It is an unenviable end, doing a vast amount of research on a particular subject and discovering your insights have already been made by others. I recently set about studying the historical trope of “the dying girl,” imagining I would write my thesis, to conclude my second master’s degree, on the topic. Unfortunately, while it was clear from primary sources that the dying girl had much to tell us about past American thought, the more scholarship I read the more it grew equally clear that the subject had been thoroughly covered. That is the way of things. Your work has to offer something new, but you cannot know if you have something new until you’ve read everything that everyone else has already written on the matter, a mammoth task, or at least read enough to come across your ideas. I also find it unnatural to try to find something new under the pressure of the clock (ringing at the end of the semester). Historical discoveries and meaningful insights cannot be rushed or forced — they may take months, years, or decades to find, and I’d rather come across them organically.

But it seemed a shame to not do something with this work, so I thought I would take some of my notes and craft a short piece.

In the nineteenth century, the archetype of “the dying girl” or “the dying woman” pervaded art and literature throughout the West, from the United States to Britain to Australia. A young female on her deathbed was the subject of a deluge of poems, short stories, novels, plays, songs, paintings, photographs, and sculptures. However manifested, the dying girl did a great deal of cultural work — as cultural theorist John Storey writes, works of art “always present a particular image of the world” and “win people to particular ways of seeing” it (Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction). The dying girl broadcast ideas on sexuality, religion, and perhaps even industrialization, the latter representing one of my few (somewhat) original insights or theories on this matter.

The archetype arose from various causes. While historians and English scholars have marked the nineteenth century as a high point of the archetype, it was hardly new, having appeared in preceding centuries. It was perhaps an outgrowth from imagery of the virgin Mary’s death. Compare Henry Peach Robinson’s photograph Fading Away (1858) with Death of the Virgin by Rembrandt (1639), Bruegel (1564), or Christus (1460). Jessica Straley, associate professor of English at the University of Utah, writes, “Scholars explain Victorian attitudes toward death as the result of the timely confluence of three traditions: the Gothic fixation on the mysterious and the melancholic, the Romantic veneration of nostalgia and decay, and the Evangelical view of death as a lesson for the living.” Thus, alongside an explosion of dying girls in art, “the nineteenth century uniquely transformed death into an elaborate performance: the century saw the invention of the modern cemetery, the elaboration of the funeral into an extravagant and expensive visual spectacle, and the codification of mourning attire and etiquette.”

There is likely a connection between the dying girl and tuberculosis, which killed large numbers of people in the nineteenth century. Scholars such as English professor Katherine Byrne of the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland (Tuberculosis and the Victorian Imagination, 2011) and Ashleigh Black, doctoral student of visual culture at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland (“Even in Death She Is Beautiful: Confronting Tuberculosis in Art, Literature, and Medicine,” 2022) have considered this. Tuberculosis, or consumption, was a “wasting disease” that British Victorians saw as enhancing feminine beauty, offering “pale, waxen features and a thin figure.” Red cheeks and glittering eyes were other key traits. Thus, real-world deaths, and ideas of beauty, bled into art. In depictions, dying girls were always young, fragile, and pretty. Symptoms of TB include cough, exhaustion, fever, weight loss, aches, and headaches, some of which are referenced in the American poems and short stories I examined (though what the dying girl is dying of is never worth directly mentioning, in the same way her name is usually unimportant).

A typical example of such a primary source (and it cannot be emphasized enough how uniform these writings are, right down to their identical titles, which limits mineable meanings) is Mrs. John K. Laskey’s “The Dying Girl” from Godey’s Magazine in 1843. The dying girl is “lovely,” “gentle,” and “youthful,” with “light curls on her brow.” Laskey depicts a struggle between the natural desire to live and the will of God, his invitation to paradise. With a warm and beautiful summertime, and a garden she “worshipped,” reminding her of the “thousand lovely things of earth,” the dying girl feels the “deep yearning of the soul for life,” longing to “delay” the end. She cries out: 

To die, alas, to die!
To say farewell to all my heart holds dear;
To pass from earth while yet the summer sky
Resounds with gladsome voices, sweet and clear, —
Oh! would I might yet longer tarry here! 

The dying girl eventually comes to her senses (“Father in heaven, my reason half departs!”), overcomes her fears, and accepts God’s will. 

Yes, yes! I will submit! — 
Forgive the spirit that has dared rebel! 
And, holy Father, if THOU thinkest fit, 
Take me from earth, for THOU dost all things well! —
With THEE, henceforth, I would for ever dwell!

