Angels in America - Part Two: Perestroika- Tony Kushner

When I was 8 or 9, my sister and I were avidly working our way through the children's library, one book shelf at a time. We would bring home stacks of books and devour them.  Eventually, when I had made my way to the science fiction area and started bringing home books with dragons on the covers, I think my dad thought we had better add some non-fiction to the mix before we ended up in a basement involved in some Live Action Role Play.

I remember walking over to the shelf of non-fiction books thinking, "oh great, I'm going to have to read some boring book about bus mechanics or something", when, what caught my eye was a series on conspiracy theories. Intriguing. The first one I picked up was about the Rosenbergs. Now this was the early 90's, a few years before the VERONA documents would have been released confirming the involvement of Julius. Let's just say it was a bit on the traumatic side. I remember, with unnerving precision, the black and white photos of the electric chairs. I think what I found most horrific though was the idea that maybe, just maybe, they could have been innocent. 

Let’s just say I have a low tolerance for the Rosenbergs being put through any additional, even fictional, ringers. 

Out of all the horrific, in your face obscenity, tricking Ethel into singing a lullaby for her nemesis, is like the powdered sugar topping on a cake made of excreta. But I think it is a good summation for everything I dislike about this play. It’s just too gratuitous. It’s bad enough that Roy gloatingly takes full responsibility for sending Ethel to the chair, he then has to continually thumb his nose at her wandering spirit. Ethel has shown up at Roy’s sick bed to hopefully be the one to personally deliver the news of his disbarment. Ultimately she wins, not only because she is able to pass on the losing tidings of his career, but because in a way she is able to forgive him and offer the kaddish at his bedside as he slowly dies, painfully and in agony. 

I think the most effective parts of the play are the opening and closing scenes, because they tie the play to a place and time and provide a backdrop of contextualism to what is otherwise a gay love fantasy. 

Scene 1 begins with the oldest living Bolshevik asking questions about the future:

Prelapsarianov: The Great Question before us is: Are we doomed? The Great Question before us is: Will the Past release us? The Great Question before us is: Can we Change? In Time? And we all desire that Change will come. (A little pause, then with sudden, violent passion:) And Theory? How are we to proceed without Theory? What system of Thought have these Reformers to present in this mad planetary disorganization, to the Inevident Welter of fact, event, phenomenon, calamity?…If the snake sheds his skin before a new skin is ready, naked he will be in the world, prey to the forces of chaos. Without his skin he will be dismantled, lose coherence and die. Have you my little serpents, a new skin?

Scene 2 begins where Millennium Approaches left off. Harper is still wandering around Antarctica, but the periphery begins to dissolve. She has gnawed through a pine tree, in part to assuage her grief, in part because she’s on pharmaceuticals, and as the snow melts around her, her mirage drips away. Joe’s form, ungraspable, is the thing that is slowly crushing her with the weight of it’s absence. Her heart is slowly breaking and she reflectively pauses to consider why she is even still alive. Shouldn’t you die when your heart breaks?

Later, while Harper and Joe’s mother, Hannah, take up residency at the Mormon visitor center, Harper will spend her time lethargically watching ‘the great history of mormonism’. In the diorama the Mormon Mother has no lines, but is a passive victim to her fate, while some characters embrace change, desire and progression. Harper is a mirror image of the Mormon Mother. She’s stuck in place, glued to the fantasy of a desire. She is the only truly one dimensional character. Without Joe she is nothing, merely a psychotic wandering the streets of Manhattan in the 1980’s. When for a nano second Joe returns, she quickly hops into bed with him, which is strange and almost out of character, if in fact she had a character to be out of. She is merely a pining away, one dimensional foil for Joe’s desirability. He’s the ‘Marlboro Man’ and both genders are duly attracted to him. When afterwards he once again leaves, unsatisfied, to “go for a walk.”, she’s at the breaking point…but since this is the only place she has ever existed, this doesn’t come across as much of a climax, but more of a “what just happened?” 

To be fair “What just happened?” Is kind of how this whole play comes across. But back to the Bolshevik. It’s 1986. Gorbachev has begun his new economic policy of ‘Perestroika’; a restructuring to reform and preserve the socialist system. The years of fabricated starvation are behind them and the fear and the terror of the Cold War is coming to an end. Change is in the air, and with it comes hope. 

Scene 4 brings us to the hospital room where we have last seen Prior. As the previous play came to a close the Angel had crashed through the ceiling calling out “Greeting Prophet; The Great Work begins; The Messenger has arrived.” We now see Prior reeling from the shock of what he has just witnessed, but while the “Angel” will prove to be inept and reactionary, Prior is competent and thoughtful. It is unclear how or why or for what purpose Prior is called to be a “prophet”…but he effectively serves as a counterpoint for the ineffectual redundancy of spiritualism. 

It is a new world order. God has left in 1906 after the San Francisco earthquake. For 70 years there has been unmitigated chaos. The Angels run hither and thither trying to persuade people to stop moving, hoping that if everyone could just stop, could just remain sedentary, maybe God could be persuaded to come back.

Angel: Forsake the Open Road:

Neither Mix Nor Intermarry: Let Deep Roots Grow: If you do not MINGLE you will Cease to Progress: Seek Not to Fathom the World and its Delicate Particle Logic: You cannot Understand, You can only Destroy, You do not Advance, You only Trample. Poor blind Children, abandoned on the Earth, Groping terrified, misguided, over Fields of Slaughter, over bodies of the Slain: HOBBLE YOURSELVES! There is no Zion Save Where You Are!

While Prior contemplates the Angels injunctions, for a moment it almost makes sense. Maybe he is a prophet. Maybe all of those, dying crippling deaths, in this epidemic of AIDS have caught the ‘virus of prophesy.” 

Prior: …Be still. Toil no more. Maybe the world has driven God from Heaven, incurred the angels’ wrath. I believe I’ve seen the end of things. And having seen, I’m going blind, as prophets do. It makes a certain sense to me. 

Angel: FOR THIS AGE OF ANOMIE: A NEW LAW! Delivered this night, this silent night, from Heaven, Oh Prophet, to you. 

Prior: I hate heaven. I’ve got no resistance left. Except to run.

Act 3 begins with another sort of illogical miscalculation. Louis has had a dream that Joe is in a cult, like the moonies or the mormons or something….meanwhile, we have been privy to their intimate or rather public sex life and it seems unlikely that Louis would not have noticed Joe’s special underwear. When Joe says…’actually I am a Mormon…’ Louis is shocked…(’oh…so that’s what that body suit is…’)  

Louis: OY. A Mormon. 

Joe: You never asked. 

Louis: So what else haven’t you told me? Joe? So the fruity underwear you wear, that’s…

Joe: A temple garment.

Louis: Oh my God. What’s it for.

Joe: Protection. A second skin. I can stop wearing it if you…

Louis: How can you stop wearing it if it’s a skin? Your past, your beliefs, your…

Louis then begins his panicky reassessment, which is his safe place… Louis is all talk, and beneath the very thin facade is a cowardly man with his sexuality being the only dimension he truly embodies. He is a coward because he refuses to stay in any relationship long enough to encounter the truth and the pain that comes hand in hand with love. When Prior is diagnosed with AIDS, he sticks around until Prior is lying prostrate on the floor begging for help. When the ‘Marlboro Man’ becomes a reality; a living, breathing, bisexual Republican/Mormon, Louis runs back to Prior, and Prior, unlike Harper, has the agency to choose not to pick up where they left off. 

As Harper wanders the city with the Mormon Mother from the diorama, she asks how people can change. 

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice. God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching. 

Kushner’s world view has changed over the last few years. Now instead of God throwing people willy nilly out of the boat, he is actively tormenting them, and it is up to us, one Howard Beale after another to shake our fists and yell “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” 

Ultimately, Prior isn’t a prophet to humanity, but to the angels. He walks in on the angel equivalent of an office meeting. The angels are wringing their hands over the absence of God and the catastrophe of Chernobyl. Prior walks in, throws down his prophetic mantle and says he’s done with the whole thing. He’s not going to sit around waiting for a God that obviously doesn’t care. They should sue the ‘bastard’ and be done with him. How dare he. 

Throughout this speech, there are 3 thunderclaps, perhaps a reference to the Viconian cycles of history? With the last thunderclap, a new era of history has dawned, the era of men. God is no longer needed, he has failed and it is now time for men to pick up the pieces and make sense of where he has left off. 

In the last scene, Prior, Louis, Belize and Hannah all sit at the Bethesda fountain in Central Park. The Bethesda angel is immortalized in stone behind them. This angel would stir the waters in a pool near Jerusalem, and the first person to touch the water afterward would be healed. Now at the angel’s feet sit the the whole gauntlet of the human race, a WASP, a Jew, an agnostic, a Mormon, a gay son, and a grieving mother. Together, in their unlikely solidarity, they will usher in the new restructured social order, an order without the need for the divine. 

I guess the question that remains, is whether or not this play is still relevant. At one point in the play while Belize, the transgender nurse is taking care of Roy, who is evil incarnate, Roy asks why Belize is helping him: 

Belize: Consider it solidarity. One faggot to another. 

