Brian Baker

Heroism and gender in war films

two), economic (chapter three) and devotional sources (chapters four and five). She is aware that the majority of beguine scholarship has focused on topics such as extraordinary feats of mysticism or on the beguine ‘need’ for economic support, but maintains that such a polarised discussion does not allow an accurate presentation of these women who, in her words, were embedded in the ‘fabric of Parisian life’ (pp. 62, 79, 171). In a valuable addition to recent scholarly discussions of education in communities of later medieval religious women, chapter five explores the spiritual and intellectual culture of the beguinage itself. Stabler Miller draws attention to the roles these women played in the traditionally masculine sphere of education. Focusing on the clerics associated with the Sorbonne, chapter four of The Beguines of Medieval Paris draws attention to the fact that a number of clerics (beginning with Robert of Sorbon) felt that beguines were essential to their pastoral work. Some attention is also given to the role of literacy and education in various beguine rules and the prevalence of books in images of beguine mistresses. Throughout the discussion, Stabler Miller integrates the rhetoric of patronage, perceptions of holiness and gender to draw attention to the status of beguines. In areas where they thrived, beguines were often able to do so because of powerful patrons and positive public perceptions. However, she makes it clear that the same factors could work against these women. Chapter six explores the controversies surrounding the beguines, and devotes some attention to the example of the ‘beguine clergesse’, Marguerite Porete. Rather than dismissing social and theological criticisms as a response to certain beguines, Stabler Miller shows how the various contradictory positions on beguines form a coherent narrative, and provide insight into narratives of later medieval gender and power. The Beguines of Medieval Paris serves several valuable functions: it shows that the research on beguines in the Low Countries over the past 15 years is applicable to other areas of Europe; it expands the relevance of the movement to discussions of later medieval gender; it touches upon issues of power, patronage and lay religiosity; and it shows the prominence of quasi-religious movements in the secular world. Most importantly, Stabler Miller’s analysis complicates the common image of women (specifically beguines) as being subject to male and clerical influences. In so doing, she makes an important contribution not only to the study of beguines, but also to gender history and more generally medieval social history.

The Drowning Machine: The Sea and the Scooter in Quadrophenia

This chapter develops a reading of Quadrophenia through the image of the drowned scooter on the back cover of The Who’s 1973 album, and compares the presentation of the scooter in the album artwork and in the film. It offers a reading of the importance of the scooter to Mod masculinity through cultural and historical context, and then develops an analysis of Jimmy’s Vespa GS as a form of “armoured” masculinity that defends the masculine subject against the pressures (and pleasures) of de-individuation. Through the work of Klaus Theweleit, Mod masculinity is read as a late re-articulation of a clean, healthy, hygienic male body and subjectivity proposed by modernity and Modernism.

‘Our Long National Nightmare Is Over’?: The Resolution of Trauma and Male Melodrama in The Tree of Life

This chapter will consider the representation of personal and national trauma in Terence Malick’s Palme d’Or-winning film The Tree of Life (2011). It begins with the news of the death of a favourite son, a trauma so profound that none of the surviving family members seem able to recover. Though this seems to denote the death in combat of a young soldier, the radical interiorisation of this event marks a steadfast refusal to connect the father’s overbearing patriarchal presence with a structure of feeling that allowed the drafting of their son to fight (though without explicit historical markers, it seems to be in Vietnam). While generically diverse and innovative (a long cinematically sublime sequence presents a cosmological ‘creation’), the film’s core is a male melodrama (a form considered by Mulvey, Schatz, and Mercer and Springer among others) wherein the traumatic event is foreshadowed by the Oedipal struggle between an authoritarian father and an elder brother within a prototypical nuclear family. Trauma in The Tree of Life is at once irrecuperable and the means by which emotional (and thereby political) conflict may be resolved, particularly with recourse to notions of sacrifice, grace and salvation clearly drawn from the Christian tradition. This chapter will read The Tree of Life as a mediation of two American ‘national traumas’, the war in Vietnam and the post-9/11 War on Terror, through the generic means of the melodrama (in the AFI’s definition, ‘[f]ictional films that revolve around suffering protagonists victimized by situations or events related to social distinctions, family and/or sexuality, emphasizing emotion’). Through the suffering and redemption of masculine characters, The Tree of Life proposes a theological solution to contemporary political and social traumas.

To the Cheshire Station:Alan Garner and John Mackenzie’s Red Shift

Cheshire is the home of the writer Alan Garner and most of his novels are set in the county; the BBC TV Play for Today adaptation of his 1973 novel Red Shift was shot on location in 1977 around Crewe station, Mow Cop and Barthomley church. In Red Shift, three narrative lines are brought together in a narrative of transmission and conjunction, where three historical periods intersect through the sensibilities of three young men. Cheshire is presented as a space of fixity and flux, its topographies and communications networks producing both a rootedness in landscape and a trajectory beyond it. A science fiction of an oblique sort, Red Shift presents Cheshire as an ‘undefined boundary’ in time and space.

Alternative masculinities for a changing world

particular focus on incest and human consumption in the work of Harriet Jacobs. This chapter contains a strong and original reading of the character of Luke and provides a necessary preliminary exploration of the role of white women within economies of power, sexuality, and gender consumption. Chapters 5 and 6 turn their focus to the contemporary period and Chapter 5 in particular marks a shift in tone and methodology away from close textual analysis and theorization to wider cultural narrative. Woodard explores responses to Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) aiming to illustrate the transhistorical legacies of homoeroticism and cannibalism via the recurrent haunting of Nat Turner. In my view, this chapter is the weakest chapter of this otherwise outstanding study. Chapter 6 returns to the framework of hunger, consumption and black male sexuality via an interesting reading of the black male orifice and oral sex scene in Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and includes a preliminary sketching of a genealogy of the uses of black bodies and body parts as figures for a ‘politics of interiority’ (p. 212). The paradigmatic potential of Woodard’s conception of the black male orifice demonstrates the potential of this work to spur new approaches to the studies of slavery and critical theory and signals productive future extensions to the epistemology outlined here to include figures and persons not currently included. It would be fitting tribute to the author himself to see readers from across the disciplines engage with the provocation and cognizance of Vincent Woodard’s work.