Melissa Gutierrez October 3, 2010
Draft of Proposal of Focused Topic
The American welfare system is inefficient and not structured well. In particular, the most recent and drastic welfare reform, the 1996 PROWRA Act, and its provision which established the new rules and guidelines for federal welfare, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, TANF, are failing recipients and the country. TANF fails us by denying welfare recipients the authentic opportunity to become self-sufficient. They are denied the opportunity to become truly self-sufficient in two ways. First, the recipients are denied access to higher education or the opportunity to attend a higher educational institution. Second, the recipients are repeatedly and explicitly encouraged to become married by the government and the welfare system. Upon the examination of the text of PROWRA, specifically the language of TANF, it is explicit that the government, particularly congress and the state and local government, are denying recipients a genuine opportunity to obtain self-sufficiency, by promoting marriage as well as by denying the recipients the ability and access, the right, to pursue a higher education, which would allow the recipients the skills and training necessary to be competitive in the market place, hence economically independent. The text of TANF explicitly states that marriage and work are the ways out of poverty. Many individual states and localities choose policies that promote “work first” and ultimately believe that any job, low-wage, temporary, insecure, is a good job.
Upon the examination of the text of PROWRA, specifically the language of TANF, it is explicit that the government, particularly congress and the state and local government, are denying recipients a genuine opportunity to obtain self-sufficiency, by denying the recipients the ability and access, the right, to pursue a higher education, which would allow the recipients the skills and training necessary to be competitive in the market place, hence economically independent. Upon examining the policy history of the American welfare system, the first blatant issue is that welfare is a product of federalism, and TANF in particular grants the states more power over the structure of the system. This allows states to use eligibility criteria and sanctions in order to force women, through the enactment of TANF, into a low wage workforce and/or marriage. An analysis of the policy history of welfare illustrates the government’s intrusion into the private lives and moral choices of recipients and their legal punishments through eligibility criteria and sanction criteria as well as through rules and regulations. The government and interests groups and businesses worked together and through a conservative movement and republican control of the government, manipulated public opinion of the welfare system by the demonization of recipients by portraying them as “welfare queens” and their “illegitimate children.”
The reason that many women remain in poverty, after all, is because they lack the skills, training, and resources to obtain a good job, any job in some cases, and some don’t even have the ability to travel to appointments and training due to transportation access as well as safe and secure child care access. It is essential to understand that the right to welfare, as Mink notes, is an essential component of reproductive freedom and for vocational choice for single mother recipients. A right to obtain higher education if one can obtain it through financial aid is denied by the states based on the criteria of what constitutes an “educational training” (if it is even allowed in the 35 hour a week work requirement) is also denied is many very poor areas. Access to higher education would mean the right to have the hours one spends in a four year institution counted as part of the recipients 35 hour a week work requirement. Many states and localities determine individually for their locality the educational programs that are eligible to be counted as part of the 35 hour a week work requirement for recipients. Many of these localities do not include four year colleges as an eligible work activity, and so through the use of sanctions for noncompliance, welfare agencies deny recipients the opportunity to go to school by also making these hours ineligible for the child care that is subsidized during the hours of the work activity to be used toward the classes. Furthermore, the right to welfare is essential in protecting recipients from the strict and moral based eligibility and sanction criteria of the state and federal governments. Sanctions punish single motherhood for the poor and force single mothers into a low wage workforce and denying them access to higher education. My goal is to illustrate the inequality of recipients citizenship status compared to the citizenship status of non-recipients by illustrating the governments denial of some of the fundamental rights of American citizens have by their enactment of TANF.
The text of TANF explicitly states that marriage and work are the ways out of poverty. Many individual states and localities choose policies that promote “work first” and ultimately believe that any job, low-wage, temporary, insecure, is a good job. Despite evidence that women who obtain a higher education have an almost 100% rate of remaining off of public assistance, the numbers of recipients in college has dropped, as noted by authors Ellen Reese and Felicia Kornbluh. This is due to the fact that local welfare agencies promote work as opposed to long term economic security and authentic self-sufficiency. This is due in part to pressure from the federal government, since TANF is partly funded by a federal block grant, and the federal government provides financial bonuses to states that lower recipient’s birth rates and abortion rates simultaneously by promoting abstinence and marriage. Furthermore, the federal government ranted the states the most freedom they’ve had with welfare since the New Deal through the enactment of TANF, allowing states to deny access to education, services, and healthcare. Additionally, the states via the power granted to them by the federal government are allowed to deny the rights of citizens to recipients, such as reproductive freedom and vocational freedom, this means that TANF explicitly violates equal protection of the law. This violation is a denial of equal opportunity, of equal citizenship, by the coercion of recipients to get married and become financially dependent on their husbands, and/or to become workers who are trapped into a low wage work force due to the denial of a higher education and/or adequate training that would have enhanced the recipients opportunity of self-sufficiency.
The relevance of these reasons is to illustrate the flaws of the welfare system that affect our economy and the future of our country. The text of TANF is federal law, it dictates the lives of the recipients and denied rights once held by recipients, rights that were fought for and gained through the welfare rights movements of the 1960’s. Through the enactment of TANF, the federal entitlement to welfare that was created by FDR was abolished as well. Without an adequate education, recipients will cycle on and off of welfare and remain in poverty, a condition that will affect all American taxpayers and the quality of our society. Furthermore, by treating recipients as legal and social sub-citizens, the government is implicitly legalizing racial and class-based hierarchies as well as the legal perpetuation of male dominance.
The kind of evidence that I will use to support these reasons are books, articles, statistical data, interviews, and research of the text of the TANF act as well as research of the three states, I am in the process of doing more research to determine which states will best illustrate my argument. I will use books to support my argument of unequal citizenship of the recipients through the enactment of TANF. Gwendolyn Mink discusses in great depth the argument that TANF creates sub-citizenship through its coercion of recipients and denial of citizenship based rights such as reproductive and vocational freedom, all though she mainly advocates a poor woman’s right to be a homemaker, and advocates economic recognition of caretaking. I rely on her analysis of recipient citizenship status as a denial of equal citizenship as support for my argument.
Ronald Dworkin discusses the concept of “external preferences” in his piece On Liberty. “External preferences” is the legal denial of equal citizenship through legislated morally based preferences that impose one version of the good life on all citizens, and does not respect the differing conceptions of the good life as equal. By denying recipients the access to services and an education based on their private moral choices to be single mothers, through the enactment of TANF, the government is imposing conservative moral preferences of individuals. Felicia Kornbluh’s The Battle for Welfare Rights will be analyzed to illustrate the necessity of social movements in order to obtain or maintain rights. Kornbluh analyzes many states, but pays particular attention to New York, and discusses policies and grassroots movements such as NRWO, which formed to fight for a right to welfare. She goes into detail discussing strategies, successes, failures, and organizational tactics for improving access to welfare benefits as well as the system itself. Ellen Reese’s Backlash Against Welfare Mothers, Past and Present, will be analyzed to support my argument as well. I would like to use my argument to build off of some of Reese’s main claims. Reese discusses in great detail the conservative movement to change welfare, the barriers that TANF creates to limit or deny access to higher education, and a policy analysis of welfare as well as an analysis of the welfare rights movement. Reese also analyses the movements and backlashes of government in response to the gain of welfare rights. In the end, Reese calls for a new new deal, for the working poor.
I will analyze welfare policy history, the history of the welfare rights movement as well as conservative “backlash” to both of these events through books, articles, and congressional and public debates on welfare. I will use articles to cite opinions and statistics to illustrate the number Through analyzing the text of TANF, as well as through an analysis of federal and three individual states eligibility and sanction criteria, as well as an analysis of the statistics of people sanctioned off of welfare, full and partial sanctions, and rates of return to welfare/people staying in poverty of recipients who went to school vs. recipients who did not go to school.
My analysis will focus primarily on the past fifty years, yet I will also go back to FDR and the New Deal to emphasize certain aspects of my argument, such as the racist nature of the welfare system. I will also use FDR’s New Deal to illustrate the establishment of an entitlement for poor people to public assistance, and I will discuss how TANF abolished this 60 yearlong entitlement to welfare and replaced it with workfare, a wage supplement, as opposed to an income maintenance program as welfare has been. But I will mainly focus on the past 50 years, beginning at the welfare rights movement and I will discover and analyze the time period in which access to higher education became an issue. Once I discover the time period, I will analyze the struggle to access higher education in depth to determine when or if there is federal access for recipients and which states out of my three deny/restrict access to higher education.
In my field, there is a lot of legal analysis, especially in pre law, such as analyzing Court cases, Congressional hearings and debates, Law review articles and scholarly articles, Presidential addresses and policy analysis. In political science we also analyze these areas, but we also build theories, either extending a theory that is already in the field or we introduce a new theory, usually we build off of other people’s research, like taking it to the next step or bringing it up to date or applying theories to current issues.
Mink, Gwendolyn: Welfare’s End Cornell University Press; Ithaca, 1998.
This denial of an opportunity for recipients to become self-sufficient members of society is problematic for many reasons. The most important being the fact that TANF contradicts its own mission statement. TANF states that is was created to assist families in obtaining self-sufficiency, this is in theory. In practice, through the grant of state power, eligibility criteria, sanction criteria, recipients loose the rights they had as citizens before entering the welfare system. When dealing with citizenship, I will be addressing the type that is based on the theory of the “right to have rights.” Meaning, the right that welfare recipients have as citizens to still enjoy the full rights of citizenship they enjoyed before entering the welfare system. In other words, meaning that recipients won’t have to give up their full citizenship and exchange it for sub-citizenship, a denial, loss, or restriction of their rights, upon entering the welfare system. The text of TANF is federal law, it dictates the lives of the recipients and denied rights once held by recipients, rights that were fought for and gained through the welfare rights movements of the 1960’s. Through the enactment of TANF, the federal entitlement to welfare that was created by FDR was abolished as well. Additionally, the states via the power granted to them by the federal government are allowed to deny the rights of citizens to recipients, such as reproductive freedom and vocational freedom, this means that TANF explicitly violates equal protection of the law. This violation is a denial of equal opportunity, of equal citizenship, by the coercion of recipients to get married and become financially dependent on their husbands, and/or to become workers who are trapped into a low wage work force due to the denial of a higher education and/or adequate training that would have enhanced the recipients opportunity of self-sufficiency. The coercion of marriage and work is explicitly done to recipients in America; non-recipients do not get economically punished for choosing not to live society’s dominant ideal of the nuclear family structure. Recipients are denied equality through their treatment by the government versus non-recipients treatment by the government, meaning the loss of some of the recipient’s rights just by becoming recipients, they enter into sub-citizenship. Recipients are also denied equality amongst each other, through location of the recipient. There exists equality between states; the rules in one state could not apply in the next. Family cap is an example of this, in some states, recipients are denied aid for additional children they bare while receiving assistance. In New York however, there is no family cap provision. There can even be differences within a given state, for example, the meager benefits one receives in NYC are nothing compared to the benefits a recipient in Westchester county receives.
