Early Modern Question 1 and 2:

I am going to combine questions one and two for the following reasons: I want to

consider genre theory in the context of my selected works’ consideration of what

constitutes race and gender; or, as might be better put in the lexicon of Kim Hall’s Things

of Darkness, the significations of difference. I will also address what it means to

approach the question through a reading of literary works rather than socio-political

documentation, as an historian or political scientist might address or formulate the

archive.

Because I feel that Irish Studies might be an important part of my further project,

and because I think the Irish question vexes postcolonial studies, and finally, because

Irishness problematizes US whiteness studies, I will draw upon Spenser. His oeuvre is

particularly useful in a question seeking to discuss the early stages of English colonialist

thinking because he was himself a colonist in Ireland, a civil-military official, the

personal secretary to Lord Grey, the governor of Ireland. In his capacity as personal

secretary, Spenser had the unique opportunity to be present at various important events,

including the massacre of Smerwick, an event which I believe is detailed and recreated in

his epic address to Queen Elizabeth, The Faerie Queene.

Relatedly, Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland allows for another

perspective from the same author detailing England’s policy in Ireland. What is nice

about using the View is that this text discusses both what is presently being done in

Ireland, as well as what should be done. In terms of its informative potential, the text’s

architecture, being divided by topical subheadings, gives the reader reassurance that this

is a document thoroughly acquainted with its subject matter; so familiar with Ireland, in

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fact, that it can select and order the topics it wants to present as most important to the

English reader’s edification.

Moreover, Spenser wrote a letter to his patron, courtier and adventurer Sir Walter

Ralegh, detailing the purposes of his writing of The Faerie Queene: saying, it was for the

cultivation and improvement of gentlemen, especially those gentlemen who would be

encountering new Worlds in the service of Queen Elizabeth I’s expansionary projects.

Discussing the Atlantic and English interventions in the Caribbean, Africa, and

India is incomplete without a consideration of English actions in the Americas as well as

in Ireland, England’s oldest and possibly most contentious colonial venture.

I want to connect the notions of difference that are signified in the ethno-religious

context by presentations of Spain and Italy with presentations of difference buried in the

depictions of Irishness and blackness in Spenser and Shakespeare. As discussed above,

Spenser is a literary producer whose economic investments in the plantation of Ireland

creep into his works, which were avowedly interested in shaping Elizabethan foreign

policies.

Discusisng Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is useful for a multitude of reasons,

not least of which is his contemporaneity ti the events that Spenser is concerned with.

Moreover, Shakespeare’s successful involvement in three of the seven major playhouses

in London mean that the questions his works are concerned with would have a relatively

wide dissemination. Finally, a postcolonial or Atlanticist reading of a Shakespeare play

set in Rome would allow for a fuller consideration of what it means to examine English

empire as a coherent set of motivations, even if with localized factors.

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It is not so much to say that the uniquities of each locale that the English

interested themselves in should be suppressed in my analysis so much as it is important to

remember that there were interconnections among the various branches of the

imperializing project, not least of which is the fact that the men deployed to represent

Elizabeth often went to more than one place and were multiply invested in the various

ventures undertaken by the Elizabethans.

Ethnicity and whiteness: > gender

There is a way in which Roman Catholicism as it is mutually signified by

Spanishness and Italianness works to define otherness over and against an English

sensibility. However, I would argue that the blackness and otherness of the African and

Irish other, respectively, constitutes a means of thinking about properly English

masculinity and femininity, establishing an English sense of gender identities by

negatively portraying diseased and perverted forms of gender performance.

So for my poetry selection I set forth Book Five, Justice, of The Faerie Queene. A

little backstory on the knight/gentleman to be discussed: he is an orphan that the goddess

Astraea discovers and handpciks to rear in the ways of Justice. Astraea is another name

for Elizabeth, so the future Redcrosse Knight is a bit of a mirror for Sir Ralegh, being as

he too is sleected to go on imperial missions. Before Astraea becomes overly disgusted

with and forsakes the world of men, she gifts RK with a man, Talus, referred to as a

groom. He is to be incredibly significant in the unfolding of the Redcrosse Knight’s

actionms, for I find that whenever a particularly brutal or morally questionable action

occurs, there is Talus in the thick of things, the most vengeful and effective slayer in the

entire epic story.

