Author: staceymeeker

Many things, having full reference
To one consent, may work contrariously.

—Shakespeare, Henry 5^th

In the evaluation of images, as one renaissance led to another, down to modern times, one value became increasingly autonomous and moved to the foreground: the value of art.

—Alain Besançon

The final scene of The Winter’s Tale, the miraculous animation of Hermione’s statue, is strikingly anomalous in terms of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. The naïve reverence of the onstage audience for the statue would be problematic at best in his other plays, even in the other Romances. But in The Winter’s Tale, their uncritical admiration is rewarded with the happy return of wife and mother. Further complicating our understanding of this scene is its obvious analogies with Catholic worship practices. As Michael O’Connell observes, Shakespeare “involves even the audience in a moment that would seem to confirm the worst fears of the Puritan antitheatricalists” (IE 13). Indeed, critics have often interpreted Hermione’s resurrection in sacramental terms, and the scene seems to evoke a religious context, as when Paulina calls on the onstage spectators to “awake your faith” (5.3.95). The problem is reconciling Shakespeare’s apparent sacramentalism here with his skeptical iconoclasm in plays like King Lear, where Lear’s blind faith in Goneril and Regan’s ritual mimesis of filial love is shattered by events. Hermione’s “dead likeness” delivers new life rather than concealing corruption (5.3.15).

For O’Connell, the statue scene exemplifies an incarnational aesthetic and celebrates “the visual and physical elements of theater” (IE 13). While maintaining that the final scene is “in some sense true,” O’Connell notes that its claim to truth is tempered by its self-consciousness, providing a necessary antidote to Leontes’ arrogant confidence in the opening scenes, where his imaginary construction of Hermione’s infidelity proves catastrophic (IE 139). Recognizing the formal originality of the Romances, O’Connell characterizes them as experimental, but he finally agrees with a traditional line of interpretation on The Winter’s Tale that Shakespeare was exploring “how tragedy may be reversed” through an art informed by “the growth bestowed by Time and ‘great creating nature’” (O’Connell, “Experiment” 224, 226). O’Connell writes, “confidence in what is seen . . . characterizes Shakespeare’s dramaturgy in the latter part of his career” (IE 136), but he doesn’t attempt to explain how or why this shift occurs. O’Connell’s reading thus ignores the central problem of the statue scene, its contradictory relationship to all that has come before, without which any interpretation is bound to be, at best, limited and incomplete.

Huston Diehl argues that the final scene illustrates a Protestant aesthetics of wonder that simultaneously asks spectators to question any uncritical tendency toward idolatry in their response to the statue (“Strike” 19-34). Hermione’s resurrection, for Diehl, arouses a Pauline wonder in nature, as exemplified by the actor’s living body. Diehl ignores, however, that the New Testament Apostle consistently preached a theology of grace, the very antithesis of natural theology. The character of Paulina is more rightly associated with a Pauline experience of resurrection; but in contrast to Paul’s personal religious vision on the road to Damascus, Hermione’s resurrection is an aesthetic, communal experience. The most important context for Hermione’s statue is not Paul’s supposed natural theology, but rather Perdita’s debate with Polixenes on art-versus-nature, whereby Shakespeare presents Hermione as a token of an art that is purified from the pretensions of both religion and nature (as the Renaissance understood that term): a humbled and chastened art that anticipates Prospero’s abdication of art as magic in The Tempest.

The statue scene appears to be a reversal of Shakespeare’s critique of idolatry in The Winter’s Tale‘s opening scenes and throughout his career (more on this below), and in one sense, it is. But in a more profound sense, this scene is actually a logical development of his iconoclasm, a dialectical development by which his iconoclasm finally turns on itself. By undermining idolatry at its root, Shakespeare attempts to make the stage “safe” for art again, that is, safe from attack by its detractors by demystifying its magical associations. But while Shakespeare successfully pulls off the theatrical coup of the final scene, he does not provide a viable model for future artists. Following Shakespeare the evolution of western art continues to be driven by iconoclasm, culminating in the formal negations of Samuel Beckett, anti-representational painting, and so on. To some extent, the novel is the heir apparent to Shakespeare’s Romances, with its formal diversity and inclusivity, but the novel is a bourgeois genre, and the reading experience is typically private.

The Winter’s Tale should be understood, first of all, in terms of Shakespeare’s turn to romance in the latter part of his career, and especially his critique of tragedy, a movement that The Winter’s Tale recapitulates in its abrupt turn from tragedy to comedy.(1) The opening Acts are the final stage in Shakespeare’s iconoclasm, in which he demonstrates that idolatry is essentially a function of the spectator’s imagination, not the material figures presented on the public scene. In what follows, I present a generative history of Shakespeare’s late artistic development as it relates to The Winter’s Tale. In contrast to the more familiar dialectical history that it sometimes resembles, generative history is founded on a working definition of the human in terms of our origin, an “originary hypothesis.”(1a)

This working definition should not be confused with any traditional humanism. The existence of the human species is nothing if not contingent. Our basic problem as a species is community, and the animal forms of social order that served our proto-human ancestors are inadequate to contain the threat of self-destruction. Humans are the species for whom the main threat to our survival is other humans, not the environment. Language (and by extension, culture) exists to ameliorate this basic ethical problem. It does this by enabling new forms of more or less ritualized social organization and interaction. Human history is a “generative” development of our origin. A full scale justification of my methodology is beyond the scope of this essay, but any theory is ultimately justified by the results it produces, and I hope the insights generated here will serve in that regard.

My thesis is that The Winter’s Tale in general and the concluding statue scene in particular constitute Shakespeare’s attempt to rehabilitate the public scene of representation. In the following section, I demonstrate how Shakespearean Romance responds to the problem of form on the public scene of representation, not only in the theater but also in political and religious ceremony. The resentment toward the public scene and its associated hierarchy finds expression in antitheatricalism as well as in political and religious radicalism. Following this discussion of the problem of the public scene, I turn to a detailed reading of the play, beginning what I call the “idolatry of tragedy” in the opening acts: Shakespeare’s critique of tragedy and how it allows for the novel developments of romance in the later acts. The art-versus-nature debate in Bohemia is analyzed by explicit recourse to the “originary hypothesis,” showing how this debate articulates the theory behind Shakespearean Romance. I conclude with my reading of the statue scene, showing how Hermione’s statue as presented by Paulina restores the public scene and our faith in its figures through a demonstration of its ethical functionality, preserving a community threatened by dissolution. From the “originary hypothesis,” I derive the crucial concept of the public scene (as distinguished from the private scene, i.e., the memory or imagination), as well as an understanding of the ethical functionality of representation.

Genre and the Problem of the Public Scene

On their first appearance, Shakespeare’s Romances were a radical departure from the usual offerings of the King’s Men. Pericles, which first appeared on stage around 1606-1608, hearkened back to an old-fashioned type of drama which the London companies had largely abandoned; its ironic naiveté must have been deliberate and remarkable.(2) The late plays continue in the tragicomic vein that Shakespeare mined in All’s Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure, but they also include typical romance elements such as “sudden tempests or disasters, separations between parents and children or between friends or lovers, wanderings and shipwrecks, wives and children lost and found, strange accidents and coincidences, encounters with the marvelous, and eventual reconciliations and reunions” (Foakes 249). Shakespeare probably collaborated with George Wilkins on Pericles,(3) but there is no question that Shakespeare is the sole author of The Winter’s Tale, which is generally recognized as his most fully realized romance (setting aside The Tempest for its unique qualities). The seemingly naïve and outmoded romances are, paradoxically, Shakespeare’s most modern plays, because in these plays he confronts the quintessential issue of modern art: the problem of form. It is not accidental that the romances are the final plays of his career.

Romance, of course, has a long history, as do tragicomedy and pastoral; but Shakespeare is more concerned to bring out the internal contradictions of the generic combination than to create a unified aesthetic whole. When Shakespeare started writing tragicomic romance, he was probably responding to contemporary events, including a new fashion for tragicomedy, the popularity of masques, and the opening of the Blackfriars theater to the King’s Men, with its more sophisticated audience and different styles of drama. While the historical events that sparked his turn to romance may have been accidental, Shakespeare’s response was not. John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont were responding to the same influences as Shakespeare, yet their romantic tragicomedy Philaster, written around 1609, is completely different from any of Shakespeare’s late plays.(4) Fletcher wrote his tragicomedies under the influence of the Italian poet and diplomat Giambattista Guarini, the main theoretician of early seventeenth-century tragicomedy.(5) Guarini argued that the genre, as he conceived it, blends tragedy and comedy harmoniously and with decorum, in order “to prevent the listeners from falling into the excessive melancholy of tragedy or the excessive lewdness of comedy,” which might be upsetting for a modern audience (Guarini, qtd. in Wiggins, 114). Guarinian tragicomedy is a courtly genre, in terms of both style and content. Both Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s tragicomedies are quite self-conscious; but in Fletcher this self-consciousness is almost precious. In Philaster, for example, the scene in which the prince Philaster is surprisingly wounded by a country bumpkin is to be admired mainly for its contrived nature rather than its pathos.(6) Fletcher’s tragicomedies are stylistically ornate; Shakespeare’s late style is elaborate but also remarkably fluent, flexible, and directly powerful.(7) Arguing against a rigid neoclassicalism, Guarini writes, “since times change, so customs change with them . . . . And truly, if public performances are meant for the listeners, then poems must also keep changing in accordance with changing times and customs” (158). Shakespeare obviously agreed with this point, but his understanding of what modern audiences required was radically different.

Shakespeare seems to delight in the sometimes absurd disjunctions and improbabilities allowed by the inclusive nature of romance. The sudden turn from tragedy to comedy with the appearance of a bear on stage in The Winter’s Tale is perhaps the most famous example. The use of allegorical or historical narrators is another “distinctly old-fashioned” (Bevington 1438) device that would serve to defamiliarize events on stage for a Jacobean audience. Shakespearean Romance is not a coherent genre in the same sense as ancient tragedy or comedy. The plays are frankly experimental in nature,(8) and this constitutes their modernity, in the sense of belonging to an age in which artists are driven to novelty and experimentation above all. Even the development of novelistic realism can and should be understood as another possible answer to the problem of form.(9)

Form is a problem especially for the public scene of representation on which Renaissance art is usually found. English Renaissance drama is among the most public and scenic of all art forms, since the audience and the actors are physically present to each other in a space that was accessible to Londoners of all classes.(10) No written page intervenes between artist and audience at the theater, and the Globe’s spectators were apparently quite lively in voicing their approval or disapproval. Shakespeare, as a member of the King’s Men and an actor in many of the plays they put on, would be present for many, perhaps most, of the contemporary performances of his plays. This intimate contact with his audience allowed him extraordinary insight into the problem of the public scene. Several of his sonnets suggest that he was sensitive to attacks on the stage. Shakespeare, for example, laments “Fortune,”

That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breed.
Thence it comes that my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand. (111.3-6)

The speaker identifies the specifically public and therefore common nature of his craft as the problem. The public scene here is a marketplace, ruled by the lowest common denominator, thus corrupting the artist, whose “nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.” It is altogether likely that Shakespeare occasionally lamented the sometimes crass nature of the audience that he served, as with Hamlet’s rant against the “groundlings” and the actors who pander to them. Plays like Julius Caesar and Coriolanus portray the “herd” of people as easily swayed, unstable, and vicious. As Robert Ormsby shows, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus shares many of the same concerns as the antitheatricalists, who were anxious about the “dangerously affective power that theatre exercises over audiences and the anarchic power exercised by audiences” (43). For an author writing primarily for the stage, the problem of the public scene appears to be the audience, for whom the leading voices are the loudest if not the most refined. A serious dramatic artist like Shakespeare will almost inevitably have an ironic and skeptical stance towards the public scene.(11)

Many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries also found the public scene problematic, for a variety of reasons. Stephen Gosson, one of the most vocal and influential opponents of the London theaters, comments on the references to pagan gods in plays:

Setting out the stage plays of the Gentiles, so we worship that we stoop to the names of heathen idols; so we trust that we give ourselves to the patronage of Mars, of Venus, of Jupiter, or Juno, and such like; so we pray that we call for their succor upon the stage; so we give thanks for the benefits we receive, that we make them the fountains of our blessings, wherein if we think as we speak, we commit idolatry, because we bestow upon the idols of the Gentiles which is proper to God. (98)

The staging of plays is part of Satan’s plot to corrupt England: “So subtle is the devil that, under color of recreation, in London, and of exercise of learning, in the universities, by seeing of plays, he maketh us to join with the Gentiles in their corruption” (Gosson 99). While Gosson was an extremist, his views reflect contemporary anxieties about idolatry which surrounded the public scene, whether theatrical, political, or ecclesiastical.

Commenting on the Martin Marprelate tracts of 1588-9, Russell Fraser writes,

To distinguish among “these stage-players, these prelates, these popes, these devils” seems to Martin Marprelate a splitting of hairs. Identity of interest yokes them together. The bishops, in their usurpation of temporal authority, are abetted—very logically, Martin thinks—by “rimers and stage players (that is, plaine rogues).” (166)

The connection between “stage-players” and “prelates” might seem obscure to modern readers, who are likely to assume that the English Church and secular theater were natural enemies. Fraser explains, in reference to the Puritan divine Henry Burton,

Art, as Burton sees it, is an appanage of Church and State. In a pair of sermons against the bishops and their supposed allegiance to Rome, he proceeds sequentially to an indictment of the stage. That is as he identifies each with a common master. “Court Gnathoes” or parasites have usurped the direction of the Church. And they are not “content, to abuse our pious Princes eares in the Pulpit, but also on the Stage.” Episcopacy, in the lexicon of the anti-episcopalian, “is a scurilous Enterlude.” The definition is striking, as it suggests the oneness of the prelate and player. And now the codicil, in which the wisdom of King James is approved: as wicked rulers and their satellites seek to “devoure Christs Vineyard, while they Suppresse the Preaching of the Word,” so “the Ninivites shall rise in judgment against this generation.” What the dissenter is proclaiming, and menacing in the guise of a figure, is a triple association of the artist, the orthodox churchman, and the Crown. (164-5)

The “triple association” is united by its staged and public nature, inviting the suspicions of those who felt excluded. Parliament shared the same associations; in 1645 after the closing of the theaters, the royalist John Cleveland complained bitterly, “since the Stages were voted downe, the only Play-house is at Westminster” (qtd. by Bawcutt, 191).

In the minds of many reformers, the stage was closely connected to England’s monarchy and court, and it is worthwhile to ask why this connection seemed so obvious. The King and his court sponsored and regulated the stage, of course, but it’s far from clear that the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries was understood as royalist propaganda. Rather, the Established Church, the royal court, and the London stages were perceived as centers of idolatry and hostile to the cause of true religion. Idolatry, we must remember, is a function not only of content, but equally location. Holy figures can be profaned by their display upon the public scene, just as, according to Puritans, the English Church made a mockery of New Testament practice, and players committed blasphemy by naming God on the public stage.

The Protestant critique of Catholic rituals as empty theater is well known.(12) Martin Luther writes, “No one should be deceived by the glamour of the ceremonies and entangled in the multitude of pompous forms” (235). Exorcism, another Catholic ritual, was sometimes practiced as public spectacle and criticized as such by reformers such as Erasmus in one of his Colloquies and Samuel Harsnett in his A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, a source text for Shakespeare’s King Lear. Stephen Greenblatt writes, “Exorcisms, Harsnett argues, are stage plays, most often tragi-comedies, that cunningly conceal their theatrical inauthenticity” (106). The fictional frame of the play action did not shield it from accusations of impiety but just the opposite. In 1606, the English Parliament passed “An Act to Restrain Abuses of Players” that penalized players who would “jestingly or profanely speak or use the holy name of God” (qtd. in Wells 238). The public scene was especially subject to the fears aroused by contagious imitation. Antitheatricalists did not acknowledge any significant barrier between stage action and spectator.

The public scene, we should note, is in many ways precisely the opposite of what we call, after Habermas, the public sphere, distinguished, ideally, by conversation, equal participation. The Renaissance public scene, in contrast, lacks this reciprocity between those persons or figures that monopolize the center and their spectators. Significantly, the antitheatricalists did not object to the reading of plays. It was only their public performance they protested.(13) The public scene sparked resentment because it was viewed as justifying the hierarchy and authority of otherwise often disparate institutions, from political to religious to theatrical, while subverting the authority of competing institutions. Renaissance art in general is distinguished by sensitivity to this resentment, which it addressed in various self-reflective forms such as the play-within-the-play or artist figures. The well-known meta-representational elements of Renaissance art functioned as self-critique as well as self-defense, anticipating and pre-empting the objections of the audience.

The London public was deeply ambivalent about the public scene and the figures that inhabit it. On the one hand, they were obviously fascinated by all types of theatrical spectacles, thus making them very profitable. But those who felt excluded by such spectacles also found ready ears for their resentments. Several of the antitheatricalists were former playwrights or actors who may well have felt their talents were not sufficiently recognized. The public scene serves to naturalize the authority of its mimetic figures (“personations”) and scripted actions. Such figures appear virtually magical by their central status. They inspire uncritical adulation, just as the performances of famous athletes, movie stars, and musicians do today. For many, however, the figures that inhabit the public stage appeared arbitrary and exclusive, precisely because of the widespread adoration.

In response to the general ambivalence about the public scene, Shakespeare’s mature drama insistently questions and often undermines its own structure.(14) In the opening scene of King Lear, for example, the simple “nothing” of one young woman precipitates the destruction of the entire ceremonial apparatus (equally theatrical and political), revealing its fragility. Lear’s great mad scenes subject the whole social order to question in an unprecedented way. The almost obsessive self-referentiality of Shakespeare’s mature work expresses Renaissance culture’s drive to understand itself, a drive motivated by resentment at the arbitrary exclusions of a hierarchical society; or, put positively, the desire for freedom from formal restrictions: artistic, social, and political.

The dramatic genre most associated with hierarchy is tragedy. In general, tragedy is a probing, skeptical genre, but ultimately it functions to reaffirm the structure of society, at least in its classical form (more on this below). Shakespeare’s late tragedies, on the other hand, question their generic conventions and foreshadow the end of high tragedy with the English Revolution.(15) Antony and Cleopatra, for example, in their play, are not just heroic but celebrities; they are conscious of their dramatic status as a role to be played, casting their tragedy into a peculiarly modern light. In Shakespeare’s last tragedy, Timon of Athens, the protagonist virtually chooses his tragic “fate” and seems almost comic as a result.(16) Shakespeare consistently questions the hierarchy and authority that underpin tragedy. The Shakespearean play-within-a-play stages and reflects upon the classical scene of representation.(17) We find in his late plays artist figures such as Prospero who serve to examine critically the role of the artist in Renaissance society. The self-consciousness of Renaissance art reflects the need of early modern society to understand the nascent transition to a market economy with little use for sacred distinctions.

While comedy does not have the same association with hierarchy as tragedy, comedy’s solutions to social problems are similarly formulaic and often include the quasi-ritual humiliation of characters such as Malvolio. Shylock is also a comic villain, but the play gives serious attention to his perspective, so that his sacrificial exclusion throws a shadow on the “happy ending.” The self-consciousness of Shakespearean comedy extends to the role of the author as the agent of the conventional ending. In his tragicomedy Measure for Measure, Duke Vincentio, in the latter half of the play, becomes an artist figure who highlights the author’s role in bringing about a happy ending.(18) Conventional forms begin to seem rigid and oppressive (perhaps more so for visionary artists like Shakespeare than for his audience) in a culture where traditional sacred distinctions are beginning the process of dissolution we call modernity.

As with his previous works, Shakespeare’s Romances are metatheatrical and generically innovative. Shakespeare’s turn to romance has to be understood first of all as a result of his exploration of the limits of traditional genres. The formal incoherency of the Romances reflects the recognition that there is no real solution to this problem. Ultimately any form is more or less exclusive and in need of justification for modern egalitarian sympathies. Modern art, to the degree of its ambition, tries to undo its own formal pretensions. Shakespeare’s Romances are like a jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces don’t fit together—not because they are a failed experiment, but because Shakespeare here confronts the limits of form, the epidemic inadequacy of form to meaning in modernity.

