Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows

Reading Vasily Grossman’s novel, Life and Fate, about the battle of Stalingrad and the lives of the people who fought there, was an outstanding experience for me.  I also was impressed by his World War II journalism collected – along with memoirs and reminiscences by others – in A writer at War with the Red Army. Grossman wrote Everything Flows after the rejection and confiscation of Life and Fate. All these books were published after his death.

Everything Flows is a difficult book to classify. It is structured like a novel, devoted to the experiences and opinions of Ivan Grigoryevitch, released into post-Stalin Russia after almost 30 years in the labor camps. It is not quite a memoir, although much of it reads like a transcription of Grossman’s observations. It is very much a polemic, an analysis of the sources of the cruelty of the Stalinist regime. He grieves for direction the Revolution took:

 Throughout its entire history, the Russian revolutionary movement included within it the most contradictory qualities. The genuine love for the people to be found in many Russian revolutionaries – men whose meekness and readiness to endure suffering has been seen before only in the early Christians – coexisted with a fierce contempt toward human suffering, an extreme veneration of abstract principles, and an implacable determination to destroy not only one’s enemies but also one’s comrades-in-arms, should their interpretation of  these principles differ in any slightest way from one’s own.

Grossman uses Ivan’s meetings with people after he leaves the camp as the thread for a series of stories, including a heart-breaking account of the famine in the Ukraine, when the regime confiscated all the grain and left the people to starve in the millions. When Ivan reflects, we get several chapters about Lenin and Stalin and the direction of Russian history.  Grossman believes that Lenin’s character foretold much of what was to come.

 It was never Lenin’s aim, in a dispute, to win his opponent over to his own views. He did not even truly address his opponent; the people for whom his words were intended were the witnesses to the dispute. Lenin’s aim was always to ridicule his opponent, to compromise him in the eyes of witnesses. These witnesses might be a few close friends, they might be an audience of a thousand conference delegates, or they might be the million readers of an article in a newspaper.

To the extent Everything Flows succeeds, it is because each story and section of analysis is compelling in its own right. Ivan Grigoryevitch is there to tell the story and make the points, and he does.

What Is Anarchism? Discuss.

Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

In response to my recent post about Emma Goldman’s essay on Anarchy, I have received a long comment from blogger Abandon TV, to which I would like to respond. You can see my post and his complete comment here.

Abandon TV begins with a statement of what he believes that Anarchism is:

I like to think of an ‘anarchic society’ as being the natural consequence of a society rejecting *the initiation of force* as a LEGITIMATE means to get things done. This does NOT mean an anarchic society would be magically free of all coercion or violence …. it just means that society has overwhelmingly rejected coercion and violence as a legitimate way for human beings to transact and interact with each other.

This definition is different from Emma Goldman’s. Goldman rejects property rights, laws and moral strictures, but she does not reject violence to demonstrate in a good cause: the propaganda of the deed. Goldman does not consider whether we need violence within an anarchic society to protect the weak and incompetent from the unconstrained actions of the strong. She is comfortable in the belief that freedom will produce only benign results. For example, when there is no private property, then by definition crimes against property cannot occur.

Abandon TV’s use of the expression “legitimate means” implies a system of rules under which actions are legitimate or not-legitimate, in other words, some implied constraints on action. The constraint may be on coercion but, like Goldman, he does not explain how rules are to be enforced, including the rule against coercion itself.

Now I’m willing to bet that you’d be prepared to debate me in an attempt to win me over. You might even be prepared to beg me to fund your scheme if it was really that important to you… but I bet you would NOT be prepared to *initiate force* against me, such as threatening me with violence …… or, if I still resisted, actually hiring armed thugs to drag me away from my family and lock me inside a cage for refusing to fund your scheme….

