Metaphors and Aliens

for Philosophy of Language class, 2012

 

Abstract

                In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that most concepts we talk about and most concepts we think about are expressed metaphorically, i.e., in terms of other concepts. I argue that the omnipresence of metaphor in English is something of which writers of science fiction and fantasy should at least be aware, and which a skillful writer can probably use to great effect. This paper will mostly consist of examples of the kind of thing I mean – a skilled writer could probably pull off much more subtle and effective metaphors than my undoubtedly relatively clumsy examples.

 

Lakoff and Johnson

                One of the more common kinds of metaphors in our language, according to Lakoff and Johnson, are orientational metaphors, where concepts are described in terms of spatial orientation. Consider a few examples of orientational metaphors and examples of an English expression derived from each, direct from the book[1]:

• ·         “happy is up”: “that boosted my spirits”
• ·         “sad is down”: “I'm depressed”
• ·         “conscious is up”: “wake up”
• ·         “unconscious is down”: “he fell asleep”
• ·         “health and life are up”: “Lazarus rose from the dead”
• ·         “sickness and death are down”: “he fell ill”
• ·         “having control or force is up”: “I am on top of the situation”
• ·         “being subject to force or control is down”: “he is low man on the totem pole”
• ·         “more is up”: “my income rose last year”
• ·         “less is down”: “If you're too hot, turn the heat down”
• ·         “[prestigious] status is up”: “he's at the peak of his career” (Lakoff and Johnson phrased this in terms of the words “high status”, which is itself an example of this metaphor.)
• ·         “[unprestigious] status is down”: “he's at the bottom of the social hierarchy” (or, again, “low status”.)
• ·         “good is up”: “things are looking up”
• ·         “bad is down”: “things are at an all-time low”

 

                These metaphors are rooted in physical and cultural experience, and so may vary from culture to culture.

                What is less likely to vary is the coherence between these metaphors: for example, more is up, and up is good, so more is good. Sad is down, down is bad, and sad is bad. There exist subcultures that use inconsistent metaphors (for example, members of an ascetic cult might think more is up and up is good, but more is bad), but such incoherencies are only ever relatively recent inventions, adapted from existing language. Incoherence between metaphors is rare in language that has arisen and grown naturally.

 

A large part of the point is that these things aren't just in the language: they're in the way we think. Consider some examples:

Where is Heaven? Where is Hell? If they existed, they probably wouldn't literally be anywhere we can access; up and down would be meaningless with respect to the afterlife. But we still think of Heaven as being above us and Hell as being below us. Up is good, down is bad.

The story is similar for the denizens of Heaven and Hell: people refer to “God in the Highest”, calling for "gloria in excelsis Deo". And of course all the angels serve under God, in some cases literally (according to legend, God sits on some angels; they're called Thrones). At the other end of the spectrum, Satan is said to be the lowest of the low – but more on demons later.

Consider also: people are always trying to build the tallest skyscraper in the world. It's been nearly a constant competition ever since skyscrapers were invented, because up is good. In mythology, too; the story of the Tower of Babel is a point of overlap between skyscrapers and heaven. Up is good, up is important, skyscrapers are up, so skyscrapers are considered good and important.

But how many people cared when the Russians dug the deepest hole in the world at the time, just to see what would happen? (I refer to the Kola Superdeep Borehole, dug in 1970.) Very few! (Excepting, of course, the people who have, ever since, circulated fabrications about the borehole breaking into hell, or hearing the screams of the damned at the bottom.) The Kola Superdeep Borehole is still considered the deepest hole ever drilled and the deepest artificial point on Earth; nobody has bothered to dig deeper, because few people care about big holes, because nobody cares about down, because down is bad. Down is bad, down is unimportant, the Kola Superdeep Borehole is down, so the Kola Superdeep Borehole is widely considered bad or unimportant[2].

 

Applications In Fiction

One of my biggest complaints about most science fiction and fantasy is that aliens (be they elves, Klingons, lichs, Sebaceans, Goa'uld, garuda, anthropomorphic animals, or what-have-you) very frequently wind up simply being humans in non-human bodies – usually American humans, at that. (In this paper, by “alien”, I will mean, roughly, “persons who are not American humans”.)

Some authors do better than others at this: the alien-ness of aliens is a plot point in several of the sequels to Ender's Game, but even the formics and pequeninos are just humans with one or two bizarre concepts ("there's no such thing as an individual" and "one needs to be vivisected in order to advance to the next stage of life", respectively) pasted on.[3]

The house elves of Harry Potter, for another example, take utmost joy in slavery, something which is even more alien to us liberty-obsessed American humans. With one exception, being freed is considered by the house elves to be the worst thing that could possibly happen to them. But aside from that, they still read as basically human-minded.[4]

But, and this is the important part, these aliens still tend to use all the same metaphors we use in English.

The point is this: alien minds will use alien metaphors. When writing dialogue for aliens, an author should be careful about the non-literal language they use. If an alien doesn't have a reason to use the same metaphorical constructions we do, then they shouldn't. But even more, if the author doesn't want aliens to just read like humans in alien bodies, they should use different metaphors for the sake of having different metaphors.

