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Letter from the Editor
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Raya Ilieva EDITORIAL REVIEWERS
Dear Reader, Welcome to Volume IV of Romanesco, the interdisciplinary humanities journal of the Nueva School! As promised in our mini-issue last spring, we are so excited for you to dive into an even wider range of scholarly work. Here, you’ll find your classmates tackling meaning, mystery, language, consciousness, and the uniquely human way of perceiving the world. The authors in this issue contemplate the wacky and the sublime, the unspoken and the ineffable, the real and the imagined. They examine convention and explore how literary and philosophical thought constantly reinvents the status quo. They enter into dialogue with seminal cultural works (including The Simpsons!) and showcase their creativity with original art. While engaging with extremely abstract concepts—time, experience, expression—they stay razor-sharp in their analysis and focus. It has been my absolute joy to watch these pieces evolve through the editorial process and see the journal come to life. I am always amazed by the quality and scope of work that falls into the hands of the Romanesco team, and feel immensely grateful that this space exists to celebrate the humanities. None of this would have been possible without the authors who so bravely shared their thoughtful, excellent work with us. If you’re inspired by what you read here and want to see your own work showcased, please share a special piece when we open our rolling submissions next fall! We hope you find something to enjoy, mull on, or wonder about in these pages. After all, with Romanesco we hope to bring more of your ideas to a wider audience, sparking questions and connections in new directions. Warmly, Raya Ilieva Romanesco Editor-in-Chief
Welles Baerenwald Eva Greenebaum Amaira Gupta Evelyn Kuan
FACULTY ADVISORS Mikel Inchausti Jen Paull Ted Theodosopoulos
DESIGN Raya Ilieva Jen Paull
COVER ILLUSTRATION Grey Liu SPECIAL THANKS Alejandro Bernhard Jackee Bruno Jessie Dubreuil Rachel Freeman Holly Nall Ryan Sawtell Claire Yeo LiAnn Yim
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Table of Contents
Human and Heptapod: Conflicting Consciousness by Welles Baerenwald
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The Springfield School of Existential Thought by Jackson Hayward
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Stolen Purity, Sundered Domesticity, and Subverted Submissiveness: The Utilization of Christian Tenet in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Soren Segre
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Artist’s Statement by Andy McLaughlin
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Chrononormativity and Women’s Agency in Dracula by Senya Salzmann
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The Fish That Taught Me to See by Ryker Law
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Boney Houses and Sentient Porcelain: Merricat’s Insanity by Caitlyn Zhu
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Are Numbers Real? by Nate Bomze
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Louise decides to do what she does not despite knowing what will happen, but because of it.
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Welles Baerenwald
Human and Heptapod: Conflicting Consciousness
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cross Ted Chiang’s novella Story of Your Life and its film adaptation, Arrival (dir. Denis Villeneuve), linguistics professor Louise’s extraterrestrial encounter with the Heptapods and her subsequent transition from sequential to simultaneous awareness mark a point of no return in how she perceives the world. The “translation” of her previously sequential experiences into heptapod language and culture creates an entirely new context, one in which her future is predetermined and she is able to visualize her entire life from start to finish. In this new reality, everything Louise says and does serves one purpose: that of acting out the future as she knows it will happen. Through the acquisition of Heptapod B, a language rooted in simultaneous awareness, Louise’s existence takes on a meaning unique to that context, revealing the impact of language on consciousness. As Louise immerses herself in the heptapod language, she begins to “remember” moments that have yet to occur—after a time, she realizes that she is seeing the future. Learning the heptapods’ language allows Louise to visualize time in the same way as the heptapods: Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all. A minimizing, maximizing purpose. (Chiang 134) Over the course of Arrival, we glimpse various scenes from Louise’s life with her daughter Hannah, from the moment of her birth to her early death from
7 a rare disease. Towards the end of the film, these “flashbacks” are revealed to be events from Louise’s future—visions she’s experienced as a result of her immersion in the heptapod language. Louise’s child with her partner Ian is a testament to how her knowledge of the future changes her: although she knows the outcome of Hannah’s life, she follows the path laid out before her exactly as she has seen it. In one of Louise’s visions, Hannah asks her why her father doesn’t look at her the same way anymore, and Louise admits to her that she “told him something that he wasn’t ready to hear”—and he said that she made the wrong choice (Arrival). But did she really have a “choice” at all? Louise’s knowledge of the future does not prevent her from acting upon it—rather, it compels her to do so. She feels “a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would” (Chiang 132). Louise’s attempt to “translate” this knowledge for Ian, whose sequential awareness does not allow him to grasp the concept of fulfilling predetermined events, ends in their separation. Ultimately, Louise decides to do what she does not despite knowing what will happen, but because of it. What, then, is the “purpose” the heptapods’ knowledge of the future gives them? In the context of simultaneous awareness, everything a heptapod does is governed by their knowledge of what is to come: The heptapods are neither free nor bound as we understand those concepts; they don’t act according to their will, nor are they helpless automatons. What distinguishes the heptapods’ mode of awareness is not just that their actions coincide with history’s events; it is also that their motives coincide with history’s purposes. They act to create the future, to enact chronology. (Chiang 137) Heptapods’ actions are not independent and born of free will, but a fulfillment of the future they already know will happen. Similarly, in any given conversation, what a heptapod says takes on a significance beyond its symptomatic meaning, which is “[the] meaning that things have just by themselves” (Bellos 69). Speech Act Theory is the idea that an utterance can carry out an action simply by being spoken, such as the performative statement “I promise.” In the case of heptapods, language serves a purpose separate from communication: that of acting upon and fulfilling their knowledge of the future. With performative language, saying equaled doing. For the heptapods, all language was performative. Instead of using language to inform, they used language to actualize. Sure, heptapods already knew what would be said in any conversation; but in order for their knowledge to be true, the conversation would have to take place. (Chiang 138) As Louise discovers the true nature of her visions and begins to view her experiences through the context of heptapod language and culture, she realizes that the experiences of exercising free will and knowing the future are not compatible: human language enables one, heptapod language the other. The switch from sequential to simultaneous awareness is, in essence, permanent: now that she has gained knowledge of the future, she can no longer visualize
8 her experiences outside the context of realizing that future. That is the purpose for which she too now exists. It is a meaning which cannot be expressed in another language—heptapod language can be translated, but heptapod consciousness is ineffable. Works Cited Arrival. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, Paramount Pictures, 2016. Bellos, David. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, 69. Chiang, Ted. “Story of Your Life.” Story of Your Life and Others, Vintage Books, 2016.
Welles Baerenwald, class of 2028, loves languages, film, and writing. An aspiring director, she wrote this paper for her Translation Studies class after her fourth viewing of Arrival.
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Jackson Hayward
The Springfield School of Existential Thought?
