the horrors of lit. crit.
Mar. 16th, 2005 08:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivendellroseI have just been subjected to the worst piece of what might generously be called literary analysis that ever saw the sunlight of the printed page.
The title, "No Sex Please - We're Hobbits" seemed like it might be a promising ray of sunshine in what has so far turned out to be the most dismal damned collection of essays ever written on The Lord of the Rings. The collection (J. R. R. Tolkien: This Far Land, edited by Robert Giddings), was working so hard to disgust and horrify me that I was starting to despair of ever finding anything worthwhile in it, so I skipped to the back, to the one promising title in the table of contents. However, this article, written by a Brenda Partridge who was, at the time, a professor of English at some technical college in Bath, is horrifically BAD. As in, I've read better literary criticism in people's livejournals. Much better.
Her arguments, broken up neatly into sections, and omitting the first argument that Tolkien was a misogynist, which just kind of makes me go "well, dear, he was an Oxford don in the early part of this century. No, he didn't think too highly of women's intellects. Get the fuck over it."
Yes, she really thinks that the straight-laced professor was having an affair with C.S. Lewis. Yes, C.S. Lewis. The king of Christian allegory. The man I can't stand because everything he wrote was so preachy it made my teeth hurt even when I was too young to really pin down what was bothering me. Her "proof" seems largely to be that:
1. Tolkien was very jealous of his friendship with Lewis
2. Lewis wrote that "in the Middle Ages heterosexual romantic love played but a small part in art as in life, and that social harmony was motivated by the love of man for man."
3. Apparently there were some homosexual feelings and "latent sadism" shown in Lewis' letters with Arthur Greeves (that's all she says, other than listing the name of the collected letters)
4. Lewis describes Tolkien after meeting him for the first time as "'a smooth, pale, fluent little chap... thinks all literature is written for the amusement of men between thirty and forty.... No harm in him: only needs a smack or two.'"
(Let me pause to say that the italics were in her text, but she never said whether they were in the original or not, and that apparently she wishes us to believe this as proof that Lewis not only wished to smack the young Tolkien, but meant it in a rather risque sense.)
And then, her crowning glory in this category, 5. "Mr. and Mrs. Tolkien began to sleep in different rooms at the same time that Tolkien's friendship with Lewis seemed to be at its height. Tolkien kept a diary in one of his own secret languages. His jealousy explodes when Willaims comes onto the scene. He is distressed when Lewis marries. He only begins to keep a diary after C.S. Lewis died in 1963."
Even the author admits that "it would not be sensible to push this evidence any further than it will easily go in an attempt to understand the under-currents in the relationships which existed between Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams," but she certainly seemed determined to try in the previous passages. As for her supposed 'evidence,' I can't imagine why it would be understood as strange that Tolkien, who'd been writing in made-up languages, as I recall, since he was very young, should keep a journal in one. But I was soon to see that this kind of "analysis" was the standard in her work.
Sam and Frodo: OTP. And you thought this argument just came out after the movies, with all the screaming slash fangirls.
She starts out pretty simply, comparing Sam to the WWI "batman, 'a servant who was detailed to look after his kit and care for him much in the manner of an Oxford Scout,'" and then to their "simple companionship," and to "an intensely intimate bond." I'm with her, so far. She keeps referring to them also as having a relationship similar to "Christ and a devotee," which kind of makes me twitch, and I think would have made Tolkien red in the face... but whatever. Then she talks about the infamous scene in Rivendell, after Frodo recovers from the Morgul blade injury as "the first sign of a physical side to his affection for Frodo, though Sam is embarassed." Okay, fine.
Where she starts to lose me is this brilliant little bit of prose: "The final, full yielding of Frodo's body to Sam's arms comes in the scene of the whipping of Frodo." Now, if you're running for your copy of the trilogy to try to find the missing Hobbit!S&M!sex scene, you're not alone. The "full yielding of Frodo's body to Sam's arms" apparently means... the moment when Frodo closes his eyes in Sam's arms, after being rescued in the Orc tower in Mordor. Here - let me give you the actual text, so you can be sure there's nothing insidious going on.
"'...I'd given up hope, almost. I couldn't find you.'
