The GW Digital Humanities Institute Defends Global Networks

"Yay #GWDH17! Memorable day 
of #Global #Chaucers & #Shakespeares: 
archives, ethics, translation, embodied 
poetics, motion X cultures @GWDHI"

@JonathanHsy

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The Ban

Do we send someone to push through protestors and fight the TSA to get our transnational scholars to the conference? Could we even get anywhere close? Would there still be a conference? These were all serious questions our conference committee (Jonathan Hsy, Alexa Huang, Haylie Swenson, and myself) were forced to consider late one January evening. The Muslim Ban had been announced earlier in the day, halting transport from seven countries but also slowing, stopping, and confusing travel of all varieties of people in the United States. Trump had signed the executive order with immediate effect but few knew exactly what to do or how to handle the number of situations with uncertain standings and outcomes. In response to the Ban and its damaging effects, protestors had gathered at major airports. What made the event stranger to me was that I was caught in the middle of it without knowing exactly what "it" was. In the days immediately prior, I had legally changed my name and gender marker at a series of government agencies across Illinois. During these personal life changes I was busy working on the conference website and following up with hotels for the various guests. Between getting my bags packed, grabbing food on way to the airport, then pushing through security, I had not given much to any attention to what was going on politically. I knew that Trump had signed a new executive order that was making a lot of people upset, but as in the campaign, the horrible news had all began to blend together. It was entirely possible some of this was bleed over from the news from the last few days of executive orders. It was not. 

The first sign that something was going on occurred when I was going through security. While I'm no stranger to strange and unnecessary interrogation from TSA agents on account of being transgender, this time I was being grilled not on who I was but where I was going and why. I was going home I told them. I live in Connecticut. Yes, I'm aware that my flight is going to Boston. Flights to Boston are three to four times cheaper than flights to Hartford, CT. Yes, that is outrageous. Yes, I do think it is a small airport in Hartford. Thank you, I am looking forward to seeing my family. No comment on whether or not I will have a good night. Once I got through to the other side of the TSA, I took a seat and opened my e-mail. Another urgent request for the website. As I paid for internet (the free 30 min was hardly enough to go through my e-mail and make replies) and got to work. After I made the changes, I turned on social media. Suddenly my unusual interrogation by the TSA agent began to make more sense. As I began to understand the gravity and widespread impact the Muslim Ban was successfully having I began contacting the other conference organizers. Over the night and for the next weeks were would monitor the situation closely. As stays were assert and the courts finally halting the ban for the time being, we began to be more cautiously hopeful that at very least the conference would still be occurring. Still, contingent plans had to been written up and a series of terrible scenerios imagined as we tried to prepare for the fallout our government's actions would have on our work and the intellectual community at large.

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The Global Community

Approaching the date, the significance of our Global Chaucer and Shakespeare conference took on a larger and more pressing significance. As the U.S. government warred with the Justice Department and the public over borders, the GW Digital Humanities Conference became living evidence on the importance of transnational networks that resisted, span, and destabilized borders. While most of the conference was carried out in English, once all the organizers and invited speakers were collected in the GW Gelman Library, our community consisted of over a half dozen nationalities and even more language groups, including a few dead languages. Counting those who participated in the conference online via live-tweeting (#GWDH17) the number of countries and language present cannot be readily tallied. What arouse in the subsequent conversations was not only a sharing of distinct cultural locations but a mutual sense of transnationalism. Michael Saenger interwove stories of his travels between the U.S. and England throughout the day's entertainment. Eve Salisbury discussed what it meant to teach students and work with speakers along the border of the United States and Canada. As borders become less permeable, the ability to slip into Canada to take a shortcut to the medieval conference in Kalamazoo, Michigan, becomes more perilous. Indeed, in the wake of the recent Ban and shift toward white nationalism in the U.S. government, boycotts of U.S. hosted international conferences are being planned. The American academics at the conference applaud the activism and wonder what effects such boycotts will have on these future conferences. For this weekend, however, we were all together to consider and plan how to use transnational technologies and humanities to build up global communities even as institutions assert greater divisions and borders.