Resorting to coercion and violence to achieve one’s personal or political aims is, after all, the dictionary definition of terrorism. It is highly immoral. We all know this. We learn it in kindergarden “Don’t hit to get what you want… don’t steal to get what you want”

We did learn it in kindergarten, or even earlier. I also learned not to slurp with my straw in the bottom of the milk bottle. That restriction no longer has any force for me, but I still believe that it is wrong to steal just to get what I want – yet I might steal to protect myself or someone else. The restriction on stealing is not any more absolute than the do-not-slurp rule; it just has a different set point. However enforced, these rules come from some place.

Abandon TV equates personal violence – hiring armed thugs – with the violence of the state.

And obviously – in a moral sense – it makes no difference if you threatened me or kidnapped me *in person*, or if you hired some thugs dressed in matching blue costumes to do threaten or kidnap me *on your behalf*.

The “matching blue costumes” are the police or the military, acting on behalf of those who are in power, often with the support of the many who are not in power. Emma Goldman remarked this, saying that “the majority cannot reason; it has no judgment.” She was influenced by the Haymarket affair in Chicago in 1886, as I am influenced by the police riot at the Democratic National Convention, also in Chicago, in 1968. In both cases the police acted with the support of the political powers and the acquiescence of the public, with the police claiming to protect that public against still greater violence.

We see here the conflict between private action and public control. It’s an old story, so old that the Greeks told it. In Aeschylus’ play The Eumenides (“Furies”), after Orestes kills his mother he is pursued by the Furies. Their pursuit is often interpreted as his madness of guilt and grief over what he had done. That is not how Aeschylus resolved it, however. Orestes killed his mother as an act of necessary vengeance (she had killed his father, after all). His deed made him a matricide, a parent killer. Poor Orestes could not win. His acts were dictated by the gods, and the Eumenides also acted on behalf of the gods. Athena negotiated a settlement whereby in the future such difficult cases would be decided by the citizens of Athens, consulting together – in effect, a jury. Private vengeance, previously mandated by the gods, is replaced by control of such violence by the public, represented here by the citizens of Athens. This is generally regarded as progress.

It is almost impossibly difficult to establish fair social rules by which we can all live together, whether the dictating power is property, or religion, or government, or “the people” through some democratic process. After all, 15% of the population is left handed. If the 85% who are right handed decide that left-handedness must be eliminated, that would be the will of the majority – and it would be wrong. If it is so difficult to establish the standards for civil society, then the implied violence to enforce those rules is only part of a larger problem.

Abandon TV makes this very point when he points out that to choose those to make the laws is to choose coercion to enforce those laws. First the choice; then the violence.

One simply cannot ‘vote’ in a democracy, or *willingly* pay taxes, without advocating for coercion and violence be used against millions of other people to make them do things against their will and pay for things against their will….. advocating for coercion and violence to be used against others is what ‘voting’ means!

One does not ‘vote’ for a candidate or party to simply get into office. One ‘votes’ for a candidate or party to get into office and then impose various policies, laws and agendas onto everyone by force…. literally at gunpoint (disobey and they put you in a cage or just shoot you).

Like I said, anarchy is the natural consequence of rejecting *the initiation of force* as a legitimate way for anyone to behave in society.

When we reject force as a legitimate way to behave, what protects those who reject force from those who do not reject force? Emma Goldman does not explain; she believes that when we are freed from the restrictions of property, religion and government we will not have any reason not to behave well.

Abandon TV approaches this issue somewhat differently. He points out that the state is an abstraction that “the only thing that actually exists is PEOPLE.” Anarchic society does not reject rules or hierarchies, but it does reject violence. He says that it is the statist society which has no rules, only laws.

A law is not a rule. A law may indeed reflect a rule (including a moral rule), but it does not have to…. It *feels* like governments enforce those moral rules, but in reality governments maintain a VIOLENT MONOPOLY on the LEGAL right to VIOLATE those moral rules…… they grant themselves the legal right to steal (tax) and murder (wage war).

Abandon TV is a social and political libertarian. The rest of his comments are in praise of personal freedom and a condemnation of government when it restricts that freedom.

