Pygmalion and "The Birth-Mark"

for Introduction to Literary Interpretation class, 2020

The whole of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark” is veined through from start to finish with the Greco-Roman myth of Pygmalion, to the point that it is practically a retelling, adaptation, or reinterpretation (one of countless many such – Pygmalion is practically archetypical).

Pygmalion is only explicitly invoked once, when Aylmer says to Georgiana, “Even Pygmalion, when his sculptured woman assumed life, felt not greater ecstasy than mine will be.”[1] However, Aylmer clearly fully fancies himself Pygmalion and Georgiana his ivory woman throughout the text.

For Aylmer, this ends poorly; for Pygmalion, it (remarkably for Greco-Roman myth) ends well, with love and marriage and a baby (named Paphos, who goes on to found the city of the same name[2])[3].

- - -

The ivory woman is often known as “Galatea” (Greek, “she who is milk-white”) since Jean-Jacques Rousseau first gave her that name in his 1762 melodrama adaptation of the myth[4]; Ovid gives her no name but calls her “eburnea virgo” (Latin, “ivory maid”)[5].

It is not clear to me how one would go about carving a full-size woman out of a single tusk of ivory – either she was assembled from multiple tusks (a dauntingly expensive proposition in classical Cyprus, one ventures to suppose, though in some versions of the myth, Pygmalion was the king, and could presumably afford it), or “ivory” is meant (by more recent writers, though possibly not by Ovid) metaphorically or in reference to color, and the “ivory” woman was in fact carved from white stone, i.e., marble. Certainly, artists and sculptors through history, interpreting the myth of Pygmalion and his statue, have generally depicted her as carved from a block of marble (or, in the case of sculptors, have actually carved her likeness from a block of marble). For example, one of the most famous depictions in painting of this myth, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Pygmalion and Galatea (shown, previous page)[6], has Galatea carved of marble.

This is relevant because, if we venture into the possibility space where Pygmalion’s sculpture was of marble, not literal elephant ivory, then the countless (actually three, but it initially seems countless once you realize what you’re looking for) comparisons of Georgiana (and/or her skin) to marble each become a potential reference to Pygmalion’s creation.

Specifically, the reference to “the Eve of [Hiram] Powers,” beautiful marble statuary, is one such possible allusion (it’s not of particular relevance that Powers never carved a Pygmalion and/or Galatea statue); as is the line referring to the mark as being “like a bas relief of ruby on the whitest marble;” and the line about the “crimson hand” being “strongly visible upon the marble paleness of Georgiana’s cheek.”[7]

- - -

Of course, comparisons of Georgiana to marble statuary are only the barest surface scratch of the allusion to the myth of Pygmalion. More comparisons begin in the very first paragraph.

The scene in paragraph 1 where wherein Aylmer “left his laboratory to the care of an assistant, cleared his fine countenance from the furnace-smoke, washed the stain of acids from his fingers, and persuaded a beautiful woman to become his wife”[8] is Pygmalion, but in reverse. It is he who is transformed to mate, not the wife. Perhaps Aylmer has it in the back of his mind that, because he transformed himself (albeit temporarily) to acquire an ivory statue, it’s only fair that the ivory statue also be transformed for him.

Consider also this passage from the first paragraph of “The Birth-Mark”:

In those days […] it was not unusual for the love of science to rival the love of woman in its depth and absorbing energy. […] [Aylmer] had devoted himself […] too unreservedly to scientific studies ever to be weakened from them by any second passion. His love for his young wife might prove the stronger of the two; but it could only be by intertwining itself with his love of science and uniting the strength of the latter to his own.[9]

Now consider this passage from the first verse of “Pygmalion and the Statue” from Ovid’s Metamorphoses:

Pygmalion saw these women [the Propoetides[10]] waste their lives in wretched shame, and critical of faults which nature had so deeply planted through their female hearts, he lived in preference, for many years unmarried. But while he was single, with consummate skill, he carved a statue out of snow-white ivory, and gave to it exquisite beauty, which no woman of the world has ever equalled: she was so beautiful, he fell in love with his creation.[11]

In each passage, the subject loves his work more than he loves women – indeed, Pygmalion at least seems to quite dislike messy mortal fleshy human women, while Aylmer loves only Georgiana in particular, except for the one most human part of her. In each, the two categories – “his work” and “women” – are at some point one and the same.

I don’t think Aylmer loves his work/women in quite the same way as Pygmalion – Pygmalion seems to genuinely be in love with his ivory woman, who starts out as his work, his magnum opus, but diverges; whereas Aylmer is in love with Georgiana except for the little hand, which provides a reason – perhaps an excuse – to merge her with his work, to (he hopes, in vain) become his magnum opus.

- - -

Aylmer’s lab assistant/servant, Aminadab, is described, in part, as follows: according to the narrator, there is an “indescribable earthiness that incrusted him”, and Aylmer calls him “thou human machine; […] thou man of clay” and “Ah, clod! ah, earthly mass!” and “matter” and “earth” (contrasting with himself, “spirit” and “heaven”) and “thing of the senses” (implicitly contrasting with himself, a thing of reason; and perhaps with Georgiana, a thing of beauty)[12] – which it is not entirely clear whether Aylmer means insultingly, affectionately, or simply descriptively.

Where Aylmer himself is Pygmalion, the sculptor, the intellect, the brain and spirit; and Georgiana is the statue of marble, of stone but better than perfect by virtue of the colored veins characteristic of her substance; Aminadab is raw earth, a clod of unshapen clay. Perhaps is it by virtue of his earthy kinship with Georgiana that Aminadab is capable of appreciating her birth-mark as contributive to her beauty, as where he says, “If she were my wife, I’d never part with that birth-mark”[13], whereas Aylmer, the sculptor, can see only imperfections in her material.

Is there a counterpart to Aminadab in the myth of Pygmalion? The myth is simple and short, so there are only a few candidates. He is probably not the Propoetides, women transformed by Venus to stone as punishment for general harlotry – the only overlap is in the earthy material that compose them. He is definitely not Venus, as he shows no creative power, although he does seem to aid Aylmer in his creative endeavors.