But as homosexuality loses it’s outsider culture, it loses one of the things most integral to its unification. In a New York Times article, “Historic Day for Gays, but Twinge of Loss for an Outsider Culture” (Kantor, Jodi. June 26, 2015)  Andrew Sullivan is quoted asking “What do gay men have in common when they don’t have oppression?” 

The sense of community, the solidarity, shared by the protagonists of Kushner’s plays, largely comes from each character representing an outsider culture. But now, gay marriage is legalized and Gordon Hinckley did his best to white wash Mormonism into an almost palatable brand of Christianity. Instead of reading this play and observing a cast of characters, struggling against the odds to be heard and to have a voice…it feels like a lot of whining, interspersed with a lot of gay sex. Even the nihilism feels a bit worn, kind of like a less successful modernization of Kafka. Rather than take any responsibility or agency, each character has the perfect scape goat to blame for their current hell and like a Kafka character, they wander around, inside what has become little more than a joke hidden behind the buttresses of political theory. 

Angels in America - Part One: Millenium Approaches - Tony Kushner

It is 1985. There is an atmosphere pregnant with hope for the coming millennium, a hope that each year this country is getting closer and closer to truly being a land of the free and a home of the brave, but there is an underlying disillusionment politically fed by the rhetoric of the conservative right. It is the year Reagan doesn't expressly forbid children with AIDS from going to school, but he expresses concern about the possibility of contagion, adding panic to what was already an atmosphere of fear.  Reagan is slow to acknowledge there is an epidemic of HIV. There is a hostile attitude towards the socially deviant, this is the curse given to pay for their sins. Meanwhile, the disease is proliferating with great speed across a country that feels less and less like home for so many. 

Despite the hope that a new millennium may bring, the  play is saturated in hopelessness. The complexities of the shape shifting lines of oppression are at the heart of the political culture and trickle into every aspect of even the most banal daily life. At one point a bleak worldview is offered:

Prior:."I think about that story a lot now. People in a boat, waiting, terrified, while implacable men, irresistibly strong, seize...maybe the person next to you, maybe you, and with no warning at all, with time only for a quick intake of air you are pitched into freezing, turbulent water and salt and darkness to drown." 

As the play opens, we are privy to a funeral for an old Jewish woman. Her grandchildren had assumed she died years ago and are shocked to realize she had been alive all this time. She is a symbol of the last clearly definable diaspora. She belonged to a people and a place and is now being buried here, a stranger in a strange land, like the last of the Mohicans - the forefathers of the "American" oppressed. The next scene is a juxtaposition between the old fragmented and forgotten diaspora with the new foreign: Mormons and homosexuals. 

Roy, a successful New York lawyer and unofficial power broker, who is secretly gay and soon to be diagnosed with AIDS, is screaming into multiple phones, while Joe, a young lawyer who is chief justice for the Federal court of appeals, waits patiently for him to finish. As Roy screams and curses, Joe quietly requests: "Could you please not take the Lord's name in vain?" The request is so shockingly out of place it could be in a different language. 

At first Joe seems like a model citizen, no substance abuse of any kind and a respect for order and decency. But beneath the surface Joe wrestles with his own Angel, or rather wishes he was. Despite the fact that homosexuality is a short one way trip to excommunication, he cannot exorcise his demon. He is married and is the proprietor of a sexless marriage. His wife, Harper, was always the wrong kind of Mormon, in a culture where coffee is frowned on for it's addictive properties, Harper has been nursing a rigorous valium addiction.  And two of our protagonists are a closeted Mormon and his 'mentally deranged sex-starved pill-popping housewife.'  

In Harper's defense, her husband has never loved her and the only person that truly listens to her is her imaginary friend/angel/demon, Mr. Lies of the International Order of Travel Agents (their motto is: "We mobilize the globe, we set people adrift, we stir the populace and send nomads eddying across the planet. We are adepts of motion, acolytes of the flux.") Our introduction to her character is through a rambling soliloquy:

Harper: "People who are lonely, people left alone, sit talking nonsense to the air, imagined...beautiful systems dying, old fixed orders spiraling apart...everywhere, things are collapsing, lies surfacing, system of defense giving way...This is why, Joe, this is why I shouldn't be left alone."

While Joe and Harper have a marriage on the rocks, their gay counterparts fair even worse. 

We meet Louis and Prior on a bench in front of the funeral home. It was Louis's grandmother who has just passed away, and as they sit there contemplating mortality and familial guilt, Prior decides since they're on the topic of death, now would be a good a time to bring up his own recent medical discovery...("Bad timing, funeral and all, but I figured as long as we're on the subject of death...") He has discovered large purple spots on the underside of his arm, something that can only bode poorly. He has consulted with the best physicians and his prognosis is grim. 

Proir: "K.S., baby. Lesion number one. Lookit. The wine-dark kiss of the angel of death."

Louis: "(Very softly, holding Prior's arm): Oh please..."

Prior: "I'm a lesionnaire. The Foreign Lesion. The American Lesion. Lesionnaire's disease." 

Louis: "Stop. "

Prior: "My troubles are lesion." 

Louis: "Will you stop."

Prior: "Don't you think I'm handling this well? I'm going to die."

Louis does not take being blindsided well. He gets up and wanders off to bury his grandmother and contemplate his options. What kind of person abandons someone in their time of need? As much as he loves Prior, playing nurse to his slow atrophy wasn't exactly what he had in mind. Sickness, sores, disease, these things don't fit into his "neo-Hegelian positivist sense of constant historical progress..." He knows he's a coward, and whatever other epithet fits...but in all honesty the need to have deviant sex in the park, trumps his need for the stability and commitment of a loving relationship. He decides he'll try to stay committed as long as possible...but he doesn't anticipate that being very long. 

Meanwhile, Joe has been offered a position in Washington DC and as he gets back from one of his long walks around Central Park, where he watches things he wishes he could do, but always from a distance, he feels like a move would not only be an incredible job opportunity but would pull him away from this growing desire that he's feeling less and less capable of combatting.  Reagan's Washington DC is a place of hope and promise. 

Joe: " America has rediscovered itself. Its sacred position among nations. And people aren't ashamed of that like they used to be. This is a great thing. The truth restored. Law restored. That's what President Reagan has done, Harper. He says 'Truth exists and can be spoken proudly.' And the country responds to him. We become better. More good. I need to be a part of that, I need something to lift me up...."

Chronologically, I don't think the audience would know Joe is gay until he bumps into Louis in the bathroom and Louis outs him to the audience. Up until this point, Joe has been an almost boringly upright citizen, with the excitement of new job prospects, a strange infatuation with Reagan and a crazy wife. 

When he sees Louis, crying in the bathroom, he's the first one to go further into the room and ask if anything is wrong, if he needs help. Louis tells him he's the first to come in and offer sympathy, usually the door creaks open, and when the intruder notices a crying man they flee post haste, these "Reaganite heartless macho asshole lawyers." Joe defends Reagan, and Louis, somewhat jokingly says "Oh boy, A Gay Republican." Joe is caught off guard. What did he say? Is it that obvious? He protests slightly, and Louis quickly apologizes:

Louis: "Sorry...sometimes you can tell from the way a person sounds that...I mean you sound like a..."

Joe: "No I don't. Like what?"

Louis: "Like a Republican."

A little later in a confusing dream sequence, Harper and Prior meet up and chat about the ludicrous situation they have found themselves in. Harper is a Mormon, she's not supposed to be addicted to anything and yet she's downing valium in 'wee fistfuls'...there's an exchange where she tells Prior that in church they don't believe in homosexuals and he counters that in his church they don't believe in Mormons. It seems as if these little hiccups of unbelief are irrelevant in a mixed dream sequence and they have a familiarity and friendship solidified by the 'threshold of revelation' that is shared by the two dream friends. Harper intuits that Prior is very sick and then asks if there is anything he can intuit about her- "Your husband's a homo." 

Harper: "Well I don't like your revelations. I don't think you intuit well at all. Joe's a very normal man, he...Oh God. Oh God. He....Do homos take, like, lots of long walks?"

Both couples must try to hold together their worlds as they are spiraling out of control, the bottom falling out beneath them. For Harper, being married to a homosexual at first is not as bad as the fear that he will leave her. Prior, on the other hand is left by the one person he hoped he could rely on almost immediately, while he lies sick on the floor, covered in his own shit and vomit. 

Joe has been wrestling for what seems an eternity. He's fought with everything inside him to kill his desire for so long that nothing is left; he's just a shell. An upright, rule following shell, his behavior is decent and correct in the eyes of the church...but he can't do it any longer. He has to go to Washington, now for a different reason, to escape. 

Joe: "I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I'd look at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don't really remember the story, or why the wrestling- just the picture. Jacob is a young and very strong.  The angel is...a beautiful man, with golden hair and wings, of course...It's me in that struggle. Fierce, and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of a fight is that? It's not just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God's. But you can't not lose."

While Joe wrestles his angels, it seems as if Prior has been chosen by his angel to be the foil for cryptic messages: 

Voice:"...You must prepare."

Prior: "For what? I don't want to..."