Here’s another observation….. except for where the state is involved, every transaction and interaction in our personal and business lives is ALREADY conducted in a state of anarchy. There is no authoritarian agency of coercion and violence dictating who we choose to have as friends, where we go for our holidays, what we wear, what we eat, who we marry, where we live, what career we have, what books we read, how we spend our weekends and so on. If any agency tried to dictate these things for you I’m sure you would be outraged and you’d protest.

I take his point, but the anarchic freedom he describes is not total, as Abandon TV will discover when he walks down the street naked or tries to marry his sister. He assumes some level of organization which makes it possible for us to eat and marry and choose a career, to go on holiday or read a book. We live in a complex world. We may not like it, but here is where we find ourselves. I am hungry. I go into the store which is well lighted (by whom?) and take money (from where?) to buy food which I assume is safe to eat. I want the freedom to do these things, but they represent very considerable constraints on the freedom of others who operate the power plant and issue the money and sell the food. Surely some means of coercion is implied by these constraints.

Abandon TV thinks, however, that government has no constructive role to play.

So what justification or benefit is there for a coercive and violent agency (such as a government) taking control, by force, of all the other aspects of our lives? (banking, currency, trade, transport, education, healthcare, welfare etc)

There is no justification and no benefit. Instead there is only chaos, destruction, war, misery, death, abuse, persecution, injustice, tyranny, hypocrisy, deceit, fraud, theft, violence and a great deal of confusion.

I wish I could believe that renouncing violence and removing the restrictions of property, religion, government and the use of force would lead us to the Promised Land, but I don’t. Imperfect as they are, our restrictions and the associated coercion have evolved over centuries of human experience as we all try to live together. We live within a system, but it is not immutable.

I think that anarchism is the power to say no. Anarchists say no to injustice, to property rights which benefit some at the expense of other, to war, to prison, to religious persecution. What each group of anarchists rejects derives from their historical experience. That is why there are so many different flavors of anarchist thought. Wikipedia lists many, from anarchic communism through anarcho-naturism and insurrectionary anarchism to platformism. In the rejection of conventional social and political arrangements, anarchism overlaps with utopian movements like the Oneida Perfectionists and the Shakers. The difference is that the utopians dreamed of – and in some cases built –a deliberately-designed alternative society. They opted out of what was and tried to construct something better. After they had said no, they said yes.

Rabbi Tarfon taught: “It is not your responsibility to finish the work [of perfecting the world],
but you are not free to desist from it either” Pirkei Avot

Attentat!

A drawing from Harper’s Weekly of Alexander Berkman attempting to assassinate Henry Clay Frick. Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

I have learned a new word: Attentat. While a dictionary definition might be “attack” or “attempt to attack”, Alexander Berkman used it to mean “propaganda by the deed”. When he both shot and stabbed Henry Clay Frick in Pittsburgh in 1892 he saw it as a noble act, a blow for freedom.

 Berkman rationalized that the assassination of Frick was not “to be considered as the taking of a life. A Revolutionist,” he said, “would rather perish t thousand times than to be guilty of what is ordinarily called murder. In truth, murder and Attentat are to be opposite terms. To remove a tyrant is an act of liberation, the giving of life and opportunity to an oppressed people.”

Sasha and Emma, Paul and Karen Avrich’s joint biography of Alexander “Sasha” Berkman and Emma Goldman is subtitled “An Anarchist Odyssey.” It certainly is. Both came from Russia as teen agers, met in the United States and devoted themselves to anarchist ideals. Not inclined to violence herself, Emma nevertheless supported Sasha before, during and after the deed: “I do not judge an act by its result but by its cause”. Frick survived the attentat and Sasha spent 14 years in prison; Emma would have been there too if the authorities could have established her complicity.