One possibility comes from Rousseau’s adaptation of the myth of Pygmalion – which was first performed in 1770, 73 years before “The Birth-Mark” (it was never Rousseau’s most prominent or esteemed work, especially outside of Europe, but Hawthorne could plausibly have been at least peripherally aware of it through the zeitgeist, so it could be a deliberate allusion on his part) – when Galatea comes to life, she touches herself and says, “me;” touches one of Pygmalion’s other sculptures and says, “not me;” then touches Pygmalion and says, “me again”[14]. Aminadab could be analogous to one of Pygmalion’s other sculptures, serving primarily to contrast with Georgiana/Galatea and Aylmer/Pygmalion.

Aylmer, too, could have been familiar with Rousseau’s Pygmalion; certainly, the point wherein Galatea indicates she is one person with Pygmalion should be well-taken with respect to his relationship with Georgiana. Though Aminadab certainly would have appreciated Georgiana more qua Georgiana, she is in the end a reflection of Aylmer – at least in Aylmer’s eyes, though he doesn’t seem to realize that’s how he’s treating her; and in her own eyes, intently reading up on Aylmer’s past work and willing to do anything for him just because he asks. Though Georgiana and Aminadab are both born of earth and Aylmer is a sculptor, she ultimately has more in common with her husband than with his assistant – or so Aylmer thinks.

- - -

To try to replicate (or exceed) the work of the gods is to invite disaster. Aylmer attempts to replicate Venus’s work on Pygmalion’s ivory woman, and it ends poorly. To wit: Nature “permits us, indeed, to mar, but seldom to mend, and, like a jealous patentee, on no account to make.”[15] The line between mending and making is blurry, and I intend to blur it further.

Aylmer fancies himself a mender, fixing an imperfection in Georgiana’s natural beauty, but I posit that in fact he is attempting to make. For one thing, the birth-mark doesn’t actually detract from Georgiana’s beauty, but is in fact an example of what the Japanese call wabi-sabi, often translated as “imperfections that make a thing better than perfect.” (Perhaps everyone would have been better off if Aylmer had studied some Japanese.) Removing it, therefore, would mend nothing. A strong case could be argued that Aylmer is in fact marring Georgiana, but the results speak against that case: if this were marring, then Nature would permit it. Therefore, Aylmer is attempting to make – specifically, attempting to make a woman out of a different woman.

On the other end, though Pygmalion carved the material into shape – carving sculpture, I have heard it said, is very simple: all Pygmalion really did was chisel away everything that wasn’t a beautiful woman – it was Venus that made a living person. Nature, the gods – either way, they reserve the power of creation to themselves.

So, my position is this: Pygmalion succeeded because he merely mended a block of material into the shape a woman and allowed a higher power to take care of the work of making it into actually a woman. Aylmer failed because, with great hubris, he attempted to make a woman into a new woman, usurping the prerogatives of the higher powers. (The woman Aylmer was using as material, one might point out, had already been given to him by Venus, as Pygmalion’s ivory woman was, so this is additionally the crime of snubbing a divine gift.)

- - -

In short, shades of Pygmalion color “The Birth-Mark” from top to bottom. From repeated raw physical description of Georgiana as like marble, to certain details (small and major) of the story lining up, “The Birth-Mark” is virtually a straight-up retelling of the myth of Pygmalion. The main difference is that Hawthorne’s adaptation ends in tragedy, where the original ends in joy.

Works Cited

Gérôme, J.-L. (1890). Pygmalion and Galatea. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Hawthorne, N. (1843). The Birth-Mark. In K. J. Mays (Ed.), The Norton Introduction to Literature, Shorter 12th Edition (pp. 339-350). New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Ovid. (8). Metamorphōseōn librī. Book 10, lines 243-297. Retrieved October 11, 2020, from http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0959.phi006.perseus-lat1:10.243-10.297

Ovid. (8, 1922). Metamorphoses. Book 10, lines 243-297. (B. More, Trans.) Retrieved October 11, 2020, from http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=urn:cts:latinLit:phi0959.phi006.perseus-eng1:10.243-10.297

Rousseau, J.-J. (1762). Pygmalion.

Good Knowledge and Evil Power in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

for Hauntology class, 2023

A Word

In Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the protagonist Oscar de León reads and writes genre fiction (Fritz) and specifically seeks to become known as a “Dominican Tolkien” (Díaz), and references to and concepts from genre fiction frequently find their way into the text through the words of Yunior de las Casas, the narrator (and diegetic writer of the book). In that nerdy spirit, channeling J.R.R. Tolkien as Díaz habitually does in this text, I shall begin by inventing a word – which does, admittedly, channel the linguist aspect of Tolkien, while Díaz tends to channel other aspects of the Professor’s work (Schulenburg; Sepulveda; Tait).

I shall borrow a concept from genre fiction where living beings – typically, but not exclusively, villains – control, or attempt to control, the dead, or the undead, to their own purposes. In genre fiction[1], this is typically referred to as necromancy, which is, it turns out, too etymologically imprecise for my purposes.

-Mancy, typically, refers specifically to divination or telling the future, from the Ancient Greek manteía, prophecy. Necromancy, then, is, most strictly, learning about the future by asking the dead (the Greek prefix necro- referring to death) about it – which is perfectly in line with, or perhaps even relies upon, the conception of ghosts as atemporal beings who begin by returning, for whom “time is out of joint” (Derrida). Hereafter, I will use necromancy exclusively to refer to divination by means of ghosts.

Which does, of course, leave a bit of a lexical gap. Control of the (un)dead for purposes other than divination is a concept found in genre fiction, and which I will explore here, and, having excluded it from the scope of necromancy, we require a term for it. By analogy with theurgy and thaumaturgy, I will pull out the suffix originating from the Greek érgon, meaning work, and refer to control of the (un)dead for one's own purposes as necrourgy.