Voice: "No death, no: A marvelous work and wonder we undertake, an edifice awry we sink plumb and straighten, a great Lie we abolish, a great error correct, with the rule, sword and broom of Truth!"

Act 3: Scene 2 we get to what could be the crux of the matter. While Reagan has ushered in an era of hope, the end of liberalism, the end of New Deal Socialism, the end of 'ipso facto secular humanism and the dawning of a genuinely American political personality..." Beneath all this rhetoric of democracy and freedom is a deep seated sense of hate. This is the land of the free and the brave, but only in an ontological sense, and only if your ontology matches party lines. In fact, this is a country that while holding the torch of liberty, simultaneously oppresses one preferred demographic at a time, standing on their backs to raise the torch a little higher.  Peter Minuit purchases Manhattan, for some beads and then ten seconds later Andrew Jackson is marching the Native Americans down the trail of tears. The Chinese almost single handedly build the continental railroad, but when gold is found at Sutter's Mill, the Chinese (and Native Americans) are almost completely systematically removed.  Of course then there's our history with slaves and the deep seated racial bigotry. But Louis argues (to his friend Belize, a black cross dresser) that our intolerance is less of a race issue and more of a political one. 

What AIDS has done for this country, during the prosperity of Reaganomics, is to reveal the limits of tolerance and the fundamental buttressing doctrines of deep seated, intense passionate hate. 

While Louis tries to make his argument concise, without offending Belize by negating the enormity of race, his summation is that we lack a cohesive monolith that truly unifies us. We, as a country are fragmented and susceptible to being infinitely tossed on the tidal waves of political uncertainty. Power is the definitive force behind ontology. We have no sense of spirit or spiritualism, we killed off all the indigenous spirits in America along with the Native Americans. 

Louis: "...There are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics, the shifting downwards and outwards of political power to the people."

Going from Federico Garcia Lorca plays to Tony Kushner is kind of like going from tango to rave. While there is the underlying rhythm of a surrealist beat in the tango, and there are motifs and themes that seem complex and unfamiliar...with Tony Kushner you're in a mosh pit with bodies throwing themselves at you and opioid addicted protagonists wandering off into the frozen tundra. There is so much going on. On the one hand it is a narrative of the complexities of oppression and the shifting mercurial demographics of the oppressed, and on the other hand it is a narrative of the disillusionment and hypocrisy of love. 

The House of Bernarda Alba - Federico Garcia Lorca

If there is one thing that is certain, it is that men are unpredictable, and the world belongs to them. They can come and go freely, their desires are always met, and the women are left to live with the consequences and pick up the pieces of their broken hearts. As the play opens, Bernarda has lost her second husband, he has left her a bit above the socio economic level of destitution, and while not completely faithful to her, having a tryst here or there with the servants, at least he conducted himself semi-discreetly. Despite their poor pecuniary status, Bernarda is part of the highest social echelon; her father built her house with his bare hands and their family name is one of honor and respect. 

If Bernarda rules her house with an iron fist, it is only because the honor of their family is precariously balancing on the cusp of catastrophe. Her mother is crazy and her five daughters are chomping at the bit of madness themselves, a situation perhaps made worse by her constant domineering and sociopathic level of control. 

As the curtain rises, the atmosphere is filled with hot frustration. Poncia, the maid, is cleaning the house while the family is at the funeral. There are spots she can't seem to remove from the glasses.  Despite her persistence the world in which she lives, the world of the Benavides family, will not be tamed. And as she grumbles about how the man of the house will no longer be able to "lift up her skirts behind the back corral," her frustration at always cleaning up the family messes, whether physical or moral, begins to pour out and she day dreams about the moment when she snaps and finally gives Bernarda a piece of her mind:

Poncia: ”On that day I will lock myself in a room with her, and spit on her for a whole year! 'For this, Bernarda!' 'And for that!' 'And for the other!' Until she's like a lizard that the children have smashed to pieces. That's what she is! And so is her whole family. I certainly don't envy the way she lives. She has five girls on her hands, five ugly daughters, but except for Angustias, the oldest- who is her first husband's child and has some money- the rest? Lots of fine lace, lots of linen shifts, but bread and grapes is all they have to inherit!"

As the maid finishes her cleaning, Bernarda and her daughters return from the funeral. In about a nanosecond it is clear that Bernarda wears the pants and that she means business. She is described as leaning on a cane…I don't picture her as feeble, but rather feeling more comfortable within easy access to a weapon. With one quick glance she assess the quality of work done, dismisses the maid for her performance piece on mourning and tells her the house should be cleaner and no one’s here to appreciate her theatrical grief. 

Bernarda is an upbraider. She upbraids the maid for basically everything, she upbraids the men that have come to show their respect for leaving footprints on the steps and lastly, she upbraids her daughters for their lack of reverence and dutiful excitement about the prospect of house arrest while they compulsorily mourn for the next 8 years. 

It seems strange, the lack of emotion regarding the death of the girls father, but the second line of the play mentions that the father only loved Magdalena, the somewhat well behaved middle child (age 30), who perhaps is too overcome with grief to get into any immediate boy trouble. 

It seems like the girls don't have much of a social life, considering the funeral becomes an outlet for making eyes at boys and hoping beyond hope they can communicate with a furtive glance "All this can be yours!! Please rescue me and take me away from this hell hole!" The biggest culprit, or maybe just the most obvious, is Angustias, the oldest sister (age 39). Her father has passed away many years before, and being a man of substance has left her a considerable inheritance, which now after the death of Benavides, becomes accessible. She is sickly and unattractive, but she finds her coquetry met with approving reciprocation from the town’s most eligible young bachelor, Pepe el Romano. Money has a way of making even the most undesirable of women attractive. 

In Angustias' defense, the flirting that Bernarda attacks her for (with her cane) is little more than hiding behind a door and listening to the men’s conversation on the porch.  In Bernarda's house that counts and she beats Angustias for desecrating the day with her brazen immorality. Bernarda is horrified by the implication that the girls would ever want to leave, and refuses to acknowledge that there are any men within a 100 mile radius that are socially acceptable. 

Somehow Pepe makes the cut as dating material…even though just last fall he was obviously making a play for the youngest sister Adela. Now that Angustias is known to have quite a fortune, he has dropped Adela and begun the courting ritual which involves coming to Angustias' window at night and chatting. The charade beguiles no one:

Amelia: ...Angustias has all her father's money.  She is the only rich one in the house. That's why now that our father is dead and the estate is being settled, they're coming after her. 

Magdelena: Pepe el Romano is twenty-five years old, and the best looking man around. It would be natural for him to be interested in you Amelia, or in Adela, who is twenty years old, but not to come looking for the gloomiest person in this house... 

Despite his obvious intentions, and his extreme lack of romance, (his proposal being "You know why I'm here. I need a good woman, well-behaved, and that's you, if you agree,") Angustias says 'yes! yes! a thousand times yes' (my interpretation) for reasons that seem better to her than reciprocated love, ie. major jealousy inducing points from her sisters and an opportunity to escape.

But in a world where you essentially live in a cage with your crazy grandmother, who is also trying to convince someone to marry her so she can escape, playing fair isn't exactly in the rule book. Or rather there is no rule book and it's a no holds barred situation. The jealousy inducing weights the scales to Angustias’ disadvanatage, making life as it has been, unsustainable for the two youngest sisters, who have their own preferred ways of playing dirty. 

Adela, the youngest, waits for Pepe to come to have his evening chat with Angustias, and then she gets naked and backlights herself in her bedroom so that her silhouette will be irresistible.  Her plan works! And after the appropriate amount of chaperoned chatting with Angustias, Pepe walks around the side of the house to get some real action with Adela.  Her plot is easily discovered though when the maid hears Pepe leave the house around 4am, three hours after he's said goodnight to Angustias. The maid confronts Adela:

Poncia: Don't be childish. Leave your sister alone; and if you want Pepe el Romano, control yourself! Besides, who says you can't marry him? Your sister Angustias is sickly, she won't survive even her first childbirth. She's narrow in the hips, old and from what I know, I can tell she'll die. Then Pepe will do what all widowers do in this country: he'll marry the youngest, the most beautiful, and that will be you. Live on that hope or forget him, whatever you want- just don't go against the laws of God.

But Poncia's speech of "hey girl keep it in your pants and hope your sister dies" has little effect. Adela is young and impatient and can see her life literally wasting away before her eyes. She’s too young to be cooped up with all these crazies, and besides she wants to wear green and live a little. She plays the fate card - what will be will be, only, since this is a Lorca play the verbiage is a little more intense:

Poncia: Don’t defy me, Adela, don’t defy me! Because I can raise my voice, light the lamps and make the bells ring!

Adela: Bring out four thousand yellow flares and set them on the walls of the corral. No one can keep what is to happen from happening! 

Poncia: You care about him that much!

Adela: That much! When I look into his eyes, I feel as if I am slowly drinking in his blood!