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“Camus may do, but Sartre is smartre [sic]” – Jay Sherman, in “A Star is Burns” (S6 E18)
he Simpsons, as one would expect for any veritable 1990s animated sitcom, already has a substantive body of literature exploring its thematic connections to philosophical concepts. The show has been the subject of college courses, books, and presumably an uncountable number of video essays. But while it is certainly difficult to embiggen what is an already cromulent field of study, I have nonetheless made my first of presumably many forays into generating original scholarship on The Simpsons’ relationship to existential philosophy. What follows will be a trio of particularly short essays analyzing great Simpsons episodes through the lens of various thinkers from this semester. Context on The Simpsons Springfield: An all-American town, both totally ordinary and completely bonkers. Homer Simpson: The moronic patriarch of the family. Somehow works as a nuclear safety inspector. Enjoys donuts, beer, and TV. In his heart of hearts, a loving family man. Marge Simpson: A competent and moralistic housewife. Too good for Homer. Bart Simpson: A mischievous 10-year-old slacker and rebel without a cause. Lisa Simpson: An overachieving and precocious eight-year-old with a deep moral conscience. Ned Flanders: The Simpsons’ devoutly Christian and Polyannaish neighbor. Loves his neighbors; his neighbors hate him. Mr. Burns: The evil, greedy, and often-incompetent owner of the Power Plant. Age unknown. How to Be a Good Christian in Springfield Søren Kierkegaard / “Homer the Heretic” (S4 E3) In the episode “Homer the Heretic,” Homer chooses to not go to church on a cold winter Sunday, instead staying in for a cozy and slothful morning. While his family endures a monotonous sermon in an unheated church, Homer gets to sing loudly
10 in a blazing hot shower, swear, dance around in his underwear, watch football, and collect loose change. It is unsurprising that Homer would prefer this morning to one spent shivering and half-asleep in Church, but to call it “the best day of [your] life?” Really? Just because you found a penny on the ground? But when we consider Kierkegaard’s adage that “boredom is the root of all evil,” this perspective starts to make more sense. Homer values this otherwise insignificant day because it is a pleasurable break from a boring routine. In a sense, he is practicing what Kierkegaard dubbed crop rotation: tired of going to church, he simply stays home. His new lifestyle quickly blossoms into a one-man religion: he stays home from work by invoking new religious festivals, avoids all social responsibilities, and never changes from his bathrobe. Homer is engaged in an entirely aesthetic life, per Kierkegaard’s vocabulary: he is concerned merely with leisure and the amusement brought on by his surroundings, and developing a new subjectivity towards God, religion, and the world in doing so. Homer’s apathetic deconversion comes as a shock to Marge, Flanders, and Reverend Lovejoy, and the rest of the episode centers on various attempts to win him back to the church. Initially, Reverend Lovejoy and Flan- ders lean on scripture to make their case to Homer. Lovejoy cites biblical passages on faith, while the Flanders family bombards him with Sunday School children’s music when he least expects it. One wouldn’t expect a musical rendition of Noah’s Ark to have much of an effect on someone ignoring their faith. These efforts, as a result, fall flat. What actually succeeds is not Bible lessons or an “objective” knowledge of religious truth, but what Kierkegaard would consider the harder task of actually becoming a Christian through one’s faith, and actions. When Homer sets his house on fire while sleeping, he is rescued by Flanders as well as a volunteer fire brigade including Apu (a Hindu) and Krusty the Clown (a Jew). Flanders chooses to risk his life and save his heathen neighbor: a selfless act that, for him, came from a place of faith. Kierkegaard argues that even someone who worships a false idol truly is more faithful than one who worships a correct God for false reasons. Reverend Lovejoy seems to agree: he notes in the episode’s final scene that God was also acting “in the hearts” of Apu and Krusty. This approach is unusual in the grand scheme of the Simpsons. Lovejoy is almost always portrayed as relying entirely on the exact kind of boring, scriptural approach that weakens Christendom in Kierkegaard’s eyes. But here, in this one oddly Christian episode for an otherwise deeply anti-religious show, the Christians of Springfield do things closer to Kierkegaard’s way—and it works.
11 Should an Existentialist “Do What They Feel Like?” Jean-Paul Sartre / “Bart’s Inner Child” (S5 E7) In “Bart’s Inner Child,” the Simpsons attend a lecture by self-help guru Brad Goodman, and while the episode’s principal target is the self-help industry and therapy-speak, there is a philosophical experiment lurking behind the satirical pop psychology. Bart heckles Goodman as he lectures his audience on embracing one’s “inner child,” but the speaker is impressed rather than insulted. Asked to explain why he behaves the way he does, Bart says “I do what I feel like.” Goodman is thrilled; he declares Bart an “emotionally healthy child … [with] fully developed ego integrity and well-defined boundaries,” and tells the audience to “be like the boy.” Over the rest of the episode, Springfield takes this message to heart. The “be like the boy” mantra is parroted by Springfield’s news channel and incorporated into the Sunday church sermon. Bart, normally the class clown, is now surrounded by other students making wisecracks at the teacher—and Ms. Krabappel laughs along. Everyone is living life more easily and neglecting social norms and conventions wherever they go. At the end of the episode, however, the city’s new Do What You Feel Festival literally falls apart as the workers responsible for the bandstand “didn’t feel like” tightening the screws on it. Pandemonium ensues, and the angry mob eventually lays blame squarely on the boy himself. In this parable, Bart has undergone a literal recreation of Sartre’s ethical proposition in Existentialism Is a Humanism. As Sartre posits, there is no objective moral code or essential purpose to human existence. The essence of man and his moral nature is defined by his actions and choices, not by something predetermined. As a result, man, “in choosing for himself chooses for all men.” Bart’s choice of lifestyle becomes the choice of everyone else, and he is forced to see the consequences of everyone “doing what they feel”: that the initial euphoria eventually turns to disaster and chaos. As a result, the parable of “Bart’s Inner Child” addresses a common misconception about existentialism. For most existentialists, the rejection of the idea of a single metaphysical truth or ethical code in favor of a focus on freedom does not infer a belief in some sort of solipsistic anarchy. Rather, they are intensely concerned with the implications of their moral choice. Bart Simpson is often described as a nihilist, in my opinion wrongly: his characterization in the fantastic season two episode “Bart Gets an F” alone should be clear proof of this. But regardless of whether he’s a nihilist or not, he is certainly not living as an existentialist. As Springfield changes, Bart begins to feel what Lisa accurately describes as a crisis of identity caused by losing a social order to define himself in opposition to. But Bart does not adapt to or change from his experiences; by the end of the episode, the show is, as usual, status quo ante.
12 The Serious Meets the Absurd Simone de Beauvoir / “Homer’s Enemy” (S8 E23) Homer Simpson does not live in reality: over the course of 37 seasons, he has experienced near-certain death thousands of times, made and lost millions of dollars, and lived through three decades without aging a day. Executive producer Bill Oakley explains that the episode “Homer’s Enemy”—often regarded as one of the show’s greatest—explored the question of “what if a real life, normal person had to enter Homer’s universe and deal with him?” The resulting comedy, and tragedy, of “Homer’s Enemy” is so dense with jokes and philosophical material that it cannot be summarized properly. I’ll try nonetheless. Frank Grimes grew up the victim of every possible misfortune, poor, orphaned, brutally injured time after time. However, through hard work and perseverance, he ultimately earned himself a correspondence degree in nuclear physics and a job at the Springfield Power Plant. Once there, he encounters Homer Simpson, who over this episode ranges from an annoying coworker (eating Grimes’s lunch) to repeatedly pushing the plant to the brink of meltdown. Grimes declares the two of them enemies, much to Homer’s shock. But ulti- mately, Grimes is the one who is truly shocked; after watching Homer enter and win a nuclear power-plant design competition judged by Mr. Burns, he has a breakdown, declaring that he can live life in spite of the rules just as Simpson does, a declaration quickly proven false as he touches a high-voltage wire and dies of electrocution. What killed Frank Grimes? It couldn’t just be Homer. Rather, Grimes was killed by the absurdity of his existence and his inability to cope. Grimes is stunned by how Homer can do so well for himself in a high-stakes job with zero qualifications and even less ability; he is baffled by his co-workers’ indifference; and he is unable to grasp the incompetence of Mr. Burns, who behaves so ludicrously as to turn down the model of a next-generation nuclear reactor because “[it has] no heart.” As these three converge at the plant design contest, Grimes’ crisis reaches a breaking point. Grimes is not from the real world—he is from the serious world. He arrives at the Springfield Power Plant believing that the system still makes sense, even though it has never worked for him. He has spent years at the bottom, but still has faith that those above him are deserving of their power, that those who work will rise, and that those who won’t will fall. He is, within the personality schema Simone de Beauvoir lays out in The Ethics of Ambiguity, something of a serious man: his motivating rationale, an ideological worship of the bootstrap. All images courtesy of The Simpsons, Fox TV
13 Homer, in this analogy, is from the absurd world. Beauvoir doesn’t use the phrasing “the Absurd” often in her writing—she concerns herself more with the language of “freedom” like Sartre—but I think the application of Camus’ language to this dichotomy isn’t an extreme stretch. Since Homer lacks a particularly strong conception of metaphysics, ethics, or really any consistent worldview, it is hard to say that Homer is an absurdist, i.e. that he lives his life in recognition of life’s meaninglessness. Instead, let’s borrow Thomas Nagel’s working definition of everyday or situational absurdity: “a situation is absurd when it includes a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality.” Homer provides an interesting example here in that he turns the usual arrangement of this definition on its head. While he aspires to very little in life beyond simple pleasures, his reality is filled with infeasible accomplishments listed in the episode: a Grammy, a space launch, a chance meeting with Gerald Ford. In Beauvoir’s archetypes, he is closest to the Adventurer; he aims “expressly at existence,” while constantly moving between new objects of brief, but intense interest on a literally episodic basis. In th episode’s final scene, Grimes recognizes that the world he exists in, which seemingly revolves around saving Homer from his own incompetence, is absurd. However, this serious man does not really change his worldview, or move to a different archetype. We cannot imagine Frank Grimes happy. Rather, this existential crisis causes him to sink into a spiral of self-destructive behavior, no longer paying heed to the real physical realities of the world he exists in and thus quickly departing it. Maybe Frank Grimes would have lived if he’d read some Camus.