This invention of a word is not simply a gimmick of pedantry; by extracting works of power and control from the traditional word and depositing it in a new one, I leave knowledge as the sole domain of necromancy. In relation to this text, there is a real distinction to be drawn, one which few observers have recognized: in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, it transpires (with some potential twists) that the work of necrourgy, in the form of fukú in the text, is the domain of villainous characters; necromancy granting knowledge, in the form of zafa, is the domain of heroic ones (or at least the less actively villainous).

The Fukú

"No matter what you believe, fukú believes in you." (Díaz 5)

Running as a theme through The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the fukú, described on the first page as “generally a curse or a doom of some kind”, originating in Africa, “carried in the screams of the enslaved” (Díaz 1), delivered to the Americas by Christopher Columbus: “a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles […] it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since […] we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not.” (Díaz 1-2).

Regarding the fukú as a ghost, as something dead or undead, is perhaps to blur concepts together that would be better off left unblurred. One might more reasonably describe it as a sort of black magic, an evil entity or sorcery, not necessarily related to the dead in particular. Blurring this concept so, so soon after being so pedantic as to invent a whole new word to satisfy my gratuitous pedantry, admittedly appears inconsistent on my part.

Still, the fukú is described as an almost consciously malevolent entity, “a demon” (Díaz 1) among other things, and as a Faceless Man who appears several times over the course of the text. Moreover, humanity has never been particularly fussed about the taxonomic classifications of spirits – peruse the etymology of ghost and behold the breadth of what its linguistic ancestors and close relatives have meant, from demon to human to angel and everything in between (Harper, Etymology of ghost).

Even setting that all aside, the fukú is, in the first sentence of the text, described as “carried in the screams of the enslaved [and] the death bane of the Tainos,” (Díaz 1) so it certainly may have something to do with somebody having died.

Even speaking of the fukú is dangerous. "To say [the Admiral's] name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours." (Díaz 1) This taboo avoidance calls to mind the linguistic origins of bear – the original European name of the bear may have been arkto, but fell out of use and was forgotten in Germanic languages: bear comes from proto-Indo-European terms meaning brown or wild animal, because to say the brown one's true name was to invoke its terrible coming. (Harper, Etymology of bear)

The fukú was “[a]lso called the fukú of the Admiral [Columbus] because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite ‘discovering’ the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing […] divine voices.” (Díaz 1) Did Columbus deliberately, fumblingly invoke or attempt to harness or deploy the fukú? Or was he simply a sort of bystander, Patient Zero in a plague of dooms?

The fukú is deliberately harnessed and employed by Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, president of the Dominican Republic 1930-1961, “our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator” (Díaz 2). Or, more specifically, “[n]o one knows whether Trujillo was the Curse's servant or its master, its agent or its principal, but it was clear he and it had an understanding, that them two was tight.” (Díaz 2-3)

Shit was so tight that many people actually believed that Trujillo had supernatural powers! It was whispered that he did not sleep, did not sweat, that he could see, smell, feel events hundreds of miles away[2], that he was protected by the most evil fukú on the Island. (Díaz 226)

(Yunior does, at least once, describe the harnessing of the fukú as “the necromantic power of El Jefe” (Díaz 158), but this is presumably because he is not so linguistically precise or pedantic as I am choosing to be.)

Anyone who opposed Trujillo wound up encountering a terrible doom, up to and including U.S. President John F. Kennedy Jr, who allegedly green-lit Trujillo’s assassination (which assassination perhaps incorporated Trujillo himself into the fukú, a ghost to haunt future generations), and was promptly assassinated himself two years later – not by “the mob or LBJ or the ghost of Marilyn Fucking Monroe [or] aliens or the KGB or a lone gunman [or] the Hunt Bruthers of Texas or Lee Harvey or the Trilateral Commission” (Díaz 4), but by the fukú of Trujillo.

The character Abelard, grandfather of the eponymous Oscar, is made subject to the fukú: "Most of the folks you speak to prefer the story with a supernatural twist. They believe that not only did Trujillo want Abelard's daughter, but when he couldn't snatch her, out of spite he put a fukú on the family's ass. Which is why all the terrible shit that happened happened." (Díaz 243)

On the other hand, Abelard is thought to have constructed a book describing Trujillo’s control of the fukú – “an exposé of the supernatural roots of the Trujillo regime! A book about the Dark Powers of the President, a book in which Abelard argued that the tales the common people told about the president – that he was supernatural, that he was not human – may in some ways have been true. That it was possible that Trujillo was, if not in fact, then in principle, a creature from another world!” (Díaz 245) – and to have been made a target of the fukú because of that.

Either way, Abelard is arrested by Trujillo, and “[a]las, the grimoire in question (so the story goes) was conveniently destroyed after Abelard was arrested. No copies survive.” (Díaz 245) In fact, none of Abelard’s books or publications, not one trace of his handwriting, was allowed to survive, a sort of damnatio memoriae executed by Trujillo or by the fukú or both.

In, among other places, chapter Six, Oscar’s lifelong depression, which drives many of his actions and the plot, is attributed to having inherited the fukú on Abelard (Díaz 263-307).

The Zafa

“Even now as I write these words I wonder if this book ain’t a zafa of sorts. My very own counterspell.” (Díaz 7)

The antidote to the fukú is the zafa. In its primary sense, the word zafa itself suffices – “anytime you mentioned or overheard the Admiral’s name or anytime a fukú reared its many heads there was only one way to prevent disaster from coiling around you, only one surefire counterspell that would keep you and your family safe. […] A simple word[:] Zafa.” (Díaz 7)

That this sole practical protection against fukú would be a word is in line with traditional conceptions of the supernatural as being linguistic, or language as being supernatural – for example, going back in Christianity to the first passage of the book of John, where “the Word [logos] was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1), or, for another example, the entire intertangled cluster of etymology leading to English words like grammar, glamour, and grimoire, through words signifying concepts pertaining to words, learning, incantations, and magic spells (Harper, Etymology of grammatical).[3] In the text, it turns out that in practice the zafa is more consistent with magic as knowledge and magic as story than magic as language – a subtle distinction, to be sure, and applying such clear distinctions to something so woolly as magic may be foolish.