 

C.S. Lewis did this fairly competently at least once: in The Screwtape Letters, the demons use words like "lowerarchy", and speak proudly of being demoted to a more prestigious, lower rank. For demons, having control or force is down, more is down, prestigious status is down, good is down. (Or, put in a more C.S. Lewis-y way, bad is good, so just reverse everything we say about good and call it a day.) Satan, the big boss, the one with force and power and prestige, is at the bottom, and all his inferiors (I almost wrote "subordinates") are arrayed above him.[5]

China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, a book whose major themes include the incomprehensibility (to humans) of alien minds, does this even better, at least in one instance. Consider the character of the Weaver, a transdimensional spider-like creature, the epitome of alien-ness, which speaks predominantly in metaphorical references to the fabric of reality. Consider a typical Weaver monologue:

 

. . . over and up in the little passage it was it was born the cringing thumb the twisted runt that freed its siblings it cracked the seal on its swaddling and burst out I smell the remnants of its breakfast still lolling oh I like this I enjoy this web the weft is intricate and fine though torn who here can spin with such robust and naive expertise . . .

. . . lovely lovely, the snipsnap of supplication and yet though they smooth edges and rough fibres with cold noise an explosion in reverse a funnelling in a focus I must turn make patterns here with amateurs unknowing artists to unpick the catastrophic tearing there is brute asymmetry in the blue visages that will not do it cannot be that the ripped up web is darned without patterns and in the minds of these desperate and guilty and bereft are exquisite tapestries of desire the dappled gang plait yearnings for friends feathers science justice gold . . .[6]

 

It makes only marginally more sense in context (the Weaver is doing something like explaining why it has chosen to aid the main characters).

But notice that the Weaver still uses common English container metaphors: “in reverse”, “in a focus”, “in the minds” – reverse, focus, and minds are not actually containers, so the usage of “in” is metaphorical in this context. (“in the little passage” is not a container metaphor; a passage is, more or less literally, a container, though the passage in question may itself be metaphorical.) So even in this style, riddled with obvious metaphors, the subtler metaphors of English creep in. (I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned out to have been deliberate on Miéville’s part; he may have discovered that expunging all our natural metaphors impeded understanding too much for his purposes.)

 

Lakoff and Johnson even provide a guideline, in passing, for use of novel metaphors in this fashion: an author should make sure the metaphors of their aliens are coherent with one another. If demons think good is down and more prestigious is down and more power is down and more is good, it won't do for it to suddenly turn out that they use more is up metaphors. It's inconsistent and, I suspect, is likely to grate on many readers, even if they don't consciously notice it.

 

Exercise 1: Xenophobia

Let us now, as an exercise, construct a culture by constructing its metaphors. Let's imagine that this culture is profoundly xenophobic, insular, and isolationist. Which is to say: out is bad; in is good. Let's just take the examples I cited previously examples and plug "out" and "in" in place of "up" and "down". Many of these metaphors actually exist in English (container metaphors being another of the most common kinds of metaphors we use), and the main change will be that we're emphasizing them over vertical metaphors. Others will require all-new metaphors. The metaphors, and the kinds of things these cultural xenophobes would say: 

• ·         happy is in: "I am in good spirits."
• ·         sad is out: "I am out of good spirits." (not "I am in bad spirits" – apparently good spirits are a substance)
• ·         conscious is in: "I am in my body."
• ·         unconscious is out: "I'm feeling out of it."
• ·         health and life are in: "I'm in good health."
• ·         sickness and death are out: "I am out of health." (This has some overlap with health is a limited substance, familiar to anyone who plays games with “hit points”.)
• ·         having control or force is in: "I have an in with the organization."
• ·         being subject to force or control is out: "I'm outside his power." (This could get confusing, as it means exactly the opposite of the usual English usage, where to be in someone's power is to be under their control. If a writer actually uses examples such as this in the text, they should be sure to add a clarifying note, to avoid confusion. Alternately, the characters themselves could become confused, and it could become a plot point.)
• ·         more is in: "I'm in great wealth."
• ·         less is out: "I'm out of money."
• ·         prestigious status is in: "The inner circle of the organization."
• ·         lack of status is out: "He's an outside man on the ring."

 

           As you can see, it is possible to create a sense of alien-ness simply by emphasizing some existing English metaphors over others.

          Now consider what one might expect to follow, given the above metaphors:

        These people probably think that heaven is within oneself, and hell is outside (be it outside the self, outside the home, outside the city, outside the civilization, outside the world, or what have you). Obviously, they'll practice meditation, focusing on the self, spending time inside oneself rather than thinking about the outside world. Perhaps they believe that good people, when they die, remain inside the body – perhaps this culture, in a fantasy setting, approves of necrourgy[7], as it allows people to, in some way, remain inside their bodies. Or perhaps they believe that the soul simply remains inside the heaven of the body for as long as the body remains intact, so they practice mummification to preserve the heaven of the body for as long as possible.

These people are, of course, likely to believe that the world is the center of the universe. But they don’t necessarily believe it to be spherical; instead, the metaphor inclines one to suppose that the world is flat. The city is the center of the country, the country is the center of the world, and the world is the center of the universe. If you go too far out, horizontally, you'll reach Hell. (The sky and the ground are probably conceptually less important to this culture than they are to us.)

