In Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society, Bryan Cheyette attempts to trace the “slipperiness and indeterminacy of ‘the Jew’—as constructed within a semitic discourse—that enables an uncertain literary text to explore the limits of its own foundations, whether they be the ideal of literary ‘realism’; or of liberal ‘culture’; or the Empire; or socialist universalism; or nationalist particularism; or ‘modernist’ post-liberalism” (11-2). Cheyette begins with a study of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), focusing on Arnold’s prediction that Hebraism and Hellenism would provide a type of center for studies of British culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Arnold, Cheyette points out, sought to allow Jewish people to participate in British culture proper, seek public office, etc. Arnold’s idea ran contrary to his Dr. Thomas Arnold, his father, “who considered Jews to be fundamentally incompatible with the ‘teutonic’ element in ‘our English race’” (16). The younger Arnold’s position on Jewish people in England seems almost as violent as his father’s, though, when we consider that MA’s ambivalence about ‘the Jew’ (the idea that Jewish people were at once the embodiment of progress and the vestige of historical medievalism, the artist and the worldly man, etc.) led him to find ‘the Jew’ culturally malleable. Cheyette then discusses how Trollope and Eliot feature Jewish characters, comparing Trollope’s “stereotypical ‘Jew’” to Trollope, who was “an alien outsider needing to be accepted by a hostile society” (32). Cheyette aligns Eliot with MA, claiming that she emphasized “both a higher ‘affinity’ with ‘the Jews’ and, [at once], their ‘superlative peculiarity’” (43). For all three authors, ‘the Jew’ represented a harkening back to Englishness and the future, which allowed ‘the Jew’ (as well as others) into the fold (at the expense of each group’s particularity).
Discussion Questions:
1. Gilman points to the tendency for race to be applied negatively, but Cheyette starts his piece with a discussion of the way “the humanities have … failed to engage with the implications of a post-Holocaust understanding of European civilization,” and that charges of “‘literary antisemitism’” are often omitted where claims of racism would not be (1-2). How might ‘racing’ a group lead to interesting scholarship? Should we be suspicious of that maneuver?
2. Cheyette begins by stating that the “homogenous ‘Western Judeo-Christian’ culture in current theories of ‘colonial discourse’” is problematic because it “does not recognize the ambivalent position of ‘the Jew’” (4). He then acknowledges that he will (admittedly) somewhat arbitrarily start with Matthew Arnold, but defends that point by claiming Arnold to be at the acknowledged “centre of liberal culture” (5). Are those two ideas in conflict, or is Arnold properly historicized?
3. What was the ‘effect’ of Cheyette’s ‘persistent’ use of ‘air quotes’ throughout the ‘entire’ ‘piece’ ‘?’
4. Cheyette seems to use biological linchpins for both Arnold (his relationship with his father) and Trollope (his own position as an outsider to aristocracy) in an argument that is ostensibly big picture. What do we make of that?
5. Gilman states that “[i]n being denied any association with the beautiful and erotic, the Jew’s body was denigrated” (174). What if we were to flip that model with the case of, say, the Irish Girl? Does eroticizing the body have the same effect?
6. How might we respond to this clip from the Marx Brothers’ film The Spies (1933) after reading Gilman’s piece?
6. Thanks for the attaching The Spies clip—much needed levity! So the issue of Al Jolson performing black-face? (I have to admit my ignorance, and maybe the strength of some type of racializing acculturation, but I thought Al Jolson was black before I looked him up.) Gilman asks, “Does black-face make everyone who puts it on white?” (238)—I don’t think so—it makes them black, obviously. Our friendly Wikipedia tells me that Jolson was an advocate for African-Americans against racial discrimination. So Jolson and the Marx brothers through their comedy are ameliorative forces. (Evidently Abraham Lincoln loved black-face performance, for what that is worth.) If “Adam Gurowski, a Polish noble, ‘took every light-colored mulatto for a Jew’ when he first arrived in the United States in the 1850s” (Gilman 174) what’s the problem with that? Obviously it is a big problem since this was a time of slavery, but might that be what The Man was getting at—the Jews and African-Americans were somehow deserving of atrocities? Rather than worrying about whether Jews are white or black (actually there are black Jews of course), what about the widespread need to exclude / include.
ReplyDelete2. Since you brought up the Marx Brothers, Matt, a line that shows that Hebrews can be good at Hellenism, “Euripides Eumenides.”
And that seems to lead into Cheyette’s comment about the ambivalent place of ‘the Jew’ in ‘colonial discourse.’ I’m not sure how Cheyette can integrate his project into colonial discourse because the Jewish people moved to the metropolitan center, and Cheyette’s focus, ‘semitic discourse,’ is not bound to place. To put his project within colonial discourse also goes against Cheyette’s move to de-essentialize ‘the Jew.’ Individual Jews played such varied roles in imperial Great Britain, I would assume?
3. Cheyette’s use of air quotes repeatedly brings to mind the fact that all the key terms are determined by discourse. As Gilman points out, Jews’ self-attribution of Jewishness means different things to different individuals (6)—unfortunately in the past, self-conception has not been positive because of the pressures of acculturation. But Cheyette’s use of quotes is also helpful in establishing the cultural nature of the binary between Semite and Aryan.
Emily--what are you saying about blackface? Are you identifying it as a potentially subversive act? If putting it on "makes you white," is Gilman saying that by "putting on" the most visible marker of race that our culture acknowledges, by performing something that dominant (ie white) culture sees as the the most essential aspect of otherness, it makes you part of that dominant culture? BlackFACE works because the body beneath it is not black, right?
