The Little Professor

In which, once again, I ruminate about conferences

By which I don't want to paint myself as "anti-conference," if there is such a thing; after all, I recently sent out a proposal to a conference whose theme aligns neatly with work I have in process.  But I have become more and more "not pro-conference," for a number of reasons--not just because we lost that tax deduction, which leaves everyone unable to obtain sufficient funds for conference travel permanently out of pocket.  My qualms have multiplied:

1) Four years ago, I noted that I wasn't really on board with reasons to continue interviewing at conferences.  I am now, I think, completely overboard.  I really cannot see how we can be justified in expecting graduate students, contingent faculty, and even junior scholars on the move to spend $$$ that will never be reimbursed.  As a 70s TV show once said: we have the technology.  

2) The obvious corollary to this position is that we need a "honey, I shrunk the MLA" moment.  Without the jobseekers, attendance would drop drastically, and not just from the side of the jobseekers--you'd also lose the people who are only attending because they're on a search committee.  Fewer attendees = possibility of smaller cities as hosts = more affordable conference for people who want to be there, as opposed to have to be.  (And perhaps we could schedule the MLA at a time of year when, you know, the likelihood of being trapped by an INCREDIBLY LARGE SNOWSTORM is somewhat lower.)

3) I believe universities should put the proverbial money where their proverbial mouth is.  (I'll note in passing that my own little regional comprehensive has actually done so.) Even if you get a roommate (not practical or desirable for everyone), and spend all of your time eating at McDonald's, tickets, room, and food are still pricey.  If faculty must attend conferences to show professional engagement or development or whatever the APT document says it is, then the university needs to pick up the entire tab.  That tax deduction for unreimbursed employee expenses let universities off the hook.  (Have I mentioned that we lost the tax deduction? Let me mention it again.) Of course, there are other alternatives to paying conference stipends...like raising faculty salaries to compensate.  (And salaries for contingent faculty.  And graduate student stipends.) Oh, wait--conferences aren't that important, you say? Hmmmm.  

4) Well, perhaps conferences aren't that important.  And there is such a thing as attending too many conferences, especially at the graduate student level.  In years past, folks critical of the publish-and-perish mentality have suggested limiting the number of publications that can be submitted for tenure; in practice, I suspect people might be more willing to get on board with limiting the number of conference presentations.  Or simply rendering them optional.

Academic Life: Spring 2019

I don't think I did this update in the Fall! In any event, here's this semester in the life of a full professor at a regional comprehensive college.

Teaching:

• I have two classes this semester, as I have a course release for an administrative assignment (see "service," below).  I don't have new preps this semester, although I'll make up for that next year.  This time around, it's Introduction to Literary Analysis, which is in the Hamlet rotation for the second half of the semester (Hamlet, Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Bailey's The Astrologer, some Victorian retellings for children, and Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well) and Women and British Short Fiction, a lower-division course that fulfills a number of gen ed requirements and thus isn't all English majors.  The literary analysis course is all poetry, all the time for the first half of the semester.

Service:

• I'm still Associate Chair.
• I'm also on the Curriculum Committee, which this semester means wrangling people for assessment.
• We have Periodic Program Review, which is ongoing and won't wrap until near the end of the semester.
• Over the break, I chaired a search committee for an administrative position.  
• There is usually an honors and awards committee assignment that will happen somewhere down the line.
• Profession-wise, I'm now a book review editor for a small online journal (incidentally, let me remind people that if you're interested in reviewing for us, please drop me a line).  The first set of reviews should arrive at the end of next month, so I'll need to put my copyediting hat on.

Professional:

• I've been working for a few months on a book proposal, which is now almost completely drafted.  
• I have...four? articles coming out this year, and should see proofs on one and possibly two of them within the next couple of months.  (One of these articles has been gestating for something close to sixteen years, so I'm glad it's finally out the door!)
• I have three relatively short pieces I need to write: the longest, for a Cambridge Companion, is due in June, plus a 2000-word encylopedia entry in September and a book review sometime this summer.  I've also got a couple of ideas for pieces related to the book that isn't the one I was asked to propose. 

 

This Month's Acquisitions

(Some books appeared while I was on the other side of the country.)

