have come from a motley crue, everybody from Michael Pollan to Christopher Hitchens to Peter Singer to Charles Colson.

The Circus Age

Title: The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)

Author: Our own Janet Davis!

Argument: "This book argues that the turn of the century railroad circus was a powerful cultural icon of a new, modern nation-state" (10) - that the circus took shape in the way it did, where it did, because of the particular society in which it flourished. The circus represented the diversity and pleasure of the spectacle of a multitudinous America, but often in a way which reiterated cultural norms.

Chapter-by-chapter:

Circus Day: Rich descriptions of the public spectacle that was a circus coming into town in "railroad circus" days, followed by a basic overview of the historical currents which fed into the phenomenon (immigration, "the search for order", racism, empire, expanding overseas markets, incorporation - see Alan Trachtenberg). Davis then describes the three largest railroad circuses upon which the book will focus (Barnum & Bailey, the Ringling Bros, and Adam Forepaugh & Sells Brothers), making a case for them as the three largest, most widely-traveled, and most influential of the circuses, and differentiating them from Wild West Shows (the circus was less historically minded, more eclectic in subject matter, and employed the definitive "big top" canvas covering).

This photo of Barnum & Bailey camels on a main street parade was found on a website called camelphotos.com. Cue the "I love the Internet" theme song.

The Circus as Historical and Cultural Process: This chapter dips back in time to the 1790s, describing the evolution of the circus during the 1800s as "a metonym for national expansion and infrastructural development" (12). (In other words, the railroad, Western expansion, and the circus were intimately linked.) This chapter also discusses, using cultural theory of Stuart Hall, Edward Said, and Judith Butler, how the different groups involved in the production of the circus came together to produce its "ideological content" (25). NB: On p 35, Davis discusses children's circus culture, including a circus toy set which modeled itself after TR's African safari of 1909.

These men were supposed to be "pearl divers from the Sandwich Islands" - an instance of American imperialism's absorption into circus-world.

Spectacular Labor: This chapter "illuminates the thick, physical framework in which the circus produced its ideological content" (39) - in other words, how did it all get done, and how does this "how" help us understand what workers, supervisors, and spectators expected? Spectators who watched the circus were not only intrigued with the parts of the show specifically designated as performance. They also congregated to watch the set-up and strike of the tent, and were fascinated/repelled by the lives of circus performers. Davis argues that these performers created a social world apart from "regular life", and also that the tightly wound methods and processes of the circus (they had to be tight, to fit onto the railroad schedule) brought the industrial order of organization to small towns far away from factories.

Respectable Female Nudity: Women were becoming more and more visible in the public sphere (see the "New Woman"), and the people who ran these circuses faced an interesting gender conundrum: what to do about their very visible female performers? In general, they tried to "reconfigure strong Euroamerican circus women into dainty, domestic ladies, and women of color into educational artifacts" (12). They did so with an eye to a subtle titillation of the viewer, playing with transgression, referring to sex obliquely, through "emphasis on female performers' lives, loves, and body-hugging tights" (85). Here is also a discussion of presentation of "untouched" tribes or "savages" in the circus context.

From the King of Beasts to Clowns in Drag: Masculinity in the circus and its contrasting meanings is the subject of this chapter, which holds that "performances...were sites of gender play that could provide audiences with liberating alternatives to disciplined lives of manly capital accumulation" (12). Although circus men were seen as exemplars of the athletic, "strenuous" ideal, they were also sometimes androgynous or dressed in drag - or, they were actually animals, dressed up as men. Here are examples of the animals' roles in particular tableaux, as well as the integration of evolutionary theory (chimpanzees used as examples of "Man, Previous to His Degeneration" [153]) and the emphasis placed on "ideal" or "alpha" specimens of megafauna (just like Carl Akeley and his Giant of Karisimbi). Men of color, even African-Americans, were often used as examples of apes or savages (182). Do hippos really have teeth that look like that?