The underlying issue is that in the emerging market economy of the seventeenth century each individual begins to be recognized as an independent center of value. This recognition makes the kind of art that Shakespeare practices increasingly problematic, an art that depends upon the public scene of representation and a shared (relatively speaking) sense of values.(19) One solution to this problem is to give the devil his due, by which I mean to work within a popular aesthetic, although the popular aesthetic of the Romances is framed within a self-conscious reflection upon the function of art. The Winter’s Tale in particular affirms the power of art to create significant difference, even in a world where traditional hierarchical distinctions are in crisis. Shakespeare’s skeptical undoing of generic conventions has the ironic result of a new faith in art, because he recognizes that in the final analysis, form is a problem of the human periphery of the scene of representation, not the center, as it usually appears. In other words, our resentment makes form a problem, not form as such. This insight allows for the utopian possibility of rehabilitating the public scene of representation through the reformation of the spectators, as we find in the final scene of The Winter’s Tale.

The Idolatry of Tragedy

The first three acts of The Winter’s Tale are often read as straightforward tragedy, and with some justification. Leontes attempts to kill his childhood friend Polixenes, publicly accuses his wife Hermione of adultery, defies the Delphic oracle, and sentences his daughter to death by abandonment. His actions result in the death of his son Mamillus, as well as the apparent deaths and actual exile of his wife and daughter; and he is indirectly responsible for the deaths of Antigonus and an entire ship’s crew. Leontes, however, is not really comparable with the protagonists of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, and a tragic conclusion to the play would raise just as many problems as the happy ending. The first three acts of the play actually critique the logic of tragedy.

The onset of Leontes’ jealousy in the first act is a famous crux because it appears so suddenly and without any obvious motivation. James Siemon observes that Leontes in these scenes reshapes the world according to “his own fearful needs” (285). Julia Lupton argues that Leontes’ jealousy is generated out of the Old Testament taboos against adultery and idolatry, and she finds the psychological mechanisms of “identification, projection, and reversal” at play (186). René Girard also focuses on Leontes’ psychology, arguing that Leontes’ jealousy originates in the need to have his choice of love objects mimetically confirmed by a mediator (309). Phebe Jensen, on the other hand, sees “Leontes’s madness as a form of fanatical iconoclasm partly directed against idolatrous ‘coactive’ arts and exposed as fear of difference, both hermeneutical and sexual” (295). Jensen, like Lupton, appeals to the Old Testament conjunction of adultery and idolatry whereby, in her reading, the unfounded fear of adultery can be understood as misdirected iconoclasm. In contrast, I will argue that Leontes exemplifies idolatry through his naïve faith in the material signs that he thinks demonstrate Hermione’s infidelity.

There is a crucial semiotic dimension to Leontes’ jealousy that previous critics have not recognized. At the onset of his jealousy, he lists what he considers to be the signifiers of their adultery: “paddling palms and pinching fingers, / As now they are, and making practiced smiles / As in a looking glass, and then to sigh, as ’twere / The mort o’th’ deer” (1.2.115-118). The nature of these signs leads Leontes to the conviction that Hermione’s adultery is a public scandal:

. . . Ha’ not you seen Camillo—
But that’s past doubt, you have, or your eyeglass
Is thicker than a cuckold’s horn—or heard—
For to a vision so apparent, rumor
Cannot be mute—or thought—for cogitation
Resides not in that man that does not think—
My wife is slippery? If thou wilt confess,
Or else be impudently negative
To have nor eyes nor ears nor thought, then say
My wife’s a hobbyhorse. (1.2.266-275)

Leontes insists upon the evidence of the senses.(20) Camillo must have “seen” or at least “heard,” since “a vision so apparent” inevitably gives birth to “thought,” “cogitation” and “rumor.” The obvious signs of her infidelity cannot be denied without an impudent refusal of the “eyes . . . ears,” and “thought.” Leontes’ reaction here illustrates the outrage provoked by public figures: how and why the material forms that inhabit the public scene can spark conflict. Leontes’s concern is as much for the “scandal” (1.2.329) as for Hermione’s supposed adultery. Unlike Macbeth’s “fatal vision,” which appears and then disappears, “proceeding from a heat-oppressed brain” (Macbeth 2.1.37, 40), Leontes can confidently list the apparently irrefutable signs of her infidelity. When Camillo protests the imputation, Leontes asks him, with the seeming logic of madness or dreams:

. . . Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career
Of laughter with a sigh—a note infallible
Of breaking honesty? Horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? Wishing clocks more swift,
Hours minutes, noon midnight? And all eyes
Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only,
That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing?
Why, then, the world and all that’s in’t is nothing,
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,
My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing. (1.2.283-295)

Leontes lists the iconic and indexical signifiers (to use C. S. Pierce’s terminology) of their affection. Signs such as “Kissing with inside lip” are direct expressions of affection, requiring little or no interpretation, and therefore seemingly incontestable. Even animals express affection in like gestures. Such signs are not apparently symbolic or metaphorical, but direct and unmediated, mimetic tokens which are not merely signs, but in effect the thing itself.(21) Leontes collapses the sign into the thing. The list proceeds from what he has perhaps observed to what he has only imagined, demonstrating the logic of mimesis, which feeds upon itself in an inflationary spiral. Talking quietly becomes “whispering” which is transformed into “leaning cheek to cheek,” “meeting noses,” and finally “Kissing with inside lip.” The signs magically multiply in his perception. Leontes seems unable to distinguish the real from the products of his mimetic imagination. The astonished reaction of everyone at Leontes’ court establishes clearly that there is no real basis for Leontes’ accusations. But it is precisely because Leontes is so focused on the seeming evidence of the senses that he remains blind to the truth. Leontes is, in effect, a refutation of naïve empiricism, demonstrating that the evidence of the senses needs to be interpreted, and that perception is not free from the action of the imagination.

There is an important connection between the material signs of Hermione’s infidelity and the logic of magic. Magic and ritual (like art) depend essentially on iconic and indexical signs, which work through the principles of analogy, physical resemblance, or proximity. Such analogies, the famous “chain of being” and the correspondence of microcosm to macrocosm, hold the Renaissance cosmos together.(22) As Leontes comments, more truly than he knows, “If I mistake / In those foundations which I build upon, / The center is not big enough to bear / A schoolboy’s top” (2.1.101-104). Although Leontes has simply imagined the problem about which he becomes hysterical, there is some truth to what he says. If the principle of analogy does not hold, if these signs do not truly signify, then “the world and all that’s in’t is nothing.” Leontes’ fears reflect the dissolution of the Renaissance cosmos in the face of emergent market forces during the seventeenth century. His fetishistic emphasis on mimetic signs is a defensive reaction to their historical loss of power in Shakespeare’s England, the decline of magic and traditional rituals.

Leontes exemplifies the naïve faith in iconic and indexical signs that Protestant reformers feared in Catholic ritual culture. He mistakes the sign for the thing itself. John Jewel observes in A Treatise of the Sacraments, quoting Augustine, “It is a dangerous matter, and a servitude of the soul, to take the sign instead of the thing that is signified” (29), speaking to the status of the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper. The symbolic Word of the Bible, according to reformers, had been disastrously replaced by mimetic tokens and actions. As William Tyndale put it, in his controversy with Sir Thomas More, once the “priests preached Christ no longer, then the common people began to wax mad and out of their minds upon the ceremonies” (76). Such people mistake the bread and the wine of the sacrament for the literal body and blood of Christ, forgetting that the purpose of the ceremony is rather to remember and meditate upon God’s sacrifice, not to re-enact it: “as though a man were so mad to forget that the bush at the tavern-door did signify wine to be sold within, but would that the bush itself would quench his thirst” (Tyndale 76). Leontes acts exactly as do uneducated people at a Catholic Mass according to radical Protestants, waxing “mad” and out of his mind in his idolatrous reverence for material figures. He is the author and actor of a tragedy of his own devising.

But rather than Leontes being sacrificed on the altar of iconoclasm, it is his unreflective faith in signs that is shattered, while he remains to suffer the consequences of his actions. As reformers like Jewel and Tyndale recognized, idolatry is rooted in a superstitious reverence for mimetic signs as magically powerful. But if so, then destroying the material figures (the typical practice of iconoclasm) doesn’t really solve the problem, which is internal not public. The portrayal of Leontes represents the last stage in Shakespeare’s iconoclasm; rather than a spectacular destruction of the golden calf and its worshipers, we find an analysis of the psychology of idolatry that more effectively crushes it by demystifying it, revealing it as pathetic rather than evil. The icon or idol is truly empty because it is entirely personal to the idolater and not worthy of public reverence. Paradoxically, as we will see, this insight restores our faith in signs, because it becomes clear that material signs, the evidence of the senses, are not the problem, but rather the imagination, the real root of idolatry. As Calvin writes, “the human mind is, so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols” (I.xi.8). Ironically, it is precisely the sensual evidence on the public stage, what the audience witnesses in the theater, that refutes Leontes’ charges and convinces us of his diseased imagination.

After Leontes hears that Camillo and Polixenes are fled, he again twists the evidence to suit his fantasy, giving a speech that demonstrates Shakespeare’s awareness of the problems raised by the material sign:

. . . There may be in the cup
A spider steeped, and one may drink, depart,
And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge
Is not infected; but if one present
Th’abhorred ingredient to his eye, make known
How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides,
With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider. (2.1.39-45)

The connection of the spider with the effect of its venom, the conjunction of the material signifier with its “meaning,” has been significantly disjoined here. The folk superstition suggests that the meaning of the signifier depends more upon its reception than its material force. To see is to feel and suffer. Leontes is again an idolater, bewitched by magical appearances.

As the antitheatricalists noticed, theaters share the public scene, the same theatrical structure, with Catholic or Anglican ritual. The public scene of ritual, as such, embodies the hierarchical structure of a traditional society. Tragedy is unlike most rituals in that it allows for the questioning of the justice of that structure. But like ritual, tragedy ultimately affirms hierarchy through the fated death of the protagonist. Ancient tragedy teaches that everyone, even (and especially) the most powerful member of society, is subject to the public scene—thus assuaging popular resentment at those in power and reconciling the spectator to his or her peripheral position, since the price of centrality is exile or death.

Renaissance tragedy is a hybrid form that questions the public scene more seriously by framing it (e.g., the play-within-a-play) and thus demonstrating its arbitrary structure. Hamlet, for example, is skeptical of the ceremonial scene framing Claudius as he announces his wedding; and Hamlet’s protestation of sincerity (“I know not ‘seems,’ madam” [1.2.76]) is a pointed rejoinder to the hypocrisy that rules the court. Yet Hamlet, despite its skepticism, bears testimony to the continued power of the scene. Hamlet is compelled to put on an “antic disposition,” a false appearance, just as Claudius has done. The seemingly providential intervention of the pirates on his journey to England brings him back to the tragic scene, which finally destroys him along with the wicked. Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, like Leontes, are all-too-credulous toward the theatrical figures of the scene: the mimesis of love by Goneril and Regan, the evidence of infidelity staged by Iago, and the prophecies of the witches. The tragic form in these cases, however, is ultimately justified by the real existence of evil in the world. We pity and fear the fate of Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists, but their deaths are the necessary purging of a larger evil that disturbs the cosmic order.

The opening acts of The Winter’s Tale are in effect a restaging of Renaissance tragedy. First of all, there are no villains to blame for the onset of Leontes’ jealousy, as in Othello. There’s no sense of a cosmic battle between good and evil, as in King Lear, Othello, or Macbeth, with the witches. Leontes’ predicament is in effect a domestic tragedy, almost what we could call today a soap opera. Because there is no physical evidence to justify his insane jealousy, Leontes demonstrates that the problem is not form as such, but rather the imagination: more specifically, the (perceived) mimetic rivalry on the periphery, and not the central figure. The cause is within Leontes, who takes to an extreme mimetic tendencies that we all share. Leontes’ apocalyptic ravings are ridiculous, and therefore he becomes subject to the carping of Paulina. By virtue of his power, Leontes does cause a crisis in the opening acts, but it is not a cosmic disorder. The “contagion” remains limited to his imagination, and he does not succeed in persuading anyone else. He never achieves tragic stature like Lear or Othello. The Winter’s Tale suggests that reforming public figures doesn’t help, because the Leontes of the world will create scandal anyway.

The tragic solution to the resentments created by the public scene is the sacrificial death or exile of the protagonist, which resolves the crisis and restores order to the community. This solution, however, is motivated by the same mimetic tendencies that caused the crisis in the first place. Nevertheless, the tragic solution is effective. But the Christian anti-tragedy, the Gospel story, illustrates that the choice of victim is ultimately arbitrary because we are all equally guilty. The New Testament also exemplifies another possible solution: the education, discipline, and conversion of the protagonist, who then provides a practical model for identity. To some extent, The Winter’s Tale follows the conversion pattern, but it also complicates it.

When Mamillus is reported dead at Hermione’s trial, Leontes suddenly recognizes his crime. His repentance is just as abrupt as the onset of his jealousy. The rest of the play hinges on the inability of his penance to change the consequences of his actions. In his earlier tragicomedy Measure for Measure, with Angelo and Isabella, Shakespeare explores the drama of conversion, the capacity of the human heart for change. But The Winter’s Tale suggests that conversion is not enough. Leontes’ conversion is sincere and lasting, but still all too easy. Avoiding tragedy in Measure for Measure involved the decidedly unrealistic interventions of Duke Vincentio; but in real life, we make mistakes and suffer the consequences. This is the reality that Shakespeare confronts here. Redemption or transcendence requires more than just a simple change of heart. The subject of The Winter’s Tale is not finally Leontes but the scene itself, the scene of art including the spectators. Like Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale employs an improbably happy ending but with considerably more success. How Shakespeare is able to pull off the happy ending in this play, rehabilitating the public scene, is the burden of the rest of this essay.

Bohemia and the Turn to Comedy

Late in the third act, after Hermione and Mamillus are reported dead, and Leontes condemned by Paulina to endless penance, the scene changes to Bohemia, which is given a seacoast for the play. In the midst of a terrible storm, Antigonus abandons the infant Perdita in the coastal wilderness and, according to Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction, exits “pursued by a bear.” The mood changes to pastoral comedy when the Shepherd enters, finds the baby, and the Clown soon follows with a report of Antigonus’ tragicomic death, being eaten alive by the bear while protesting his aristocratic status. The fourth act then begins with a speech by “Time, the Chorus,” announcing the passage of sixteen years, followed by the events surrounding the famous sheepshearing festival. While the first three acts, as I have argued, point up the limitations of tragedy, there is no apparent logic to the move to pastoral comedy.(23) The entrance of a bear on stage is deliberately crude, evoking the bear baiting that was popular in London at this time; and the whole transition is abrupt and fanciful. The appearance of Time as a chorus heightens the unreality rather than softens it. In the tragicomedies of Fletcher and Beaumont, combining tragedy with comedy creates an ironic distancing that functions as a sophisticated yet ultimately superficial form of aesthetic ornament. Shakespeare, on the other hand, shocks the audience with radical disjunctions and strange novelties, dramatically revealing the arbitrary nature of aesthetic conventions.

The turn to pastoral comedy in the third act is quite openly a move to popular art, a rejection of the elitism of tragedy. In Bohemia, we enter a world governed primarily by desire rather than resentment. At the same time, there is a metadramatic dimension, as with the debate on nature versus art, that saves the latter half of the play from being a simple concession to popular taste. With Autolycus, Shakespeare creates a figure of the popular artist that pokes gentle fun at both himself and the more credulous members of his audience. Pastoral is a self-consciously artificial mode that often addresses the role of art in society, and Bohemia is no exception in this regard. Popular theater, in the hands of Shakespeare, allows for the exploration of serious anthropological issues.

The sheepshearing festival in Bohemia exemplifies popular art through the various dances and songs, the costumes, ribbons, and the ballads performed by Autolycus; overall, this scene brilliantly evokes and celebrates a once-vital strain of English popular culture. The problem here is that Bohemia is governed by the same forces of the imagination that proved so destructive in Sicilia. The first three acts revealed that the problem of the public scene is not the material figures that provoke scandal but rather the apocalyptic imagination of isolated members of the periphery, such as Leontes. To some extent, this revelation helps to rehabilitate the public scene, and the sheepshearing festival continues this rehabilitation by showing the positive, harmless products of the popular imagination. But even the imaginative productions of Bohemia are not without danger, and Autolycus (as thief) remains as a reminder of the susceptibility of the imagination to deceit.

Art vs. Art

The debate on nature-versus-art between Perdita and Polixenes, although brief, articulates the theory behind Shakespeare’s rehabilitation of the public scene. As Perdita is handing out flowers to the guests of the feast, she says to Polixenes that when autumn arrives,

. . . the fairest flow’rs o’th’ season
Are our carnations and streaked gillyvors,
Which some call nature’s bastards. Of that kind
Our rustic garden’s barren, and I care not
To get slips of them. (4.4.81-85)

When Polixenes asks “wherefore,” she responds,

. . . For I have heard it said
There is an art which in their piedness shares
With great creating nature. (4.4.86-88)

The artifice of crossbreeding produces “streaked gillyvors” and multi-colored carnations, which usurp the power of “great creating nature.” Such flowers are “nature’s bastards,” illegitimate offspring that should be rejected in favor of the beauty of natural flowers. Human art is inferior to that of “great creating nature.”

Polixenes takes exception to her position:

. . . Say there be [such an art];
Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean. So, over that art
Which you say adds to nature is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend nature—change it, rather—but
The art itself is nature. (4.4.88-97)

Polixenes rejects the absolute distinction between art and nature. What is art, he argues, but another form of nature? Nature is ultimately the mother of art, of everything on earth that fits its purposes. Art is an instrument of nature in the service of mending or changing itself. Polixenes’ argument here recalls Sidney’s in The Defense of Poesy; in response to the critique of art as a fallen or inferior nature, Sidney argues that art improves upon nature, producing a golden world from nature’s brazen one (216).

Perdita’s response to Polixenes is a little ambiguous. At first she says simply, “So it is” (4.4.97), seeming to agree with Polixenes. But then, when Polixenes draws the logical conclusion, “Then make your garden rich in gillyvors, / And do not call them bastards,” she says:

. . . I’ll not put
The dibble in earth to set one slip of them,
No more than, were I painted, I would wish
This youth should say ’twere well, and only therefore
Desire to breed by me. (4.4.99-103)

Rather than arguing with Polixenes, she simply refuses, giving an analogy in support. She compares the art that “mends” nature to the art of cosmetics that makes a young woman more attractive than her natural beauty warrants. She disdains that a youth should “Desire to breed by me” on such superficial grounds. She wants to be desired for her natural beauty, not a false appearance. So even though Perdita seems to accept Polixenes’ argument at first, she goes on to reject it, implying that it is sophistical. Art is art, and nature is nature, no matter what Polixenes says. Polixenes may call the art of crossbreeding another form of nature, and Perdita does not care to debate the logic, but it still must be rejected as deceptive for all that.

For the Renaissance, of course, both “nature” and “art” were value terms, and the debate was a traditional courtly and Pastoral topos. There was no question of rejecting art altogether, as some Puritans might claim to do. Perdita is not rejecting earthly beauty, in sum, but rather arguing for a particular form of beauty. The issue was one of decorum, the proper form of art. Perdita herself is a dramatic figure of natural beauty staged in the theater, personated by a boy actor, and created by Shakespeare. So while Polixenes may argue that both terms of the debate are “nature,” from our perspective, it is precisely the opposite. “Nature,” in context, refers to a traditional art that humbly imitates nature. In modern terms, the nature itself is art.

This debate offers us an excellent opportunity for the exercise of originary analysis, in which a significant distinction is traced back to a hypothetical “originary scene” upon which language and culture originated.(24) The advantages of such an analysis are that it allows us to sort out the more significant elements of the debate and to identify what is really at stake in ethical terms. To some extent, Perdita follows such a procedure by giving an example from life (i.e., cosmetics and courtship) that suggests what is ethically at stake; and Shakespeare places this seemingly academic debate in a dramatic context where it has serious ethical implications. The “originary scene,” however, is not just one example of culture, but the founding origin of culture, so it has a privileged epistemological status. While the details of the hypothesis are certainly up for debate, as is my application of it, the essential argument of Generative Anthropology is that we need a working hypothesis of the origin of culture in order to ground cultural analysis and save it from subjectivism.