Jackson Hayward, class of 2026, has seen every classic era Simpsons episode at least twice, and moonlights as a high-school student between rewatches. This piece was written for an Existentialism elective, to combine an analysis of two philosophers.
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Soren Segre
Stolen Purity, Sundered Domesticity, and Subverted Submissiveness: The Utilization of Christian Tenets in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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he Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was published in 1845, in the midst of the rising influence of the Cult of Domesticity, a Christian movement that emphasized the importance of women practicing the movement’s four “cardinal values”: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity (University of Washington). With these virtues, women could claim “true womanhood.” Douglass’s narrative examines many of the intimacies of his life; however, despite his wife’s presumably significant role in his life, the details of their domestic relationship are omitted. Douglass chooses to mention his wife only to state their legal marriage, and when describing this courthouse wedding, he mentions a witness ten times by name, while Anna Douglass is only mentioned four times (Douglass 101102). The choice to only tangentially reference his relationship to his wife amidst the resurgence of advocacy for traditional familial and marital dynamics seems illogical, considering that his audience would have been predominantly Christian. Yet, this deliberate exclusion of his relationship with his wife allows Douglass to draw the reader’s focus to the violation of these tenets of traditional femininity under the system of slavery, thus drawing his intended Christian audience to condemn slavery. Throughout the Narrative, Douglass describes physical and sexual violence against enslaved women, infusing these scenes with religiously charged wording to illustrate the ungodly conduct of slaveholders and show how enslaved women were not able to practice the tenet of purity. When Douglass was sold to Mr. Covey, a slave breaker, he describes how Covey “deceived himself into the solemn belief, that he was a sincere worshipper of the most high God” at the very same time that he may be said to have been guilty of compelling his woman slave to commit the sin of adultery […H]e bought her, as he said, for a breeder […] The result was, that, at the end of the year, the miserable woman gave birth to twins. At this result Mr. Covey seemed to be highly pleased, both with
15 the man [(an unnamed, enslaved, and married man)] and the wretched woman […] The children were regarded as being quite an addition to his wealth.” (Douglass 58-59) By describing Covey as a “deciev[er],” Douglass evokes the story of Genesis, with Covey as the serpent (popularly equated with the Devil), compelling a woman to sin. However, unlike Eve, this woman is not given the dignity to choose to sin. Instead, she is “compell[ed]” to nonmonogamy, as shown by Douglass’ word choice; she becomes “miserable” and “wretched” after being forced to sleep with a married man (Genesis 3:13). The dismal, powerless tone he imparts through these adjectives is furthered by Covey calling her “a breeder,” an indignity Douglass emphasizes by italicizing the term. Moreover, “wretched” is an especially powerful descriptor, as it references “Amazing Grace,” a hymn written in the 1770s by former slaveholder and British abolitionist John Newton. This hymn became widely popular in America during the 1830s and it expresses Newton’s gratitude for his sense of redemption: “Amazing grace / that saved a wretch like [him]” (Newton, Library of Congress). In harkening back to a reformed slaveholder, Douglass implies that Covey, too, must be delivered from his “wretched[ness],” and only then will he truly be a “sincere worshipper of [...] God.” Another violation of Cult of Domesticity’s tenet of purity occurs when Douglass witnesses his Aunt Hester being brutally beaten after being intimately involved with an enslaved man. Douglass states that their overseer, Mr. Plummer, stripped her to her waist and that if Plummer had “been a man of pure morals himself, he might have been thought interested in protecting the innocence of my aunt; but those who knew him will not suspect him of any such virtue” (Douglass 21). Douglass then describes Plummer tying up his aunt “for his infernal purpose” and saying “horrid oaths” as he viciously whipped her (Douglass 22). While infantilizing, this characterization of his aunt as a figure whose “innocence” requires “protecting” aptly appeals to this tenet of purity. Coupled with Douglass’ choice to use antithesis while pairing the imagery of his aunt with the overseer’s “infernal purpose,” and implied lack of “pure morals,” he distinguishes his Aunt Hester as a forsaken figure of purity. Douglass suggests his aunt deserved protection from the “infernal” pain of slavery, but was instead made victim to its violence. Enslaved women could not practice the namesake tenet of the Cult of Domesticity, creating and caring for a home and family. Douglass describes the ruin of familial structures: “For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection towards its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child” (Douglass 2). Douglass employs “blunt” and “destroy,” two vehement verbs with multiple sharp plosive sounds in each, to tangibly convey the cruelty of the destruction of family bonds. These violent verbs are then quickly juxtaposed with the positive reference to “natural affection.” Douglass manipulates the sounds, associations, and placement of these words to enhance his ethos, allowing his reader to intensely feel the cruelty of the destruction of the family unit by slavery. Douglass further elaborates upon how slaveholders systematically obliterated familial bonds: “The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families,—sundering
16 husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers,—leaving the hut vacant, and the hearth desolate” (Douglass 102). Douglass initially utilizes sibilance to convey the holiness of the home (“sacredness”) but abruptly shifts its use to convey destruction: “scatters” and “sunders.” The drastic change in connotation for the /s/ sound represents the deceit of the slaveholders; they present themselves as righteous Christians, but do not practice what they preach. By contrasting the image of a “warm defender” with the “[desolate] hearth,” Douglass accentuates how the slaveholder benefits from performative piety. Furthermore, by describing a “hut” and “hearth,” some traditional foundations of a home, as “vacant” and “desolate,” Douglass emphasizes how shattering domesticity goes against the fundamentals of Christian society. Slavery also restricts the ability of slaveholding women to adhere to the Cult of Domesticity’s tenet of submissiveness. Douglass outlines how the system of slavery corrupts the character of slaveholding women by encouraging them to leverage their authority and perpetuate violence on those more disenfranchised than themselves— therefore undermining their “natural” submissiveness. By illustrating this subversion of supposedly “natural” gender dynamics, he encourages his Christian audience to intervene in such disruption. Douglass aptly demonstrates the subversion of the “natural” role of women when he reflects on the behavior of Mrs. Auld, his mistress during his enslavement in Baltimore. Upon their first meeting, he observed that she was “a woman of the kindest heart and finest feelings [...] preserved from the blighting and dehumanizing effects of slavery [...] Her face was made of heavenly smiles, and her voice of tranquil music” (41). Douglass uses dicolon throughout the passage: “kindest heart and finest feelings,” “blighting and dehumanizing” and “heavenly smiles, [...] tranquil music” to showcase the bounty of virtuous traits that his mistress possessed. However, his use of ecphonesis shatters the idyllic tone of the scene, as he introduces the distortion of his mistress’ virtues: But, alas!... The fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her hands, and soon commenced its infernal work. That cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, all made of sweet accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon.” (Douglass 41) The tricolon structure created by the use of semicolons, and the asyndeton between the smaller clauses of each independent clause, create a labyrinthine sentence. Douglass uses that overwhelming struture to convey his mounting fear and confusion at his mistress’ transformation. Douglass also employs contrasting imagery, conveying the previously positive traits of his mistress: “cheerful eye,” “voice[…] made of sweet accord,” and “angelic face,” before the “infernal work” of the “fatal poison of irresponsible power” distorts these heavenly traits into hellish ones. By describing this shift as one from “angelic” to “demon[ic],” Douglass implies that her transformation into an aggressor subverts the “natural” and “godly” behavior expected of women. In highlighting this shift to violence and attributing it to a demonic influence, Douglass reveals how the conventions of Christian women’s roles are broken by slavery’s influence, leading his Christian audience to condemn slavery as a corrupting force.