Here you see the three key elements of the dying girl’s beauty, her noble Christian example, and her love of nature. These appear throughout my sources, whether written by men or women (typically white and middle or upper class). Of course, scholars have seen sexual connotations in the dying girl’s beauty and weakness. The archetype has been described as “a male fantasy of women’s bodily surrender.”

Magda Romanska, theatre scholar at Emerson College, explores the connection between the dying girl and sexuality in “NecrOphelia: Death, Femininity, and the Making of Modern Aesthetics” (2005). The nineteenth century, she writes, “was a period of morbid aesthetics and a peculiar and apparently inexplicable fascination with deadly eroticism.” Indeed, the “poetic and artistic imagination of the time began conceiving of the erotic as invariably ‘touched by death’ and of death as invariably touched by the erotic.” European artists, for example French sculptor Auguste Clésinger (“Woman Bitten by a Serpent”), offered in their work naked or semi-naked dying women, whose limp, sprawled forms could be read as post-orgasmic as easily as post-mortal. The dead or withering female body was inherently pornographic. The male gaze, Romanska argues, had a particular impact on artistic depictions of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, who became a central necrophilistic subject: “dead, yet sexually appealing.”

Of course, the nineteenth-century writer could not get away with descriptions of the nude body or various stages of undress and hope to be published; the painter and sculptor had more freedom in this regard. The furthest one could go would be where preacher and historian Timothy Horton Ball went in his 1893 Annie B., The Dying Girl: the girl is “very fair,” a “maid” (virgin) of “faultless form” and “native grace,” her cheeks and lips a “rosy hue,” her eyes “tender,” “bright,” and “blue.” This is alongside a beautiful voice and loving nature. Her lips and skin of course grow pale from illness. Not exactly erotica, but certainly pleasing to the male gaze. Elsewhere vulnerable girls are “sad and languid, weak and faint.”

And the dying girl is indeed at times explicitly a maiden, a sexual prize. (Though not always: see Deborah Deacon, “Seduced and Dying: The Sympathetic Trope of the Fallen Woman in Early and Mid-Victorian Britain.”) Professor of English Susan K. Martin of La Trobe University (Australia) explores this in her 1995 article “Good Girls Die; Bad Girls Don’t: The Uses of the Dying Virgin in Nineteenth-century Fiction.” After pointing out that nineteenth-century Western narratives confined young middle-class women to very few roles (“she can marry; she can fall; she can die”), Martin turns to the dying virgin, finding in her an “unthreatening ideal.” By ideal, Martin means that the dying girl is successfully trapped in a “closed system of virginity.” The only way to preserve her sexual purity is to kill her. The dying girl is unthreatening because her agency and power — sexual, social, economic, political, and so on — are curtailed through illness and eventual termination. In much Australian literature, Martin observes, including works by women, female characters who are transgressive, who push against class or gender boundaries, are both punished and cured of “over-active and over-assertive” traits by illness and death — they are made powerless and passive. 

However, various interpretations, and myriad authorial anxieties, are possible: the “death of young women on the brink of sexual maturity” could also be read as escape “from repressive models of nineteenth-century female maturity, the sexual economy and gender boundaries which burden the adult female.” Martin also notes that dying girls issue commands and instructions to men that can hardly be refused (they also provide religious teachings to men, for instance in Ball’s piece). Narratively, the deathbed is a place of power: with the tale about to end and the dying girl showered with love and adulation, anything can be asked for. Further, in some instances, as with Beth and Jo in Alcott’s Little Women, the interpretation that a dying (ideal, domesticated) young woman enables the more radical path of another young woman is possible. Other scholars have noted that Poe’s dying women tend to return from the grave. Dying girl stories can thus be seen as sites of negotiation or feminist subversion, not solely as weapons of male supremacy and the gender order.

However, it must be said that the short nature of the works that appear in American magazines and newspapers do not allow for substantial narrative (and, again, there exists little variance). There is no before or after, no time for the girl to be transgressive, for other characters to walk a life path, etc. The girl is introduced on her deathbed and described physically, she comforts a loved one, reminisces about her childhood in nature, accepts God’s will and delights in seeing heaven, and dies. It is a steady drip of specific ideas into the cultural body. While we certainly see commands that cannot be refused, they tend to service the religious indoctrination. In Daniel Cooledge’s 1833 The Dying Jewess, the girl begs her father to find Christ as she has; she passes away and he does just that.

Beyond the alluring femme fragile and sexually untouched object, beyond the exemplar of the good Christian death (which was a staple of children’s literature in the nineteenth century and prior centuries, featuring more than just dying girls), only the adulation of nature appears to have received little commentary.