The second youngest sister, Martirio, has a more complicated and methodical way of playing dirty, that involves sneaking Pepe’s picture from under Angustias’ pillow, ostensibly for some voodoo magic and basically doing a lot of spying. She’s constantly sneaking around and making accusatory statements. She has caught on to Adela’s tryst and while not having a plan to stop it does have a plan for making everyone awkward and uncomfortable. Eventually Angustias realizes her special picture has been stolen and makes a big whiney scene, she’s aware that her sisters are being slowly poisoned to death by their jealousy and enjoys taking every opportunity to up the ante. 

As usual, Bernarda comes running in frothing at the mouth and hitting everyone with her cane. She demands to know what’s wrong and when it is discovered that Martirio has snuck a picture of Angustias’ fiancé, she flips out:

Bernarda: (coming at Martirio and hitting her with her cane): May God strike you dead, you two-faced scorpion! You thorn in my flesh!

One can only imagine what the response will be when Bernarda finds out that Adela has been carrying on her own little illustrious affair with the living breathing Pepe…and just as we close our eyes and begin to imagine the scene, a crowd is heard murmuring and shouting in the distance. The girls rush off to see what is happening. Librada’s unmarried daughter has had a baby and to hide her shame, she killed it and hid its body under some rocks, but a pack of local dogs found it and returned it, putting the body on Librada’s doorstep. Now the whole town wants to kill the daughter and they are dragging her down the street and into the olive grove, “shouting so loud the fields are trembling.’”

Bernarda: Yes! Let them all bring whips made from olive branches and the handles of their hoes! Let them all come and kill her!

Adela: No! No! Not to kill her!

Bernarda: Any woman who tramples on decency should pay for it!

(Outside, a woman screams and there is a great uproar.)

Adela: They should let her go! Don’t go out there!  

Martirio: (looking at Adela): She should pay for what she did.

Bernarda: Finish her off before the police get here! Burning coals in the place where she sinned!

Adela: (clutching her womb): No! No!

Bernarda: Kill her! Kill her!

End of Act Two.

As the last Act opens, it is evening, the air is hot and still and the stallion in the corral is restless and in heat. 

Bernarda and Angustias have the closest thing to a heart to heart of which they’re capable. Angustias thinks Pepe is hiding something from her. Bernarda’s advice is not to pry, never ask questions and above all never to let him see her cry. Pepe supposedly is away for the evening so Angustias and Bernarda make their way to bed, while simultaneously Adela slips out to meet Pepe in the corral out back. Martirio, spying as ever, watches Adela sneak out and quickly runs to the door to confront her, but is intercepted by the crazy grandmother, who is doing a late night perambulation of her own, while carrying a baby ewe like an infant. Martirio is basically like ‘Gram? How did you get out of your room and where did you get a baby lamb?’

The grandmother: It’s true. Everything is very dark. Just because I have white hair you think I can’t have babies. And - yes! Babies and babies and babies! This child will have white hair, and have another child, and that one, another, and all of us with hair of snow will be like waves, one after another after another. Then we’ll all settle down, and we’ll all have white hair, and we’ll be foam on the sea. Why isn’t there any white foam here? Here, there’s nothing but black mourning shawls. 

Martitio is like ‘Gram- wish I could stay and talk crazy with you, but I have to go catch Adela doing it in the corral with Pepe…’

She runs to the door and calls Adela, who after a minute comes to the door annoyed and a bit tussled. Martirio confronts her sister and Adela basically says she doesn’t care if Pepe only wants her as his whore, she doesn't care if she is an outcast and branded with a scarlet letter. She paints a picture of an idyllic little shack by the water where Pepe will come to her whenever he wants to…at least he wants her! At least she has a chance to escape and she’s not going to lose it. 

As the argument escalates the whole family assembles and Bernarda demands to know what’s going on, her cane ready and waiting to give the appropriate beating. But not this time:

Adela:(confronting Bernarda): The shouting in this prison in over! (She seizes her mother’s cane and breaks it in two): This is what I do with the tyrant’s rod! Don’t take one more step. No one gives me orders but Pepe!

Bernarda, apoplectic and without her beloved cane, runs off looking for her gun, while the four sisters begin to circle Adela frothing at the mouth for their own individual reasons: Angustias preparing to avenge her honor, Magdelena demanding honor for their family, Martirio enraged that Adela has had Pepe all this time…when a shot is fired and Bernarda comes back into the room triumphant. Bernarda, tauntingly dares Adela to find Pepe now! And Adela runs to her room, a maelstrom of confused emotion. 

The sisters ask Bernarda if she really killed Pepe and she slyly tells them he just ran off on his horse, but she doubts he’ll be back anytime soon, when they hear a thud…Adela, depressed and without hope or a reason to live has hung herself. 

Bernarda jumps into action demanding they quickly dress her in white and tell everyone she was a virgin:

Bernarda: I want no weeping. We must look death in the face. Silence! (To another daughter) Be quiet, I said! (To another daughter) Tears, when you’re alone. We will all drown ourselves in a sea of mourning. The youngest daughter of Bernarda Alba has died a virgin. Did you hear me? Silence! Silence, I said! Silence! 

And so the play ends, bookended between two deaths. The father’s death covers his impropriety with the servants, and Adela’s death covers up her infidelity with Pepe el Romano. And the substance in-between, the frustrations, the futile desires and moral decay are of little consequence if appropriately white washed and hidden away within the confines of the house of Bernarda Alba. 

Yerma - Federico García Lorca

When I was a little kid I made myself an oath; it was three oaths really. One, that  I would never get married; two, that I would never have kids; and three that I would absolutely NEVER be the type of woman that is consumed with the desire to have a baby. " I will never get married," was my mantra, and when I met Matthew, a part of me feared that everything I had always stood for (ie. a life of celibacy and the downward spiral into cat ownership) was about to slip away. I felt momentarily untethered...but eventually I realized "crazy Dean" is much better when moderated by a good dose of "stable and serene Matthew." 

Some of the responsibility for these oaths lies with my Grandfather. He was an architect and in large part the reason I pursued architecture. I loved that we could spend an afternoon in a parking lot measuring grades and a few months later the landscape would be unrecognizable, a new building in its place. Architecture was creating life from an idea, breathing form into a dream. Sometimes as we pulled into the driveway after a day of crawling through rafters and measuring sites he would let me out of the car and call after me "None of this really matters, you're probably just going to grow up, get married and have babies." My job was to prove him wrong. I would join his club of workaholics with poor relational skills and we would laugh about how empty all those people with functional families were. 

Five years after getting married, my grandfather found out he had ALS and was doing poorly. At the same time I found out that I was pregnant, an unexpected surprise. I literally almost hoped there was a way he wouldn't have to find out...that he could die thinking that I would't let him down, that the drafting table I was about to inherit wasn't going to just lie fallow indefinitely. Someone in my family told him, and he said congratulations...but I interpreted it as “Et tu, Brute?” 

Once again I had to reevaluate everything I had stood for. At this point I was already unemployed, so it's not like I would be sacrificing a dreamy career (I had already left my dream job the year before to move back across the country...) 

Both of those moments were hard. But by far the absolute worst experience was the realization that I had in fact become a woman pining after a baby. After Dez was born I thought a) I'm pretty awesome at popping out babies and b) Go big or go home...so let's do this thing and have us some Irish twins. Instead, things ended up being more complicated and I found myself completely obsessed with having another baby. I tried bartering with God...all the disgusting stereo types became the person I was living and breathing. People would encourage me to just "not think about it" but it literally was who I was at a cellular level: a desire, a need; I felt like someone was missing and everything in my power to make them appear was not enough. 

Yerma is the posterchild for all women pining for babies. She lives in a world where childbirth and child rearing are a woman's destiny, but for her it's more than that; it's not just destiny, it is all that she is; all that she was created for and while she waits, her impotent ineffectual life trickles down the drain one wasted day at a time.

It’s not that Yerma’s husband is unloving, he’s just oblivious and he spends way too much time taking care of his sheep or grapes or whatever he does and is kind of a jerk. He tends his crops, carefully and tenderly but from the first line of the first Act he seems exhausted by his relationship with his wife and their conjoined infertility. He also passively defies her will by refusing to take care of himself and using work as an excuse to literally never be in the same room as her. As the play opens he’s racing out the door to go to the fields and Yerma runs after him asking if he wants a glass of milk- He’s getting skinny and she’s worried about his health. In response to her loving, if somewhat naggy, monologue he asks “are you finished?” Of course she’s not finished, and the audience is let in on a blow by blow account of the frustrations the last two years of marriage have been, with the resounding chorus being: I’m still not pregnant.

In Lorca’s form of deism, God is not only absent, but also has willfully made the world filled with heartache and brokenness and the only way to survive is to give up. But Yerma is a fighter who refuses to give up, and as the years pass and she becomes more desperate, we find her consorting with a pagan woman and engaging in pagan rituals. 

Yerma: God help me!

Pagan Old Woman: Not God. I never cared for God. When are you going to realize that he doesn’t exist? It’s men whose rotten seed dams up the joys of the fields! 

