Barbara Eckstein

The Legacy of Laveau in the Practice of Helen Prejean: The Tradition and Territory of New Orleans’ Spiritual Advisors

In 1852 a man sentenced to die was taken to the scaffold outside New Orleans Parish Prison just behind Congo Square, in full view of the public, as was the custom. Just as the gallows opened and the noose began to tighten, the execution went awry. An enormous black cloud that had blown overhead let loose with a tremendous storm. The frightened spectators, running amok, charged the scaffold and were further terrified by being entangled with the hanging man. Somehow the condemned man continued to live. Later, within the walls of the prison, this man was hung—again—and the law was changed so that all subsequent death sentences were carried out within the prison, away from the public’s eyes and their susceptibility to horror. So recount informal historian Herbert Asbury in his 1936 book about the New Orleans underworld and New-Orleans-born writer Robert Tallant in his 1946 book about New Orleans voodoo (Asbury 270–276; Tallant 68–73).

Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition, and: American Designs: The Late Novels of James and Faulkner (review)

In his preface Philip Home describes his project clearly. Henry James and Revision has ten chapters: the first three are introductory; the second three are examinations of the novels Roderick Hudson, The American, and The Portrait of a Lady; the next three are studies of the novellas Daisy Miller, The Aspern Papers, and The Lesson of the Master; the last chapter looks at Jamess final years. A chronology of Jamess correspondence (1890-1912) pertinent to the creation of the New York Edition and a bibliography follow the ten chapters. But the role of revision in Homes work is less clear. Revision is a theme in and a tool for his interpretations of Jamess work, but Home offers no coherent theory of the revision process in general or Jamesian revision in particular. Homes Henry James is an English Romantic. So, in Chapter Two, when Home attempts to define the meaning of revision for James, Home places Jamess words in the context of the words of Keats, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. This context produces an idea that, for James, revision is an organic process unconscious as well as conscious. This process is, above all, of the imagination and even of instinct. Home quickly dismisses any Freudian interpretation of the unconscious, and, although he repeatedly approaches ideas of consciousness that theories of phenomenology could make coherent, he never refers to this or any theory of thought or language production. Similarly, he speaks of Jamess connection between rereading and revising without reference to any theory of reading. (Roland Barthess ideas on rereading could be, for example, a relevant and useful commentary on Jamess ideas.) Homes extensive knowledge of Jamess public work, correspondence, and manuscripts informs his interpretations of individual works. But here again the role of revisions in these interpretations is not as salient or coherent as one might expect. The chapter on Portrait of a Lady posits as its thesis that the novel has transitional status looking both backward and forward to Jamess other books and techniques. In support of this contention Home includes Jamess revision of Portrait for the NYE among a wealth of other biographical and textual evidence equally weighted. At the close of this chapter, Home does, however, provide a nicely honed close reading of a passage from the NYE revision that speaks directly to his thesis.