According to this hypothesis, the originary scene is constituted by a center, occupied by a desirable object, and the periphery, occupied by humans. The converging desires of the periphery make the central object a potential source of violent conflict; this crisis is resolved when the humans produce a sign which designates the central object as sacred and therefore taboo, too powerful and dangerous to be appropriated by any individual. The exchange of signs on the periphery defers the violence threatening the group and makes possible a new social order based on ritual rather than a simple dominance hierarchy such as we find among chimpanzees and other social animals.

In the debate between Perdita and Polixenes, the opposition between nature and art corresponds to the originary opposition between a central object and the signifiers exchanged on the scenic periphery that refer ostensively to (in a sense, imitate) the central object and designate it as sacred. Beauty, in the nature vs. art debate, corresponds to the sacrality or (more generally) significance of the central object. The question, then, is the status of the central object’s sacred beauty. Is it “beautiful” because it is designated as such (by our beautiful signifiers, perhaps), or is its beauty independent of human representation, the activity of the periphery? Perdita’s common-sense position is that the central object’s beauty is an inherent quality of the object itself. Beauty emerges “naturally” from beautiful objects. The best art would be one that humbly imitates this natural beauty. The signifier that designates the object as beautiful is at best redundant, a superficial ornament that adds nothing to its beauty, and in fact degrades it, by distorting it, advertising it, and subjecting it to mimetic inflation. As Shakespeare writes in sonnet twenty-one, “I will not praise that purpose not to sell.” Put more positively, Perdita calls for faith in the inherent beauty of the beautiful object, its formal adequacy to its meaning. The example that Perdita gives to support her position is significant: she does not want to be desired sexually on the basis of her cosmetic appearance. Not only would such a painted appearance be an insult to her natural beauty, it might also multiply her suitors and create mimetic competition leading to conflict among them. In addition, such inflated desires might cause one of her suitors to attempt to appropriate her against her will: thus, in originary terms, violating the sacred aura that surrounds the central object. In other words, cosmetics are the first step on a slippery slope that leads to conflict on the one hand or prostitution on the other.

Perdita fears the power of mimesis, and thus she insists on decorum, the separation of the central object from the periphery, the sacred from the profane, the aristocrat from the commoner. Signifiers that imitate a beautiful object should not be inflated and ornate, but modest and verisimilar. The artist’s role in this scenario would be minimal at best: calling our attention to or imitating the beauty of nature, the cosmos, the eternal order. Perdita’s position implies that the cosmic order is prior to the originary event, which simply discovers or recognizes it. Any attempt to modify that order would be a dangerous usurping of nature’s power.

Polixenes’ position is more modern and democratic. He recognizes that the beauty of the central object is enhanced by the signs that imitate it, and he sees this as positive or at least permissible. To extrapolate from his position, the “beauty” of the central object is not something independent of our judgment, but rather it becomes beautiful, or at least more beautiful, through the creative activity of the periphery. Polixenes rejects the absolute distinction between center and periphery. The human is part of and harmonious with nature (as the divine). From an ethical perspective, Polixenes’ thesis risks dissolving the boundaries that distinguish the beautiful object and preventing it from becoming an object of contention. History teaches us that only when society learns to view each individual as an independent center of sacrality will it become possible to weaken the taboos surrounding public, sacred figures.

The debate between Perdita and Polixenes is complicated by the dramatic context. Certain aspects of the context support Perdita’s position. For example, Perdita is born an aristocrat yet has been raised as a shepherdess. Despite her lack of status and training, however, her inherent nobility, grace, and beauty shine through in her every action. Her value is recognized by Florizel, the prince of Bohemia, who plans to marry her. She doesn’t need any supplemental signs to be recognized by a prince. Her beauty emerges naturally without any aesthetic enhancements. Her planned marriage to Florizel seems to contradict her opposition to “crossbreeding,” but since she is actually born an aristocrat it only confirms her thesis that natural value will always be recognized without the need for “art.”

The earlier scene of Leontes’ jealous fit (1.2) also throws light on Perdita’s position. In that scene, Leontes recognizes the value of both his wife and his best friend, but as Girard has pointed out, he seeks mimetic confirmation of their value, by means of his wife’s persuasion of Polixenes to stay in Sicilia (Girard 309). What Leontes wants, in semiotic terms, is a supplemental sign that validates the desirable objects, his wife and friend. He gets the sign he wants, but then he multiplies its significance in his imagination, creating a situation that leads to conflict and death. The supplementary sign, or art if you will, leads to mimetic confusion and crisis, just as Perdita would anticipate. If Leontes had followed Perdita’s advice about respecting, that is, having faith in the inherent value of his friend and wife, then the tragedy of the opening scenes would have been avoided.

We must also consider that while Polixenes advocates “crossbreeding” in theory, he tyrannically opposes it in practice, in regard to his son. Polixenes’ hypocrisy compromises the integrity of his argument. The court, which insists on the superficial signs of nobility, fosters flattery and corruption, as we see in many of Shakespeare’s plays and especially in his pastoral works.

But other aspects of the context complicate Perdita’s position and support Polixenes. For example, Perdita at first finds her costume uncomfortable. She says that she, a “poor lowly maid,” feels awkward “Most goddesslike pranked up,” and that she would “swoon” to “To show myself a glass” (4.4.9-14). But later in the scene, she acknowledges the mimetic power of her artificial costume: “Methinks I play as I have seen them do / In Whitsun pastorals. Sure this robe of mine / Does change my disposition” (4.4.133-135). Ironically, while her role as “queen” of the festival is a fiction, in fact she is a princess and likely to be a queen herself someday. So the costume here supplements her natural beauty, but also transforms her in a positive way by revealing a truth about her nature that she doesn’t fully recognize herself.(25)

In addition, the play itself, as a tragicomedy, is an example of generic crossbreeding. And Pastoral, while it traditionally celebrates nature, is a very self-consciously artificial genre. The orphaned aristocrat who exhibits her true breeding despite circumstances is an ancient dramatic convention. Furthermore, the sheepshearing festival is an artificial, utopian space that elides, at least temporarily, the potential for conflict.

So the basic problem of this debate is that while Perdita’s affirmation of nature appears quite serious, it takes place within a very artificial context. This, in sum, is the main interpretative problem of The Winter’s Tale. To take just one example, the tragic opening scenes raise serious ethical issues that are almost magically resolved in the providential ending. Shakespeare, far from minimizing the contradiction, seems to emphasize it at every turn, as in the abrupt shift from tragedy to comedy. So while Shakespeare seems to affirm decorum through Perdita, he habitually violates dramatic decorum in practice.

The contradiction is real, which is another way of saying that form continues to be problematic. But at the same time, Shakespeare’s affirmation of natural form here (through Perdita and the context) is also a dialectical development of his undoing of formal conventions. Once the pretensions of the public scene have been deflated, then it becomes safe again for art, but an art that is recognized as art, not as nature. In the final analysis, the Romances are popular art and not the “high” art of his great tragedies. Perdita’s affirmation of natural beauty is serious, but it needs to be bracketed by the understanding that the role of art is changing, that it no longer supports the cosmic order except within the context of “an old tale,” “a winter’s tale,” as the play insistently reminds us. The cosmic order is consciously framed by a nostalgia which is undoubtedly very powerful, but which is still nostalgia for all that.

Once skepticism has destroyed the idols, then a new opportunity for faith arises. After we’ve seen the Wizard of Oz operating the levers behind the curtain, he becomes our friend in a new way, although he is not so powerful as we once thought. Once we understand art as art, not as nature, then it becomes adequate to its more minimal and modest content. Understood in context, the “nature” that Perdita affirms is not finally a cosmic order, but simply the sensual, quite human forms of beauty, cleansed of their supernatural trappings. Perdita’s rejection of art here is comparable to Prospero’s rejection of magic, which is not a rejection of art as such, but a recognition that the Renaissance cosmos is coming to an end. Shakespeare had the generosity of spirit to see this as a good thing and not the end of the world. The future is in good hands with Perdita and Florizel, Miranda and Ferdinand. The final scene provides the dramatic confirmation of Perdita’s theory.

The Statue Scene

The concluding statue scene of The Winter’s Tale is Shakespeare’s ultimate attempt to rehabilitate the public scene of art, including the material figures that inhabit its center and the imagination of the audience that gives them life. The “resurrection” of Hermione effectively demonstrates the originary power of art, not only in terms of an aesthetics of wonder, but also, more practically, by uniting a community that is threatened by dissolution after Hermione’s death.

Shakespeare prepares for the presentation of her statue carefully in the comments of the gentlemen of the court and in Paulina’s introduction. These introductory comments emphasize two apparently contradictory aspects of the statue: its realism and its artifice, thus revisiting the nature-versus-art debate of the fourth act. The third Gentleman reports that the statue is:

a piece many years in doing and now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape; he so near to Hermione hath done Hermione that they say one would speak to her and stand in hope of answer. (5.2.96-103)

Paulina, as she gets ready to reveal the statue, says, “Prepare / To see the life as lively mocked as ever / Still sleep mocked death” (5.3.19-20). The power of the statue to “beguile Nature,” to “mock” life, suggests the virtually supernatural realism of the statue; it appears unmediated like a medieval relic such as the Shroud of Turin. The artist has completely negated his desiring imagination in an openness to the beauty of the object, as Shakespeare was said to have done by Keats through “Negative Capability.” The “realism” of the statue signifies that it has escaped the process of desire that infects mere imitation; the statue is in effect a “natural,” unmediated signifier, hence sacred, wondrous, not unlike the iconic signs used in ritual and magic. The naturalism of the statue is confirmed by its undeniable evidence to the senses.

On the other hand, the play insistently calls attention to the statue as a work of art and hence not real. The statue is a product of the exquisite craftsmanship of “that rare Italian master, Julio Romano,” an important Renaissance artist, and inhabits a gallery stocked with “many singularities.” Paulina proclaims, “her dead likeness, I do believe / Excels whatever yet you looked upon / Or hand of man hath done” (5.3.16-17), emphasizing its sublimity yet recalling its human origin. When Leontes notes that “Hermione was not as much wrinkled, nothing / So aged as this seems,” Paulina responds, “So much the more our carver’s excellence, / Which lets go by some sixteen years and makes her as she lived now” (5.3.30-32)—again highlighting the realism, but also the carver’s skill. Despite all efforts at realism, art is ultimately representation, not nature. There are no artworks, as such, in nature.

Furthermore, the statue is “framed” on stage by its audience and Paulina, an artist-figure in this scene who presents the statue and directs its reception. As is typical of The Winter’s Tale, we find an insistence on “nature” framed within a highly conscious artifice. This, in sum, is the complexity and difficulty of Shakespeare’s project in the Romances.

On the one hand, to have too much confidence in the statue’s mimetic naturalism would be to repeat Leontes’ mistake of the first act, a form of idolatry that Shakespearean tragedy warns against, the unreflective credence in the undisciplined imagination as stimulated by mimetic figures. On the other hand, to insist on the frame, the artifice, would demystify the statue and reduce its power, which depends on “a willing suspension of disbelief.” We must remember, however, the deeper lesson of the opening acts, that the problem is not with the mimetic sign or central figure as such, but the act of reception—hence the crucial importance of Paulina, who guides the on-stage audience.

Shakespeare is certainly not looking for simple sensationalism here but rather a deeply reflective moment of wonder, recognition, and understanding. Paulina serves to maintain the precarious balance between mimesis and reflection by managing the reception of the statue. Indeed, the reaction of the audience is just as if not more important than the artwork itself. The on-stage audience is amazed primarily by the realism of the statue. Leontes’ first words are “Her natural posture!” (5.3.23). Because of its realism, they react to it almost as if in the presence of Hermione herself. Leontes is struck by remorse: “Does not the stone rebuke me / For being more stone than it?” (5.3.37-38)—an emotion that Paulina has encouraged since Hermione’s death. Perdita kneels and asks for a blessing from the statue, reaching for the statue’s hand to kiss—a move that Paulina is quick to prevent, saying that the paint is still wet. Similarly, Leontes wants to kiss the lips of the statue, and Paulina again must intervene. The audience is moved by its mimetic realism to ascribe virtually magical qualities to the statue, a persistent theme of this scene. Leontes addresses the statue as a living person: “There’s magic in thy majesty, which has / My evils conjured to remembrance and / From thy admiring daughter took the spirits, / Standing like stone with thee” (5.3.39-42). Paulina insists on the “naturalism” of the statue, but she is also concerned to deny that any magic is involved. After preventing Leontes from kissing the statue she says:

. . . Either forbear,
Quit presently the chapel, or resolve you
For more amazement. If you can behold it,
I’ll make the statue move indeed, descend
And take you by the hand. But then you’ll think—
Which I protest against—I am assisted
By wicked powers. (5.3.85-91)

Paulina wants the statue to have a powerful effect, but within certain limits. The statue is insistently “art” and not “nature.” Both Leontes and Perdita are so taken by the naturalism of the statue that they want to embrace it, to treat it as literally real, but Paulina consistently moves to prevent such an interpretation, which would be a form of idolatry similar to Leontes’ in the opening act. We could also compare the initial response of Leontes and Perdita to a sentimental interpretation of the statue, as indeed this scene borders on the sentimental, simple wish fulfillment. Paulina’s denial of “wicked powers” functions similarly to ward off a gothic interpretation; a murdered woman literally returning to life would be a moment of horror comparable to the appearance of Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth. The sentimental or gothic interpretation of the statue confuses the originary, ethical function of art, which is not primarily to satisfy desire through wish fulfillment or revenge, but to defer desire, by substituting a sign for a significant object. Paulina needs to teach this simple yet profound lesson because the evolution of Renaissance culture has threatened to obscure it. Traditional forms of art have become problematic because of their connection to a social structure that is in the process of dissolution. In order to rehabilitate art, it becomes necessary to return to its original function, which, indeed, is always connected to social structure, but not necessarily to any particular one. In his move to popular culture in the Romances, Shakespeare particularly needs to avoid relapsing into simple wish fulfillment or sensationalism. But at the same time, he wants to preserve, to rehabilitate the public scene of art.

After allowing the “naturalism” of the statue to work its magic on the audience, Paulina announces that she can animate the statue; but she insists that not only the consent but the active engagement of the audience is necessary:

. . . It is required
You do awake your faith. Then all stand still.
On; those that think it is unlawful business
I am about, let them depart.
[ . . . ] . . . Music, awake her; strike!
‘Tis time. Descend. Be stone no more. Approach.
Strike all that look upon with marvel. (5.3.94-100)

We may ask why “faith” is necessary if indeed no magic is involved. The rest of the scene clearly indicates that Hermione has been alive for the whole time, waiting sixteen years for the fulfillment of the oracle’s prophecy in the return of her daughter (5.3.126-129). What is at stake in this scene is not simply a happy ending that answers to the desire of the audience, both on- and off-stage, but rather art itself in relationship to its audience. “Faith” requires our active, sympathetic engagement but also that we “stand still,” that is, that we engage with the statue as art, and not as a real person, as magic.

One of the major difficulties of the statue scene is that the earlier scene in which she died very clearly and emphatically indicated that Hermione was dead—the only place in Shakespeare’s dramatic oeuvre where he deceives the audience on a major plot point. The dramatic lacuna is not accidental, nor is it simply a cheap trick to increase the wonder of the final scene. On one level, Hermione is indeed dead. Shakespeare’s insistence on the fact of her death suggests that this final scene is an allegory of art, which makes it no less powerful, but on a different level than wish fulfillment.(26) Critics generally agree that Hermione’s resurrection is an emblem of the power of art, but, curiously, they tend to ignore or gloss over the problem created by her death (not to mention Hermione’s appearance like a ghost to Antigonus in his fatal dream [3.3.15-45]). But the power of her resurrection is created by precisely this contradiction, which on the plot level is indeed “magical.” Shakespeare provides us in this scene with an originary emblem of art. The artwork is not just the product of the artist’s imagination in dialogue with history. Rather, the artwork originates in a specific event: the death of Hermione through the destruction of her body. This event, analogous to the originary sparagmos, threatens the community by isolating the individual members in guilty remembrance and creating the possibility of resentful recriminations among the survivors, as we find in the debate over Leontes’ possible remarriage earlier in the fifth act.(27) At the same time, the memory of her death is vitally important, providing the basis for the continuity of culture. The resentment that was discharged yet also revived by the sparagmos is also important as a motor of ethical progress (as Paulina uses the memory of Hermione’s death to keep Leontes in check). The guilt over the sparagmos is to some extent assuaged by the memory or “resurrection” of the central figure on the private scene of the imagination, followed by the creation of figural representations. But Hermione’s memory, as with her statue, ambivalently stimulates as well as ameliorates resentful guilt.

The problem of our origin, we recall, is community itself, and this problem requires an institutional or ritual solution. Paulina is not only an artist figure, but more precisely a high priestess; she first presides over the sacrifice of Hermione, majestically announcing to the community, “Look down / And see what death is doing” (3.2.148-9). She then maintains the communal memory of her death, and Leontes’ responsibility, who becomes, in this respect, emblematic of each individual in the community, just as in the final scene, he is a representative yet typical ritual participant. Paulina then fashions a mimetic representation of Hermione, and provides music, another powerful mimetic form.(28) The requirement for music clarifies that Hermione’s reanimation is a mimetic effect. When Paulina repeatedly remarks upon the naturalism of the statue, she is suggesting to the audience how they should respond, mimetically encouraging the response of wonder. Similarly, when she insists upon faith, she acknowledges that it is precisely the audience’s imaginative involvement, their guilt and memory first of all, but also their consent and willing belief, that metaphorically animates the statue.(29) It is the audience’s imagination, ultimately, that provides the power of art, not the art object by itself, nor the artist, as Prospero acknowledges in the famous Epilogue of The Tempest.

Critics have sometimes tried to connect Paulina to the New Testament Apostle,(30) but they miss the main connection, which is not Paul the preacher and theologian, but rather Paul on the road to Damascus, where the subconscious guilt over his persecution of Jesus and his followers results in his vision of Jesus in the sky, the power of which is symbolized by the blinding light and heavenly voice which knock him to the ground.(31) Just as Paul provided a model of conversion for generations of Christians, so Paulina facilitates such an experience of resurrection for her audience. By providing the statue as a substitute for the dead Hermione, Shakespeare dramatizes the originary priority of representation (as deferral) over sacrificial violence, the sparagmos. The reanimation of Hermione through art substitutes in a very real and literal sense for the death of Leontes and the revenge of the community. Shakespeare illustrates in the final scene our continuing need for a public “sacred.” What’s real in the final scene is not Hermione’s literal resurrection, but rather what it means, the peaceful presence of the community to itself. Hermione is a symbol of this ultimate human reality.

By dramatizing the origin of figural art within religious ritual, Shakespeare illustrates art’s ethical functionality, but he also clarifies the difference between art and religion. The final scene takes place within a context that is metatheatrical and overtly artificial. Paulina emphasizes the point for us: “That she is living / Were it but told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale” (5.3.116-8). Similarly, Leontes exclaims, “If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating” (5.3.110-111). Precisely. Shakespeare’s dramatic magic is an art as lawful as eating. The problem of high tragedy, we recall, is that it is too close to ritual and its associated hierarchy. Just as traditional rituals are on the decline, so too is tragedy, thanks in part to Shakespeare himself. But in The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare demystifies the public scene of art, cleanses it of its supernatural elements, while demonstrating its continued power and relevance, which is aesthetic and ethical, not supernatural or religious. Unfortunately, the public forms of art that Shakespeare practiced are coming to an end, but The Winter’s Tale demonstrates that art continues to have the power to create significant difference.

In Chapter 44 of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Estella informs the protagonist Pip that she is engaged to the snobbish Bentley Drummle, leaving Pip with nothing to lose but to confess unreservedly his long-harbored love for her:

You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since—on the river, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever been acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displayed by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there, and everywhere, and will be. (335)

The above dramatic expression of romantic love helps illustrate the first part my argument, which is that many nineteenth-century British novelists used jealousy to facilitate interplay between narrative and poetic discourse. By narrative discourse, I mean the temporal, contingent series of events constituting plot and story, and by poetic discourse I am referring to Michael Riffaterre’s definition: “the equivalence established between a word and a text, or a text and another text” (19). In other words, poetic discourse alludes to contexts beyond the periphery of the temporal, narrative scene.