Demons literally live outside the world (but one must be sure not to say demons live in Hell, because in is good, and any proximity to Hell cannot be good; you might say instead that demons live at Hell, a more neutral, less metaphorical term); the people who live outside the country are actively demonic; the people who live outside the city are bad; the people who live outside the home are merely distasteful. Which is to say: this culture of xenophobes is also likely to be a culture of introverts. This is unlikely to be a very large country; more likely it is to be many city-states, each of which comes into belligerent conflict with one another despite (indeed, because of) their shared culture.

 

Notice how I have taken a one-concept description ("xenophobic/insular/isolationist"), derived from that the sort of metaphors they’re likely to use, and then derived additional details of their culture and religious beliefs which simply follow from the metaphors. An author who has trouble with world-building might consider this as a world-building technique.

 

Exercise 2: Color

And yet "in is good, out is bad" is still a pretty human metaphor, by dint of its many points of overlap with our English container metaphors. We can easily see the culture of xenophobes being a human culture.

What if we want to describe truly alien minds? Let's consider creatures which are not subject to the force of gravity at all. Perhaps they're celestial beings, or they live in space, or they're jellyfish-people who live in a gas giant (with an atmosphere so thick it would take a lifetime to float from bottom to top or vice versa) and are neutrally buoyant.

Spatial metaphors may not be completely absent from the vocabulary of these creatures, but they're likely to be much less important. Being radially symmetric, jellyfish aliens will themselves not have a front or back or sides, so they're unlikely to have many metaphors that hinge on front or back or sides, if they even have words for “front” or “back” or “sides” at all.

They might have concepts of up and down, or at least top and bottom, unless they are perfectly spherical jellyfish. But, in this situation we’ve constructed, there's effectively no difference between travelling up and travelling down, so vertical spatial metaphors will probably be mostly absent from their vocabulary.

But if we're trying to make truly alien-minded aliens, let's just expunge all spatial metaphors entirely. Yes, container metaphors, too. No in/inside/out/outside.

 

So what metaphors remain for them to use, then? Let's suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that they see colors roughly like we do. (This is probably implausible, if they're gas-giant-dwellers; it's probably somewhat dark inside a gas giant, and it’s hard to imagine their diet consisting largely of fruit, which seems to be the reason color is so important to humans. But for the sake of exercise, we shall imagine it to be plausible.) Perhaps, then, as examples: 

• ·         happy is red: "I am red with joy."
• ·         sad is violet: "I'm feeling blue."
• ·         conscious is red: "I was orange and alert."
• ·         unconscious is violet: "I'm going to go see purple [i.e., sleep] for awhile."
• ·         health and life are red: "The redness flows in me."
• ·         sickness and death are violet: "My breathing organs are tinged with violet."
• ·         having control or force is red: "I oranged and he gave me all his money." (Exactly what sort of activity "oranging" is might need to be explained.)
• ·         being subject to force or control is violet: "He is the violet man in the painting." (The “painting” in question being the same sort of metaphor as the “totem pole” on which a person can be the “low man” in English.)
• ·         more is red: "My boss reddened my pay today."
• ·         less is violet: "My savings are so blue I can hardly feed my family."
• ·         prestigious status is red:  "He wears the red." (Note that, in this culture, red, not purple, is associated with royalty, because prestigious status is red and royalty is prestigious.)
• ·         lack of status is violet: "He was purple with envy." (Not green, as one might expect an English-speaker to say.

 

"Infrared" and "ultraviolet" are likely to be roughly equivalent to our "110%" and "less than nothing", respectively.

One advantage of color metaphors: they allow for somewhat more of a spectrum than spatial metaphors. If one is rooted to up/down metaphors, one can speak of up and down, further up and further down, but using color in this way makes it easier and more natural to pinpoint a specific point on the spectrum.

This implies that these aliens are more likely to think in terms of continua where we think in terms of black or white. Perhaps it’s impossible to get a straight yes-or-no answer out of one of these guys; they'll always give you some shade of “maybe-leaning-towards-yes” or “almost-but-not-quite-no” – which they have words for, probably the same words as they use for the colors. “Strong yes” is red, “strong no” is violet, “maybe/no opinion” is green or greenish-yellow. They may well identify more specific points on the color spectrum than the six or seven colors we choose to pick out as the most important ones.

Similarly, what we call “middle management”, these creatures would call “green management”; a “middleman” would instead be a “green man”. A greenman is green between a purpleman and a redman – which may imply that, in this color-oriented culture, all transactions are considered inherently and explicitly unequal. One can be spatially in the middle between two others, but spatial metaphors are irrelevant to these jellyfish-people; color is the metaphor that matters, and it is difficult to be “in the middle” between two colors without one being more red or more violet than the other.

 

Other Examples

All of the above examples do privilege happiness, consciousness, health and life, control and force, amount, and status, which is itself an anthropocentric view. What if a culture doesn't care about control or status, but does care about, say, delicious flavor? Delicious is up, disgusting is down!

A writer might use a particularly violent people – orcs, for example – whose metaphors are all in terms of violence – violence is good, peace is bad. Consider the situation: an orcish elder explains the plan to pillage and massacre the village of Aardham. A young upstart orc things they should pillage and massacre Beantown instead, and shouts out, metaphorically, "the elder is advocating peace!" Meaning that the elder is saying bad things, not that he's literally advocating peace, which he isn't. Or perhaps, if an orc eats the most delicious pie he's ever eaten, he might opine that "This pie really stabs me in the face!"

