In 1967, French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes wrote of “The Death of the Author,” arguing that the meaning of a text is divorced from authorial intent and life influences — meaning is in flux, changing with each reader.^[1] “We shall never know” motivations or “the writer’s interiority,” Barthes insists, it is only “language which speaks,” meaning “every text is eternally written here and now,” interpreted by today’s reader, full of empty enunciations without her.^[2] Interestingly, this post-structuralist position has helped some individuals of the modern age reconcile their enjoyment of a work of art with their disdain for the artist, e.g. J.K. Rowling or R. Kelly. If it is the consumer who matters, it is easier to ignore vile things artists say or do, whether within texts or outside them. Readers of early twentieth-century horror writer H.P. Lovecraft may face similar struggles, as Lovecraft’s perceived anti-immigrant and racist narratives and language intrude upon, or are foundational to, highly engaging mysteries and terrors. (Here “perceived” is used not to question this interpretation, but to highlight the fact that a post-structuralist analysis would acknowledge “the destruction of every voice,” including Lovecraft’s, and the futility of seeking “ultimate meaning” and intent.^[3] Future statements concerning Lovecraft’s racism have this caveat — the racism is found in the language through this reader’s interpretation. See footnote 31 for all concerns about contradiction.) Recent works — Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) and Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (2016) — have something to say about this tension. These creations reconcile Lovecraft’s racism with his popularity by adopting, through delightful metatextuality, a post-structuralist literary perspective, a recognition that meaning is constructed by others and that Lovecraft’s intentions are hardly the end of the story. These works are representative of Barthes’ thesis — at least, that is the meaning this reader observes, which of course will not be contradicted by creator intentions.^[4] How can one appreciate Lovecraft’s tales despite their exercise of power against people of color? Remember, our recent texts seem to say, the author is dead. In other words, Lovecraft’s works are incomplete until we experience them, until we actively give them meaning.^[5] Let us therefore complete them.

LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom is a retelling of Lovecraft’s 1927 “The Horror at Red Hook,” which closely associated immigrants and people of color with evil, crime, and decay.^[6] “Persian devil-worshippers” and “squinting Orientals…swarmed” New York’s (nonfictional) Red Hook neighborhood, “a babel of sound and filth.”^[7] There is “an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth,” “mongrels” and “evil-looking strangers” who kidnap white children for human sacrifice, “vicious criminals” among the “slums and dark foreign faces.”^[8] (For those who know Lovecraft but not this side of him: how ironic it is to find the truth, gain hidden knowledge, about Lovecraft and find a monster!) Robert Suydam, a white man, taps into their occult element to remain young and be resurrected upon his death. The Ballad of Black Tom subverts Lovecraft’s monstrification of “The Other,” making a monster out of Jazz Age racism. Tommy Tester, a black street musician and hustler, endures everything from suspicious white glances to the police murder of his father, prompting him to join and then replace Suydam in a mission to conjure the elder god Cthulhu to destroy and remake the world.^[9] Importantly, this work features and gives voice to characters of color, humanizing the residents of Red Hook, Harlem, and elsewhere (without denying the presence of crime^[10]). Suydam alone appears responsible for the sinister esotericism. Stories of white kidnapped children were racist rumors.^[11]

The Ballad of Black Tom is a rather close reflection of Barthes’ theory, as it takes one of Lovecraft’s stories and reveals a hidden story beneath it (this is also a delicious twist on the hidden worlds and unrevealed truths found in many of Lovecraft’s tales). LaValle does not attempt to make the stories fit perfectly together — for instance, in “Red Hook”Detective Malone witnesses many things in the tenement basement, from “headless moon-calves” to the reanimation of Suydam’s corpse, that are absent from the tenement basement scene in Black Tom.^[12] But Lovecraft’s story was abstract and light on narrative, leaving plenty of room to flesh out the story with new characters, perspectives, motivations, and events while preserving its overall structure. LaValle’s approach to “Red Hook” is to suggest that the horrors were misunderstood, a white and prejudiced perspective altering who was responsible for the occult, whether kidnappings occurred, what people of color were like, and so on. This is stated fairly directly when Tommy discovers he has misjudged a Caribbean immigrant establishment called the Victoria Society, finding not a “den of crime and sin” where the “worst criminals were too afraid to go” but rather a peaceful spot for cards, music, and dinner.^[13] “Had Tommy simply assumed terrible things about this wave of West Indian immigrants?”^[14] Seeing the truth was “like learning another world existed within — or alongside — the world he’d always known”; he had been “too ignorant to realize it.”^[15] Black Tom likewise reveals the secret world behind “Red Hook.” On the one hand, here Lovecraft the Author is called out for his personal bigotry, for not discovering his own hidden worlds in early twentieth-century America. On the other hand, “Red Hook” is treated as if it exists on its own, outside the author, a post-structuralist framing — the story is incorrect, despite what its creator might say. (And despite what certain characters might say, those who LaValle notes misremember the tale.^[16]) Lovecraft’s dreadful intentions, his story elements even, can be disregarded at will. LaValle read “Red Hook” and found new meaning, knowing silenced perspectives and hidden worlds were somewhere beneath the surface. He gave it new meaning, made it more complete with his own interpretation, perhaps helping to reconcile his “conflicted feelings” about Lovecraft, to quote his telling dedication. 