In this sense, prima facie, the zafa is on the same order of magic as the fukú: a deliberate invocation of supernatural powers, albeit protective instead of harmful – where “[f]ukú works in an active fashion” (LeBlond), zafa is protective and reactive.

More specifically, throughout the book, the actual zafa that appears, most commonly taking the form of a golden mongoose, trends towards the necromantic, not the necrourgic. The mongoose does not typically defend against the fukú directly; more precisely, it grants knowledge of how to defend against the fukú.

A turn of wit allows Abelard to protect his daughters from Trujillo for a time: cleverness inspired by “a Numinous Being.” (Díaz 223) The golden mongoose comes to Oscar’s mother Beli after she is beaten by goons in a cane field, and leads her to safety. (Díaz 149-150)

Oscar’s great-aunt, La Inca, receives several messages and instructions from her late husband in dreams, instructions which serve to counter the fukú. One instructs her to find Beli; another reveals that she should send Beli to New York for safety (Díaz 157).

Oscar’s sister, Lola, is said to congenitally have the ability to harness supernatural powers for knowledge: “For as long as you've been alive you've had bruja ways; even your mother will begrudge you that much. Hija de Liborio she called you after you picked your tia's winning numbers for her and you assumed Liborio was a relative.” (Díaz 53)

The golden mongoose comes to Oscar, as Oscar is about to jump to his death from a train bridge onto the highway, and may be what guides him to fall on a concrete divider, instead of into traffic, saving his life (Díaz 190-191).

Indeed, Oscar himself is a ghost haunting the text – he never speaks directly, and his story is (necromantically) told after his death by others, chiefly by Yunior. Through writing the book (in part for Oscar’s niece, who is presumably subject to the fukú), Yunior conjures Oscar’s spirit as a guiding, storytelling, informing zafa against the fukú that “just happens to be the one that’s got its fingers around my throat.” (Díaz 6) Yunior – and Oscar – take the role of heroes, invoking zafa with their writing (Mahler).

In nearly all cases, the power of the zafa comes in the form of knowledge granted by – or anyway acquired from – the spirits – necromancy. In one of the few cases where the zafa does something other than grant knowledge, La Inca prays so hard for Beli to recover from a beating that it works: “Through the numinous power of prayer La Inca saved the girl's life, laid an A-plus zafa on the Cabral family fukú (but at what cost to herself?).” (Díaz 155) I feel it would be not entirely honest to claim the zafa merely vouchsafed methods of healing to La Inca which saved Beli, so this stands as a counterexample to my assertion.

This necromancy of the zafa occasionally fails, or is incomplete, as in the case where the mongoose tells Oscar, “— — —” (Díaz 301), cases of páginos en blanco explored satisfactorily by other authors (O'Brien).

One might observe that Trujillo’s powers are described as possibly also having included uncanny knowledge – “that he could see, smell, feel events hundreds of miles away” (Díaz 226) – but I would contend that Trujillo’s powers of knowing were more likely purely mortal – after all, the “[d]ude had hundreds of spies whose entire job was to scour the provinces for his next piece of ass” (Díaz 217), and his non-ass-oriented spy network was even more extensive – “he had a Secret Police that out-Stasi’d the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone, even those everyones who lived in the States […] you could say a bad thing about El Jefe at eight-forty in the morning and before the clock struck ten you’d be in the Cuarenta having a cattleprod shoved up your ass.” (Díaz 225)

Other Considerations

One other noteworthy point of intersection – be it similarity or opposition – between necrourgy and necromancy in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is that the mongoose usually seems to come to people willingly, bestowing its wisdom unsolicited (La Inca’s days of prayer for a zafa notwithstanding), while it is left deliberately unclear whether Trujillo is master of the fukú, or works in tandem with it, or even works subordinate to it: “[n]o one knows whether Trujillo was the Curse's servant or its master, its agent or its principal, but it was clear he and it had an understanding, that them two was tight.” (Díaz 2-3)

One might also observe that the zafa usually plays a reactive role, helping mortals defend against the depredations of the fukú (in literature, a tendency more traditionally reserved usually for heroes), while the fukú more actively seeks to bring about its victims’ doom (actively seeking change being a tendency reserved more usually for villains). And yet, the fukú can also be defensive or reactive, as, for example, when it retaliates against Kennedy for his role in the death of Trujillo (Díaz 3-4), so this is not a particularly strict dichotomy.

Works Cited

Bethesda Game Studios. "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim." Bethesda Softworks, 11 November 2011.

Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx. Routledge, 1994. Print.

Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007. Print.

Fritz, Robert K. "Gender and Genre Fiction in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." Chasqui 48.1 (2019): 206-223. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26795323>.

Harper, D. Etymology of bear. 6 October 2022. 3 March 2024. <https://www.etymonline.com/word/bear>.

—. Etymology of ghost. 7 December 2018. 25 March 2024. <https://www.etymonline.com/word/ghost>.

—. Etymology of grammatical. 7 December 2020. 26 March 2024. <https://www.etymonline.com/word/grammatical>.

John. "John." The Bible. King James Version. n.d.

LeBlond, Lisa. "From Plátano Player to Questioning Chronicler—Historiography in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (2023).

Mahler, Anne Garland. "The Writer as Superhero: Fighting the Colonial Curse in Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 19.2 (2010): 119-140. <https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2010.494928>.

O'Brien, Sean P. "Some Assembly Required: Intertextuality, Marginalization, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 45.1 (2012): 75-94.

Schulenburg, Chris. "Nerd Nation: La breve y maravillosa vida de Óscar Wao and Life in Tolkien’s Universe." MLN 131.2 (2016): 503-516.

