The Midwest quarterly 

About: The Midwest quarterly is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Narrative & Political sociology. It has an ISSN identifier of 0026-3451. Over the lifetime, 193 publications have been published receiving 678 citations.

The Dark Side of Democracy

Abstract: THE TOWER OF BABEL, though a handy explanation for the diversity of languages, does not account for the multiple meanings of some key words in any one language In everyday discourse, these words are asked to carry a heavy load: "love," "freedom" (or "liberty"), "justice," "constitution," and, of course, "God," whom even Hitler sometimes invoked But the one word in the political realm which signally works overtime is "democracy" Recall the Communist regimes with titles like "the People's Democratic Republic of " Such temerity in kidnapping the word suggests that it must have strong positive connotations Not everyone, of course, sees it that way Hitler may have invoked God but was contemptuous of democracy, a feeling shared by some Islamic countries and fundamentalist movements Even if we limit ourselves to home tuff, "democracy" is not well understood Ask Americans what it means, and they are, collectively, likely to list a plethora of uplifting customs Overarching all these blessings is the popular sense that democracy is a vote of confidence in the wisdom of the common people by placing the political solution of the largest questions at their disposal Loving democracy therefore means being upbeat about people (the government, after all is of, by, and for them) and optimistic about life These fine-sounding traits are, however, but the branches or manifestations of democracy The unsavory truth is that the essence of democracy is actually pessimism, based on absence of innocence and loss of knowledge Democracy means serious doubts about people and about the truth, doubts about our ability to withstand temptation and about our capacity to know, doubts about ethics and epistemology Democracy is, finally, communal metaphysical rudderlessness I Original Sin All non-democratic forms of government are based on an explicit or implicit elitist view Whether it be a monarchy, aristocracy, theocracy, a Robespierre-like expression of the Rousseauist General Will, a Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat, a British or French colony run by a disinterested civil service, a Huxleyan utopian republic, or a plutocracy in various times and places, some individual or group is seen (or is cynically rationalized) as capable of rising above selfish interests--as few people are--and of governing for the common good Although all early societies operated on this assumption, the notion was first given eloquent expression by Plato, whose hypothetical Republic is ruled by a class of selfless guardians and who memorably stated that there would be no good government until philosophers became kings or kings became philosophers In principle, Plato was right; monarchy would work, indeed would be vastly superior to democracy, if good and wise men became kings; aristocracy would work if patricians were the best persons in the realm They obviously have not been Thinkers from the time of the American Revolution--behind them, Locke and Montesquieu--have realized that there can be no elite to govern us for our benefit Though a few individuals are a little more objective than the rest of us, no one knows, on the basis of past behavior, how anyone--not even oneself will behave under temptations that, having newly come to power, one has never known before It takes possession of high office to reveal the true inner person, and the record of history has been that it brings out the worst in most people The very few who are able to pass the test cannot be isolated in advance from the others who look equally promising but turn out not to be so We have had, furthermore, a century of thinkers like Marx and Nietzsche and Freud, who taught us about the role of the unconscious in human affairs, about self deception and rationalization, about ulterior motives and mixed intentions, about moral ambiguity These notions make it hard to believe in incorruptible, unchanging altruism in anyone and make it easy to believe that precisely those who talk a good game are often the ones least trustworthy …

