Past Imperfect (Journal)
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Hunting in Seneca’s Phaedra
No full textSeneca, in his tragedy Phaedra, created an elegiac character using, among other elegiac conventions, the amorous hunting. His Phaedra turns into an aggressive erotic predator who wants to “hunt” Hippolytus whom she is in love with. The prologue of Phaedra connects the play with elegiac poetry through the extensive use of venery description, because it highlights Hippolytus’ attitude to love: the young man sees the forest as a place of reclusive solitude where he can hide from frenetic passion. The prologue to Phaedra is also important from a spatial point of view, for Seneca associates his two main characters with a fundamental difference in locale that recalls the roman elegiac paraclausithyron, where the lover tries, without success, to penetrate into his beloved’s intimate space, the house. Furthermore, Seneca reverses the relationship between the lovers: Hippolytus becomes the beloved, Phaedra, the lover, thus inverting the gender roles of normal erotic elegy. At the same time, he amplifies this convention, making it the main theme of his tragedy, for Phaedra has a fundamental impact on the play’s action through her desperate attempts to conquer her stepson. Roman love elegy often associates the lover, the feeble man, with the hunter, while representing the beloved, the dominant woman, as his prey. Seneca goes further, because Hippolytus, the true hunter, becomes the erotic prey, while the female character takes on the role of the erotic predator. In this way, Seneca justifies the reversal of the male and the female characters’ roles in his use of the elegiac theme of hunting
Gene A. Plunka, Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
No full textConversion versus Ethnography: Adrien Gabriel Morice and the Western Dene
No full textConversion versus ethnography—how can one be both a missionary and an ethnographer? Is there not an inherent contradiction between trying to radically change a culture and society through religious conversion, while simultaneously trying to “scientifically” record the same culture and society? Yet, many missionaries found themselves in the situation of attempting to preserve via their academic writings the very cultures and societies they condemned and sought to change in their religious career. This article is about one such missionary, Adrien Gabriel Morice, Oblate missionary to the Tsilhqot’in (Chilcotin), Dakelh (Carrier) and Tse Keh Nay (Sekani) of northern central British Columbia. It examines how he dealt with this inherent contradiction and concludes that not only did it hinder his conversion of First Nations, but also prevented him from making the academic move from Enlightenment ethnology to social Darwinism and Boasian anthropology. Nevertheless, despite the fact that this inherent contradiction cost him his mission post at Stuart Lake in 1903, Morice benefitted from his first-hand experience at that post and became influential as an ethnographer with regards to Dakelh social organization, religion, burial practices and gender. In this achievement, he was able to leave a lasting legacy despite the inherent contradiction between his role as a missionary and as an ethnographer
Disappearance: How Shifting Gendered Boundaries Motivated the Removal of Eighteenth Century Boxing Champion Elizabeth Wilkinson from Historical Memory
No full textIn the eighteenth century, one fighter’s reputation outshone all others. She was Elizabeth Wilkinson, a bare-knuckled, trash talking, knife wielding, European boxing champion. Both throughout her life and a century and a half thereafter, writers heaped praise at her feet. She provided a point of imperial pride for authors that pointed to her as proof that the British of both genders were strong and brave. This began to change at the end of the nineteenth century. As the British Empire seemed in danger of collapse and the American economy shifted unpredictably, men on both sides of the Atlantic basin began to redefine their masculinity. They embraced a new form of passionate manhood that judged men as lovers, athletes, and for their ability to give and withstand pain in the boxing ring. Boxing, which had long been British regardless of gender, now became male, regardless of nationality. Men built a mythical past for boxing that ignored Wilkinson and crowned one of her contemporaries, James Figg, the sport\u27s first champion
