In his 1843 “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Karl Marx famously considered the relationship between religion and ordinary people’s struggle to survive under capitalism. Faith is “a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”^[1] Religion brings relief, in other words, to miserable workers and their families — think of promises of paradise, eternal life, or seeing lost loved ones again, as well as a sense of community, one’s squalid life being God’s will or even noble, and so on. Marx argues that poverty and class exploitation sustain comforting religions, and vice versa, rejecting both: one must fight “a condition that requires illusions.”^[2] Society must work toward “real happiness,” not “illusory happiness.”^[3] When “man is the highest essence” there exists an “imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved” being; not so with religion.^[4] Interestingly, Marx’s ideas come readily to mind while consuming classic works of popular culture full of commentary on both God and oppressed workers: L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s The Wizard of Oz (1939), and Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995). Given that, according to cultural theorists, even fantasy texts “always present a particular image of the world,” this paper argues that these works frame America as a site of struggle between illusory happiness and attempts at real happiness.^[5] That is, as a place where worker liberation is inhibited by consoling faith.

Others have interpreted L. Frank Baum’s narrative as an allegory for — or simply influenced by — the populist movement of the late nineteenth century, which saw farmers in the American heartland organize, forming associations and political parties, in response to economic hardships like crop failures, falling prices, and increasing debts. Farmers pushed for policies such as the expanded use of silver for currency, progressive taxation, the right to vote for U.S. senators, and nationalization of some industries. Dorothy’s silver shoes, which are magical and the key to her desired return to the family farm in Kansas, are judged representative and significant, for example.^[6]

It is difficult to deny Baum’s interest in the plight of farmers. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz opens with two pages of agrarian misery. Dorothy, Uncle Henry, and Aunt Em live in a one-room home, surrounded by land that is nothing but a “gray mass, with little cracks running through it” from drought.^[7] In the same way the sun and wind have ruined the earth, they have also drained Aunt Em, removed “the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also.”^[8] She was thin as a rail and “never smiled,” in the same way Uncle Henry “never laughed.”^[9] “He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He was gray also…stern and solemn, and rarely spoke.”^[10] Most disturbing is a possible description of prairie madness: with “not a tree nor a house” to break the monotonous landscape, and seemingly no other people around, Aunt Em “would scream and press her hand upon her heart” when she first heard Dorothy’s laughter, shocked that the little girl “could find anything to laugh at.”^[11] This opening is significant, as there is little narrative reason why Aunt Em and Uncle Henry should live such dreadful lives — they play no real role in the tale. A dreary farm may provide a sharper contrast with and highlight the colorful, fantastical land of Oz, but the story would function just as well if Dorothy’s parental figures were happy and their home pleasant — perhaps better, as Dorothy is so determined to get back. Clearly, the author has something important to say — the reason is thematic, ideological. Baum is concerned for farmers of the Midwest, for their living conditions, their broken bodies and minds. Yet Dorothy’s love for and determination to return home suggests there is value there — the farm is a place worth treasuring, perhaps all the more so if it could be made anew, as it is after the tornado.^[12]

Baum also seems interested in the abilities of ordinary people. Various observers have reasonably read the scarecrow, the tin woodman, and the cowardly lion as stand-ins for the common man. The characters famously seek, respectively, a brain, a heart, and courage. The scarecrow, being a tool of the farmer, is seen as representative of the farmer. (The tin woodman, losing body parts and perhaps his soul, may be the industrial worker.^[13]) There is a moment just after the scarecrow is created when he feels he is “as good a man as anyone.”^[14] A crow later tells the scarecrow, who is sad that he has failed in his duties and cannot keep birds away, “If you only had brains in your head you would be as good a man as any of them, and a better man than some of them.”^[15] All this feels like rather pointed language, this comparison to other men. It is tempting to read this as the farmer is as good a man as any of them, though some say otherwise. Consider that Dorothy’s companions already possess that which they seek from the wizard. The scarecrow uses logical thinking to help the group cross a chasm safely, the tin woodman is so compassionate he cries over accidentally killing insects, and the lion bravely faces down monstrous beasts.^[16] Then, at the end of the tale, the scarecrow is made ruler of Oz, the tin woodsman ruler of the Winkies, and the lion ruler of the beasts of the forest.^[17] The supremacy of great wizards and witches comes to a close, and simple folk are crowned. The implication seems to be that we should question stereotypes concerning ordinary people and the self-doubts they create (the scarecrow thought he was an equal to others before the crow suggested he needed brains first, which he took to heart). The common man is not inadequate or inferior, but capable and worthy of determining his own destiny — whether through certain monetary policies and the direct election of senators, the overthrow of capitalism and establishment of the workers’ state, or some similar reading. 