“ Douglass initially uses
sibilance to convey the holiness of the home but abruptly shifts its use to convey destruction.
”
18 While Douglass excludes personal details of his own marital relationship, he portrays other women caught in the extreme distortions and damages of slavery, their traditional Christian expectations wrecked. In demonstrating how purity is violated, domesticity is destroyed, and submissiveness is subverted by those involved in slavery, Douglass calls his Christian audience to defend their beliefs—and in so doing, rallies them against slavery. As a longstanding supporter of women’s rights, Douglass may not have believed in “true womanhood” as delineated by the Cult of Domesticity (National Park Service). Still, he utilized the conventions of that popular movement to further his abolitionist cause. Works Cited Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Edited by Ira Dworkin, Penguin Publishing Group, 2014. “Frederick Douglass.” National Parks Service - Women’s Rights National Historical Park, U.S. Department of the Interior, 13 Feb. 2018, Accessed 7 Dec. 2025. www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/frederick-douglass.htm. The Bible. New International Version. Zondervan Publishing House, 2011. “The Cult of Domesticity.” First Wave Feminisms: TWOMN 347: History of Women in the United States, University of Washington, 19 Mar. 2022, Accessed 5 Dec. 2025 https://sites.uw.edu/twomn347/2022/03/19/the-cult-of-do mesticity/ “The Creation of ‘Amazing Grace.’” The Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/col lections/amazing-grace/articles-and-essays/creation-of-amazing-grace/. Accessed 7 Dec. 2025. Newton, John. “Hymn: Amazing Grace.” Hymnal.Net, www.hymnal.net/en/ ymn/h/313. Accessed 8 Dec. 2025.
Soren Segre was inspired by his coinciding history project to write this essay, and has been interested in the practices and influence of religious movements throughout his time at Nueva. When not found languishing at his desk over the editing process, he enjoys writing fiction that explores the impact of extreme religious groups on childhood, as well as painting.
My Staring Contest with Jackson / My Paintball Fight with Lily
Andy McLaughlin, class of 2026, created this work as part of Marie Burks’ Existentialism elective.
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Andy McLaughlin
Artist’s Statement
M
y painting, My Staring Contest with Jackson/My Paintball Fight with Lily, is an interpretation of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s thoughts on freedom and human existence. Sartre’s ideas on human existence center the painting. Though Beauvoir’s influence is more subtle, I was specifically drawn to her ideas on freedom in The Ethics of Ambiguity. One of Sartre’s iconic existential claims is that “existence precedes essence.” Building on Nietzsche’s belief that God is dead, Sartre writes that a human is therefore the only being whose existence comes before their essence: “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards.” Essentially, Sartre argues that we lie completely in control of ourselves— there is no divine image, no social conditioning. We are “condemned to be free;” the weight of our own actions rests on our own shoulders. I reflect this surge by depicting my figures as if they emerge from puddles, since the term made me think of storm surges. The figures are the same color, pure black, to emphasize their sameness. Moreover, their shapelessness evokes “existence before essence” as our minds construct the figures. The painting exists before its interpretation. The red, yellow, and blue represent the subjectivity of each figure, symbolically positioned over the heart and lungs as the “essence” layered atop the “existence.” The irony, of course, is that the essence of the painting came before its existence. None of my marks from the beginning of the process have been erased—if viewers look closely at the figures, my pencil sketches confront them. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir outlines a phenomenological conception of freedom, concluding that true freedom can only be achieved by acceding the freedom of others. De Beauvoir writes that the will to power has been assumed to mean that “the individual, knowing himself and choosing himself as the creator of his own values, would seek to impose them on others.” This, however, must distort existentialist values, because it requires the imposition of one subjectivity on another. She claims that this therefore implies that “the me-others relationship is as indissoluble as the subject-object relationship.” In my painting, I depict two figures to illustrate the me-others relationship: me and Jackson or me and Lily. In the case of the “staring contest” with Jackson, we see in each other’s heads a reflection of the colors of our own chests, a play on how we recognize other people but are unable to inhabit their subjectivities. In the case of me and Lily, we fight while trying to assert our subjectivities over each other. Photo courtesy of Holly Nall
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Senya Salzmann
Chrononormativity and Women’s Agency in Dracula
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n Bram Stoker’s Dracula, women are victims. Central to Dracula is the torment of its two main female characters, Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker, by the immortal Dracula. Written at the height of the Industrial Revolution, Dracula’s examination of Victorian femininity is inextricably intertwined with the anxieties of the rapid societal changes caused by industrialization. In English historian E.P. Thompson’s seminal work “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” he posits that the Industrial Revolution marked a shift from task- to time- oriented work: pre-industrialization, workers were paid by each skilled task they completed, while in a deskilled industrial society, time spent working became directly proportional to money earned. As a result, industrial life evolved to be dictated by a regimented schedule (63–75). In Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, scholar Elizabeth Freeman examines the impact of industrialization on gender and sexual identities. Freeman claims that in the industrialized world, “socalled personal histories become legible only within a state-sponsored timeline” (4). According to Freeman, industrial society generates what she refers to as a “chrononormative” template for the “state-sponsored timeline” of its members’ lives. Freeman posits that “in the eyes of the state, this sequence of socioeconomically ‘productive’ moments is what it means to have a life at all” (4-5). Freeman goes on to argue that the concept of “woman” exists outside of chrononormativity: “Woman, as a cultural symbol, comes to be correlated with the endless returns of cyclical time, as well as the status of monumental time: the figure of Woman supplements Image courtesy of Dracula, Universal Pictures, 1931
22 the historically specific nation-state with appeals to nature and eternity” (5). Freeman’s temporal theory of femininity (henceforth referred to as “women’s time”) frames womanhood as inherently antichrononormative, albeit with its own set of norms that are “outside of—but symbiotic with—linear time” (5). Viewed through the twin lenses of women’s time and chrononormativity, the foils of Dracula’s Lucy and Mina draw stark restraints on women’s agency. Lucy’s downfall demonstrates the vassalage inherent to women’s time. However, through Mina’s journey, Stoker imagines a path toward self-determination for women who can embrace chrononormativity. While Lucy’s tragic demise serves to caution against diverging from women’s time, Stoker appears to be more directly criticizing her hedonistic denial of both traditional feminine and masculine temporality. Stoker bestows Lucy with antichrononormative tendencies incompatible with Victorian norms. Lucy’s antichrononormativity is most plainly illustrated by her sleepwalking, depicted as “a very strange thing… for as soon as her will is thwarted in any physical way, her intention, if there be any, disappears, and she yields herself almost exactly to the routine of her life” (Stoker 82). With the phrase “a very strange thing,” Stoker reminds the read“Stoker appears to be more er of Lucy’s deviance. Further, sleepwalking removes Lucy’s