Category: Issue Valentine 2021

I’ll confess that I’ve avoided writing a piece like this for a long time. I was afraid a reading that hinged so much on two figures who happened to share a last name would come across as a gimmick. I think I was afraid because I, too, so often feel like I might be a […]

Art always says “And yet!” to life. ~Georg Lukács I’m late to the conversation about Bridgerton—specifically, about its counterfactual premise, which undoes white supremacy in Regency-era England. But I want to jump in from another place, or what looks like another place: not race, but class. I’ll start with a moment in Episode 4 that […]

In June 2011, almost a decade ago now, I received an email with the tantalizing subject line—“A Call for Corsets!”—that has stayed with me. Marilyn Hall, a textiles artist, was asking for help. She had been researching corsetry and how it affected women’s lifestyles during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She was planning to use […]

I am filled with the most intense dread when I imagine anyone Googling my name. Now I know what you’re thinking, but nothing inappropriate or untoward will pop up if you decide to Google me. Instead, you’ll see a few embarrassing attempts at self-construction in the form of old, outdated bios I’ve written describing myself […]

Now it is down to six, or rather we are seven: six poets and one bachelorette. She is the one for me because I can feel what she is thinking. I don’t like seeing you with other poets, behind the candelabra. I am here for the right reasons; those reasons include Greek mythology and maybe […]

“I do” is a performative speech act. You say it in the midst of a marriage ceremony and then you’re wed. “It’s over” is also a performative speech act—when you say it, the relationship ends. But when I said that my marriage was over, I also had to fly to South Carolina to say it […]

Little in my life prepared me for parenthood. I was not raised with a soft spot for children. My own deeply broken family exemplified many of the worst cliches of WASPy upper middle-class repression: my mother died young due to substance abuse, and my father remains so emotionally distant that I have never really known […]

When the seventeenth-century poet John Dryden wanted to celebrate the English King Charles II’s ascent to the throne in 1660, he cast the new King as essentially a sacred being. In “To His Sacred Majesty,” Dryden describes Charles’s coronation in the following lines: Next, to the sacred Temple you are led, Where waites a Crown […]

I once heard Blakey Vermeule, a scholar I admire, describe the challenge of breaking students out of their passion for Jane Austen’s novels as romances in order to introduce them to an analytical mode of response—a challenge that anyone who has taught Austen has faced. Vermeule reported that she usually begins with the following thought […]