• M. H., From Cottage to Castle; Or, Faithful in Little.  A Tale Founded on Fact (Nimmo, 1883).  The experiences of a young Scottish girl and her sister as they face various trials in the wake of their parents' deaths.  (eBay)
• Florence E. Burch, Led by a Little Child, or the Blind Basket-Maker (RTS, n.d.).  A little girl helps restore the faith of a man who lost his eyesight during a lightning strike.  (eBay)
• Christine Alexander, ed., An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Bronte, Volume II: The Rise of Angria, 1833-1835; Part 2: 1834-1835 (Basil Blackwell, 1991).  Collection of Angria tales beginning with High Life in Verdopolis.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Ottessa Moshfegh, McGlue: A Novella (Penguin, 2014).  In the mid-nineteenth century, a man wakes up and tries to remember if he just killed someone.  (Lift Bridge)
• Bryan Furuness, ed., My Name was Never Frankenstein: And Other Classic Adventure Tales Remixed (Indiana, 2019).  Anthology of mashed-up and otherwise revised stories featuring famous literary characters.  (Lift Bridge)
• Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne, eds., Charlotte Bronte: Legacies and Afterlives (Manchester, 2017).  Ways in which both Bronte's life and her fiction have been dramatized, idolized, and reworked.  (Amazon)
• Ian Haywood, Romanticism and Caricature (Cambridge, 2013).  Analyzes a series of specific caricatures by Cruikshank, Gillray, Heath and Grant, and Rowlandson, looking at their implications for thinking about political debate in the early nineteenth century.  (Amazon)
• Jessica Fay, Wordsworth's Monastic Inheritance: Poetry, Place, and the Sense of Community (Oxford, 2018).  Examines the importance of monastic ruins, Spenserian aesthetics, the pastoral, etc. for Wordsworth's representations of local community.  (Amazon)
• Alison Milbank, God & the Gothic: Religion, Romance, and Reality in the English Literary Tradition (Oxford, 2018).  Argues that the Gothic is deeply rooted in post-Reformation theological questions.  (Amazon)
• Tim Allender, Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1820-1932 (Manchester, 2016).  Examines how ideas about gender altered in different contexts across India, including in education, missionary work, medicine, etc. (Amazon)
• Christopher Wakeling, Chapels of England: Buildings of Protestant Nonconformity (Historic England, 2017).  An architectural history of Nonconformist chapels between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.  (Amazon)
• Ethan Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Princeton, 2018).  A history of what it meant to "believe," including the new crisis of defining belief post-Reformation.  (Amazon)
• Susan O'Brien, Leaving God for God: The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul in Britain, 1847-2017 (Longman, 2017).  The history of a religious community, both in and of itself and as a way of thinking about Catholic history more generally.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Ruth Compton Brouwer, New Women for God: Canadian Presbyterian Women and India Missions, 1876-1914 (Toronto, 1990).  Studies how missionary work intersected with questions of early feminism and imperial politics.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• David Fitzpatrick, Descendancy: Irish Protestant Histories since 1795 (Cambridge, 2014). Studies Protestant narratives about their sense of growing marginality, focusing on the role of the Orange Order.  (Amazon)
• Diane Langmore, Missionary Lives: Papua, 1874-1914 (Hawaii, 1989).  The personal experiences of missionaries to Papua, New Guinea (both Catholic and Protestant), including their relationships with indigenous people, domestic lives, educations, and so forth.  (Amazon [secondhand])

 

Things not to do, #1291: insult graduate students who have dropped out of your special issue

It is not a good advertisement for one's feminist journal to tell a graduate student that having to pull out of a special issue because of financial exigency is "frankly unacceptable."  It's not just egregious, but reeks of--dare I say it?--the kind of privilege that feminist journals are purportedly in the business of undermining.  As someone who has worked (and is once again working) the other side of the journal production fence, the entire scenario is bizarre.

Reason #1: Contributors were told that "withdrawing was not an option"? Somebody always has to withdraw.  Always.  As in, you assume that a contributor will vanish into thin air because of family issues, or illness, or unexpected emergencies, or something.  This is true in both edited collections and special issues.  (My article in that Blackwell companion to the Brontes that came out a couple of years ago was in fact supposed to be two entirely different articles; the late Diane Hoeveler, who edited it, contacted me late in the process to explain that a contributor had stopped responding to emails, and could I, you know, maybe spend more time on the Methodists?)  In this case, the journal has not even received essays yet, which means that there's time for any number of stopgap measures--like putting out an emergency CFP, begging one's friends, or dredging through the journal backfile.  