At the end of Act one we meet Victor, the antithesis of Yerma’s husband, in the sense that he actually talks to her and in every other category. While Yerma’s husband is sickly and the physical embodiment of a drought, Victor exudes fecundity, he’s practically dripping with it. Yerma and Victor chat about singing and birds and such until Yerma thinks she hears the sound of a drowning baby, oh wait, it’s just her husband, who walks onto the scene and asks what Yerma is doing outside…she better get inside before people start talking. And in a nutshell that’s their relationship, she must stay indoors tending to housewifely things, but he refuses to participate in giving her the one housewife duty she craves, that of motherhood. 

Eventually five years have passed and we come upon the unhappy couple having the same argument, to what has become the soundtrack of their abysmal lives; her unmitigated desire. 

Juan: Being around you only makes me restless and uneasy. When there’s no other choice you should resign yourself.

Yerma: I came to this house so I wouldn’t have to resign myself! when I’m in my coffin with my hands tied together and a cloth wrapped around my head to keep my mouth from falling open- that’s when I’ll resign myself!

Juan: Then what do you want to do?

Yerma: I want to drink water and there’s no glass and no water! I want to walk up the hill, and I have no feet! I want to embroider my petticoats, and I can’t find the thread! 

Juan: The truth is that you’re not a real woman, and you’re trying to destroy a man that has no choice!

They obviously need a bit of marriage counseling. Instead of seeing Yerma at the end of her rope, exhausted by her desire and burdened by her flaccid ineffectuality, he’s annoyed that she can’t just get over it already…looks like the kid thing isn’t for them- now it’s time to move on. But for Yerma, moving on isn’t an option. She is lost, sleepwalking through a life without purpose and devoid of meaning. 

Yerma: I don’t think about tomorrow, I think about today! You’re old, and now you see everything like a book you’ve read before. I think I am thirsty, but I have no freedom! I want to hold my child in my arms so I can sleep peacefully! And listen carefully, and don’t be frightened by what I say: even if I knew that one day my son was going to torture me, and hate me, and drag me through the streets by the hair, I would still rejoice at his birth! It’s much better to cry over a man who is alive and stabs you with a knife, than to cry over a phantom sitting on my heart, year after year!

Juan resents Yerma because in her eyes he sees himself as a failure, unable to perform the one task required of him; every look from his wife is interpreted as daggers ripping into his insecure, mercurial heart. Eventually when Yerma begins to take long walks at night through the fields, barefoot, feeling the fecund, wet earth beneath her feet, he decides to have his two unmarried sisters come live with them to keep an eye on his wife. He is obsessed with the idea that his impotency will drive her to another man and constantly hounds her about his family’s honor, as if they have a corner on the market for this particular character trait. Again, he completely misreads Yerma. She is not without honor and while she may beg a potion or two from the traveling potion distributors, she is a far cry from jumping into bed with another man. 

Secretly Yerma suspects that her husband doesn’t want children, that although he performs his duty, that is all it is, a duty, lacking passion and vigor and intent. She carries this burden of desire alone, but the burden is beginning to be more than she can bear, and she is completely hopeless. When Juan finds her in the house of the local conjurer one morning, he is beside himself with rage, once again she has snuck out to try some magic trick or potion or something, what will the neighbors say? And as he tries to hurry her out the door and back into their house where their public shame and disgrace of being unable to procreate is forever before them, he tries to quiet her escalating despair.

Juan: Be quiet! Let’s go!

Yerma: (screaming) God damn my father for giving me his blood - the blood of the father of a hundred sons! God damn my blood that pounds on the walls looking for them!…Wanting something in your head is one thing, but it’s something else when your body - damn the body! - won’t respond. This is my fate and I’m not going to fight against the tide. That’s it. Let my lips be sealed! 

The final Act takes place at a pagan fertility shrine. The penitents make their way slowly, the desperate women in solemnity and the lucky men waiting to perform the holy act behind any statue that provides itself, with joy and frivolity. Years have passed since the opening act and it seems like our favorite dysfunctional couple joins in on the amusements more from a cultural ritual than a hope that finally their fertility problems will be solved, (although Yerma might still have the shadow of what was once hope still traceable in the caverns of her empty heart.) Yerma and her husband make their way through the crowd, just within sight of each other and when an old woman offers her son and his assured potency for her problem, Yerma is shocked and offended, and hastily defends her honor, why would she sneak out of her house to beg for what is rightfully hers? Her husband was her destiny just as her longed for son, and while fate is cruel, it is not the job of mere mortals to reconstruct the variables. 

At this moment, as Juan overhears Yerma’s dignified speech about morality, he decides now would be a good time to have that conversation he’s been putting off for the last ten years or so. 

Juan: I can no longer put up with this constant grieving over obscure things, unreal things made of thin air. 

Yerma: (dramatically) Unreal, you call it? Thin air, you call it? 

Juan: Over things that have not happened and that neither you nor I can control.

Yerma: (violently) Go on! Go on!

Juan: Over things I don’t care about! Do you hear? That I don’t care about! I finally have to tell you! All I care about is what I can hold in my hands. What I can see with my eyes! 

While Juan may have thought this speech would go over well and that Yerma would say something like “you know what? You are so right? We have each other and that’s good enough for me!” His assumption was galaxies away from the reality in front of him. When Yerma asks, so basically all you ever wanted was someone to cook, clean and a house filled with peace and quiet, you can see the look of relief pass over Juan’s face. Finally! She gets it! They can finally call a spade a spade and he can admit he has never wanted children in the first place- she has always been all that he has ever wanted. 

This does not go over well. Enraged, apoplectic, when Juan suggests they kiss and make up and enjoy the rest of their lives walking hand in hand, Yerma attacks her husband, clutching him by the throat and strangling him to death. As she slowly walks away from his prone body, there is a look of relief on her face, now she truly is and will always be barren. Finally there is closure and she can lay to rest her hopes and dreams once and for all. 

Thankfully my own journey ended far before any attempts at strangulation and even without a trip to the local conjuror. I've heard that one of the ways to cure arachnophobia is to cover yourself in spiders. Maybe the only way to be released from my childhood oaths was to be submerged in them, only to open my eyes and realize I was still alive. Each thing I swore I would never do, upon the doing, has brought with it a profound appreciation for the unknown and a greater understanding of my complete lack of omniscience. 

Eight weeks ago a little 8 lb 12 oz. girl decided to join our family, nine days overdue and ready to face her own incomprehensible destiny.

Blood Wedding - Federico Garcia Lorca

Blood Wedding is the first in Lorca's trilogy of the "Spanish earth," and out of the three feels the most earthy; the moon has a role and Death is personified by an old beggar woman. As I've mentioned in the past I'm not usually in love with plays as a genre, (unless of course they are edited by John Reddick). I find it a very difficult medium to jump into without much historical/social/etc. context and Lorca's plays accentuate this point. While the plot itself is very simple, the deeper metaphorical narrative is somewhat lost on me. I need John Reddick to come hold my hand and guide me through a deep sea of meaning and symbolism...but I will give it my best shot. Thankfully I am not entirely alone, reading the Penguin Modern Classic edition, there is a lovely introduction by Christopher Maurer, which I find to be incredibly helpful for at least establishing the most basic facts.

Supposedly Spanish theater in the 1920's was in crisis. Lorca considered "everything that is now in Spain is dead. Either the theater changes radically or it dies away forever. There is no other solution." I'm not entirely sure what he meant by this, but he took his place alongside Miguel de Unamuno and Ramon del Valle-Inclan to create a new form of minimalism that distilled plays down to their most essential elements, stripping away cluttered language and scenery, seeking to expose the more crucial and pertinent issues: faith, free will, personal identity, artistic creation and the conflict between the individual and society. Influenced by Shakespearian and classical tragedy (although with more of a Woody Allen feel than Euripides) Lorca's plays are painted with a spectrum of references and metaphors that go from the obvious to the obscure.

Act One:
Within the first few lines of the play the plot is somewhat clearly outlined for us. The Bridegroom is about to get married to the Bride, who recently was dating a member of the Felix family, Leonardo. While that may be water under the bridge...the awkward variable is that the Felix family has murdered the Bridegroom's father and brother. As the Bridegroom makes his way to his vineyard (a status of his wealth and the reason the Bride has accepted the Bridegroom and rejected Leonardo) he picks up a knife and triggers his mother's PTSD:

Mother: (muttering as she looks for the knife) The knife! The knife! Damn all of them! And the monster who invented them!

Bridegroom: Lets change the subject.

Mother: And the shotguns and the pistols and the smallest knife- and even the pitchfork and the hoe!

Bridegroom: Enough!

Mother: Anything that can cut into a man's body! A beautiful man, with life like a flower in his mouth, who goes out to the vineyards or to his own olive groves, because they are his, inherited...

Bridegroom: (lowering his head) Mother, be quiet!

Mother: and that man does not return. Or if he does, it's only to have a palm placed over him or a dish or rock salt, so his body won't swell.  I don't know how you dare to carry a knife on you! Or why I allow that serpent inside the cupboard!

The Mother definitely wears the pants in this relationship. While the Bride is not the Mother's first choice, the son has a tremendous burden of providing heirs that will firmly establish their lineage to perpetuity. While allowing her son to marry the Bride, she constantly hints that she was with another man, that there's something suspicious about her behavior and that perhaps she can't be trusted, foreshadowing the fateful trajectory both mother and son find themselves being swept along.