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“The champion of true Justice Artegall” is given a biography, an official

accounting for in Canto One:

For Artegall in justice was upbrought

Even from the cradle of his infancie,

And all the dpeth of rightfull doome was taught

By faire Astraea, with great industrie,

Whilest here on earth she lived mortallie.

For till the world from his perfection fell

Into all filth and foule iniquitie,

Astraea here mongst earthly men did dwell,

And in the rules of justice them instructed well. (Book 5, 1, 5)

That Artegall is morally instructed is left in no doubt with the phrase “rightful

doom”, and that his instruction is consistent and thorough—as contrasted with the

haphazard educational standards of the Anglo-Irish inhabitants of the Pale complained

about in A View—an instruction that begins from the “cradle of his infancy” already

leaves the reader with a sense of what Rousseau will essay later to be an exemplary

education: Artegall has been both instructed and habituated from the earliest moment in

the ways that are right for his station. That this teaching needs to be done with “great

industry” is yet another thrust at the instability of educational and acculturative norms in

the Pale. Trinity College Dublin was established in 1590, right about the time that The

Faerie Queene is written, to provide education and fellowship to the Protestant ruling

class out in this colonial setting.

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The English in the Renaissance were greatly concerned with the phenomenon

they called “degeneracy”, the problem of going native. A much-cited example of this

deals with the portraiture so critical to the period’s sense of self-identity: Anglo-Norman

cousins of Elizabeth are seen in full-length paintings barefoot and with hair dressed in the

native fashion, which is to say, long and uncut, flowing. They are English, of the oldest

stock, and yet have come to be very “Irish”: speaking Irish, Irish servants (nurses to the

children are Irish and children are often translators for their English-only parents),

familiar with Irish land practices, and espousing Roman Catholicism.

Another problematic feature of colonization for the English was the problem of

the “black Spanish”, namely, that the Spanish conquest of the Americas, while incredibly

successful in that galleons came home filled with bullion, was also a moral and spiritual

fiasco in that the people without godliness were being wiped out. The rapidly-dwindling

native populations and the injustices wrought upon them were detailed in Bartholome las

Casas writings. The translation of his essays, which were circulated at the Spanish court

and meant to influence policies of governance in Peru and the Americas, came to be

available in English in the late 1560’s, so the English court had ample opportunity to

acquaint themselves with the less savory side of colonial rule.

The brutality depicted by Las Casas gave the English pause; for on the one hand,

to grow one’s hair long and lose one’s sense of the English tongue was a very real danger

to the Elizabethans, and an underpinning of their persecution of the Irish tongue in their

own colonial policies in Ireland, as Patricia Palmer notes in Language and Conquest in

Early Modern Ireland. On the other hand, the civilizing mission that the English prided

themselves on, bringing English and Protestantism to their colonial counterparts, meant

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that the effectiveness of Spanish colonial rule might not be fully available to an English

imaginary: that is, how to justify to themselves as the local governors, as well as to their

Queen, notoriously shy of bloodshed. Pragmatism alone would not have been sufficient

cause to convince Queen Elizabeth of a more firm-handed (re: brutal) putting-down of

insurrectionary impulses in Ireland and the New world colonies; she hesitated for too

many years in ending the threat posed by Mary Queen of Scots, preferring an

imprisonment from which revolution was nonetheless fomented to the execution of

another sovereign/woman.

The fact that Spenser is speaking to Queen Elizabeth in The Fairie Queene is

obvious by the laudatory addresses used in the poem, like Astraea for Elizabeth, but is

also thematically apparent in that Duessa, a character who is described as being part

woman and part monster, and very beautiful when clothed, is indistinguishable from a

woman of quality. In speaking to the Queen, Spenser takes the position of a returning

émigré, addressing the problems of Irish governance. Concerted plantation efforts had

taken place during the 1570’s and 1580’s, culminating in a terrible massacre in 1580 at

Smerwick, a coastal outpost. In short, a Spanish fleet had wrecked there, and rather than

observing international law and custom, the English garrison at Smerwick had taken upon

themselves to massacre the entire population of the ship, as well as some Irish civilians.

