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Richard Marsh The Beetle (1897) - Coggle Diagram
Richard Marsh
The Beetle
(1897)
"loins"
pg 50--seeing the eyes; "glued and unglued" stickiness, "squelching" "Higher and higher! It had gained my loins!" (51)--skin crawling
phenomenology and affect: this repulses us, we shiver or cringe, it's about engaging audiences' bodies
if this negatively orients us AWAY from the Beetle, how are we thus "oriented" to other ideas of sex, sexuality, race?
orients us away from "foreign" bodies: "There was a quality in the voice which I cannot describe. Not only an accent of command, but a something malicious, a something saturnine. It was a little guttural, though whether it was a man speaking I could not have positively said; but I had no doubt it was a foreigner." (pg 52, beginning of chpt 3); certainly aligns us against the "foreign," and it hints at homosexuality with the setting and man in the bed
"I could not at once decide if it was a man or a woman. Indeed at first I doubted if it was anything human. But, afterwards, I knew it to be a man, --for this reason, if no other, that it was impossile such a creature could be feminine" (53) --women can't be ugly? "it" dehumanizes
"Then, whether I was dead or living, I said to myself that this could be nothing human,--nothing fashioned in God’s image could wear such a shape as that"
What parts of the body is Marsh via Holt marking/noting here (pg 53): eyes, nose, lips, "saffron yellow skin"; ways of marking racist difference; phrenology
erotic reifying/upholidng/praising of whiteness: What a white skin you have,--how white! What would I not give for a skin as white as that,--ah yes!’"
The queer threats and sex acts:
Paul Lessingham:Is there a better thing than to be his wife" (64); "ideal" man--white, strong, "straight" in bodyl and a civic-minded politician
"You with your white skin, if I were a woman, would you not take me for a wife" (86)
Even then I was struck by something pleasant in his voice, and some quality as of sunshine in his handsome face.
privacy and break ins
how does this work for fantasies of men being autonomous/in control?
it's also in a bedroom so like...how is this about will/compulsory (chp 3 the man in the bed)
"Paul Lessingham's impenetrability is proverbial" (75) : he is unfazed; also not gay; his coolness remains unruffled
a
THE BEETLE!--pg 76 "I gazed at the frightened figure [...] the god of my political idolotry" (76)--Holt stans
"all the muscles of his face and all the limbs in his body seemed to be in motion at once" (77)--panic attack;
body-mind control / possession
"For the time I was no longer a man; my manhood was merged with his. I was, in the extremest sense, an example of passive obedience" (54)--certainly about the loss of autonomy; "Passive obedience" means not man??? (shows how overdetermined masculinity is based on autonomy
if to be a human means to be autonomous, then this is about dehumanizing
"What he willed that I should say" (54)--it's a strange word; what is the relationshiop between "will" and one's own actions? Shows someone is doing the actions for him?
possession / sexual possession correlates to consensual; Marsh imagines same sex acst as rape
Narration style: first person perspective with Holt; fosters sympathy
hungry, broke, unhoused; homeless clerk;
"tramp" -- "with heavy force" (verb); transient, negative connotation one who moves place to place; tramp as promiscuous woman? (1922 so probs not this definition of tramp, but that's cool)
"depressed in mind and body"--""(of a person) in a state of unhappiness and despondency""
lost guy--how does this shape ideas of masculinity? If masculinity supposed to mean "one who is not lost" and in control of himself, then this seems to be making "man" vulnerable
gender variance
"I wondered if I could by any possibility have blundered, and mistaken a woman for a man"