condirectly criticizing her hedonistic trol over her body, to the point that she needs to be physically denial of both traditional feminine “thwarted” to regain the chroand masculine temporality.” nonormative “routine of her life.” Lucy’s antichrononormativity is put on further display when she contemplates her multiple suitors: “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” (54). Here, Stoker emphasizes Lucy’s indifference to her abnormal expectations with flippant phrases like “why can’t” and “save all this trouble” to indicate that Lucy does not appreciate the immorality of polyandry, or having multiple husbands at once. Within the framework of women’s time, the failure to take romantic (and presumably sexual) relationships in sequence is a clear moral failing. Each of these attributes bring Lucy closer to Dracula, whom Stoker establishes as an antichrononormative force. Dracula’s immortality and nocturnal schedule situate him outside of industrial Victorian society, and he spreads his vampirism by targeting those vulnerable to antichrononormativity. Thus, Stoker sets up Lucy’s ultimate victimization to be a punishment for her refutation of Victorian norms. Throughout both her blood transfusions and her visceral, rape-like death scene, Lucy’s autonomy is stripped away not just by Dracula, but also by the other men in her life. Stoker uses Lucy’s narrative to argue that Victorian society is constructed in such a way where women who cannot abide by women’s time and chrononormativity are bound to lose their agency at the hands of men. When Dracula begins to regularly prey on Lucy, Van Helsing starts performing blood transfusions on her
23 in order to address her mysterious ailment. Stoker removes Lucy’s agency in these transfusions by rendering her unable to consent; Lucy is always in either a drug- or Dracula- induced sleep during these operations. During Lucy’s second blood transfusion, Dr. Seward writes, “It was with a feeling of personal pride that I could see a faint tinge of colour steal back into the pallid cheeks and lips” (122). Stoker’s alliteration of “personal pride” emphasizes Seward’s sense of ownership over Lucy’s body. Exchanging bodily fluids with a woman who cannot consent is an accomplishment worthy of “pride.” Seward goes on, “No man knows, till he experiences it, what it is to feel his own lifeblood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves” (122). Seward’s generalization—“no man knows”—frames the joy of his blood donations as a given. Further, Stoker’s combination of the phrases “lifeblood” and “woman he loves” adds an undeniably sexual connotation to the passage. In effect, Stoker argues that when faced with an antichrononormative woman, men can guiltlessly take advantage of her under the guise of being a savior. By the end of the blood transfusions, all of Lucy’s suitors—and even Van Helsing—have donated blood to her. After Lucy’s first death, Van Helsing acknowledges the sexual nature of these operations: “Said he not that the transfusion of his blood to her veins had made her truly his bride? … Then this so sweet maid is a polyandrist” (165). Here, Stoker ties Lucy’s blood transfusions to her sexuality. By equating the operations to polyandry, Stoker recalls when Lucy considers marrying three men at the beginning of the novel. In doing so, he implores the reader to regard Lucy’s antichrononormative outcome as a moral failing on her part. Victim-blaming is a common theme in sexual assault cases, and Stoker does nothing here to remind the reader that Lucy did not consent to the blood transfusions. Instead, he chooses to emphasize how the transfusions make Lucy permanently sinful. Just as Lucy lacks autonomy in her salacious blood transfusions, her final death scene marks the complete evisceration of her agency. When choosing Lucy’s killer, Van Helsing justifies selecting Arthur, Lucy’s fiancée, since “she would herself have chosen [him], had it been to her to choose” (202). Here, Stoker dismisses Lucy’s lack of agency in the matter. What happens to Lucy’s body remains outside of her control, however much the men in her life might pretend that it is her decision. For her final death, Lucy is asleep. In Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siecle, literary critic Elaine Showalter equates Lucy’s killing to a “gang-rape” (198). In her study of desire and repulsion in Dracula, Nancy F. Rosenberg claims that “in killing Lucy, the men have not only rid the world of her evil, but have in the process saved her from her own sexuality” (Belford). As a vampire, Lucy is completely objectified, and gone is any semblance of agency: “The thing in the coffin writhed, and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions” (Stoker 203). This Lucy is a gruesome creature, and Stoker focuses on her inhumanity by using word choice such as “thing,” “body,” and “hideous” to describe her. Only when Lucy dies for good does she cease to be a monster, her features morphing into those of “unequalled sweetness and purity” (204). The only way to save a vampire is to kill it. And, to Stoker, the same solution applies to antichrononormative women. Lucy’s story signals that if a woman cannot
24 abide by women’s time and the chrononormative, she is bound to lose her agency and is ultimately better off dead. This raises the question: What if a woman did what Lucy failed to and abided by women’s time? Would she retain her agency? Stoker thinks not. Mina Harker is the ultimate “New Woman.” Unlike Lucy, she is drawn to the chrononormative and abides by women’s time. Van Helsing describes Mina as having a “man’s brain” and a “woman’s heart” (221). Mina is a working woman who is proficient in shorthand and memorizes train timetables. At the same time, she marries Harker and lives according to Puritan values. By being both chrononormative and abiding by women’s time, Mina is caught between the linear and cyclical natures of her two inclinations. This tension comes to a head when the men around “Stoker subverts typical her go to hunt Dracula and leave her in the dark on the matter—both litergender norms by having ally and figuratively. Mina is forced to Dracula assume a maternal forgo her chrononormative need to help with the hunt in favor of following role in feeding Mina... Mina’s women’s time, but in doing so she ends allegiance to women’s time up being assaulted by Dracula. When wasn’t enough to protect her.” the men discover the Count preying on her, Stoker details her lack of agency in visceral terms. Mina is forced to feed on Dracula’s chest like “a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink” (264). Here, Stoker subverts typical gender norms by having Dracula assume a maternal role in feeding Mina. Mina is effectively defeminized through Dracula’s sexual deviance. In marking her, Dracula sterilizes Mina by dooming her to become a vampire. According to Stoker, in Victorian society, if women only follow women’s time, they are vulnerable to be punished for men’s actions. Even though Mina did everything right, because the men around her were antichrononormative and left her alone at night, Mina’s allegiance to women’s time wasn’t enough to protect her from Dracula. Only when Mina reembraces her chrononormative tendencies can she regain her agency. At Mina’s request, Van Helsing begins regularly hypnotizing her to acquire information on Dracula’s whereabouts: “‘I want you to hypnotize me!’ she said. ‘Do it before the dawn, for I feel that then I can speak, and speak freely. Be quick, for the time is short!’” (292). Stoker has Mina not only give consent to being hypnotized, but also drive the endeavor from the outset. She uses phrases like “I want” and “speak freely” to express the sense of agency this gives her. Though Mina is unconscious for these sessions, embracing the chrononormative technology of hypnosis allows her to protest Dracula’s vampiric influence. Ultimately, Mina’s chrononormative efforts help slay Dracula, freeing her from his authority and allowing her to successfully reenter women’s time. In Dracula’s epilogue—which takes place seven years after the events of the novel—Mina has completely regained her role and agency as a Victorian woman, having started the family she always wanted with Jonathan Harker.
“ The only way to
save a vampire is to kill it. And, to Stoker, the same solution applies to antichromonormative women.