The reason for this had to do with fears that the Irish would provide refuge for the

Spanish, who were considered by the English to be natural allied because of their shared

Roman Catholicism. Moreover, the English feared that should the Irish harbor the

Spanish, the Spanish could stage a takeover of Ireland, so there were strategic military

concerns as well. Something of this anxiety of spatial conquest can be seen in The

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Tempest, when the deposed king is fearful that his island will be taken over, that he will,

in the bounds of story, be deposed again, but in a larger sense, the threatened deposition

hails fears surrounding the Elizabethan court: that Elizabeth’s position is threatened

because she is heirless, that the English position is threatened vis a vis Spain so long as

Ireland remains wild and uncontrolled, and that English cultural unity is under threat both

because of the lack of vernacular literary culture, and the influx of Italian and Spanish

literary antecedents. There is an irony in the fact that Spenser’s blast against lackadaisical

English foreign policy dealing with Ireland and Spain would take the form of epic, a

genre that is inherited from the Spanish and Italian tradition.

But to return to the text: Canto Six details Astraea’s kidnap of Artegall. It is said

he is playing among his friends, and she overhears him speaking, and finding his manner

and speech to be “fit, and with no crime defiled”, as if he were prelapsarian, she takes

him from their childish company and rears him to justice practice. I say kidnap with some

extremity, for perhaps, if he is a model or emblem for the Anglo-Irish experience, he

would simply be restored to the company or class he was born into in the first place. But

what’s interesting about Artegall’s upbringing is that it is separate from the others, a sort

of monastic experience. His only companion is Astraea’s groom, Talus, and the forest

creatures, on whom he practices his first ministrations of Justice.

Maureen Quilligan speculates that the forest creatures are really supposed to be

the native Irish, and where therefore Artegall is being raised is beyond the Pale

someplace. That is to say, “filth and foule inquitie” would code the Pale, the settlement

where those of English descent lived and ruled the surrounding Irish and anglicized

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populations. My reading thus far is that of a literary historian, one who is treading the

archive for evidences of a kind that the literary critic does not usually seek.

I think, however, that situating the political and socio-economic context is

important, and following literary historian Nicholas Canny, believe that a sense of the

history that surrounds the production of an undoubtedly literary work provides useful

insights into the ideological constructions that uphold the text’s worldview and

understanding of itself. In a way that Canny might not have anticipated, being as he is

interested in unpacking the reciprocal history of Anglo-Irish cultural influences, I would

suggest that the political climate that Spenser was steeped in can help in an application

and extentsion of Kim Hall’s seminal work on race and gender in the English

Renaissance, Things of Darkness.

Where Things of Darkness is concerned with untangling the knottiness of English

notions of what constituted black/African over and against white/English, I would

forward Hall’s analysis to extra-domestic texts like The Farie Queene, and not just

courtly writings by such figures as Aemilia Lanier, and Mary Sidney. In uncovering

(some muight say “discovering”) an entire archive of material artistry (jewelry, art) that is

devoted to the depiction of blackness and whiteness (cameos, say, or portraits of women

with their slaves, both in pearls), Hall as furthered the argument that the basis for what

would be come “race” was a primary construction of the Renaissance’s concern with

overseas and imperial expansion, and not just a late 19th century scientific invention.

For example, in the rescue scene where Artegall is redeemed from the

enslavement to women;s work at the conclusion of Book Five (notably: Justice), there is

an erasure that occurs. Britomart authorizes Talus to decimate the local population,

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women who were of the Amazon Radigund’s rule, and who helped in the administration

of an entire colony of men enslaved to the work of spinning and the wearing of women’s

clothes. That is to say, initially, the warrior woman Britomart allows Talus to chase down

the last few defenders left after the battle for the castle where the men are being held

dressed as women. What this chasing-down becomes is a massacre of civilians and

warriors alike, a rout so brutal that Britomart has to hide away.

Effectively, justice is restored. In the language of the text, women were made to

be women again (except for the killed, presumably unrecoverable as women).