Reason #1a: On what planet are contributors possessed of prophetic abilities? Nobody knows what's going to happen to them a few weeks or months down the line! Why are you blaming them for wanting to eat?

Reason #2: The deadline you tell the contributors should not be the actual deadline, precisely to avoid the emergencies associated with Reason #1.  (Yes, I'm giving away an important secret there.)

Reason #3: I''m in agreement with those in the responses who pointed out that professors operating a journal do, in fact, receive "compensation."  (The editorial assistant is probably the only person receiving immediate $, although perhaps not very much.  A senior U of C professor asked me if the job paid "moderately well"; I responded, "it pays moderately.")  Such work goes on your annual report as service to the profession and thus counts towards contractual service obligations, promotion, evaluation of performance at rank (important if your university does post-tenure review), and bonus pay.  It also confers at least some degree of power, inasmuch as controlling access to your journal affects careers, possibly world-wide.  

(I am paid for my research, as well as my new job as a small-scale book review editor, because it's part of my contract.  That thing which stipulates what I need to do in order to earn my salary. If I go above and beyond expectations, I get additional compensation.  Now, we can talk about disproportionately exorbitant journal subscription fees, the impossibly high price of many academic books, and so forth, but that's not the same thing as saying "I'm doing this for free."  By contrast, an unemployed graduate student or underemployed adjunct really isn't being compensated for their research or service work.)

 

Mary, Queen of Scots

As monarchy biopics go, Mary, Queen of Scots does its best to stay in familiar territory.  (Or, as one critic puts it, rather more harshly, "indulges in every threadbare period-film trope.")  The fictionalized secret meeting between the two queens is a dramatic device going back to Schiller; the gendering of the pair, with Elizabeth as "masculine" and Mary as "feminine," goes back even further (arguably back to the lifetimes of the queens themselves); the conflict between private romance and public duty is a staple of the form; even the moment of prophecy at the end has been popular in representations of the Tudors and Stuarts since Shakespeare and Fletcher (who pull this off at the end of Henry VIII).  Unfortunately, I don't remember whether or not I've seen the previous Mary, Queen of Scots biopic, but its trailer indicates that its 2018 descendant has borrowed the mise-en-scene for the moment when Darnley is forced to sign off on Riccio's death.  Strictly speaking, the only real nod to experimentation here is the color-blind casting for supporting actors and extras.

For this viewer, at least, the film's key problem is Mary herself--and, for that matter, what I felt was a discrepancy between the film's purported and actual approaches to her behavior.  On the one hand, the film represents Mary as the modern ideal of royalty: she valorizes emotional authenticity over realpolitik; yearns for real love (and sex, with ironic consequences); tries to model toleration for her subjects; makes a point of connecting with the common people; attempts to make proto-feminist (albeit monarchist) common cause with Elizabeth; and so on.  All of this is in contrast to the performative, insistently celibate, and increasingly made-up Elizabeth, who breaks down only rarely into raw emotional expression.  (Notably, Mary spends a lot more time out in nature than Elizabeth does; even Holyrood is rough-hewn out of rock.)  On the other hand, the film is also stuck with the real Mary's political acumen, or lack thereof, and so it's hard to avoid the conclusion that she self-inflicts more wounds than those suffered by poor Riccio.  Despite the explicit "men, amirite?" tone of the dialogue, Mary's brother James spends most of the film being correct.  No, Mary should not tick off John Knox (who seems badly in need of shampoo); no, Mary should certainly not marry Darnley; yes, marrying Darnley will blow up the Anglo-Scottish detente that James has worked so hard to achieve. While Mary's decision to spare James' life (pesky historical reality again) comes across as yet another example of emotional authenticity, not to mention Christian forgiveness, one can't help noticing that Bothwell has reason to be exasperated.  For that matter, Mary's complete misunderstanding of Bothwell's behavior sums up her utter failure as a politician, let alone a monarch.  Mary's "authenticity" consistently prevents her from listening to or learning from her brother, even though he has actually been running things for years.  It keeps her from judging Darnley's character (the film makes him more of a weasel than even the real Darnley, which is saying something).   And it makes her incapable of grasping that Bothwell, her apparently loyal protector, is as much on the make as anyone else.  Her climactic encounter with Elizabeth--a.k.a. the person with the upper hand--is a mind-boggling miscalculation of epic proportions.  ("Shut up, Mary," wails the viewer, as Mary shoots herself thoroughly in the foot with a cannon.)  Was the irony of the ending, in which a guy ascends the throne and everything is fine, really intended by the filmmakers?