”
26 Ultimately, Stoker unites his female characters’ narratives under the guise of agency. Mina achieves the devoted family life she set out for, and, in a twisted way Lucy’s desires with her three suitors are fulfilled through blood transfusion. But how much autonomy did they really have? Even if by embracing chrononormativity women can gain agency in Stoker’s Dracula, Stoker portrays women as inherently incompatible with the industrial world and its chrononormative demands. At the end of the day, the stories of the women in Dracula pertain to the perils of trying to navigate a society that wasn’t made for them—a message that any marginalized group can identify with. Though 21st-century America holds looser social norms than Victorian England, we still have a long way to go in forging a society where assimilating isn’t necessary to have agency. Works Cited Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press, 2010. Rosenberg, Nancy F. “Desire and Loathing in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Journal of Dracula Studies, no. 2, 2000. Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siecle. London: Vi rago Press, 1992. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Penguin Classics, 2003, https://www.bramstoker.org/pdf/ novels/05dracula.pdf. Thompson, E.P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present, no. 38, 1967, pp. 56–97.
Senya Salzmann, class of 2026, wrote this piece for the English elective on Victorian monstrosity where they were tasked with writing an essay using literary criticism to frame Dracula.
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Ryker Law
The Fish That Taught Me to See
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hen I first encountered Tsevhu—a language written using swimming fish—I assumed I was learning a clever visual encoding system. By the end of the semester, I realized I was learning something deeper: how linguistic structure creates meaning, and how meaning often comes from relationships rather than from individual elements. Here I explore three areas we studied in a linguistics elective: speech and sound, sentence structure, and language’s role in shaping how we perceive the world around us and each other. One of my earliest projects involved speech segmentation: given an audio recording, determine where speech begins and ends. I tested two approaches. The first relied on changes in loudness and frequency. The second searched for stretches of silence in spectrograms. Both approaches failed in instructive ways. When testing the Greek phrase “Σε γνωρίζω από την κόψη του σπαθιού την τρομερή” (“I know you by the terrible edge of your sword”), the first method missed the word “κόψη” because of a glottal stop, a brief silence that is actually part of the word. The second method struggled with phrases like “ξέρω από,” where words blend together without clear acoustic boundaries. This revealed that speech is physically continuous—and that the boundaries we hear are themselves a kind of meaning made from a relationship. Listeners impose boundaries based on expectation, context, and linguistic knowledge. Words feel discrete, but they are cognitive constructions layered onto sound waves. Meaning doesn’t lie in the sounds themselves but in how they connect. That same logic, it turned out, extended from sound all the way up to sentences. We studied X-bar theory, which proposes that sentences across languages share a common underlying structure, even when the languages look very different. For example, both English and Japanese build sentences from the same three functional components: a specifier (the subject or topic), a head (the main verb or relational word), and a complement (the information the head connects to). In the English sentence “Mary has said that John...,” these map cleanly onto: (Specifier) + (Head) + (Complement) Here the subject leads, with the verb in the middle, the rest following after. Japanese uses the same roles, but arranges them differently, placing the complement before the head rather than after: (Specifier) + (Complement) + (Head) The order shifts; the underlying logic does not. Both languages reflect the same cognitive need: to organize information, mark relationships between participants, and guide a listener toward meaning.
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Translation here: Deep into that darkness tapping Comes a silent argonaut out of darker spheres Tsevhu—a constructed language in which every grammatical element is expressed through the position and movement of drawn fish and the puddles beneath them, rather than through spoken or written words—made these abstract ideas tangible. In Tsevhu, grammatical information is encoded visually. A fish’s direction indicates tense: rightward for present, leftward for past, upward for future. The tail’s orientation marks sentence type: whether the sentence is a statement or a question. Ripples near the tail indicate aspect, which in linguistics refers to how an action unfolds in time, whether it is completed, still ongoing, or habitual. A declarative sentence in the simple present might be “She closes the case.” The same sentence in the present perfect—“She has closed the case,” meaning the action is complete but relevant now—would be represented by a fish swimming rightward with a ripple positioned before the tail. Designing and decoding Tsevhu sentences showed me that constraints can enhance meaning rather than restrict it. In spoken or written language, tense and aspect are encoded in verb forms that readers and listeners process quickly and mostly unconsciously. “Closed” versus “was closing” register as different, but the difference rarely demands active attention. Tsevhu slows that process down. Because each grammatical feature must be deliberately encoded as a visual element and then deliberately read, the relationships between those features become impossible to Image courtesy of www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/gyo92t/tsevhu_koiwrit_shorthand/
29 overlook. The language depicts the structure underneath information. The course also demonstrated how grammar and wording shape perception. In one study, participants judged an accident differently depending on verb aspect—that is, how the grammar framed the action in time. A description in the simple past (“he ran the red light”) presents the action as a discrete, completed fact, which led participants to assign blame more confidently. A description in the progressive (“he was running the red light”) presents the action as still unfolding, which distributes responsibility more broadly. What we judge, and how firmly, bends to the structure of the sentence we read or hear. Another study examined metaphors in political speeches. Speeches built around a single, consistent metaphor—politics as a race, for instance—were more persuasive than those that mixed metaphors. What made this work was not the metaphor itself but the network of relationships it established: candidate to opponent, effort to outcome, progress to finish line. Once those relationships were in place, listeners stopped noticing the metaphor. The framing shaped interpretation invisibly, which is precisely what made it powerful. Meaning, again, was not located in any single phrase—it lived in the connections the metaphor quietly assembled. Word choice and register carry the same shaping force within sentences. “A bunch of people arrived late because traffic was unpredictable” and “Multiple colleagues experienced delays due to commute instability” state the same fact, but they imply different kinds of events, different levels of social distance between the speaker and the person being described. Language constructs the relationship between everyone involved in the exchange, and that relationship is itself a kind of meaning. The final line in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose captures the central lesson of the course: “The rose exists only in its name; we hold only names.” My early algorithmic failures showed that linguistic boundaries are not inherent in sound but constructed by listeners drawing on context and expectation. X-bar theory revealed that what looks like a surface difference between languages conceals a shared relational logic underneath. Tsevhu demonstrated that even an invented system feels real when its internal relationships align with how the mind expects meaning to work. Throughout, the same conclusion holds: meaning unfurls from what happens between individual elements. Language, then, frames the way we perceive, judge, and understand the world— and because it is made of relationships, it is flexible and consequential. The grammar of just one sentence can shift who we blame for an accident. A sustained metaphor can quietly reorganize how we understand an argument. Our words signal how we expect to be heard by our audience. Recognizing this does not make language feel less natural. It makes the connections it carries feel more worth attending to. Ryker Law, class of 2026, wrote this piece after being inspired in the Linguistics: Logic and Language elective. He crafted this response to investigate speech segmentation, x-bar theory, constructed language, and linguistic perspective.