 

Or consider the most alien of all: cultures which communicate exclusively in metaphors, or cultures which use no metaphors in communication at all.

 

The former idea was explored in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok”, wherein the Enterprise encounters the Tamarians, a species of aliens who communicate exclusively in metaphors, or more specifically references to stories, which the universal translator lacked the cultural context to properly translate. The pronouncements of the Tamarians were statements such as "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" (referring to fighting a common enemy), "Shaka, when the walls fell" (failure), "Temba, his arms wide" (giving and receiving), and "Sokath, his eyes uncovered" (comprehension). By the end of the episode, “Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel”, a reference to the events of the episode, had apparently become the Tamarian term for “first successful communication between Tamarians and humans”.

“Darmok” wound up being among the most critically-praised episodes of TNG, and I think it was certainly one of the episodes that was most like traditional (e.g., Asimovian) science-fiction. It was done quite well, if a bit awkwardly; I wouldn't necessarily expect anybody to be able to use this concept without any awkwardness. But it is a very interesting concept to explore, and I'd love to see it explored by more people.

 

A culture with no metaphors at all, on the other hand, would be even more awkward to write. The author wouldn't be able to use orientational or container metaphors. They would, for example, never speak of being in an organization or an emotion, they would never speak of being in love.

Indeed, a metaphor-free culture would never reify at all. Emotions, colors, properties, actions, thoughts, etc., are only metaphorically things at all. A metaphor-free culture would have no concept of "concepts". They would probably become confused if you used the word “love” or tried to describe it at all: love is itself not a literal thing.

Metaphor-free language would be so difficult to think with, let alone communicate with, that I doubt such a culture would have anything like the focus on linguistic communication that we do.

For comparison, years ago, I came up with an idea of a culture which, early on in their development of mathematics, discovered that you cannot divide by zero without entailing terrible nonsensical things. It didn’t occur to them, for whatever reason, to arbitrarily disallow dividing by zero as we do, so on that basis they concluded that all of mathematics is just incoherent. This culture threw out the whole discipline of mathematics, so all of science and engineering in this culture would run purely on trial-and-error, so they never would have gotten beyond the Iron Age.

In a similar way, it seems like a culture which never invented/discovered metaphors may have long since discarded language as an almost entirely fruitless endeavour.

 

Conclusion

Being aware of metaphors in the dialogue and thoughts of characters can be an important tool in selling the idea that the characters are not simply human minds in non-human bodies.

I have only given a few examples of the kind of thing I mean. There are, of course, countless other ways a writer could structure the metaphors of fictional aliens. As long as all the metaphors are coherent with each other and with the culture the author is trying to describe, I think almost any variation can work.

 

Works Cited

Card, Orson Scott. Speaker For The Dead. New York: Tor Books, 1986. Print.

"Darmok." Star Trek: The Next Generation. Season 5, episode 2. Paramount, 1991. Television.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Print.

Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942. Print.

Miéville, China. Perdido Street Station. New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2000. Print.

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter. 7 vols. New York: Scholastic Press, 1997-2007. Print.

Wikipedia contributors. "Kola Superdeep Borehole." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 17 Apr. 2012. Web. 30 Apr. 2012.

---

[1] Lakoff & Johnson (1980), pp. 14-17.

[2] Wikipedia.

[3] Card (1986).

[4] Rowling (1997-2007).

[6] Miéville (2000), p. 344.

[7] The usual word is “necromancy”, but the “–mancy” suffix refers to divination – necromancy is specifically telling the future by talking to the dead. As I strive for clarity, accuracy, and precision, the manipulation of the dead and the creation of “undead” creatures call for a different suffix, in this case “–urgy”, from the Greek for “work” – necrourgy thus being a more general “working with death”.

“Which Breakup is Taylor Swift’s New Sonnet About?” and Other Silly Questions

 for Shakespeare's Sonnets class, 2024

Abstract

Just as it is common for people to wonder what real-life relationships are described in Taylor Swift’s songs, it is common for academics to wonder what real-world people correspond to the Young Man and the Dark Mistress of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The two areas of inquiry have a commonality: both rest on an assumption that the artist’s works are autobiographical in nature, and therefore the very validity of the inquiry rests on an unproven premise. This essay seeks to build, from evidence in the Sonnets themselves and from Shakespeare’s life, an argument as to whether the Sonnets are, or are not, autobiographical, to determine whether inquiry into the 'real' identity of the Young Man or the Dark Mistress has any chance of being fruitful. In the end, we conclude there is no evidence that they are not autobiographical, but precious little evidence that they are.

An Analogy with Taylor Swift

A cottage academy exists to analyze each song by Taylor Swift, one of this generation’s preeminent musical artists, and determine exactly who – often, specifically, which of her relationships (mostly, if you believe her reputation, breakups) – is really referenced in each one – is “The Alchemy”, filled with football metaphors, about her latest beau, footballer Travis Kelce (Earl and Willman)? Is “Hey Stephen” about musician Stephen Barker Liles, or “Style” about singer Harry Styles; is “We Are Never Getting Back Together” about actor Jake Gyllenhaal, or “Enchanted” about singer Adam Young (Mcglone and Stern)?