To exercise some of our most fundamental rights, we need to be assured that we have access to other rights. The reason that many women remain in poverty, after all, is because they lack the skills, training, and resources to obtain a good job, or any job in some cases. This is an example of having the right to equal opportunity of citizenship. A right to obtain higher education if one can obtain it through financial aid is denied by the states based on the criteria of what constitutes an “educational training” (if it is even allowed in the 35 hour a week work requirement) is also denied is many very poor areas. In NYC for example, while non-recipients who are poor and can get Pell and TAP are allowed to go to school, recipients who get Federal Pell and state TAP are told that they cannot go to school, because welfare doesn’t recognize their right to equality. Some recipients don’t even have the ability to travel to appointments and training due to transportation access as well as safe and secure child care access. They need the right to safe and secure childcare and the right to adequate transportation if none is available in order to even comply let alone exercise true vocational freedom. My goal is to illustrate the inequality of recipient’s citizenship status compared to the citizenship status of non-recipients by illustrating the government’s denial of some of the fundamental rights that American citizens have by their enactment of TANF. Furthermore, by treating recipients as legal and social sub-citizens, the government is implicitly legalizing racial and class-based hierarchies as well as the legal perpetuation of male dominance. Gwendolyn Mink discusses in great depth the argument that TANF creates sub-citizenship through its coercion of recipients and denial of citizenship based rights such as reproductive and vocational freedom, all though she mainly advocates a poor woman’s right to be a homemaker, and advocates economic recognition of caretaking. I rely on her analysis of recipient citizenship status as a denial of equal citizenship as support for my argument. Also, Ronald Dworkin discusses the concept of “external preferences” in his piece On Liberty. “External preferences” is the legal denial of equal citizenship through legislated morally based preferences that impose one version of the good life on all citizens, and does not respect the differing conceptions of the good life as equal. By denying recipients the access to services and an education based on their private moral choices to be single mothers, through the enactment of TANF, the government is imposing conservative moral preferences of individuals. The government, interests groups and businesses worked together and through a conservative movement and republican control of the government, to manipulate public opinion of the welfare system by the demonization of recipients through the portrayal of them as “welfare queens” and their “illegitimate children.” This is an example of an external preference, that preference of the Republicans, being the nuclear family and work first, which manifested into bad policy, that is bad governing and I will illustrate why. Furthermore, this demonization of recipients creates a problem for mobilization due to the stigma created, and it also creates a barrier for people to truly understand the welfare system. Felicia Kornbluh’s The Battle for Welfare Rights will be analyzed to illustrate the necessity of social movements in order to obtain or maintain rights. Kornbluh analyzes many states, but pays particular attention to New York, and discusses policies and grassroots movements such as NRWO, which formed to fight for a right to welfare. She goes into detail discussing strategies, successes, failures, and organizational tactics for improving access to welfare benefits as well as the system itself. Ellen Reese’s Backlash Against Welfare Mothers, Past and Present, will be analyzed to support my argument as well. I would like to use my argument to build off of some of Reese’s main claims. Reese discusses in great detail the conservative movement to change welfare, the barriers that TANF creates to limit or deny access to higher education, and a policy analysis of welfare as well as an analysis of the welfare rights movement. Reese also analyses the movements and backlashes of government in response to the gain of welfare rights. In the end, Reese calls for a new new deal, for the working poor.
Upon examining the policy history of the American welfare system, the first issue is that welfare is a product of federalism, and TANF in particular grants the states more power over the structure of the system. This allows states to use eligibility criteria and sanctions in order to force women, through the enactment of TANF, into a low wage workforce and/or marriage and to attempt to control recipient fertility. Furthermore, TANF is partly funded by a federal block grant, and the federal government provides financial bonuses to states that lower recipient’s birth rates and abortion rates simultaneously by promoting abstinence and marriage. Both the state and the federal government are denying recipients the full rights of cit citizenship hence are treating the recipients as sub-citizens. An analysis of the policy history of welfare illustrates the government’s intrusion into the private lives and moral choices of recipients and their legal punishments through eligibility criteria and sanction criteria as well as through rules and regulations. Furthermore, the federal government granted the states the most freedom they’ve had with welfare since the New Deal through the enactment of TANF, allowing states to deny access to education, services, and healthcare.
Sanctions and eligibility criteria punish single motherhood for the poor and force single mothers into a low wage workforce and denying them access to higher education. In essence, they are denying the option of single motherhood as economically feasible and legally protected. Many states and localities determine individually for their locality the educational programs that are eligible to be counted as part of the 35 hour a week work requirement for recipients. Many of these localities do not include four year colleges as an eligible work activity, and so through the use of sanctions for noncompliance, welfare agencies deny recipients the opportunity to go to school by also making these hours ineligible for the child care that is subsidized during the hours of the work activity to be used toward the classes. Despite evidence that women who obtain a higher education have an almost 100% rate of remaining off of public assistance, the numbers of recipients in college has dropped, as noted by authors Ellen Reese and Felicia Kornbluh. This is due to the fact that local welfare agencies promote work as opposed to long term economic security and authentic self-sufficiency.
It is essential to understand that the right to welfare, as Mink notes, is an essential component of reproductive freedom and for vocational choice for single mother recipients. Through TANF’s work first policy, denial of higher education, promotion of marriage, and family cap policies, these freedoms are denied by the welfare system. Through a right to assistance though, a woman could in theory be independent, until the system is altered, it will be just that, a theoretical right. The right to welfare if administered properly (the system and the right) would allow for the true exercise of reproductive and vocational freedom, but presently, the system denies these rights to recipients. Access to higher education would mean the right to have the hours one spends in a four year institution counted as part of the recipients 35 hour a week work requirement. Furthermore, the right to welfare is essential in protecting recipients from the strict and moral based eligibility and sanction criteria of the state and federal governments. Without an adequate education, recipients will cycle on and off of welfare and remain in poverty, a condition that will affect all American taxpayers and the quality of our society.
To make my argument, I will examine books, articles, statistical data, interviews, and research of the text of the TANF act as well as research of the three states, I am in the process of doing more research to determine which states will best illustrate my argument. I will use books to support my argument of unequal citizenship of the recipients through the enactment of TANF. My analysis will focus primarily on the past fifty years, yet I will also go back to FDR and the New Deal to emphasize certain aspects of my argument, such as the racist nature of the welfare system. I will also use FDR’s New Deal to illustrate the establishment of an entitlement for poor people to public assistance, and I will discuss how TANF abolished this 60 yearlong entitlement to welfare and replaced it with workfare, a wage supplement, as opposed to an income maintenance program as welfare has been. But I will mainly focus on the past 50 years, beginning at the welfare rights movement and I will discover and analyze the time period in which access to higher education became an issue. Once I discover the time period, I will analyze the struggle to access higher education in depth to determine when or if there is federal access for recipients and which states out of my three deny/restrict access to higher education. Through analyzing the text of TANF, as well as through an analysis of federal and three individual states eligibility and sanction criteria, as well as an analysis of the statistics of people sanctioned off of welfare, full and partial sanctions, and rates of return to welfare/people staying in poverty of recipients who went to school vs. recipients who did not go to school. I will analyze welfare policy history, the history of the welfare rights movement as well as conservative “backlash” to both of these events through books, articles, and congressional and public debates on welfare. I will use articles to cite opinions and statistics to illustrate the number.
Dworkin, Ronald: On Liberty
Mink, Gwendolyn: Welfare’s End Cornell University Press; Ithaca, 1998.
Kornbluh, Felicia: The Battle for Welfare Rights University of Pennsylvania Press; Philadelphia, 2007.
Reese, Ellen: Backlash Against Welfare Mothers, Past and Present University of California Press, 2005.
Through TANF, the federal government gives the states the ability to impose moral based eligibility requirements. Restrictions placed on recipients by TANF welfare policy are placed carefully in an implicit manner, because the government must respect the Constitution and cannot force labor of lifestyle (reproductive, relationship) demands on recipients explicitly. So the states and individual counties impose these morality based requirements which coerce recipients into certain personal relationships and jobs. For economic purposes, the effects of the “labor market,” and wages, welfare was turned from an “income maintenance program” to a “wage supplement.” (Somewhere in intro)
Melissa Gutierrez November 3, 2010
The American welfare system has through out history and currently through the enactment of TANF, denied recipients the opportunity to obtain self-sufficiency or independence. One way this is done is through the promotion and focus of work first, which denies recipients the opportunity to pursue a higher education and forces them to take any low-wage position they can in the place of welfare. Therefore the recipient is stuck in a cycle of poverty between wages and welfare, due to their inability to gain marketable skills that would allow them to command a permanent or higher paying position. This unequal opportunity to pursue a higher education between recipients and non-recipients is a example of unequal citizenship status between recipients and non-recipients.
Another way that recipients are denied an opportunity for self-sufficiency is through TANF’s funding of marriage promotion. In the form of financial inscentives such as bonuses for married couples and bonuses for states who keep down out of wedlock child rates, TANF allows the government to promote marriage through federal funding. Marriage promotion fosters economic dependency in recipients on their husbands. Furthermore, it promotes the nuclear family as legitimate and ideal while stigmatizing poor single mother headed families as illegitimate. As political theorist Ronald Dworkin would note, the American government has legislated “morality based external preferences.” This imposition of morals doesn’t respect a citizens “moral independence” to be a single mother. TANF is an example of the government not “being neutral” to “varying conceptions of the good life.” Congress is choosing to divert funds from something Conservatives don’t support, single motherhood, and reallocating it in something they do agree with, an external preference, marriage promotion. This is explicitly saying that the government is economically disenfranchising single motherhood by using TANF funds to promote marriage as opposed to crate services that would help them therefore violating their right to privacy, their liberty to choose marriage or not. The government is violating their right to privacy by implicitly coercing or “quasi-coercing” recipients to become married and denying the choice of single motherhood as legitimate. The government is not respecting individual recipient’s versions off a good family, it is imposing the dominant social norm of a nuclear family as the “foundation of a healthy society” and all things outside of this norm would be subject to economic sanction.
TANF’s missions statements, which lines the walls of welfare offices across the country, is to promote self-sufficiency and independence. There is a difference in theory and practice, TANF states it promotes independence, in theory, they believe they are promoting economic self-sufficiency through the promotion of work first and marriage. I assume that the government defines self-sufficiency as not collecting TANF. Yet, in practice, through the allocation of resources, policies, and federalism (differing state rules and eligibility and sanction criteria), TANF promotes or fosters economic dependence on a spouse or the government.