Caitlyn Zhu
Boney Houses and Sentient Porcelain: Merricat’s Insanity
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rom the opening lines of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In The Castle, it is apparent that the narrator, Mary Katherine Blackwood, is an oddball. Her voodoo-like practices, such as nailing her father’s book to a tree to charm her house, reflect a tendency to assign objects a salience on par with that of living things. Jane Bennet’s concept of “vibrant matter”—a view of non-living matter as active and autonomous, rather than passively subject to human will— provides an intriguing framework through which to explore Merricat’s psychology. Bennet comments that “[The] habit of parsing the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings) is a ‘partition of the sensible’” (Bennet, Vibrant Matter). Yet, for Merricat, this partition is blurred in an “insensible” way. This is the source of her insanity and her alienation from the villagers in the town, the former because it is fallacious to treat objects and persons as equals, and the latter because she focuses on object-based rituals rather than social interaction. Bennet proposes that a culture recognizing “vibrant matter” could help promote policies that protect the environment (Bennet, Vibrant Matter). In contrast, Jackson’s depiction of inanimate “actants” is focused on Merricat’s inner psychology. For Merricat, the existence of “vibrant matter” evokes a collapse of her worldview. The physical objects around her are implanted with her internal state of mind, causing them to appear like they are themselves actors. Yet, this “vibrant matter” is not anti-anthropocentric. Rather, it is Merricat-centric. In other words, Jackson’s “vibrant matter” is not a way of negotiating the relationship between living and inanimate things, but between Merricat’s internal world and the physical world outside herself. Throughout the novel, Merricat uses various items, such as the aforementioned book, to carry out superstitious rituals in which she blurs the line between her own will and that of the objects used. Yet, she also clearly describes the items as subjects to her use rather than actors. She believes her cousin Charles, who is courting her older sister Constance in hopes of accessing the Blackwood family’s wealth, to be a demon and uses these rituals against him: “It was important to choose the exact device to drive Charles away…if Charles had not gone away before three days I would smash the mirror in the hall” (71). Merricat believes that through her own careful choice, she can harness the latent power of objects to influence the people around her. Merricat’s belief in this latent power attributes a kind of “vibrancy” to the mirror in the hall, but not the status of an “actant,” or
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31 autonomous being. Similarly, she treats objects symbolically like people: “I laughed when I found a round stone the right size, and scratched a face on it and buried it in the hole. “Goodbye, Charles,” I said” (89). This ritual exposes Merricat’s stunted social capacity, as she expresses her desire to murder Charles using a stone as a proxy, choosing to avoid real confrontation. The use of objects to simulate social interaction is familiar in child development, but Merricat is already 18 years old. This example demonstrates how Merricat’s “vibrant” perception of objects around her enables her to withdraw from people, who often scorn and reject her—instead, she can live in a space where all matter around her literally embodies her own beliefs. The source of the “life” that objects take on is not their own autonomy, but rather the emotional meaning that Merricat projects onto them. As a result, Jackson’s depiction of “vibrant matter” does not fully align with Bennet’s version, which has its own autonomy completely separate from human influence. In a crucial turning point, when Merricat burns down the Blackwood house, she goes from merely humanizing objects to also objectifying humans; in vivid language, she depicts the house and the fire as having more “vitality” than the anonymous, emotionally non-relevant villagers. Merricat is not thankful for the firefighters’ presence, but observes them as having a mechanical and inhuman quality: “one of the dark men…turned and waved and grinned” (104) The ominous phrase “dark men” paints the firefighters in a negative light rather than as saviors; the rigid, uncanny description “turned and waved and grinned” likens them to mannequins. Rather than the people, Merricat emphasizes the house and fire with a living salience: “anonymous men in hats and raincoats were curiously able to destroy the fire which was running through the bones of our house” (104). The house is humanized through the intimate anatomical description: “the bones of our house.” The hats and raincoats that the firefighters wear are superficial coverings, juxtaposing the visceral internality of “bones.” Interestingly, although fire is typically seen as a force of destruction, it is itself “destroyed,” and lightly personified by the word “running,” as though it were a human victim, lost in the chaos striking the house. Merricat also emphasizes a playful, human aspect of the fire: “a singing hot noise upstairs” (104). “Singing,” again, has not a destructive connotation but a musical one. The fire isn’t evil because to Merricat, it’s just a way for the house to purge itself of Charles. Overall, the fire and house are described with more natural movements and more life than the obscure firefighters. The “vibrancy” of nonliving matter over people again
32 emphasizes Merricat’s distorted worldview, revealing her inability not just to speak to people, but to categorize them as emotional beings. In the aftermath of the house fire, Merricat continues to impose life upon the burned house and objects associated with it through surreal descriptions. Searching for salvageable items in the ruins of her home, she says: “I remembered that one of our mother’s Dresden figurines had rolled safely onto the grass and I wondered if it had hidden successfully and preserved itself ” (115). Merricat describes the figurine as an actant, with its own will to survive and ability to execute that will—“hidden successfully,” “preserved itself.” These active verbs highlight a glitch in Merricat’s “partition of the sensible,” which separates inanimate objects from autonomous beings, living matter. Merricat’s belief that the figurine could have “escaped” “[Merricat] goes from merely through its own actions most likely reflects her emotional attachment to sympathizing with the house the figurine as one of the few relics to treating it like an extension from her family that was, miraculously, not destroyed by the villagers. of her own body.” Merricat projects her own experience of fleeing her burning house to save herself onto the doll. This supposed allyship with a doll demonstrates how Merricat takes one-sided refuge in human perception of objects, rather than forming mutual bonds with other people. In an even further stretch from reality, Merricat views her burned house like a sentient being, though this is a result of her conflating her own mental state with her physical surroundings. As she and her older sister Constance, her only remaining family, approach the house, Merricat considers it like a traumatized family member: “Constance hesitates at the kitchen door, but she had opened it a thousand times before and it ought surely to recognize the touch of her hand… The house seemed to shiver when she opened the door, although one more draft could hardly chill it now” (114). Merricat and Constance’s care in re-entering the burned house shows that they regard it as a sensitive being. Indeed, like a living thing that could “recognize” Constance’s touch, and perhaps protest their entry if it didn’t recognize them as familiar and safe. Merricat seems to sympathize with the house, recognizing the “shiver” which highlights its vulnerability and need for protection. Notably, “chill” is the same word that Merricat often uses to label her own emotional distress, specifically when it comes to her fear of losing her sister Constance—the single person in the novel whom she cares about the most. For instance, at the very beginning of the novel, she describes her dislike of the idea of Constance leaving the house, even temporarily: “It was the second time [Constance] had spoken of going outside, and I was chilled” (21). Although Merricat describes the house as “chilled,” the draft reflects her emotional climate as well as the actual weather outside. Overall, it is strongly implied that Merricat’s sympathetic descriptions of the house come from her own shock and feelings of loss, as she considers the house part of her family.
33 Indeed, just like how Merricat projects her personal will onto the objects she uses for her rituals, she eventually goes from merely sympathizing with the house to treating it like an extension of her own body. Specifically, Merricat wishes to protect Constance, her precious older sister, who after the house fire is her only remaining family member. Determined to completely isolate Constance and herself from the outside world, she boards up the kitchen windows, leaving not a single opening: “when I found small cracks I nailed on more boards” (140). Although such obsessive actions betray Merricat’s paranoia about the outside world, her intention is not to imprison Constance, but rather embrace her. Reinforcing the protection of the house around them is part of the same sentiment with which she always “puts her arms around Constance” (59). Thus, the house, which appeared while it was burned to be “vibrant matter” with a life of its own, is naught but a physical manifestation of Merricat’s possessiveness over her sister. To Merricat, whether firefighters or Dresden figurines, hunks of matter are “vibrant” to the extent that they have emotional significance or ritualistic use for her, serving her own desire to protect the sanctuary she has with Constance. The “vibrant matter” of the house embodies Merricat’s own victimhood and her desire to barricade herself and Constance from human contact. Jackson’s framing of “vibrant matter” cements Merricat’s worldview into the very substance that constitutes it, emphasizing the role of matter in human psychology, rather than the innate autonomy of non-human things, as was Bennet’s focus. In other words, Jackson inverts Bennet’s “vibrant matter” from a societal matter of environmental policy to the personal matter of Merricat’s inner self. While Bennet conceived “vibrant matter” as a concept that can inspire a broader perspective of how humans belong in the world, Jackson uses it to collapse the world into a narrow, dark tunnel—the tunnel of Merricat’s tormented mind. Works Cited Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matter. Duke University Press, 2009. Jackson, Shirley. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Penguin Classics, 2009.
Caitlyn Zhu, class of 2026, loves to write poetry in her free time. She wrote this essay for Brianna Beehler’s Monstrosity elective.
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Nate Bomze
Are Numbers Real?