The metatextuality is in some ways different in Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, which contains creatures, objects, and so on from Lovecraft’s stories but is not a direct retelling à la LaValle. (Either way, one cannot help but think of Barthes’ depiction of a text as “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”^[17]) In the world of Atticus Turner, a black veteran uncovering the mysteries of magic and confronting the monster^[18] of 1950s American racism, Lovecraft existed and can be discussed directly. Atticus reads “The Call of Cthulhu” on the same night his father Montrose tells him he “did a little research on your friend Mr. Lovecraft.”^[19] Atticus braces himself, knowing “something he enjoyed was about to be irrevocably spoiled,” and is handed a copy of Lovecraft’s 1912 poem “On the Creation of Niggers.”^[20] Montrose does not believe his son should be reading Lovecraft, nor other problematic white authors.^[21] Atticus resonates more with his uncle George. “I do love them,” George says of pulp stories of this nature, but one must “cherish their virtues and overlook their flaws… They do disappoint me sometimes… Sometimes, they stab me in the heart.”^[22]“Overlook” is interesting word choice, especially in a book interested in confronting the bigotry of popular horror writers and the larger society. In any event, Atticus does not reject Lovecraft (his books appear among Atticus’ favorites and to-reads in the Braithwhite manor^[23]), and continues to represent those who, despite conflicted feelings, enjoy his stories. Reconciliation, the text seems to suggest, is possible, acceptable.

While other observers have rightly noted that the frights and themes in Ruff’s text are not always particularly Lovecraftian, it is interesting to consider a world in which Lovecraft existed but so do the beasts and spells from his writings. Black Tom and Atticus (and companions) both use magic to confront racism, but the latter would be in a position to suspect that Lovecraft himself misunderstood the realities of “unheard-of powers.”^[24] The Braithwhites and other white men of the Adamite Order of the Ancient Dawn are responsible for the sorcery, and Atticus’ power is derived directly from his white ancestor.^[25] This is as far from Persian devil-worshippers, and the framing of people of color as Other, as one could get. Characters of color of course use incantations and powerful objects not for evil but for survival in Jim Crow America, such as when Atticus avoids death at the hands of the Order or when Ruby experiences freedom and opportunity after transforming into a white woman.^[26] Lovecraft Country also has moments where Lovecraft’s monsters feel less like mindless forces of apocalyptic destruction and more like partisans. A shoggoth devours Sheriff Hunt and other racist policemen but seems to leave Atticus, George, and Letitia alone.^[27] It seems a happy coincidence that a box with a tentacled creature meant to kill Hippolyta is opened by a white farmer who is harassing her; the farmer’s head is consumed.^[28] And while Winthrop’s ghost at first tries to kill Letitia, it eventually plays board games with her and seemingly agrees to help protect her home from white vandals, dragging them “screaming into the darkness.”^[29] Magic — who is responsible for it, how people of color use it, whether its creatures have sympathies or can be tamed — is clarified. Again, Lovecraft’s fictional stories can be judged to contain truths and untruths. The world they attempt to describe is bigger than them, exists outside of them — Atticus can come to understand it better than Lovecraft, as can Ruff, as can we. The Author is not God, the sole arbiter of truth over his own work.^[30] Ruff reinterprets Lovecraft’s monsters and sorcerers, while at the same time suggesting we need not feel that we must throw out artists who stab us in the heart. These activities are connected, the former aiding the latter.

This paper argued, while working to avoid contradiction,^[31] that The Ballad of Black Tom and Lovecraft Country address the tension between Lovecraft’s racism and enjoyment of his work by utilizing post-structuralist ideas, imparting new meaning to Lovecraft’s lore. The awfulness can be undermined by completing and clarifying the stories, rejecting authorial intent. Ruff and LaValle have unleashed Cthulhu to murder the Author. Lovecraft’s works need not be rejected, as they are fictions rife with errors — the reader can dig beneath the surface to find more accurate fictions. Hidden worlds abound, and not just for lay readers. In the future, scholars might explore strange intersections, or at least tantalizingly close parallels, between the ideas of Barthes and Lovecraft himself. At first one jests that Barthes’ text as a “tissue of signs,” an amalgamation of prior ideas, writings, and language, sounds monstrous, while the reader bringing “focus,” “unity,” and “meaning” to the “multiplicity” of signs sounds magical.^[32] But then things grow a bit more serious, with Barthes declaring we should avoid seeking “secret” or “ultimate meaning” in a text and Lovecraft having his characters who discover hidden truths go raving mad.^[33] A colleague of mine sees suspicion of intellectuals and academics in Lovecraft’s works, part of this warning against pursuing certain knowledge; Barthes, though an intellectual himself, seems unimpressed with the “Critic,” who supposes he has all the answers because he has discovered the Author.^[34] And can we, somehow, compare the post-structuralist’s “anti-theological activity” — to “refuse to fix meaning” is to “refuse God” — with the nihilism and sense of cosmic indifference in the horror writer’s texts?^[35] The works inspired by Lovecraft may not be the only ones worthy of a post-structuralist reading.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

---

^[1] John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, 5th ed. (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2009), 126.