Among the language groups in active use in the conference was American Sign Language (ASL) as translators and speakers addressed the audience in a variety of modes. Following the question of access, as well as Carol Robinson's discussion of "Chaucer and Shakespeare in the Deaf World: Transcriptions and Interpretations," Jill Bradbury added insights on how to make literatures like Chaucer and Shakespeare accessible to a wider range of audiences, especially among the Deaf community. Key to this discussion was the dialects and performances of sign language in different versions of Shakespeare. Those who attend to the American Sign Language translations the words being verbally spoken on stage will discover how much they add to and define the performance. When Shakespeare is done in part or entirely in ASL the plays take on new ranges of expression and meaning. ASL Shakespeare continually builds on the combined talents of performer and translator. Robinson affirmed how her students worked at the intersection of translation and adaption when creating American Sign Language versions of Chaucer's The Wife of Bath. Because ASL relies on embodied cues, each translation carries significant bonds with the performance. Certain gestures and facial expressions make the signs clearer or add further meaning. As a result, another person telling the same story in ASL would likely end up creating their own adaptation of the performance even as they stayed faithful to the same text. Indeed, when the conference broke for food, the conversation continued. I got to speak with Katherine Schaap Williams over salad and wraps on how disability and diverse embodiments interpenetrate all our global networks. While languages and codes shift, technologies are replaced by newer models, from medieval to modern society, history continues to play out the dialectical battle of access and boundaries. Out of this arouse a shared sense of the pressing need to be conversant in multiples historical eras, networks, and modes of communication.

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What a Transnational 

Chaucer and Shakespeare

Mean Here & Now

Following the insights from the World Shakespeare Bibliography Online (Laura Estill) on "What's In and What's Out," The Global Shakespeare Project (Alexa Huang) shared the roundtable with the Global Chaucer Project (Candance Barrington and Jonathan Hsy)resulting in some good-spirited competition and a sincere collaboration in asserting the transnationalism of these key literary figures. The entries in the Global Chaucer Project attest that the Canterbury Tales did not only travel across London but across Argentina and Brazil. Shakespeare not only spoke English and French but Portuguese and Spanish in Central and South American Dialects. By allowing Chaucer to become provincial in China or Russia, at home in their language and culture, his words become transnational. Of course, the challenge of curating such archives is determining "what is in and what is out." For Global Chaucer, this has more to do with labor and feasibility. In general, explained the directors, they do not say, "no." What they are more likely to say is, "how?" or "can you help get this done?" As a result, contributors take a hand in constructing the archive and not merely adding content to it. On the other side, Global Shakespeare admitted that due to feasibility issues, they are forced to be more limiting in what they will host. So many performances and adaptations of Shakespeare are made every year that archiving all of it with the limited workers and technology available would bring the network to a stand still. As a result, Global Shakespeare requires a performance to be released on television or film and available on an accessible recording. After all, said Global Shakespeare, there are other sites currently at work documenting and archiving other forms of performance. One archive does not need to do it all. In the end, the good is better than the perfect because it effects more change. By providing a growing range of editions for readers of Chaucer and Shakespeare to explore, more global adaptation, reading, and community will be produced by those who follow these authors as they migrate and find refuge around the world.

The roundtable concluded on a thread began in the insights of Fundación Shakespeare Argentina (Mercedes de la Torre and Carlos A. Drocchi), and the featured speaker and translator, José Francisco Botelho, who explored how Chaucer and Shakespeare became Brazilian in the process of making Portuguese editions of their works. For instance, common brown birds like larks do not mean the same thing in Brazil as they do in England, so other birds are named. The meaning of a play or the Canterbury Tales stays the same, says Botelho, only by changing some of the details. A lark becomes unusual and foreign if used in a Brazilian context. A common brown bird from Brazil on the other hand gives a sense of people on pilgrimage not too far from home. As a result, Canterbury begins to feel a bit more like it is located in some out of the way place in South America. Chaucer begins walking out of London and may find himself listening to birds and walking over a stream in Brazil. As a translator, Botelho finds himself having to make more alterations or additions to the text in Shakespeare plays because of their genre as a performance text. Consideration has to be given as to how actors might interpret the lines to make the most out of them for a local Brazilian audience. As much as he could, the translator would stick with a direct translation but often enough the meanings didn't have the same one to one connection as the words. Some direct translations would require a wider understanding of English culture, environment, and history in order to make full sense of them. These demands are less problematic in written texts such as Chaucer's. In Shakespeare's plays this additional historical context can be clunky. These changes were important, explained Botelho, "because jokes aren't funny if you need a footnote to explain them." 

