Review of Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart by Gavin Hopps, Continuum: 2009.
Gavin Hopps takes seriously Morrissey’s claim that when he formed The Smiths he ceased to be Steven Patrick Morrissey. Hopps explains that, “rather like the portrait in Dorian Gray’s attic”:
“Morrissey’s eponymous creation began acquiring a quasi-life of its own – a dramatically constituted life, to which every lyric and public act would contribute – which effectively consumed its creator. This sublimation of self seems to have been consciously willed by the singer. When asked in an interview ‘Is Steven Morrissey dead?’ he replied, “Yes, when the Smiths began it was very important that I wouldn’t be that horrible, stupid, sloppy Steven. He would have to be locked in a box and put on top of the wardrobe. I needed to feel differently and rather than adopt some glamorous pop star name, I eradicated Steven, which seemed to make perfect sense. Suddenly I was a totally different person.” (12)
That person is the subject of this biography. Morrissey: the Pageant of His Bleeding Heart aims to strike a difficult balance, studying the life of the persona that is Morrissey with little support from details of the actual man’s life. Morrissey’s songs with The Smiths and solo, both as works of lyrical poetry and as pieces of music, along with his remarks to the media, his performances on stage and in music videos, and visual works such as album covers and magazine photo spreads constitute the curriculum vitae that Hopps examines.
It is probably no truer that the Morrissey we know is not really Steven Patrick Morrissey than it is true that Madonna is a distinct person from Madonna Louise Ciccone. However, Hopps makes the prescient point that while Madonna is best viewed as a protean figure whose very mercuriality is more remarkable than any of her individual manufactured images, Morrissey has been relatively constant. He has merely matured a little, not evolved, over the two decades of his career. A star fixed in the firmament, his public persona invites sustained scrutiny.
Pop music fans feel that we form personal connections with our idols, but can we really know them in any meaningful way? Morrissey himself describes the devoted fan of a dead pop star as “a child from those ugly new houses / who could never begin to know” in the song “Paint a Vulgar Picture.” Hopps critically examines the traditional assumption of popular music critics that they are able, by matching up biographical data with textual analysis of songs, to explain the essence of the artist. In fact, rock critics have typically taken that as their duty, and consumers have presumably read books and magazine profiles specifically to learn about the real people they idolize. Contemporary popular music is the most personal art form our civilization has ever known, often seeming to be the ultimate expression of a post-ironic age. Even those of us who should know better like to believe that the best pop singers really do “spill some blood on the page,” as Mick Jagger sang decades ago.
However, Hopps’ assertion that “Morrissey is undoubtedly the most literary singer in the history of British popular music” (xi) relies in part on the knowledge that even when Morrissey seems to be painfully confessional there is always ironic distance between the man and the performance. Of course, Hopps makes this assertion to justify Morrissey as an object of study, but he does not want to present Morrissey as something exceptional. He wants utilize the clarity of Morrissey’s earnest contrivance to present a model of how we should study any pop musician.
Hopps reveals Morrissey to be a figure capable of simultaneously representing many contradictory notions. Similarly, Gilbert Rodman writes of Elvis Presley, “that Elvis is an incredibly full signifier, one that is already intimately bound up with an entire range of important cultural mythologies.” [1] The significant difference here is that Rodman implies that the process of weaving Elvis into these mythologies occurs outside of Elvis himself. Morrissey, on the other hand, represents contradictory notions only because he is such a skilled poet and performer, without any mythology that would present him as a savant.
Hopps endeavors to work with the extent literature on Morrissey generated by rock critics while also setting himself apart from it. He quotes from the work of Simon Goddard, Johnny Rogan, Mark Simpson, and David Bret when they offer observations upon which he can expand, but also takes opportunities to point out their shortcomings, from the perspective of an academic. Hopps consistently avoids one particular affectation fairly common among both rock critics and academics who write about Morrissey: to refer to him as Moz or Mozzer. These common friendly diminutives of this common Irish surname would be more commonly applied to a pub mate than an effete aesthete, emphasizing one’s intimacy with Morrissey. Instead, Hopps chooses to refer to him as “the singer,” thereby sticking to the conventions of literary criticism – by which one would commonly refer to one’s subject as “the writer,” “the poet,” or “the author” – while also emphasizing that he is studying the performed artistic persona and not the man. Additionally, in this way Hopps subtly places Morrissey in something like the cinematic auteur tradition. By giving all credit for the finished product of a song to “the singer” Morrissey, Hopps elides the work of the songwriter or the guitarist Johnny Marr, the producer John Porter, or whomever else may have had a hand in the production process, thereby remaining consistent with the perspective of the common consumer.