A not-so-cottage academy has existed, for hundreds of years, analyzing the Sonnets by William Shakespeare, his generation’s preeminent playwright, to determine who the Dark Mistress and Fair Youth really were (the latter presumed to be Mr. W.H., to whom Thorpe’s publication of Shakespeare’s sonnets was dedicated). Was the Fair Youth actually Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, or Shakespeare’s nephew William Hart, or William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke? Was the Dark Mistress actually Emilia Lanier (Rowse), or the wife of linguist John Florio (Bate), or William Herbert’s mistress Mary Fitton (Tyler)? Countless drops of ink (and, more recently, pixels) have been spilt on these questions over the centuries.

The parallels, as I have laid them out here, are obvious, and each hinges on the degree to which the writer’s work is autobiographical. There seems to be little debate over whether Swift’s songs are autobiographical – it is widely assumed they are completely so. To be fair to this assumption, Swift has spoken of parallels between a few specific songs and her own life, which is admittedly more than we have for Shakespeare’s sonnets, the background of which we know very little. But surely a masterful writer, whatever century they were born in, is capable of writing some art that is not fully autobiographical?

Psychoanalysts know that […] it is impossible for a creative writer to completely disconnect themselves from their literary creations. […T]here is a wide spectrum of possibilities, from strictly factual autobiography to purely imaginary fiction. (Waugaman)

Is this instinct to treat Shakespeare as the Sonnets’ speaker as well as their author, to treat Swift as her songs’ speaker as well as their writer, not an example of “the intentional fallacy that works from text back to author rather than in the more common reverse mode” (Charles)?

It seems I write dismissively of this assumption, but its answer does power some interesting questions, beyond just the real-world identities of the Young Man and Dark Mistress (a matter which I will not address here, beyond the question of if they have real-world identities). For example, one facet of the question of whether Shakespeare himself was or was not queer hinges on whether the author of the queer (or are they? that is another question) Young Man Sonnets was writing autobiographically (Charles).

Building Up an Argument from First Principles

The philosopher René Descartes took it as his mission to build all of human knowledge on what can be known a priori, before observation of the real world has even begun. Never mind whether he succeeded: I am taking a similar approach to the question of the autobiographicality of the Sonnets.

“A central tenet of literary theory for many years has been that we should focus solely on the text, not the life or psychology of the author. Fictional characters are said to be merely words on the page, and we are not allowed to speculate about their psychology or backstory.” (Waugaman) Here, we make no assumption of ‘the death of the author’, but neither do we assume the contrary position – we’re just looking for evidence one way or the other.

Waugaman, among others, argues that Shakespeare was actually in fact some other guy, which strays a bit further than the scope of this paper. Here, we will simply take it as axiomatic that William Shakespeare is the author of the Sonnets. We only seek to investigate whether he is also the speaker of the sonnets, the character known as the Poet.

“I always write of you”

Some readers draw the seemingly natural conclusion that “the 1609 arrangement gives us a coherent, probably authorial, ordering” (Heale) and that the Sonnets correspondingly tell a single coherent narrative of two relationships.

This is not a sufficient precondition to conclude that the Sonnets are all autobiographical, but it may be a necessary one. If the Sonnets, “written […] singly or in groups over a period of at least 10 years” (Heale) are not about some consistent two actual individuals, then either the author wrote some or all of them about fictional individuals, or the author fell head-over-heels in love with a succession of men, each more perfect in the author’s eyes than the last. The latter possibility, though humorously reminiscent of Romeo spending his first scenes mooning hopelessly over Rosaline before completely forgetting about her the instant he meets Juliet, does not feel compelling to attribute to as fine an explorer of the psyche as Shakespeare. (This is, admittedly, somewhat tenuous reasoning.)

Luckily, the Sonnets themselves present evidence that they are a single coherent whole, in the form of Sonnet 76, where Shakespeare recognizes the repetitiveness of the Sonnet sequence: “Why is my verse so barren of new pride,/So far from variation or quick change?”, and answers the question: “O, know, sweet love, I always write of you” – the Poet is telling us, within the sequence itself, that every poem in the Young Man sequence, or at least the sequence up until Sonnet 76, is about the same subject.

“My Name Is Will”

There are, of course, several of the Sonnets where the word “Will” is capitalized in the original Q, indicating at least some form of personification, and, it is natural to assume, some identification between the Poet and William Shakespeare. Most noteworthy of such are Sonnets 135 and 136, consisting almost entirely of various multiple entendres on the word/name Will, the second of the two poems concluding with the straight-up, apparently nonmetaphorical, statement, “my name is Will.” At the barest, absolute minimum, we can safely conclude that the speaker of Sonnets 135-136 (and their ilk) is named Will, which does just happen to also be the author’s name.

Putting this together with the previous evidence that the sonnet sequence is a narratively coherent single whole, the speaker of all the sonnets is, one may conclude, one Poet: Will.

“Beated and chapped with tanned antiquity”

The Poet gives a variety of other biographical details about himself, mostly various descriptions of himself as old and decrepit in various ways, much older than the Young Man. The Poet describes himself as old often enough that either it’s an in-joke that he is only very slightly older than the Young Man, or he is actually old. Shakespeare, born 1564, was 45 when Q was published (he would have been a bit younger when the Sonnets were written – it is, of course, unlikely they were published before he wrote them). In Renaissance Europe, 45 could quite plausibly have qualified as decayingly old. This is certainly not proof that Shakespeare and the Poet are one and the same, but it is not the counterevidence it could so easily have been.

