Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are in my head

ROS: I'm stuck.
GUIL: No, you're not.
ROS: Yes, I am, I tell you.
GUIL: No. You're not. Look here.
ROS: Oh.
[ten minutes later]
ROS: I'm stuck.
GUIL: Oh for the love of Christ.
ROS: No, I mean it this time. I'm stuck.
GUIL: Look. You can't be stuck. Our deadline's less than two months away. This is no time to screw the pooch.
ROS: All right, all right.
[ten minutes later]
ROS: I'm stuck.
GUIL: For the last fucking time, YOU ARE NOT STUCK.
ROS: Okay, I'm not stuck.
GUIL: Good.
[beat]
ROS: I'm bored.
[GUIL chases ROS offstage with a Swingline stapler]

---

The Mirador, Chapter Four: 8,606 words

Half of Chapter Four is now Chapter Five, because more than 70 ms pages is just ridiculously long for a chapter. Chapter Five is 8,727 words and growing.

UBC #13: Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel

UBC #13
Zwinger, Lynda. Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel: The Sentimental Romance of Heterosexuality. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

This is, yes, fifteen-year-old feminist literary criticism. But it's very intelligent and it has things to say that I found very useful.

Zwinger's primary texts are Clarissa, Dombey and Son, Little Women, The Golden Bowl, and The Story of O, along with a final chapter on Austen, C. and E. Brontë, and George Eliot. And what's brilliant about this book is that it shows the ways in which The Story of O is a lineal descendant of the sentimental (in its technical sense) novels of the nineteenth century. O's efforts to remake herself into something that Sir Stephen will love is the same struggle, in a different register, as Florence Dombey's or Jo March's: the desire to please the patriarch, The Man. Zwinger's reading also makes sense, for me, of Little Women, for it points out that Jo's struggle is not to become an adult, independent woman writer (as we, as modern feminist readers, wish it was), but to become a daughter her father can be proud of. (And, yes, cue the teeth-grinding venom about Bronson Alcott.)

Zwinger is very clear on the ways in which feminist readers will find themselves misled and trapped in novels like Little Women. She is also brilliantly, brutally clear about Freud's self-interest in creating the family romance in such a way that the father is never at fault. The best Freudian criticism is always that which insists on pointing out that Freud himself was not a disinterested observer, that uses his ideas on his own writing.

( like this )

Freudian criticism has to be approached warily, skeptically. (Freud's assertions about the gendered responsibilities of parents only works in the ideal bourgeois nuclear family, for instance, in which there are two parents, one of each gender, and the feminine parent cares for the children while the masculine parent leaves the house to work) But Zwinger uses it well and carefully, and she never forgets to examine her own subject-position as she goes.