Ode to a Spring Uniform

O believe me if all of the flagrant bright blue,

Which to many an eye has brought hurt,

Were to fade in the wash to some delicate hue,

Both the blouse and the unplaited skirt.

Thou wouldst then be more fit for the pupils to wear,

Though thy advocates boost thee sky high,

For this loud awful color is more than we'll bear

If thy shade can be changed by a dye

The American conservatives of the 1960s have arrived at last. Not in Washington, not in positions of power – they did that during the “Reagan Revolution” of the 1980s and the Republican Congresses of the 1990s. No, it is in history itself, the record of events, that the right is finally appearing. Now that the elephant has occupied the parlor, scholars are inquiring whence it came.

The autobiographical Prologue to Toni Cade Bambara's Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999) provides an intensely localized narrative cartography of a working-class, African American neighborhood in southwest Atlanta circa 1981. We witness the authorial figure “running down the streets of southwest Atlanta like a crazy woman” – running because “[a] cab can't jump the gully back of the fish joint and can't take the shortcut through the Laundromat lot.” Bambara does not detail these quotidian geographies just for the sake of it: her novel is immersed in the period (1979–81) when Atlanta's black community was both torn asunder and brought together by the disappearance and death of a number of local children. The Prologue's protagonist walks through the wooded lot because, in such secluded spaces, she might find evidence that will help to solve the Atlanta Child Murders: “You stub your toe on brown glass … you pry loose a crusty beer bottle … beneath the bottle is a rain-blurred Popsicle wrapper. Late summer, you figure, moving on.” The narrator runs frantically because she is supposed to collect her twelve-year-old child (apparently Bambara's own daughter, Karma) from school in a time and place when local youths are going missing, and being found murdered.

On the morning of 16 March 1968, the men of Charlie Company, 11th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division, US Army, entered the village of Son My, on the coast of Central Vietnam. The company was led by Captain Ernest Medina. In charge of the company's 1st Platoon was Lieutenant William Calley. The company encountered no enemy forces, no opposing fire of any kind. Its only casualty was self-inflicted. Nevertheless, by early afternoon, over 400 villagers lay dead. Those killed were – almost exclusively – either women, old men or small children. For many of the women, rape had preceded death. Other victims had been tortured and mutilated, then killed. Much of the killing, though not all, had occurred in the collection of hamlets known by the Americans as My Lai 4 and had been conducted by 1st Platoon.

Edith Wharton's ghost stories have usually been seen as skilful appropriations of the Gothic that allowed her, in Kathy Fedorko's words, to dramatise “the conflict between male and female selves in a ‘dialogue with the unconscious.’” They are also vehicles through which she expresses not only her indebtedness to her precursors in the Gothic mode, such as the Brontës, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Louis Stevenson and Sheridan Le Fanu, but also her independence from them. In this article we shall argue that some of Wharton's ghost stories contain a further dimension, beyond allusion, where they shift into a parodic and humorous strain that enables her to engage self-reflexively with the Gothic tradition. Here we define parody as a literary mode that, whilst engaging with a target text or genre, exhibits a keen sense of the comic, an acute awareness of intertextuality and an engagement with the idea of metafiction. This is a deliberately generous and inclusive definition that differs, for example, from some postmodern definitions of parody which (perhaps in an attempt to elevate its cultural function) minimise or excise the importance of comedy as an aspect of parody. We would suggest, furthermore, that it differs from travesty, pastiche and satire in that travesty reduces the target text to something ludicrous, pastiche “works by imitation rather than direct transformation” and satire does not necessarily engage with precursive texts.

In October 1844, on returning to the United States after the four years at sea which became the basis of the majority of his early novels, Herman Melville discovered that his elder brother Gansevoort had become a political orator of national notoriety and a major figure in the Democratic presidential campaign of that year. Gansevoort Melville's political preferences, as widely reported in the newspapers of the day, were for a post-Jacksonian populism which denounced the aristocratic foppery of the Whigs and urged the immediate annexation of Texas in the name of free, white labor. His patriotic invocations of the virtues of salt-of-the-earth republicanism and the American workingman were, that year at least, hardly matched. Described in contemporary reports as “the orator of the human race” and “the great New York orator” he addressed audiences of thousands throughout New York State and at Democratic meetings as far afield as Tennessee and Ohio. He coined the respectful, evocative and adhesive nickname “Young Hickory” for James Polk the Democrat's presidential candidate and in August made a symbolic visit to the ailing Andrew Jackson. According to Hershel Parker, Melville's most recent and most exhaustive biographer, Herman spent the final days of the campaign with his brother probably participating in a huge torchlight procession through Manhattan and listening to his climactic election-night address in Newark, New Jersey.