In the above passage, Pip prefers reveling in the feelings evoked by the sign rather than directly pursuing his beloved, which would require a direct plea for Estella’s love and her reconsideration of her engagement to Drummle. At this particular moment, he is privileging vertical, poetic flight over narrative’s grounded path. Of course, we can and should argue that this lyrical language is motivated partly by Pip’s ultimate narrative aims of appropriation, for the enticing allurement of Pip’s poetic expression has the potential to be an effective, pathos-driven means of convincing Estella to break off her engagement with Drummle in favor of him. However, even if he would fail to use poetic language to convince her to leave Drummle, the speech is an aesthetic means of managing his jealousy and resentment. By ingratiating himself in the imaginative sensations induced by the signs he designates for Estella, he can potentially purge himself of some of the pent-up desire he has for her. Moreover, the hyperbolic nature of his declaration of love—as exemplified in the claim that his imaginative world is as real as the “stones of which the strongest London buildings are made”—undermines the notion that his happiness is dependent on a romantic relationship with Estella. Pip confesses in the passage that his imaginative reveries of her can bring him as much pleasure (if not more) as a real relationship. He gains pleasure in designating Estella as a sacred object who is only obtainable through the many signs of her he can conjure up—”on the river, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets.”

What Pip does not admit is that his poetic reverie is derived mimetically from Drummle and other rivals; he likes to think that his love is not contingent on resentment. When we take into consideration the fact that Pip is expressing his love for Estella at a moment when he has lost her to someone else, we can see how such a lyrical passage contextualized within a scene of mimetic rivalry challenges the Romantic belief that sexual desire can be autonomous, separate from a mimetic sphere of influence. As René Girard would contend, Pip at this moment resembles a Romanticist or Symbolist, both of whom Girard claims want “a transfiguring desire which is completely spontaneous,” and do “not want to hear any talk about the other” (39). Pip seems compelled to deny that her desirability in the eyes of other men has some effect on his high estimation of her, even though he admits earlier, while reflecting on Estella’s time spent in London at the Brandley home, that “[s]he had admirers without end” (281). In actuality, Pip’s poetic expression of love for Estella—that she is part of himself, the “embodiment” of “every graceful fancy” he has entertained—occurs at a mimetic crisis, when he realizes that his opportunity for marrying his beloved has been temporarily or permanently lost due to the fact that she is engaged to someone else. The resentment and jealousy generated from a heightened awareness of Estella’s inaccessibility makes her more desirable and more likely to make Pip’s estimation of her importance objectively inaccurate. Considering the friendships he establishes over the course of the novel—such as that with Herbert Pocket and Wemmick—and his monetary good fortune that Magwitch has given him, we are not led to think that Estella is always the focal point in Pip’s line of vision within the many mimetic, triangular scenes in which he is situated. It is at this crisis point of mimetic rivalry with Drummle, when Pip realizes that Estella has chosen his rival, that her stock rises so high that all other pursuits and relationships seem worthless. In much the same way that human jealousy and envy work in the marketplace to inflate the value of commodities, Pip’s jealousy inflates Estella’s value.

Eric Gans provides a theoretical framework for understanding the causality and mechanisms for such poetic inflation. Gans argues that the language of representation of the object occurs when a subject, for whatever reason, either cannot or decides not to pursue the object, which is positioned at the center of mimetic circle, recreating the “originary scene” upon which language originated. In an effort to defer violence, the subject makes the decision to abort the appropriation of the object:

The center of the circle appears to represent a repellent, a secret force that prevents its occupation by the members of the group that converts the gesture of appropriation into a gesture of designation, that is into an ostensive sign. Thus the sign arises as an aborted gesture of appropriation that comes to designate the object rather than attempting to capture it. The sign is an economical substitute for its inaccessible referent. (Originary Thinking 9)

The object for a desiring subject is at the center, and this conceptualization helps us understand why Pip claims Estella’s aura is present in every activity in which he is engaged. We can see how Pip’s lyrical proclamation of totalizing love for her creates space where temporal life is at the periphery and the sacred atemporal is at the unobtainable center. To simulate the act of appropriation, Pip lyrically converts the “repellant” Estella into a multitude of memorialized, ostensive signs of designation, and these signs are willfully placed as substitutes for the unreachable referent. Through the rendering of signs iterated as the aborted gesture of appropriation, a lyrical chronotope of ideal space-time beyond the temporal, diegetic space of narrative-fiction is created. The signs help him obtain the poetic verticality of transcendence over the immanent mimetic crisis constituting the narrative. Therefore, the narrative-poetic interplay is a consequence of the subject vacillating toward and away from the desired object; narrative discourse is the move toward the center of the circle where the desire object lies, and poetic discourse is the movement away from the center. Jealousy is the principal emotion facilitating this interplay because the jealous subject is clearly placed in a predicament of having to choose between narrative attempts at appropriation and lyrical signification.

II

The second part of my argument is that the vacillations a jealous subject experiences within a novel like Great Expectations shed some light on competing influences of which nineteenth-century British writers were particularly aware. These two influences were the literary marketplace and its antithetical scene of “high art.” While straight-forward narrative discourse satisfies the desires of an ever-expanding bourgeois readership, therefore helping the novelist achieve the cultural and economic capital associated with popular art, poetic discourse represents the scene of high art. Attention paid to jealousy and the novel provides a fresh outlook on how Victorian novelists during the latter half of the nineteenth century were instrumental in changing the British novel’s reputation as popular literature to that of serious literature. Since Jay Clayton’s Romantic Vision and the Novel, critics have provided little attention to poetic discourse’s contribution to alterations in the British realist novel’s structure and theme. George Levine’s apt and nuanced understanding of realism unintentionally goes a long way in explaining why poetic discourse sometimes appears in realist fiction: “Traditionally realism is associated with determinism. The anti-romance is the denial of the imagination’s power to control circumstance. And thus the characteristic subject of realistic fiction is the contest between dream and reality; the characteristic progress, disenchantment” (56). Levine’s conception of realism as featuring the “contest between dream and reality” helps explain why the consistent blending of poetic and narrative discourses would be present in a realist novel, for this “contest” can be found at the intersection of poetic and narrative discourses.

But not all works of realism aim to develop such a stark contrast between one’s imaginative vision and the external world. How can a novel that does not invest much energy in developing the imaginative lives of the characters and one that clearly does both be considered works of realism? The answer is that they share the idea that realism places emphasis on the cultural-political institutional controls on the individual. While one type of realist novel takes this fact for granted and focuses almost entirely on a character’s external behavior, another type at least presents us with glimpses into the character’s internal world as he or she fights the losing battle with determinist social forces. The latter type of realism is as much internal as it is external. However, it is this very attention directed toward the imaginative life of the subject that threatens to test the ideological limits of realist fiction because the project of illuminating the nature of this contest between dream and reality subverts realist objectivism.

A novelist’s motivation for such subversion was to achieve a balance between, to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, heteronomous and autonomous principles of literary production.(1) Out of respect for the heteronomous principle, artists are supposed to produce art for the sake of earning monetary and cultural capital. Victorian novelists could use professional and sexual jealousy to help develop plots from which middle-class themes such as the dream of upward mobility (like Pip’s aspiration to be a gentleman), domestic tensions between men and women, moral issues related to sexual behavior, and problems associated with masculine identity emerge and are examined. The autonomous principle, on the other hand, represents the notion that good art is rendered without concern for its popularity in the marketplace and temporal themes associated with contemporary life, that what matters is its aesthetic quality.

Before discussing novels that aim for aesthetic literariness (while still exhibiting a conscious attempt at market appeal), let us first look at two novels that are noticeably market-driven in order to make clear how the jealous plot is naturally associated with popular, domestic topics. It is important to pursue this tangent in order to show jealousy as situated at the intersection of two distinctive types of realism, both the psychological kind containing a strong poetic undercurrent and the more mimetic, domestic variety affiliated with novels with broader commercial appeal and a more direct connection with domestic and middle-class themes.

Ellen Wood’s East Lynne depends on the jealous actions of the protagonist Lady Isobel Vane, who has an adulterous affair with the attractive and rakish Captain Francis Levison because he deceives her into believing her husband, Archibald Carlyle, is having an affair with Barbara Hare. After becoming pregnant illegitimately, she leaves the East Lynne estate only to come back later (unrecognizable to Archibald because a railroad accident greatly alters her appearance) to work as a governess so that she can be close to her children. Having discovered her ex-husband has married Barbara, Lady Isobel’s desire for Archibald, which is first awakened out of her suspicions of Barbara before her affair with Levison, is intensified now that his love is inaccessible. In East Lynne, jealousy appears unambiguously as a product of mimetic desire and is almost exclusively used as a narrative device to advance the plot. Wood’s novel uses the jealous circumstance to depict the anxieties of middle-class audiences, who generally believed the preservation of the social order relied on domestic stability.

Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right takes a more critical view of the objectification of women than East Lynne by showing its debilitating effects on men who are obsessed with maintaining complete control over the terms of their relationships with women. In the character of Louis Trevelyan, Trollope uses male jealousy to expose the negative consequences of a patriarchal order that treats women as property. The jealous sufferer, Louis, essentially dies from morbid jealousy, wasting away in isolation in the English and Italian countryside because his wife Emily refuses to end her acquaintanceship with an old family friend, Colonel Osborne. Both Emily’s compassion for her husband during his bout of insanity and her refusal to give in to his irrational demand make her an honorable and empowering character. Louis’s mental illness draws attention to the great irony of the patriarchal order, which is that the unnatural male hubris it enforces has the potential to be as psychologically damaging for men as it is oppressive for women.

As these brief plot summaries illustrate, Wood and Trollope respectively capitalize on the jealous plot to create a domestic drama that raises issues especially interesting to a popular readership. However, these texts are limited in the extent to which they create psychological depth and appeal to literary critics’ sensibilities. The work of helping readers become intimately acquainted with a character rather than caught up almost exclusively in the external circumstances of mimetic conflict requires developing a character’s internal life through poetic discourse. Naturally, focusing on the circumstances reiterates the ideological position that mimetically-realistic Victorian novels were known for promoting, which was the suppression of individual expression. As Nancy Armstrong argues, these kinds of novels “make the turn against expressive individualism a mandatory component of the subject’s growth and development” (8). However, and as Armstrong points out, there is an important irony that occurs when authors switch from using this idea as a principle for limiting their own expressive individualism in plot-driven realist fiction to staging it thematically in their work. Armstrong notes that the creation and subsequent disciplining of the individual subject that occurs in novels of the second-half of the nineteenth century “requires the novel offer an interiority in excess of the social position that individual is supposed to occupy” (8). Armstrong is bringing to light a paradox that exists in novels aiming to stage rather than simply follow the “turn against expressive individualism,” which is that to do so requires the production of an aesthetic excess of interiority that the narrative discourse threatens to suppress. It is this excess of interiority that requires the development of poetic discourse and, therefore, the strategic employment of the autonomous principle of literary production. Applying the autonomous principle to literary production means that a strong, poetic undercurrent must form so that the text can refer to circumstances beyond its historical situation.

When the work could somewhat resist certain restrictions of periodization, it increased its potential to transcend the limits of mimetic, domestic realism that had been holding the novel back from consideration as serious literature. Patrick Brantlinger makes note of the “inferiority complex” that haunted the novel throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: “As a genre, the modern novel was born with an inferiority complex: it wasn’t classical, it wasn’t poetry, and it wasn’t history” (3). With a stronger lyrical discourse it still is not classical, poetry, or history, but it can acquire recognition as a genre that is able to, like Romantic lyric poetry and other fine arts, present itself as a messenger of higher truths and draw conspicuous attention to the novel’s potential for genre blending.

Gans helps us understand why this move to the lyric is so crucial in the novelist’s endeavor to be considered a serious author of high art. As mentioned before, for Gans the aesthetic is dependent on the aborted gesture of appropriation, on the subject’s decision to defer desire through the production of the lyrical sign of the desired object, and it is this move in a work of literature that exhibits the difference between “art” and “entertainment.” The division between high and popular art “reflects a tension internal” to the mimetic scene of triangular desire: “In the context of the contemplation of the central object in the scene, the moment of art looks back to the renunciation of appetite implicit in the sign, whereas that of entertainment looks forward to the appetitive satisfaction of the communal feast that will follow” (End of Culture 171-72). Art features the renunciation of appetite and the deferral of desire, while entertainment privileges appetitive fulfillment. Art, rather than entertainment, prefers the abandonment of the act of acquiring the object in favor of the creative act of representing it.

If we were to use Gans’s dichotomy of high vs. popular art when taking into account the fact that the Victorian domestic novel is known for its marriage plot, we may be initially inclined to consider it primarily as entertainment and only secondarily as art, since marriage is the epitome of appetitive satisfaction. However, the degree to which a novel containing a domestic narrative can be considered popular art (or entertainment) varies according to the extent to which the narrative delays such satisfaction. When poetic discourse enables a narrative to transcend chronology and temporality, there is the opportunity for aesthetic deferral and focus on the sign. As D. A. Miller argues in Narrative and its Discontents, while many nineteenth-century novels “’build’ toward closure, . . . they are never fully or finally governed by it” (xiv). Miller observes that novels focused on the “obsessions” and “idiosyncrasies” of character establish to a great degree independence from the governance of closure: “The text of obsession or idiosyncrasy is intrinsically interminable; as it can never be properly concluded, it can only be arbitrarily abandoned” (41). If what Gans calls the “entertainment” of appetitive satisfaction (marriage) is suppressed by what Miller calls “idiosyncratic” acts of deferral, then we are more likely to consider the text as “high” rather than “popular” art.

It is worth pointing out that jealous subjects are particularly instrumental in both building and deferring desire because they are frequently placed in the position of having to vacillate between taking actions toward appetitive satisfaction and finding ways to defer such satisfaction because of the inaccessibility of the desired object. The jealous subject is frequently searching for creative ways to defer resentment(2) by expressing desire for it, and this deferral is represented lyrically rather than through action, forming a poetic discourse that transgresses the temporal conditions of plot and facilitating poetic-fictional interplay. As a consequence of using the jealous subject to facilitate this interplay, novelists were able to create metafictional passages representative of the author’s own precarious, indecisive position in the literary marketplace. Because jealous characters like Pip pivot from acts of appropriation to the imaginative acts of deferral (deferral by designating signs of the aborted gesture of appropriation), they are ideal subjects for representing the Victorian novelist pivoting between the heteronomous principle of meeting the market demand for developing plausible plots within realistic settings and ignoring that demand in favor of lyrical adornment.

III

There is perhaps not a clearer illustration of jealousy’s usefulness in creating and facilitating interplay between poetic and narrative discourses than George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. The illustration is a self-conscious one, drawing attention to the novelist’s own deliberations between autonomous and heteronomous principles of literary production. Because his wife abandoned him for an adulterous relationship with his longtime friend and poet, Denzil Somers, Sir Austin harbors the sexual jealousy and resentment that helps shape his misogynist views of women and low estimation of poets. One of the ways his jealousy manifests itself is in the pedagogical methods he employs in rearing and educating his son Richard. The young Feverel matriculates within a very structured environment that is organized by an antiquated system designed to raise him in accordance with aristocratic principles while protecting him from the perceived immoral influences outside the cloistered world of Raynham. Sir Austin is particularly adamant about shielding Richard from romantic engagements with women until he is twenty-five years old, at which time the Baronet will find him someone to marry. Accompanying the prohibition on sexual relationships is the prohibition on poetry writing. As Sir Austin notes, “No Feverel has ever written Poetry” (130-31).

If his father was his only mediator, Richard could perhaps be content with his father’s prohibitions on poetry and romance, but other mediators emerge when he attends school, and, consequently, Richard soon becomes enamored of other pursuits. Richard’s main mediating rival is Ralph Morton, who is superior to Richard in sports, excelling in cricket, swimming, running, and jumping. He is “a match for Richard in numerous promising qualities, comprising the noble science fisticuffs” (126). Richard’s privileged upbringing stirs feelings of entitlement that make it difficult for him to adjust to social circumstances that challenge such feelings. The threat to his supremacy leads to resentment and jealousy, and he frequently manages these feelings through negative assessments of the rival’s personality: “Young Ralph was a lively talker: therefore, argued Richard’s vanity, he had no intellect. He was affable; therefore he was frivolous. The women liked him: therefore he was a butterfly. In fine, young Ralph was popular, and our superb Prince, denied the privilege of despising, ended by detesting him” (126). In an attempt to affirm that Ralph’s athletic feats and sexual attraction cover up intellectual weaknesses, the young Feverel exhibits snobbery stereotypically associated with aristocrats.

Despite his father’s heavy-handed authority and Richard’s awareness of the ledger of athletic losses to Ralph, he cannot resist challenging Ralph to a swimming race across the width of the Thames. Richard’s inevitable defeat becomes the impetus for Richard to retire from athletic competitions with Ralph. The circumstances surrounding Richard’s loss commence a new period in Richard’s adolescence, one in which his attention is redirected. He comically blames the loss on Lady Blandish’s infamous Bonnet, which infatuates him as he stands waiting for the starter’s gun to begin the race while Blandish sits in the stands among a crowed of onlookers. The Bonnet’s splendor distracts Richard enough to get him off to a slow start from which he never recovers. Richard therefore comes to the conclusion that “[i]t was the Bonnet [that] had beaten him, not Ralph . . . the Bonnet was his dear, detestable enemy” (128). While the Bonnet serves as the scapegoat for his loss, it also directs his attention to the scene of romance, serving as the sign of two unobtainable desired pursuits: consummated love and athletic victory.

And now he progressed from mood to mood, his ambition turned towards a field where Ralph could not rival him, where the Bonnet was etherealized, and reigned glorious mistress. A check to the pride of a boy will frequently divert him to the path where lie his subtlest powers. Richard gave up his companions, servile, or antagonist: he relinquished the material world to young Ralph, and retired into himself, where he was growing to be lord of kingdoms: where Beauty was his Handmaid, and History his Minister, and Time his ancient Harper, and sweet Romance his bride: Where he walked in a realm vaster and more gorgeous than the great Orient, peopled with the heroes that have been. (128)

The swimming race becomes Richard’s originary event upon which he has declared a new object in his life to be sacred. His escapist, romantic imagination conjures up scenes directly related to romantic desire but also indirectly related to his failed quests at athletic accomplishment. To strengthen an ego that has been damaged by another loss to his rival, Richard, like Pip in Great Expectations, turns to his imagination, lyrically recovering the cumulative pride he lost to Ralph over a span of many competitions. The Bonnet is both the object anchoring him to the temporal scene and the muse inspiring him to dream of a world beyond the scene.

The atemporal sphere where Ralph is not around to rival him epitomizes Girard’s point that the concept of autonomous desire emanates from the refusal to admit that desire is mimetically derived from the mediating rival. However, in Richard’s mind a new order is reformulated through a lyrically-rendered, hermetically sealed world of aesthetic pleasure. By contextualizing such discourse within a narrative scene of loss, Meredith is showing how poetic idealization is connected to resentment and jealousy. Additionally, the scene is metafictional in that it self-consciously demonstrates Meredith’s process of negotiating between the demands of the literary market, which asks for domestic fiction focusing on the external rather than internal affairs of the individual, and the aesthetic literary standards drawn up by the literary-critical establishment. By noticeably and somewhat crudely (thus the comical effect Meredith is known for producing) integrating the lyrical discourse within the context of domestic fiction, Meredith finds a “middle way” rather than having to choose between the principles of autonomy and heteronomy.