 

The Favourite

Films set from the reign of George III and later usually face one problem head on: how to justify the ongoing existence of a monarchy in a country where the monarch no longer has any well-defined powers as a ruler.  A few years ago, I argued that from The Madness of King George onwards, the usual solution has been to narrate how the monarch gets his (or her) "glamour" back--how, that is, they reemerge as unifying national symbols who reside beyond the taint of the political, a process that often requires the help of a civilian guide.  Frequently enough, having rescued the country by rescuing the monarch, the all-too-helpful civilian finds himself kicked to the curb at the end (The King's Speech is an important exception to this rule).  All of these things play out before--indeed, require--an eager public to consume the monarch's image. But The Favourite tackles a different problem, yet one recognizably filtered through the preoccupations associated with symbolic monarchy films: what happens to the glamour conferred by divine right when the supposedly powerful monarch is merely a civilian tool? 

The Favourite opens with a nod and wink to King George: whereas that film begins with the king's robing for the opening of Parliament, The Favourite opens with the queen's disrobing after the speech.  Figuratively shedding the mantle of earlier monarchy films, which if nothing else are often Oscar-bait for costume design, The Favourite revels in announcing its disinterest in the history that purportedly underlies its plot.  The film has a complicated relationship to the satires of the real Duchess of Marlborough's friend Arthur Maynwaring; here, the satires don't exist, and are replaced instead by Abigail's initial attempt to blackmail Sarah and then Sarah's own attempt to blackmail the Queen with the Queen's love letters to her.   Abigail loses years off her age--she was considerably Masham's senior--while Sarah loses all her children and Queen Anne her husband. That Abigail was related to both Sarah and Harley goes similarly unmentioned.  Events that took about six years to unfold here appear to transpire in a matter of weeks.  So The Favourite does its best to emulate Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown (also known as the film with the missing Prime MInister) when it comes to cheerfully abandoning all pretensions to accuracy.  At the same time, the contrast between the period interiors and the twenty-first century women's costumes (geometrically-ornamented "sketches," as it were, of appropriate dress), language, and, most famously, dance moves continually reminds the viewer that this film is mediated through our own aesthetics and politics. 

One of The Favourite's most interesting deviations from the contemporary monarchy film, in fact, is that the focus is on Queen Anne's relationships to other women: films about Victoria and the two Elizabeths primarily focus on the queen and men, whether as political or romantic objects.  As has been oft-remarked by the critics, the film plays games with gender stereotypes: the men's more accurate costumes appear "feminine" to a modern viewer (men ought to be "pretty," Harley remarks), in contrast to Anne's and Sarah's masculine riding habits and shooting garb.  But the men also spend as much time as the bored queen playing silly games like racing ducks and throwing fruit at each other.  Arguably, the only character in the film with a gimlet-eyed approach to politics is Sarah--even her romantic relationship with the queen is integral to her agenda.   Moreover, because the Queen actually makes decisions, instead of being reduced to a ventriloquist's dummy (in theory, anyway), the division of power by gender becomes much more complex: the politicians can try to manipulate the Queen, but they can't make a move without her giving the OK; if they do manipulate the Queen successfully, it's through the medium of another woman.  Indeed, the women (even the Queen) are much more alert to the politics of sex and courtship than the men.   

The public/private split that takes up so much of the post-George films' attention here reappears as the conflict between Sarah (who manipulates the Queen for what she believes is the national good) and Abigail (who has no ambitions beyond ensuring her own safety after years of abuse).  The wider public is noticeably missing altogether: the Queen has no contact with anyone beyond the palace boundaries and only hears about their opinions (and riots) secondhand--foreshadowing the ultimate fate of Sarah's letter at the end.  Wheeled to a dance, the gouty queen must sit by herself and watch, and she clearly spends much of her time alone and self-absorbed.  Thus, instead of focusing on the Queen (re)learning how to perform in order to settle national unrest, the film emphasizes how Sarah and Abigail compete in their performances for the Queen--Abigail's flattery (but is it always?) vs. Sarah's truthfulness (but is it always?).  Sarah, the character who fits most neatly into the contemporary monarchy film's more traditional plot, suffers the usual fate of all non-royal advisers--but without accomplishing her goals.  In a sense, the film acts as a thematic prequel to the symbolic monarchy films, as Anne willingly (if not always wittingly) relinquishes the political power that later monarchs conspicuously fail to possess.  