Sepulveda, Fremio. "Coding the Immigrant Experience: Race, Gender and the Figure of the Dictator in Junot Diaz's "Oscar Wao"." Journal of Caribbean Literatures 7.2 (2013): 15-33. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/43672608>.

Tait, Connor. "There and Back Again: Tolkien's Work in Diaz." ENG621 at Buffalo State University. Buffalo, 14 December 2023.

“Constantly Leaning Over to Whisper Discouragement”: Depression as a Haunting, in Contemplation of Lincoln in the Bardo

for Hauntology class, 2023

Depression as a Haunting

Depression is a haunting: a ghostly, uncanny force that bedevils and confuses the mind. George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo inspires and can clarify this metaphor – I call it a metaphor although, as we will see, there is a certain extent to which I mean it literally, not just metaphorically.

In Lincoln in the Bardo, the eponymous bardo is a sort of pre-afterlife, where ghosts dwell until they are freed of their burdens and can move on to whatever comes next[1]. In the bardo, depression is a spectre: a haunting of the mind. I argue that this is an apt metaphor (if metaphor it be), that it is true in life as well as in the bardo, and I observe that it carries through Lincoln in the Bardo in several aspects.

Depression is unheimlich – it is quite the opposite of “intimate, friendlily comfortable; the enjoyment of quiet content, etc., arousing a sense of agreeable restfulness and security” (Freud 198); there is an “uncanny effect of […] manifestations of insanity” (Freud 201-202), of which depression is a subset; “an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced […] when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes […] The infantile element in this, which also dominates the minds of neurotics, is the over-accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality” (Freud 221) – depression frequently whispers messages that are at odds with observable reality: most sufferers of depression are probably not unloved nor unlovable, yet this is a common delusion smuggled into the brain by depression.

The ghostly characters of Lincoln in the Bardo “narrate themselves into existence” (Vorbeck). Depression, too, narrates itself into existence – it’s a story that tells itself in the sufferer’s brain. Part of the point of cognitive behavioral therapy is to stop allowing depression to narrate itself into existence.

I’m not saying that depression tends to correlate with belief in ghosts – although that turns out to be true (Sharps) – nor that depression causes one to become haunted by literal ghosts – an assessment of stories where that occurs are beyond the scope of this paper – but that depression is a spectre.

Spending Many More Words on Tim Midden Than Saunders Does

One ghost in the bardo is described as having “always gone about dogged by a larger version of himself, that was constantly leaning over to whisper discouragement to him” (Saunders 257), until he is freed from this burden by exposure to President Lincoln’s mind. The ghost in question, Tim Midden, is himself haunted by a spectre[2]: of depression or self-doubt or self-abnegation.

Ghosts in the bardo seem to operate in accordance with the traditional conception of ghosts as possessing physical manifestations of their psychological attributes in life (and/or at their moment of death) – see, for example, A Christmas Carol’s ghost of Jacob Marley, and the ghosts on the street that he shows to Scrooge, all (literally) wearing chains that they (metaphorically?) forged in life, through such things as their greed and lack of charity (Dickens).

Bevins, for example, has slashes on each wrist representing his manner of death, and countless sensory organs (eyes, ears, noses, etc.) representing his desire to experience – which may have been a feature of his entire life, or it may be only representative of his last thoughts, as, in his last seconds, he changed his mind about killing himself, because there were so many things he still wanted to experience. Similarly, the ghost of Hans Vollman possesses a tremendous phallus, representing the fact that he died just as he and his wife were on their way to the bedroom to have sex for the first time, and thus left permanently in suspense, his final carnal desire unfulfilled.

Thus, as Tim Midden’s ghost is hounded by depression, self-doubt, and self-abnegation in death, we can safely presume that he was hounded by these same things in life, or at least at the end of his life (perhaps, like Bevins, he killed himself – but unlike Bevins, did not at any point change his mind about it).

Depression, Clinically

To get a clear definition out of the way, the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders describes depression in terms of depressive episodes (and the frequency thereof), with the symptoms of such including: feeling sad, empty, or hopeless; diminished interest or pleasure in activities; decrease or increase of appetite or weight loss or gain; insomnia or hypersomnia; uncontrolled or slow movements and thoughts, or feelings of restlessness or being slowed down; fatigue or loss of energy; feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt; diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness; recurrent thoughts of death (not just fear of dying) or of suicide (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).

Some of these symptoms describe some of the ghosts of Lincoln in the Bardo – most of the ghosts single-mindedly focus on one activity to the exclusion of all others, instead of showing diminished interest in activities – but many are negated by the staunch inability – or refusal – of the ghosts to understand their status as ghosts. Indeed, the ghosts cannot – or do not – have any thoughts of death, despite being dead. Shaimaa Gohar would argue that most of the ghosts are powered by their fear of death, their fear of moving on (Gohar) – but a fear of death, being more or less reasonable, is explicitly excluded from the DSM-5’s symptoms of depression. It is convenient that I am not claiming any of the ghosts (aside from Tim Midden) are depressed, because I would certainly not be able to defend that claim.

All we know about Tim Midden is that he had “always gone about dogged by a larger version of himself, that was constantly leaning over to whisper discouragement to him” (Saunders 257). This pretty clearly qualifies as at least one of DSM-5’s depressive symptoms – feeling sad, empty, or hopeless, or feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt – so I’m comfortable diagnosing him with depression given that the one sentence is all we learn about him, making it likely all that is important to know about him, or else the author would have told us something more important in that precious throwaway sentence about Tim Midden. This is fine; he only exemplifies my claim, he does not provide a foundation for it.

The symptoms of depression given in DSM-5 can also be symptoms of haunting by a ghost, but are not consistently so, and anyway the key similarity is the persistence. Ghosts, traditionally and in most recent spectral fiction, stick around until their unfinished business is concluded[3], or, in the case of Lincoln in the Bardo, until they have accepted their status as deceased, set aside their unfinished business, and are ready to move on; similarly, depression sticks around forever.

Depression and grief are distinct, although the two often overlap, so they need to be disentwined.