The strikers at Frick’s Homestead steel mill, although they had suffered greatly from Frick’s cruel tactics, reacted to Berkman with horror. Their plea for justice had relied for its power on their own non violence. Some of the other anarchists didn’t like it either. Benjamin Tucker commented,

 “As one member of the human race, I fully confess that I am more desirous of being saved from friends like Berkman, to whom my heart goes out, than from enemies like Frick, from whom my heart withdraws. The worst enemy of the human race is folly, and men like Berkman are its incarnation. It would be comparatively easy to dispose of the Fricks, if it were not for the Berkmans…. The hope of humanity lies in the avoidance of that revolution by force which the Berkmans are trying to precipitate.”

At the heart of anarchist philosophy was belief in freedom from authority, whether of the government or of the capitalist owners or of religious doctrine. Yet to strike a blow on behalf of others is to assert an authority, an authority based on purity of intent and correctness of opinion. The “propaganda by the deed” is meant to influence others, to assert control in the situation. Berkman never recognized this. He was the angry young man all his life, the pure thinker who knows that his actions are right. To act in violation of human law – for example, to plan to murder Henry Clay Frick and then attempt to do so – is to seek justice above the established law. This issue is faced by all of those who break the law out of conscience, including Thoreau and Gandhi and Martin Luther King. They set their judgment above the social judgment of their time. In their insistence on non-violence, however, they may have learned something from Sasha’s example.

Life and Fate, Part II

In the post about Part I of Vadisy Grossman’s long novel, Life and Fate, I commented that, although the Russians are fighting for national survival and the struggle has now centered on Stalingrad, many of Grossman’s characters recognize that personal survival still depends on staying on the right side of the Stalinist regime. Memories of the famine resulting from collectivization and grief for friends and family members executed or sent to the camps never fade completely.

This continues in Part II. Semyonov, a Russian soldier from Moscow, escapes from the Germans and hides out with peasants in the Ukraine. The Ukrainians remember:

 A low wailing hung over the village; the little children kept up a constant, barely audible whine as they crawled about like living skeletons…. The women went on searching for something to eat, but everything had already gone – nettles, acorns and linden leaves, uncured sheepskins, old bones….

Meanwhile the young men from the city went from house to house, hardly glancing at the dead and dying, searching cellars, digging holes in barns, prodding the ground with iron bars… They were searching for the grain hidden away by the kulaks.

…. One of them, a man with blue eyes and an accent just like Semyonov’s, had walked up to the corpse and said: ‘They’re an obstinate lot, these kulaks. They’d rather die than give in.’

An added trouble is the revival of anti-Semitism. Viktor, the scientist in Kazan, is recalled to Moscow where his important scientific advances are questioned because they “contradicted the Leninist view of the nature of matter.” Worse yet, Victor’s mother was Jewish; his Jewish associates can no longer work in his laboratory.

We experience the peak of murderous German hatred of the Jews in the passages where Grossman describes the construction of the gas chambers and the implementation of the final solution. He links the two expressions of anti-Semitism through the person of Obersturmbannfuhrer Liss, who appears several times in this Part II. Liss is a Gestapo officer and sees himself as a philosopher and scholar, studying the requirements for leadership in totalitarian ideology. Every statement Liss makes about the Fascist regime the Russians are fighting applies equally to Stalin. Interrogating an Old Bolshevik prisoner, he observes:

 Today you’re appalled by our hatred of the Jews. Tomorrow you may make use of our experience yourselves. And by the day after tomorrow we may be more tolerant again. I have been led by a great man down a long road. You too have been led by a great man; you too have travelled a long, difficult road.

And a little later –

 ‘Do you think the world looks on us [the Germans] with horror and on you with hope and love?” he asked. ‘No, the world looks on us both with the same horror!’

Subsequent to this exchange, Liss visits an extermination camp under construction.

 Liss was delighted to be entrusted with this mission. He was tired of the atmosphere in the camp, of constant dealings with men of a course, primitive mentality.

Liss’s hopes that his conscientious work will be recognized by his superiors. Then he can return to his real interest.