Mink defines citizenship as “a web of relationships between the individual and the state, relationships that incur both rights and obligations.”1 Mink discusses obligations as “ethical and legal” and they are “codified through statute and political culture.” Rights, are either “explicitly enumerated in the Constitution or have been definitively located in its penumbras by the Supreme Court.”2 As a democratic republic, all citizens have political rights which in theory make us equals. Mink discusses the 1950’s and 60’s as a time for universalizing the civil rights of all citizens through the Court. “Social inequalities” pose as barriers which limit citizens’ ability to exercise our political rights equally. Social rights attempt to create equality, to ensure, for example, “the basic economic security of citizens.” This equality would lead to the equal ability between citizens to exercise their political rights. The paradox lies here, social rights are easier to deny when they lose majority support, yet social rights enable the equal exercise of the political rights of citizenship. The goal is for recipients to not only to have their constitutional rights as citizens recognized under TANF, but to also obtain the social right to welfare, to make it an entitlement again. TANF creates unequal citizenship between welfare recipients as well as between recipients and non-recipients. The restrictions imposed on all welfare recipients (although they vary for married and single women in many ways) degrade the recipient’s rights and deny constitutional protections other citizens enjoy, such as reproductive freedom, a right to privacy, and vocational freedom. Through work first and marriage promotion, recipients are denied opportunities and choices, protected Constitutional rights, that non-recipients exercise.
Additionally, since TANF allows for wide state discretion for TANF eligibility and sanction criteria, it’s implemented differently and the different policies in different states creates unequal citizenship between recipients in different states. An example of this is the family cap, a rule stating that if a recipient has a child while on TANF the new child would be ineligible to receive TANF funds. Yet this rule only applies in some states.
1 – Mink page 9
2 – Mink Page 9-10
Melissa Gutierrez November 10, 2010
TANF: Denying Single Mothers the Opportunity to Obtain Self-Sufficiency
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families is a flawed system of American welfare provision. My overall thesis is that recipients are denied the opportunity to achieve self-sufficiency in the American welfare system. I focus on how single mothers are denied an opportunity for self-sufficiency through the implementation and structure of TANF. In the book Welfare’s End, Gwendolyn Mink analyzes the history of United States welfare from its origin in states’ “mothers’ pensions” until the federal enactment of the Personal Responsibility Act. I build on Mink’s theory, which supports the right of TANF recipients to have the option to be stay-at-home mothers. Single motherhood, with the exception of widows, has been and still is morally regarded as unacceptable and economically punishable. A conservative coalition has launched attacks on welfare since its beginnings in 1935, and they won with the enactment of TANF. TANF promotes a model of wage-earning in the nuclear family as envisaged by conservative policy as the foundation of a healthy society” (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996). By promoting marriage through the use of TANF funds, as opposed to creating programs that could aid single mothers, Congress and the states have chosen to legally quasi-coerce recipients into positions of dependency. Non-conformity to this patriarchal social norm, being a single mother, results in an economic sanction. If women wanted to be stay at home mothers they had to remain married. If they wanted to be single mothers, they are punished with work outside of the home. I will also cite political and legal theorist Ronald Dworkin’s works Liberalism and A Moral Reading of the Constitution as an analytic framework to illustrate that through the enactment of TANF, the government legislated unconstitutional moral preferences.
Melissa Gutierrez October 20, 2010
Annotated Bibliography
In the book Welfare’s End, Gwendolyn Mink analyzes the history of United States welfare states until the enactment of the Personal Responsibility Act. Mink discusses “Welfare as a condition of women’s equality,” (Mink 1). Mink makes an argument about the sub-citizenship of welfare recipients when compared to non-recipients. Mink refers to the history of welfare to its origins to illustrate that the reform would only harm poor single mothers and their children by ending the entitlement to welfare and replacing it with a policy that coerced women to work outside of the home as well as implicitly controlled their sexual and reproductive freedoms. “The Personal Responsibility Act makes poor single mothers decisions for them, substituting moral prescriptions for economic mitigation of their poverty. Moreover, the Act withdraws rights from recipients, thereby restoring the moral regime that sifted, sorted, and ruled welfare applicants and recipients until the late 1960’s.” (Mink 6). Mink advocates that we all recognize and fight for a right to welfare, because “social rights such as welfare are a condition of equal citizenship.” (Mink 32) Mink analyzes the history of civil rights in the law to argue that poor single mothers are being denied citizenship through the denial or restriction of their civil rights as equal citizens in the eyes of the law.
Felicia Kornbluh’s The Battle for Welfare Rights will be analyzed to illustrate the necessity of social movements in order to obtain or maintain rights. Kornbluh analyzes many states, but pays particular attention to New York, and discusses policies and grassroots movements such as NRWO, which formed to fight for a right to welfare. She goes into detail discussing strategies, successes, failures, and organizational tactics for improving access to welfare benefits as well as the system itself.
Ellen Reese’s Backlash against Welfare Mothers, Past and Present, will be analyzed to support my argument as well. I would like to use my argument to build off of some of Reese’s main claims. Reese discusses in great detail the conservative movement to change welfare, the barriers that TANF creates to limit or deny access to higher education, and a policy analysis of welfare as well as an analysis of the welfare rights movement. Reese also analyses the movements and backlashes of government in response to the gain of welfare rights. In the end, Reese calls for a new new deal, for the working poor.
This source provides empirical evidence for my argument. It discusses the fact that low wage work and welfare do not adequately support a family. Women in different states were interviewed to illustrate this reality. This illustrates that many single mother headed families do need subsistence, which they do not get from the market nor from the welfare system. Chicago, Boston, San Antonio, and Charleston were some of the cities examined to prove that single mothers headed families could not survive merely on welfare and low wages, and certainly not on either alone.
In the book When Welfare Disappears: The Case for Economic Human Rights, Kenneth J. Neubeck discusess economic human rights, and the history of welfare policy in the United States. Neubeck illustrates why single mother recipients have particular difficulty staying off of or avoiding public assistance which is through systemic barriers such as a lack of access to education and job training skills that would allow single mothers to be more competitive in the job market and get out of poverty. “PROWRA reflects what some have called the “new paternalism.” The act subtly communicates a strong distrust of–if not disdain for–impoverished lone mothers even as it spells out measures to control them,” (Neubeck 31). “U.S. welfare policy has reflected and, in many ways, has reinforced society wide systems of class, gender, and racial inequality,” (Neubeck 32). Neubeck discusses the difficulty of single mothers and uses statistics of those on TANF, exiting, and the poverty rate to illustrate the harmful effects of TANF. Neubeck analyses history of the welfare policy as well as TANF and uses a human rights framework as a claim for welfare rights in the United States. Neubeck discusses “invisible barriers” such as mental illness and domestic violence that are not adequately addressed by the system. ultimately, I will refer to Neubeck to illustrate that the right to welfare would encompass the human/economic rights to food/from hunger, to a job or assistance, a right to shelter, a right, although Neubeck states “welfare has never been treated as a right,” (page 35) which is true, it was an entitlement, but if the argument for a right to welfare was framed as essential to fulfilling the human rights of American citizens who were in need, then we could be closer to equality between recipients and non-recipients citizen status.
Goldberg begins the book by stating that “The central thesis of this book is that social welfare policies have been preeminent sites for political struggles over the meaning and boundaries of citizenship in the United States. These struggles are easier to grasp if we understand citizenship as an instrument of social closure through which people monopolize valuable material and symbolic goods while excluding others,” (Goldberg 1). For the purpose of my honors thesis, I will rely on Goldberg’s definition of citizenship when using the term citizen.
This book is a collection of essays and short pieces addressing the topics listed in the title. Pieces from authors such as Mink, Linda Gordon, Virginia Sapiro, Paula Baker, Barbara Nelson, Jane Jenson, Nancy Fraiser, Elizabeth Schnider, Frances Fox Piven, Diana Pearce, and Teresa Amott. The book addresses a lot of the theoretical framework of analyzing the welfare state, offers an analysis of the history of the welfare state and women’s rights in some parts, and ultimately offers a critique of the welfare state and how it limits/denies women’s rights. The book offers hope for the future of the American welfare state, by illustrating the flaws of the system and encouraging them to be fixed in order to create a better and more efficient welfare state for women. The authors all wrote their pieces from a feminist perspective and address the oppression of women on welfare, since the origins of the American welfare state. I will use the authors to address the gender discrimination within the welfare system and how this in turn oppresses recipients, who are predominantly females (heading the household). This oppression and discrimination in turn creates unequal citizenship between female recipients and non-recipient females.
This book is phenomenal, it offers and extensive and detailed history of American welfare policy and why it is flawed. It goes all the way back to the 1900’s, when welfare was first conceived of and ran by the states on a local basis. What I find particularly useful about this book is both its policy analysis as well as its historical analysis of the welfare state, and I will be using both analysis in my argument. It has many short articles, pieces, or chapters from books, cases, basically any type of document that had anything to do with American welfare, both Conservative and Liberal commentary, opinions, and advocacy. It will be extremely useful for both my own analysis and counter argument. I will use the cases discussed to illustrate the Supreme Courts power in creating or denying welfare rights and a right to welfare. I will also analyze the time periods of these cases and what was going on with both public opinion (the welfare rights movement) and with welfare policy at the time as well as the liberal or conservative influence on both the government and the public, depending on the time period.
Charles Noble offers the reader a deep and extensive analysis of the political history of the American welfare state. What is particularly interesting of Noble is his comparison of the American welfare state to the welfare systems of other industrious nations, and illustrates how America has the most poorly designed and implemented welfare system of all of the developed nations. He then breaks his analysis into three sections that were meaningful to American welfare policy, the Progressive Era, the New Deal Era, and the Great Society Era, and discusses the conservative backlash to these liberal time periods of widening rights for recipients. Noble illusrtaes why reform is difficult in America, and ends the book discussing the future of reform, and offers some great advice based on his analysis of Conservative backlash, he suggests how actors and recipients should move in this politically hostile environment.
This book is phenomenal, and in great detail discusses the welfare rights movements of the late sixties and early seventies. Davis provides us with background, of how legal aid was created, the idea in the legal world that poor people deserved representation as well. The lawyers in this time period played an essential role in aiding the movement by assisting the recipients with fair hearings and class action law suits. Also, this book addresses the need for more lawyers in the field.
Cloward, Richard A, Piven, Frances Fox Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare Vintage
“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”
Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry’s ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure. “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” (Deathly Hallows 723)
This exchange is arguably the most important conversation in all 41,000 pages of the Harry Potter books. It takes place at the end of the final Harry Potter book, when Harry meets his (dead) mentor in a dream-like state following Voldemort’s second-to-last attempt to kill him. Harry presents Dumbledore with a binary choice, as if “real” and “happening inside my head” are mutually exclusive. As John Granger writes, “Dumbledore’s response reveals that he thinks Harry has created a false dichotomy. There is another option to account for his experience than just either/or…there is a nonmaterial (albeit, anything but immaterial) unity between what is real and what is happening in our heads” (Granger, Lectures 178, 179). Dumbledore casting aside Harry’s dichotomy, and replacing it with an option that offers the unification of opposites, is the most literal example of Rowling’s alternative to the dualism of the apocalyptic myth.