A lot of viewers were baffled by those bunnies at the end, incidentally.  My own reading of that closing image was that the rabbits (her "children," standing in for the seventeen lost pregnancies and dead children) have represented throughout an emotional alternative to Sarah, Abigail, and all the rest: the rabbits are the Queen's emotional utopia of sorts, an escape to a psychological place in which nothing is demanded of her other than food, water, and petting.  The rabbits have no ulterior motives and make no judgments.  But as the juxtaposition to the Queen's physically and sexually abusive demonstration of power over Abigail suggests, the Queen's love for the rabbits is also amoral (and, of course, vice-versa).  The rabbits are the Queen's fantasy of uncomplicated happiness; Abigail, however, is what the Queen has.  

My Year in Books

• Favorite fiction: Kate Atkinson, Transcription; Richard Beard, Lazarus is Dead; Hamish Clayton, Wulf; Barbara Hanrahan, The Albatross Muff; Jeannette Ng, Under the Pendulum Sun; Caryl Phillips, A View of the Empire at Sunset; Adam Roberts, The Black Prince.
• Favorite historical mystery: Elizabeth Haynes, The Murder of Harriet Monckton.
• Detective with most eye-watering dress sense: Richard Jepherson in Kim Newman’s The Man from the Diogenes Club. 
• Weirdest take on Christianity: Robert Shearman, “Pumpkin Kids.”
• There are unpleasant boarding schools and then there are…whatever this is: Colin Winnette,  The Job of the Wasp.
• Novel that made me want to yell “Why on earth would you ever keep doing this?!” over and over again, which is pretty awkward when you’re on a plane to the UK: Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.
• Novel reread for the first time since I was about ten: Louisa May Alcott, Little Women.
• Best novels reread for class: Laura Fish, Strange Music; Caryl Phillips, Cambridge; Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier.
• Most fun novel to teach: Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier. 
• Now I’m seeing it everywhere: The result of teaching a Pilgrim’s Progress course. 
• Actually Dickensian neo-Victorian novel: Stephen Jarvis, Death and Mr. Pickwick.
• Most unusual bildungsroman: Lorna Gibb, A Ghost’s Story.
• Best unintentional demonstration that nineteenth-century economists were not necessarily brilliant novelists: Robert Torrens. 
• Discovery resulting in a moment of existential despair: Turning up far too many Victorian epic poems about the Crusades.  (It has occurred to me that I should really do some writing about Victorian religious poetry.  However…)
• What is this I just read: A Christian with Two Wives.
• There are times one suspects the author lacks inspiration: The first name of the Lady Macbeth equivalent in Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth is…Lady. 
• Most unusual Sherlock Holmes pastiche: Gordon Alpine, Holmes Untangled.
• Funniest Sherlock Holmes pastiche: G. S. Denning’s ongoing Warlock Holmes series.  OK, the humor is broad, but I laughed anyway.
• Sherlock Holmes mashup trend that is not perhaps entirely necessary: Do we need two different series in which Holmes gets mixed up with the Cthulhu mythos?
• Sherlock Holmes anthology that best created the fiction of a singular voice: Christopher Sequeira, ed., Sherlock Holmes: The Australian Casebook.
• Most wearisome ongoing Neo-Victorian trend: Given the number of Jack the Ripper copycats wandering through nineteenth-century London, it’s amazing that England made it into the twentieth century with most of its female population intact. 
• Monograph finally discounted enough for me to purchase it: The third volume of Michael Watts’ study of Nonconformity in Britain. 
• Most antiquarian purchases: Barbara Hofland’s The Blind Farmer and His Children and a first edition of Grace Kennedy’s Father Clement, both 1823; Elizabeth Sandham, Providential Care, a Tale Founded on Fact, 1825.     
• The duplication blues: Yet again, I somehow managed to purchase books I already owned. 