 He dreamed of returning to his research on important figures who had shown hostility towards National Socialism; of studying questions that, for all their complexity and cruelty, could at least be solved without the shedding of blood. Then he would smoke only two or three cigarettes a day and he would stop drinking. [He remembers the earlier discussion.] Not long ago, he had played a game of political chess with an old Russian Bolshevik; he had gone back home afterwards, fallen asleep without having to take any tablets and not woken up until nine in the morning.

Bloodless ideology is much more satisfying than the other kind. On this basis, Liss knows he is an enlightened man, not a “primitive mentality.”

Life and Fate, Part III.

Are we blue?

A certain blogger I love, Grandma Uncut, has a post-election, post-storm meditation about blue.

Thank you Grandma. Here is my response:

After eight years of second Bush trauma
And the crazy red primary drama,
We ask, Is it true?
Are we really now blue?
Yes! –red, white, and blue-black Obama.

Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

Which would you like, the personal Cleopatra or the political Cleopatra? I knew the personal one as a giggling teenager in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and in the movie by that name (Vivian Leigh, before she was Scarlett). I knew a mature, poetic Cleopatra from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Great fun, great drama, but certainly not one woman. “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety,” as the Bard said.

In Stacy Schiff’s biography of the Egyptian queen, Cleopatra, I detect a political Cleopatra. A descendant of Ptolemy and the Macedonian Greeks who apportioned out his empire after the death of Alexander the Great, Cleopatra was the successful ruler of an independent Egypt for 20 years. The conniving and scheming of which she has stood convicted these many centuries were the maneuvers of a ruler trying to hold onto her own. She succeeded for a substantial period in this time of civil wars interspersed with wars of conquest which were a smash and grab for power and treasure. In the end she lost not just her life, but the independence of Egypt and any possible future for her children in the Ptolemaic dynasty.

This book gives us Rome as seen from the other side of the Mediterranean, a nation determined to build an empire which would not be a federation of kingdoms and cultures like Alexander’s, but a set of dependencies, controlled by Rome. Last year when I read the Aeneid, I was appalled by the glorification of Rome. Telling the story of Aeneas’ escape from Troy to found the future Rome, the first part is modeled on the Odyssey (a man returning home) and the second part on the Iliad (battle and conquest). Whereas the Greeks fought for personal glory and for treasure, the proto-Romans under Aeneas fought to establish an empire which was still supposedly centuries in the future. All the mayhem was justified because Rome would bring peace and prosperity to all.

Cleopatra’s story and Cleopatra’s fate tell us something else. Schiff says,

If you were looking for a date for the beginning of the modern world, her [Cleopatra's] death would be the best to fix upon. With her she took both the four-hundred-year-old Roman Republic and the Hellenistic Age. Octavian would go on to effect one of the greatest bait and switches in history; he restored the Republic in all its glory and — as would be apparent within a decade or so — as  a monarchy.

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi – I loved these books. The first one is subtitled The Story of a Childhood, while Persepolis 2 tells the story of Satrapi’s teenage and young adult years. Born in Iran Satrapi  identified with her family and culture, but she was sent at 14 to continue her education in Austria. Her parents were apprehensive about the trouble she was likely to get into with an increasingly repressive regime. They were right to be apprehensive. Satrapi was rebellious and the monitors could whip you for showing too much hair or wearing the wrong color socks.

Initially Satrapi’s liberal parents welcomed the revolution. Down with the Shah! What came after was just as bad. They passed from an extreme of imposed secularism and corruption to an extreme of imposed religiosity and corruption. This is similar to the story told in Reading Lolita in Teheran, where the restrictions also increased, step by stop.

As you can see from the sample here, the Persepolis books are graphic novels. I used to be rather sniffy about this literary form — adult comic books — until I read the Age of Bronze series by Eric Shanower which brings the time of the Trojan War to life with his drawings of people and places. Satrapi’s illustrations depict the emotional truth of the events she experienced. As a child, she saw and felt as a child. As a teenager, she became something else.