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Thank You GW Digital Humanities

The Global Chaucer and Shakespeare Conference was a bitter sweet event not only because of its resistance to the wider U.S. political position but also because it signaled the last event Haylie Swenson and myself would be organizing for the GW DH Institute and GW in general. Both of us will be finishing our Ph.D's and moving on to other pastures by the end of the year. Speaking on our behalf, we are grateful for the fellowship of directors Jonathan Hsy and Alexa Huang, as well as the wider network of scholars, translators, and digital humanities the Institute has allowed us to engage as members. Moving forward, we will remain a part of the DH Institute's wider network but after this academic year will be less involved on the day to day work. Too often the value of day to day work is underrated and remembered only in recollection. Our heads are down and focused on the work in front of us. A lot happens over computers, skype meetings, and sitting around an Indian restaurant with invited guest. Personally, I'm grateful for the role each of those moments had in us laying the foundations of an excellent Institute, some cutting edge conferences, and in building up movements of resistance, reform, and revolution. Thank GW DH and let's keep this going. The work isn't done yet!

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Stories of Saline: Gender Fluid Love in Twelfth Night

"Water is the menstruum of the world"

Michael Sendivogius 1566-1636

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The following is a transcript of a talk on SALINE 

from the Gender Matters Conference at DePaul University 

on April 12th, 2013. 

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Liquid Friendships

It’s so nice being (back) in Chicago where the water doesn’t smell. There is a sense that comes from traveling and living abroad that gives one an appreciation of the chemical diversity of water. Washington DC was a former swamp and its water remembers. Hawaii has sweet water that lingers in the nose with a fragrant greenness. Boston has very business-like water. New York water doesn’t give a shit. In them all, I can taste the material personalities that flow through the geography and its people. The story of the human species is a long love-affair between a primate and water. Our densest population centers and our most magnificent industrial works gravitate around water-sources. And as my aquatic pallet reveals, there is much more to water than H20.

Water is defined by the things floating in it. It’s what gives water it’s taste or apparent lack of it. Pure H20 is incredibly rare and very difficult to produce. It’s uses are limited, as any living thing that drank it in would find themselves seized by convulsion, shock and sickness as the pure water actually sucked all the minerals out of the body. This heavy water has one primary use: the production and cooling of nuclear materials. Thus, despite our fantasies and phobias, we actually don’t want perfectly pure water; it’s too lonely and anti-social for our interests.

We like water because of what appears to give water its life: its capaciousness for friendship. It invites things into it. Its most common and perhaps favorite partner is easy to imagine for anyone who is an avid swimmer. On this planet, it’s hard to find water not arm and army with its best friend salt; and for good reason.

Salt makes things more themselves, a cook friend once told me. It makes meat meatier, vegies vegier. Salt infuses and slows us down. It enhances flavor and it preserves. It raises our blood pressure and in solutions it can hydrate. It sticks to our butts when we lay on the beach and it crusts our hair as we soak in the ocean. It's on our glasses as we drink our summer drinks. It's on our meat as we grill under the evening sun. We kill for it. Saline is medical. It’s political. It’s culinary. It drowns and it washes away civilizations.