This Last Three Weeks' Acquisitions

• Margaret Oliphant, Caleb Field: A Tale of the Puritans (Harper and Brothers, 1851).  Historical novel about the persecution of the Puritans, set around the time of the Great Plague.  (eBay)
• Meir Goldschmidt, Jacob Bendixen, the Jew, trans. and adapt. Mary Howitt, 3 vols. (Colburn, 1851).  A young Jewish man tries to construct an identity for himself, with little success.  First published in 1845.  (eBay)
• Elizabeth Sandham, Providential Care: A Tale, Founded on Facts (Harvey and Darton, 1825).  Two poor children find help and live happily ever after.  (eBay)
• Sylvain Marechal, The Woman Priest, trans. Sheila Delany (University of Alberta, 2016).  Translation of Marechal's 1801 novella about a young woman who decides that the best way to join the priest she loves is to become one herself.  (Amazon)
• Gerald Murnane, Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murname (FSG, 2018).  Short stories by the Australian novelist.  (Lift Bridge)
• Laurie R. King and Leslie Klinger, eds., For the Sake of the Game: Stories Inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon (Pegasus, 2018).  Includes both straight Holmes pastiches and more loose responses (including Holmes and Watson as...insects).  (Amazon)
• Jonathan Dent, Sinister Histories: Gothic Novels and Representations of the Past, from Horace Walpole to Mary Wollstonecraft (Manchester, 2016).  Argues that eighteenth-century Gothic fiction transformed contemporary historiography in its construction of terrifying pasts.  (Amazon)
• Justin A. Sider, Parting Words: Victorian Poetry and Public Address (Virginia, 2018).  Analyzes the valedictory mode in Victorian poetry.  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)
• Colin Jager, Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age (Penn, 2015).  Emergence of different forms of "the secular" in the early nineteenth century.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Jonathan Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford, 2005).  Studies the literary-political implications of the expanding notion of "enthusiasm" during the early nineteenth century (religious, radical, etc.).  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Sebastian Lecourt, Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, & the Secular Imagination (Oxford, 2018).  Analyzes the Victorian racialization of religious identity (e.g., Eliot, Arnold).  (Amazon)
• David Young, F. D. Maurice and Unitarianism (Clarendon, 1992).  Examines the influence of Unitarian thinking on the Broad Church theologian F. D. Maurice.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters, Volume III: The Crisis and Conscience of Nonconformity (Oxford, 2015). Conclusion of Watts' trilogy about the history of Nonconformist belief in Britain, focusing this time on its transformations during the Victorian period.  (Amazon)

Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle

The selling point of Mowgli has been its "dark" quality, in comparison to the song-and-dance animated Jungle Book feature and, for that matter, the more recent live adaptation (the film which came, saw, and conquered this one, cinematic-release speaking).  In practice, this results in a kind of tonal dissonance: Mowgli's frequently light-hearted coming-of-age narrative runs smack into a much bloodier story about the ethics of hunting.  (TL;DR: hunting for food, good; hunting for sport, bad.)  As a result, it's not always clear whom the film is for, a problem accentuated by the sometimes odd CGI (Shere Khan and Father Wolf are especially...off) and the sometimes cartoonish, sometimes very brutal violence. Interestingly enough, Mowgli turns out to have its competitor's problem with the in-universe politics of Mowgli's identity as a human being, and yet solves them it in a way that arguably out-Kiplings Kipling.