Inveighing his strongest sweeping criticism of those who have written about Morrissey before him, Hopps declares of his own analysis:
“[Chapters one through three] highlight a range of epistemological issues whose significance has been neglected. Most discussions of Morrissey’s lyrics, for example, consider his allusions to other songs, films and novels, etc. Yet such inquiries inevitably have a ‘trainspotterly’ character and tend only to be concerned with the question: where is it from?” (8)
Clearly, Goddard, et al, would defend themselves by saying that they would rather give their readers what they want than talk over their heads. Most rock fans are satisfied to know who their favorite musicians’ influences may be, and the process of sampling hooks and fragments of lyric is rarely more than a matter of pastiche anyway. Hopps, however, applies his critical skills to place Morrissey in context with the British canon, including John Betjemen and Philip Larkin.
Perhaps Hopps’ most perceptive remarks concern the relationships between Morrissey and Oscar Wilde and William Browning. Of course, Hopps is very far from the first person to compare Morrissey and Wilde; Morrissey himself has done so repeatedly. However, Hopps does an excellent job throughout the book of explaining many aspects of Wilde’s relevance viz. Morrissey, whereas other commentators often seem to merely use “Oscar Wilde” as a signifier for Morrissey’s dandyism, or as a midbrow strategy to imply that he is gay. Hopps provocatively compares The Smiths’ “The Boy With the Thorn In His Side” to Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose,” in which the songbird is only able to sing its most beautiful song when a thorn pierces its heart. Hopps’ comparison of Wilde and Morrissey works particularly well in reference to the conspicuous use of flowers by Morrissey and his fans. Hopps explains that the two Irish-English artists both play with flowers to underscore the ironies of nature, since it is often unnatural for a man to associate himself with something so natural, and hothouse creations such as Wilde’s beloved green carnations are always already unnatural. Floral details are among the ways Hopps ties the Morrissey oeuvre to Wilde’s De Profundis:
“[W]here he speaks of Christ as the first to say that people should live ‘flower-like lives.’ Morrissey, as we know, picks up the phrase in ‘Miserable Lie’; although we should notice that the speaker applies it to himself, and subtly alters its connotations in the process (‘you have destroyed my flower-like life’). This statement is typical of Morrissey’s early lyrics and contributes to a pervasive impression of vulnerability. “(20)
In Morrissey’s time the idea that to be truly masculine a man should also be emotionally vulnerable is still not a universally accepted truth in Western society, making the work of these two artists all the more profound.
Comparisons to Wilde of course help Hopps place Morrissey in the camp tradition, since Wilde so clearly influenced Susan Sontag’s conception of camp. Of course, one way to define camp is as the dominant employment of lightness in Anglo culture, and Hopps successfully defends the lightness of Morrissey. “Lightness,” writes Hopps, “has had an extremely bad press and has oddly come to be a term of abuse” (96). Exhibiting the kind of disgust for popular culture that Andrew Ross describes in No Respect, Hopps shows that rock critics, in arguing for the artistic importance of pop music, exalt the heaviest of the genre in expense of the lightest. As Hopps argues so effectively:
“There is obviously something quite crazy about this. It is like criticizing Beaujolais for not being Claret. In many cases, lightness isn’t a deficiency of seriousness or an anemic version of something else, it is its own thing. Its delicacy, its mobility, its ‘only’ being this or that, its repudiation of gravity or heaviness may be – as it is in the finest china, the movement of Galina Uvanova, or the passing of David Beckham – the result of the most exquisite skill and evidence of alternative aims. ” (97)
Following this logic, Hopps argues for the merits of songs and passages of songs that may make even Morrissey’s most ardent fans cringe, such as: Carry On inspired numbers like “Vicar in a Tutu” and “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others”; outsized puns like “Roy’s Keen”; falsetto indulgences, such as the final two minutes of “Miserable Lie”; yodeling, as in the coda of “The Boy With The Thorn In His Side”; and the Bakhtinian carnivalesque grunts, belches, and other noises that punctuate songs throughout the Morrissey catalog and often fill gaps between songs in concert.