The ocean, a giant saline basin, thus serves as the spring and the graveyard for life-system upon life-system. If water obsessively relates and seeks to cut out new passages, salt emphasizes and remembers, highlights and preserves. Salt holds onto water and that's one of the many reasons we find it in saline solutions that are designed to hydrate us. For those who have lost a lot of blood or water, taking in salt water allows us to hold on to the water when the solution gets into our veins. 

Saline performs the simultaneous function of holding fast and keeping things together and spreading out and integrating with the world. It is hardly surprising then that sailors are famous for their songs and their stories. For those that listen to the sound of the waves, the creeping of the tides, the drizzle of ocean spray, and the murmurs of water apparently at rest, (as with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's upcoming Stories of Stone) Saline is full of tales to tell.

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Storied Oceans

Across the Ages

On one dark night in Oahu, away from the light pollution of tourist traps and hotels, my partner and I sat in her car watching the stars slowly appear over the jet black ocean. We could make out the changing shape of the waves as mountains of water and foam raised up and fell into valleys, creating a dancing and inconstant horizon of stars as its shapes cut them off from our sight. It was like the ocean was waging war against the sky. Into this deep and ancient conversation we waded. It was my first time swimming since my transition. As the salt-water sucked the heat from my ribs as it washed over my bikini, I became elated. 

Standing still was impossible but I tried to at least quiet my motions so I could listen to it as it prodded, explored, and caressed my body like an aggressively curious friend. Water is defined by what is in it. That night, I had never before felt more feminine; more in touch with a long and expansive history of femininity. The saline that soaked through my skin, coated my hair and which got breathed into my lungs in a thousand little droplets had once ran through and touched billions of my sisters of so many species, peoples and gender formations. The story of woman is one the sea has been telling for millennia. From Venus, to Viola, to me.

The first book of the Torah and the first book of the metamorphoses share a common feature: out of chaos, when the first words are spoken and things begin to form, we are told they are carried across an expanse of dark water. From this all things came: sea-creatures, whales, dinosaurs, civilization. From the sea-foam Venus was birthed and took one of her names. In turn, her daughter-son, the progeny of Mercury and Venus, the dawn-star and the dust-star, the god of transitions and the goddess of gender, Hermes and Aphrodite, took the name Hermaphroditus. Ovid tells us how as a youth, the child wandered in the wild alone and came upon a pool. Descending into it, he was grappled by the waters dangerous friends, the material agency of the water nymph which dissolved into the youth’s body until they became one. Rising from the waters, the child was a boy become a woman, both masculine and feminine, and yet neither.

The transformative powers of saline were remembered and hallowed throughout the medieval period. Recorded and commented on by alchemists such as Michael Sendivogus, they believed water to be the source of all life and all forms. Preserving the medical texts of Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen until the early modern period, these early scientists and medical doctors believed that all bodies were defined by four elements & four humors. The human body itself was not fundamentally divided into races or sexes, but existed in a competing balance of fluids that in different ratios changed skin color, temper, and sexual characteristics. 

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Changing Waterscapes
in Shakespeare's England

A manly man had the right amount of fire & earth, he was hot and dry. A woman was a body that literally cook in the womb long enough; thus women were cold and wet. Because these differences are matters of degrees and material balances, however, a woman could theoretically become a man with extreme effort and legal, scientific & literary accounts evidence that this occurred intermittently for hundreds of years. Perhaps more dangerously for early modern London, was that men, sufficiently wet, such as by a life at sea, could become feminized. 

Early Modernists & eco-theorists Steve Mentz and Lowell Duckert demonstrate how vital water-scapes were not only to the cultural imaginary of Shakespeare’s London but to the materiality reality of the stage. Theater presented enough inconstant forms to give the most sensual Reformation preacher, like William Prynne, enough anxiety over the categories of being so as to go write a book-length treaty on the Unlovilness of Love-locks where he worries that the wearing of long-hair, extensions, and wigs, such as found both on and off the stage in London, had “hermaphrodit’d” English manhood. 