Similarly, the Poet does not have “public honour and proud titles”, according to Sonnet 25, and certainly neither did Shakespeare (Waugaman’s argument to the contrary notwithstanding).

It turns out biographical details such as these are actually few within the Sonnets, general enough that they might reasonably apply to most people (most people, after all, do not have public honour nor proud titles, and so on), and, though none of them present serious counterevidence to the possibility that the Sonnets are autobiographical, ultimately they are not, singly nor in aggregate, compelling evidence for the autobiographicality of the Sonnets.

“(                                  )”

What conclusion, then, can we draw? Having assessed the evidence in the Sonnets and some of the academic literature, is the Poet Will one and the same as the author Shakespeare?

Ultimately, the answer remains a shrug, a resounding ‘maybe’. There is little to no counterevidence against the proposition that Will is Shakespeare himself, but there is precious little concrete corroborating evidence, either. It’s probably a fair assumption for the sake of discussion that the Sonnets are autobiographical, so long as we always bear in the back of our minds that we’re building on an uncertain foundation, and correspondingly none of our conclusions are entirely certain.

Luckily, if we’re in a mood where we want concrete, definite answers, we can just ask Taylor Swift which of her songs are or are not autobiographical.

Works Cited

Bate, Jonathan. "The dark lady." The genius of Shakespeare, Picador, 2008, 94, ISBN 9780330458436.

Charles, Casey. "’Was Shakespeare Gay?’ Sonnet 20 and the Politics of Pedagogy." College Literature, vol. 25, no. 3, 1998, pp. 35-51, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25112402.

Earl, William and Chris Willman. "Which New Taylor Swift Songs Are About Matty Healy, Joe Alwyn or Travis Kelce? Breaking Down ‘Tortured Poets Department’ Lyric Clues." Variety, 19 April 2024, https://variety.com/2024/music/news/the-tortured-poets-department-song-relationships-breakdown-1235975036/. Accessed 25 April 2024

Heale, Elizabeth. "Will in the Sonnets." Shakespeare, vol. 5 no. 3, 2009, pp. 219-34.

Mcglone, Allison and Elizabeth Stern. "A Complete Breakdown Of Who Taylor Swift's Songs Are (Allegedly) About." YourTango, 23 October 2022, https://www.yourtango.com/2021341576/list-people-taylor-swift-has-written-songs-about. Accessed 25 April 2024.

Rowse, A. L. Shakespeare's sonnets - the problems solved. Macmillan, 1973, ISBN 9780333147344.

Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Edited and annotated by Stephen Booth, Yale University Press, 1977.

Tyler, Thomas. "Preface." Shakespeare's Sonnets, 1890, p vi, OCLC 185191423.

Waugaman, Richard M. "The Origins of Modern Literary Theory in the Repudiation of Autobiographical Readings of Shakespeare's Sonnets." Psychoanalytic Inquiry, vol. 43 no. 5, 2023, pp. 364-82.

Defying Normativity: Queerness as Strength in Wicked

for Queer Theatre class, 2023

There is little overt homosexuality in Wicked, despite featuring several romantic pairings (not to mention a strong apparently platonic friendship between two young women) but that’s among the few things about it that aren’t queer. It is commonly well-understood that characters, plots, and themes of Wicked all turn out to be queer, at the very least in the broadest sense of transgression against societal norms. Ultimately, queerness drives and strengthens the main character of Wicked, just as the antagonist is correspondingly empowered by his queerness.

Even Dorothy’s Enemies Turn Out to Be Her Friends

When discussing Wicked, there are four main levels of canon to draw upon: the 2003 Broadway musical with book by Winnie Holzman and music/lyrics by Stephen Schwartz[1]; the musical is adapted from Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West[2]; the novel is in turn written as a prequel to the 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz directed by Victor Fleming[3]; the movie is itself an adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz[4]. However: the corpus of works from which Wicked descends is tremendously vaster even than that: Baum, of course, wrote some 13 sequel novels to his The Wonderful Wizard of Oz before his death in 1919; there have been a number of unofficial sequels to the movie, perhaps most famously Disney’s 1985 Return to Oz, directed by Walter Murch, based on some of Baum’s sequels; and Maguire wrote three sequel novels to Wicked; moreover, there have been countless other adaptations of Baum’s original into various other media, including a 1902 Broadway musical. There is also a movie adaptation of Wicked the musical in production, due to come out in two parts in late 2023 and 2024[5].

In the mid-20th century, being a ‘friend of Dorothy’ became code for being a gay man, derived possibly from the gay icon status of Judy Garland, who played Dorothy in the 1939 movie, but also in line with the themes of the book and its adaptations. Though Dorothy is herself a standard-issue straight white girl who is not, to all appearances, in any way queer herself, she does collect a motley crew of queer, outcast friends – a walking, talking Scarecrow; a woodcutter made of tin; a Lion who lacks bravery – so Dorothy can stand as a queer icon even outside of Judy Garland herself. So it is that Wicked comes from a long and proud dynasty of queer literature.