Instruct the Minds of All Classes: Through the circus (and the Wild West show), American involvement in foreign countries was processed, naturalized, and contained. Episodes of foreign entanglement were re-broadcast in circus format, reenacted or dramatized. The overriding philosophy behind these representations was that circuses were "moral cheerleaders of expansionism" (194). Meanwhile, on a material level, animals and labor from overseas were used in performance, dramatizing the advantages of selective American extraction of talent and labor from foreign countries - however, Davis points out, the freakiness of these performers may have served to subtly uphold an anti-imperialist racial logic of exclusion (see Eric Love).

Looks like kind of a scary dream for a kid to have.

Legacies: From Las Vegas to the Bridges of Madison County: Contemporary analogues of circus culture, and some speculation as to what forms of culture may have taken its place.

Reviews: In the Journal of American History, Don Wilmeth lauded the book for being "clearly written, persuasively argued, exhaustively documented", and wrote that it did an admirable job of completing its project of connecting the circus to the cultural history of the time. The book was also well-reviewed in non-scholarly pubs, including the NYT and the Times Literary Supplement.

Books to follow up on: Primary: Peter Harkness, Andy the Acrobat; or, Out with the Greatest Show on Earth (1907); William Hornaday, The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals (1922); Harvey Root, Tommy with the Big Tents (1924).

Secondary: Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society (1986); Elizabeth Haiken, Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery (1997); RJ Hoage and William A Deiss, New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (1996); Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century (1999); Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Engima of Efficiency (1997); Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (1990); Patricia Vertinsky, The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors, and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century (1990).

Spectacular Nature

Title: Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)

Author: Susan G. Davis, professor of communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her PhD is in "folklore and folklife," from UPenn. Her first book was Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (1986). She lists her interests as "politics of contemporary public and commercial space; nature and its relation to mass commercial culture; history and memory on the landscape; the contemporary history of tourism, southern California and San Diego history and culture." She doesn't seem to have written another book since this one.

Argument: Davis takes a holistic look at the production of the Sea World experience, seeking to outline the park's positioning as public and as educational space. To this end, she describes the park's interaction with the community; analyzes the corporation's advertising and packaging, both in print media and within the exhibits and the park itself; conducts ethnographic research within the population of those who work at the park and within the population of visitors; and parses the physical space of the park. Through all of this work, Davis hopes to understand how Sea World, and other examples of what she calls "spectacular nature", are "corporate culture's philanthropic answer to a world of environmental emergencies," through which "the possibility of alternatives" (to environmental destruction, especially species extirpation) "collapses into the consumption of images" (237-8). Theoretically, she draws from Raymond Williams' concept of nature's ability to obscure hidden social relationships of power, as well as Donna Haraway's work on museum exhibits.

This picture was attached to a blog post about an article about applying Sea World's animal-training techniques to husbands. Human husbands, that is.

Chapter-by-Chapter:

One: Another World: Theme Parks and Nature: Davis sets up the framework for understanding theme-park nature as a product, and the theme park industry as the producer. This chapter is a cultural history of theme parks, concentrating on the ways in which theme parks produce multiple streams of income for corporations (through licensing, tie-ins, concessions). Davis sees Sea World, owned by Anheuser-Busch, as a powerful way for a company to associate itself with neutral and pristine white-washed ideals of nature.

Two: The Park and the City: Here, Davis does a site-specific historical analysis of Sea World's location in San Diego, concentrating on the ways in which the park must appeal "both to an audience of locals and tourists," situating itself in San Diego but responding to a national corporation and trying to attract national and international tourists as part of SD's tourism juggernaut (41). In early permutations, Sea World had a more cheesy, sideshow visual language - dolphins wore bikinis, etc - but later on it sought to reposition itself as an Educational Institution.

Sea World mascot.

Three: Producing the Sea World Experience: Landscape and Labor: Sea World's landscape, Davis points out, is a space constructed out of "human work, time, space, dirt, plants, and animals" (77). Here, using interviews with managers, she tells us about the way in which the corporation uses numbers to drive the park's physical workings, constantly recalibrating based on statistics derived from market research in order to achieve a "good length of stay" which will provide the maximum visitor utilization of concessions and other money-making components (extra shows, rides, etc) (87). She also unpacks the visual rhetoric of the exhibits, examining interactivity, levels of educational specificity, showcasing of certain animals, etc.