It is critical to understand, however, that this is more than simply concerns over performance and the play of signifiers. Deconstruction alone will not give you the keys to unlock this Puritan’s complaints. Rather, Prynne was a sensible early modern bio-chemist. Hair, as it was believed was the result of heat and dryness leaving the body; that is why we have hair, he said, in places that are often the warmest: the arm pits, the pelvis and the head. Hair, chemically, it was believed, was the crusty “excrement” of the watery brain, itself merely a giant radiator. As a result, long hair, literally was a sign that a body had lost the defining heat and dryness that made it male and put it on the course to wet womanly coolness.

What we see then on Shakespeare’s stage when the young boy playing Viola puts on his wig and performs a transfigured body, this is more than illusion, but cutting edge humoral theory at work. The technologies of the stage materially, according to the science of the day, metamorphosed the bodies of the actors. When gender was not merely what was between your legs but what formed the whole assemblage of elements that made you, the prosthetic hair, especially doused in water, such as would have been in the opening scene of Twelfth Night, performed the wonder of making a boy into a woman, of literally and literality recreating the birth of Hermaphroditus. The men of London were being hermaphrodit’d indeed! 

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Inundated Bodies
in Twelfth Night

“Be my aid for such a disguise as haply shall become the form of my intent” the soaking wet Viola instructs her fellow cast away as they climb from the sea-coast, their bodies inundated with saline (1.1.55-58). Her twin brother lost at sea, Viola, by altering her hair, adding a wig, fuses their identities and bodies as Salmacis the water-nymph had with Hermaphroditus. Viola takes on a new name and identifies as a eunuch; another kind of scientifically, medically feminized body. 

Becoming the servant of Orsino, she listens as he swears that as a man he could consume the whole ocean (the material & symbolic fountainhead of women), until Viola interjects that another body might do so as well or better, making suggestive allusions to his transfigured state as a child of sea-travel and the sea-foam, Hermes and Aphrodite, masculinity and femininity. When Viola lays herself bare to Orsino and he takes her as his wife, we do not get an easily resolution of genders. 

Once transformed, gender will forever remain inconstant and in motion, however material it may remain. While her lord begs that she might change into her womanly attire, Viola begs that they are currently lost to her and she must remain in her mixed gendered state for the time being. Orsino, in response, pats her on the back and confesses that as she is a man, she shall be his companion, and as she is a woman, she shall be his “fancy’s queen.” 

Seeing the narcissistic game Orsino played with Olvia, staring at her as though she was a pool of water, reflecting back only his image and imaginings, we might understand why Viola prefers to remain the embodiment of choppy, mixed, impure water; to hold onto his friendship, and her own manhood, just as water holds onto salt in a saline solution. Not only a kind of early modern feminist, but science as well. Shakespeare, through the sailor and mixed body of Viola, dressed in her long soggy prosthetic love-locks presented to his audience a vision of London’s gender: somewhere at sea between masculinity and femininity, using its powers of dynamism, friendship, preservation and story to rise from the sea as a nation.

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Alchemic Waters
and Trans Bodies

Only a few hundred years later, across less time and space than the ocean carried the stories of Ovid to Shakespeare’s London, I emerged from the ocean in Oahu. The salt-water kissing my skin and crusting in my hair, I lay out on a blanket under the stars with my partner. Feeling the saline sting my lungs, I dream of Venus, Hermaphroditus, and Viola. Salt-water had transformed their bodies and their gender. One day, it might transform mine in new and innovative ways. 

Saline implants remain a popular material for breast augmentation. Literally packaged as kinds of salt-water-balloons,  they are surgically placed into the chest, under the muscle, raising and forming the breasts. This material metamorphosis continues to resonate with women and femininity across time and space. The very salt-water that fills them and filled my gendered body, may have once passed through Ovid’s bathwater or been splashed on the actor that play Viola on Shakespeare’s stage, may even be somehow related to the water dripping off my body as I lay there on the beach.