My angry feminist comment: This is what happens when men define what women are and what they ought to be. Women must cover their hair and shroud their bodies because when men see these desirable objects, they are sexually aroused and that is sinful. Their own responsibility is nowhere considered. It is all the women’s fault and so they must be strictly controlled to prevent men from sinning. Poor weak men! As Majane Satrapi’s grandmother said, if God knew that women’s hair would cause so much sin, he should have made them bald.

The Belly of Paris

The Belly of Paris is Les Halles, the great food market celebrated by Emile Zola in this 1873 novel. The only previous book I have read by Zola is the more famous Nana. I liked this one better because — I was about to say –of the more realistic people and situations. That’s not quite it. Zola is called a realist, but he uses his very sensual descriptions to make emotional points. For example, when the old gossips get together to tittle tattle with each other they meet in the cheese market.

All around them the cheeses were stinking…. A parmesan added its aromatic tang to the thick, dull smell of the others…. Then came the strong-smelling cheeses…. and, finally, stronger than all the others, the olivets, wrapped in walnut leaves, like the carcasses of animals which peasants cover with branches as they lie rotting in the hedgerow under the blazing sun.

Florent, an idealistic revolutionary, has escaped from his unjust imprisonment on Cayenne (Devils Island) and returned to Paris where he works in Les Halles and plans the downfall of the very Bourgeois government. He knows the sumptuous market is not the place for him. In his very difficult life he has become thin and he identifies with the thin people. Les Halles is the place of supply for the fat people, and the fat people include his half brother, his sister-in-law and all the people who mock his ideals. Florent is not eloquent but his artist friend is.

Claude shook his fist at them. He was exasperated by all this joyousness in the streets and on the rooftops. He cursed the Fat people, for they had won. All around he could see nothing but Fat people, increasing ins size, bursting with health, greeting another day of eating and digesting.

The sadness of the ending is not just that Florent’s impractical schemes have failed. The sadness is that the fat people prefer eating and drinking to the pursuit of justice.

Thank you, Bill

Journalist William Greider is my little brother, and I am his warm supporter and affectionate critic.

His article in the new issue of The Nation feels my pain and makes me proud, proud that someone I love and respect has articulated what I have been fuzzily groping toward for several years now.

When Bush won in 2000 I was disgusted; I believed he had stolen the election. When he won again in 2004 I was disgusted again. Yes, he had really won this time, but by playing on our fears. During all those eight years I grieved at the trashing of the public welfare but hoped that better times were coming.

Obama fed that hope and I greeted his victory in 2008 and inauguration  the following January with exhilaration. It was good to elect our first black President, although it would also have been good to have elected our first female President. My joy came from the belief that we were now back on track to build an America based on shared values and the equal worth of every individual.

Bill has learned that it’s not working out that way:

I asked an old friend what she makes of the current mess in Washington. “Whatever the issue, the rich guys win,” she responded.

As Bill points out, the system seeks excess:

What the capitalist system wants is more — more wealth, more freedom to do whatever it wishes. This has always been its instinct, unless government intervened to stop it.

You may disagree. You may say that simple survival instincts will keep the major corporate interests from going so far that they destroy the system. Our experience — as recently as two years ago  — does not support this. When you are on a big ship, you believe you are immune to problems like icebergs and, should you encounter one, you have your own lifeboat on reserve. This attitude disparages a culture that thinks we are all in it together.

In Collapse, his book about the extinction of once-successful societies, Jared Diamond shows how the elite can go on denuding resources until no one can survive. The chiefs on Easter Island always wanted more statues, even though it was clear the practice could not continue They knew they were superior and they felt secure, especially because they were making more statues. They were wrong, of course and, when they went down, they took everyone else with them. Diamond also asks why, conversely, a society may be willing to pay a great deal to ensure the security of all. In the Netherlands, social and political opinion supports a very expensive system of sea walls. They know that when the sea comes in, they will all drown.