That alternative is evident throughout the series, though not always so explicitly spelled out. Rowling’s characters are carefully crafted so very few can be easily classified using a binary paradigm. On the surface, the “good guys” are a ragtag group, poster-children for diversity. Harry, the hero, was raised in the Muggle world and is a half-blood; his mother was a Muggle-born (a witch or wizard from a non-magical family). His best friend Ron’s family are Purebloods, but considered “the biggest blood-traitor family there is” for their acceptance of Muggles and Muggle-borns (Deathly Hallows 482). Harry’s other best friend, Hermione, despite being the “cleverest witch of [her] age” is a Muggle-born (Prisoner of Azkaban 253). Other members of the alliance include a half-giant, a werewolf, a Squib (someone from a magical family born without magic), and others who blur the lines between magical and non-magical or human and magical creature (Order of the Phoenix 173-174).
More significant than this superficial, visible diversity, however, is Rowling’s use of morally ambiguous characters to illustrate the grey area between good and evil. According to Elizabeth Rosen, morally ambiguous characters are one way in which the postmodern style manifests in an author’s adaptation of the apocalyptic narrative (14). Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, fought against Voldemort and rejected his Pureblood family ‘s prejudices against Muggles. By a binary standard, that should make him good; he fights for the “right” cause. The way Rowling writes him, however, he is often excessively cruel to those he considers “other.” His extreme mistreatment of his house-elf (servant) ultimately led to a betrayal that cost him his life (OotP 831-332).
Ironically, earlier in the series, Sirius is the one who says to Harry, “If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals” (Goblet of Fire 525). He talks the talk, but ultimately doesn’t walk the walk. By creating a character who fights with the good guys but shows the prejudice of the bad guys, Rowling challenges the reader (like Dumbledore challenges Harry) to accept a reality that can’t be explained by the apocalyptic, binary worldview. Other “good” guys include a spy in Voldemort’s inner circle, a thief/smuggler, and the owner of a bar that caters to a very shady clientele (OotP 173-174). Not exactly as innocent a group as the 144,000 virgins redeemed in the Book of Revelation (14:4).
It is Dumbledore himself, though, who presents the biggest challenge to a dualistic moral system. Rosen argues that authors of postmodern apocalyptic fiction translate the traditional deity figure into secular terms by humanizing the deity (xxiii). Some writers create more than one deity, splitting the traits of the traditional Judeo-Christian God among different characters (Rosen xxiii). Rowling, on the other hand, uses the same technique Rosen describes while analyzing the work of Alan Moore, that is, she “conflates the God/Devil binary structure of the traditional apocalyptic paradigm in order to represent a far more shaded morality than Revelation allows” (Rosen 8).
In the first four books of the series, Dumbledore is portrayed as powerful, infallible, and all-knowing. Harry (and therefore the readers, who get only his side of the story from the books’ third-person limited point of view) considers Dumbledore the greatest sorcerer in the world, whose “powers rival those of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named [Voldemort] at the height of his strength” (Chamber of Secrets 17). When Voldemort returns at the end of the fourth book, Harry expects Dumbledore to be the savior of the wizarding world, the only one who could possibly defeat Voldemort.
Throughout the fifth, six, and seventh books, however, this illusion is systematically destroyed as Harry loses faith in Dumbledore and learns about the more unsavory details of his past. In the fifth book, Harry blames Dumbledore for Sirius’s death, and Dumbledore admits to making “an old man’s mistakes…I had fallen into the trap I had foreseen, that I had told myself I could avoid, that I must avoid.” (OotP 838). Not only must Harry accept that Dumbledore’s plans were flawed, Harry realizes that it is, in fact, his task to defeat Voldemort. For the first time, Dumbledore is neither all-knowing nor all-powerful. In the sixth book, Harry watches Dumbledore die, leaving no doubt about his mentor’s mortality (Half-Blood Prince 595-596). The illusion of Dumbledore’s invincibility is shattered. After reading Dumbledore’s obituary, Harry admits to himself, “[h]e had thought he knew Dumbledore quite well, but ever since reading this obituary he had been forced to recognize that he had barely known him at all” (DH 21).
In the seventh book, Dumbledore takes on the qualities of a Devil or Antichrist figure. It is revealed that in his youth, Dumbledore was ambitious, power hungry, single-minded, and above all, committed to “cleansing” the world of Muggles and Muggle-borns – the very traits Voldemort is famous for (DH ch. 18). At first, Harry refuses to believe Dumbledore could be anything but “the embodiment of goodness and wisdom,” but eventually the evidence against Dumbledore is overwhelming (DH 360). Harry, seeing the world in terms of moral absolutes, begins to hate Dumbledore. Dumbledore’s fall from grace is complete; Harry’s feelings about him could not be farther away from the respect and adoration he felt in the first four books.
Hermione vainly attempts to convince Harry not to see Dumbledore as completely evil. She reminds him of the heroic Dumbledore they knew and tries to make Harry understand that “He changed, Harry, he changed! It’s as simple as that! Maybe he did those things when he was seventeen, but the whole of the rest of his life was devoted to fighting the Dark Arts!” (DH 361). Harry, however, can’t help but adamantly insist he’s been betrayed. According to his idea of moral, if Dumbledore wasn’t all good, he must have been all evil. Trapped in this all-or-nothing mentality, Harry takes it far too personally when Dumbledore’s immorality is revealed. He later wonders whether everything Dumbledore ever told him was a lie.
Rowling has a tendency to introduce characters as either good or evil, then gradually reveal over the course of the series how they actually embody some combination or middle ground between the two. For most of the series, however, Harry stubbornly refuses to recognize anything beyond the two extremes. He is devastated when he discovers his father, who he idolizes as a martyr and about whom he has never heard anything but praise, was a bully as a teenager. His feelings are described as “horrified and unhappy,” (OotP 650) and “as though the memory of it was eating him from inside” (OotP 653). He even goes so far as to wonder whether his father had forced his mother to marry him. He can’t accept the idea of his father as anything other than completely good or completely evil. “For nearly five years the thought of his father had been a source of comfort, of inspiration. Whenever someone had told him he was like James, he had glowed with pride inside. And now… now he felt cold and miserable at the thought of him” (OotP 653-654).
Harry feels similar anguish each time a character proves to be more than what he or she seems. After Sirius dies, and Dumbledore reveals his mistreatment of the house-elf as the cause, Harry is furious at Dumbledore for his implicit criticism of Sirius. “The rage that had subsided briefly flared in him again…He was on his feet again, furious, ready to fly at Dumbledore, who had plainly not understood Sirius at all, how brave he was, how much he had suffered…” (OotP 832). For Harry, Sirius’s sacrifice meant he could never have been anything but completely good. It’s impossible for Harry to reconcile Sirius’s good and bad traits; he can only see his godfather, like Dumbledore and his father, as one or the other.
Harry also fails to understand that not everyone shares this dualistic worldview. When Dumbledore talks about Sirius’s flaws, Harry immediately accuses him of implying Sirius’s death was only getting what he deserved. Dumbledore, of course, believes nothing of the sort. In fact, he is “ever on guard against letting his perception be clouded by labels, prejudicial stigmas, and pigeon holes” but he also knows Harry is not yet capable of accepting this type of non-binary morality (Granger, Keys 195) .
Of course, Harry’s apocalyptic sense of morality cuts both ways. It not only prevents his acceptance of bad traits in good characters, it blinds him to any redeeming characteristics in so-called “evil” characters. Harry hates his Muggle relatives, not without good reason. They neglected and abused him as a child, locked him in a cupboard under the stairs and forced him to do all the housework. The second Dumbledore starts to say something that could redeem his aunt, Harry interrupts, “’She doesn’t love me,’ said Harry at once. ‘She doesn’t give a damn – ‘ ‘But she took you,’ Dumbledore cut across him. ‘She may have taken you grudgingly, furiously, unwillingly, bitterly, yet still she took you” (OotP 835-836). This time, Dumbledore doesn’t let Harry get away with using her faults to eliminate her virtue. Obviously Dumbledore doesn’t think she was a good surrogate parent. But he also refuses to condemn her as evil within a binary moral system.
Severus Snape seems to hate Harry from the first second he sets eyes on him, and the feeling quickly becomes mutual. At eleven years old, Harry decides that because Snape picks on him for (apparently) no good reason, he must be evil. For the following six books, nothing can convince him Snape is actually working to protect him. Harry suspects Snape of helping Voldemort in every scheme, even after Dumbledore repeatedly assures him that he trusts Snape completely. Harry doesn’t understand the moral gymnastics required for Snape to put on a convincing show as a double agent. Spying for Dumbledore within Voldemort’s inner circle means maintaining his cover, at all costs. Displaying anything less than hatred of Harry would raise Voldemort’s suspicion. In Harry’s eyes, however, Snape must be as evil as his actions.
After Sirius’s death, Harry uses his righteous certainty of Snape’s guilt to deny his own. He demands Dumbledore give him a good explanation for Snape’s behavior. After getting one, “Harry disregarded this; he felt a savage pleasure in blaming Snape, it seemed to be easing his own sense of dreadful guilt” (OotP 833). Even though it comes at the cost of powerful allies like Snape and Dumbledore, seeing the world in black and white makes Harry’s life far simpler and his emotions easier for him to handle. It isn’t until the very end of the series that Harry finally matures enough to lose this crutch and appreciate shades of grey.
Rowling’s use of third-person limited narrative voice produces an effect similar to the experience of reading the Book of Revelation. Allowing the reader to know only what Harry knows evokes the same feeling of tunnel vision in John of Patmos’s first-person account in the Book of Revelation. By letting the reader see everything Harry sees and feel everything Harry feels, Rowling also allows the reader to share Harry’s transformation from a binary moral system to a non-binary moral system when it happens in the seventh book. The conversation Harry has with Dumbledore before the final battle sets in motion the events that prove Harry has moved beyond binary morality. In the epilogue, nineteen years after the events in the last chapter, Rowling reveals Harry named his middle child Albus Severus, giving him both Dumbledore’s and Snape’s first names. More than signaling Harry’s acceptance of their ambiguous moralities, Albus Severus symbolizes the end of the wizarding world’s metanarrative of prejudice.
At Harry’s school, Hogwarts, students are sorted into four “houses,” or dormitories. Each is known for different personality traits – Hufflepuffs are loyal, Ravenclaws are smart, Slytherins are ambitious, and Gryffindors are brave. Under these simple adjectives, however, lies the metanarrative that explains conflict in the wizarding world. Slytherins are shady characters, if not downright evil. As Hagrid tells Harry in Book 1, “There’s not a single witch or wizard who went bad who wasn’t in Slytherin. You-Know-Who [Voldemort] was one” (Sorcerer’s Stone). In addition to Voldemort, Snape was in Slytherin, as was Harry’s childhood nemesis Draco Malfoy. Harry’s experiences with Slytherins paint them as prejudiced against Muggles, power-hungry, and devious. Gryffindors, on the other hand, can do no wrong.