In the next scene we are introduced to Lorca's reinvention of the Greek chorus and the plot progresses almost sinisterly through song. As Leonardo's wife sits with her mother-in-law, who is gently rocking a child, they both sing dark and inappropriate lullabies akin to Marie's lullabies in Woyzeck only significantly longer and more disturbing.

Mother-in-law: Go to sleep, my rose- The horse begins to cry. His wounded hooves, His frozen mane, And in his eyes,  A silver dagger. They went to the river, Down to the river! The blood was flowing Stronger than water.

I think Lorca is a little heavy handed with the chorus. The songs feel surreal and indecipherable. Why doesn't the horse want the water? Is the mare that awaits foreshadowing the Bride? Or is that too simplistic...Why is the horse crying?

Eventually Leonardo shows up and rescues the reader from having to parse out more oblique references and the play jumps back into a narrative dialogue. Leonardo was unaware that the Bride was about to be married...and even though he's been married to the Wife and they have a small child...something fishy is definitely going on. (Spoiler alert: he's a peeping tom and rides his horse to death every night to stand under the window of the Bride and watch her...)

When Leonardo realizes the Bride is about to get married he's annoyed but to add insult to injury his mother has to remind him how wealthy everyone else is; the Bride and Groom are from wealthy families and the joining of the families is cause for celebration for everyone except Leonardo. If he had been wealthy perhaps he would have married the Bride to begin with, but skipping a socioeconomic bracket and marrying beneath your status...while maybe ok for the prince and Cinderella, generally is frowned upon, at least in Spanish culture of the 1920's.

A little girl walks onto the set and starts rattling off everything the Groom has recently bought for the Bride at the local general store, everything of course of the finest quality. This only serves to make Leonardo more apoplectic, as his simmering rage begins to boil over the top his wife confusedly asks what's wrong (duh! He's obviously in love with the Bride but couldn't marry her because he's too poor!) and in a huff Leonardo races off to either engage in more peeping or sulk.

Next we meet the Bride, who seems anything but excited to be getting married. The appropriate spouse has been chosen and after he earned enough to finally buy that last vineyard, his wealth and status have reached the acceptable marriageable quotient...not exciting, not dangerous and mercurial like Leonardo, but bland and expected. While the Bride mulls over the upcoming doom she is about to tether herself to, her maid mentions that someone has been standing under the tree by her window and suggests it's the Groom...but the Bride knows it's Leonardo...and the seed of possibility is sewn in her disconsolate heart.

Eventually it is the day of the wedding and the chorus is excited. They sing the refrain "The bride is awakening" over and over interjected between comparisons between the Bridegroom and golden flowers...or emphasizing the purity of the virginal Bride.

As the wedding day progresses the Wife realizes she has been thrown aside. Leonardo refuses to ride with her in their carriage but has to ride his old nag, free and alone, so he can work on the appropriate degree of rage mixed with the appropriate amount of charm. The rest of the Second Act is a frenetic mix of the Bride being despondent and distant while the Groom tries to enact any amount of excitement regarding their nuptials. The Wife is running around looking for Leonardo, then someone realizes the Bride is not in her room napping after all...and the unimaginable has come to pass- the Bride has run off with Leonardo!

Act Three feels like a concoction of Greek tragedy, naturalism and a Salvador Dali painting. Three woodcutters stand around talking about the fact that the Bride has run off with Leonardo and the Groom has saddled his horse and run after them...their escape is futile but that does not negate the genuine honesty of the action:

First Woodcutter: You must follow the course of your blood.

Second Woodcutter: But blood that is spilled is soaked up by the earth.

Third Woodcutter: What of it? Better to be dead with no blood than alive with it festering.

Next the Moon and a Beggar woman/Death consort on the unlikely survival of the lovers. The Moon agrees to assist in the slow and painful demise of Leonardo and the Bridegroom. The Beggar woman tells the Moon to shine on "his vest and open the buttons, then the daggers will know their way." The Moon agrees and ups the ante:

Moon: Let them be a long time dying. Let blood hiss softly through my fingers. See my ashen valleys waken, Anxious for this trembling fountain.

Before the ultimate climax, the Bride and Leonardo are seen racing through the forest and stop to decide who is the most responsible for their elopement. The Bride begs Leonardo to go back, to give her the gun and she can fight it out alone with the Bridegroom...Leonardo while not about to leave does not take responsibility for what has happened. Like all men in this play he is a passive victim, willing to suffer the consequences of fate but not without piping up a tiny offering of his lack of agency:

Leonardo:...Because the blame's not mine! The blame belongs to the earth, And to the smell that comes from your breasts and from your braids.

Eventually their dialogue turns from the "love sonnet" genre to the "I hate myself for loving you" genre. The Bride tells Leonardo that she must obviously be crazy for loving him, she doesn't want to share his bed or his food...but simultaneously longs to be with him...but since they're talking about it, the Groom really was a great guy, super honest and genuine...at this point they both realize that there is no escape. They have made a terrible and hasty decision to run away, the Bride still in her wedding dress...during the wedding celebration! The timing is so bad... but now what? The only option is to try and outmatch each other with their love and affection and demand to be the one who dies first. The Bride realizes they probably won't kill her and instead she will live out the rest of her life a social pariah, someone to throw apple cores at while laughing about her unfortunate but self inflicted misery. Leonardo promises the only way they will get to her is if he is dead...but considering the Moon and Death are already guiding the Bridegroom through the underbrush...his oath doesn't hold much water. And the next time we see the Bride she is alone, preparing the spend the rest of her life begging people to kill her as her wedding dress slowly turns to rags around her shoulders.

While the women in this play have slightly more agency than the men, it is really the social constructs of Spanish culture that has become the new Aphrodite preparing to teach Hippolytus a lesson. The lovers have defied the God/Social strictures and the only punishment is a slow and painful death that begins the first time the lovers lay eyes on each other. They can never be together, but rather than families feuding and a secret love affair, it is not their families keeping the lovers apart but the vague expectation of a pecuniary culture.

Effi Briest - Theodor Fontane

While Nana's courtesans lead Paris into moral decay and the country's subsequent defeat by the Prussian army, in Effi Briest, we see the imminent decline of Bismark's Prussia for exactly the opposite reasons.

Set in the 1880's we are confronted with a culture deeply entrenched in Prussian ideology, "a mixture of militarism, Lutheranism, loyalty to state and king, order, ambition and obedience, the Kantian ethic of doing one's duty and Hegelian apotheosis of the state- a combination of elements which Fontane regarded highly critically and to which he attributes the essential responsibility for Effi's destruction."(Fontane, Theodor. Effi Briest. Ed. Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers. 1995)  

Geert Instetten is a 38 year old bachelor who, after spending the last twenty years diligently working for crown and country, has finally arrived at the point in his career where his status as Landrat would be greatly improved by a wife from a proper family. It is time for him to get married, so he packs a bag and heads to the home of his childhood sweetheart to ask for the hand of her 17 year old daughter.

In contrast to Geert's calculating propriety is Effi, a nature loving free spirited tom-boy racing around the backyard in a toga. Effi is playing with her three friends, none of which are quite in the same social strata as the Briest's, but as the daughters of schoolmasters and rectors there is no impropriety in their friendship. Hulda is described as "while more ladylike than the other two, she was also boring and conceited, a lymphatic blonde with somewhat protuberant eyes that somehow always seemed to be searching for something."

As the quartet plays languidly in the late morning sun, they decide to have a mock burial for the gooseberry skins they have been collecting and slowly make a funereal procession to the pond. As Effi solemnly intones the litany she remembers something:

"Hertha, your guilt is now consigned to the deep,' said Effi, 'oh and that reminds me, this is how they used to drown poor unfortunate women, from boats like this, for infidelity of course."

Thus we have the first foreshadowing of what is to come...although technically their downfall is inscribed within our protagonists names themselves, Effi, (according to the wonderful introduction by  Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers) is an echo of Eve; the implication being that her fall from grace and removal from the idyllic garden, in which we find her in the opening scene, is imminent and predestined. "'Geert' not only means 'a tall slender stem' as old Breist remarks, but also a 'switch', an instrument of punishment and control." (p. xii)

And so from the beginning their roles are written for them and the conflict begun. Effi, the wild spirit, that represents nature must either be controlled by pragmatism and culture, that her much older husband represents or fight back against his austere orderliness but in doing so risk losing everything.

 According to HR and HC there is some debate about whether or not Fontane is subtle and intriguing as he spins his narrative web or a bit heavy handed. I tend to agree with the 'heavy handed' camp. Just so we don't lose sight of the fact that Effi is a young inexperienced virginal maiden, there are about a million references to the 'Virginia creeper' ie. virgin's vine, ie. wild wine "suggesting both freedom and Dionysian pleasure," (p. x) that separate the wild maiden surrounded by nature and the sitting room in which Instetten has begun the formalities of asking for Effi's hand in marriage.