Revisiting Literary Blacks and Jews

Abstract: ONE NEED ONLY dip a toe into the sea of Jewish-American literature to recognize that African-Americans have long preoccupied the Jewish-American imagination. Indeed, making my way as an undergraduate through my Jewish-American Literature reading list, I can still remember wondering what so many African-American characters were doing between the covers of books written by authors with last names like Roth, Malamud, and Bellow. What was that dapper Black pickpocket doing in Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970)? Why was that "little colored kid who liked Gauguin" such a powerful presence in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus (1959) (47)? And what could Bernard Malamud have had in mind when he fashioned such contrastive African-American characters as Alexander Levine, a Black Jewish angel, Willie Spearmint, a militant Black writer, and the lovely, poignantly drawn Ornita Harris of "Black Is My Favorite Color"? It didn't take a Ph.D., as they say, to figure out that African-Americans played some significant role in the artistic vision of the most esteemed Jewish-American writers, and I hoped to explore exactly what that role was in some Jewish writing of my own (i.e., an article). Before I could put pen to paper, however, before the seed of a respectable thesis could even germinate in my mind, I suffered a lamentable fate common to writers, I now know. I was pre-empted, robbed, silenced. A writer named Cynthia Ozick, it turned out, had already had the temerity to write an essay on literary Blacks and Jews--an essay titled, in fact, "Literary Blacks and Jews." All it took was one reading of the essay. It wasn't so much what Ozick said about the subject that silenced me (I can even remember not particularly liking what she had to say), but the way that she said it. A redoubtable, nearly Solomonic intelligence seemed to burst forth from every sentence. Put simply, Ozick had (and has, it must be said) a voice. "It was as improbable for the Jew," Ozick wrote of the 1950s, "to imagine himself in the role of persecutor--or even indifferent bystander--as it was for him to imagine the Black man in that same role. Yet by the late sixties Jews and Blacks were recognizable, for and by one another, in no other guise" (46-47). This seemed to be Ozick's overarching point. And what could a pisher like me, who hadn't even lived through the fifties or sixties, say to that! To support her thesis, Ozick limns the contrasts between Malamud's depiction of Black-Jewish relations in his 1958 story, "Angel Levine," and his 1971 novel, The Tenants. In "Angel Levine," one may recall, Malamud creates a Black Jewish angel in Alexander Levine, who magically heals Manischevitz's ailing wife; only 13 years later, Malamud was compelled to depict a fiercely hostile relationship between a Black and Jew in The Tenants, which revolves around the intensifying enmity between two writers, one Jewish and one Black. "It took the narrowest blink in time," Ozick marvels, for Malamud, "who more than any other American writer seeks to make a noble literature founded on personal compassion," to eschew the sunny optimism of "Angel Levine" for the gritty realism of The Tenants (44). Ozick, then, offers these two Malamud works as an analogue of Black-Jewish relations and, more precisely, of the deterioration of this relationship by the late 1960s. But not quite. By the end of the essay, Ozick suggests that the affinity between Blacks and Jews during the hey-day of the Civil Rights movement--and Malamud's "Angel Levine" insofar as it embodies this supposed affinity-was always more myth than reality. "`Angel Levine' is not merely out of date," Ozick concludes, "it is illusion" (65). For Blacks, Ozick argues, had always distrusted the Jewish identification with Black suffering. That Jews continued to prosper in America while the condition of Blacks scarcely seemed to improve only reaffirmed for most Blacks that ostensible Jewish support for Black causes always lay rooted, primarily, in Jewish self-interest. …