'Well, you have now, Sam, dear Sam,' said Frodo, and he lay back in Sam's gentle arms, closing his eyes, like a child at rest when night-fears are driven away by some loved voice or hand."
Yes, there are undertones. I'm not going to argue that. But a "final, full yielding of Frodo's body to Sam's arms"? Um, no. And her interpretation directly after that passage is just ludicrous - "The union becomes complete, the relationship now consummated develops with no further hesitancy as the two are engaged in the remainder of their battle to destroy the ring and struggle to return to their friends."
No, those are not MY missing commas. They're all hers. There are horrible missing commas all through this essay. But, more importantly... consummated? Did I miss something in that passage? I seriously reread it four times, trying to figure out where the fuck she was seeing consummation of anything other than poor Sam finding his friend again and Frodo being Very Very Tired. If that's her idea of consummation, I feel sorry for this woman.
I could go on a bit further about her interpretation of Sam and Frodo, but why not move on to something even more fun?
Sam and Shelob: more than you ever wanted to know.
"Male fear of the power of women's sexual attraction is revealed in the constant connection with black magic, the wtich and her familiar, the cat. Shelob herself is compared to a cat in the way she is fed food by Sauron." Now, forgetting that this prose is such shit that even in a finals-induced stupor I generally write better analysis in my essays for undergraduate classes, I sort of agree with her on this. She forgot a vital part of the argument (that Shelob, as a giant spider, is a perfect image of the archetypical Devouring Mother imagery in so many mythologies), but I'll forgive that as the cat thing is a good point. She compares Shelob to Milton's Sin in Paradise Lost, as well, which I seem to recall as an accurate connection. But by the time she's interpreting Frodo's piercing of the web as having "diction... traditionally associated with the tearing of the hymen," she's really starting to worry me. It's a web - of course it looks something like a "veil." And "rent"... well, "rent" is a pretty traditional term for ripping any kind of fabric. The connotations are pretty thin, in my mind. But don't worry - she doesn't stop there.
"Galadriel's phial indeed represents good versus evil using conventional light versus darkness imagery, but it also represents a phallus more potent than their swords. When Frodo falters as he tries to out-menace Shelob, the temporary diminishing of the phial's powers is described not in light and dark terms but in sexual terms." By which she means this:
"Frodo's hand wavered, and slowly the Phial drooped."
Somehow, I seriously doubt the italics in her copy are Tolkien's. I also seriously doubt that Tolkien meant anything other than that it 'drooped' because Frodo's hand was lowering... and I'm having a real hard time grasping Galadriel's phial as a phallic image. That just takes some reaching that I'm not willing to do. And then... it just gets BAD.
"The description of Sam's battle with Shelob is not only a life and death struggle of man and monster, good and evil but also represents a violent sexual struggle between man and woman. Shelob's 'soft squelching body' is a metaphor for the female genitals swollen and moist in sexual arousal. [...] Her imprenetrable skin hangs in folds like the layers of labia."
I think that's enough of that, don't you? The author apparently doesn't.
"The male organ puny compared with the vast, evil smelling mass of the female is described in euphemistic sexual terms as his 'little impudence.'" Funny, I thought he was talking about Sam's courage. I wonder where I got that impression? Oh, right - because the text says "smothering him and all his little impudence of courage."
But it gets worse. "And so Sam and Shelob interlocked climax in an orgasm with the male phallus thrusting hard inflicting great pain and a deadly blow deep into the female sexual organ."
The pain of transcribing this woman's inability to use commas is really getting to me, but it's nothing compared to what she's actually saying with her poor prose. "In the aftermath of the climax as the erection subsides the male, though victor, is again seen as frail and overwhelmed by the female's bulk." (Is it just me, or does this sound like something out of a National Geographic documentary?) "Shelob then crawls away in agony as Sam in a final gesture holds up the phial, once more asserting male supremacy, brandishing the phallus, male symbol of power."
I'd say something about her interpretations of Eowyn, Goldberry, and Galadriel, but, honestly, they're so typical that I can't be bothered. Yeah, we get it, they're made into goddesses. No one with a brain could miss it. Yup, we understand that Eowyn's desires to go be a warrior are eventually explained by her unrequited passion for Aragorn, then sublimated into her marriage to Faramir. Fascinating. *Yawns* At leat the rest, though poorly-written and insane, was kind of amusing.