This is not the first time that Talus effects what is otherwise too brutal for the text

to explicitly own as its own heroic, civilizing desire. What I do find interesting is that the

Book ends with Talus enacting this feature of his relationship to authority by way of his

relationship with Britomart, a woman. Yes, Britomart is an iteration of Elizabeth, but in

the view of the poem, what is interesting is that it’s not the masculine hero Artegall who

is responsible or connected to the final massacre. If ever there were a coding of civilian,

woman might be it. I take this slippage/substitution of the female sovereign for a

masculine hero to represent the text’s anxiety over colonial responsibility. Canny notes

that Spenser was certainly present at the massacre of Smerwick, if he didn’t help to

instigate and admnister it, and that kind of complicity in the brutalities of colonial rule

just might have a bearing on how Spenser would portray his heroes in what he wrote to

Ralegh was essentially a conduct manual for young gentlemen.

The English upper-class preoccupation with temperance as a moral virtue would

help explain why Artegall was initially taken in by Duessa’s beauty or Radigund’s

femininity, both times to his detriment. Which is to say, Artegall is taken in because he

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doesn’t know how to read, for two reasons. One, he is trained in temperance, which

means he can’t recognize the extreme monstrosity of Duessa or the Amazonian quality of

the Queen Radigund. At the same time, his only exposure to women figures has been the

goddess Astraea, who is goddess of Justice. Despite all his training in the workings of

Justice, deciding, like Solomon through love, which Squire goes with which Lady,

Artegall cannot quite figure out how to read women, and this is an extendable,

commonplace metaphor for the readings of strange lands.

While I am not conclusively sure of what Hall’s reading of race in the

Renaissance can do for gender precisely, at this moment what does seem clear is that in

The Faerie Queene there are different genders for different races of women. Also, Talus,

the main masculine presence in the final scene, is an interesting substitute for Artegall,

because he is the “yron man”, who refuses to rescue his patron in the first place because

Artegall was captured in a just battle, and Talus knows that Artegall would not want to be

rescued by him. Talus is a squire, so it’s not surprising in the context of the story that he

knows his master’s mind. What is more interesting to me is the use to which his

privileged knowing is put, and what it says about the dynamics of their relationship.

While Tlaus is initially referred to as a groom when Astraea first gives him to Artegall as

her parting gift, he is thereafter referred to as an yron man. Yron is both tempered, and

when tempered, turns black. Could it be that the loyal Talus is rendered an yron man to

represent the possibilities of blackness? That is, in an Anglo-Irish context in which the

English feared becoming too Irish, as well as constantly suspecting the Irish of reverting

to their uncivilized ways, black slaves/servants could have provided an imaginative

solution ot the problem of conquering and administering strange lands. A loyal and

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domesticated (Christianized) population of African slaves could take the place of the Irish

kern, unreliable and infidel.

This kind of servility, which goes for the most part unarticulated, is taken up in

Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in the relationship between the deposed ruler and magician,

Ferdinand, and his native/miscegenated monstrosity, Caliban.

The problem of blackness as categorical otherness is also taken up in Titus

Andronicus (1592), where Aaron the Moor represents by way of his verbal command and

emotional ballast, the ideal man lauded in Machiavelli’s The Prince. This is a telling

conflation on the part of Shakespeare, for the Elizabethans considered Machiavelli to be a

vaillian, and his ideal man to be something of a monster, and certainly a form of

masculinity to be avoided by good gentlemen.

Yet, what is interesting about Shakespeare’s portrayal of Aaron is that his

“otherness” is the most sympathetic in the play: he is the only one of the important

characters to love a child more than his own honor, and in so doing, the only character to

perpetuate his line. While his infant’s upbringing is only promised at the barest, it

nonetheless is better-fated than that destiny awaiting the Goth Queen’s or Roman

general’s children, which is summary death. Moreover, Aaron’s love of his infant

represents a form of self-love that the other characters’ choices (choosing honor or

vengeance) would seem to deny the viability of. But I wonder that this form of self-love,

of wanting to perpetuate oneself, is especially problematic when the character in question

is as dangerous as Aaron is. He controls the Queen Tamora, who redeems herself from

POW capture by seducing the Roman Emperor into marrying her. She cuckolds him, and

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it would seem that Aaron is on his way to puppeteering the Roman Empire, except that

Titus’ vengeance (on Tamora’s sons raping his daughter), gets in the way.

This question of alternative masculinities as played out in Roman (Italian

Catholic) and Moorish (Spanish) contexts is of course echoed in the “black ram” Othello,

who is perhaps the ultimate example of what martial nobility can attach to a depiction of

a black male character. I know I am conflating blackness and Africanness, but Moorish is

North African, and there is a kind of exoticization, following Hall, that attends blackness

in this period.