Depression involves endless feelings of, among other things, “hopelessness and helplessness which lacks a justifiable cause”, and is sometimes more severe and usually lasts longer than grief; grief, on the other hand, though its symptoms resemble depression, is seen as “a natural consequence of a loss”, and moreover does not typically last forever (Parker). In comparison to depression, grief is more literally – though not fully unmetaphorically – a haunting by a deceased person.

Many characters in Lincoln in the Bardo are haunted by grief. Bevins, for example, killed himself because (as it turns out) his lover Gilbert broke up with him, claiming it was because he wanted to live in the closet, then was seen with another man, laughing at (it seemed to Bevins) Bevins (Saunders 326) – heartbreak being more like grief than like depression.

Similarly, President Lincoln does spend the text struggling with his grief about his son’s death – “a vain and useless grief” (Saunders 308) – but also with depression. The two phenomena are so intertangled in the President’s mind in this text that it may be impractical to try to differentiate them, but an attempt will be made here nonetheless.

Scrutinizing Lincoln’s Hauntings

In the context of scrutiny of this text, President Lincoln is, of course, two distinct but related entities: the real person who presided over the actual United States, and the fictional character based on that actual President (although the fictional Lincoln is presented as real through excerpts from ostensibly historical texts, half of those texts are themselves invented by Saunders (Moseley)). Here, we are considering primarily the proposition that depression is a haunting, through the lens of Lincoln in the Bardo, so the fictional Lincoln of the text is of foremost concern. The main reason we might be inclined to consider the actual historical Lincoln here is insofar as our understanding (and Saunders’s understanding) of the actual Lincoln can inform our understanding of the fictional Lincoln.

The actual historical Lincoln is known to have had depression, and at times took pills for it that probably made it worse (Shenk). He certainly also had his share of sources of grief – sons kept dying on him, plus of course the countless dead of the Civil War.

Correspondingly, Lincoln as portrayed in the text seems to have both depression and grief. He is certainly stricken with grief at the death of his son – his choice to haul Willie’s body out of his “sick-box” (Saunders) and hug it is a pure expression of this grief. Meanwhile, the descriptions of his sadness rang true to me as descriptions of depression: “Oh, the pathos of it! – haggard, drawn into fixed lines of unutterable sadness, with a look of loneliness, as of a soul whose depth of sorrow and bitterness no human sympathy could ever reach. The impression I carried away was that I had seen, not so much the President of the United States, as the saddest man in the world.” (Saunders 201) He "did not wish to live. Not really. It was, just now, too hard. There was so much to do, he was not doing it well and, if done poorly, all would go to ruin. Perhaps, in time (he told himself) it would get better, and might even be good again. He did not really believe it. It was hard. Hard for him." (Saunders 343) Lincoln’s general sadness, as described in several places, could be equally plausibly attributed to grief or to depression.

President Lincoln’s depression originates, according to some theorists in the text, with his tremendous capacity for empathy – “Lincoln had the tenderest heart for any one in distress, whether man, beast, or bird […] He had a great kindness of heart. His mind was full of tender sensibilities; he was extremely humane […] He was certainly a very poor hater” (Saunders 284);

His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated (Saunders 303-304)

At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end, the many losses we must experience on the way to that end. […] We must try to see each other in this way. […] As suffering, limited beings – […] Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces. […] His sympathy extended to all in this instant, blundering, in its strict logic, across all divides. (Saunders 304)

As it turns out, this allegation is plausible. Within a moderate range, depression is negatively correlated with both higher-than-average empathy (Hoffman) and lower-than-average empathy (the mechanism here is less clear) (Cui); it is, all in all, negatively correlated with moderate empathy, but positively correlated with very high and very low empathy. Depression can be caused by deeply feeling the suffering of one’s fellow persons, as in Saunders’s Lincoln; depression can also blunt and reduce capacity for empathy (Tully).

I would compare this correlation to Reverend Everly Thomas, who, though he initially fled his ultimate fate out of fear of the bad afterlife, has since dedicated his existence in the bardo to empathetically tending the flock of ghosts.

Depression as the Entanglement Phenomenon

The phenomenon that entwines the ghost of Willie Lincoln, as it previously entwined the ghost of Elise Traynor, is of note – “The roof around him had liquefied, and he appeared to be sitting in a gray-white puddle. […] From out of the puddle, a vine-like tendril emerged. […] If Miss Traynor’s case was any indication, this tendril would soon be followed by a succession of others, until the boy was fully secured (Gulliver-like) to the roof. […] Once secured, he would be rapidly overgrown by what might best be described as a placental sheen” (Saunders 110-111). The description of the next stage of the phenomenon will sound familiar to anyone who has suffered depression: “The sheen then hardening into a shell-like carapace, that carapace would begin to transition through a series of others […] the more perverse the carapace, the less ‘light’ (happiness, honesty, positive aspiration) would get in” (Saunders 111). Depression is a force that entraps the mind and prevents such ‘light’ from getting into it. This phenomenon can, therefore, be doubly likened to depression – it ensnares and prevents light from entering, even beyond the usual effects of haunting.

The phenomenon pursues Willie until he escapes it by entering the chapel – the chapel, then, is some space safe from depression (or at least from one level of depression). For some, religion can, indeed, provide relief from depression; for some, there is medication, or therapy, or both; being surrounded by friends helps some, by a natural environment helps others; the treatments available for depression are myriad, and as varied in effectiveness.

This phenomenon is initially mysterious, but is eventually explained to itself be formed of ghosts: “comprised of people. People like us. Like we had been. Former people, somehow shrunken and injected into the very fabric of that structure” (Saunders 267), “compelled” (Saunders 267) to take the form of a prison for other ghosts – some sinful people, it turns out, are relegated to this as punishment. Depression, in this analogy, is a ghostly force, insofar as it is a force made of ghosts – Willie is haunted, if ghost-on-ghost conflict can reasonably be described as one haunting the other.