The plot of Wicked – the musical and the novel – follows Elphaba[6]: a girl who is born with green skin; goes on to develop magical powers; forms a friendship with another girl at school who goes on to become Glinda the Good Witch of some longitudinal direction[7]; acquires a revolutionary mission to save talking Animals from a holocaust at the hands of the Wizard of Oz; and winds up falling victim to the Wizard’s propaganda and the teenaged inadvertent assassin he sends after her. Side characters include Elphaba’s sister Nessarose, who becomes the Wicked Witch of the East; and a variety of persons who wind up, through the events of the musical, becoming Dorothy’s queer companions as we see them in the movie.

Elphaba’s friendship with G(a)linda is easy to read as having romantic undertones, particularly in the transition from the hatred-filled “Loathing” to the romantic tone with which the two serenade each other in “For Good”[8], and this interpretation is one that has made Wicked very popular among young queer people. However, it is not clear to me that a homoromantic or homosexual relationship would necessarily be frowned upon in Oz; it isn’t explored enough to be understood by the audience as particularly stigmatized or not. On a meta level, ‘queerbaiting’ is itself a story that is all too familiar to queer people -- a same-sex friendship that can be read as romantic, but which is carefully kept not explicitly romantic, perhaps angling towards the sort of mainstream success that explicit homosexuality would have hindered in 2003 (and which Wicked has, of course, achieved). And we do not, of course, see any homosexual relationships in the canon, so my contention that such a romance would not necessarily actually be particularly queer in-universe has little canonical evidence for or against it.

It is facile to describe any narrative featuring physical transformation as a transgender narrative – sometimes a thing is easy because it fits, while sometimes it takes a shoehorn: the creation story of both the Scarecrow and the Tin Man could perhaps more plausibly be read as stories of transformation because of trauma, which it may be a bit of a stretch to describe as queer.

Still, the magical transformation into a Scarecrow that Elphaba imposes on Fiyero can be seen as analogous to a gender transition, but in reverse: Fiyero starts out carefree and fitting comfortably in his own skin, until he takes a beating, at which point Elphaba assigns him the body of a Scarecrow to protect him[9]. The traditional gender transition involves progressing away from one’s assigned gender at birth to a new gender, chosen by the self, though in the process becoming (distressingly) much more susceptible to beatings in today’s society.

Similarly, when Nessarose seeks to rape the munchkin Boq, her spell goes awry, potentially killing him, and Elphaba casts a competing spell to save his life, thereby transforming him into a man of tin with no heart. However it is that we see Fiyero’s transformation, Boq’s is analogous.

Disability is, of course, queer. Elphaba’s sister Nessarose struggles throughout the musical with her inability to walk and her use of a wheelchair, until Elphaba enchants her bejeweled slippers to allow her to walk[10] – the very same ruby slippers that Dorothy then inadvertently steals in the movie and Elphaba seeks to recover[11].

In Oz, the societal expectation of Lions is that they are brave. The Lion of these stories, being cowardly due to the events of the musical[12], is therefore queer.

Of course, the Wizard himself turns out to be, on all four levels of canon, a fraud with limited magical ability, putting on a great show of being magically powerful, in order to take and maintain power. On one level, his is a recognizable queer story – but he leverages his power over society’s conceptions to his own ends, including the genocide of Animals, not to mention the incident of probable rape of Elphaba’s mother, none of which are particularly queer. Let’s put an asterisk on the Wizard’s queerness.

Incidentally, the Wizard’s plot to rob Animals of the ability to speak is a holocaust that targets queer folk and seeks to make them less queer by force – something homosexual and transgender people are all too familiar with in reality.

So I would ultimately say that literal homosexual or transgender content, if present – and it could be present, though not made explicit – is among the least queer thing about Wicked. The transitions of Fiyero and Boq, and a variety of other minor cases show that Wicked is suffused with queer themes. But I have not even yet touched upon the chief and foremost of my readings of queer content in this musical: Elphaba’s status as an outsider because of the color of her skin, and the way she uses or masks it to her own advantage.

“Green!”[13]

The protagonist Elphaba is, of course, green of skin, a situation which causes much of the musical’s tsuris – or at least, which drives Elphaba herself, causing both resentment and a need to excel. I wouldn’t say that the common people don’t care about Elphaba’s green skin – she certainly lists her perceptions that she is discriminated against on the basis of her skin color in “The Wizard and I”[14], and the populace does seize upon it as a reason to hate her, once prompted, in “Thank Goodness”[15] – but I would suggest that Elphaba cares about it more than they do, as evidenced in her song, “The Wizard and I”[16], where she is very keen to pretend she doesn’t care about her “verdigris”[17], but makes it clear that she does, in fact, care very much about it:

And one day, [the Wizard]'ll say to me "Elphaba,

[…]

Would it be all right by you

If I de-greenify you?"

“Of course that's not important to me;

All right, why not!" I'll reply.[18]

This is all easy to read as a commentary on racism (depending on exactly how broadly we define queerness, a discriminated-against race could itself still be considered queer), but, given that her parents are not green – indeed Elphaba seems to be the only green-skinned person in Oz – and given my contention that Elphaba cares about her green skin more than the common people do, I think this doesn’t quite fit[19]. It could fit as a homosexual, or possibly transgender (born into a body that differs from one’s self-conception), analogy. Or the story of Elphaba’s green skin could be treated as a story about disability, or about the sort of discrimination that people with vitiligo or albinism face – I suspect this last fits best, conceptually. Regardless of the parallels we draw, it is clear that Elphaba’s green skin, and the discrimination she faces because it places her fundamentally as an outsider, makes her queer, and her story a queer story.