While the Bonnet is an ideal poetic muse, Richard must unfortunately suppress his inclination to write because of his father’s oppressive, mimetically-influential desires. As a young man whose father has ordered him to remain a virgin and refrain from writing poetry, Richard is incapable of creating something tangible out of his sexual desire. However, his lyrical, anti-narrative impulse toward poetic expression is reincorporated into another narrative sequence of events, thanks again to Ralph’s intervention. After a day of exercise, Richard retires to his room, where he begins to dream of romantic interludes in faraway places:

He was off Bursley, and had lapsed into that musing quietude which follows strenuous exercise, when he heard a hail and his name called. It was no lady, no fairy, but young Ralph Morton, an irruption of miserable masculine prose. Heartily wishing him abed with the rest of mankind, Richard rowed in and jumped ashore. Ralph immediately seized his arm, saying that he desired earnestly to have a talk with him, and dragged the Magnetic Youth from his water-dreams, up and down the wet mown grass. That he had to say to be difficult of utterance, and Richard, though he barely listened soon had enough of his old rival’s gladness at seeing him, and exhibited signs of impatience; whereat Ralph, as one who branches into matter somewhat foreign to his mind, but of great human interest and importance, put the question to him:
“I say, what woman’s name do you like best?” (145)

This passage is self-reflexive, as it draws attention to what Meredith’s novel is supposed to be if it were to conform to mimetic-realist conventions: a straightforward Victorian realist novel that presents objective reality rather than the subjective, atemporal plane of existence upon which Richard wishes to remain. The “jumping ashore” represents the changeover from lyrical reverie to domestic narrative, in which Richard will have the opportunity to find a living, breathing love interest rather than the phantoms he has been chasing down in his daydreams. Ralph’s odd question, “what woman’s name do you like best?” commences the rival’s conditioning of Richard for reincorporation into the triangular order of narrative. The scene of mimetic desire has once again shifted.

Ralph has now become a new sort of rival, one who, like Richard, has turned inward: “Instead of the lusty boisterous boy, his rival in many sciences, who spoke straightforwardly and acted up to his speech, here was an unabashed and blush-persecuted youth, who sued piteously for a friendly ear wherein to pour the one idea possessing him.” Judging by these observations, Feverel believes that Ralph “likewise was on the frontiers of the Realm of Mystery, perhaps further towards it than he himself was” (146). The notion that he is “perhaps further towards it” is not an innocuous, passing emotion for Richard but rather a rallying cry for him to show similar romantic passion publicly rather than simply feel it internally. Immediately, Ralph’s interest in female names rubs off on him:

Gradually, too, Richard apprehended that Ralph likewise was on the frontiers of the Realm of Mystery, perhaps further towards it than he himself was; and then, as by a sympathetic stroke, was revealed to him the wonderful beauty and depth of meaning in feminine names. The theme appeared novel and delicious, fitted to the season and the hour. But the hardship was that Richard could choose none from the number; all were the same to him; he loved them all. (146)

Feverel’s problem of not being able to settle on a name creates for him an identity crisis in comparison to Ralph, who, as it turns out, has already chosen a specific name—Feverel’s cousin Clare. The thought of pursuing Clare never occurs to Richard until he learns of Ralph’s love for her, for prior to this Feverel is experimenting with a variety of ideal images to represent what has become, long since his initial flight from the scene of jealousy, a series of solipsistic expressions of love. The flight into solipsism becomes a flight away from the scene of mimetic jealousy and into “the realm of mystery” where the actual name of the female object of desire is immaterial.

By committing to a name, Richard is selecting an object of desire with a renewed mimetic, social consciousness, as illustrated in Richard’s following awakening:

For the first time it struck him that his cousin Clare was a very charming creature: he remembered the look of her eyes, and especially the last reproachful glance she gave him at parting. What business, pray, had Ralph to write to her? Did she not belong to him, Richard Feverel? He read the words again and again; Clare Doria Forey. Why, Clare was the name he liked best: nay, he loved it. (147-48)

Feverel becomes jealous of Ralph, for he is threatening to take as a lover someone to whom Richard feels entitled. Prior to Ralph’s disclosure to Richard of his feelings for Clare, Richard has had no serious interest in her, which is a fact that helps illustrate Girard’s claim that desire for the object is an artificial projection of desire for the mediator. Richard’s jealousy threatens to send the protagonist on a dangerous course of action that will result in yet another mimetic crisis with Ralph.

Of course, Richard is cut off from his pursuit of Clare once he spots Lucy Desborough in the compromising position of being about to lose her balance and fall into the river while reaching for a dewberry. The poetic picture of Richard’s first encounter with Lucy that Meredith paints for us suggests that the hero switches from the pursuit of someone (Clare) aroused by temporal, mimetic jealousy to the pursuit of someone (Lucy) who is desirable beyond the mimetic scene. As he rows down the river, burdened by his jealousy over Ralph’s love for Clare, he comes across a scene that changes the direction in which the plot is headed: “Above green-flashing plunges of a weir, and shaken by the thunder below, lilies, golden and white, were swaying at anchor among the reeds. Meadow-sweet hung from the banks thick with weed and training bramble, and here also hung a daughter of Earth” (148). Although it is Meredith who is making the poetic allusion to Eve and the Garden of Eden, he is clearly identifying sympathetically with Richard’s subjective view of the scene. For Richard, Lucy draws him away from his rivalry with Ralph and become a new love interest. Consequently, the plot both twists and stalls, as a new object of pursuit gives Richard something to do, but the absence of competition allows Richard to take delight in the imaginative, faraway places that Lucy inspires.

The fact that he finds another woman to idealize at the time in which his rivalry with Ralph is reborn is no accident; Lucy is a sign of the appetitive satisfaction he would achieve were he to be successful in beating his competition by winning Clare’s affection. Moreover, Sir Austen’s mimetic influence also plays a role in Richard’s attraction to Lucy, for she resembles the kind of woman Sir Austen would want him to marry at a later date: “Had she stood before Sir Austin among rival damsels, that Scientific Humanist, for the consummation for his System, would have thrown her the handkerchief for his son” (150). First and foremost, however, Lucy offers for Richard escape from competition with his rival Ralph for Clare’s affections. As the following passage shows, the narrator sees the island in which he finds Lucy as an atemporal paradise: “He had landed on an Island of the still-vexed Bermoothes. The world lay wrecked behind him: Raynham hung in mists, remote, a phantom to the vivid reality of his white hand which had drawn him thither away thousands of leagues in an eye-twinkle” (149). This lyrically rendered, aesthetic place is constructed with the help of allusion to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. One reason Richard cherishes this Bermoothes-like paradise is because it offers aesthetic escape from his rivalry with Ralph for Clare’s affection. Secondarily, by referring to the island as Bermoothes, Meredith is reminding us of Sir Austin’s continued mimetic influence on Richard. Implied in the comparison is that Sir Austin is Prospero, Richard is Ferdinand, and Lucy is Miranda. This lyrically-rendered scene is therefore contingent on the mediating influences of both Ralph and his father.

The self-conscious and conspicuous nature of how Meredith explores this relationship between poetic reverie and realist prose provides us with a clear picture of an author mediating between two ideals, autonomy and heteronomy. In fact, Meredith seems to be idealizing his position as mediator. In exhibiting a clear relationship between lyrical idealism and the mimetic mediation that is such a vital part of realist fiction, Meredith is able to live up to his own definition of a “great genius.” In his letter to the Reverent Augustus Jessop, Meredith argues that “[b]etween realism and idealism there is no conflict” because a “great genius” is able to show the relationship between illusion and reality. For Meredith, idealism “is an atmosphere whose effects of grandeur are wrought out through a series of illusions, that are illusions to the sense within us only when divorced from the groundwork of the real” (156). Meredith uses narrative in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel to “develop the groundwork of the real” from which lyrical illusions sprout and, in so doing, is able to strike a balance between heteronomous and autonomous principles. And because the jealous subject faces the dilemma of participating in or withdrawing from the point of mimetic crisis, he is the natural subject Meredith can use to establish this symbiosis between illusion and reality.

IV

This essay’s brief analysis of Dickens’s Great Expectations and more extensive study of Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel demonstrate how novelists can use jealousy to find ways to develop a strong lyrical discourse that, in turn, forms the contours of the dream vision. What Great Expectations and The Ordeal of Richard Feverel therefore accomplish is to show how in the prosaic age of the Victorian novel the poetic imagination provides an influential, ideological legacy in certain realistic fiction. The jealous character is a logical envoy of the lyrical ideal because the moment of realization that the object of desire will be lost to a rival creates an existential crisis where one’s very identity, which had been defined by the subject’s pursuit of the object and relationship to the rival, needs to be refashioned, with the imagination serving as the means through which the refashioning can occur. I would therefore argue that, contrary to claims made about realism being dismissive of lyrical idealism, these two novels do not stage the contest between the imagination and concrete reality to underscore the defeat of the former; rather, they show how lyrical idealism can restore agency and provide psychological depth to major characters. Such restorative energy is part of a larger metanarrative of novelists like Dickens and Meredith attempting to assert their individuality within a genre that had a reputation for being oppressively formulaic.

Although the 2011 Summer Conference issue has been postponed until Spring 2012, this issue contains one article based on a paper delivered at the conference in High Point, NC: Martin Fashbaugh‘s groundbreaking analysis of the lyric or “romantic” component of realism itself in Dickens and Meredith, his first article for Anthropoetics.

The other articles are by veteran contributors. Peter Goldman‘s study of The Winter’s Tale, derived from his GA Summer Conference paper in 2010 in Salt Lake City, interprets the Shakespearean romance as a critique of tragic form that accepts art’s power to change the “fatal” world of tragedy. Raoul Eshelman pushes his notion of performatism to its limits in his analysis of a television series devoted to a “socially useful” serial killer. Finally, Dawn Perlmutter, whose articles are rarely good bedside reading, outdoes herself in describing the horrors perpetrated in the cause of Islamist purification.

About Our Contributors

Raoul Eshelman (Ph.D. University of Constance 1988, Habilitation Hamburg 1995) is a Slavist and Comparatist specializing in modern and postmodern literature. He is presently teaching at the Dept. of Slavic Literatures at the University of Munich. His book Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism appeared in 2008 as a publication of the Davies Group.

Martin Fashbaugh is an Assistant Professor of English at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, South Dakota, where he teaches a variety of English courses. His specialty is 19th-Century British Literature and is currently working on a book on representations of jealousy in Victorian poetry and fiction. He has attended three Generative Anthropology summer conferences.

Peter Goldman is an Associate Professor of English at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. He serves on the editorial board for Anthropoetics and is also a board member of the Generative Anthropology Society & Conference (GASC). Peter teaches classes on Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and film studies. His publications include articles on Shakespeare, Reformation literature, film studies, Generative Anthropology, and Kafka. His current project is a book on Shakespeare and the problem of iconoclasm, for which the article here will be a chapter.

Dawn Perlmutter, director and founder of Symbol & Ritual Intelligence, (formerly the Institute for the Research of Organized & Ritual Violence, LLC), is considered one of the leading subject matter experts (SME) in the areas of symbols, ritualistic crimes and religious violence. She regularly trains law enforcement agencies throughout the United States, has advised police departments and prosecutors offices on numerous cases of ritual homicide and presented expert witness testimony on ritualistic crimes. She is the author of two books and numerous publications on ritual violence. Her most recent book ‘True Believers, The Symbolic Code of the Global Jihad’ is forthcoming in 2012 CRC Press. As an expert on ritual murder she has been interviewed for many documentaries, newspapers and newscasts inclusive of The O’Reilly Factor, the Fox News Channel, NBC, CBS, The Learning Channel, the CBC and the BBC. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy from New York University and a Masters Degree from The American University, Washington, D.C. Dawn Perlmutter is an active member of the distinguished Vidocq Society, an exclusive crime-solving organization that solves cold case homicides.

Every ritual murder is a symbolic act. Murder in the form of terrorism, matricide, sororicide, filicide and particular acts of suicide are all obligatory rituals in the context of an Islamist code of conduct. This code, highly symbolic by nature, prescribes violent ritual practices sanctioned by cultural traditions and taboos. Explicit acts of mutilation inclusive of burning, stoning, disfigurement, dismemberment, beheadings, gouging out eyes, cutting out tongues, cutting off noses, slicing off ears and other atrocities are symbolic expressions specific to the perceived offense. Part one of this article introduces the concept of the Islamist symbolic code; a combination of tribal honor code, Sharia law and Islamic rites of purity that inculcate a shame based ideology triggered by sacred and profane symbols. Part two provides a symbolic analysis of “honor killings,” the ritual murder and mutilation of primarily women, most often by family members for allegedly violating cultural traditions. Part three applies symbolic analysis to the ritual murder of enemies exemplified by a detailed analysis of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks that involved ritualized torture. In the final section of this article honor killing, ritual murder and mutilation are characterized as acts of iconoclasm; the breaking and destruction of sacred objects and icons of power. It will be demonstrated that the primary motivation of Islamist atrocity is an irrepressible impulse to alleviate shame and a sacred duty to restore honor, serve vengeance, preserve purity, maintain tradition, and save face.

1. The Islamist Symbolic Code

Symbolic codes represent a way of life, a common identity and worldview whose meaning is derived and expressed through shared symbols, myths, rituals and a complex of significant things and actions of a people within a historically given and changing world. Allegiance to symbolic codes produce a community of true believers and relate these believers to matters of life and death, to distinctions between good and evil, to social virtues, community relations and to past and present. The Islamist Symbolic code is a syncretic tradition that is principally a tribal honor code that evolved into Sharia Law while retaining the primal concepts of blood relations, honor and vengeance.

Tribalism is the foundation of the code, it establishes social and physical boundaries and most significantly provides a shared group identity. Tribal societies are characterized by blood relations, common ancestry, unwavering loyalty, solidarity, conformity and most significantly an us versus them philosophy. “Tribal society is a closed order. Those within the tribe are deemed to be relations by blood, a family, by virtue of which they are to be protected and secured; those outside are strangers, and therefore suspected to be enemies.”(1) Freedom of choice and individuality are discouraged and every intimate aspect of life is determined by the tribal code; who you will marry, where you will live, your religion, education, what you will eat and even the clothes that you wear. These and every other custom, ritual, tradition and taboo are dictated by the tribes’ symbolic code. Although Islamists reside in numerous countries, use modern weapons, and live in a global technological world, they are fundamentally tribal. Islamists live by a code of honor and are willing to die and kill to preserve their way of life. They occupy a territory, defend sacred land and are guided by the law of the jungle in which each person unconditionally supports the tribe. If one person is insulted, the entire tribe is injured; if one person is esteemed the entire family is respected; humiliation and honor are felt by all. Tribalism is in direct opposition to a Western rational society that values individualism and freedom of choice.

Purity symbolizes the morality of the code; it functions to instill and enforce tribal traditions and taboos and is characterized by faith, righteousness, honor and cleanliness. Rites of purity are found in the symbolic codes of all known cultures and entail an idea, in one form or another, that the inner essence of man can be either pure or defiled.(2) Rites of purity also encompass sacred spaces and land which can be defiled and designated as unclean. The heart of the Islamist symbolic code is the strict observance of purification rites that entail everything from dietary laws to sexual prohibitions. Impurity represents a corruption of the soul and a desecration of the land through outside forces. Islamists aspire to be in a state of purity, good moral standing. This is achieved by following traditions and obligatory rituals such as daily ablutions (ritual washing), prayer, avoiding those things and people that are designated as impure (najis) and faithful adherence to all aspects of the code. Most significantly, rites of purity function as ritualization, a form of repetitive symbolic conditioning. This process is similar to cult indoctrination techniques that use words, images, symbols, and rituals to embed ideals that resonate throughout life. Ritualization is accomplished through multiple daily ritual washing, strict prohibitions on diet, designating natural bodily functions as intrinsically impure, and the calculated use of images, language, and rituals that demarcate specific things as unclean. The result of this process is that the human body is experienced as a source of shame, full of impurities that must be covered, concealed, and continuously purified. In psychological terms rites of purity serve to instill a visceral shaming code to thoroughly inculcate tradition and taboos, prevent any form of cultural assimilation, and to prompt warfare when territory (sacred land) is being threatened. This is achieved by uncompromisingly indicating specific behaviors as impure, designating others as filthy unbelievers who contaminate the purity of true believers and sacred spaces.

For Islamist true believers breaking tradition has serious consequences; the individual is designated as impure both physically and spiritually and the family and/or community loses honor. Ritual uncleanness is an impurity of the soul as much as of the body for this reason it cannot be washed away with water and soap. The ritually unclean person must be cleansed through strong rites.(3) Honor killing and ritual murder are essentially purification rites that remove specifically defined uncleanness. The nature of the accusation always entails a violation of purity which requires murder or mutilation to restore honor. The violence is ritualized and the method of operation entails a purifying agent such as water, fire, earth, or sacrificial blood to cleanse the stain of impurity. One cannot underestimate the power of impurity, it equates to the impact of evil. The accused are not only designated as impure but more significantly they symbolize evil in the form of contagious pollution that spreads through sin and corruption. Rites of purity are intertwined in fears of disease, expulsion, and eternal punishment, connecting taboo to terror. Purification rites are a form of symbolic conditioning that evolves into the natural instincts of true believers, a method of social control that prevents assimilation to other cultures, a system of demarcating territory as sacred land and the underlying mechanism of personal and cultural violence.

Honor symbolizes the virtue of the code; it functions to determine status, respect, and reputation for the individual, family and community and regulates every aspect of individual and group conduct. For Islamists honor is everything. Humiliation, shame and dishonor are to be avoided at all costs. “Honor is what makes life worthwhile: shame is a living death, not to be endured, requiring that it be avenged.”(4) The Western concept of honor: integrity, sincerity, justice, dignity, and honesty does not equate to the Islamist concept. For Westerners peace means freedom; for Islamists peace means honor. The Arabic word for male honor is sharaf and for face is wajh. “The Western terms, “saving face,” and “loss of face,” describe concepts of honor and prestige that originated in the Eastern world.”(5) Islamists’ concept of honor and face is specific to the Arab world and interestingly employs visual symbolism to describe these significant concepts. “The Arab either ‘whitens’ the face (saves face), or ‘blackens’ the face (loses face). Face is the outward appearance of honor, the ‘front’ of honor which a man will strive to preserve even if, in actuality, he has committed a dishonorable act. In the Arab world ‘honor’ and ‘face’ are so closely related that the words are almost interchangeable. This “face,” or “honor,” is such an integral part of the Arab mind that a person is considered perfectly justified in resorting to deceit and falseness in order to ‘whiten,’ or save, their own, someone else’s or the entire Arab world’s face. The Arab mind is in perpetual motion–working against ‘blackening’ the face (losing face), and thus sculptures its words accordingly.”(6) Honor is what defines Islamists as men and is achieved by fulfilling traditional masculine virtues, from being a warrior to fathering children, sons above all.(7) Honor for men is signified by characteristics of courage, bravery, heroism, power, virility, and strength. Any sign of weakness in word or action relinquishes honor. Honor for women consists of modesty, faithfulness and bearing children. Immodesty or unfaithfulness forfeits a woman’s honor and shames the men in the family in whose keeping this honor is vested.(8) Mujahideen, soldiers of god, achieve honor through warrior initiations, endurance rituals and ruthlessness in battle. Martyrdom in suicide attacks is a particularly high honor. The Western presence in the Persian Gulf, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the very existence of Israel are viewed as a shameful occupation of Islamist territory, a loss of face and a defilement of sacred land. This is an ongoing unbearable humiliation, a dishonor that must be avenged. It is a moral imperative for Islamist Jihadists to rid sacred land of infidel unbelievers and restore their honor through vengeance. Similarly, women who have allegedly dishonored their family must be killed to preserve the family honor.

Vengeance symbolizes the justice of the code, it functions to reinstate and protect honor, purity, and territory. Most significantly vengeance justifies violence and regulates social order. Vengeance is characterized by acts of retribution, bloodshed, and sacrifice. When land has been defiled through occupation and people of the tribe have been killed Jihadi warriors must avenge their death. This is the origin of blood vengeance, also referred to as blood revenge, and blood feud. Blood vengeance is the obligation to kill in retribution for the death of a member of one’s family or tribe. “In tribal society, violence is a mechanism of social control… Should life be lost, the tribe is diminished and must exact retribution. The blood feud begins. The feud is not simply primitive barbarism but also a mediating process by which groups constrain each other to constrain their own members, by wreaking vengeance indiscriminately, anonymously, on any members of the rival group.”(9) For this reason Islamists do not distinguish civilians from enemy targets or individuals from their relatives, they are all designated as members of the rival group. Islamists maintain the pre-Islamic tribal tradition of blood feuds. According to the honor code acts of violence inclusive of murder in the form of killing enemies, martyrdom in the form of suicide attacks, and honor killing in the form of killing family members are not only justified but required because the only way honor can be re-established is through bloodshed. Symbolically vengeance is a purification ritual that removes the stain and shame of being occupied by enemy forces or any disgrace brought about by a family member. For Islamist true believers blood purifies shame, murder cleanses disgrace, and violence purges humiliation, hence, justice is served, purity is reestablished and face is saved.