Moreover, the entangling phenomenon is specifically an evil ghostly force, insofar as it is made of specifically evil ghosts. Discussion on whether evil forces can, in principle, be good if turned to good ends are beyond the scope of this paper – I am treating the entanglement phenomenon as evil because it is made of evil ghosts in the most simplistic sense, as if evil is an elemental force – so, the same sense as observing that an ice cube is wet because it is made of water. All of this simply serves the purpose to imply, transitively through the metaphor, that depression is an evil force.

How Far Does It Go?

As mentioned above, depression is unheimlich, and both depression and ghosts each narrate themselves into existence.

Depression, in a sense, is not a thing – or at least it’s more an adjective than a noun. Depression does not exist as a phenomenon per se – the term ‘depression’ describes only a nexus of symptoms (adjectives and verbs) that tend to coincide with one another and respond collectively to treatment, i.e. a category more than a thing (this does, of course, describe most diseases, especially those whose causes are unknown).

Similarly, in the case of haunting, the effects of a ghost are much more observable than the ghost itself, even setting aside the question of whether ghosts do or do not even exist in real life. In Lincoln in the Bardo, ghosts may (or may not – they may be deluding themselves) have some effect on a living person’s personality when they occupy the same physical space as that person. But certainly, they somewhat exist as entities in the text – "If what you say is true -- who is it that is saying it? […] Who is hearing it? […] Who is speaking to you now? […] To whom do we speak?" (Saunders 297). A ghost’s effects on the world constitute a haunting, while the ghost itself is only liminal, midway between existence and void (Ní Éigeartaigh). Outside of this text, ghosts are traditionally hard to perceive; a poltergeist, for example, cannot be seen, but the objects it throws across the room can be.

President Lincoln, in Lincoln in the Bardo, is haunted by depression, by grief for his son and the dead of the Civil War, by the ghost of his son, by the other ghosts of the bardo. Although we attempted to disentangle grief from depression earlier, it’s certainly easy to treat this agglomerate as one huge messy haunting by a bunch of things, indistinguishable and individually unplaceable.

So it is that haunting and depression have a great deal of similarity, ghosts/haunting are on a similar level of thing-ness to depression, and Saunders’s President Lincoln is haunted by both depression and ghosts and distinguishing the two would get messy. All of which leads to this: I don’t, in the end, mean that depression is entirely figuratively a haunting – I mean it literally (at least insofar as a haunting by anything is literal).

Works Cited

American Psychiatric Association, DSM-5 Task Force. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Fifth Edition, Text Revision. American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc., 2022.

Cui, Dan, et al. "Association Between Children’s Empathy and Depression: The Moderating Role of Social Preference." Child Psychiatry and Human Development (2023): 857–69. <https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/7q3gmc/cdi_proquest_miscellaneous_2616595911>.

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. London: Chapman & Hall, 1843. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. "The 'Uncanny'." Freud, Sigmund. Writings on Art and Literature. 1919.

Gohar, Shaimaa. "Taming the Terror of Death in George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo." Alif 42 (2022): 181–206. <https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/7q3gmc/cdi_gale_lrcgauss_A702239745>.

Hayes-Brady, Clare. "‘Everyone, We Are Dead!’: (Hi)story and Power in George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo." 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past. Ed. Ruth Maxley. Palgrave, 2020. 73–91.

Hoffman, Ferdinand, et al. "Empathy in Depression: Egocentric and Altercentric Biases and the Role of Alexithymia." Journal of Affective Disorders 199 (2016): 23-29. <https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/7q3gmc/cdi_proquest_miscellaneous_1808705560>.

Moseley, Merritt. "Lincoln in the Bardo: ‘Uh, NOT a Historical Novel.’." Humanities 8.2 (2019): 96-. <https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/7q3gmc/cdi_doaj_primary_oai_doaj_org_article_23003b63ed4b492cb388c75af080177a>.

Ní Éigeartaigh, Aoileann. "Liminal Spaces and Contested Narratives in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Parámo and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo." IJAS Online 8 (2018/19): 66-83.

Parker, Gordon, et al. "Clinical Features Distinguishing Grief from Depressive Episodes: A Qualitative Analysis." Journal of Affective Disorders (2015): 43–47. <https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/1umeg80/cdi_proquest_miscellaneous_1664204362>.

Saunders, George. Lincoln in the Bardo. New York: Penguin Random House, 2017. Print.

Sharps, Matthew J., et al. "Cognition and Belief in Paranormal Phenomena: Gestalt/Feature-Intensive Processing Theory and Tendencies Toward ADHD, Depression, and Dissociation." The Journal of Psychology 140.6 (2006): 579–90. <https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/1umeg80/cdi_proquest_miscellaneous_57115082 >.

Shenk, Joshua Wolf. "Lincoln’s Great Depression." The Atlantic Monthly 296.3 (2005). <https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/7q3gmc/cdi_gale_infotracmisc_A136121721>.

Tully, Erin C., et al. "Quadratic Associations Between Empathy and Depression as Moderated by Emotion Dysregulation." The Journal of Psychology 150.1 (2016): 15–35. <https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/7q3gmc/cdi_proquest_journals_1735896881>.

Vorbeck, Cara. "A Graveyard Smash: Analyzing Embodied Memories in Lincoln in the Bardo." Style 57.3 (2023): 350–69. <https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/7q3gmc/cdi_crossref_primary_10_5325_style_57_3_0350>.

Macbeth and Lord of the Rings

for Shakespeare For Future English Teachers class, 2022

Great Fangorn Forest to High Isengard Shall Come (And Then, For Good Measure, to Helm’s Deep Shall Come)

In The Two Towers, the second book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien, one of the eponymous towers[1] meets its end in a most Macbeth-inspired way. No prophecy is involved in the Tolkien here, but a clear line can be traced from one of the witches’ masters’ prophecies in Shakespeare’s Macbeth to the fate of the tower of Orthanc and the fortress of Isengard.[2]

The third apparition conjured by the witches – the Child crowned, with a tree in his hand – informs Macbeth that he “shall never vanquish’d be until/Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill/Shall come against him.”[3] In the end, the prophecy of Macbeth’s doom is fulfilled when the armies of Macbeth’s enemies take branches and boughs from Birnam Wood and march holding them, to disguise their number as they approach Macbeth’s stronghold at Dunsinane.[4] This was, in Tolkien’s opinion (at least when he was a boy), an utter cop-out; absolutely dodgy, wimpy writing.