We now turn to a second common interpretation of Baum’s text, and move towards synthesis. While the Wizard of Oz could be seen as the politician or capitalist oppressing the masses, his godlike qualities are more obvious. He is “wise,” “powerful,” and “good,” but may also grow “angry” and “destroy” the “dishonest” and “idle”; he is often called “great” and “terrible” in the same breath,^[18] reflecting older visions of the Judeo-Christian deity that balanced righteousness with wrath. Oz appears in different forms, as gods often do, to each of the main characters.^[19] “Few have ever dared ask to see his face,” the Emerald City gatekeeper tells Dorothy,^[20] somewhat reminiscent of biblical declarations that none who look upon the face of God shall live. “I am everywhere,” Oz says plainly, “but to the eyes of common mortals I am invisible.”^[21] “O Oz,” Dorothy says reverently.^[22] Baum’s entire story could be judged an anti-religious text: four companions bring their desires (prayers, if you will: “I come to you praying that you will put brains in my head,” the scarecrow tells the wizard) to a powerful being who ends up being a man-made invention.^[23] The wizard can only give the three locals (unneeded) facsimiles of what they seek, and fails to help Dorothy return to Kansas.^[24]

It is here suggested that these interpretations cannot be parsed apart. If the farmer’s conditions are dire, if the characters position the farmer and other workers as intelligent, compassionate, and brave enough to wield power, and if Oz is representative of God, then narratively the workers have overthrown and replaced God. The companions expose the wizard as a fraud and rule in his stead; comforting, illusory religion has been overcome, and the working class has gained the power to control its own destiny, improving its conditions, pursuing real happiness in the here and now. The worker will now, to quote Marx, “think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.”^[25] Man, not God, is the center of concerns. It is important to note that in the story the falsity is embraced while real suffering occurs. The wizard, despite being mysterious and frightening to the people of Oz, is revered: “the people remembered him lovingly” and “grieved over the loss of the Wonderful Wizard.”^[26] (But, the wizard suggests, this is only because the masses did not discover his secret: “they would be vexed with me for having deceived them.”^[27]) The people love their illusions. But the god figure is powerless to stop characters who are better stand-ins for capitalist oppressors, such as the Wicked Witch of the East, who “held all the Munchkins in bondage for many years, making them slave for her day and night.”^[28] Dorothy must (accidentally) dispose of the evil witches.^[29] The oppressed creatures love their god, but will receive no help in improving their circumstances from fictions. Their devotion sustains wizard rule and by extension a brutal status quo.

The 1939 film The Wizard of Oz can be read in the same way.^[30] In fact, though its setting and consideration shift to a later American period, some class and religious elements are slightly reinforced (as is an Oz-U.S. connection, with characters existing in both realms). True, Dorothy’s caretakers are not as shattered and isolated as Baum’s versions. But the Kansas farm looks weathered by the Dust Bowl and Great Depression alike, and the drab sepia tone reflects the book’s obsession with gray. Ms. Gulch, who will become the Wicked Witch of the West in Dorothy’s dream, owns half the county, more closely tying witches to the ruling class. The subjugated Munchkins have Lollipop Guilds and Lullaby Leagues, reflecting workers’ unions. The wizard gives the scarecrow, tin man, and cowardly lion a college degree, philanthropic testimonial, and medal, saying that in the real world these are given to people with no more brains, heart, or courage than they have — a shot at society’s better-off, a cheer for common folk. Meanwhile, when Dorothy asks the gatekeeper at the Emerald City if he has ever seen the wizard and hears no in reply, she then asks how he knows there is one — a common question concerning faith. The scarecrow is still appointed ruler when Oz departs, to be assisted by the tin man and lion. 

Gregory Maguire’s Wicked continues the cultural work of its predecessors. With the wizard, the traditional god character, now cast as an authoritarian (and Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, as a freedom fighter, if a morally complex one), there exists even more fertile ground to consider how religion inhibits worker freedom. To begin, the pleasure faith, which is all about fulfilment of base desires, clearly grows from and distracts from human miseries — similar to those of Kansas farmers (who get a nod with a description of Oz as “bankers against farmers and factories against shopkeepers”^[31]). Frex, a unionist minister and Elphaba’s father, considers the people of Rush Margins: “Their lives were hard and their hopes few. As the drought dragged on, their traditional unionist faith was eroding,” replaced by “the so-called pleasure faith,” full of “spectacle and violence.”^[32] It was all “individual freedom and amusement,” “sorcery,” “charms,” “sound and light displays,” and “hedonists.”^[33] But perhaps followers of the pleasure faith and the familiar, monotheistic unionism (as well as tiktokism, Lurlinism, and other religions) are not so different. The atheistic Elphaba wonders:

Do you need religion as, say, the hippos in the Grasslands need the poisonous little parasites within them, to help them digest fiber and pulp? The history of peoples who have shucked off religion isn’t an especially persuasive argument for living without it. Is religion itself — that tired and ironic phrase — the necessary evil? The idea of religion worked for Nessarose, it worked for Frex. There may be no real city in the clouds, but dreaming of it can enliven the spirit.^[34]

The opium of the people, the soul of soulless conditions, the “universal basis of consolation.”^[35] For Elphaba, there is something “appealing” about the pagan Lurlinism, with “Lurlina in her fairy chariot, hovering just out of sight in the clouds, ready to swoop down some millennium or other…”^[36] Perhaps the vague Unnamed God of unionism needs more “character” to be less “hollow,” bringing greater relief to the people as a more relatable, anthropomorphic fantasy: “Perhaps it’s time to name the Unnamed God, even feebly and in our own wicked image, that we may at least survive under the illusion of an authority that could care for us.”^[37] Illusions, Elphaba sees, aid survival and give comfort.