"Instetten nodded mechanically in agreement, but his mind was scarcely on these matters as he glanced repeatedly in a kind of fascination at the Virginia creeper climbing up the window to which Briest had just alluded, and as he dwelt on this it was as if he saw the golden red heads of the girls again among the tendrils, and heard once more their 'Come back Effi.'"

While perhaps a bit on the wild native side, Effi is not without ambition of her own, and this match, although initially surprising is accepted in due course with little hesitancy. In a discussion with her girlfriends regarding whether this Geert is the 'right one' or not Effi replies:

"Of course he's the right one. You don't understand these things Hertha. Anybody is the right one. Provided he is an aristocrat and has a position and good looks, naturally."

And so begins their life of matrimony. They move to a provincial town, Kessin, where Geert is the highest member of society/only member of society. Part of societal ambition is being able to show off your position in society and Effi is disappointed with her lack of peers. She is cooped up in a little house, no more than a cottage, complete with it's own ghost of a chinaman that haunts the upper levels, an old maid that sits in a chair rocking a black hen and specimens from hunting exhibitions made by the former occupant hanging from the ceiling. When Effi asks to make changes to the decor, Geert is gentlemanly intractable, he likes the decor the way it is. While not unkind, Geert believes since he is confident in his love for Effi that there is no need to make a big show of it/any show of it. But for a young idealistic 17 year old ready and willing to pour out a heart full of passion, this just isn't quite enough, and it pains her that her marriage lacks marks of devotion or encouragement or even little attentions.

Within the year Effi has begun another transition, that of motherhood, and with Geert constantly on the road running hither and thither at the behest of Bismark, Effi's cocoon of solitude becomes unbearably snug.

Eventually the Crampas family moves to town. Crampas is an old soldier buddy of Geerts with a reputation for being a ladies man and a jealous wife of the 'ball and chain' type constantly supervising his extracurricular activities.

In a letter to her mother, Effi describes Crampas as "apparently a man who has had many affairs, a ladies man, which I always find ridiculous, and I would find it ridiculous on this occasion too,  if he hadn't had a duel with one of his comrades for just that sort of reason."

GA! It's all so out in the open. We're only half way through the book and everything is unraveling before our eyes. Here is the ridiculous man, who is going to ridiculously insert himself into Effi's affections and although he's already fought a duel once before with a comrade, he is destined to fight another.

But first, a break in the narrative trajectory and Effi makes her way home with her new little precious cargo, Annie, and finds herself once again, and a year later, in the garden of her parents' estate. Still a young girl, but now with responsibilities almost too taxing, she seeks a respite in the quiet normalcy of her girlfriends who now envy her her position and wealth as the young Baroness Instetten. But Effi is still a wild, untamable colt and spends long afternoons swinging...?

"...best of all she had enjoyed standing on the swing as it flew through the air, just as in the old days, and the feeling 'now I'm going to fall' had given her a strange tingling sensation, a shudder of sweet danger."

Once again, Geert is absent. Throughout the whole summer he fails to take the short trip to Hohen-Cremmen and is instead entirely devoted to his job and subsequent endless duties. Effi finds his absence disheartening and a little chink in her armor, right above the heart, is pried just a little wider.

Upon her return to Kessin, Effi finds herself more and more in the company of Major Crampas in what, at first, are completely innocent circumstances. But then as Effi takes long walks alone, her absence seems to be pregnant with indiscernible meaning. One day, upon her return to the stable yard, Effi catches her nursemaid Roswitha chatting up the married stable man and gives her a bit of a chewing out, and we have a feeling that the pot is calling the kettle black. Her lack of patience with Roswitha's professed innocence is a bit much and she harshly tells her that if she's banking on the stableman's sick wife to die and leave him an amiable widower, she's waiting in vain, the sick tend to live the longest, and that wife with her black hen will probably cast a hex or a pox or something on Roswitha in the meantime.

Thankfully, Geert is eventually promoted and at just the right moment Effi makes her escape to Berlin. For a moment we breath a sigh of relief, thinking Effi has dodged a bullet and has miraculously escaped with her virtue intact.

6 years pass and the Instettens have settled into their new more cosmopolitan life. After the birth of Annie, Effi has found herself frequently ill with only the type of sickness that strikes the protagonists of 19th century literature. Unable to have more children, the Instetten line is at risk for extinction, but all is not completely lost. Effi takes long treatments at different German spas to work on her weak health and here we find her, at a treatment center in Ems chatting with a fellow patient Frau Zwicker.  Effi, now 25, is still the innocent and asks this older more experienced woman her opinion on foreign literature, in particular Nana, was it really so dreadful?

"My dear Baroness, what do you mean, dreadful? There are much worse things than that.' She also seemed inclined, Effi concluded her letter, 'to tell me all about these "worse things". But I wouldn't let her, because I know you think the immorality of our times derives from such things as these and you're probably right."

I'm not sure what Frua Zwicker could mean by "worse things than that" as reading Nana in the 21st century was still at times a bit shocking, although I am a bit of an innocent prude myself...but the point is while France is embroiled in gratuitous prostitution, Prussians won't even read the book or discuss it's contents afraid that might lead to moral decay.

It is at this exact point, while Effi is at the spa in Ems, there is a moment of frenzy involving Annie falling down stairs and hitting her head and a quick decision to break open Effi's desk to find something to wrap on her head (?) A package of old letters are discovered, wrapped with a single red thread.

After ascertaining whether or not Annie's case is dire, and deciding it's not, Geert turns his attention to the packet of incriminating letters and to his horror finds evidence of his wife's infidelity with none other than that ridiculous old Major Crampas! Immediately Geert calls a friend and asks him to be his second and without delay they make their way to Kessin to challenge the Major to a duel.

For a moment there is the slightest hesitation. It has been 6 years since they left Kessin, His wife was 17 and perhaps entitled to a momentary lapse in judgment? And besides, Geert feels little resentment or bitterness...but his duty compels him onward.

"We're not just individuals, we're part of a larger whole and we must constantly have regard for that larger whole, we're dependent on it, beyond a doubt...wherever men live together, something has been established thats's just there, and it's a code we've become accustomed to judging everything by, ourselves as well as others...The world is as it is, and things don't take the course we want, they take the course other people want. All the pompous stuff you hear from some people about "divine justice" is nonsense of course, there's no such thing, quite the reverse: this cult of honor of ours is a form of idolatry, but as long as we have idols we have to worship them."

And so, Geert challenges the Major to a duel that ends fatally for the Major. Effi is sent a missive, telling her that her husband is filing for divorce and without a moment to say good bye to her daughter or pick up personal items from home, her life as Baroness Innstetten is over. Her parents agree to give her a small stipend to live on, but they are hesitant about having her return home, knowing that would ruin their social lives. Effi spends a few years living in essentially a garret, until news of her poor health reaches her parents and they finally decide to take their miscreant daughter home, where her health, with moments of improvement, gradually declines and she is destined to end her days in the garden, forever Effi Briest, untamed and true to herself/her nature at the cost of everything else.

In Nana there is no question that Parisian society is morally decayed and on the brink of it's ruin, but in Effi Briest the imminent ruin is a bit more subtle. At first glance it seems like Geert's intrenched morals are what will save Prussian society- they are incorruptible! But slowly we realize, that it is the cult of honor that propels Geert forward, not his feelings of justice or morality. "Innstetten's final, impotent recognition of the hollowness of his establishment principles coupled with the dying out of his family name prefigures the inevitable demise of an antiquated social and political construct. Fontane agrees with Charlotte Bronte: conventionality is not morality." (p.xi)

 His duty to society is inflexible and demanding and he is willing to sacrifice the hope of an heir at the altar of culture and ambition.

Nana - Émile Zola

A few months ago I wrote a book report on The Princess of Cleaves and the Birth of Fomo. The book focused on the upper echelons of Parisian society circa 1678, where infidelity was rampant and the finesse of balancing multiple lovers simultaneously was practically the norm. Yet, alongside this culturally acceptable moral myopia were those that held fast to their principles, creating a sort of dialectic between virtue and debasement.

Our heroine, eventually is either so virtuous (or so afraid that her true love may be only a mirage) that her only solution is to join a convent, and there she spends the rest of her short life in pious contemplation while her suitor hovers just outside the frame hoping she'll change her mind.

Two hundred years later, during the Second Empire, Parisian culture is quite different. Rather than trysts being carefully hidden and out of sight the courtesans are a ruling class of their own, destroying the peerage with their avarice and caprices and making a laughing stock of all that is noble.

In contrast to the respect and esteem the Princess of Cleaves was met with by her equals, who admired her virtue even if they were confused by her stubbornness, in 1870 virtue is no longer an attribute to be lauded and to devote oneself to God is an endeavor only to be pitied.

About a hundred pages into Nana we find ourselves at a cocktail party. While conversation flits about from one topic to another, there is a soliloquy devoted to which of the ladies have remained faithful to their spouses. Eventually the conversation turns to a topic that has gripped society for the last three days: "The eldest daughter of the Baron de Fougeray, who at the bidding of an irresistible vocation, had just entered the Carmelite Order."