^[2] Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Music, Image, Text (London: Fontana, 1977), 142-148. Retrieved from https://sites.tufts.edu/english292b/files/2012/01/Barthes-The-Death-of-the-Author.pdf.

^[3] Ibid., 142, 147.

^[4] It is not claimed that a Barthesian framing is intentional. See footnote 31.

^[5] Storey, Cultural Theory, 126.  

^[6] H.P. Lovecraft, “The Horror at Red Hook,” Weird Tales vol. 9, no. 1 (January 1927): 59–73. Retrieved from https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/hrh.aspx.

^[7] Ibid., parts 2, 3, 4.   

^[8] Ibid., parts 3, 5, 6, 7. 

^[9] Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2016), 12-13, 60-66, 121-134. 

^[10] Ibid., 73-74.

^[11] Ibid., 136.

^[12] Lovecraft, “Red Hook,” part 6. And LaValle, Black Tom, 119-134.

^[13] LaValle, Black Tom, 15, 28-29. 

^[14] Ibid., 29. 

^[15] Ibid., 30. 

^[16] In Black Tom, Detective Malone begins to misremember the climactic events; his memory begins to align with Lovecraft’s story. See pages 138-140: “Malone began to doubt his own memory of the villain known as Black Tom. Hadn’t it really been Robert Suydam all along who’d guided those awful forces?” Lovecraft’s story is wrong; it is the product of forgotten truths. The newspapers likewise err in their reports, delivering a “Red Hook” version of the tale.

^[17] Barthes, “Death,” 146.

^[18] Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country (New York: Harper Perennial, 2016), 47-52 for example. On page 21, it is made clear a white sheriff is a “real monster.” 

^[19] Ibid., 14.

^[20] Ibid., 14-15.

^[21] Ibid., 12.

^[22] Ibid., 13. 

^[23] Ibid., 65. 

^[24] Lovecraft, “Red Hook,” part 4. 

^[25] Ruff, Lovecraft Country, 75, 79, 86-87. 

^[26] Ibid., 102-103, 213-270, 369-370. 

^[27] Ibid., 52-56.

^[28] Ibid., 208-209. 

^[29] Ibid., 129-130, 135, 137-141. 

^[30] Barthes, “Death,” 146-147. 

^[31] This paper may feel contradictory, but that is, hopefully, illusory. These points may offer some clarity.

    1) This paper assigns meaning to texts and declares that meaning to be “You can assign meaning to texts.” This is consistent. (This paper has a post-structuralist flair and claims these novels do as well.)

    2) To see a post-structuralist framing (or any framing) is not necessarily to claim this was the author’s intent. Perhaps it was, perhaps it was not. But here it is only observed meaning. It would indeed be quite a headache to argue intended meaning here (as the intended meaning would be that intended meaning is unimportant, cannot be known, and so on).

    3) “How can one say these works are countering Lovecraft’s racism with post-structuralist ideas if post-structuralism questions whether Lovecraft’s racism (authorial intent and character) can be found in the text in any absolute way?” This is not a contradiction. According to Barthes, the reader is the interpreter, the one who gives meaning. If the reader sees racism, racism is present. (Recall the caveat in the opening paragraph.) If she then sees an anti-racist response with a Barthesian bent in another text, that exists as well. Within the mind of the individual, this is consistent. The reader, as Barthes observed, brings unity (see page 148).

^[32] Barthes, “Death,” 147-148.

^[33] Barthes, “Death,” 147. And Lovecraft, “Red Hook,” part 1. See also H.P. Lovecraft, “Dagon,” The Vagrant no. 11 (November 1919): 23–29. Retrieved from https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/d.aspx. 

^[34] See the school of economics, social clubs, and cafes where intellectuals and other “sinister men” might hang out in H.P. Lovecraft, “The Street,” The Wolverine no. 8 (December 1920): 2–12. Retrieved fromhttps://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/s.aspx. Robert Suydam in “Red Hook” is a man of letters and a man of study, an “authority on mediaeval superstition.” See also Barthes, “Death,” 147.

^[35] Barthes, “Death,” 147. LaValle comments on Lovecraftian indifference on pages 49, 66, and 148 to frame racism as worse than Cthulhu.

Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels (1974) and its film adaptation Gettysburg (1993) both overlap and diverge in their cultural work. They both show, this paper argues, great respect and sympathy for Union and Confederate soldiers. From this shared ancestor, a split occurs: the book then questions, perhaps in a general sense, war and its ideologies, growing quite nihilistic, while the movie maintains focus on the fighting men’s heroism, even elevating it through sound. We might think of a simplified slate of categories of cultural presentations of war and those who conduct it (which at times feel contradictory), ignoring neutral categories:

1) Question War; No Soldiers Are Heroes
2) Question War; One Side’s Soldiers Are Heroes
3) Question War; Both Sides’ Soldiers Are Heroes
4) Accept War; No Soldiers Are Heroes
5) Accept War; One Side’s Soldiers Are Heroes                   
6) Accept War; Both Sides’ Soldiers Are Heroes 

This paper places Shaara’s work in Category 3 and Gettysburg in Category 6. It further posits that the senselessness of war found in the former and the both-sides heroism of both texts are made more possible or likely by the exclusion of African American perspectives. 

The 1996 edition of The Killer Angels features a blurb declaring the text a “bitter anti-war tract.”^[1] While Shaara’s work is open to various interpretations, it is indeed easy to sense a deepening nihilism as one marches through its pages. In the beginning, Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain gives a moving speech to Union soldiers: “If you look at history you’ll see men fight for pay, or women, or some other kind of loot. They fight for land, or because a king makes them, or just because they like killing. But we’re here for something new… We’re an army going out to set other men free.”^[2] By the end, after the slaughter at Gettysburg, Chamberlain has “forgotten the Cause. When the guns began firing he had forgotten it completely. It seemed very strange now to think of morality…”^[3] The bloodbath was so great as to render causes questionable, even naive. Union troops, Chamberlain muses, were “animal meat: the Killer Angels.”^[4] That is to say, examining an earlier titular reference, that “Man” may pursue moral “action…like an angel” yet cannot even do this without “murderin’” — his noble cause is thus debased, his pursuit of it violent, horrific, suicidal, senseless.^[5] Are those marching to war for a cause good but foolish, simply meat in the meat grinder? Admiring and pitying fallen Southerners and Northerners alike, Chamberlain remarks to his brother that the dead are “all equal now.”^[6] Capping their discourse on why men fought, the subtext seems to be that whether motives are right or wrong, destruction awaits — what real meaning do motives then have? All of this feels bathed in the anti-Machiavellian anti-war tradition, where the means are of equal or even primary importance in the moral calculus. Significantly, it all occurs in the final two pages of the book, where it takes on the mien of a conclusion (reflecting a page of cause-critiquing quotations before the narrative begins^[7]). 

Three pages prior, the mood in the Confederate camp is rather similar. The defeated General Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant General James Longstreet reflect somberly on the outcome of the battle. “I don’t think we can win it now,” Longstreet says, speaking of the war.^[8] Shaara writes: “After a moment Lee nodded, as if it were not really important.”^[9] Lee muses that each soldier has his own reasons to fight and die, but seems to frame himself as a man caught up in something against his will, swept this way or that on a current of uncontrollable events. “If they go on,” Lee says of his men, “I will go on… If the war goes on…what else can we do but go on? It is the same question forever, what else can we do? If they fight, we will fight with them.”^[10] Lee describes a reactionary existence — if his men, the Confederacy, or the Union wish to fight, he must follow, forced to do likewise. Then Lee verbalizes the intimated unimportance of Confederate victory with a remarkable line: “Does it matter after all who wins? Was that ever really the question? Will God ask that question, in the end?”^[11] Meaninglessness again permeates. Human agency erodes. If one is forced to act, or is carried through places and events by divine, inevitable forces, why would outcomes matter to the individual? Throughout the text, Lee reflects that outcomes are in God’s hands.^[12] Here Lee implies that to care about who wins the war is nonsensical, as either result would be God’s will, beyond human control or motivation. Causes hardly matter. This religious nihilism is mixed with ideals of duty, as seen in Lee’s “If they go on” statements and his final lines in the book. “You and I, we have no Cause. We have only the army,” he tells Longstreet, as if they are men just doing their jobs. “But if a soldier fights only for soldiers, he cannot ever win. It is only soldiers who die.”^[13] It may be useful for soldiers to have causes — ideology turns ordinary, even angelic men into killers — but in the end one is playing a role for armies, nations, gods, and other higher forces, carried along by the current, one’s individual designs rendered futile. 

Gettysburg ends with Chamberlain and his brother embracing to moving, soaring music.^[14] The former’s thoughts from the book are not verbalized. Lee’s reflections do make it into the film, except for his “Cause” line. The music is mournful. However, the absence of Lee’s final line and Chamberlain’s private thoughts, and perhaps less attention paid to Lee’s fixation on God’s will throughout, lessens the impact of the general’s gloomy ponderings on meaning. “Does it matter after all who wins?” is a bit more difficult for a viewer to understand — perhaps it will be chalked up to mere despair over losing a battle — and feels more like it is in the film out of obligation than thematic significance. Its inclusion feels like that of a Confederate debate on Darwin.^[15] “Because,” the screenwriter might say, jabbing a finger at the book, “it’s there.” Regardless, one would be hard-pressed to find other vestiges of nihilism in Gettysburg. It has rather different emotions to evoke.