The cause of Elphaba’s greenness has something to do with a “green elixir”[20] given to her mother by a traveling salesman (who later becomes the Wizard of Oz), who then sleeps with said mother; this could make Elphaba’s greenness a commentary on either adultery or rape, depending on how, exactly, the elixir scene is read: it’s unclear to me whether the elixir is an aphrodisiac, a sleeping draught, a love potion, alcoholic, or a nostrum with no particular effect. Given the Wizard’s depiction elsewhere (in the 1939 movie, for example) as a snake oil salesman with no particular actual powers, the last seems plausible, though it may not be the intended conclusion. If it is a nostrum or an aphrodisiac, the Wizard is relatively faultless in this case and the commentary is on Elphaba’s mother’s adultery; if it is a sleeping potion or love potion, the Wizard is guilty of rape (although love potions are a literary device with a long history, I would contend that they remain, fundamentally, rape potions). In any of these cases, Elphaba’s greenness is a ‘sins of the parents’ situation – it’s nothing about Elphaba herself that made her green, and if it’s a punishment (by the narrative, or by any deities Oz might have) then it is an undeserved punishment.

The Wizard, given his non-proficiency with actual magic, probably couldn’t actually turn Elphaba’s skin to a less queer hue like she wishes[21], but it seems obvious to me that he could grant her wish the same way he grants the wishes of Dorothy’s queer companions: it wouldn’t take much effort on the part of the Wizard’s propaganda apparatus to loop Elphaba’s appearance into the whole schtick of the Emerald City – so named because it is so very green. (In Baum’s original books, all visitors to the Emerald City are fitted with a pair of green sunglasses, illegal to remove as long as they are within city limits – and of course it transpires that not everything in the Emerald City is actually green; everything just looks green through green sunglasses.[22])

Instead, upon discovering a nefarious plot by the Wizard against Animals[23] to strip them of their ability to talk, Elphaba makes an enemy of the Wizard, and that propaganda apparatus is turned against her instead. Facing the propaganda machine of the state and the consequent opprobrium of society is, of course, a quintessentially queer story. The order of causation in reality is up for debate – taking homophobia as an example, it’s not clear whether the propaganda machine of the so-called social ‘conservative’ movement invented homophobia out of whole cloth as a tool to achieve its own malign ends, or homophobia somehow arose naturally in the general population and the ‘conservative’ movement seized it and turned it to its own ends; I would suppose probably some of both. In any event, in Wicked, it is clearly the propaganda apparatus that comes first, as the Wizard’s new press secretary first labels Elphaba a “wicked witch” at the end of Act I[24], immediately[25] followed by a mob of the populace in Act II singing a song about how bad the Wicked Witch of the West is[26].

One major theme of the musical involves the question of whether you are at risk of ultimately becoming the mask you wear; whether you take on and internalize the role society assigns you. As Elphaba sings,

Let all Oz be agreed,

I'm wicked through and through.

Since I can not succeed,

Fiyero, saving you,

I promise no good deed

Will I attempt to do again![27]

Ultimately, of course, Elphaba doesn’t actually do anything particularly wicked after that, instead faking her death and fleeing Oz – but she uses the people’s perception of her ostensible wickedness to accomplish that feat, hinging on a popular superstition that pure water would melt her[28].

Masking is ultimately a queer thing – whether you are ‘in the closet’ in terms of sexual orientation or gender or masking a neurodivergence and trying to pass as allistic. Though the closeted gay man who hates who he is so much that he goes into government to legislate against it is a classic archetype in American culture, I would venture to suppose that there is little risk of actually becoming the mask in reality. Those who are not society’s approved standard sexual orientation, gender, or neurotype cannot help but be who they actually are, no matter how intent they are on masking.

It isn’t entirely clear to me whether Elphaba leaning into society’s perception of her, as she says she’s prepared to do in “No Good Deed”, is really a decision to actually be a wicked person, or simply to wear the mask of wickedness while remaining good at heart, thereby accomplishing more than if she had continued to spend her energy fighting it. If we as queer persons in reality lean into society’s perception of us, we might be able to accomplish more than if we spend all our energy fighting it.

A contrast can certainly be drawn between the respective queernesses of Elphaba and the Wizard. While the Wizard uses his queerness and his mask to acquire power and accomplish his own evil ends (rape, genocide, etc.), Elphaba uses her queerness and her mask to try to help others and, in the end, to escape persecution by faking her death – probably, given her consistent characterization, to go on continuing to help people after the end of the musical, albeit perhaps not in Oz.

Works Cited

Baum, L. F. (1900). The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. George M. Hill Company.

Holzman, W., & Schwartz, S. (2003). Wicked. Broadway, New York.

Langley, N., Ryerson, F., Woolf, E. A. (Writers), & Fleming, V. (Director). (1939). The Wizard of Oz [Motion Picture].

Maguire, G. (1995). Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. HarperCollins.

Weinersmith, Z. (2020, July 9). "Meaning". Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Retrieved from https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/meaning-3

Presented Without Comment

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