We are living behind sea walls that our elites no longer wish to maintain. Our father (Bill’s and mine) worked for one company all his life and retired on his Social Security and a modest pension. My husband and I have our Social Security, he has a small pension, and we have some other resources. Politicians act as if Social Security were nothing, an insignificant amount of money to the individual. Maybe it is minor if you are making big bucks and big bonuses and are used to living that way. We held moderately-paying middle class jobs. In retirement our two Social Securities are enough so that, even without other resources, two people can live modestly in a paid-for house — but only if they have medical insurance.

I don’t know if our present way of life will be available to our children. Right now, they count on their own educations and smarts and careers to see them through and to educate their own children for similar survival. I hope it works for them; if not they’ll have to figure it out themselves because I certainly won’t be here to tell them it doesn’t have to be that way.

So I love Bill. He doesn’t think it has to be that way either. After suggesting what you can do, now,

Somewhere in all these activities, people can find fulfilling purpose again and gradually build a new politics. Don’t wait for Barack Obama to send instructions.

Mark Twain, The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) is Mark Twain’s first novel. He and Charles Dudley Warner wrote it together after an argument in 1872 about “the current state of popular fiction.” Their wives were involved also, sitting in on nightly reviews of the joint product. It reads like that: too many characters, too many plot lines, developments that don’t develop, odd changes in tone.

The book is a blend of the personal and the political. Twain had spent time in Washington, D.C. and he observed well. It pains me to read his descriptions of all the nice little tricks of corruption, as a new Congress gathers in 2011, making equally pious noises.

It is only for the politics that the book is worth reading today. That said, my attention was caught by two female characters. Ruth, the daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker family desires to study medicine and become independent. Laura, the beautiful adopted daughter of a land-poor Missouri family, fails at love, becomes a ruthless lobbyist and, eventually, murders her former lover. These characters represent the authors’ attempt to understand feminism. It is good that they tried, but sad that they failed.

Here is Ruth, arguing for her medical education:

I want to be something, to make myself something, to do something. Why should I rust, and be stupid, and sit in inaction because I am a girl? What would happen to me if thee should lose thy property and die? What one useful thing could I do for a living, for the support of mother and the children? And if I had a fortune, would thee want me to lead a useless life?

Sounds right to me, but the authors undermine her case. She begins the course, decides she needs more “general culture’ (do male medical students require that?), goes off to an academy, turns into a party girl, comes back to study and labor “beyond her strength” in a hospital, and almost dies of a fever before recognizing her own true love. Arrrggghhh!

Laura is beautiful and true-hearted, yet rendered insecure by the loss of her parents in a steamboat accident. She is wooed by a dastardly Confederate officer, then abandoned after a false marriage. The reaction is a typical 19th-century illness and a change in her nature.

Laura was ill for a long time, but she recovered; she had that resolution in her that could conquer death almost. And with her health came back her beauty, and an added fascination, a something that might be mistaken for sadness. Is there a beauty in the knowledge of evil, a beauty that shines out in the face of a person whose inward life is transformed by some terrible experience? Is the pathos in the eyes of the Beatrice Cenci from her guilt or her innocence?

Laura not was much changed. The lovely woman had a devil in her heart. That was all.

Here is a woman who managed to be both victim (“terrible experience”) and perpetrator (“devil in her heart”) and we know what must be ahead for her. Still and all, it is great fun when she takes on the Congress and lobbies on behalf of the family land and fortunes. I was sorry to see her lose, then end up in prison, only to prevail after some wonderfully cynical trial scenes. A survivor all the way, until the authors — not knowing what else to do with her — kill her off.

Twain and Dudley have glimpsed the situation. They see that Ruth is reasonable to desire education and independence. But they know in their hearts that she should belong to some man. They grudgingly admire the Laura who is hell-on-wheels as a lobbyist and manipulator. But they know that evil beauty is dangerous and must not be allowed to live.