It's Been a While, and Still Some Things Don't Ever Change

Long time, no see. America is drowning from a recent tea party (btw, totally symbolically boycotted tea on Election Day and got all of my caffeine from coffee, despite my preference for tea!), and in the world of fictional narratives, maybe nothing's different. Despite national turmoil.

Right now, I'm teaching a section of freshman comp in the Rutgers-Newark Writing Program, and we're moving into a unit on heroes. We've started with part of the introduction to Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which Campbell argues for what he calls the "monomyth": It's very Jungian, in that Campbell posits that there are archetypes that recur throughout cultures. And we've basically been dealing with the same kinds of stories. It's the context that's different, the names and faces and particular quirks of characters that are unique.

That seems to be a popular opinion in what I've been reading as of late. In A Short Story Writer's Companion, Tom Bailey argues that it's characters that make stories different and meaningful. This is not unlike Campbell's monomyth, which has been appropriated by modern tale tellers like George Lucas.

How'd I get on this tangent? The most recent update to Kate Beaton's webcomic Hark! A Vagrant! Beaton lampoons Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in a series of strips that place Friday as the more intelligent, sophisticated of the two. The purpose behind Beaton's comic is to mock a recurring film archetype that she read about in the Bright Lights Film Journal, in which Frederick Zackel argues that we've been seeing Robinson Crusoe's master-slave/white-black dialectic played for years. And it's everywhere. Yet we've been overlooking it in to address other concerns. Zackel writes,

For instance, we all remember the brouhaha about whether the 1993 movie Rising Sun actually represented Japan-bashing. Yet none of us seemed to have noticed that the two male leads in that movie, Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, were busy reenacting (or maybe "perpetuating" is a better word) one of the oldest fictional partnerships in our Western culture.

Englishman Connery played the part of Robinson Crusoe, while Snipes, a descendant of slaves, played his Man Friday. Not that those were their characters' names, of course. Not that either man realized what they were reenacting, either. Nor can either man be blamed for his part in perpetuating the myth.

First of all, I take offense to his referring to Sean Connery as an "Englishman," but his point is that Connery's and Snipes's characters are reenacting/perpetuating (his words) the Robinson Crusoe/Friday model. And it's not just Rising Sun; other movies, like Men in Black, have the older, wiser, patriarchal white male figure overseeing, guiding, and correcting a black counterpart (Tommy Lee Jones with Will Smith, for instance).

But seriously--Sean Connery is a Scot. Mr. Zackel is perpetuating his own stereotype--that Scots are happily English. But just as the rise of the Scottish parliament speaks towards Scotland's move toward freedom, so too should we try to craft into our fictions a move away from the Crusoe/Friday paradigm (first African American president, anybody?). Otherwise, nothing will ever change.

Once upon a Time, There Was a Ralph Lauren [stereotype-laden] Fairy Tale...

Well, Ralph Lauren has decided that apparently there's something to all the hype about children's lit. After all, their most recent children's catalogue is an interactive Flash video modeled after a storybook.

Harry Connick, Jr. narrates The RL Gang: A Fantastically Amazing School Adventure, which puts stylish kids in Ralph Lauren designs against backdrops that appear as either paper cutouts or chalk drawings. And if one listens to the stories, they're...well, hardly fantastic.

Willow, the first child shown in the video, represents the extreme of this back-to-school fantasy; she resembles a modern day Robin Hood with her hat--a style that, no doubt, is not about to earn her any props on the playground. (It may, however, clinch her the lead in the elementary school's production of Peter Pan!) The other children in the video become less stylized and seem poised to sell Ralph Lauren's brand of cultural and ethnic identities to school children.

Clothes--yes, they certainly can be exciting, especially for fashionistas and those who enjoy a nice, new sweater. But these kids are being dressed up like their 20-something equivalents. There's Jasper, whose polo shirt, baseball mitt, and wavy blonde hair make him look like he's about to go recruiting for TKE. (Thank your lucky stars that his collar *isn't* popped.) Then Mae, the Asian girl, who wears a sweater over a collared shirt; it's as if the RL ad department has already relegated her to a life of crunching numbers and whipping out laptops or TI-83s whenever a problem appears. The worst of the lot, though, is Zoe, an African American girl with large, frizzed hair forced under a knit cap; her hair sags down around the sides of her face like Snoopy ears, and she's dressed in a flannel shirt under what appears to be a black, pleather bomber's jacket.

Ralph Lauren is dolling kids up as stereotypes before they're even old enough to understand what they're lampooning. But--if that weren't enough--you can click on each child's image and open their closet, which can help parents foist these fashions (er, stereotypes) on their kids. Or, just buy the hardcover book!

All this from the world's "first shoppable storybook," a narrative catalogue in stereotypes. Respond as you will.