But perhaps they also help maintain domination: the nonreligious Elphaba engages in resistance against the wizard, whereas Nessarose establishes her own unionist “religious tyranny” over Munchkinland and Frex is “feckless” in the face of authoritarianism, “reacting instead of acting, mourning the past and praying for the future instead of stirring up the present.”^[38] Indeed, the people of Oz distracting themselves from the harsh realities of life with religion surely benefits the wizard, who rules with an iron fist and is of course responsible for many of these realities — the Quadlings suffer in mines, sentient Animals are stripped of their rights and become beasts of burden, and so on.^[39] Faith stunts a coherent response to wretched conditions under a dictator and exploiter. This is suggested when an imprisoned cow tells Elphaba that many Animals tended to “draw a connection between the rise of tiktokism and the erosion of traditional Animal labor.”^[40] The growing passions and diversions of religion occurred at the same time that oppression crushed workers. We know that the wizard desired the latter; if the former aids the latter, so too would the wizard desire it. In fact, it is easy to interpret the pleasure faith and its tiktok derivative as extensions or outgrowths of the wizard’s presence and will. The wizard himself is a spectacle, a sound and light display. Elphaba makes this connection when the tyrant takes the form of a skeleton: “The Wizard turned itself around, broke off its femurs, and pounded the seat of the throne as if it were a kettledrum. ‘Really, this is getting ridiculous, it’s all pleasure faith showbiz,’ said Elphaba.”^[41] Further, Elphaba, likely the wizard’s daughter, was born in the Clock of the Time Dragon, the central pleasure faith artifact.^[42] Perhaps the wizard birthed or fed these newer faiths, to turn the gaze of the masses away from his oppressive policies (“Who had engendered this Time Dragon, this fake oracle, this propaganda tool for wickedness,” wondered Frex. “Who…was benefiting?”^[43]). Either way, the faiths serve this function.

For the scholar of history or culture, addressing the question of how creators saw and presented their societies has more to do with answering “What is the author interested in?” than demonstrating that a fantasy land like Oz is a neat allegory for the United States itself (even if a good case can be made). After all, one could find authorial, 1970s perspectives on capitalism and exploited workers in Alien without its setting (a ship, space) being a stand-in for a particular place. An allegorical setting is a bonus, but not necessary to do cultural work. All you need is interest, which offers to the consumer a specific image of the world. This paper argued that interest in the plight of ordinary people and how religion both soothes and prolongs it can be seen in Baum’s original work, the classic film, and Maguire’s reenvisioning. These texts are concerned with the exclusion of the common person from power. But this cannot be merely a general sentiment. This common person is inevitably American not solely thanks to an allegorical setting but, first, because the creators were Americans whose interests were shaped by the American world and whose offerings were made to the American public with its reaction in mind.

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^[1] Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, February 7, 1844. See the introduction. Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm.

^[2] Ibid. 

^[3] Ibid. 

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, 10th ed. (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2024), 4.

^[6] L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Orinda, CA: SeaWolf Press, 2019), 187-189.

^[7] Ibid., 2-3.

^[8] Ibid., 3. 

^[9] Ibid.

^[10] Ibid. 

^[11] Ibid. 

^[12] Ibid., 189-190. See also page 29.

^[13] Ibid., 40-41. 

^[14] Ibid., 31.

^[15] Ibid., 31-32.

^[16] Ibid., 49, 53-57.

^[17] Ibid., 185-187. 

^[18] Ibid., 84-85, 133.

^[19] Ibid., 90-98.

^[20] Ibid., 85.

^[21] Ibid., 132.

^[22] Ibid.

^[23] Ibid., 94, 132-136.

^[24] Ibid., 141-145, 149-150.

^[25] Marx, “Critique.” See the introduction. 

^[26] Baum, Wizard of Oz, 150. 

^[27] Ibid., 148. 

^[28] Ibid., 12.

^[29] Ibid., 12, 112-113.

^[30] The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming (1939; Beverly Hills, CA; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer).

^[31] Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1995), 158.

^[32] Ibid., 13.

^[33] Ibid., 41.

^[34] Ibid., 387.

^[35] Marx, “Critique.” See the introduction. 

^[36] Maguire, Wicked, 388.

^[37] Ibid., 387-388. 

^[38] Ibid., 350, 319.

^[39] Ibid., 194, 174, 317.

^[40] Ibid., 317.

^[41] Ibid., 176. 

^[42] Ibid., 15-21, 374-375. 

^[43] Ibid., 12.

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.

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^[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. 

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^[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.

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^[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.