This dualism is reinforced throughout the books, up to and including the final battle, during which all the Slytherins leave the school to protect themselves or fight with Voldemort, and almost all the Gryffindors try to stay and fight. The only hint that there might be an alternative is Dumbledore’s speech after Voldemort is reborn. “Lord Voldemort’s gift for spreading discord and enmity is very great. We can fight it only by showing an equally strong bond of friendship and trust” (GOF 723). That Harry’s son is named after members of both houses who were not wholly good or evil recognizes the need to bridge the rift between the two houses. The Gryffindor-Slytherin combination is a unification of contraries, and represents the end of apocalyptic morality in the wizarding world.
Harry’s eventual acceptance of Snape’s true loyalty and Dumbledore’s transformation from devil to god to neither one or the other would have impossible within a binary framework. The fact that Dumbledore could embody all three identities forces readers to consider “very complex and shaded questions that the entity now poses about the nature of evil…” (Rosen 17). By inviting the reader to share Harry’s transcendence of the apocalyptic moral paradigm, Rowling “satisfies the need we all feel for meaning that is not moralizing and for virtue that is heroic and uniting rather than divisive” (Granger, Keys 236).
References
Granger, John. The Deathly Hallows Lectures: The Hogwarts Professor Explains the Final Harry Potter Adventure. 2nd ed. Allentown, PA: Zossima Press, 2008. Print.
—. Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader. Allentown, PA: Zossima Press, 2007. Print.
Rosen, Elizabeth. Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination. Lanham, MD: Lexington – Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. Print.
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. New York, New York: Scholastic, 1999. Print.
—. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. New York, New York: Scholastic, 2007. Print.
—. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. New York, New York: Scholastic, 2000. Print.
—. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. New York, New York: Scholastic, 2005. Print.
—. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. New York, New York: Scholastic, 2003. Print.
—. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. New York, New York: Scholastic, 1999. Print.
—. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. New York, New York: Scholastic, 1998. Print.
Allan, Robin. Walt Disney and Europe: European Influences on the Animated Feature Films of Walt Disney. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999. Print. Robin Allan’s book discusses Walt Disney’s animated fairy tales as being profoundly influenced by European culture and European folktales. He cites many of the well-known animated tales such as Cinderella and Snow White and meticulously examines how their re-working of characters and themes is attributed to European sources. In addition, he analyzes Disney’s tales in regard to the pop culture of the time, drawing on the audiences that were targeted and reasons why.
Golberg, Stefany. “The Smart Set: Happy 200th, Snow White! – October 1, 2010.” The Smart Set. 1 Oct. 2010. Web. 19 Oct. 2010.
Haase, Donald P. “Gold into Straw: Fairy Tale Movies for Children and the Culture Industry.” The Lion and the Unicorn 12.2 (1988): 193-207. Project MUSE. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Web. The journal article addresses two sides of a debate about the Disneyfication of fairy tales: one about the definite structure of a fairy tale and how Disney distorts it with his adaptations and the other about the fairy tales having never contained any eternal truths but rather reflected the values of their time, as did Disney’s. The article discusses varying motifs and structural changes that fairy tales have underwent as a function of new power relations, morals, and experiences of the society (i.e. patriarchal structure, female roles). In addition, analyses of other scholars such as Charles Eidsvik, Bruno Bettelheim, and Clarke Sayers are included.
Jean, Lydie. “CHARLES PERRAULT’S PARADOX: HOW ARISTOCRATIC FAIRY TALES BECAME SYNONYMOUS WITH FOLKLORE CONSERVATION.” TRAMES: Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 11.3 (2007): 276-83. Estonian Academy Publishers. Web.
Knox, Skip. “Germany after the Thirty Years War.” Boise State University. Boise State University. Web.
Orenstein, Catherine. Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale. New-York: Basic, 2003. Print. Orenstein’s book traces the history of Little Red Riding Hood in various social contexts, analyzing them in light of the values common to the times. She cites Charles Perrault’s fairy tales how they are reflections of the court society present in 18th century France. It discusses elements of aristocratic lifestyle that influenced the writing style and content of the tales. In addition it portrays Perrault’s literature as an attempt to defend the aristocracy’s lifestyle and strengthen it.
Perrault, Charles, and Judith Bronte. “”Cinderilla or The Little Glass Slipper” by Charles Perrault, 1729.” Judith Bronte – Christian Poetry, Inspirational Romance, John Bunyan, & Christian Romance. Web.
Pineiro, Victor. “The Moral of Snow White.” Popten. 24 June 2008. Web.
Weber, Eugen. “Fairies and Hard Facts: The Reality of Folktales.” Journal of the History of Ideas 42.1 (1981): 93-113. JSTOR. University of Pennsylvania Press. Web.
Zipes, Jack David. The Brothers Grimm from Enchanted Forests to the Modern World. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Print. In his book, Jack Zipes explores the journey of the Brother Grimm’s fairy tales, starting with how they gathering the tales from storytellers in early 19th century and ending with the development of new fairy tales post-1945. The book discusses symbols and characteristics of heroes found in their fairy tales, the opinions of others regarding the tales, and the shifts the fairy tales underwent in their themes, coinciding with a shift in targeted audience (i.e. adults to children).
Ilya Ryvin
Honors Thesis Colloquium
Prof. Lee Quinby
Position Paper #2
This begs the question: What is transmedia storytelling?
Transmedia Storytelling: What Is It?
On April 6, 2010, the Producers Guild of America made an announcement that many in the media industry were waiting for: the expansion of the Guild’s Producers Code of Credits to include the category of Transmedia Producer. With this announcement came a guideline as to what constitutes a “transmedia narrative”; it states:
A Transmedia Narrative project or franchise must consist of three (or more) narrative storylines existing within the same fictional universe on any of the following platforms: Film, Television, Short Film, Broadband, Publishing, Comics, Animation, Mobile, Special Venues, DVD/Blu-ray/CD-ROM, Narrative Commercial and Marketing rollouts, and other technologies that may or may not currently exist. These narrative extensions are NOT the same as repurposing material from one platform to be cut or repurposed to different platforms. (“Code of Credits – New Media”)
Almost immediately, these guidelines sparked a healthy debate, some arguing that the definition was too narrow in scope. For example, Christy Dena, a prominent media scholar, questioned the requirement of a work having to permeate at least three different media platforms, thereby ignoring transmedia works that span only two platforms (“PGA’s Transmedia Producer!”). Likewise, the Transmedia Hollywood: S/Telling the Story conference held in March 2010 ignited a similar debate amongst a number of industry insiders who could not even agree on the newness of transmedia, with some arguing that it is ultimately a rehash of “long-standing practices” (“Hollywood Goes ‘Transmedia’”).
While this development within the PGA certainly legitimizes transmedia as an industry practice, the debates within the scholarly and creative communities reveal an interesting problem: we, as of yet, have no authoritative definition for transmedia storytelling. Henry Jenkins, a noted transmedia scholar and USC professor, offers an explanation for this omission; he argues:
From the beginning, transmedia has been a site of experimentation, innovation, and exploration at the heart of mainstream media…. As such, the transmedia discussion has always moved across registers and as a consequence, needed to be expansive, to include anyone who wants to engage with these topics and who is willing to put these ideas into practice…. This very expansiveness is what allows us to bring many different voices to the table, to map diverse kinds of experiments, and to promote new explorations and innovations. (“Hollywood Goes ‘Transmedia’”)
Although the PGA offers a perfectly adequate definition, I agree with Jenkins that we “should push back on any attempt to too quickly formalize the limits or boundaries of this practice” (“Hollywood Goes ‘Transmedia’”). However, the simple fact that the PGA was able to create a definition means that there are a number of transmedia practices that are largely agreed upon as central to the form. In fact, several key players in the field, specifically Starlite Runner’s Jeff Gomez, have been instrumental in lobbying the PGA to get the aforementioned classification approved (“Hollywood Goes ‘Transmedia’”). Therefore, I want to use the PGA’s definition for transmedia storytelling as the foundation for my definition. Building on that foundation, I can take what other scholars have said about transmedia storytelling and apply their theories to case studies, allowing me to analyze what works and what does not. By no means will my definition be authoritative. In fact, because the field is in a constant state of flux, my definition may very well be obsolete half a year from now. Nevertheless, I am but another “voice” bringing my own perspectives about what I have seen, and as you will see in section 3, my goal is to promote further “explorations and innovations,” specifically through the application of transmedia practices in television (“Hollywood Goes ‘Transmedia’”).
Transmedia Storytelling: Extensions
In his book Convergence Culture, Where Old and New Media Collide, Jenkins discusses “transmedia storytelling” at length. He describes it as the following:
A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best−so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics; its world might be explored through game play or experienced as an amusement park attraction. Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice versa. Any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole. Reading across the media sustains depth of experience and motivates more consumption. Redundancy burns up Fan interest and causes franchises to fail. Offering new levels of insight and experience refreshes the franchise and sustains consumer loyalty. (Convergence Culture 95-96)
Before I continue, it is important to explain why two portions of Jenkins’ definition have been highlighted. When comparing the PGA’s definition to Jenkins’, a number of similarities become obvious. Both definitions agree that each text in a transmedia franchise should contribute something new to the whole, and that redundancy should be avoided. It is also the case that both definitions mention the actual dispersal of information across different media platforms, as they should. However, Jenkins’ definition deviates in two ways: he claims that each medium should do “what it does best,” and that “each franchise entry needs to be self-contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice versa. Any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole” (Convergence Culture 96). By analyzing The Matrix franchise, it becomes evident rather quickly why both points are not absolutes.
Extensions in The Matrix
Jenkins’ argues that The Matrix franchise, developed by Andy and Larry Wachowski, is the most ambitious attempt at transmedia storytelling (“Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics…” 14). When the The Matrix hit theaters in 1999, no one could have predicted that it would become a worldwide phenomenon. The film, which tells the story of humanity’s struggle for survival against brutal machine overlords, eventually went on to gross more than $463 million worldwide (Box Office Mojo). But the Wachowskis did not stop there; the brothers had a plan that would expand the universe of The Matrix beyond the scope of just one film. What soon followed were two sequels, a series of comics and web-comics, a number of anime films released on DVD, and two videos games.
Each text was designed to contribute new material to the narrative without rehashing the same old information. In the first film, Morpheus briefly recounts the war between man and machine. He does not divulge much about the war, but at one point states, “We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky” (The Matrix). “The Second Renaissance,” a two-part animated film included in The Animatrix DVD, explores the entire history of the war. It even reveals what Morpheus meant in his cryptic speech to Neo by showing how humans used nano-machines to darken the sky and block out the sun (The Animatrix). In this case, the Wachowski’s managed to successfully add distinctive and valuable information to the world of The Matrix by expanding through the anime something briefly mentioned in the film.