However sad the necessity of it may be, Hopps’ comparison of Morrissey’s lyrics and the dramatic monologs of Robert Browning is valuable. Part of Hopps’ frustration with rock critics’ condemnation of lightness is that they expect songs to be clearly about something, judging the songs by how well they represent worthwhile subjects, and light songs may either be about nothing at all or something very silly. Meanwhile, Morrissey also gets in trouble when his songs are fairly heavy but are grounded in a seedy perspective, particularly the unseemly nationalism of “We’ll Let You Know,” “Bengali in Platforms,” and “National Front Disco.” Of course, Morrissey is no more an English racist than the poet who wrote “My Last Duchess” and “Porphyria’s Lover” was a murderous misogynist, but even the most erudite Morrissey listener might fail to extend him the charity of ironic distance. One need not hold degrees in literature to understand that Morrissey’s greatest artistic gift has been the ability to consistently defend the validity of outsider perspectives, yet we might forget that reactionary conservatism is itself an outsider perspective worthy of artistic treatment.
The final two chapters are the most difficult for Hopps’ project, since they deal with Morrissey’s allegedly bleeding heart without attempting to delve into the man’s soul. The penultimate chapter explores the complexities of Morrissey’s sexuality. It is unlikely that anything relating to Morrissey has been discussed more, since he has steadfastly insisted upon his celibacy to interviewers throughout his career while evincing himself to be a sexual polymath, though at other times championing abstinence, in his lyrics. Here, as elsewhere, Hopps portrays his subject as an artist capable of occupying multiple positions with equal dexterity, often within the same song, while very little of Morrissey may be in there at all.
Some of Hopps’ most nimble scholarship comes through in this chapter, as he deploys Slavoj Zizek’s commentary on the impossibility of satisfaction to explain Morrissey’s overdetermined sexual frustrations. According to Zizek, desire desires not satisfaction but the perpetuation of desire itself. “[W]hether or not [this theory] adequately explains what’s going on,” explains Hopps, “it helps us to discern certain patterns of nonsatisfaction in Morrissey’s lyrics,” because he repeatedly, in songs such as “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” depicts subjects who want something until they obtain it and find it to be ultimately undesirable or illusory (202).
The final chapter is more problematic, because it deals with issues of spirituality in Morrissey’s musical catalog. Given the title of this book and Hopps’ position as a fellow at a divinity school, one might have expected the entire book to be a hagiography; in fact, The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart is far from that, directly opposed to Simpson’s Saint Morrissey. The fact that Morrissey’s most recent albums have included songs such as “Dear God, Please Help Me” certainly invites a critic to conclude that, in his own way, Morrissey has come around to confront the role of religion in his life. Hopps, however, provocatively claims that Catholic faith has always been “The Light That Never Goes Out” for Morrissey, as it was for his idol the “weird lover” Wilde.
Hopps is most convincing in this regard when offering a close reading of Morrissey’s “I Have Forgiven Jesus,” in which the singer asks his creator why he tortures him with love that he cannot express, causing him to hate himself. Hopps compares these lyrics to the lamentations of Job. One may be shocked by the video for this song, in which Morrissey appears in the figure of a priest saying his morning prayers, but Hopps assures his reader that when Morrissey makes the sign of the cross he is not just thumbing his nose, for to be sacrilegious is still to be religious. His faith may not be orthodox but it is genuine, according to Hopps, as expressed through his lyrics and his performance of them.
Note that Hopps’ title promises to examine the pageant, not the passion, of Morrissey’s bleeding heart. The subject under examination is not a saintly pop singer. Morrissey is a complex mass culture simulacrum of saintliness within our secular society that contains genuinely spiritual elements, including the willingness to be unflinchingly vulnerable.
Work Cited
[1] Rodman, Gilbert. “A Hero to Most?: Myth, and the Politics of Race.” Cultural Studies, 8(3), 1994, pp. 457.
Richard E. Otten is an adjunct professor of American Studies at Anne Arundel Community College and a Cultural Studies Ph.D. student at George Mason University.
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Morrissey’s Flower-Like Life
Review of Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart by Gavin Hopps, Continuum: 2009.