Water is defined by what’s in it. Salt floats in our the cycle of waters-life, so does gender, so do the trans and transformed bodies of god, mortal, Greek, English, and American. Saline forms not only the meeting place of our friendship, but the very material and language by which we speak and related to one another. In human speech, we form myths, poems, plays, alchemical treatises, surgical procedures, anecdotes, conference papers. The stories told by Saline are however even more manifold because of their inhumanity, and yet they are nonetheless gendered. If gender is a line of flight and a way of relation, then saline follows femininity in ways we may not yet be able to imagine. Gender embodies; Gender transforms; Gender preserves; Gender flows; Gender speaks; and Gender matters.

Kids From Yesterday, Today: Shakespeare & New Moon

"You only live forever in the lights you make

When we were young we used to say

That you only hear the music when your heart begins to break

Now we are the kids from yesterday, today"

Danger Days, MCR

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Working in trans, queer, and disability theory in the field of medieval literature, I have found myself compulsively seeking what Eve Sedgwick calls "reparative readings" of rejected persons, narratives, cultures, and even time periods. I have come to firmly believe that a smart reader makes a book smarter. While Twilight has been a public success, it remains an abject or guilty pleasure for many serious academics. In many respects, however, the things that attract readers to Twilight queerly reflect much of the allure of medieval literature; including shared relations to time, conflicts and magical realisms. Pulling Twilight and Medieval-Early Modern Literature together becomes not only a queer project of appropriating from the mainline but a medieval project of messing with the archive. Enjoy!

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As I continue to read forward through the Twilight Saga, I keep getting pulled backward towards childhood and beyond, to ages that I don't remember and cannot reach without the aid of another; in this case, Shakespeare. Engaging with the English playwrights sonnet sequence in the context of queer embodiments, Aranye Fradenburg has invited me, through her contribution to Shakesqueer, "Momma's Boys," into a meditation on Power, Instability and Absence, which Resonates with my reading of the second book in the Twilight Saga, New Moon.

If in the Teen and 'Tween (or Middle) Ages we are stuck between reaching to exercise our own agency and being supervised or dominated by a parental figure, then Childhood or Early/Pre-M(e) Ages may be defined by an anxiety over the loss or impending loss of the Parent/Dom/Love-Object. In New Moon, Bella receives what many of her readers may have wished for her in the first book, an escape from her Vampire-stalker, Edward. The sudden loss is however shattering to her pysche and alters her liveliness. Likewise, as Fradenburg notes, Shakespeare's sonnets are steeped in the anxiety for a lost care-giver and lover, which has in turn, become imprinted on the childish poet.

The description and marketing of Twilight has struck an ironic chord between the youth market and their "mothers." While I will abstain from defining the gender parameters of the book's readership so starkly, I will agree that the book functions within a logic of (managing/engaging) childishness. Stephenie Meyer, Twilight's author, admits to writing the book "with one kid on my knee and another at my feet." Shakespeare too freely directs his sonnets here to a "youth" and there to a "dark lady" which is simultaneously casts as both lover and mother. What comes from the loss of our vampire, our domme, our lady at a tender age?

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"Many of my students" writes Fradenburg on Shakespeare's Sonnets, "find Will childish and narcissistic (he wines endlessly, he should get over it, he's a loser). We are often not comfortable when we see the infantile in the grown-up. But I argue that is exactly the view the Sonnet's permit" (F 321). Certainly Shakespeare appears very locked, compelled, out of (self) control in the Sonnets. Yet, is this so surprising? If many of them are about Love and Time/Aging, then are we not exactly situated among things which appear by definition to challenge our self-governance? Eros and Thanatos, well before Freud, are marked as checking the Will with powers outside of himself/itself.

Those that give us Life and those that give us Death, are not so easy to distinguish. Feeling with the childish Will, Fradenburg admits on one side (such as in Sonnet 110), "How could we not fall in love with those who give us life -- as we seek in turn to vivify those we love?" (325); and on the other (such as in Sonnet 35).  "Attachment happens whether or not children are well treated. Abused kids often defend their parents and fear being taken from them. Attachment may ensure survival, but... it is not designed to make us happy" (324). As those familiar with Sub/Dom or Age play, a Sub/Little may most love their Dom/Big when they are disciplining them.