Tolkien therefore devised a race of tree-people who dwell in Fangorn forest in Middle-Earth called Ents, who, after holding an Entmoot to discuss the matter at length, elect to march on Isengard, where the antagonist Saruman dwells and builds his forces. And so it is that the forest of Fangorn literally comes to Isengard and destroys it.[5] The parallel is not a coincidence.

(Jackson, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, 2002)

Tolkien wrote to his friend W.H. Auden that the Ents’ “part in the story is due, I think, to my bitter disappointment and disgust from schoolboy days with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of ‘Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill’: I long[ed] to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war.”[6]

The Ents then send the Huorns of Fangorn forest – slower-moving and less sapient tree-people shepherded by the Ents[7] – to assist the protagonists at the Battle of Helm’s Deep[8], so Tolkien wrote himself a nice little twofer of biting his thumb at Shakespeare.

The Hand of No Man Shall Harm the Witch-King of Angmar

There is at least one other clear and obvious Macbeth parallel in Tolkien’s Legendarium. This one does involve a prophecy, but we do not have the same clear word from Tolkien’s own hand that he was inspired by one-upping Shakespeare.

In The Silmarillion, a prequel to The Lord of the Rings, the elf Glorfindel issues a prophecy about the Witch-King of Angmar, chief of Sauron’s Nazgûl, that "not by the hand of man shall he fall."[9] Compare this to the prophecy given to Macbeth by the bloody Child apparition, “laugh to scorn/The power of man, for none of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth.”[10] Both Macbeth and the Witch-King of Angmar interpret their respective prophecies as foretelling total invulnerability and invincibility, and both of their interpretations are proven incorrect by an unforeseen twist that fulfills the prophecy yet allows for their dooms.

Macbeth ends up executed by Macduff, a man who is not technically of woman born, but instead from woman “untimely ripp’d” – transitioned from fetus to baby via a C-section.[11]

Similarly, the Witch-King of Angmar is killed at the Battel of Pelennor Fields, not by a man, but by the tag-team of the Hobbit Meriadoch Brandybuck (using an ancient magical blade given to him by Tom Bombadil, which undid some of the magic protecting the Witch-King) and the woman Éowyn (who lands the killing blow using a mundane sword, presumably procured the old-fashioned way from the armory of the soldiers of Rohan). Tolkien, being a professional academic linguist, was very deliberately clever about his use of the word “man” here – Merry is a man by gender, but is not of the race of Man; while Éowyn is of the race of Man, but is not a man by gender; apparently two man-in-one-sense-but-not-in-the-other adds up to close enough to zero men to successfully fulfill Glorfindel’s prophecy. The Witch-King of Angmar, not being a linguist, was taken by surprise by this turn of events.[12]

(Jackson, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, 2003)

In Pedagogy

A substantial discussion could be driven by prophecy in fiction, starting with the five prophecies in Macbeth (by my count[13]); continuing on with the parallel of one of them with Glorfindel’s prophecy about the Witch-King of Angmar; open an exploration of ancient Greek stories where struggling against fate was common (considering all the stories featuring the Oracle at Delphi, with a bonus sprinkle of the story of Cassandra for taste), and stories from other mythologies featuring prophecy; delve into how prophecy/fate can interact with free will[14]; there’s a whole slew of discussions and lessons one can engage in about prophecy.

While Tolkien is perhaps not as relevant to the youth of today as he was when he was first published, or when Peter Jackson’s film adaptations came out in the early ‘00s, there should certainly still be some students familiar with these works. Painting pictures from Tolkien could help get some students more invested in the Shakespeare. Certainly, using scenes or stills from Peter Jackson’s movies could help to illustrate the parallel concepts from Macbeth (perhaps one might make a video of clips of the Ent attack on Isengard and the Huorn intervention at Helm’s Deep and putting it on repeat before the beginning of the class period that we’re to discuss Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane, and leaving it playing as students trickle in).

On the other hand, letting it be known that one parallel event in Tolkien derived from Tolkien’s scorn for how Shakespeare wrote it (even if that scorn originated when Tolkien was a youth, it was still expressed when he was an adult) could be counterproductive, so this merits some thought and care.

Certainly, painting a picture of the long tapestry of human literature (in the very broadest sense here – plays, epics, poetry, novels, television, movies, everything) as an unending chain of creators, inspired by one another and answering one another, could serve pedagogy, especially if I make note to explicitly include my students in the chain. In short, if riffing on Shakespeare was good enough for Tolkien to be literature (and riffing on actual history, as he did in very many of his plays, was good enough for Shakespeare to be literature), riffing on either of them is certainly good enough for my students to be literature.

Works Cited

Banks, F. (2013). Creative Shakespeare: The Globe Education Guide to Practical Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Jackson, P. (Director). (2002). The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers [Motion Picture].

Jackson, P. (Director). (2003). The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King [Motion Picture].

Pullman, P. (1995-2000). His Dark Materials. Northern Lights/The Golden Compass; The Subtle Knife; The Amber Spyglass. United Kingdom: Scholastic Print.

Shakespeare, W. (1606). The Tragedy of Macbeth. London.

Tolkien, J. (1954). The Fellowship of the Ring. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Tolkien, J. (1954). The Two Towers. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Tolkien, J. (1955, June 7). Letter 163. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. (C. Tolkien, & H. Carpenter, Eds.)

Tolkien, J. (1955). The Return of the King. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Tolkien, J. (1977). The Silmarillion. (C. Tolkien, & G. G. Kay, Eds.) London: George Allen & Unwin.