However, not every extension was this successful; in some instances, the extensions hurt the franchise. For example, the story of Kid was first introduced in “Kid’s Story” in The Animatrix. He is next seen in the first sequel, The Matrix Reloaded, interacting with Neo. He is never properly introduced in the film, and the interaction between Kid and Neo alludes to events that occurred in the anime. By the third movie, The Matrix Revolutions, Kid plays an even larger role where he heroically defends Zion against the robot invasion. This lack of formal introduction in the films presents a problem for those who have not seen the anime, so much so that when Kid has his heroic moment at the end of the third film, it is difficult to react with anything other than indifference. However, those who saw Kid’s background story in the anime may have a different reaction when watching the same scene, having been exposed to him in a much more meaningful way.
According to Jenkins’ definition of transmedia, both the film and the anime should provide potential points of entry into the franchise “for different audience segments” (“Transmedia Storytelling 101”). For example, both film and television attract relatively large and diverse crowds; comic books, animes, and video games, however, are more tailored to a specific niche (Convergence Culture 96). In other words, an anime fan can enter the franchise through The Animatrix, a gamer can enter through Enter the Matrix, and a film buff can enter through the film. Once inducted into the franchise through one entry point, further exploration of the franchise through other media is encouraged; a gamer might want to watch the film after playing the video game and vice versa.
However, this is only possible if each point of entry is self-contained, as can be seen by the backlash the franchise encountered. A number of critics panned the films, arguing that they “were not sufficiently self-contained and bordered on incoherent,” and a number of video game critics complained that the story of Enter the Matrix “isn’t strong enough to stand on its own…making the game worth a look for hard-core fans of The Matrix films, but a buggy disappointment for just about anyone else” (Convergence Culture 65; Gerstmann). Following Jenkins’ definition, the video game should engage more than just fans of the film; it should also work as an entry point for people who have not seen the films. In this case, however, it is unlikely that a person who played the game will be engaged enough to explore the rest of the franchise if his experience with the game was disappointing.
It is here that I take issue with Jenkin’s claim that every “franchise entry needs to be self-contained” (Convergence Culture 96). I contend that only the primary text needs to be self-contained, and extensions should be used to explore the storyworld, or “diegesis,” of the primary text; these extensions can flesh out backstories, histories, and locations to create a multilayered universe (Film Art: An Introduction 76). Extensions that do this and strive to be self-contained should stay within the universe of the primary text, but focus on elements outside of its direct narrative. This claim implies several things:
1) Not all texts are created equal. There is one primary text that drives the core plot (everything that is “explicitly presented”) through which extensions develop (Film Art: An Introduction 76).
2) Extensions are optional. They should not be mandatory for understanding the narrative of the primary text.
3) Some extensions explore the storyworld by expanding on something that appeared in the primary text. Others can simply expand the storyworld without referencing material from the primary text.
4) Not all extensions need to act as entry points into a franchise.
5) Transmedia producers need to understand how to best utilize the conventions of the platforms through which they create their extensions.
These points exist to highlight the fact that producers need to be highly selective when choosing to extend their narratives across different media platforms. They need to understand and utilize the conventions of the platforms through which they create their extensions, otherwise they will repeat the mistakes the Wachowskis made with their franchise. I contend that this is what Jenkins meant when he said, “each medium does what it does best” (Convergence Culture 95). However, this too is difficult to determine What works in a ten minute animated short may not work as well in a video game.
As I mentioned already, Enter the Matrix was seen as a failure due to its lack of self-containment and uninspired gameplay, the result of the Wachowski’s lack of understanding of the video game platform. Stephen Johnson argues that video games emphasize “form” instead of “content,” and he contends that “with the occasional exception, the actual content of the game is often childish…” (Everything Bad Is Good for You 39). While I agree that some games like Pac-Man and Halo do focus more on form, an increasing number of video games today do have “complex storylines” with “memorable and endearing cast of characters” that drive player engagement (Shoemaker). Therefore, there should be a focus on not just form, but the ways form and content work together to create a compelling game. In the case of Enter the Matrix, the Wachowski’s tried too hard to intertwine the game’s narrative with the film’s narrative, jumbling the coherence of the game. At the same time, by using the game to fill in the narrative gaps between the first and second films, they ignored the form of the game, essentially turning Enter the Matrix into a mini-film. Critics noted that this problem was so pervasive that at times narrative cut scenes would interrupt actual gameplay (Gerstmann). Perhaps the game would have served the Wachowski’s better if they chose to explore some other facet of the Matrix world, one that has no mention in the film but is still clearly recognized as belonging to that universe. This way, the game does not have to rely on the film for coherence and a gamer can enjoy the game on its own merits, with a cohesive storyline and form that work together.
On the other end of the spectrum, The Animatrix highlights not only the failures of the Wachowski’s transmedia experiment, but also its successes. I have already demonstrated how “Kid’s Story” created problems for the films. I have also demonstrated how “The Second Renaissance” successfully fleshed out the history of the war between man and the machines from a conversation in the first film. It is important to emphasize that this extension is not necessary for us to understand the story of the first film; we are told that mankind fought a war against the machines and lost, and that all subsequent events are the result of that conflict. However, those who watch “The Second Renaissance” can achieve a deeper understanding of that conflict, and ultimately, the world that The Matrix inhabits. Jenkins calls this deeper understand “additive comprehension,” asserting that “each new texts adds a new piece of information which forces us to revise our understanding of the fiction as a whole” (“Transmedia Storytelling 101”). Furthermore, The Animatrix is also unique in that it can attract a niche audience to the franchise. Made up of eight films, The Animatrix is a collaboration between The Wachowskis and a number of renowned Japanese anime producers. It is arguably the best example of a stand-alone extension within the franchise, and I agree that this is true to some extent. By collaborating with a number of well-known Japanese anime producers, the Wachowskis succeeded in creating eight varied and visually exciting stories. This by itself can be a potential attractor for someone who simply likes anime and is a fan of said producers. These works offer a new interpretation of the universe within the franchise, and that interpretation may inspire further investigation.
I have already said that transmedia storytelling builds worlds, and that transmedia extensions are crucial to that process. But how can transmedia producers design transmedia narratives? What separates transmedia narratives from other grand, multi-platform stories from the past (Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings). And what happens when there are multiple authors in one franchise, as was the case in The Animatrix. The follow section will explore these issues, and offer further insight into the question: What is transmedia storytelling?
Transmedia Storytelling: World-building, Additive Comprehension, Adaptation, and the Issue of Canon
In Convergence Culture, Jenkins quotes a Hollywood screenwriter:
When I first started, you would pitch a good story because without a good story, you didn’t really have a film. Later, once sequels started to take off, you pitched a character because a good character could support multiple stories. And now, you pitch a world because a world can support multiple characters and multiple stories across multiple media. (Convergence Culture 114)
The screenwriter highlights a very important point: there has been an increase in the number of films and television programs that take place in highly expansive and imaginative story worlds. With all this excitement hailing transmedia as the next big thing, it is important to note that transmedia storytelling is not an entirely novel concept. Specifically, the notion of dispersing a story or world across a number of different platforms is not unique to transmedia storytelling as it is defined today. There have been a number of media franchises in the past that did just this, perhaps the most notable example being George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise. The first trilogy started with Star Wars: A New Hope, released in 1997, and ended with Star Wars: Return of the Jedi in 1983. It sparked a number of tertiary texts aimed at expanding the universe, focusing on characters and stories that were ultimately unexplored in the films. While some of these works were produced under the watchful eye of Lucas, many were produced by outside authors who ultimately had little to no affiliation with Star Wars or Lucas.
Works Cited
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 8th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Print.
“Code of Credits – New Media.” Producers Guild of America. Web. 3 Nov. 2010.
Dena, Christy. “PGA’s Transmedia Producer!” Christy’s Corner of the Universe. 5 Apr. 2010. Web. 3 Nov. 2010.
Gerstmann, Jeff. “Enter the Matrix Review.” GameSpot. 20 May 2003. Web. 10 Nov. 2010.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Print.
Jenkins, Henry. “Hollywood Goes “Transmedia”.” Web log post. Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. 12 Dec. 2009. Web. 18 Oct. 2010.
Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” Web log post. Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. 22 Mar. 2007. Web. 10 Nov. 2010.
Long, Geoffrey A. “Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics, and Production at the Jim Henson Company.” Thesis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007. Web. 19 Oct. 2010.
Johnson, Steven. Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005. Print.
Shoemaker, Brad. “The Greatest Games of All Time: Chrono Trigger.” GameSpot. Web. 10 Nov. 2010.
The Animatrix. Dir. Mahiro Maeda, Shinichirô Watanabe, Andy Jones, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Takeshi Koike, Kôji Morimoto, and Peter Chung. Warner Home Video, 2003. DVD.
The Matrix. Dir. Larry Wachowski and Andy Wachowski. Perf. Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne. Warner Bros., 1999. DVD.
“The Matrix (1999).” Box Office Mojo. Web. 10 Nov. 2010.
Shoemaker, Brad. “The Greatest Games of All Time: Chrono Trigger.” GameSpot. Web. 10 Nov. 2010.
The theme of inter-generational conflict in American Pastoral demonstrates the collective desire to “one-up” or be different from one’s parents; in other words, to become more American. Of the youngsters of his neighborhood, Zuckerman says, “…we were steered relentlessly in the direction of success: a better existence was going to be ours” (41). The ability to step forward and do something better comes from the immense American energy after the Great Depression, according to Zuckerman (40). Not only are Zuckerman and his childhood peers eager to move forward and make a name for themselves, but it is “mostly the friction between generations [that is] sufficient to give us purchase to move forward” (42). The children are highly aware of signs of immigrant status, like whether or not a neighbor’s mother has an accent (43). Keen to their surroundings, the children of Zuckerman’s area are observant of the indicators of “the minutest gradations of social position” (43) among their families.
Zuckerman reports a “generalized mistrust of the Gentile world” (41) at the time of his childhood and “exclusions the goyim still [wish] to preserve” (44) at his high school reunion, 45 years later. The words “gentile” and “goyim” both mean non-Jew, but “goyim” is slightly offensive. With the use of almost derogatory language when referring to non-Jews, Zuckerman demonstrates the lingering attitude of distrust.
Part of the conflict between people of Zuckerman’s age in the 1940s and their parents is that the “adults… [are] striving and improving themselves through [the children]” (42). Zuckerman says of his generation’s astuteness that there is an “unfiltered way meaning comes to children, just flowing off the surface of things” (43). It is important for the young ones to interpret those around them to help carve a sense of self-identity. It is easy for them to “[grasp] how every family’s different set of circumstances set each family a distinctive different human problem” (43). It is the very human problem that each family suffers that pushes the younger generation to move toward success.
