Category: Sam Barnes

These Hands Hold the History

This is a dance of undoing, unraveling the psychic and social knots we harbor around sexuality. This is a dance of liberation, the freedom to be fully human and the freedom to recognize all those who you encounter as something so much more than their roles, a dance where we discover each other as mutual […]

Cal’s riveting tale of transformation in Books III and IV of Middlesex is hardly contained to his imagined person. This transformation that Eugenides so deftly splices onto the page reverberates up through his fingertips into the the author himself, through the rods and cones of the reader as she deduces meaning, pattern, and emotion through […]

Throughout Books One and Two of Jeffery Eugenides’ Middlesex, we the reader are placed in the unusual position of casting our hopes with the success of a character, Cal, whose sexual identity—and, correspondently  his path through the world—is quite unlike that of the overwhelming majority of his readers. This trick is nothing new (I am not an […]

In a matrifocal kinship network, the relationship between mother and child is of utmost importance, and is the relation upon which all power is patterned. This integral, essential connection is blurred under the aegis of the patriarchy that defines power dynamics in the contemporary era. One could argue that the defining relationship was between father […]

How shall we read Lolita? Nabakov’s seminal text subtly invites the reader to don the glasses of an array of different observers; it tempts us in turns towards judgment and complicity, dispassionate analysis and evocative terror. In what appears at first gander to be a tale of perversion lies hidden a whole world of meaning to […]

From the first, Humbert Humbert is by his searing shame. In the opening chapters, the reader becomes acquainted the man as he slowly falls for and wins over his beautiful, 12-year-old housemate Lolita. His shame does not come from a fear of hell—though he mentions it—nor does it come clothed in the garb of a […]

The modern museum is a direct descendant of the Victorian ‘cabinet of curiosities.’ In that era, the worldly, the wealthy and the wise make an art of collecting and ordering tchotchkes and artifacts from all across the heathen kingdoms of botany, biology, and colony. Within the wunderkammers, the perverse, the shocking, and the odd were […]

The Victorian consciousness, labeled in conventional academia and history as thoroughly repressed and compartmentalized, is revealed in the documents of chapter 6 to be anything but. When we shift our eyes from convenient assumption and towards the historical reality, rich crenellations and borders appear; in them a wealth of romance, desire, and love come into […]

“The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed…” Like a tremor shaking its way from the depths of Earth’s trenches before splitting the surface in two, or a storm that swirls unheard from up the coastline in all the epochs before radar, the retrospective observer can feel the force of […]