T
hroughout history, mathematics has been scaffolding, sword, scythe, symphony, symbol, and soon, superintelligence. It spans nearly every modern study and occupation, from the blueprints used to construct our skylines to the camera lenses used to capture them and the computer software used to digest them. Mathematics is Yggdrasil, the World-Tree, branching off into concentrated disciplines that sprout and blossom and meld with each other, creating great knots of complexity and debate that endure for centuries. Most of this tree of mathematics is bifurcated; for the vast majority of people across recorded history, mathematics was either a tool of theory or one of practice. But when that distinction is obscured, it allows us to lose sight of the meaning of truth and mistake likelihood for universal certainty. A key illustration of this dichotomy is as follows: almost five millennia ago, as the oft-repeated parable goes, a band of Egyptian laborers finished a grueling day of work in Giza. Their work would be recorded as one of the greatest engineering and mathematical marvels in history: the Great Pyramid of Giza, nearly 500 feet tall and 700 feet long on each side, each identical to less than two inches. Khufu’s mausoleum’s four corners were a mere 0.05 degrees off from the cardinal directions, and yet the awe-inspiring colossus in the background was not the subject of the workers’ interest. Instead, in a shady spot in the dunes, three of them picked up a hempen looped rope with twelve knots spaced equally along its length. Standing in prescribed locations, and holding the line at specific spots, the workers stepped back to reveal a perfect 3-4-5 right triangle appearing in their hands. In its own way, the abstract Image courtesy of Karina Nizametdinova, Unsplash
35 beauty of the rope triangle they formed was just as captivating as the monument nearby. Despite these frequent bifurcations, the math-tree finds itself rejoined at its trunk, and these intersections of theoretical development and practical necessity are what have enabled the ideation and creation of tools like quantum supercomputers, protein folding technology, and all manner of astronomical inventions. Unfortunately, to almost everyone living today, the numbers they see in their daily lives are not qubits or Greek variables; they are prosaic counts like dollars and stopwatches. To most people, then, in what form do these numbers take? In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics, professor Joel David Hamkins begins by addressing the semiotic distinction between numbers and numerals using a wonderful example from The Phantom Tollbooth, one of my favorite childhood stories. As repeated by Professor Hamkins, in the novel, the largest number was not some absurd construction of infinity, it was “a gigantic number 3—over 4 meters tall—made of stone.” There is, of course, great irony in this description, in that the measure we use to describe this final number, four meters, is greater than the number itself. And yet the concept of four meters is an entirely artificial one. We might just as easily see the number as one tollbooth tall, or perhaps infinite phantoms in height. The equality implied here between a count of one, four, infinity, or any other measure the reader so chooses (571 ant-lengths tall, anyone?) suggests a frivolity to our system of units and measures. The pound, for instance, which remains the most common measure of weight in the United States, is very helpfully defined as the mass of “a platinum cylinder nearly 1.35 inches (34 mm) high, and 1.15 inches (29 mm) diameter, and the edges are carefully rounded off. It has a groove about 0.34 inches (8.6 mm) from the top, to allow the cylinder to be lifted using an ivory fork.” How can such an artificial concept represent concrete mathematical certainty? How can one trust the building blocks of civilization to such arbitrary precision? The idea that society is based on naturally derived standards is a helpful illusion, but one without basis in reality. These questions about concepts like unit equivalence are outwardly practical concerns, but their significance to pure theory cannot be understated. In other words, they are woodpeckers digging into one side of the math-tree, while the maggots they let in threaten the entire canopy. Hamkins addresses these concerns (rather cursorily, for the practical ramifications of mathematical philosophy are not his primary subjects) in his discourse on rigor, where he writes about the necessity of a system of mathematics to all forms of scientific knowledge. Hamkins describes the theory of the indispensability of mathematics as the following: “at every physical scale, from the microscopic to the cosmic, our best scientific theories are thoroughly mathematical…Newtonian physics are expressed in universal differential equations…our best theory of electromagnetism posits unseen electrical and magnetic fields…relativity theory explains the nature of space and time with exotic mathematical geometries; quantum mechanics uses Hilbert spaces; string theory uses still more abstract mathematical objects; and all the experimental sciences, including the social sciences, make fundamental use of mathematical sta-
36 tistics.” He then describes the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument for mathematical realism, suggesting that this seeming universality of mathematics proves the ontological existence of mathematical realism. Since scientists accept the existence of miniscule germs due to theories of disease and the molten nature of the Earth’s core due to similarly indirect theories, the supposition goes, we should be willing to accept the existence of mathematics that’s so clearly suggested by physical laws. Unfortunately, these concrete applications of mathematics have a far lower standard of proof than their theoretical underpinnings. Let us suppose that the math-tree is planted perfectly on the border between two states, such that its two halves are under vastly different jurisdictions. In one state (call it Nevada), environmental regulations are scarce, and all citizens are de jure free to splint and mold the branches of the math-tree into any configuration they so choose. In the neighboring jurisdiction (call it California), laws are much stricter, and only graduates of the famed University of California Horticulture program are allowed to make contact with the math-tree’s branches. The equivalence posited by Hamkins is akin to a group of Nevadans crossing the state line one night, carving their initials into the math-tree’s trunk, and pleading their innocence to California courts by stating the legality of their actions in their home state. Our everyday acceptance of conjectures as truth based on the costs and benefits of their adoption is entirely distinct from our demand for certainty when making totalizing claims about the world. We accept the germ theory of disease, for instance, because there is overwhelming evidence in support of it, but we don’t posit it to be a universal, ontological necessity. Instead, the consequentialist benefits of its adoption to society probabilistically outweigh its costs, and so we allow it to remain a card-carrying member of the zeitgeist. Unfortunately, this standard of adoption is by no means a permanent one. The only constant in science is the near-daily replacement of outdated theories by newly demonstrated contradictions. Universal ontologies, like those Nevadan troublemakers’ carvings, cannot be overturned; they are permanent assertions about the fundamental nature of the universe. Their prerequisite for adoption cannot be that they are unfalsified. Instead, it must be that they are provable and proven, standards that the existence of numbers do not reach. Specifically, the necessity of mathematics to existing physical theories, the basis of the indispensability theory, is a standard for falsification but not provability. There are two candidates for falsification: a physical theory that relies on non-mathematical premises, and a non-mathematical system that supersedes mathematical theory as a basis for explanations of physical law. While the first option is as of yet undiscovered, there are several existing possibilities for the second. In 1980, the nominalist Hartry Field argued that a mathematical ontology is not a prerequisite to science as currently known. He uses conceptions of “conservative theories,” or ones that only prove assertions already provable by external theories, such that the conservative theories may be ancillary or even inaccurate, and yet perfectly predict all existing belief. In essence, there exist such normalist versions of spacetime or gravity where abstract concepts of “number” are replaced by the real location of particles in space, absolving science of the need for abstract math to
37 enable discovery. Similarly, fictionalist scientists see concepts of number as a convenient fiction, simultaneously artificial and deeply useful. In doing so, they avoid statements about the factual question of the existence of “number” while focusing more on its use to science. Imagine scientists attempting to build a treehouse atop the math-tree. Would it much matter if the math-tree was wood or a fiberglass facsimile? The nature of the existence of numbers is a fundamental question, and one that has by no means been answered. The math-tree may be an illusion, or a platonic conception in a universe irrevocably bound to entropy and chaos. In his discussion on the indispensability of mathematics, Hamkins quotes Dirac in 1963 as saying “one could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order.” Instead, perhaps God is a philosopher. Works Cited Field, Hartry. Science Without Numbers. Princeton University Press, 1980. Hamkins, Joel David. Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics. MIT Press, 2021. Juster, Norman. The Phantom Tollbooth. Random House, 1989.
Nate Bomze, class of 2026, wrote this essay on the semiotics of numbers for his Math and Philosophy elective, inspired by the important of the arbitrariness in our most fundamental understandings of the universe.