Four: Entertainment Lite: The Theme Park Classroom: Davis examines Sea World's actual functioning as an educational institution, questioning Sea World's claim to "make enlightenment available in a variety of ways" (117). Davis' stance is that "the theme park education that works its way into the life of the school and the family is so carefully crafted to meet Sea World's marketing and publicity needs that the union between spectacle and education is a lopsided one" (118). In heartbreaking ethnographic sequences, Davis writes about the experiences of disadvantaged schoolchildren with and at the park, pointing out that although Sea World claims to serve "San Diego's schoolchildren", the ones who actually come on a regular basis are the ones whose families own annual passes, and who come in casual fashion with their parents, while poorer schools may barely afford one official trip a year. On these trips, Davis writes, the children seem to learn very little on an unscripted, truly engaged basis.

Still from a Sea World X-Box game. Spiked purple floating globe unheard of in nature.

Five: Routine Surprises: Producing Entertainment: Here Davis strips Sea World's animal shows (which, she points out, take a lot of time to structure and revise) down to their elements, trying to understand what they say about SW's mass culture of nature. Davis interviews trainers, producers, and others involved in the making of these shows, finding that the behavioral possibilities of the animals, the desires of the corporation, and audience feedback all come together in the objectives of the show. In the end, Davis argues, the show's elements are carefully scripted, leaving the animal performer to provide all of the novelty and possibility of surprise within the performative space.

Six: Dreaming of Whales: The Shamu Show: Continuing with her analysis of the performances themselves, Davis writes of the Shamu-based show that it carries "an enormous weight", one which is "devilishly complex to analyze" (197). "Triangulating" between "performance, institutional context, and a larger cultural context", Davis finds that the Shamu show is a "kind of routinized magic", one which plays with expectations about nature and culture (198-9). The show contains and normalizes Shamu's dangerous nature as a "killer" whale. It reminds the audience of the ecological fragility of Shamu's habitat, then reconstitutes the corporation and related actors as those who are in Shamu's corner, trying to preserve his nature.

Shamu Southwest Airlines jet.

Reviews: In AQ, Brian Black wrote that Davis' analysis, situated as it was within corporate culture of the contemporary world, rather than in historical context, missed an opportunity to take what he sees as American Studies' "next step" into an understanding of "the role and nature and the environment in American life." However, in general Black found Davis' project compelling and superbly executed, pointing to her folkloric training as an definite advantage in this project. The Pacific Historical Review ran a piece by John Findlay which took issue with the book's attempt to link the politics of Sea World's space with what Findlay saw as a "free-floating academic malaise" about the state of modernity and specifically the conservative brand of capitalism flourishing in Southern California. (Findlay thought this part of the book was shallowly executed, comparing it to Sea World itself with its empty gestures toward greater meaning. What's with these reviews of books about edutainment that compare the books themselves to edutainment? Weird.)


Books to follow up on: Secondary: Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, 1820-1870 (1980); Warren J. Belasco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the Food Industry, 1966-1988 (1989); John Berger, "Why Look at Animals?" in About Looking (1980); Henry Giroux, Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture (1994); Henry Giroux, et al, ed, Popular Culture, Schooling, and Everyday Life (1989); Peter Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (1990); Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (1992).

Reading National Geographic

Title: Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)