Lighting, music, framing, and other elements of film language set a tone and instruct the viewer how to feel. In Gettysburg, largely free of any questioning or despair over meaning and war, the Union and Confederacy are presented as heroic in roughly equal measure. The music, for instance, is consistently sympathetic. “March to Mortality (Pickett’s Charge)” offers as glorious a sound as any offered to the Union. “General Lee at Twilight” and “General Lee’s Solitude” are reverent and thoughtful, much like Chamberlain’s “Men of Honor” (both men also get voiceovers, usually reserved for positive protagonists). Ominous music does make an appearance, such as when Lee’s pride and concerns of honor override sensible tactical decisions, or during Chamberlain’s increasingly bloody and precarious defense of the Union flank at Little Round Top. But this is not a film that would assign a darker score or lighting arrangement to those who fought for the nation seeking to preserve the enslavement of black people. There are no insinuations of villains; both sides get to be the heroes.

The narrative takes the same tack, but simply follows foundational elements of The Killer Angels. Shaara may question mass bloodshed over causes, but his book is greatly sympathetic toward participants on both sides. The film simply focuses on and emulates the latter. Confederates are God-fearing, treat local populations with respect, care about honor (albeit to a fault), fight for their rights and the consent of the governed rather than slavery, lament both gray and blue losses, and do not consider Union soldiers enemies (they are rather all friends tragically torn asunder). Gettysburg is sure to show shoeless Confederates and amputations in makeshift hospitals on Lee’s side rather than the Union’s, stresses that Lee was “perhaps the most beloved general in American history,” and so on. The Union army is sympathetically presented as well. Respect and equal time are likewise offered to both sides in the book.^[16] The shared cultural work of book and film are clear: these men were all Americans (nearly a direct quote^[17]), all honorable, brave, admirable. National leaders and their (slaveholding) motives may be problematic, but not the fighting men.^[18] Historians, of course, be damned.^[19]

Arguably, these pieces of popular culture are more free to engage in anti-war nihilism and both-sides heroism because they are not interested in the black experience. So little interest is expressed, in fact, that while historians have established that blacks, slave and free, supported both armies as laborers at Gettysburg, the book and film show nothing of the sort — only a chance encounter with a runaway slave that has Chamberlain and other Unionists marveling as if observing an extraterrestrial.^[20] This lack of attention makes sense. Presenting meaninglessness and celebration of Confederates in an exploration of what was by then a war to free African Americans from slavery^[21] is disjointed and uncomfortable. It seems easier to do without black characters and their perspectives around to contradict the sentiments. 

In a film like Glory (1989), where black men are more centered, nihilism and both-sides admiration seem less possible.^[22] In this work, the Confederates are a distant enemy, seen only on the battlefield. It is blacks who are shoeless, the Union that has an amputation scene; black laborers are present on Northern lines. It is the black Union troops of the 54th Massachusetts who are the heroes, alongside their white commander Colonel Robert Shaw. They alone get soaring music, parades, black children in awe, and celebration of their accomplishments, from protests against unequal pay to the valiant attack on Fort Wagner that proved the might of black soldiers to the nation two weeks after Gettysburg. “Ain’t even much a matter what happens tomorrow,” Private Trip (Denzel Washington) says on the eve of the assault, “’cause we men, ain’t we?” This may sound nihilistic, but no: Trip suggests that whether they live or die, win or lose, their presence, actions, and cause matter — they have climbed to a status, the soldier, once reserved for white men, so-called full men, and in battle prove themselves equal, worthy of freedom.^[23] “O Heavenly Father,” cries Sergeant Major John Rawlins (Morgan Freeman), “we want you to let our folks know that we died facing the enemy! We want ’em to know that we went down standing up! Amongst those that are fighting against our oppression. We want ’em to know, Heavenly Father, that we died for freedom!” Could meaninglessness be comprehensible in a text where men are fighting for their liberation and common humanity? Would admiration of their enemies find a home? Presentation Category 5: Accept War; One Side’s Soldiers Are Heroes.^[24]

In sum, The Killer Angels lifts up the tragedy of war and its fueling ideologies, reaching a rather nihilistic conclusion, while still paying immense deference to soldiers — the victims — on all sides, doing what it can to parse their motives from those of the real culprits, national leaders.^[25] It embodies the “hating war is not hating the troops” refrain. Meanwhile, Gettysburg simply lauds the boys in blue and gray, accepting war; here causes, such as states’ rights of self-determination (preservation of slavery being hardly worth mentioning, again the motives of others higher up), not only go unquestioned but can be celebrated for inspiring men to acts of bravery and sacrifice. As with heroism, both texts treat causes as equivalent. One positions causes as equally dangerous, the other as equally celebratory, or at least roughly so. Glory, centering African Americans, rejects all these ideas, having no taste for nihilism nor patience for equivalencies. 

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

---

^[1] Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1996). See interior praise pages.

^[2] Ibid., 28.

^[3] Ibid., 329.

^[4] Ibid. 