Samuel D. Patterson’s “The Prayer of the Dying Girl” was published in Godey’s Magazine in late 1848. The titular character remembers fondly her childhood home, and pleads to be taken there to die. She recalls the green valleys, streams, mountains, and plains she would explore, the “happy days that there I spent when health and strength were mine,” when she “never knew a pang of sorrow or of pain.” The Mourner’s Chaplet: An Offering of Sympathy for Bereaved Friends from 1844, edited by John Keese, contains three works entitled “The Dying Girl,” seemingly by different authors. In the first poem, the girl lifts up the natural world left behind: “Speak of me, when the summer day is bright / With glorious sunbeams, and the golden light / Streams through the lattice of my own green bower / Let me be there, in that rejoicing hour.” Heaven is likewise described as an everlasting spring, with flowers and streams and peaceful skies. The second poem speaks of exploring the ocean shore and picking flowers in childhood. In the third work, the dying girl admires the “golden sun” that warms her “lovely” “native land,” remembering herself as a “careless merry child” who “twined me garlands of sweet wild flowers — no hot-house denizens.” This is an explicit rejection of an urban structure. She regards each “rock and tree as old remembered friends,” and lauds the sparkling river and soft grass. Finally, consider abolitionist and suffragist Mattie Griffith Browne’s “The Dying Girl,” prominently positioned as the first poem in her 1853 collection. This dying girl laments she will not be buried at their family home but rather in “this cold, strange land.” No further explanation is given.

Straley argues that the Victorians linked death and childhood (death is returning home and becoming a child again, returning to a state of innocence), an idea existing alongside a connection between death and the erotic (see Romanska), and between death and woman (both seen as Other, outside the norm, in male-centric societies). But the dying girl’s rejection of her current place and the craving to return to nature could reflect attitudes toward the increasing urbanization and industrialization of nineteenth-century America — in other words, these are works of the Romantic movement (think Thoreau, Emerson, Bryant). Cities grew rapidly in the early 1800s and they were not always pleasant, nor was industrial labor. Philadelphia, Boston, and New York saw large influxes of rural migrants — these are the cities with the magazines and newspapers that received and published most of the dying girl stories I surveyed. While the idea that these works contain expressions of yearning for old ways of life is interesting, it is a bit interpretive for my tastes (like some elements of the sexual analysis) and could not carry a lengthy thesis.

Similarly, my suggestion that the dying girl archetype began to die out with the transition from Americans dying in the home to dying in the hospital in the late nineteenth century (the good Christian death was supposed to happen in the home, the hospital is a less sentimental setting, you may be less likely to be surrounded by family at the end, etc.) would be difficult to prove and quick to discuss.

It is time, then, to find a new topic.

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My latest book is now available for purchase! It is a bit different than my prior works. It is entitled Becoming Missouri State: Conversations on the Great Name Change Battle.

Missouri State University was known as Southwest Missouri State until 2005. The Bears fought for the name Missouri State for 25 years, overcoming fierce opposition from the University of Missouri and Columbia legislators, who acted like “the sky would fall” if Southwest succeeded, to quote a Mizzou graduate. This is that story.

Becoming Missouri State can be found on Amazon here. I do hope you enjoy it.

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Taylor Swift and Drake are, according to a recent piece in The New York Times, the only modern artists who have a chance to overtake The Beatles in popularity, though this remains a daunting task. They have without question defined their respective genres for a generation. Having recently crafted a playlist for a family member to introduce her to Drake, I thought I would pass it along here and create a similar selection of the Taylor Swift songs I most enjoy.

Drake is one of my favorite hip hop artists, alongside Lil Dicky and others who generally seem to be having the time of their lives, and he is certainly who I listen to the most in this genre. I decided to pick 12 songs, exemplifying a healthy mix of his styles, for the Drake Starter Kit. It’s a fun challenge to limit the selection.

And hopefully it generates some curiosity: what 12 Taylor Swift songs would this guy go for? I think my overall interest in Swift remains modest due to a preference for folk over pop (or country, though do see Begrudgingly Acknowledged Country Bangers). To me, much of her work feels a bit empty compared to, say, Una Walkenhorst or Dead Horses. Nevertheless, plenty of Swift songs absolutely slap. Taylor Swift Bangers features a dozen of my favorites. Skirting potential controversy, some songs are the originals. With art, there can be a certain magic and innocence to original creations that is hard to recapture later, and some of the content and spirit of her early work surely benefits from her youth. At other times, the more mature voice of Taylor’s Versions lends a new and beneficial gravitas to the song, a wiser and older woman looking back at something in the true distance (“All Too Well,” for example).

Enjoy.

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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.