The title, "No Sex Please - We're Hobbits" seemed like it might be a promising ray of sunshine in what has so far turned out to be the most dismal damned collection of essays ever written on The Lord of the Rings. The collection (J. R. R. Tolkien: This Far Land, edited by Robert Giddings), was working so hard to disgust and horrify me that I was starting to despair of ever finding anything worthwhile in it, so I skipped to the back, to the one promising title in the table of contents. However, this article, written by a Brenda Partridge who was, at the time, a professor of English at some technical college in Bath, is horrifically BAD. As in, I've read better literary criticism in people's livejournals. Much better.
Her arguments, broken up neatly into sections, and omitting the first argument that Tolkien was a misogynist, which just kind of makes me go "well, dear, he was an Oxford don in the early part of this century. No, he didn't think too highly of women's intellects. Get the fuck over it."
Yes, she really thinks that the straight-laced professor was having an affair with C.S. Lewis. Yes, C.S. Lewis. The king of Christian allegory. The man I can't stand because everything he wrote was so preachy it made my teeth hurt even when I was too young to really pin down what was bothering me. Her "proof" seems largely to be that:
1. Tolkien was very jealous of his friendship with Lewis
2. Lewis wrote that "in the Middle Ages heterosexual romantic love played but a small part in art as in life, and that social harmony was motivated by the love of man for man."
3. Apparently there were some homosexual feelings and "latent sadism" shown in Lewis' letters with Arthur Greeves (that's all she says, other than listing the name of the collected letters)
4. Lewis describes Tolkien after meeting him for the first time as "'a smooth, pale, fluent little chap... thinks all literature is written for the amusement of men between thirty and forty.... No harm in him: only needs a smack or two.'"
(Let me pause to say that the italics were in her text, but she never said whether they were in the original or not, and that apparently she wishes us to believe this as proof that Lewis not only wished to smack the young Tolkien, but meant it in a rather risque sense.)
And then, her crowning glory in this category, 5. "Mr. and Mrs. Tolkien began to sleep in different rooms at the same time that Tolkien's friendship with Lewis seemed to be at its height. Tolkien kept a diary in one of his own secret languages. His jealousy explodes when Willaims comes onto the scene. He is distressed when Lewis marries. He only begins to keep a diary after C.S. Lewis died in 1963."
Even the author admits that "it would not be sensible to push this evidence any further than it will easily go in an attempt to understand the under-currents in the relationships which existed between Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams," but she certainly seemed determined to try in the previous passages. As for her supposed 'evidence,' I can't imagine why it would be understood as strange that Tolkien, who'd been writing in made-up languages, as I recall, since he was very young, should keep a journal in one. But I was soon to see that this kind of "analysis" was the standard in her work.
Sam and Frodo: OTP. And you thought this argument just came out after the movies, with all the screaming slash fangirls.
She starts out pretty simply, comparing Sam to the WWI "batman, 'a servant who was detailed to look after his kit and care for him much in the manner of an Oxford Scout,'" and then to their "simple companionship," and to "an intensely intimate bond." I'm with her, so far. She keeps referring to them also as having a relationship similar to "Christ and a devotee," which kind of makes me twitch, and I think would have made Tolkien red in the face... but whatever. Then she talks about the infamous scene in Rivendell, after Frodo recovers from the Morgul blade injury as "the first sign of a physical side to his affection for Frodo, though Sam is embarassed." Okay, fine.
Where she starts to lose me is this brilliant little bit of prose: "The final, full yielding of Frodo's body to Sam's arms comes in the scene of the whipping of Frodo." Now, if you're running for your copy of the trilogy to try to find the missing Hobbit!S&M!sex scene, you're not alone. The "full yielding of Frodo's body to Sam's arms" apparently means... the moment when Frodo closes his eyes in Sam's arms, after being rescued in the Orc tower in Mordor. Here - let me give you the actual text, so you can be sure there's nothing insidious going on.
"'...I'd given up hope, almost. I couldn't find you.'
'Well, you have now, Sam, dear Sam,' said Frodo, and he lay back in Sam's gentle arms, closing his eyes, like a child at rest when night-fears are driven away by some loved voice or hand."