High society is in an uproar, "What a horrible way to lose a daughter!" is a constant murmur throughout the crowded streets and at our cocktail party the sentiment is a bit more vulgar:

"The fact is that they marry God when they haven't been able to marry their cousin,' muttered Vandeuvres, who found the whole subject a bore. Joining Fauchery, he went on: 'My dear fellow, have you ever seen a woman who had a man to love her become a nun?"

And at that the two men go back to the intrigue of the following night's party at Nana's house, where some of the most desired courtesans will be on display.

I thought this would be a good place to start. Paris is a different world, but not necessarily one without religion, just a new religion whose deity is pleasure and debauchery. In the introduction, Zola sums up his philosophy for his novel:

"The philosophical subject is as follows: A whole society hurling itself at the cunt. A pack of hounds after a bitch, who is not even in heat and makes fun of the hounds following her. The poem of male desires, the great lever which moves the world. There is nothing apart from the cunt and religion."

As always, Zola is an expansive writer, detail obsessed down to a microcosmic level. The way the narrative progresses, leaving one protagonist to follow another, creates a frenetic atmosphere where at any moment a hero or heroine may find themselves cast off and struggling along the dregs of society to merely survive, while the never ceasing maelstrom of Parisian debauchery moves on to the next victim.

As the novel opens, we find ourselves in an Opera house waiting to catch a glimpse of the new up and coming star that has left Paris breathless and trembling. As the merits of the play and the star are debated, the crowd waits, expectations only growing in anticipation.

"At that very moment the clouds at the back of the stage parted, and Venus appeared. Very tall and well built for her eighteen years, in her goddess's white tunic, and with her long fair hair hanging loosely over her shoulders, Nana came down towards the footlights with quiet self-assurance. Greeting the audience with a laugh, she launched into her big song..."

The audience for a moment is stunned. Never before has anyone heard a more tuneless voice, could this be a joke? But Nana knows how to work the crowd and with a toss of her curls and a sway of her hips she seems to let the audience in on the joke- she does have a terrible voice, and can hardly be expected to remember all of the lyrics, but isn't life simply hilarious? Isn't it all just perfectly grand?

And slowly the crowd, tickled in all the right places, is captivated.

"When she came to the end of the verse, her voice failed her completely, and she realized that she would never get through the whole song. So, without getting flustered, she thrust out one hip which was roundly outlined under the flimsy tunic, bent backwards, so that her breasts were shown to good advantage, and stretched out her arms. Applause burst forth on all side."

While she is a tremendous success on the stage, there is no end in sight for her pecuniary problems. The next morning we find her searching through her apartment for a louis to pay the workmen already sitting in her foyer. After begging change from her maid to no avail she resorts to her steady failsafe: a quick trick with a gentleman caller.

The transition between prostitute and gentlewoman seem only to happen in her mind.  At her dinner party, the guests arrive and make themselves at home in her sparse, barely furnished apartment and she presides over them like a schoolmarm, demanding order and decorum. The men wait with baited breath, surrounded by courtesans, the anticipation of vulgarity is almost too much to bear.

Eventually Nana's success catapults her into a life of notoriety and wealth. Being desired by princes and bankers, she takes what she can from them, climbing the ladder out of the gutter one rung at a time, until at last she has convinced one of her lovers to buy her a country estate where she can escape for the summer to play house. But even here, in this place of expected solitude, there is little escape. She is hounded by boys and men and seems to pick her lovers indiscriminately.

She has left the city certain that her place in the theater was secure, but after her summer vacation comes to an end, she finds that she has been readily replaced by another buxom girl/body. She takes this in stride and decides to set up house with a friend of hers, Fontan, a goat-like actor whom all the courtesans seem to love for his "personality." As Nana spends her savings setting up their garish apartment, throwing away her hard earned money one louis at a time, it is not long before Fontan's true personality begins to shine through.

In a moment he goes from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde, demanding she pay for everything and beating her at first because she needs more money or can not provide dinner, but eventually just because he feels like it. Yet, she chooses to stay and eventually must resort to walking the streets and prostituting herself on the street, simply to put food on the table for Fontan and his guests. With each beating, she looks forward to the moment when they will make up and so chooses to stay. It is not until she is actually locked out of her apartment, while Fontan makes love to another woman, that she decides to move on and reinvent herself. This time she will no longer be the plaything, but will exact her revenge on men first and class second, carefully laying her traps of destruction and devouring all that, by their own caprices, fall into her lair.

The first step to her plan is to accept the Comte Muffat's addresses, which she has heretofore rejected. She demands terms and conditions, which he hastily accepts, shaking with lust and desire. She will be established in one of the finest houses in Paris, she will be given an infinite stipend and recast as a gentlewoman. It is not long before she has become an icon of fashion and Paris waits with baited breath each day to see what she will wear.

All that the Comte asks is that she remain faithful to him. And at first she does so, biding her time while the currency of desire rises amongst the men that are constantly surrounding her. Quietly, she begins her conquests, one fortune at a time, as these men, lacking agency and completely controlled by their lust and desire lay their fortunes at her feet. Fortunes that took generations to amass are decimated in a matter of weeks. Estates are sold to pay for her equipage and brocades. And when a suitor is no longer solvent, our Medusa moves on the next victim who is waiting for the privilege of being stripped and decimated by a courtesan of such high rank and prestige.

Eventually these trysts become more brazen. Nana is practically taunting the Comte to leave her, knowing he is powerless over his desire. Instead, he must take his place in line behind the rest of her suitors, her bedroom a veritable public house, with the effluvia of the men before still clinging to the sheets and bed curtains. The high price he pays to keep her established grants him little more than the title of "official lover" and the courtesy of a smile, yet his need for her gnaws at him like an inescapable disease.

"A pious churchgoer, accustomed to ecstatic experiences in sumptuous chapels, he encountered here exactly the same mystical sensations as when he knelt beneath some stained-glass window and surrendered to the intoxication of the organ music. Woman dominated him with the jealous tyranny of a God of wrath, terrifying him, but granting him moments of joy as keen as spasms, in return for hours of hideous torments, visions of hell and eternal tortures. He stammered out the same despairing prayers as in church, and above all suffered the same fits of humility peculiar to an accursed creature crushed under the mud from which he has sprung."

If anyone is the victim in this narrative, it is the men. They lack free will and are totally controlled by desire and lust. It's almost too easy. All it takes is a little cleavage and they are groveling at the feet of their infatuation. As a whole they are weak cowards, unable to take destiny into their own hands but rather throwing away their fortune and dignity at the shrine of Bacchus. The Comte is an even sadder exhibit. He is a cuckold and as such completely emasculated. He has no power over the women in his life and while he throws his money at them, their avaricious demands grow and morph into infinite unmet expectations.

Upon learning that his wife is cheating on him with a newspaper man, he walks the street late at night, circling the apartment where he assumes the tryst is taking place. He thinks about confronting them, but eventually decides on standing in the shadows and waiting, watching, hoping to see if his wife will emerge and confront her. But his wife is nowhere to be seen, and as the sun comes up, he is once again a man of inaction, too weak to defend his honor and too cowardly to confront his wife.

As his relationship with Nana becomes more tenuous, he shrinks even more until his humiliation becomes the thing that keeps both of them interested in an otherwise boring relationship. It is now her turn to be the master, and like Fontan, Nana begins her games of abuse and debasement.  Finally, she demands that he come dressed one evening in his uniform of court chamberlain and after laughing uproariously, carried away by her irreverence, she begins a new game of kicking him in the ass and shouting "get a move on, chamberlain!"

"Every kick was a heartfelt insult to the Tuileries and the majesty of the imperial court, dominating an abject and frightened people. That was what she thought of society. She was taking her revenge, settling an unconscious family grudge, bequeathed to her in her blood. Then, once the chamberlain was undressed and his uniform spread out on the floor, she shouted jump, and he jumped; she shouted at him to spit, and he spat; she shouted at him to trample on the gold, the eagles and the decorations and he trampled on them. Abracadabra, and nothing was left; everything was swept away. She smashed a chamberlain just as she smashed a bottle of a comfit-box, turning him into filth, and reducing him to a heap of mud in the gutter."

At last, the Comte has had enough, walking in on Nana with his old and decrepit father in law is the last straw. Death and destruction have surrounded him and he has finally worked up enough gumption to walk away. Nana is ready for a change herself, the house feels too small, she has vanquished all the vanquishable and is ready to move on to greener pastures, but her victory lap is short lived.

After traveling abroad for a few months, she returns to Paris and has somehow along the way contracted smallpox. As her body begins to decompose, her face unrecognizable behind the mask of suppurating boils, she takes her last breath surrounded by her fellow courtesans. None of the men are brave enough to enter the sick room and instead hover outside, making awkward conversation and pretending they care less than they all actually do. As Nana breathes her last breath, the women surrounding her are destined to carry her torch, to spread a virus of their own of lust and debauchery. And while Nana lies there, her skin already decaying she is the embodiment of a festering Paris, rife with an incurable disease.  From her deathbed, through the open window can be heard "To Berlin, To Berlin, To Berlin" chanted by the crowds enamored by the recent declaration of war on Prussia, a war they will lose, and with it the collapse of the Second Empire.