Such a binding together of the self and the other, wherein the absence of one may mean the dissolution of the other, can have tragic consequences, as the Sonnets demonstrate. Shakespeare's Sonnet 143, which Fradenburg uses to introduce her essay, concludes with a desire for the absent mother to return so as to silence the desire/life of the infant: "Turn back to me, / and play the mother's part, kiss me, be kind: / So will I pray that thou mayst have thy Will / if thou turn back, and my loud crying still" (Sonnet 143). There is a desire for the absent thing which can grow into a desire for absence itself. The depart inspire an uncontrollable feeling of being "parted" oneself, and that the remains of your life are no longer sustainable. In this case, the attainment of the beloved or else destruction (or both) seem to become two overwhelming trajectories. One cannot help but hear in this resonance, the plot and words of Romeo and Juliet, which begins Meyer's second book.

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"These violent delights have violent ends / and in their triumph die, like fire and powder, / which, as they kiss, consume," are the lines from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet that open New Moon (II. VI). The book itself becomes structured along the lines of the play of these foolish children that cannot seem to wait, with the exile of the beloved (Edward/Romeo), opening up an opportunity for the alternative suitor (Jacob/Paris) to come in and offer up a more sustainable lifestyle, but which in the eyes of the lover (Bella/Juliet) is such an overwhelming loss that she contemplates and even feigns suicide (via jumping off a cliff/drugging), which is mistranslated to the absent lover by an unreliable source (Balthasar/Roselie), compelling the lover to attempt to take his life (via suicide by cop/poisoning). 

While this is on one hand, perhaps, a reductive allegorical reading of New Moon, it is openly invited by the book. The play is referenced throughout the book, with Bella reading it in school and at home, as she fawns over Edward; and Bella goes as far as to call Jacob her "Paris," a point which Meyer underlines by making that the chapter title.

Beyond the obvious, however, and bringing in Fradenburg's reading of Shakespeare as childish, we might find resonance between the Sub/Child author of the Sonnets and Bella. This consuming desire for the Powerful Dom/Parent, whether present or absent, is consistently marked by tradition as "inappropriate," writes Fradenburg, "for someone thirty years older [or in Bella's case, Edward is nearly 100 years older], thirty years younger [or 100 years younger]. The kind of love that makes a fool, a pervert, a stalker out of you" (F 317). The love certainly seems to make a stalker out of Edward (who even watches her while she sleeps), and consistently makes a fool out of Bella (so much it can be hard to read).

One of the central things which propel and participate in Bella's madness/foolishness/childishness during Edward's absence and removal of domination, is that he has become so inscribed in her psyche/being that she hears a phantom of his voice speaking to her. "Sonnets are about the way others live in our minds" writes Fradenburg, and perhaps Edward's infamous Lullaby for Bella, which he sings for her and which she replays, functions in a similar way after he is gone; "if you are alive in my mind -- or, rather, if that is where I have to talk to you, you are probably not around. But this is not just about controlling the locomotions of the other by incorporating them; it is about the way representation allows us to maintain and create links with people we cannot be with" (F 325). Indeed, it is the desire for hearing Edwards phantasmal voice that propels Bella to instigate them by foolish, dangerous acts, such as the jump from the cliff which results in Edward attempting suicide.

Of course, in Bella's case, unlike Juliet's, she is able to get to her beloved in time to prevent him from destroying himself. As a result, Edward returns (or turns back) like the "dark lady" in Shakespeare's sonnets and "silences" her crying by giving her both Love and Death simultaneously: he turns her into a vampire. The exchange comes along with a promise of marriage, so that for this child, she exists in a state of UnLife: caught between perpetual desire and destruction, Submission and Domination, childishness (Edward will ever be 17 years old and Bella 18) and age (they will live forever). In a sense, she comes to occupy (through the powers of supernatural vampirism) what Juliet and Shakespeare cannot: a paradox of sustaining and culminating opposites and being a kid from yesterday, today.

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