Mowgli's narrative combines the Mowgli tales from the first Jungle Book, including Shere Khan's manipulation of wolfpack politics, Mowgli's kidnapping by the Bandar-Log (here just known as the Monkey People), and Mowgli's time in the village, although it concludes by foreshadowing his afterlife as Master of the Jungle in the Second Jungle Book (without mentioning that, in his late teens, he returns to his adoptive family).  Moreover, there is a new addition who serves as a pivot point, a deconstructed Great White Hunter (seriously) with a drinking problem and the perhaps somewhat odd habit of lugging all of his hunting trophies around with him.  (Lockwood's obsession with Shere Khan turns out to be a sort of discount Moby Dick plot.) . Much of the tension in the film's first half derives from a rite of passage nowhere in Kipling, the "running," which qualifies the cubs for full membership in the pack; Mowgli's physical inability to keep up with the other cubs, which marks him out as a "freak" alongside his runty albino friend Bhoot, would disqualify him, were it not that he learns to master tree-climbing instead.  It is only Bagheera's deliberate intervention that cheats Mowgli out of winning the contest and inadvertently leads him to being captured by the Bandar-Log.  Mowgli's desire to be accepted, just like everyone else--one of the most popular plots in all of children's and YA film--supplants the original story's explanation for the loathing with which the other wolves regard him: "The others they hate thee because their eyes cannot meet thine; because thou art wise; because thou hast pulled out thorns from their feet—because thou art a man" ("Mowgli's Brothers").  Instead of the film's more generic "we're special!" with which Mowgli's buddy Bhoot tries to console him, the short story very clearly insists on the animals' instinctive recognition of human superiority.  By the same token, the film displaces just about all of the nastiness of human nature (aside from some children being jerks) onto Lockwood, the aforementioned hunter; the villagers, it is made clear, have every right to want to eliminate Shere Khan (who is eating their cattle and, of course, has a history of eating them as well).  Notably, Mowgli never speaks with another human being, although the stories emphasize that he picks up the language very quickly--a kind of distancing that makes it easier for him to abandon the village at the end in order to return to the jungle.

Structurally, as the film makes explicit in Kaa's concluding voiceover, Lockwood and Shere Khan are two aspects of the same violation of jungle law.  Early on, Bagheera explains to Mowgli that hunting for food is both "sacred" and a "right," but one must never hunt for pleasure.  Shere Khan, who kills cows for the fun of it (an especial violation of the law, as it brings humans into the jungle seeking vengeance), is the animal equivalent of Lockwood, a sportsman who displays rather than eats his kills.  (It doesn't help that Lockwood's trophies include half of one of Hathi's tusks and, alas, the taxidermied Bhoot.) Lockwood's implied alcoholism functions similarly to Shere Khan's limp, inasmuch as both have problems with mobility (and, unfortunately for Lockwood, aiming).  Moreover, it is clearly the manner of killing that is also at issue.  First, in a reworking of the original, Akela evicts Mowgli from the pack for saving him with fire, a human weapon; later, Lockwood gifts Mowgli a knife with which to hunt.  Mowgli's success at killing Shere Khan (here, with the help of elephants instead of buffalo) is the moment when he truly establishes himself as a successful man-wolf hybrid: Mowgli can kill Shere Khan because he isn't a wolf, and uses the knife to finally finish him off, but he also kills using the same intimacy prescribed by jungle law.  Lockwood, by contrast, uses a gun, and the gunsight paradoxically makes him unable to see his own oncoming death.  Having erased both the law-breakers and the overly-hidebound from the narrative--Akela dies fighting with Shere Khan, another deviation from Kipling--the film leaves the field open for Mowgli's creativity to rejuvenate jungle law.  Being different, rather than being human, turns out to save the day--and yet, in the end, Mowgli's difference remains predicated on his being human.

 

Brief note: In the House in the Dark of the Woods

Where there are fairy tales, there are often forests; where there is American Gothic, there are also forests.  Laird Hunt's recent In the House in the Dark of the Woods fuses these traditions, yoking "Hansel and Gretel" and "Little Red Ridinghood," in particular, to Gothic narratives of witchcraft and Puritanism--especially Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown."  (One of the characters turns out to be named Faith...)   Most of the plot, which as we discover near the end actually begins in medias res, is told in the first person by a young wife known only by her wifely identity, Goody.  Goody lives with her clearly abusive husband and possibly autistic son in an isolated cabin, although close to some of the "first folk" who still occupy the nearby lands.  Her wanderings through the woods lead her to three women: Captain Jane, a mysterious woman in a magical cloak and affinities with the wolves; Eliza, a beautiful young woman (or so, at least, she seems), who is for seem reason trapped in an Edenic house and lands (or so, at least, they seem); and Granny Someone, a stereotypical witch who sends Goody on a classic fetch quest.  All three of these women are under the power of a mysterious being known only as Red Boy, who controls not only the woods, but the very identities of all three women: "We are all what Red Boy has told us we are," Captain Jane tells Goody (loc. 1220).  The reader up on their colonial America will expect that Red Boy, a competitor to God, must be Satan, although the novel never quite affirms that interpretation.  

I'm going to talk about some key aspects of the plot, so let's go below the fold.