Adele Ratignolle: Kate Chopin's Feminist at Home in the Awakening

Abstract: IN KATE CHOPIN'S The Awakening, the feminism of Adele Ratignolle is often overshadowed by the radical feminism of the heroine, Edna Pontellier. Edna chooses suicide rather than a life confined by societal expectations, and her shocking resolution provokes passionate reactions in readers, as extreme acts will do. But to focus solely on Edna's radical feminism is to limit Chopin's exploration of feminism itself. Today, more than ever, feminism is about choice, and Chopin, through Adele, offers her readers more than one definition of feminist expression. Granted, Adele's subtle rebellion to patriarchal ideology is easy to overlook as she forges her resistance from behind and within masculine parameters, manipulating the male-defined borders of her identity as wife and mother, at once being and contesting the patriarchal ideals. Adele's interior subversion is far less dramatic than Edna's total rejection, yet, as the saying goes, Adele "lives to tell the tale," and thus, through Adele's character, Chopin offers an affirmation of feminist possibility. Introduced as a "mother-woman," Adele's position as a feminist is difficult for some readers to discern, and this difficulty betrays the double-bind women often find themselves in: to become a wife and mother is, on some level, to capitulate one's self to patriarchal systems, but this should not render a woman's feminism suspect--and yet it so often does. Chopin highlights this feminist tension through her heroine: Edna cannot perceive Adele as a self outside of her societal roles, ironically placing Adele behind the same role limitations Edna herself is attempting to escape. Adele is described as what Edna is not: a "mother-woman." Right from the start, though, Chopin toys with feminine stereotypes as the narrator proceeds to celebrate Adele as a "bygone heroine of romance and the fair lady of our dreams," the "embodiment of every womanly grace and charm. If her husband did not adore her, he was a brute, deserving of death by slow torture" (51). The tone is almost silly in its over-the-top admiration, undercutting any serious valorization of Adele. As Ruth Sullivan and Stewart Smith have noted with regards to the narrative stance in Chopin's text, when the narrator interrupts with "grand assertions ... it becomes unreliable," and suggests an ironic stance exists behind the narrator's admiration (149). In the above passage, the melodramatic language is gently sarcastic, signaling that a healthy skepticism should accompany the reader's acceptance of Adele's mythical status. This skeptical reading is further enhanced and supported by the narrator's description of the "mother-women" of Grand Isle over whom Adele presides: It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood ... women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels. (51) This exaggerated description at once captures, and mocks, the idealized patriarchal role of mother-as-saint. (Interestingly, Chopin was ahead of her time; contemporary feminist Judith Butler argues that when we expose "the performative status of the natural," we expose the "unnaturalness" of assigned gender roles [Butler as quoted in DiQuinzio, 17].) Chopin reveals how women are being defined by a male construct of motherhood that not only denies their individual identity, but also continually reinforces a sense of inferiority, for what woman can measure up to the standard of an "angel?" Obviously, through Edna's growing unrest and eventual rejection of the roles society has assigned to her, the burden of these expectations is shown to be a real dilemma on a woman's psyche. Chopin also, however, uses Adele's character to show readers another form of resistance: Adele reveals her strength and feminist identity by working the patriarchal system to her advantage. …

David Copperfield and the Goldfinch: The Coming of Age Novel in Two Centuries

Abstract: Practically every reviewer of Donna Tartt's latest novel has used the word "Dickensian" to describe her work. In The New York Times, Stephen King writes that "like the best of Dickens, the novel turns on mere happenstance," with Theo Decker a twenty-first century Oliver Twist and Theo's father a Fagin in Theo's life, along with "Dickensian dollops of suspense." But while The Goldfinch can be called "Dickensian," not least of all because of its length and number of coincidences, it is its characterization and plot that invite comparison to Dickens, and rather to David Copperfield and, structurally, to the long tradition of the Bildungsroman (coming of age) novel. Looking at Tartts work in that light, shows how the tradition continues to inform the modern novel, albeit with some significant differences from its nineteenth century predecessor. The best overview of the Bildungsroman tradition remains Jerome Buckleys 1974 study, Seasons of Youth, which identifies a number of specific stages in the hero's journey from youth to adulthood. These stages begin with the depiction of a sensitive child growing up in a happy and protected atmosphere. But soon this comfortable world is disrupted. His family, usually his father, is hostile to his creative instincts, and he is forced to leave his comfortable home and make his way independently. On a visit to his old home, the young man discovers that it has fundamentally changed, and that it impossible to return. Next, the hero prepares for a career, even while he is torn between two loves, one debasing, the other exalting. Finally, after many trials and encounters, he enters the world as a mature individual and asserts his values. This pattern underlies the paths of both young protagonists in David Coppetfield and The Goldfinch. In the Dickens novel, David Copperfield enjoys a happy and loving childhood with his young, pretty mother. As the older David remembers, "nobody knows better than I do that she likes to look so well, and is proud of being so pretty" (2). But separation soon comes in the person of his abusive stepfather, Mr. Murdstone, with his "beautiful black hair and whiskers" and "ill-omened black eyes" (2). Eventually, David's mother dies, a victim of her abusive and repressive husband. But David always remembers her as she was, as "the young mother of [his] earliest impressions, who had been used to wind her bright curls round and round her finger, and to dance with [him] at twilight in the parlor" (9). Similarly, The Goldfinch begins with the narrators memories of his young mother. She too made an unpleasant marriage, but, eventually deserted by her husband, this modern woman makes a good life for herself and her son in New York City. Then one day, taking Theo to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an exhibit of Dutch painting, she dies in a terrorist bombing. I dreamed about my mother [....] she came up suddenly behind me [....] it was her, down to the most minute detail, the very pattern of her freckles, she was smiling at me, more beautiful and yet not older, black hair and funny upward quirk of her mouth [....] a force all her own, a living otherness. (7) She had been "young, playful, fun-loving, affectionate [....] a mother who threw Frisbees [...] in the park and discussed zombie movies" (145). The narrator defines her death as a dividing mark in his life. "I've never met anyone who made me feel loved the way she did" (7). Each young boy remembers clearly the last moment he saw his mother. David, sent away for a stay at Yarmouth, so that in his absence his mother can marry Mr. Murdstone, recalls his mother calling the carrier to stop so that she can give David one more kiss. "I am glad to recollect that when the carriers cart was at the gate, and my mother stood there kissing me, a grateful fondness for her [...] made me cry. I am glad to know that my mother cried too and that I felt her heart beat against mine" (38). …