ReplyDeleteMatt, I think Cheyette's obsessive quotation marks are interesting in that they sort of seem to mirror the point Cheyette is trying to make about the nature of Jewish identity and representation--it is at once both "this" and "that"--both universalizing and othering, etc etc.
(The quotes are also "annoying," of course--but I think it's probably a case of form playing off of content here.)
Your question about the body of the Other (whether seen as ugly or hypersexual) is very interesting. I think the obvious answer is that it matters less whether a body is seen as overly erotic or overly unattractive--the real problem occurs when the body itself is on display. That is just the obvious answer, though--I think we get into interesting territory about gender when we think about how a raced body is perceived, and this easy answer doesn't address that at all.
Stephanie, yes, I got what Gilman was saying. I find it very irritating that he does not seem to want to be African- American :) . Gilman is saying that by putting on black-face a person becomes white, but I really did think Al Jolson was black. So I think that given his sympathies, Al Jolson's performance was a subversive act, and not a way to prove his whiteness.
ReplyDeleteLike Stephanie, I found Matt’s question about the intersection between racialized body and gender/sexuality very interesting, especially when thinking about the contrast between Irishness and Jewishness. As Jews were physiognomically marked by their noses, Irish, too, were distinctly marked in racial discourse—“semianized,” so to speak. But, at the same time, such physiognomic marking of semianization was mostly applied to Irish male. As we have observed in WIG, Irish women—and more importantly, Ireland itself, as is epitomized by the national representation of Hibernia—are rather disembodied, treated as ethereal, which enabled the gendered discourse of “marriage plot” between England (male) and Ireland (female), bypassing the issue of sexuality. In other words, Irishness is gendered but asexualized. But in case of Jews, they were designated as “masculine,” both in terms of gender and sexuality—their noses are associated with the circumcised penis, “that invisible but omnipresent sign of the male’s Jewishness” (Gilman 192), so much so that Jewish female was rendered as suffering from the “pathology of the nose which was equivalent to the general cultural view of the Jewish male” (189). Therefore, unlike Irish, there was no way for Jews (both gendered and sexualized as male) to have national reconciliation by marriage plot in the discourse of heterosexual hegemony. Nose job, in this regard, functioned not only as operation creating invisibility but also as a symbolic castration. Considering that the rise of quasi-scientific discourse of race was coeval with that of sexuality as an identity category, the interconnection of these two categories is interesting. As Stephanie says, what matters is the body that is put on display, for the body lies at the intersection of these categories, but I’m still wondering what I can make of this co-occurrence of the categorization.
ReplyDeleteCheyette on Arnold
ReplyDeleteIf I’m reading Cheyette correctly, he’s saying Arnold was trying to indicate that people could “transcend” their race through culture: “Arnold positioned fixed racial differences between ‘Aryans’ and ‘Semites’ as something that should be transcended by his ideal of ‘culture’” (5). From what I gather, however, Arnold was pushing for the conversion of Jewish people to Christianity (20). I believe this was part of the “transcendence” from “Hebraism” to “Hellenic.”
Anarchy gets a bad rap. Again.
Cheyette goes on to state:
Arnold’s avowed ‘central target’ in Culture and Anarchy was the ‘bad civilization of the English middle class’, the purveyors of a distorted modernization, that were deemed by him to be overly ‘hebraized’.…Hebraism also represented for Arnold the ‘anarchy’ of bourgeois individualism (or ‘doing what one wants’) which, he believed was increasingly divorced in late Victorian England from the ‘sweetness and light’ of the Hellenic tradition. (18)
I’ve noticed a sustained contempt for anarchy in our readings this semester. I responded to it briefly in my response to The Wild Irish Girl and the Curtis article. Cheyette discusses it further when he talks about Matthew Arnold. We’re reading a selection from Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy next week, so perhaps that will be a better time to discuss the Victorian perception of anarchy. I don’t think the perception has changed too much in the last 100 years.
Note on quotes
I agree, I think Cheyette overdid it on the use of quotation marks. Many one-word items didn’t seem to need them, but he surrounds them with this ubiquitous punctuation, including “ghetto,” “romantic,” “realistic,” “dreams,” “freedom,” “Christians,” “prejudice,” and “problem” (30). In some ways, I can see why he used them—sometimes they’re pulled from a particular text and have a particular meaning like “medieval” (30), and other times it seems like they’re particularly loaded terms—however, I just think it’s overkill.
Gilman
I have to admit, I was fascinated by the section on noses. I was thinking more in terms of body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), however. Apparently, “the first, modern cosmetic rhinoplasty” was performed for a man who complained of the following:
“his nose was the source of considerable annoyance. Where ever he went, everybody stared at him; often, he was the target of remarks or ridiculing gestures. One account of this he became melancholic, withdrew almost completely from social life, and had the earnest desire to be relieved of the deformity” (184, my emphasis)
I guess I can’t judge how others feel and/or mitigate their unhappiness, but I find it curious how there was nothing really physically wrong with him, he just (1) didn’t like the way he looked, and/or (2) didn’t like the way he was perceived. It’s interesting, albeit a little sad, that people seek physical answers (i.e. surgery) for ailments that are psychologically based. This is a little bit of a digression, but I think that with the advancing of technology, people are just going to have more access to do these sorts of things, that is, alter their bodies surgically if they aren’t content with them.
Cheyette’s article on the whole suggested to me the paradox that complicates some discourse on race, which he characterizes as ambivalences. It seems difficult to get away from that whenever an attempt is made to define or discuss any kind of racial difference. I think Gilman’s comments on blackface are interesting and make a good point yet oversimplify that matter. How doe we respond knowing that African Americans have themselves worn blackface. In some contexts, they still do (go see the Zulu parade Tuesday morning).
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