Authors: Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins. Lutz, an anthropologist, is now at Brown and writes that her interests include "cultural understandings of the emotions, popular photography and ideas of race and gender in the U.S., changes in local democracy with economic restructuring in the last part of the twentieth century, and militarization and its shaping of social life beyond the battlefield," but that for the last ten years she's been working on projects dealing with society and the military (she also works for the American Friends Service Committee!) Her most recent book is about Fayetteville, NC: Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century (Boston : Beacon Press, 2001). Collins, who is now in a sociology and women's studies department at Wisconsin, lists her interests as "Qualitative Sociology, Rural Sociology, Sociology of Culture, Sociology of Economic Change and Development, Sociology of Gender." Her most recent book is Threads: Gender, Labor and Power in the Global Apparel Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Argument: The Geographic, a middlebrow cultural production par excellence, has been normalized as an "educational" and "positive" publication, one which Americans and other Westerners look to for an enjoyable and "objective" window on non-Western cultures. Lutz and Collins hold that the production of the photographs in the magazine is regulated by a system of understood rules and norms held by the publishers and editors, imparted to the photographers, and expected by the public. These rules and norms (especially during the period they propose to examine, 1950-1986) demand(ed) a portrait of the non-Western world that is free of strife, violence, hunger, and trouble; colorful; sensual; inviting; and positive. Overall, these qualities are meant to add up to what L & C call a "conservative humanism" - a view of the world that normalizes the "other" by proposing that "we're really all alike under the skin."

L & C hold that, in the end, although this point of view is nominally positive and affirming, it means that the photographs have "rarely cried out for change, raised painful, unresolvable questions, embarrassed, or caused discomfort...in general, they have existed as a beautiful, somewhat compelling body of evidence that the third world is a safe place, that it is made up of people basically like us, that the people who are hungry and oppressed have meaningful lives, and that the conflicts and flare-ups we hear of in the news occur in a broader context of enduring values and everyday activities. These images obscure the American relationships with the third world that have structured life there in profound ways; they deny real social connections even as they evoke empathy" (280).
In their survey of readers' attitudes towards Geographic photographs, L & C found that pictures showing children (particularly, happy children) were consistently ranked as the "most enjoyable." "The magazine's focus on children alone or in other groups of children is consonant with the sociological reality in which children are not integrated into the adult world of work or leisure and with the cultural belief that the child is a special kind of person rather than a miniature or even protoadult" (107). This photograph of a Garifuna child, by Susie Joy Rust, is titled "Joy in Motion," and its caption reflects this bias toward romanticization of childhood: "Beaming with pleasure after doing flips with his friends, Antheon Petillo of Dangriga romps along a well-worn path that connects his schoolhouse to a palm-lined Caribbean shore. Antheon and his classmates at Sacred Heart Elementary School are being taught Garífuna history and language, part of an effort in Belize to keep this culture alive."

Chapter by Chapter:
One: Comfortable Strangers: The Making of National Identity in Popular Photography: An introduction which situates the Geographic in the realm of "mass culture" (using the Frankfurt School's formulation) and points out that among "edutainment" products, very few have the "cultural legitimacy of the Geographic" - a legitimacy that stems, in part, from its associations with "the state, national identity, and science" (7).

Two: Becoming America's Lens on the World: National Geographic in the Twentieth Century: A history of the formation of the Geographic's cultural authority (as laid out in the previous chapter). Includes information about early Geographic editorial guidelines for content in the magazine (27), the story of the magazine's adoption of color photography (32); the magazine's association with the government (34). Overall, describes the development of the Geographic's idea of American national identity: "rational, generous, and benevolent" (46).

Three: Inside the Great Machinery of Desire: Perhaps the most interesting chapter, methodologically, in which L & C gain access to the internal workings of the magazine, attending editorial meetings, hovering over layout artists while they work, and interviewing photographers and editors about how they "frame" a story during its development. Also presents interesting information on how the marketing and advertising departments contribute to choices of subject matter and frame: "Africa is an unpopular subject, as are social problems...articles on small, endearing animals, or endangered species" are popular (83). The process of creating the magazine, the authors write, is a "highly negotiated" one, in which the editors seek to receive a "constant supply of what they consider very good pictures - photographs that operate within traditional realist frameworks, yet contain elements of surprise and interest", while still allowing photographers a degree of autonomy (85).

Caption written by Geographic website: "A Woman of Faith, Photograph by David Alan Harvey. With nine decades of living etched on her face, Mãe Filinha exudes the quiet authority of her position as leader of the Sisterhood of the Good Death. This religious group practices Candomblé, a belief system based on African traditions and influenced by Catholicism and South American Indian rituals. The sisterhood is known for processions marked by singing and praying as members move through the streets of Cachoeira. During Candomblé ceremonies adherents enter trances and commune with their gods. The chanting and beating of drums can last well into the night." Interestingly, the site also includes information about the technical details of the photographic equipment used, intimating that the reader could (should?) participate in the production of similar pictures.