Perhaps the most important development to an English colonialist mindset in the

period is the impending decisiveness of color and race as signifiers of difference, which

then provided the basis for notions of civilizability and the possibility of assimilation into

an Anglocentric cultural framework. So long as blackness could provide a repository of

difference, especially in relation to establishing normative femininity, as Hall argues,

blackness was indispensable to a colonial imaginary, providing the means for colonists to

hierarchize embodied differences in such a way as to essentialize and categorize those

differences as more and less inimical to Englishness. This is seen in such novelized

contexts as Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s 1827 early frontier novel, Hope Leslie, or Early

Times in the Massachusetts, but also in such contemporaneous works of record like

Captain John Smith’s travel diaries.

In these accounts, the strangers in question are Native Americans, who are seen to

be clever, but not civilized, and in fact very childlike, warlike but also easily led. In some

ways, the deviousness that is ascribed to the Native Americans in this early colonial

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context echoes that which is attributed by Spenser to the native Irish in a sister colonial

project. As an example, both populations are said to be easily swayed by trinkets.

Four Nations study has been quick to note the emergence of anti-Welsh and anti-

Scottish themes in Shakespeare; perhaps it is the fact that Irishness is a form of whiteness

in the US diaspora that postcolonial and early modern studies out of the US has been

slower to recognize the value in looking at historical context in examining the language

of the plays and poems of the period. So I am actually disagreeing with your lead in this

question; you want me to make the argument that reading as an historian is not the thing

to do, and I’m saying that reading as a literary historian can turn up some useful contexts

for the imaginative sketching happening in a politically high-stakes text like The Faerie

Queene, especially when it has a corollary text such as A View.

On the other hand, there is the problem of Shakespeare plays; this dramatist was

not directly involved in the colonial ventures that Spenser took part in—what are ways of

reading fiction that allow for advantages over reading literature as historical evidence? In

a previous question, I had argued that the literary critic gets to encounter “projective” or

“predictive” power in a work of the imagination. I would further the claim by way of

saying that a thought-experiment, as work of fiction is, is not so fettered by what is, but

can imagine what might be. Not only does Spenser’s TFQ offer up a disguised trove

dealing with political matters of great import to the Elizabethan court, it does so in a

fashion of revision, offering alternative ways to read: for example, it features female

rulers, offering differing iterations of moral success as embodied by Duessa, Radigund,

Britomart, and Astraea. In so doing, the text is already radically at odds with such as

work as John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regement of

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Women, taking for granted that there are female sovereigns, and that they can be effective

and wise.

So I have made the claim that texts can be multi-generic, inhabiting fictive and

historical modes. I am also claiming that the process of reading can itself take the

approach of historical or literary modes; I think that texts meant for a wide public

consumption, as Shakespeare plays were, lend themselves to this kind of omnivorous

reading practice. As argued in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, the vastly differing

lengths of performed and printed versions of his plays suggest that the longer plays were

meant to be read, and not simply as records of primarily performance-oriented pieces.

This suggests to me that the questions being raised, like over slave speech in The

Tempest, are questions meant to be pondered and circulated.

Theory Question 2:

“He performs those miracles for strangers.” The Godfather. (9)

I want to suggest that a fruitful way to think about the literature of diaspora is in

the context of wartime. Through this lens one can get at a multitude of axes of difference,

including race, gender, class, and sexuality. I’ll talk about The Godfather and its debts to

The Rise of David Levinsky and The Rise of Silas Lapham, as well as Kazuo Ishiguro’s

genetic dystopia, Never Let Me Go in relation to The Remains of the Day. I think each of

these texts hides behind a thematic storyline another narrative about the effects of

organization loyalty and honor, virtues difficult to uphold in the diaspora.

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In the preceding epigraph, the Godfather is speaking of his third and favorite son,

Michael, the one who is, like Aaron the Moor, hinged in such a way as to take nothing

and “everything [is] personal”, to wait for his moment to strike back. Michael has come

back from WWII decorated, written up in the magazines, and has enrolled himself

“without consulting anybody” at Dartmouth, studying to become a mathematics

professor.