^[5] Ibid., 114.

^[6] Ibid., 330.

^[7] “I hate the idea of causes,” an E. M. Forster quote reads on the page after Shaara’s dedication, “and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

^[8] Ibid., 325. 

^[9] Ibid. 

^[10] Ibid., 326. 

^[11] Ibid.

^[12] Ibid., 15, 137, 182-183, 257-258, 287. 

^[13] Ibid., 326. This reflects page 251, where Lee has “no cause” and fights only for the people of Virginia.  

^[14] Gettysburg, directed by Ron Maxwell (1993; Burbank, CA: New Line Cinema).

^[15] Shaara, Killer Angels, 125.

^[16] See for example Shaara, Killer Angels, 15, 61-62, 126-128, 163, 174, 181, 240, 246, 256-257, 302-303, 316, 329, 333. Also relevant is the page of quotations (before the Contents) on friendship, family, and civility and their relationship to causes, patriotism, and crimes against humanity. As is the framing of two sides fighting for two different “dreams” on the back cover. Should not the focus be, all this suggests, on what unites us? Were there not good people on both sides?

^[17] Ibid., 329. 

^[18] Indeed, none of this is to argue that Shaara or the film’s creators would have preferred a Confederate victory or that the works are pure bothsidesist texts. Consider, for instance, that the author uses both Union and Confederate officers to declare that the war was over slavery (see pages 28 and 244), and spends no time defending the institution. Shaara may have opposed slavery like most Americans of the 1970s. The point is that the Southerners of book and film are divorced from the motivation to preserve slavery and can thus be lifted up as heroes. With such a division in place, sympathies can be extended to the Confederate army, but not toward Confederate politicians, the new nation, or slavery.

^[19] Maintaining control of black people was a motivating factor for ordinary Confederate soldiers. See Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2008), 12, 36-39, 217-218.

^[20] In Shaara, Killer Angels, see pages 161-162.

^[21] See Manning, This Cruel War. Recall also that Gettysburg (July 1863) occurred after the Emancipation Proclamation (January 1863).

^[22] Glory, directed by Edward Zwick (1989; Culver City, CA: TriStar Pictures). 

^[23] While Trip does question whether final victory will mean much for blacks when refusing Shaw’s request that he carry the flag, in the climactic battle he picks up the fallen flag, signifying full devotion to the cause.  

^[24] Minus, of course, some racist Union soldiers and officers.

^[25] For example, Shaara, Killer Angels, 244: “The war was about slavery, all right. That was not why Longstreet fought but that was what the war was about…” 

Disney’s Pocahontas (1995) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) both present stories based on Pocahontas mythology, the former directly with its titular character and the latter less directly through its stand-in Magawisca. These works also offer some progressive ideas: independent, outspoken women protagonists, criticism of white attitudes and actions toward Native Americans, and a multicultural framing of colonial history are inherent to each, to different degrees and with varying flavors. The purposes of the creators had some overlap, as did the cultural work done upon the American societies of each century. However, the Magawisca story is one Disney’s Pocahontas could not fully express. Pocahontas, constrained by art form and associated ideological filters, cannot critique Christianity or its specific denominations. Sedgwick employs Magawisca to engage in such a critique, doing some cultural work quite different from that of Disney.

Pocahontas has little interest in the religion of the English. True, in its first song, “The Virginia Company,” a chorus sings, rather inaudibly, of sailing to the New World “for glory, God, and gold.”^[1] “Say your prayers, lads!” shouts one sailor as a storm threatens to sink their ship. “Godspeed,” another says later. Most notably, the English refer to the Powhatans as “heathens” and “devils,” their skin a “hellish red.” Beyond this, however, Christianity remains invisible, with no discussion of the subject or religious imagery to be found. There are no priests, no prayers before battle, no crosses, no bibles. The staff in Theodoor Galle’s Allegory of America or the garb in Eugène Duflot de Mofras’ engraving of Padre Narciso Duran and the indigenous girl would have seemed as foreign to Disney’s areligious Englishmen as to Native Americans. The Jamestown settlers may not have been religious refugees, but they were religious people, most Anglican. The only religion the film considers is that of the Powhatans, animating animism (most notably the Grandmother Willow tree and the wind) and featuring much dialogue, spoken or sung, on spirits in nature. It is a rather lopsided presentation.