2. Sacred Violence – Honor Killings

One primary purpose of Islamism is to protect the people of the code and their sacred land from designated enemies. Another significant aspect of the honor code is to maintain tradition and punish those who engage in taboo conduct. Although there are distinctions between the ritual murder of enemies and the ritual murder of family members both function to restore honor to the community and remove pollution from the tribe before it becomes contagious. Ritual murder of enemies is enacted by the warrior class mujahideen and is in the context of Jihad, holy war. The ritual murder of a family member is enacted by one or more fellow family members or tribal affiliates and is referred to as “honor killing.” In the West honor killings are narrowly defined to specifically apply to women, but victims include both males and females that allegedly have brought dishonor upon the family or community. The ritual murder of both family and enemies is about honor (purity) and dishonor (impurity). For this reason in both cases violence entails ritualized symbolic acts such as stoning, burning, beheading, mutilation, and body desecration. Ritualizing the violence is what makes it sacred and sacred violence is always justified.

Honor killings are sacred acts. When fathers, brothers, sons, cousins, and uncles kill their own wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters, it is a ritual murder that functions as sacrifice and expiation. The beloved daughters or wives are the sacrificial victims that must be killed to remove the stain of sin and restore honor and purity to the family. It is a moral imperative to remove the polluting evil that infected the weak female before it corrupts the entire family and subsequently the community. In the context of the patriarchal aspect of the tribal code, the polluting sin is always in the form of sexuality and specific to reproduction. The greatest female transgression in a patriarchal tribal culture is expressed in sexuality because the greatest male fear is not knowing who the father is. The sexual aspect of honor killings is evident in all cases. Either the daughter refuses to participate in an arranged marriage, elopes with a man of her choice, the virgin daughter is defiled, the wife commits adultery, or a woman is raped. In each case there is the possibility of an illegitimate child, a symbol of the ultimate taboo, pollution, chaos, evil, and possible destruction of the entire tribe. Even if intercourse does not occur, any impropriety that has the remote possibility of leading to sex with anyone other than the designated male is still a violation of the code. If a wife asks for a divorce she may meet another man, if a woman refuses to wear modest clothing she is making herself attractive to men, if a young man and woman fall in love without approval there is always the potential for illicit sexual activity which subsequently could bear an illegitimate child. The function of honor killings is to ensure the paternity of the child, hence the purity of the blood line. This is accomplished through strict traditions and taboos on sexuality of both men and women. Women are viewed as either pure or impure vessels and any hint of stain or inappropriate behavior taints the vessel hence the unborn child. Only children born in the sanctity of marriage to obedient women are pure and the Islamist definition of marriage includes as many as four wives. A bastard child represents evil and chaos and disrupts the integrity of the entire tribe. If there is any doubt whatsoever over the paternity, the woman, and sometimes the accused male and child are murdered. “From the tribal standpoint, the only way a family can regain its honor is to eliminate the women in question. “The law of the clan is sacred,” notes Jibril, a Palestinian merchant. “A man is entitled to kill for his honor.” Several Palestinians justified honor killings by equating a woman’s reputation to glass, porcelain, or other fragile objects, stating, “Once broken, it is ruined. It cannot be fixed or repaired.”(10) Honor killing is a righteous act of ritual murder because maintaining the purity of the patrilineal culture is sacred. The tribal honor code would have no meaning if tribes assimilated, bloodlines mixed and crossbred. Territory, boundaries, and traditions would be compromised and the culture would devolve into disorder and chaos. In this aspect honor killings function to prevent women from assimilating to Western culture.

The United Nations approximates that as many as 5,000 women are the murder victims of honor killings each year worldwide.(11) Since these crimes are rarely reported or listed as accidents or suicides the actual numbers are much higher.(12) Asma Jahangir, the United Nations special reporter on extrajudicial, summary, and arbitrary executions wrote in her 2000 annual report to the Commission on Human Rights that “honor killings tend to be more prevalent in, but are not limited to, countries with a majority Muslim population. She added that they have been reported in Bangladesh, Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Turkey, Uganda and the United Kingdom.”(13) More recent studies document cases of young Muslim women in many Western countries that have also been victims of honor killing in Germany, Sweden, and other parts of Europe, Canada, and the United States.(14)

Honor killings are extremely brutal and include everything from slitting the throat, beheading, whipping, lashing, beating, pouring acid on, stoning, shooting, stabbing, strangling, and burying or burning the woman alive. Women are frequently raped or gang raped before they are tortured and killed. In some countries honor killings are public spectacles with multiple members of the community participating in the ritual rape or execution. Stoning and being buried alive are some of the oldest forms of ritual sacrifice, beheading and slitting the throat is the preferred method for Islamic blood vengeance, shooting is a contemporary quick method, beating, stabbing, and strangulation is personal and hands on, acid and body dismemberment disfigure the woman and send a message to others, and burning is one of the strongest methods of purification. There are many women who are severely traumatized and disfigured who have survived these attacks.

Rape and gang rapes are referred to as honor punishments and in many instances are ordered by a tribal court, Jirga. The women are not always punished for their own crimes but often for the infidelities of their brothers, uncles and fathers. This corresponds to the tribalist aspect of the code in which any member can be punished to settle a feud even if they are individually innocent. This was exemplified by one of the rare publicized cases of the brutal gang rape of Mukhtar Mai in the southern Punjab village of Meerwala in Pakistan in June 2002. An unofficial tribal jury from the local Mastoi tribe ordered four of their own men to rape Mai as punishment for an alleged crime of rape committed by her twelve year old brother that had brought shame to the Mastoi clan.(15) In another highly publicized case six men kidnapped a sixteen year old girl in Habib Labalo village in southern Sindh province Pakistan in January 2007 because her cousin had an affair with a woman from their family. Two of them raped her and eleven others forced her to parade naked through the village streets before an older woman covered her with a blanket.(16) Hundreds of women are raped or gang raped in the Southern Punjab every year, afterwards many are then honor killed or commit suicide. Rape related honor killings in Libya started being reported by UN agencies and Libyan aid workers in June 2011. Libyan women and girls who are deliberately being raped in front of their fathers and brothers or who become pregnant through rape are being murdered by their own families. “To be seen naked and violated is worse than death for them. . . . In Libya when rape occurs, it seems to be a whole village or town which is seen to be dishonored.”(17) The only method for the father to restore his honor is to kill his daughter. These honor killings are the result of Libyan Leader Colonel Gaddafi’s strategy to use rape as a weapon of war. “The International Criminal Court has reason to believe orders to rape were given, and the drug Viagra was distributed to fighters. A major in the Libyan army who has now deserted told the BBC the shipments of Viagra were widely known about. . . . The order to rape was not given to the regular army. . . . Col Gaddafi knew we would never accept it. It was given to the mercenaries.”(18) The girls and women are also contracting HIV Aids.

Historically rape has often been used as a weapon of war but the addition of Viagra represents new improved biological ammunition in the arsenal of psychological warfare. According to the tribal honor code rape is a form of punishment that not only shames the victim but also punishes the entire family who has to bear the humiliation. The basis for the taboo of rape is the threat that the girl will produce a child that is of another bloodline which would pollute the entire tribe. This is why rape victims are then killed by their own families, it is the only method of ensuring the purity of the community. Even if the raped women were not impregnated they are constant reminders of the disgrace. Psychologically this is stigma, symbolically rape is ritual defilement, an impurity that pollutes the entire family clan or tribe that can only be cleansed through bloodshed. Women are not the only victims of honor rapes, there have also been incidents of men being gang raped in honor punishments for breaking Islamist taboos. In May 2010 in Dasht-e Laili (Laili desert) of Jawzjan province, Northern Afghanistan a dozen farmers and shepherds raped two young men as a punishment for engaging in sexual relations with two young women. Their justification was that the punishment was meted out as an act of revenge for the sexual acts undertaken by the young men. The gang rape was praised by many members of the local community.(19) Gang rape is a fraternal ritual, often an initiation rite into manhood, proving masculinity, power and brotherhood, particularly in cultures that are hypersensitive to homosexuality. “When men are raped by other men, the overt, conscious symbolic meaning of the event is that they are being turned into women.”(20) Islamist culture is a pure culture of patriarchy, machismo and homophobia in which the worst humiliation is to be feminized. Rape as punishment is a life sentence of shame that can only be exonerated through stronger acts of violence.

Stoning, also known as lapidation or rajm in Arabic, is a group ritual, a form of capital punishment that is sanctioned by Sharia law as a communal execution that punishes men and women who are accused of committing adultery and sexual sins of fornication. Homosexuals and rape victims are also punished as adulterers and subject to being stoned to death. Stoning is legal in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Pakistan, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, and Nigeria and practiced in Afghanistan, Somalia, and India with many incidents carried out by communities in other countries. “The Islamic Penal Code of Iran is very specific regarding the details of how stoning should be executed. Article 102 states that men shall be buried up to their waists and women up to their breasts for the execution. Article 104 states, referring to the penalty for adultery, that the stones used should “not be large enough to kill the person by one or two strikes; nor should they be so small that they could not be defined as stones (pebbles.)”. In some cases, if a victim can escape from the ditch during the stoning, they will be freed. However, because women are buried up to their breasts and men only at their waists, women will have a smaller chance of escaping than men.”(21) The average execution by stoning is extremely painful, lasting at least ten to twenty minutes”.(22) The ritual varies depending upon the community and the Islamist group. In Iran there are so many cases that an organization titled, “The International Committee Against Stoning” was formed. Their website whose address is stopstonningnow.com, currently lists 150 Iranian victims but claims there are many more.

In Afghanistan and Pakistan the Taliban often punish both men and women by stoning them to death. In August 2010 in in the district of Dashte Archi, in Kunduz, Afghanistan, a twenty-five year old man named Khayyam and a nineteen-year-old woman named Siddiqa were arrested by the Taliban on the request of their families after they tried to elope. Siddiqa had run away after being sold into an arranged marriage against her will. Two Taliban Mullahs read the judgment of the religious court before the young couple was publicly stoned to death. Hundreds of villagers watched as Siddiqa was buried up to her waist in a four foot hole in the ground, then the crowd threw rocks at her head and body as she desperately tried to crawl free. After she collapsed, covered in blood, but still alive a Taliban fighter shot her three times in the head with an AK-47 while the crowd shouted allahu akbar. Khayyam was then marched in front of the crowd blindfolded with his hands tied behind his back, and then the villagers hurled rocks at his head and body until he was killed. In January 2011 a video of the entire incident was released on the internet.(23) In July 2010 in the upper region of Orakzai in Northwest Pakistan a woman was stoned to death by Taliban militants because she was seen being out with a man. A cell phone video of the incident was smuggled out of the country by a Taliban member who witnessed the stoning.(24) In April 2005, in the Urgu district of Northeastern Badakhshan province, Afghanistan, a twenty-nine-year-old woman known only as Amina was stoned to death after being accused of adultery by her husband. The man accused of committing adultery with her was flogged a hundred times and freed.(25) In a well-known incident in April 2000 the Taliban religious rulers stoned a woman to death at a sports stadium in Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan before a crowd of several thousand spectators.(26)

In Bashika, Iraq, in April 2007, a seventeen year old Yezidi girl named Du’a Khalil Aswad was stoned to death by her fellow tribesmen. A member of a minority Kurdish religious group, the Yazidis, she was condemned to death by her family and hardline religious leaders because of her relationship with a Sunni Muslim boy. The teenager was dragged from her house by nine men who threw her on the ground and joined a larger group of men who pulled up her skirt, beat, kicked and stoned her for half an hour until she died. A month later a video was posted on YouTube of the entire incident, showing the mob of men circling her, throwing stones and photographing the attack.(27) Two Islamist groups in Somalia Hizbul Islam and al Shabaab, who merged in June 2010, also regularly stone people for adultery. In December 2009 a Somali man accused of adultery was stoned to death in front of hundreds of local residents by Hizbul Islam in Afgoye, a village twenty miles from the capital, Mogadishu. Mohamed Abukar Ibrahim, forty-eight, was buried in a hole up to his chest and then killed with rocks. The girl with whom he was accused of having an affair received one hundred lashes; she escaped being put to death because she was not married at the time of the alleged sexual relations. Both video and graphic photographs of the stoning and his mutilated body after the execution were posted on the internet.(28) In November 2009, in a small village near the town of Wajid, 250 miles North-west of Mogadishu, the al-Qaida linked group Al Shabaab stoned a twenty-year-old woman to death. The divorced woman who was accused of committing adultery was taken to the public grounds where she was buried up to her waist and stoned in front of a crowd of about two hundred people. “Her unmarried boyfriend was given one hundred lashes at the same venue. Under al-Shabaab’s interpretation of Sharia law, anyone who has ever been married, even a divorcee, who has an affair, is liable to be found guilty of adultery, punishable by stoning to death. An unmarried person who has sex before marriage is liable to be given one hundred lashes.”(29) In October 2008 a thirteen-year-old girl Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow was stoned to death by a group of fifty men in a stadium in the southern port of Kismayu, Somalia in front of one thousand spectators. She had been gang raped by three men and reported it to the Al Shabaab militia who control Kismayo. This resulted in her being accused of adultery. “A truckload of stones were brought into the stadium to be used in the stoning. At one point during the stoning, eyewitnesses reported that nurses were instructed to check whether Aisha was still alive when buried in the ground. They removed her from the ground, declared that she was, and she was replaced in the hole where she had been buried for the stoning to continue. Inside the stadium, militia members opened fire when some of the witnesses to the ritual stoning attempted to save her life, killing a boy who was a bystander. None of the men she accused of rape were arrested.”(30)

Stoning is an ancient form of punishment that by its very nature is a communal sacrificial ritual. All members of the village are required to participate either actively or passively. Similar to a firing squad, the concept of stoning is that the individual that delivered the fatal blow cannot be identified and all participants are equal executioners. To try to prevent the punishment is a transgression in itself. A person who interferes with the ritual is an indication that the uncleanness has not been contained, a sign that he has been contaminated by the impurity of the original victim, hence also needs to be sacrificed. True believers actively participate either by enthusiastically cheering, videotaping the spectacle, or actually throwing the stones. The function of the stoning ritual is a communal act of expiation, expelling the pollution of adultery. The purifying elements are blood and earth. Ritualizing the violence justifies it and makes it sacred. Once the transgressors are ritually killed the impurity is removed, the taboo has been ameliorated and justice is served. Videotaping and photographing the ritual murders on cell phones is a new tradition, a peculiar combination of primal tribal sacrifice and modern technology.

Although not a ceremonial ritual murder like stoning there have been some instances where women were buried alive in honor killings. In a remote region of the Baluchistan Province in Pakistan in July 2008 three teenaged girls and two women were buried alive after they were beaten and shot. The three girls aged between sixteen and eighteen were kidnapped by armed local Umrani tribesman and murdered in Baba Kot, a remote village in the Jafferabad district because they wanted to choose their own husbands. The girls were beaten and shot, but still alive when they were thrown into a ditch. When the two older women, relatives of the girls tried to intervene they were also shot and thrown in the ditch. They were all still breathing as mud and stones were shoveled over their bodies. The killings were defended by some politicians from Baluchistan and the brother of a provincial minister was allegedly among the tribesmen who killed the women. Reacting to a female colleague’s attempt to raise the issue in parliament, Israrullah Zehri said such acts were part of a “centuries-old tradition” and he would “continue to defend them.”(31) In February 2010 in Kahta, Turkey, a sixteen-year-old girl Medine Memi was buried alive by relatives because she talked to boys. Her body was found in a sitting position with her hands tied in a six foot hole dug under a chicken coop in the courtyard of her family’s home forty days after she had been reported missing. The hole had been cemented over. According to post mortem reports the teenager had a large amount of soil in her lungs and stomach, had no bruises on her body and no sign of narcotics or poison in her blood, indicating that she was alive and fully conscious when she was buried. Medine Meme’s father and grandfather were arrested for her murder. The girl had made several complaints to police before she went missing, saying that her grandfather beat her because she talked to boys only to be sent home. Her father told relatives that he was unhappy that his daughter, one of nine children, had male friends.(32) Although female infanticide was common in pre Islamic Arabia, specifically the practice of burying female infants alive, there is no modern precedent for teenagers and women. “Pagan Arab men used to bury their newborn daughters alive in the sand, out of shame for having something so low and disgusting like a girl instead of a son.”(33) Strategically this is obviously a method to dispose of and hide the bodies. In other cultures live burials were an ancient form of sacrifice with various functions. Brides, concubines, and slaves were buried alive to provide companionship for the dead in the afterlife, prisoners of war were buried alive as offerings to gods and in some cases sacrificial victims were buried in building foundations as human pillars to ensure the buildings against disasters or enemy attacks. In the context of the Islamist code live burials are another method of honor killing. Like all honor killings they are purification rituals, in the case of live burials, earth is the purifying element. The daughter’s mouth filled with dirt can no longer talk to boys; her father and grandfather effectively buried their shame.

Another archaic form of punishment is being burned alive and hundreds of women each year are disfigured and murdered by fire in honor killings. “Many of the murders are disguised as suicides or accidents with burning oil.”(34) The UN Assistance Mission in Iraq expressed serious concern over the rising incidence of honor crimes in Iraqi Kurdistan, confirming that 255 women had been killed in just the first six months of 2007, three-quarters of them by burning. An earlier report cited 366 cases of women who were the victims of “fire accidents” in Dohuk in 2006, up from 289 the year before, although most were not fatal. In Irbil, the emergency management centre had reported 576 burn cases since 2003, resulting in 358 deaths.(35) In 2006 in Sulaimaniyah, Iraq there were 400 cases of the burning of women.(36) “An employee at the hospital in Erbil stated that burnt women are brought in every day and the home minister in Kurdistan confirmed that this is something that happens daily in Iraqi Kurdistan. Many women die a short time after their arrival at the hospital.”(37) In one of the cases the husband’s motive for setting his wife on fire was that he did not think that he was the father of her baby. “Twenty six year old Najie had been married off to a man ten years her senior. They had only been married eight months before he set fire to her. Her husband watched as she tried to beat out the flames herself. Najie told a Kurdish journalist before her death, “He dragged me into the shower by my hair and threw oil on me. He gave me a lighter. He was holding matches. He said I had to light myself or he would do it himself. He lit the fire and watched while I tried to put out the flames. Then he drove me to the hospital and threatened me, saying that if I told anyone I would be killed with a poison injection.”(38) In March 2009, a sixteen year old Muslim girl suspected of having a relationship with a boy was burned to death by four male neighbors in her village in Ghaziabad, North India. They came to the girl’s house and demanded to know why the young man frequently visited her, and then the men beat her, doused her with kerosene and set her on fire.(39)In July 2011 in Hasanpur village in the Kithaur district of Meerut, India a girl was burned to death by her father and uncle for refusing to marry their chosen groom. Both she and her sister were scheduled to be married and told relatives that they were unhappy with the respective matches. They were both immediately beaten. After the beating Pooja drank poison and her father and uncle burned her alive in a silo instead of taking her to the hospital.(40) Symbolically women who are burned alive are human sacrifices that are being purified through fire. Fire is considered a powerful transformer of the negative to the positive. Because of such properties, fire is commonly found in purification rites throughout the world. In other cultures polluted persons may be required to walk around, jump over, or jump through fire.(41) Historically, burning a person to death was reserved for the most threatening evil, such as heresy or witchcraft and considered an extreme form of purification. In the context of honor killing the use of fire is not only symbolic but practical. Because most of the homes do not have electricity, every house has a large supply of oil, which makes it easier to conceal honor killings under the guise of suicide or kitchen accidents.