Passing into Post-Ethnicity: A Study of Danzy Senna's Caucasia

Abstract: THERE HAVE BEEN at least two significant literary African American Renaissances in the twentieth century. The first emerged in and around Harlem in the 1920s, composed primarily of poets such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer, who frequently fused jazz and lyricism in poetry and poetic prose. Their work was both self- and literarily affirming, breaking from the confining metric and rhythmic norms of European and American poetry of the time. They also depicted and criticized the evils of segregation and discrimination while humanizing and empowering African Americans through their realistic, sympathetic, and complex writings. A second major literary African American Renaissance occurred in the late 1960s through the early 1980s (although some might suggest that it continues to the present day). To be sure, I do not mean to suggest that no significant African American authors emerged during the time in between these two movements, for the 1930s and 40s brought the important work of Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright and the 1950s saw the emergence of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, among others. However, it wasn't until the 60s and 70s that a centralized but diverse group of African American writing emerged, such as the postmodern science fiction novels of Samuel Delany, the unflinching emotionally and socially revealing novels of Toni Morrison, and continuing with the poetry of Maya Angelou and Rita Dove as well as the fiction and essays of Alice Walker, among many others. It could be said that the apex (or end) of this Renaissance occurred when Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993. In recent years, these writers (mainly born in the 1930s and 40s) have continued to publish, at times with great commercial and/or critical success. But what of their figurative literary offspring, a younger generation of African American writers, born in the 1960s and 70s? Why is it that they have, for the most part, been ignored or glossed over by the critics and academics alike? A dismissive response might be that none have emerged with the caliber or potential of a young Toni Morrison or that the younger, media-savvy generation has become disinterested in literature. While the latter claim may have some truth to it, the former is an unfair and counterproductive assumption which I seek to question. It is the purpose of this essay to introduce readers to a major work by a member of a younger generation of African American writers, Danzy Senna, a writer I believe will become a major force in twenty-first century American literature. Before doing so, I would like to provide a brief overview of some younger, extremely talented African American writers in hopes not only of exposing them to a larger audience, but also to place Senna in context with this generationally specific group, of which she is a part. The previous generation of African American writers such as Toni Morrison grew up amidst segregation and came of age during the Civil Rights movement. Their work typically reflects a passionate commitment to achieving equality and empowerment for African Americans through social criticism, realistic depiction, and/or historical revisionism. However, in the 1990s, a new generation of post-civil rights and post-segregation, African American writers (sometimes ethnically mixed) emerged. This group, born in the 1960s or early 1970s, includes, but is not limited to, writers such as Jake Lamar, Colson Whitehead, Paul Beatty, and the subject of this essay, Danzy Senna. Jake Lamar, a former Time writer, is the author of a memoir, Bourgeois Blues (1995) and two novels, The Last Integrationist (1996) and Close to the Bone (1999). Like Senna, his characters tend to uneasily straddle the lines between white and African American cultures, unclear and uncertain as to what defines each "ethnicity." Furthermore, his novels often include African American politicians and media icons. …