One might interpret this as the creators rejecting Christianity and pushing Native American spiritualism on young people, as some Christian conservatives did in the 1990s, but there exists a superior explanation, simple sanitization. Remember, Pocahontas is sympathetic toward the Powhatans. Governor Ratcliffe is the villain; the English are greedy for gold, quick to violence, and regard indigenous people as “savages,” “vermin” who are “barely even human”; whites lament “what you get when races are diverse” and openly admit they “invaded [Indian] land.” The Powhatans step toward violence rather reluctantly.^[2] Pocahontas rejects it entirely; racism and imperialism, too: “You think you own whatever land you land on… You think the only people who are people / Are the people who look and think like you.” The cultural work of the text clearly frames the English arrival at what would become Jamestown as problematic, victimizing Native Americans — “This is their land!” John Smith, the transformed Englishman, bellows at Ratcliffe to drive the point home. But while the creators cared about multiculturalism and different historical perspectives, in 1995 there were still limits to who could be greedy, racist invaders. Whites clearly, but to frame Christians as such was far less likely. Anglican beliefs, practices, symbols, possessions, and so on — Christianity’s place in the story of 1607 — would be minimized or erased (“disarticulated”^[3]), consciously or not, to align with and protect the dominant belief system of American audiences. In the same way even populist-leaning cultural productions often leave capitalism and consumerism unexamined, Christianity remains “uncontested,” even in a progressive text with much to say about race, gender, and imperialism.^[4] Ratcliffe and his men would not be displaying crosses or holding bibles in between (or while) marching to war or singing “We’ll kill ourselves an Injun / Or maybe two or three.” This absence constructs, as John Storey of the University of Sunderland wrote when exploring theories of ideology, a “distorted image of reality,” or at least of history.^[5] 

Try to imagine a Disney movie critiquing Christianity in a serious, unambiguous way. It is difficult to do. Pocahontas can tell Smith about her faith — “I know every rock and tree and creature / Has a life, has a spirit, has a name” — but she cannot criticize his. In Hope Leslie, however, Magawisca is not so restrained. She tells Everell Fletcher, the character who parallels John Smith, about how colonists decapitated her brother. “You English tell us,” Magawisca says, “that the book of your law is better than that written on our hearts, for ye say it teaches mercy, compassion, forgiveness — if ye had such a law and believed it, would ye thus have treated a captive boy?”^[6] The Puritans of 1640s Massachusetts were hypocrites, in other words, extolling the bible but not taking its edicts seriously. Everell has no response to this. Sedgwick, or the narrator, often as unsubtle as filmmakers 170 years hence, praises Magawisca’s “reflecting mind” for highlighting the “most serious obstacle to the progress of the christian religion.”^[7] The contrast between the faith’s “divine principles and the conduct of its professors” made conversion of “heathen men” more difficult; Sedgwick criticizes the faith — or rather those, past or present, who ignore its edicts to address the “Indian problem” — without fully rejecting its aims.^[8]

Magawisca, having observed Puritan violence and faith alike, resists the Fletchers’ attempts at conversion. On “principle,” “her eye is shut and her ear is closed” to Christianity.^[9] Sedgwick again assigns Magawisca “rare gifts of mind,” stressing the intellectual and rational nature of her opposition to a religion overly violent and, further, fundamentalist.^[10] For Magawisca is following the example of her mother, Monoca, who refused to convert, believing in the efficacy of all faiths: “all the children of the Great Spirit were equal objects of His favour,” and the bible was divinely “withheld” from Pequot culture because it was not “needful.”^[11] The Fletchers are sympathetic toward this view, supposing they should not be narrow-minded and wondering if Monoca’s good deeds would be enough for salvation.^[12] Here is a call for religious tolerance — Sedgwick may not fully reject conversion aims, but she does question them. It is difficult to envision the questioning of Christianity as the one true faith, or linkage of Christianity to hypocrisy and violence, in Pocahontas.

Why does a popular cultural artifact from 1827 seem more free to engage in religious criticism, even of long-faded sects, than one from 1995? True, different eras have different tolerances — at times the “pulse of the masses”^[13] is counterintuitive and surprising — and varied creators have varied intentions. We cannot discount these things. It is insufficient to say that Hope Leslie is for adults and Pocahontas for children, as the latter has no problem marking whites and historically celebrated history as problematic — it simply will not do the same to a specific group. (Some cultural theorists describe popular culture as possessing an inherent clash and negotiation between ideologies of resistance and domination, between, in Gramsci’s terms, counter-hegemonic elements and hegemony, which may explain the allowance of some critiques and not others in any given work.^[14])

Form is surely part of the answer. The writer is like a vigilante, with more freedom of expression. While still constrained, far fewer people stand between her unexpressed vision and the public consumption of her art, compared to film production. Less of Pierre Bourdieu’s “cultural capital” — required training, technology, access to institutions — stands in her way.^[15] Ideas can more easily traverse from mind to page to publisher to printer to bookshop. Publishing houses are institutions, of course, but perhaps easier to get “authorization” (pace historian Holt N. Parker) from than film studios, given the scale of the endeavors and opportunities at small firms.^[16] Perhaps more important is the potential societal response. Should the writer traffic in troubling or counter-hegemonic ideas, she can be waved away as a lone lunatic. Not unreasonably, the public places responsibility for a novel’s content on the author (the publishing institution usually avoids blame, though not always). Ruling classes may therefore be less concerned, creating opportunities.