The reader notes the presence of Jewish elements in Zuckerman’s life in the past and the present. Zuckerman mentions the yahrzeit candles some of his neighbors have when he is a child (43). Another element of Judaism is the goodie bag of rugelach that everyone receives at the end of the Weequahic High School reunion (46). Rugelach is an old, traditional variety of Jewish cookie. The phenomenon of the high school reunion brings together people who have not spoken in years. After growing into adults and being independent, everyone inevitably returns to the personality and energy of high school. Zuckerman says to an old friend, Mendy Gurlik, that “after years and years of painting ourselves opaque, this carries us straight back to when we were sure we were transparent” (51). This quote suggests that the Jewish men and women who grew up with Nathan Zuckerman spend years trying to be different, to be American, but the reunion returns them to the time when their shared raw Jewishness was impossible to hide. In their adult years, these people succeed in disguising their Jewish heritage in the hopes of acceptance and success in a “typical” or “mainstream” American life. This sense of “passing” is one of the central themes of American Pastoral and indicative of the necessity to relinquish one’s Jewish heritage in order to succeed. Just by participating in the reunion, Zuckerman can say he has an “uncanny sense that what goes on behind what we see is what I was seeing” (52). He is comfortably aware that everyone at the reunion is putting on a face, trying to be someone else. This “someone else” is someone they strive to be; someone like the Swede who manages to be the darling of the community for his near-gentile looks and abilities. That is to say, everyone at the reunion, though the majority are Jewish, are trying to downplay their Jewishness, which has been a natural behavior since before high school.
The reader sees the social barrier between Jews and non-Jews with the appearance of an old classmate with a shiksa, or Gentile woman, for a wife. The wife questions her husband, Schrimmer, about the nicknames she hears everyone calling each other at the reunion. She asks, “Why are they all Mutty and Utty and Dutty and Tutty? If his name is Charles, why is he called Tutty?” (57). To this, Schrimmer responds, “I shouldn’t have brought you… I can’t explain it… nobody can. It’s beyond explanation. It just is” (57). Not only does this exchange show the rifling animosity Schrimmer can still show for his Gentile woman who is his wife, but it broadcasts the kind of unique Jewish nickname-giving of the Newark Jewish community that divides it from its non-Jewish counterpart.
Zuckerman’s encounter with Jerry Levov, the Swede’s younger brother and a classmate of Zuckerman’s, fills in a lot of blanks of information about the Swede. Most importantly, Zuckerman learns that the Swede has just died within the last week. Zuckerman concludes that the Swede must have known he was dying at their dinner meeting and wanting to express some unfulfilled emotions by speaking to a long-lost acquaintance (82). Unfortunately, the Swede never speaks about writing a book about his dad, as he mentions in his letter to Zuckerman imploring him to meet for dinner. How far had the Swede’s seemingly perfect life crumbled? Jerry says, tragically, that the Swede is “a perfectly decent person who could have escaped stupid guilt forever” (68). What exactly did the Swede not escape? Is death the only thing that interrupted perfection?
Slowly, Zuckerman begins to realize the façade of the Swede. He, too, was trying to pass, but really lived a double life. Zuckerman learns from Jerry about the Swede’s revolutionary daughter, Merry, who detonated a bomb in a post office during the Vietnam War, killing one person. This is the first real chip in the perfect picture of the Swede’s life. Jerry recalls finding the Swede crying in a fancy restaurant’s bathroom stall following an otherwise pleasant family dinner about the alleged death of Merry (71). The failure in Merry is a sudden tragedy to the Swede. Of the Swede’s naivete, Jerry says, “Never in his life had occasion to ask himself, ‘Why are things the way they are?’ Why should he bother, when the way they were was always perfect?… The question to which there is no answer, and up till then he was so blessed he didn’t even know the question existed” (70). The Swede’s tragedy is important because it is the equivalent to the loss of his ability to pass, to be a real American. Jerry brings it one step further when he says, “That was [the Swede’s] fate – built for bearing burdens and taking shit” (70). Jerry is essentially breaking the image Zuckerman always held of the Swede. The Swede never really was perfect. He always had problems dealing with the expectations of others, and he never knew that life could be a different way until his only daughter became a murderer and an outlaw.
There is a difference between the two Levov brothers in their ability to take what life gives them and continue moving, or passing. According to Jerry, it is the Swede’s lack of rage, or reaction, that keeps him from letting go of the loss of his daughter, ultimately leading to his death. On the other hand, according to Zuckerman, Jerry has “a talent for rage and another… for not looking back” (72). This talent for not looking back demonstrates the need to hold only the loosest bonds to where one originated in order to be able to move forward. This means, among other things, to not grasp onto Judaism so much because it would impede on the possible successes ahead.
A perfect self-observation Zuckerman makes is that he must have been sitting “in Vincent’s restaurant, childishly expecting to be wowed by [the Swede’s] godliness, only to be confronted by an utterly ordinary humanness” (72). Zuckerman processes it himself that the Swede is no different from him. He was not god-like, he did not have all the answers and he certainly did not pretend to be the same childhood hometown sports legend that he used to be.
Another way we see the tragedy of the Swede is that he was “fatally attracted to his duty… fatally attracted to responsibility” (72). The use of the word “fatally” suggests that in being so loyal to his responsibilities, or the norm or familiar, the Swede caused his own death by not properly responding to the crimes and death of his daughter with flexibility. Apparently, for the rest of his life it was all he could do to “bury this thing,” that “one day life started laughing at him and it never let up” (74).
The one thing that no one trying to be successful or to pass can escape is the body. While speaking with an old romantic interest, Joy Helpern, at the high school reunion, Zuckerman marvels at the changes in her “body, from which one cannot strip oneself however one tries, from which one is not to be freed this side of death” (79). That is to say, no one can escape the confines of his or her own body no matter how much he or she wants it. It will always be there, this relic of one’s heritage, one’s journey. This is important because it shows the desperation of Zuckerman’s peers who want to assimilate to such a degree that even their own bodies are a problem – they betray who they really are.
Zuckerman comes to his own conclusion about the post-Merry’s bombing life of the Swede: “Stoically he suppresses his honor. He learns to live behind a mask. A lifetime experiment in endurance. A performance over a ruin. Swede Levov lives a double life” (81). Furthermore, Zuckerman deduces that “[the Swede] had learned the worst lesson that life can teach – that it makes no sense” (81). The loss of Merry is really what brings the Swede back down to earth and makes him god-like no longer in Zuckerman’s eyes. It is probably this very family tragedy to which the Swede was referring in his letter to Zuckerman, even though he never brought it up in person at their dinner. The haunting nature of the double life of the Swede plays itself in the notion that “the responsibility of the school hero follows him through life” (79). This school hero, this legend, was all a tangible dream for which the neighborhood was partly responsible.
The Swede’s problem with “making himself unnaturally responsible” is that he “keeps under control not just himself but whatever else threatens to be uncontrollable, giving his all to keep his world together” (88). The Swede must be so ingrained to the norm that he limits himself and causes hardship by not being more open. The Swede’s boyhood successes have influenced his constant desire to please by taking responsibility. These efforts bring him further and further from his Jewish religion. He is “an American not by sheer striving, not by being a Jew who invents a famous vaccine or a Jew on the Supreme Court, not be being the most brilliant or the most eminent or the best. Instead – by virtue of his isomorphism to the Wasp world – he does it the ordinary way, the natural way, the regular American guy way” (89). This presents the indelible problem: the shed one’s Judaism in order to become American and be accepted by all.
The reader finally gets a clue about what might have led to the Swede’s downfall when it is revealed that the Swede kissed his 11-year-old daughter on the mouth at her request. Zuckerman’s interpretation of this event and its impact is that “never in his entire life… had [the Swede] given way to anything so alien to the emotional rules by which he was governed, and later he wondered if this strange parental misstep was not the lapse from responsibility for which he paid for the rest of his life” (91). Why is there an emphasis on responsibility or the lack thereof? Why does the Swede follow an instinct to be responsible for everything around him, controllable or uncontrollable? Is this mistake really the only time that the Swede did not meet his self-imposed standards, the real reason for his downfall, his inability to pretend anymore?
Zuckerman shows us that the Swede so long crated fell apart after the realization that the Swede’s whole life changed after that illicit 10-second kiss (92). Putting himself in the Swede’s shoes, Zuckerman tells us, “All the triumphs, when [the Swede] probed them, seemed superficial; even more astonishing, his very virtues came to seem vices. There was no longer any innocence in what he remembered of his past” (93). The self-judgement leads the Swede to believe that his whole life has been a sham, that he has never truly passed for a stable, got-everything-together all-American man. The intention of the kiss is supposedly to relieve Merry of her tensions and make her feel comfortable, but it may have resulted in Merry’s unfortunate, obstinate stutter. Thus, the Swede concludes, “What you said and did made a difference, all right, but not the difference you intended” (93).
The Swede’s crestfallen attitude about the consequences of his actions influences him for the rest of his life. Relating his life to the handicap of his only daughter’s stutter, he “no longer had any conception of order. There was no order. None. He envisioned his life as a stutterer’s thought, wildly out of control” (93). This loss of control is synonymous with his loss of responsibility, his waning life force soon leading to his death.
There is more lack of practice of Judaism in reference to the Swede’s family. His teenage daughter takes Saturday trips to New York City to meet with other political radicals during the Vietnam War. Saturday is supposed to be Sabbath observed by all Jews, which includes not doing any work. Traveling to New York City constitutes as work, and we see that the Swede makes no mention about a possible disappointment in Merry’s failure to observe the Sabbath. Also, when Merry is younger, she sees speech therapists for her stutter on Saturdays. One surprising element of Judaism, though, is when the Swede is angered by Merry’s Catholic trinkets given to her by her Gentile grandparents. After it becomes clear that the trinkets are not going away, the Swede has a talk with Merry, explaining that Jews do not have crosses or pictures of Jesus Christ hanging in their rooms, and that these objects should be hidden when the Swede’s own parents come to visit (94).
Merry’s weekend trips to New York City are even more disrespectful of the laws of Judaism in that she neglects the laws of kashrut, or the eating restrictions. One of these restrictions is that meat and cheese should not be eaten in the same meal, and it seems Merry often enjoys cheeseburgers while in New York City (105). Merry has many arguments with her dad, the Swede, about her activities and whereabouts on these trips, and she astutely says to him during one such argument, “You think everything that is f-foreign to you is b-bad. Did you ever think that there are some things that are f-foreign to you that are good?” (110). Herein lies the problem with the Swede: he likes everything to be at a comfortable, controllable norm, and when things get too “extreme” he does not feel safe and secure.
Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant is one of the seminal works of Jewish fiction in the 20th century. Morris Bober is the Jewish grocer who cannot break the cycle of perpetual poverty. He “never alter[s] his fortune, unless degrees of poverty [mean] alteration, for luck and he [are], if not natural enemies, not good friends” (16). Bober’s modest neighborhood grocery store has not grown much over the 20 some-odd years it has been open. He life he has made for his family and himself after World War II in Brooklyn is not much. The store is open for most Jewish holidays, so the family obviously does not particularly note or celebrate them (reference?) Being one of only a handful of Jewish merchants in the neighborhood makes Bober a target for harsh anti-Semitism: his store is robbed by two men who say bigoted phrases, like “You’re a Jew liar” (25) and “Your Jew ass is bad, you understand?” (26). This event leads to Bober losing the mere $10 he earns that day, in addition to suffering a crippling blow to the head.
Ida Bober, Morris’ wife, accurately depicts their misfortune when it comes to the business:
Everything we did too late. The store we didn’t sell in time. I said, ‘Morris, sell now the store.’ You said, ‘Wait.’ What for? The house we bought too late, so we have still a big mortgage that it’s hard to pay every month. ‘Don’t buy,’ I said, ‘times are bad.’ ‘Buy,’ you said, ‘will get better. We will save rent.’
It is a hardship even to sell the grocery store. Is the difficulty due to prejudice, the Brooklyn neighborhood, or general lack of wealth after World War II?
The Bobers’ daughter, Helen, is the symbol of changing America. Her father, Morris, laments at his inability to support her during her childhood years, saying, “for myself I don’t care, for you I want the best but what did I give you?” (21). Helen replies, “I’ll give myself… there’s hope” (21). Even though times are hard, Helen holds hope for the future, which assumedly requires even further limitation of Jewish practice to succeed economically.
Ida Bober calls a regular Polish customer “die antisemitke” (32), or the anti-Semite. Though Ida senses the anti-Semitic attitude, the customer’s daily payment for a roll and the occasional pickle is necessary to stay in business. In the same vein, the customer’s anti-Semitism must be put on hold for the novelty of a “Jewish roll” or “Jewish pickle” (32).
The ubiquity of hardship in this post-war era is present in the new character of Frank Alpine, also known as “the stranger” who visits this small Brooklyn town and eventually works for Morris. While Morris questions the stranger’s history and how he came to Brooklyn, the stranger simply says, “I had a rough life” (33).
Philip Roth is another renowned writer in the Jewish scholarly world. His novels explore the neuroses and internal conflicts of Jewish characters. American Pastoral is perhaps the last novel in which his memorable character, Nathan Zuckerman, appears. Zuckerman’s relationship with a not-so-Jewish-looking Jew is the focus and evolution of American Pastoral.
Physically, Seymour Irving “the Swede” Levov, of Zuckerman’s memory and present experiences, does not look like a Jew. While describing the Swede of the past, Zuckerman says, “Of the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school, none possessed anything remotely like the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov” (3). Not only is the Swede an enigma in physical beauty, but in physical strength, too. The Swede’s abilities in basketball, football and baseball earn him legend status as a high school student in the neighborhood and beyond. Of Swede’s individuality and importance, Zuckerman says he is “a boy as close to a goy as we were going to get” (10). This attitude suggests that at the time of Zuckerman’s high school years, the late 1940s, it is seen as a disadvantage to success to be Jewish. The only way, apparently, for Jews to make a name for themselves within their community is to bolster the successes of a boy whose talents they think are so non-Jewish that they bring them to a higher level of value. But what provokes this attitude that beauty and natural talent for sports like Swede has is non-Jewish? HE cannot be the only Jew that has played on a high school football team. What exactly promotes his status as a legend, and how does it affect his neighbors’ attitudes towards their own Jewish identities as related to their abilities to succeed?
Part of the Swede’s mystique, according to our ever-observant Zuckerman, is his “talent for ‘being himself’” (19). This statement insinuates that Jews of that era ordinarily have to pretend to be something they are not. This is confusing, then, because Zuckerman may be suggesting that all Jews have those talents, but the Swede is the only one confident enough and self-assured enough to use them. Further along, Zuckerman says that the Swede has “the natural modesty of someone for whom there were no obstacles, who appeared never to have to struggle to clear a space for himself” (19). This skewed remark demonstrates the preeminent attitude that families with more money had fewer struggles. In reality, the Swede’s grandfather and father have struggled to pull together and maintain a successful glovemaking business to support the family. Of course, Zuckerman does not learn about this history until he meets Swede for dinner 50 years after high school.
This dinner is imperative to teach Zuckerman that the supposed glory of the Swede is not everything he thinks it is. The Swede does not escape prostate cancer, death in the family or divorce. Do these revelations make Swede less of a goy (non-Jew) than before? Should he now be considered “more Jewish” for having endured more public struggles?
It is interesting to try to break apart and evaluate Zuckerman’s childhood adoration for the Swede. Like others, he is enchanted by the Swede’s athletic skills that seem to lift the Jewish community of Newark out of its World War II stupor and depression. Zuckerman speaks eloquently about Swede’s celebrity and his relationship top Judaism:
The Jewishness that he wore so lightly as one of the tall, blond athletic winners must have spoken to us… in our idolizing the Swede and his unconscious oneness with America, I suppose there was a tinge of shame and self-rejection. Conflicting Jewish desires awakened by the sight of him were simultaneously becalmed by him; the contradiction in Jews who want to fit in and want to stand out, who insist they are different and insist they are no different, resolved itself in the triumphant spectacle of this Swede who was actually only another of our neighborhood Seymours whose forebears had been Solomons and Sauls and who would themselves beget Stephens who would in turn beget Shawns. Where was the Jew in him? You couldn’t find it and yet you knew it was there. Where was the irrationality in him? Where was the crybaby in him? Where were the wayward temptations? No guile. No artifice. No mischief. All that he had eliminated to achieve his perfection. No striving, no ambivalence, no doubleness – just the style, the natural physical refinement of a star. (20)
Zuckerman’s almost Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness-esque adoration for Swede shows several problems in his own self-identity and his relationship with Judaism. First, Zuckerman notes that the Swede, being just another Jew from the block, will inevitably bear children with names that are less and less Jewish over the generations. This demonstrates the waning importance of obvious Jewish identifiers like names in the community. At the same time, the Swede represents everything the Jews want to be and nothing that they are. They see in him something Jewish, but cannot place their finger on it. He has become so non-Jewish in nature and behavior that he the most noteworthy Jews of all. Zuckerman aptly states, “I don’t imagine I’m the only grown man who was a Jewish kid aspiring to be an all-American kid during the patriotic war years” (19-20). This demonstrates the desire to shed Jewish identity in order to become more American. In other words, one cannot be American unless he or she releases his or her Jewishness.
Abramson, Edward A. “Bernard Malamud and the Jews: An Ambiguous Relationship.”
The Yearbook of English Studies. Vol. 24, Ethnicity and Representation in
American Literature, 1994. 146-156. Modern Humanities Research Association
Web 19 Oct 10 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3507887>.
The article’s thesis:
My contention is the Bernard Malamud is not only far from being an author concerned with the plight of one small grouping of humanity, but that when he treats Jewish matters, most often he universalizes Jews, Jewish culture, history, and Judaism to such an extent as to render them no more than bases from which to explore the human condition.
Alter, Iska. “The Natural, The Assistant, and American Materialism.” The Good
Man’s Dilemma: Social Criticism in the Fiction of Bernard Malamud New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1981. 1-26. Rpt. In Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 129. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web 19 Oct 10 <http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1420047439&v=2.1&u=cuny_ccny&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w>.
The thesis:
To embody his concerns as a Jew, an artist, and a moral man, Malamud has evolved a style that is uniquely his. Its fusion of the fabulous and the factual, called “lyrical realism” by the Yiddish critic Mayer Shticker, is the fictive analogue to the Chasidic belief that the mystical connection to God is to be found not in ascetic isolation, but through man’s participation in the ordinary activities and mundane events of daily existence.
Spevack, Edmund. “Racial Conflict and Multiculturalism: Bernard Malamud’s The
Tenants.” MELUS. Vol. 22, No. 3, Varieties of Ethnic Criticism (Autumn, 1997),
pp. 31-54. 26 Sept 10 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/467653>.
The problem of this article is stated in multiple questions:
One main goal of this essay will be to examine whether Malamud adheres to a belief in a clearly delineated formal and thematic mainstream at the beginning of the 1970s, or whether he ventures to depart from traditional mainstream attitudes towards non-Western peoples and their forms of literary expression. Another key problem arises directly from this fundamental issue: may Malamud’s novel (with its theme of racial antagonism in the United States, as well as its reflection on the varieties of literary forms of expression) be seen as anticipating the multiculturalism and canon debates of the 1980s and 1990s? Should Malamud’s work thus be seen merely as problematic (commenting on the current state of affairs in 1971) or perhaps also as somewhat prophetic (attempting a prognosis, whatever its accuracy, of future developments)?
Shear, Walter. “Culture Conflict in ‘The Assistant’.” The Midwest Quarterly. 7.4
(Summer 1966): 367-380. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. James P. Draper and Jennifer Allison Brostrom. Vol. 78. Detroit: Gale Research, 1994. Literature Resource Center. Gale. CUNY – City College of New York. 20 Oct. 2010 <http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=cuny_ccny>.
The thesis:
In The Assistant two cultures, the Jewish tradition and the American heritage (representing the wisdom of the old world and the practical knowledge of the new), collide and to some degree synthesize to provide a texture of social documentation which is manifested in a realistic aesthetic. However, the dichotomy is preserved and in fact given emphasis through an entirely different aesthetic presentation, one which tends to project the characters as types and treats their motivations, environments, and ideas as symbolic threads which link the narrative to the deeper level of personal significance from which the elements of human strength and weakness manage to emerge in the actions which both define and dramatize culture as a phenomenon.
Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto. “Mourning the ‘greatest generation’: myth and history
in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.” Twentieth Century Literature. (Vol. 51). .1 (Spring 2005): p1. Literature Resource Center. Gale. CUNY – City College of New York. 20 Oct. 2010 <http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=cuny_ccny>.
The thesis of this article can be summarized in this quote: “I would argue that in American Pastoral, Roth, in the guise of his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, returns to a consideration of the sixties, but with a less satirical, more elegiac voice.”
Tuerk, Richard. “Jews Without Money as a Work of Art.” Studies in American
Jewish Literature. 7.1 (Spring 1988): 67-79. Rpt. in Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Gale, Literature Resource Center. Gale. CUNY – City College of New York. 20 Oct. 2010 <http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=cuny_ccny>.
The thesis:
Jews Without Money may be “simple.” Still, it is more than a series of vivid, episodic, factual but roughhewn sketches of East Side life with a radical ending. It is, in fact, the end product of much revision, and it often comes closer to fiction than fact.
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