Four: A World Brightly Different: Photographic Conventions, 1950-1986: An analysis of the "surface content" of the photographs, done by coding a random sample. In this chapter, the authors introduce the wide range of themes they will problematize in future chapters. The view the authors see emerging through this sample is one of a non-Western world "of happy, classless people outside of history but evolving into it, edged with exoticism and sexuality, but knowable to some degree as individuals" (116). They hold that the evaluation of this view should be based "not on the intentions of the magazine's makers but on the consequences of its photographic rhetoric" (117).

Five: Fashions in the Ethnic Other: Here, L & C describe shifting interests in "other" cultures throughout the postwar time period, pointing out differences in regional coverage (the Pacific Islands receive far more attention, proportionally, than other regions, for example), and changes in coverage during times of US political involvement in the country in question (see: formerly positive, then negative portraits of Ferdinand Marcos).

Six: The Color of Sex: Postwar Photographic Histories of Race and Gender: Interpretations of photographs of non-white females, with emphasis on how they were used as exemplars of "unspoiled" sensuality and womanhood (and maternality), in contrast to a Western womanhood perceived "ruined" by education and careerism. Here, too, an analysis of the bare-breasted issue - the darker the woman, L & C found, the more likely she was to be bare-breasted in the magazine (this is still true).

Availability and sensuality of non-Western women is a mainstay of the Nat Geo appeal. "Introduction" and caption written by the Geographic: "Salvador, Brazil, 2002. Photograph by David Alan Harvey, Magnum. Introduction: 'I call Brazil the "land of the 10,000 senses" because of the lushness and diversity of it all. Just the Amazon rain forest alone fills the sense with its sounds, smells, colors, even its silences.' -National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis. Caption: In Bahia, Africa cultural traditions are strong and set the rhythm at Carnival. That most sensual of festivals hold sway every February from Recife to Rio."

Seven: The Photograph as Intersection of Gazes: An intimate analysis of the"gazes" to be found in Geographic photos, including the direct gaze at the camera (which was more likely to be seen in photographs of the powerless - darker, younger, poorer, more female - subjects); the gaze within the photographic rectangle; and the gaze of the subject upon his/her own reflection in a mirror, a Polaroid, or a camera's viewfinder.

Eight: The Readers' Imagined Geographic: An Evolutionary Tale: Introduction of the sample of white Americans used for the ethnographic portion of this book. The most interesting part of this chapter is the assessment of the evolutionary views of the readers - an assessment which finds that "the categories of primitive or traditional, civilized or modern, were assumed by virtually everyone we talked to in the interviews" (236) and that "modernization is sometimes viewed as analogous to transmitting disease - as a kind of physical, determinate process outside human intentionality" (240). L & C found strong currents of Rosaldo's "imperialist nostalgia" (246) within readers' reactions to photographs of modernizing peoples, but also point out that the overriding contradiction and confusion of readers' responses mitigate against any pinpointing of operative ideologies - readers were more likely to use and combine several different ideologies while describing a picture's content.

Nine: The Pleasures and Possibilities of Reading: A final chapter that seeks to examine the real-life implications of the reader responses that the Geographic solicits. Here is where L & C arrive at the conclusion that the humanism provoked and enforced by these pictures is essentially conservative, and that human differences "that could tell us something important about history...or be turned critically on our own society...become construed as superficial, even if attractive, flourishes that can be pulled back to reveal a confirmation of important Western values" (277). This humanism, they claim, following Barthes, "cannot accommodate differences of interest or account for incidents of injustice" (282).