He is also dating a “washed-out rag of a girl” Kay Adams, whose ancestry is

Revolutionary and whose religious affiliation is Protestant to Michael’s Roman

Catholicism. She is also a student at Dartmouth, and conspicuously at the wedding of

Constance, Michael’s sister, a college girl. So Kay is different from the other women in

the wedding by at least a factor of three: multi-generationally American, Protestant, and

college-bred. One might also add that she is very fair and thin. These differences signal

something about Michael, who as his father’s favorite is destined to inherit the family

business. As if this were a Shakespeare play, concerned with matters of succession, there

is a sense that all this hash of difference would make Kay seem unfit for the position of

future Corleone matriarch.

But this is a story about the Family as a corporate, business-oriented entity. And

there is something very significantly useful about Kay’s Protestantism, the novel’s catch-

all term for her portfolio (and the value) of difference. She waits for Michael three years

after he goes into hiding, even taking him back though he married (and was widowed)

someone else. In fact, the discussion that takes place regarding whether they will get

married centers around what religion the children will be, and how their religious

affiliation will be the basis for their Americanism. Michael explains--I want them to be

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American---professors, not like me) which sounds strange for an Ivy-Leaguer who is a

war hero: how much more does it take to be an American?

But there is that business of being Italian-American and Roman Catholic. If the

children could be Protestant, they’d be that much closer to being real Americans. But

what does it mean to be Protestant in the terms of the novel? To be Protestant means to

not be fighting internally, but externally: to fight on foreign shores rather than city streets

at home, as Sonny, Michael’s older brother, does. To be Protestant (that is, American)

means to be part of an imperialism that expands outwards rather than colonizing within

spaces it already occupies. In real estate terms, infill is less valuable than sprawl. Or in

terms of Arendt, the capital machine needs to expand outwards, and being a good,

genuine American is to be part of that expansion.

It’s no surprise, then, in terms of the novel’s positive alignment with Anglo-

American imperials values that The Godfather’s far-seeing vision alerts him to the

possibilities of Vegas, a Western promised land where people can refashion themselves

according to their talent rather than their stations. This accounting of talent, the narrative

allure of the New World, is what accounts for who lives and who dies: the Jack Woltzes

and Moe Greens of the East cannot make it in Vegas, but the Lucy Mancinis and Jules

Siegel do. Lucy is a shopgirl and unlike Sister Carrie or Gerty McDowell, the economy

of Las Vegas is such that she can make an honest living with herself. That’s but one

index of the utopic energy of this Western land. Moreover, there is redemption: Lucy gets

thin from exercise and dresses better, and she doesn’t have to have a boyfriend anymore,

which id that isn’t a new feminist moment, I don’t know what is. She meets someone,

who turns out to be a great surgeon on the outs with the medical community because he

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had the mercy and the guts to perform abortions. The novel takes the position that he

does the abortions so that women don’t have to get back-alley operations, but he is

blacklisted in any case and cannot get work anymore as a surgeon. Because ---is

responsible for Michael’s successful reconstructive surgery, the Corleones offer ---a

position in the new hospital they are putting up in Vegas, an opportunity that will

professionally redeem and remunerate the young doctor.

This adoption of talent—the doctor’s name sounds Jewish to me—means that the

practice that began with Tom Hagen continues. The tricky thing about diaspora is that

authenticity gets thin without a little counterexample to support it. Sonny as young boy

had brought home the orphaned Hagen, wandering about after his mother died with a

nasty eye infection, with nowhere to go, as Michael recounts to Kay. Tom keeps his name

“out of respect for his parents” but is otherwise made a member of the Family. To the

extent even that he is given the position of Consigliere, which is usually reserved for

someone who is full-bloodedly Sicilian, much less German-Irish. The Corleones are

referred to by other Families as the Irish Gang, which says something about how the

novel considers purity to work: being part-Irish is enough to make you Irish. Perhaps this

was some of Michael’s reasoning with Kay being Protestant: one American parent would

be enough.