A film is a bit different, with many more individuals involved in its creation, meaning more gatekeepers. Radical ideas can be better filtered out. The requirement of more cultural capital means those who produce such art are better aligned with elite interests or are among their number (in other words, hegemonic influence and cultural capital are tied together in a positive correlation, one rising with the other). Sizable, elite-owned institutions are, or were, generally necessary to create and distribute feature-length movies of acceptable quality, therefore individual troublemaking is less likely. Further, the institution may be held responsible for the content of this medium. Hope Leslie is a Sedgwick novel, while Pocahontas is a Disney film, not a Gabriel and Goldberg, or Binder, Grant, and LaZebnik, film.^[17] This is to say that compared to lone wolf authors and their novels, more social pressure, and elite pressure, may exist for films to follow dominant ideologies, as it would not do for major institutions to endorse subversive ideas. Art’s form, its associated barriers to existence and post hoc legitimizations, affects what art can say. After all, is it not easier to imagine a novel from the 1990s criticizing past Christians, and harder to imagine an 1820s Broadway play (films did not exist) doing the same? (There are no absolutes, of course, only influences.)

Cultural theorists contend that texts “always present a particular image of the world” and “win people to particular ways of seeing” it.^[18] Texts take sides, in other words.^[19] Our two works took opposite positions on whether Christianity had much to do with the European incursion in North America. Pocahontas sees and hears nothing of Anglicanism, therefore she cannot comment upon it, while Magawisca exists in a thoroughly Puritan world and is free, or forced, to interact with it. Despite any similar cultural work these texts do, and without denying other divergences undiscussed, such a significant narrative and semiotic difference sends a rather different message to viewers and readers, which, while its impact may be impossible to measure, should not go unnoticed.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

---

^[1] Pocahontas, directed by Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg (1995; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios).

^[2] Of the Powhatans, only Kocoum seems eager to fight. Powhatan eventually feels he has no choice, but in the end rejects violence like his daughter.

^[3] John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, 10th ed. (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2024), 11.

^[4] LeRoy Ashby, “The Rising of Popular Culture: A Historiographical Sketch,” OAH Magazine of History 24, no. 2 (April 2010): 13. Often critique must stay within certain parameters, Ashby argues.

^[5] Storey, Cultural Theory, 3.

^[6] Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie, or Early Times in the Massachusetts (New York, NY: Penguin, 1998), 52-53.

^[7] Ibid., 53

^[8] Ibid.

^[9] Ibid., 32.

^[10] Ibid., 33.

^[11] Ibid., 21.

^[12] Ibid., 21-22. It should also be noted that Hope stands up to Puritan authorities and extremism during the witch trial in chapters eight and nine, one of several criticisms of religion by white characters.

^[13] Ashby, “Popular Culture,” 11-12.

^[14] Storey, Cultural Theory, 10-11.

^[15] Holt Parker, “Toward a Definition of Popular Culture,” History and Theory 50, no. 2 (May 2011): 160-162.

^[16] Ibid., 163-166.

^[17] Directors, writers.

^[18] Storey, Cultural Theory, 4.

^[19] Ibid.

Upon visiting the U.S. Constitution in the National Archives museum, or seeing an image or recreation of the document elsewhere, one is at once struck by an interesting oddity. The letter “s” appears to be, in some places, replaced with a lowercase “f”! Why in the world does the Constitution speak of “Congreſs” rather than “Congress”?

You may need to zoom in or find a magnifying glass to notice that the letter is not actually an “f.” The little horizontal line is either nonexistent or is only found on the left side of the symbol’s body, rather than going all the way through. It looks like this: “ſ.” This letter is, in fact, a “long s,” which has long fallen out of use.

Conservator Rachel Bartgis at the National Archives writes that the English alphabet, being an offshoot of the Roman alphabet with the same feature (why the Romans favored this is unknown), used both a short and long “s” until the early 1800s. The “ſ,” the “long s,” was used at the (uncapitalized) beginning or middle of words. The “short s,” the one we know and love, was used at the end or when capitalization was involved. Today’s double “s” (like in “Congress”) would have both letters if at the end of a word (“Congreſs”), but you’d see “ſſ” in the middle of words (“paſſed”).

These rules, Bartgis says, changed over time and were not always followed. Marissa Laliberte at Reader’s Digest suggests that people of past centuries understood how confusing it could be to have an “f” and a “long s” that looked so similar, given certain historical rule breaks: “Often, a short S would go next to the letter F (e.g. misfortune) to avoid confusion.” Considering how small text was printed in newspapers in early America, one imagines plenty of opportunities for frustration.

According to Laliberte, printers in the late 18th century may have begun simplifying and streamlining their typesets, ditching the redundant letter, as technology changed. Each additional letter for new printers, after all, required materials and effort to create and use it. Bartgis implies, however, that the nature of typesetting may have slowed down the transition a bit, as getting rid of one letter required getting rid of several combination blocks used in the printer, such as “ſh” (for the “shhhh” sound). Replacing all those could be costly.

While you will not see the “long s” much outside of historical documents, and there remains work to do for historians to uncover why users of Latin (as well as Greek) felt the need for two lowercase “s” letters, your visits to the National Mall will at least be far less confusing in the future.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.