It becomes apparent that the type and severity of honor killing punishments are directly proportional to the amount of fear that the man or family has concerning their status in the community and the perceived threat to his manhood. The following are examples of honor killing cases that entailed stabbing, shooting, beheading, slitting the throat, hanging, and dismemberment. An “eighteen-year-old Palestinian man stabbed his teenage sister forty times because of a rumor that she was involved in an extramarital affair. The family thanked God for her death. In an adjacent neighborhood, a sixteen-year-old boy killed his divorced mother, stabbing her repeatedly as he chased her into the street. The boy told authorities he was upset because neighbors were gossiping about her allegedly immoral behavior.”(42) “On May 31, 1994, Kifaya Husayn, a sixteen year old Jordanian girl, was lashed to a chair by her thirty two year old brother. He gave her a drink of water and told her to recite an Islamic prayer. Then he slashed her throat. Immediately afterward, he ran out into the street, waving the bloody knife and crying, ‘I have killed my sister to cleanse my honor.’ Kifaya’s crime? She was raped by another brother, a twenty one year old man. Her judge and jury? Her own uncles, who convinced her eldest brother that Kifaya was too much of a disgrace to the family honor to be allowed to live.”(43) “In Egypt, a father paraded his daughter’s severed head through the streets shouting, “I avenged my honor.”(44) A sixteen-year-old Palestinian girl became pregnant after being raped by her younger brother. Once her condition became known, her family encouraged her older brother to kill her to remove the blemish from their honor. Her brothers, the rapist and the murderer, were exonerated. The girl was blamed. “She made a mistake,” said one of her male cousins. “She had to pay for it.”(45) “An Egyptian who strangled his unmarried pregnant daughter to death and then cut her corpse in eight pieces and threw them in the toilet stated: “Shame kept following me wherever I went [before the murder]. The village’s people had no mercy on me. They were making jokes and mocking me. I couldn’t bear it and decided to put an end to this shame.”(46) “A twenty five year old Palestinian who hung his sister with a rope stated: ‘I did not kill her, but rather helped her to commit suicide and to carry out the death penalty she sentenced herself to. I did it to wash with her blood the family honor that was violated because of her and in response to the will of society that would not have had any mercy on me if I didn’t. . . . Society taught us from childhood that blood is the only solution to wash the honor.’”(47) In July 2011 a Jordanian man confessed to stabbing his twenty-two-year-old wife to death claiming that “he wanted to cleanse his honor after he suspected his wife of bad behavior.”(48) In July 2011 in Faisalabad, Pakistan a father killed six of his daughters because they were “without honor”.(49) There are hundreds of cases with similar statements that refer to shame, humiliation, blood, honor, and manhood.

Honor Killings have migrated to Europe and North America along with other Islamist traditions. There have been numerous incidents in Europe, Canada, and several in the United States. Due to the lack of understanding of these crimes they frequently go unrecognized or are relegated to a category of domestic violence. “Growing awareness of honor killings prompted Scotland Yard to establish a task force in 2004 to reexamine 109 homicides over the previous decade to determine how many were honor-based.”(50) One of the primary reasons Western investigators do not immediately comprehend the nature of these murders is that nothing in their culture prepares them for the prospect of multiple family members including women willingly participating in the murder of their own daughters and other relatives. In the West these crimes are designated as domestic violence and are perceived to be the result of an individual’s spontaneous violent rage instead of a communally sanctioned, premeditated, ritual murder.(51) Izzat Muhaysin, a psychiatrist at the Gaza Program for Mental Health, has a better understanding than his Western counterparts when he “describes the honor killing culture as one in which a man who refrains from “washing shame with blood” is a “coward who is not worthy of living.” Many times, he adds, such a person is described as less than a man.”(52)

Honor killings are simply one of the purification rituals required by the tradition of the Islamist symbolic code. These purification rites are rooted in deep-seated concepts of honor (purity) and dishonor (impurity). Purification rituals serve to remove shame through the elements of fire, earth, water and blood. In Islam there are lengthy treatises on how to purify things that have become impure. There are four categories of purifying agents (mutahirat); 1) water is the primary agent, 2) fire or boiling water, 3) sunlight with other contributory elements such as wind and 4) earth which includes soil, rock, sand, stone, plaster, and lime.(53) Although blood is intrinsically impure (najiis), sacrificial blood is a purifying agent. Since blood represents both life and death, purity and impurity, the use of blood in purification rites is often central to the symbolic renewal process. Honor killings are essentially ritual murders, a sacrificial transformation, an expiation through death in which sins are expelled and purified by the victim’s blood. The purifying elements of blood, fire, and earth are evident in the various types of ritual murders such as stoning and live burials (earth), burning (fire), and stabbing (blood). In the cases of strangulation and hanging, the bodies are often maimed or have blood drawn in some manner. The mutilation and disfigurement of women who are spared death function as a form of symbolic warfare; they become living signs that advertise to other women that this is how you will look if you even consider conforming to Western customs. The ritual murder of women in honor killing is a sacrificial rite that expiates the sin, cleanses the family honor and reinstates manhood to male relatives. The men have reestablished control over the family bloodline and are safe in the knowledge that future children are their biological heirs.

3. Blood Vengeance: Ritual Murder of Enemies

The ritual murder of family members protects the patrilineal bloodline by defending family honor and preventing women from assimilating to other cultures. The ritual murder of enemies protects the patrilineal bloodline by defending sacred land and preventing subjugation by other cultures. The disgrace of occupation evokes even stronger reprisals and more virulent acts of violence than the shame of family dishonor. Dishonor is magnified because the threat has greater consequences, the eradication of the entire culture. Hence, acts of blood vengeance are even more barbaric than honor killings. Frankly, if one can violently kill a mother, daughter, or sister than it is no problem torturing, mutilating, and killing enemies. The ritual murder, mutilation, and desecration of enemies can be analyzed in the context of the signs and symbols of honor and its corollary dishonor and their significance for the Islamist code. These signs have psychological, symbolic, and cultural attributes. According to the Islamist code honor is signified by stereotypical male characteristics such as courage, bravery, heroism, power, virility, and strength; dishonor is signified by stereotypical female characteristics such as weakness, vulnerability, helplessness, and submissiveness. Honor is what defines Islamists as men and psychologically is experienced as dignity and pride; conversely dishonor is indicated by female traits of weakness experienced as humiliation and shame. Islamists are in a constant struggle with fear of disgrace and maintaining manhood, particularly those living in countries that they consider to be occupied or invaded by their enemies. Occupation equates to dishonor, therefore emotions of weakness, helplessness, shame are always just below the surface, triggered by a hypersensitivity to any real or perceived act of humiliation. Even a sideways glance can be misinterpreted as a questioning of manhood.

The Islamist code functions to cultivate this honor-shame paradigm so that boys will grow to be ruthless warriors that require blood vengeance to restore honor and maintain power. The fear of even the appearance of weakness or vulnerability provides one explanation for the extreme punishment of innocent women and the inexplicable torture of enemies. According to the Islamist code, mercy, compassion, sympathy, and kindness symbolize weakness; cruelty, brutality, violence, and atrocity symbolize strength. This explains inexplicable violent acts such as children joyfully participating in the dismemberment of a body, posing for pictures in front of mutilated corpses, and committing a ritual beheading at twelve years old. Children want to evince their strength and alleviate feelings of shame that have been inculcated since birth. Through murder and mutilation these children experience relief from a sense of incomprehensible humiliation, perhaps for the first time. Psychologically they equate their relief with violent atrocity. Symbolically blood cleanses their impurity. Culturally the violence is sanctioned and they are viewed as heroic. As they grow up it becomes natural and moral to punish disrespect with torture, mutilation, and ritual murder. The Islamist symbolic code is so ingrained that even moderate Muslims who have attempted to assimilate to Western culture revert back to violence when their manhood is challenged. This has been exemplified in many honor killing cases in Europe and North America. Particularly, the February 12, 2009 case in suburban Buffalo, New York of Muzzammil Hassan, who used two hunting knives to stab his wife more than forty times in the face, back and chest and then behead her while she was still conscious. Aasiya Hassan had filed for divorce a few days earlier. Muzzammil Hassan was viewed as the model of a moderate Muslim, a former banker who established Bridges TV network in 2004 to counter negative media portrayals of Muslims and to promote cultural understanding. Although he emigrated from his native Pakistan twenty five years earlier, when his manhood, reputation, and honor were in question his shame became so unbearable that ritual murder was the only way to alleviate the disrespect. Hassan did not just shoot his wife, he brought sacrificial knives and took her head with them, ritualizing the violence. Beheadings by their very nature are ritual murders. The purpose of the honor-shame paradigm is to ensure that violence will function as expiation. Blood cleanses shame, mutilation purges disgrace, murder feels good. Ritualizing the violence makes it sacred and sacred violence is always justified, alleviating not just shame but any sense of remorse. “Violence from the point of view of those who engage in it, does not intensify shame, it diminishes it and even reverses it into its opposite, namely, self-respect.”(54) Hassan not only did not feel any guilt or remorse; his defense was to claim he was an abused husband, which from the moral perspective of the Islamist honor code was true. The fact that his wife reported beatings to the police and filed for divorce was felt as abuse and a humiliating attack against his honor requiring vengeance.(55) Hassan had been indoctrinated into the honor-shame paradigm during his first seventeen years growing up in Pakistan, and twenty five years in the United States could not deprogram the inculcated violence mechanisms that were triggered by his loss of face. He saved face by obliterating hers.

The Islamists’ honor code is calculated to intensify feelings of shame, ridicule, and disrespect that can only be alleviated through violence. A semiotic analysis of the victimology and amount of “overkill” in Islamist murders reveals a direct correlation between the specific types of mutilations and the perception of the threat. This is exemplified in the burnings, stonings, and disfigurements of honor killings and was epitomized in the torture, mutilation, and mass murder of 166 people by members of the Islamist Jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, in ten coordinated shooting and bombing attacks across Mumbai, India on November 26-29, 2008. During the siege operation the Jihadists took the time to sexually humiliate, torture, and mutilate some of the victims before shooting them dead. Foreign nationals and Jews were specifically targeted. The doctors working at the hospital where the victims were taken said it was apparent that most of the dead had been tortured. One doctor who had conducted the post-mortem of the victims, said: “Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again.”(56) His claims were corroborated by the Intelligence Bureau during the interrogation of the only surviving terrorist, “During his interrogation, Ajmal Amīr Kasāb said they were specifically asked to target the foreigners, especially the Israelis.”(57) He confirmed that the Nariman House which was home to a Chabad house, a Jewish outreach center that housed an educational center and a synagogue, was the primary target. “Ajmal Kasab reportedly told the police they wanted to send a message to Jews across the world by attacking the ultra-orthodox synagogue.”(58) During the attack six of its occupants, including twenty nine year old Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his twenty eight year old wife, Rivka, who was six months pregnant, were sexually assaulted and their genitalia mutilated before they were killed.”(59) Their two-year-old son, Moshe, may have been beaten by the militants, his back was covered in bruises consistent with abuse.(60) Unconfirmed reports claimed that the Rabbi was castrated and the baby was cut out of the body of his pregnant wife. In a symposium on Islamic terror and mutilation Dr. David Gutmann, emeritus professor of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, attributed the atrocities to “shame” cultures. “The torture, mutilation and murders documented recently in Mumbai are certainly not limited to Kashmiri Jihadists. During the Israeli War of Independence Jewish fighters, including female soldiers captured by Arab irregulars, were routinely tortured and mutilated in the most obscene ways. . . . The Palestinians, along with the majority of Arab males, belong to what has been called a ‘Shame’ culture, in that they are quick to feel humiliated and equally quick to defend against the sense of insult. . . . By mutilating the bodies of their Jewish captives, the Palestinians metaphorically rob them of their manhood. . . . For the members of a Shame culture . . . the aim of torture is to reveal the cowardice and femininity of the foe, and in so doing to export the torturer’s hidden shames onto the enemy, while co-opting his store of courage and hardihood–the masculinity–that he has given up, screamed away, under the knife. ‘Clearly, he and not me, is actually the woman.’ Islam does sponsor, more than any other religion, the Shame cultures which in their turn sanction these terrible rituals.”(61)

This psychological analysis is consistent with the honor-shame paradigm of the Islamist symbolic code. Dishonor is signified by female characteristics, hence, castration is the ultimate symbol of emasculation. Symbolically, “shame dwells not only in the eyes but also the genitals. The relationship between shame and genitals is so close and inextricable that the words for the two are identical in most languages” and the word shame is often used as if it referred only to sexual modesty.(62) Ritually the violence is a cleansing rite that restores honor and purity by removing the polluting organs, the sexual organs that signify masculinity, strength, and the reproduction of more enemy occupiers. Historically, castration was used to eliminate potential opponents. In the Byzantine Empire, for a man to be castrated meant that he was no longer a man, half-dead, “life that was half death”.(63) “Castration also eliminated any chance of heirs being born to threaten either the Emperor or the Emperor’s children’s place at the throne.”(64) In primal warrior rituals the function of dismemberment was to assimilate the strength and virility of the enemy into the warrior. Islamist mutilation has specific symbolic meaning, and historical and theological precedents in Islam, and has been committed in previous wars. The ten Islamist Jihadists who attacked Mumbai were born and trained in Pakistan where there is a long history of religious violence, genocide, and similar mutilations. During the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, a civil war between West Pakistan and East Pakistan allied with India, over 2.5 million Hindus alone were slaughtered by Muslims.(65) Robert E. Burns, the author of Wrath of Allah states, “The mutilation was disgusting: eyes gouged out, pregnant women disemboweled, male genitals cut off, women’s breasts cut off.”(66) Although the terrorists were too young to have witnessed or participated in these atrocities, the handlers who sent them on the Mumbai suicide mission understood the strategic and symbolic benefits of mutilation. The recruits were trained by retired personnel of the Pakistan Army in combat and marine warfare and exposed to Jihadist propaganda that included highlighting alleged atrocities on Muslims in India.(67) “Kasab was indoctrinated into the hate-India campaign by making him believe that he would go to heaven (jannat) for his actions. Sources said that Kasab believed that it was God’s wish that he carry out the attack. “He did not regret the act and insisted that his actions were not against Islam, which is against the killing of innocents, “According to sources, Kasab has not lost his composure and shows no sign of remorse. Kasab believed that his trainers were sent by god to help the ‘jihadis’ carry out these attacks.”(68) In less than one year Islamists took a poor disaffected youth and turned him into a mass murderer who was convinced that his killing was righteous.(69) According to the Islamist code mutilation is not a barbaric act, atrocity sanctifies the violence and brutality is transformed into a sacred ritual that cleanses sin through bloodshed. For Kasab murder was not immoral but righteous blood vengeance that restored honor to Pakistani Muslims and the people of his village. Kasab was inculcated to believe that through murder and mutilation he would acquire strength, alleviate dishonor, and achieve heroic status as a ruthless Mujahideen warrior. Killing was an initiation ritual that transformed him from a poor village boy ashamed of his status in life into a man respected by Islamists all over the world. The Mumbai attacks were martyrdom operations, a suicide mission by young recruits who evinced the Islamist code of honor by engaging in blood rituals that simultaneously served as actual and symbolic warfare, sacrificial purification rites and warrior initiation rituals. The recruits were inculcated through shame and only murder could restore honor. On May 6, 2010 Kasab was sentenced to death and is awaiting execution by hanging; meanwhile he has become famous as the personification of evil and is often burned in effigy on the anniversary of the attacks and during Hindu festivals. On Dussehra, the culmination of the nine-day festival of Navaratri, marking the triumph of good over evil, huge effigies are burned of Kasab instead of the demon king Ravana. During the spring festival of Holi a 45 foot effigy of Kasab was burned in the traditional fire symbolic of the destruction of evil. Kasab’s shame was purified through ritual murder, his victims bloodshed unleashed an epidemic of contagious evil that is being expiated through the fire of Kasab’s effigies. Ritual murder in the form of terrorism precedes symbolic murder in the form of burning effigies which precedes ritual murder in the form of judicial execution. The reciprocal cycle of sacrificial violence, expiation and purification comes full circle.

4. The New Iconoclasm

Symbolically, mutilation is the archetypal sign of dishonor. From a strategic perspective a mutilated victim is forever stigmatized, a living personification of shame, a walking sign of dishonor, and a political advertisement of who is in power. Women are not only raped, tortured, and murdered in honor killings, many are deliberately disfigured. Appearance, particularly for women, is an important aspect of the Islamist symbolic code. Modesty is how women achieve honor and to appear in anything revealing brings shame not only for her but for the entire family. Any perception of impropriety necessitates severe punishments. Almost all Muslim governments encourage and even legally obligate women to dress modestly (hijab), at a minimum to wear a headscarf, in some countries a veil (niqab) and in others a full body covering (burqua). Wearing hijab is enforced by the Taliban regime, and is enforced in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and in the Islamic Republic of Iran as a compulsory part of Sharia law. Punishments for women who appear in public without the prescribed Islamic dress include everything from public floggings, whippings, beatings, burning, disfigurement, and death.(70) Uncovered women are viewed as prostitutes and adulterers and the prevailing attitude is that if an uncovered woman is raped, she asked for it. In September 2006 in a Ramadan sermon on adultery Australia’s most senior Muslim cleric blamed immodestly dressed women who don’t wear hijab for being preyed on by men. Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali alluded to the infamous Sydney gang rapes in 2000, committed by a group of fourteen Lebanese Australian men, suggesting the attackers were not entirely to blame. Sheik Hilali said: “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it . . . whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem.” The sheik then said: “If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.” He said women were “weapons” used by “Satan” to control men. “It is said in the state of zina (adultery), the responsibility falls ninety per cent of the time on the woman. Why? Because she possesses the weapon of enticement (igraa).”(71) According to the extreme patriarchal aspect of the Islamist code women are exclusively sex objects whose sole obligation is to maintain purity and modesty; an uncovered woman is sexually arousing and responsible for unleashing uncontrollable evil. On February 11, 2011, when Egyptians were celebrating the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the blonde haired blue eyed TV journalist Lara Logan who was reporting for CBS News was not wearing a headscarf. Being uncovered it was obvious that she was not an Egyptian Muslim woman, hence she was an open target. Logan was beaten and gang raped by a crowd of three hundred men who were screaming “Jew! Jew!” and “American bitch!” although she is neither Jewish nor American. While Western media seemed to be squeamish about reporting the facts, particularly since they did not fit in with their peaceful narrative of the secular pro-democracy demonstrators, YouTube and some Arab websites reported that at least six men raped her vaginally, and a number of men raped her anally. She was also masturbated and urinated on. There were reports that her left breast was bitten and that the entire left nipple was bitten off. One account claims that somewhere from six to fifty men might have sexually assaulted or beat the reporter.(72) In her one and only interview discussing the attack on 60 Minutes Logan did not provide details of the sexual aspect of the assault but described how her clothes were ripped off, she was beaten with flagpoles and sticks, how the men tried to tear off chunks of her scalp and literally tried to tear the limbs from her body. She remembers people taking cell phone photographs of her naked body and thinking that she was going to die a torturous death that would go on forever and ever.(73) There is no doubt that if she had not been saved by a group of women and twenty Egyptian soldiers they would have torn her limb from limb, which has happened in other Islamist attacks. From a Western perspective this was a crazed mob out of control, for Jihadists this was an acceptable punishment for an infidel unbeliever, an alleged Jew who is less than human, a woman who was not properly covered. They pulled that blonde hair right out of her head and more than likely kept it as souvenirs. What Logan did not understand is that women in Islam are explicitly sexual beings every part of whose body is thought to be erotic. The reason for being covered from head to toe is that a woman’s entire body is viewed as private parts. So if you shake hands with her it is the same as touching her crotch. If she displays her hair, it is the equivalent of exposing her pubic hair. Every square inch of her is sexual.(74) Logan’s gang rape was a primal fraternal ritual. Each assault humiliated her and increased the status of the man. It was even reported that a young boy grabbed her breasts obviously wanting to prove his manhood. Not only will the offenders feel no remorse but they most likely boasted about the rape of the blonde infidel who dared to appear in public uncovered. According to the symbolic code the attack was justified and the men were not responsible because she unleashed evil in the form of uncontrollable sexual urges.