The novel does a three-sixty by having Kay convert at the end to Roman

Catholicism, which Kay embraces with a fervor equaled only by Mama Corleone. But

even this religiosity is economic in thrust: Kay’s renewed consent to her marriage---she

leaves Michael after he has their brother-in-law executed, to her chagrin—is one in which

she renegotiates their original contract. Where Michael had wanted her for her

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Protestantism, she is now Roman Catholic. But everything else she brought as the freight

to her “Protestantism”, inventoried earlier, remains and is heritable property for their

children. Kay has called Michael’s bluff, for that inventory was exactly what was missing

from their clan makeup, and could not be found in the diaspora. For their Family to move

forward into that space of colonizer (of Vegas, of the late twentieth century, no less) they

needed to have those qualities that Kay Adams embodied.

In this, the novel is incredibly essentialist, suggesting that loyalty and honor might

be mental processes or intellectual attributes, but that there are reproductively-linked

traits of ethnicity that are property. It is for these reasons that Mama Corleone approves

of Kay, and would probably not approve of the girl that Michael married while he was in

exile in Sicily. In fact, I’ll advance the reading that Mama/Family had the new wife

assassinated. One of the old maidservants in the villa where Michael and ---lived,

Filomena, was an old friend of Mama. Moreover, Filomena had many years previously

participated in the incineration of an infant at its father’s behest, so the killing of a

pregnant woman would not necessarily be anathema to her. In addition, the novel had

already made clear its position on the unborn, so while Roman Catholic in orientation, the

novel’s direction towards the New modern World would suggest that in all particulars

such a killing would be imaginatively permissible. I think the utility of this theory is ore

to suggest what the novel imagines itself capable of saying about the adaptability of

diaspora organizations and their moral regimes than it is a micro-reading of what Italian

matriarchs are capable of. As a not so incidental side-note, Tom Hagen lashes out at Kay

that she made the perfect move on their erstwhile brother-in-law, getting him to trust her

so they could capture him. The novel asks us to consider in light of a narrative of

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American success story what it would mean to have the means if you’d just admit to the

wherewithal.

This is why the self-made Jack Woltz hails the milieu of David Levinsky and the

personality of Silas Lapham. He is a studio executive who is big in his world but unlike

the Godfather its’ not in friendships that he is rich, but rather in dollars. In David

Levinsky one gets ahead by friendship; his first big break came from someone

sympathetic to the manner of his mother’s death. Whereas in Silas Lapham, the big

industrialist has no friends so when his paint business becomes over-productive, there is

no one to help him with his (literally) burning house problems. Likewise, Woltz neither

elicits sympathy (in fact, unlike David he is an abuser and not a friend to women; where

Levinsky thought that some whores were the best people he’d met, the caricature that is

Woltz makes whores out of the innocent) nor has friends to help him. The Godfather’s

strike against this enemy depends on the fact that Woltz surrounds himself with people

who can be paid off, rather than people who have sworn their lives.

Speaking of Silas Lapham, this novel is a great way to think about how race and

class get tied together in diasporic literature. Penelope Lapham is dark and Japanese-

looking, but it is she unlike her English rose of a sister who captures the heart of the high-

born but ill-funded WASP scion. They eventually end up together when she is poor and

he is genteel, in part because she is willing to relinquish him once it’s obvious that she

can’t bring him a dowry. He’s an adventurer and they’re going to Brazil a la Hurston’s

Passing (if Hurston had a happy ending), where in a post Teddy Roosevelt world it will

be enough for them to be white and American.

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Then there’s Ishiguro;s super-sensitive treatment of class as a form of

racialization, insofar as class distinctions in Never Let Me Go signify those who get to

live, and those who die for them. The rich have innovated a way of staying healthy longer

by cloning themselves and then harvesting from the clones on as-needed basis. Like the

protagonist of The Remains of the Day, it takes a long while to figure out what’s going on

in Dodge is not good, and even longer to know what that malfunctioning is. It is

unnameable, unspeakable. Like the Nazis’ experiments on camp prisoners, or the

Japanese medical experiments on POW’s, there is a difficulty in naming the practice.

Essentially, “race” becomes a way to describe those people on whom one would perform

acts that are not acceptable to be performed on one’s own people, or those who are like

one’s own. In the diaspora context, the concept of “race” gets stretched and entangled in

the concept of class, which was once the demarcation for this same treatment: if one were

noble (that is to say, literate,) the recitation of a passage from the Bible could get you off

in court, whereas the opportunity was not even offered to the peasantry or artisanal class.

And because class is relatively less visible in the US, whiteness becomes a trickier index

of what constitutes a dominant or hegemonic condition.

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