Here, a Western scientist working in Guyana to study catfish employs "local residents" to help him gather the fish. The scene, which depicts non-Westerners stooped over and supervised by a white Westerner, evokes questions about colonial relationships, especially ones shaped around "science"; questions not examined by the Geographic-written caption ("'Hard Science,' Photograph by Randy Olson. 'It’s very difficult to catch fish in streams with large rocks and fast water,' says Larry Page. So he hired help. Raising a ruckus, local residents drive fish into the scientists’ nets. In calmer waters researchers go 'hoggin’'—wading into the shallows, then sticking a hand into a log or other dark, wet place. 'You pull out whatever is in there,' says Page, 'and hopefully all your fingers as well.'"

Reviews: In a long review in AQ, Kathryn VanSpanckeren wrote that the book is "comprehensive," "generous-spirited", "readable", but adds, "This straightforward book does not offer striking new theoretical formulations...instead, it bristles with specific information and offers concise reviews of theoretical positions only if they are helpful in understanding the magazine." Her main criticism lies in the omission of text in the analysis, and says that techniques of literary theory and the greats of postcolonial theory could have been employed to advantage. She also holds that L & C should have done a better job at situating the magazine within magazine history. Most of all, she criticizes the book for re-inscribing the central fallacy of the magazine itself: not allowing the non-Western peoples a voice. In Science, Heidi Larson (of Unicef) wrote that she wished the captions themselves had been given more attention, especially in the chapter in which the authors interviewed white Americans using uncaptioned pictures as prompts. Reviewing the book for the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Joseph Wood liked the way the book "turned the tables" on National Geographic, examining it the same way it examines others, and writes that the book "illustrates quite effectively how our view of the world is socially constructed."


This photo, called "Afghan Girl", by Steve McCurry, ran in a 1985 edition of the Geographic. In 2003 the magazine made an effort to find the subject, named Sharbat Gula. The way that the magazine wrote up this search is fascinating, in light of the conclusions Lutz and Collins draw: the search was framed as an exploration in and of itself, looking for the anonymous woman whose "direct gaze had intrigued the West for so long" (see L & C on the gaze of the photographed, chapter 7). By dramatizing the search in this way, the magazine appears to have glossed over the fact that the reason Gula remained anonymous was that the magazine had failed to identify her in her initial portrait (see L & C's conclusions on the anonymity of the non-Western subject), as well as to re-inflect the viewer's relationship with the subject with significant overtones of desire.

The follow-up picture, which has Gula, now a mother, holding the magazine, echoes previous Geographic pictorial compositions in which the subject is seen as engaging with his/her depiction in the magazine - a construction which L & C holds is fundamentally reflective of the idea that the Geographic, and by extension, the Western world, has brought self-awareness, history, and change to the rest of the world (208). The Geographic's reflections on the search for Gula also noted that she had not even seen the photograph until they "found" her - a fact which the Western reader could see as indicative of the tremendous difference and distance between Gula's life and their own, given the iconic nature of the photograph. The slightly icky connotations of this relationship - isn't it sort of weird that we've been enjoying her beauty for so many years, while she's been living in a refugee camp in Pakistan, an experience which has clearly aged her beyond her chronological age? - are not explored.

Follow up: "Brazil...is often portrayed in popular culture as a kind of sister state to the United States, complete with the same vast area, wealth of resources, frontier with Indians, and much immigration" (125).

New words: "hebete" ("dull, stupid, obtuse"); "ludic" ("of or pertaining to undirected and spontaneously playful behaviour").

Books to follow up on: Secondary: Christopher Lyman, The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by Edward Curtis (1982); Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (1985); Bernard MacGrane, Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other (1989); Susan Moeller, Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat (1989); Roy Preiswerk and Dominique Perrot, Ethnocentrism and History: Africa, Asia, and Indian America in Western Textbooks (1978); Richard Ohmann, Politics of Letters (1987) (on the development of the magazine market); Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth (1989); John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (1988); Min-Ha T. Trinh, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989); Eric Wolf, Empire and the People Without History (1982).

Poem: "In the Waiting Room", by Elizabeth Bishop

In Worcester, Massachusetts
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It was dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
"Long Pig," The caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked, women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover;
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came a "oh!" of pain
Aunt Consuelo's voice
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I we were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should I be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
I couldn't look any higher
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.
Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, of even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How I didn't know any
word for it how "unlikely…."
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?
The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.