Yes, there are undertones. I'm not going to argue that. But a "final, full yielding of Frodo's body to Sam's arms"? Um, no. And her interpretation directly after that passage is just ludicrous - "The union becomes complete, the relationship now consummated develops with no further hesitancy as the two are engaged in the remainder of their battle to destroy the ring and struggle to return to their friends."
No, those are not MY missing commas. They're all hers. There are horrible missing commas all through this essay. But, more importantly... consummated? Did I miss something in that passage? I seriously reread it four times, trying to figure out where the fuck she was seeing consummation of anything other than poor Sam finding his friend again and Frodo being Very Very Tired. If that's her idea of consummation, I feel sorry for this woman.
I could go on a bit further about her interpretation of Sam and Frodo, but why not move on to something even more fun?
Sam and Shelob: more than you ever wanted to know.
"Male fear of the power of women's sexual attraction is revealed in the constant connection with black magic, the wtich and her familiar, the cat. Shelob herself is compared to a cat in the way she is fed food by Sauron." Now, forgetting that this prose is such shit that even in a finals-induced stupor I generally write better analysis in my essays for undergraduate classes, I sort of agree with her on this. She forgot a vital part of the argument (that Shelob, as a giant spider, is a perfect image of the archetypical Devouring Mother imagery in so many mythologies), but I'll forgive that as the cat thing is a good point. She compares Shelob to Milton's Sin in Paradise Lost, as well, which I seem to recall as an accurate connection. But by the time she's interpreting Frodo's piercing of the web as having "diction... traditionally associated with the tearing of the hymen," she's really starting to worry me. It's a web - of course it looks something like a "veil." And "rent"... well, "rent" is a pretty traditional term for ripping any kind of fabric. The connotations are pretty thin, in my mind. But don't worry - she doesn't stop there.
"Galadriel's phial indeed represents good versus evil using conventional light versus darkness imagery, but it also represents a phallus more potent than their swords. When Frodo falters as he tries to out-menace Shelob, the temporary diminishing of the phial's powers is described not in light and dark terms but in sexual terms." By which she means this:
"Frodo's hand wavered, and slowly the Phial drooped."
Somehow, I seriously doubt the italics in her copy are Tolkien's. I also seriously doubt that Tolkien meant anything other than that it 'drooped' because Frodo's hand was lowering... and I'm having a real hard time grasping Galadriel's phial as a phallic image. That just takes some reaching that I'm not willing to do. And then... it just gets BAD.
"The description of Sam's battle with Shelob is not only a life and death struggle of man and monster, good and evil but also represents a violent sexual struggle between man and woman. Shelob's 'soft squelching body' is a metaphor for the female genitals swollen and moist in sexual arousal. [...] Her imprenetrable skin hangs in folds like the layers of labia."
I think that's enough of that, don't you? The author apparently doesn't.
"The male organ puny compared with the vast, evil smelling mass of the female is described in euphemistic sexual terms as his 'little impudence.'" Funny, I thought he was talking about Sam's courage. I wonder where I got that impression? Oh, right - because the text says "smothering him and all his little impudence of courage."
But it gets worse. "And so Sam and Shelob interlocked climax in an orgasm with the male phallus thrusting hard inflicting great pain and a deadly blow deep into the female sexual organ."
The pain of transcribing this woman's inability to use commas is really getting to me, but it's nothing compared to what she's actually saying with her poor prose. "In the aftermath of the climax as the erection subsides the male, though victor, is again seen as frail and overwhelmed by the female's bulk." (Is it just me, or does this sound like something out of a National Geographic documentary?) "Shelob then crawls away in agony as Sam in a final gesture holds up the phial, once more asserting male supremacy, brandishing the phallus, male symbol of power."
I'd say something about her interpretations of Eowyn, Goldberry, and Galadriel, but, honestly, they're so typical that I can't be bothered. Yeah, we get it, they're made into goddesses. No one with a brain could miss it. Yup, we understand that Eowyn's desires to go be a warrior are eventually explained by her unrequited passion for Aragorn, then sublimated into her marriage to Faramir. Fascinating. *Yawns* At leat the rest, though poorly-written and insane, was kind of amusing.