Disfigurement and mutilation is even more common than rape as punishment for not wearing hijab. In Pakistan, Kashmir, and Afghanistan, hundreds of women have been blinded or maimed when acid was thrown on their unveiled faces by men who considered them improperly dressed.”(75) Acid attacks are a popular method of punishment not just for not wearing hijab but also for refusal of arranged marriages; they are used in land and dowry disputes and most often by husbands who have accused their wives of infidelity. Schoolgirls have also been the victims of acid attacks simply for attending school. If the women and girls survive the attacks they are permanently disfigured and often blinded from the hydrochloric or sulfuric acid. Symbolically, acid is a burning ritual, purification through fire. Throwing acid on the face, the only body part permitted to be viewed in public, is intended to socially stigmatize the women, a message that they are of disrepute, bad character, outcasts who engaged in taboo conduct. These women are visible signs of dishonor. Erving Goffman in his classic text “Stigma, notes on the management of spoiled identity” writes, “The Greeks, who were apparently strong on visual aids originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. The signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor–a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places.”(76) Stigma and dishonor are both the intent and result of rape and acid attacks.

Another common form of mutilation is gouging out the woman’s eyes and/or chopping off parts of the woman’s face such as lips, ears and most often the nose. In Western culture victims of domestic abuse and organized crime are also facially disfigured but typically as a result of being beaten or scarred with a knife. Cutting off the nose, lips, ears, tongues and gouging out the eyes has historical, symbolic and magical meaning in the context of the Islamist code of conduct. There are hundreds of women in Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Turkey, and other countries who are mutilated for dishonoring their families. Most cases are not even documented; occasionally they are publicized through women’s and health organizations. In Afghanistan at the age of ten Bibi Aisha was sold to a Taliban fighter to pay off her father’s debt. Child brides are commonly sold into slavery and abused by the entire family. In 2009 at the age of eighteen after suffering years of beatings and torturous abuse she ran away and was caught. After being dragged from her house in the middle of the night she was judged by the local Taliban commander for shaming her in-laws. Punishment was immediate; her brother in law held her down while her husband cut off her nose and ears then left her for dead in the mountains. She managed to crawl to her grandfather’s house and her father got her to an American medical facility. Aisha was the subject of an August 9, 2010 cover story for Time magazine and charities funded her facial reconstruction in the U.S. that involved a prosthetic nose. Most women either die from their injuries or live the rest of their lives in misery.(77) In September 2005 a Pakistani man hacked off the nose and sliced off the lips of his nineteen year old sister-in-law because she went to court to ask for a divorce.(78) In May 2010 in Chandigarh, India a nineteen-year-old bride and her mother-in-law were murdered and the husband was seriously injured by the father, brothers and uncles of the newlywed girl. Her family was angry when they eloped and the community became aware of the couple’s pre-marital affair. They stormed into the mother-in-law’s house with sharp weapons and guns, chopped off the girl’s fingers and stabbed her in the neck and shoulder. There were deep wounds in the mother-in-law’s eye sockets where they attempted to gouge out her eyes, the groom managed to flee with several gunshot injuries. They chose not to attack the grandparents.(79)

A 2009 documentary on Turkish honor killings described numerous murders in detail including an interview with the father of an honor killer in a village close to the Iranian border. The father describes how his son murdered his twenty-one-year-old wife Nazinme Alir because he suspected her of infidelity and was driven mad by the thought of his honor being betrayed; “his son gouged out her eyes, cut her tongue off and put her remains in a plastic bag before burning her. Nearly all the men in the village say they would kill their wives and daughters for honor–life without honor is not worth living.”(80) In Pakistan in 1998 Zahida Parveen weighing less than100 pounds and three months pregnant was bound, gagged, and hung upside down from a rope in her living room by her husband who accused her of having an affair. He beat her with a wooden ax handle, and then used a razor–he was a barber by profession–to cut off the lower lobes of her ears, cut up her tongue and slice off her nose. Then he used a metal rod to gouge her eyes out.(81)The severity of the brutality was most likely the result of him thinking that the baby was not his. In another atypical outcome Zahida Parveen went to the United States and was fitted with prosthetic eyes, ears and nose by former CIA disguise-maker Robert Barron, who was part of a US surgical team who donated their time.(82) In June 2011 thirty three year old Rumana Monzur, a Fullbright scholar and graduate student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver was blinded and had her nose bitten off by her husband when she returned to her home country Bangladesh to write her dissertation. He flew into a rage after she showed him photos on her Facebook page, accusing her of having an affair. During the assault “her husband pressed his fingers into her eyes, gouging them out, gnawed at her cheek, lips, and nose, biting off bits of flesh, blood spilling throughout the room as Monzur flailed. Her daughter, Anusheh, stood in a corner of the room, screaming, as two household servants struggled to open the locked door.”(83) Rumana returned to Vancouver, Canada in July 2011 for further treatment of her eyes.(84) After her husband was arrested for attempted murder he launched a smear campaign against her in the media, attempting to disgrace her for an alleged affair. In a rare display of support this was counteracted in social media where Monzur was defended on many Facebook pages. One Bangladeshi man wrote only, “Shame! Shame! Shame!” against her husband and “The day after the husband’s allegations, a young male Bangladeshi blogger, asked, “Whose face are we saving?”(85)

Women are not the only victims of honor killings, and these types of mutilations are not always specific to punishments for accusations of infidelity or refusals of arranged marriages. Men who refuse arranged marriages or who are accused of being traitors or spies, or simply designated as infidel unbelievers are victims of similar atrocities justified as legal punishments. There are numerous reports of eyes being gouged out, hacking off noses, cutting out tongues, castration, dismemberment, and disemboweling by Islamists all over the world. Similar to women this is part of the honor-shame paradigm. In November 2008 in Kandahar, Afghanistan, armed assailants attacked a farmer and gouged out his eyes in front of his family. The spokesman for the governor of Helmand Province blamed Taliban fighters who often brutally murder innocent Afghans they accuse of being spies.(86) In a tribal dispute in Multan, Pakistan in January 2007, fifteen men armed with small arms, daggers and axes cut off the ears and nose of a Pakistani man who married a woman from their tribe for love without their consent. She was spared only because she was not at home; however, they also chopped the ears off the man’s brother and cut off his mother’s hand.(87) In December 2001, gunmen flagged down a bus outside Kabul, Afghanistan and ordered all men who had shaved their beards to get off the bus, then proceeded to cut off the ears and noses of the six clean shaven men as punishment for defying the Taliban’s order to grow long beards.(88) In May 2011 an Assyrian Christian construction worker was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by Al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq. According to the Kirkuk police “his body was mutilated. His head was nearly severed off. He was tortured before he was executed. His eyes were gouged out, his ears were cut off and his faced was skinned. There were also signs of dog bites on the body.”(89) The worst atrocities are inflicted on Christians and Americans.

The Islamist code inculcates a hypersensitivity to shame and humiliation, a result of the symbolic conditioning of a shame-honor culture in which manhood is always in question. “Punishing others alleviates feelings of shame because it replaces the image of oneself as weak, passive with the contrasting image of oneself as powerful.”(90) The victims of these mutilations are always potential witnesses to the perpetrator’s unspoken and often imagined shame. In order to alleviate the feelings of humiliation and restore a sense of honor he has to destroy the organs that saw it, heard it, and could talk about it. Strategically it sends a message to others to keep their eyes shut, their ears closed and their mouth sealed, stigmatizing the victim as an adulterer, outcast, traitor, or spy. Symbolically the mutilation of eyes, ears, and tongues is the literal manifestation of see no evil, hear no evil,  and speak no evil. The specific mutilation of eyes and tongues were analyzed by prison psychiatrist Dr. James Gilligan who posited the significant role that shame plays in the motives for murder. When presenting the case study of a man who cut out the tongue and eyes of a woman he raped and murdered he states, “To understand or make sense of this man’s mutilation of his victim, which is senseless from any rational standpoint, we need to see it as the concrete, nonverbal expression of the following thought. ‘If I destroy eyes, I will destroy shame’ (for one can only be shamed in the eyes of others); in other words, ‘If I destroy eyes, I cannot be shamed’; and ‘if I destroy tongues, then I cannot be talked about, ridiculed or laughed at: my shamefulness cannot be revealed to others.’ The emotional logic that underlies this particular crime, then, which I call the logic of shame, takes the form of magical thinking that says, ‘if I kill this person in this way, I will kill shame…’ The fact that he focused his attention and hostility on his victim’s eyes and tongue is a valuable clue to his corresponding preoccupation with and hypersensitivity to the fear of being overwhelmed by shame and ridicule.”(91) The rituals surrounding violence, like all rituals, are profoundly symbolic and hence profoundly meaningful; they follow the laws of magical rather than rational thinking. “The mutilation served as a magical means of accomplishing something that even killing one’s victim cannot do, namely that of destroying the feeling of shame itself . . . by means of ritual . . . the murderer can stave off the tidal wave of shame that threatens to engulf him.”(92)

Cutting off noses, gouging out eyes, cutting out tongues, and mutilation of genitalia can be interpreted from more than just a psychological perspective of shame and stigma. Historically, particular facial mutilations were both political and a common method of punishment. In the Byzantine Empire any mutilation, especially facial wounds, would disqualify an individual from taking the throne. Blinding a rival would make it almost impossible for them to lead an army into battle and castration meant that he was no longer a man and eliminated any heirs being born to threaten the Emperor. Rhinokopia, cutting off the nose, was also a method of excluding persons from the imperial dignity, or to punish them for adultery.(93) The sin of adultery was drawn to the face, the invisible illegitimate sexual intercourse made manifest, the social capital of honor circumcised.(94) Dr. Riffat Hassan, a Pakistani-born Islamic theologian, describes the connection between honor and the nose, “There’s a saying in Pakistan that honor is like a person’s nose. If a person dishonors you, they say that person has cut off your nose. It’s a metaphor, but in Pakistan people actually do it.” (95) Symbolically these mutilations are identical to acts of iconoclasm in which sacred objects and images of power are mutilated by having their noses, eyes and faces attacked. The term iconoclasm, is “derived from the Greek eikon (‘image’) and klasma (‘Broken thing’)”, and is defined as “the breaking or destroying of images; especially the destruction of images and pictures set up as objects of veneration.”(96) Honor killings, ritual murder and related atrocities are essentially acts of iconoclasm; people who have been mutilated are broken things. Similar to statues that have been defaced, women who have had their faces damaged are no longer objects of beauty arousing adoration, their value is diminished.

Significant parallels between the mutilation of images and the mutilation of people provide a unique understanding of the semiotics of honor killing, ritual murder, and violent atrocity. Identical to the mutilation of people, in many instances iconoclastic acts were construed as the punishment of images. Pamela Graves in an article titled “From an Archaeology of Iconoclasm to an Anthropology of the Body” describes how attacks on statues in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England were directed against particular parts of the body, the same parts to which capital and corporal punishment were administered. Statues were imprisoned, tried and sentenced as heretics, then burnt in staged public executions similar to the punishments of condemned criminals as witches, heretics, and traitors. There was also public dismemberment of images–the striking of the heads and hands from statues and obliterating their faces. Images were variously burned, drowned, and beheaded. In the Middle Ages images and relics of saints were ritually debased, humiliated, and physically assaulted. Graves demonstrates that the equivalence of punishments meted out to statues and offenders was based on an understanding of the relative role and value of the body parts. The seriousness of the crime was mapped out on the body.(97) “For the most serious of crimes, the most serious of penalties were reserved: the mutilation of ears, lips and tongue, the amputation of hands, feet and ears, the gouging of eyes, or death by hanging, beheading or other means. . . . Burning was for crimes requiring ‘extreme purification by the total elimination of the offender’s body.’”(98) “To put this in context, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a woman accused of whoredom or adultery was given the whore’s mark on her face, often a slit nose. To damage the nose on a male was to imply sodomy. This made the sins of the lower body visible on the face. Scholarly culture of the Middle Ages considered the beauty or physical integrity of the face to reflect the inner honesty and integrity of the soul and taught that facial flaws were signs of sin. Thus to damage or defile the face was to damage reputation and honor.”(99) The Islamist tribal code proscribes these Medieval bodily punishments for similar symbolic, judicial, and psychological reasons, essentially to stigmatize and shame the victim, purify the sin, and restore order and honor to the community. This is exemplified by an incident in Haripur, Pakistan in June 2011; Ansar Bibi, whose husband chopped off her nose after accusing her of having an affair, states “He should have ended my life, rather than leaving me to live with the stigma of being a woman of bad character,” His justification was that he had to save face, she claimed it was because she was unable to bear children.(100)

The parallels between iconoclasm and mutilation also entail more primal magical motivations for the disfigurement of both people and statues. Sympathetic magic is a primal tradition of magical thinking that implies that you can injure, humiliate, or murder a person by injuring or damaging an image of him. This is a classic expression of political iconoclasm: destroy the statues of power and you topple their control. “When a Pharaoh was hated, Egyptians destroyed their statues, hacked their faces from stone images and erased their names from cartouches because they believed that statues contained the spirit of a person. The ancient Egyptians believed that tomb statues could be transformed into living beings through a funerary ritual called the Opening of the Mouth Ceremony. The ‘living statue’ then served as an eternal home for the deceased’s soul. A tomb robber or a person anxious to destroy the soul of a dead enemy simply broke the statue’s nose to prevent the deceased from exacting revenge. Smashing the nose of the statue made it impossible for the figure to breathe; effectively ‘killing’ the statue. Eyes, ears, and mouths were also defaced to destroy the main senses. Symbolically the statues are being deprived of the sensory organs that animated their life force, magically they are being killed. Mutilating the nose and mouth of the statue is the antithesis of the mouth-opening ceremony that brought the inanimate object to life, it is a ritual murder.”(101) Mutilating women by cutting off their ears, lips, and tongues, blinding them, and hacking off their noses symbolically reduces them to inanimate objects, statues that have no spirit.

The concept of image magic is the basis for the ritual execution and punishment of statues and is consistent with an honor-shame paradigm: “if one can be honored by means of an image, one could also be dishonored by one.”(102) Magical thinking is evident in the thousands of effigies burned throughout the world, the beating of statues with shoes, and the mutilation of images of powerful men. Protests that involve effigies are a public shaming of the person represented. The burning is symbolic and cathartic; a purification ritual that punishes the offense, expels the impurity and restores honor to the community. Interestingly, attacks on images frequently focus on the face and particularly the eyes. In his book The Power of Images, art historian David Freedberg suggests that the eyes “are the clearest and most obvious indications of the vitality of the represented figure. The livelier the eyes seem the livelier the body. Take away the eyes and remove the signs of life. . . . Everyone senses that to deprive the image of its eyes, in particular, is to deprive it effectively of its life.”(103) Freedberg also describes attacks in which noses were destroyed, “The Virgin of Michelangelo’s Pieta looks too beautiful, so the man . . . breaks those parts which make her beautiful and therefore make her seem desirable. He destroys her face by breaking her nose . . . not only does she threaten the senses . . . she arouses carnality.”(104) The same iconoclastic impulse was evident in reports of Taliban cleric’s reactions to a 2,000 year old priceless clay statue of a seated bodhisattva that enraged them because it was mostly naked. The Taliban would slap the statue around the head and shoulders, causing museum workers to buy a glass case to protect it.(105) Iconoclasm, honor killing and bodily mutilation share the same symbolic and magical motivations: punishment, public humiliation, purification, and expiation. Eyes are gouged out and blinded with acid to destroy vitality; noses are cut off so the woman is no longer desirable; the body is visibly shamed, the spirit is broken. In protests effigies are burned, in honor killings women are burned. In magical thinking there is a conflation of image and prototype. “The people who assail images do so in order to make clear that they are not afraid of them, and thereby prove their fear. It is not simply fear of what is represented; it is fear of the object itself.”(106)

Islamists are no strangers to iconoclasm and Islam is an aniconic tradition. Muhammad himself removed the idols of the pre-Islamic Arabs from the Ka’abah in Mecca. Interestingly, he first attempted to strike out their eyes with his bow. Muslim iconoclasm derives from the Quranic prohibitions against idolatry. The famous Great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt was mutilated by a Sufi Muslim in the 14th century who chiseled away the nose because Egyptian peasants worshiped the Sphinx as the talisman of the Nile and brought offerings in the hope of increasing their harvest. In the broader sense, iconoclasm refers to religious and political movements throughout history that encompassed not just the destruction of statues and images but also the destruction of churches, temples, and buildings that are symbolic of religious and political power. There have been thousands of incidents of Islamic iconoclasm, particularly conquering Muslim armies that destroyed Hindu and Buddhist temples, statues, images, and icons, then erected mosques in their place, in many instances building on the very foundation of the temples, sometimes using the same stones. This is the basis for one of the arguments against the ground zero mosque, that it is essentially another ‘Victory Mosque’ built on the remnants of sacred buildings destroyed by Muslim armies. Muslim iconoclasm is still very active today, for the same religious and political reasons, and is expressed in destroying sacred places and objects and in many image controversies such as the publication of Muhammad cartoons and the Muhammad episodes of the South Park animated television series. In Afghanistan in the 1990’s seventy percent of the 100,000 relics in the Kabul Museum were looted and approximately 3,000 pieces were destroyed by the Mujahideen. Taliban officials hacked to pieces Buddhas and carvings and anything featuring the human form. In March 2001, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar issued an edict against un-Islamic graven images; as a result, the Taliban militia went across Afghanistan, destroying all pre-Islamic treasures and ancient sculptures. They used explosives, tanks, and anti-aircraft weapons to blow apart the Buddhas of Bamiyan, two monumental statues of standing Buddhas carved into the side of a cliff in the Bamiyan valley of central Afghanistan, built during the 6th century.

In Egypt edicts concerning idols inspired a new wave of iconoclastic attacks. In April 2006 Sheikh Ali Goma’a, the Grand Mufti of Cairo, issued a fatwa which declared it un-Islamic to exhibit statues in homes and although it did not specifically mention statues in museums or public places, it condemned sculptors and their work. This provoked much criticism and fear that the edict would encourage people to attack the thousands of ancient and pharaonic statues at tourist sites across Egypt. In less than two months after the fatwa a woman attacked three artworks in a Cairo Museum before security guards stopped her. She was wearing a burqa and screaming, “Infidels, infidels” during the attack. Her justification was that “She had been listening to the mufti, and was following his orders.”(107) Now fears escalated from Egypt’s antiquities being destroyed to Egypt becoming an Islamist State. In early 2011 both fears started coming to fruition. During the uprising that led to the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on February 11, 2011, the Cairo museum was looted and vandalized. The media focused on the looting aspect and not the fact that vandals took the time to behead and mutilate mummies. Similar to the magical thinking of Ancient Egypt they were destroying the soul of their dead enemies by beheading the mummies. Egyptian fundamentalists have long objected to displays of mummies and ancient religious idols and not simply because of the Islamic prohibition of images. Statues, paintings, artifacts and mummies are totems from other tribes whose very existence is an ongoing humiliation. As long as the idols of other tribes exist the threat of insurrection exists. For this reason, there are legitimate fears that once the Muslim Brotherhood, now operating under the new name Freedom and Justice Party, is placed in power in Egypt that they will conduct an iconoclastic campaign similar to that of the Taliban and will destroy the mummies, museums, pyramids, Coptic Churches, and other symbols of Egypt’s pre-Islamic past, not to mention an escalation in the violent atrocities committed against Coptic Christians. Destroying the symbols of power is a classic sign of victory over the culture.

Iconoclasm is the manifestation par excellence of the Islamist symbolic code. Whether in the form of destroying buildings and statues, mutilating women, honor killing, ritual murder, or terrorism, for Islamists all violence is about restoring honor, serving vengeance, preserving purity, maintaining tradition, and saving face. Iconoclastic acts are a symbolic diminution of power, a deliberate infliction of shame, a public humiliation, and a loss of face. Enemies must be physically and symbolically broken. Idols worshiped by other religions must have their eyes, noses, and faces removed because they signify other traditions that threaten and mock Islamists. Women accused of violating customs must have their eyes, noses, and faces disfigured because they signify disrespect and noncompliance that threaten and mock Islamists. The imagined mockery is experienced as shame that originates and resides in the eyes of the statues and women; both innocent bystanders, they are silent witnesses of imagined disgrace, so they must be gouged out; the tongues that can make public the shame must be excised; the ears that hear the defamation must be cut off and the noses that represent honor must be slashed. Through these specific acts of mutilation the visible signs of shame are now successfully projected onto both animate and inanimate objects. Murder and mutilation in the form of honor killings, ritual violence and iconoclasm cleanses the taboo, breaks the power of the image and the spirit of the person. Without witnesses shame no longer exists. Honor and purity, the essence of the Islamist symbolic code is restored. Face is saved.