Gavin Hopps takes seriously Morrissey’s claim that when he formed The Smiths he ceased to be Steven Patrick Morrissey. Hopps explains that, “rather like the portrait in Dorian Gray’s attic”:
“Morrissey’s eponymous creation began acquiring a quasi-life of its own – a dramatically constituted life, to which every lyric and public act would contribute – which effectively consumed its creator. This sublimation of self seems to have been consciously willed by the singer. When asked in an interview ‘Is Steven Morrissey dead?’ he replied, “Yes, when the Smiths began it was very important that I wouldn’t be that horrible, stupid, sloppy Steven. He would have to be locked in a box and put on top of the wardrobe. I needed to feel differently and rather than adopt some glamorous pop star name, I eradicated Steven, which seemed to make perfect sense. Suddenly I was a totally different person.” (12)
That person is the subject of this biography. Morrissey: the Pageant of His Bleeding Heart aims to strike a difficult balance, studying the life of the persona that is Morrissey with little support from details of the actual man’s life. Morrissey’s songs with The Smiths and solo, both as works of lyrical poetry and as pieces of music, along with his remarks to the media, his performances on stage and in music videos, and visual works such as album covers and magazine photo spreads constitute the curriculum vitae that Hopps examines.
It is probably no truer that the Morrissey we know is not really Steven Patrick Morrissey than it is true that Madonna is a distinct person from Madonna Louise Ciccone. However, Hopps makes the prescient point that while Madonna is best viewed as a protean figure whose very mercuriality is more remarkable than any of her individual manufactured images, Morrissey has been relatively constant. He has merely matured a little, not evolved, over the two decades of his career. A star fixed in the firmament, his public persona invites sustained scrutiny.
Pop music fans feel that we form personal connections with our idols, but can we really know them in any meaningful way? Morrissey himself describes the devoted fan of a dead pop star as “a child from those ugly new houses / who could never begin to know” in the song “Paint a Vulgar Picture.” Hopps critically examines the traditional assumption of popular music critics that they are able, by matching up biographical data with textual analysis of songs, to explain the essence of the artist. In fact, rock critics have typically taken that as their duty, and consumers have presumably read books and magazine profiles specifically to learn about the real people they idolize. Contemporary popular music is the most personal art form our civilization has ever known, often seeming to be the ultimate expression of a post-ironic age. Even those of us who should know better like to believe that the best pop singers really do “spill some blood on the page,” as Mick Jagger sang decades ago.
However, Hopps’ assertion that “Morrissey is undoubtedly the most literary singer in the history of British popular music” (xi) relies in part on the knowledge that even when Morrissey seems to be painfully confessional there is always ironic distance between the man and the performance. Of course, Hopps makes this assertion to justify Morrissey as an object of study, but he does not want to present Morrissey as something exceptional. He wants utilize the clarity of Morrissey’s earnest contrivance to present a model of how we should study any pop musician.
Hopps reveals Morrissey to be a figure capable of simultaneously representing many contradictory notions. Similarly, Gilbert Rodman writes of Elvis Presley, “that Elvis is an incredibly full signifier, one that is already intimately bound up with an entire range of important cultural mythologies.” [1] The significant difference here is that Rodman implies that the process of weaving Elvis into these mythologies occurs outside of Elvis himself. Morrissey, on the other hand, represents contradictory notions only because he is such a skilled poet and performer, without any mythology that would present him as a savant.
Hopps endeavors to work with the extent literature on Morrissey generated by rock critics while also setting himself apart from it. He quotes from the work of Simon Goddard, Johnny Rogan, Mark Simpson, and David Bret when they offer observations upon which he can expand, but also takes opportunities to point out their shortcomings, from the perspective of an academic. Hopps consistently avoids one particular affectation fairly common among both rock critics and academics who write about Morrissey: to refer to him as Moz or Mozzer. These common friendly diminutives of this common Irish surname would be more commonly applied to a pub mate than an effete aesthete, emphasizing one’s intimacy with Morrissey. Instead, Hopps chooses to refer to him as “the singer,” thereby sticking to the conventions of literary criticism – by which one would commonly refer to one’s subject as “the writer,” “the poet,” or “the author” – while also emphasizing that he is studying the performed artistic persona and not the man. Additionally, in this way Hopps subtly places Morrissey in something like the cinematic auteur tradition. By giving all credit for the finished product of a song to “the singer” Morrissey, Hopps elides the work of the songwriter or the guitarist Johnny Marr, the producer John Porter, or whomever else may have had a hand in the production process, thereby remaining consistent with the perspective of the common consumer.
Inveighing his strongest sweeping criticism of those who have written about Morrissey before him, Hopps declares of his own analysis:
“[Chapters one through three] highlight a range of epistemological issues whose significance has been neglected. Most discussions of Morrissey’s lyrics, for example, consider his allusions to other songs, films and novels, etc. Yet such inquiries inevitably have a ‘trainspotterly’ character and tend only to be concerned with the question: where is it from?” (8)
Clearly, Goddard, et al, would defend themselves by saying that they would rather give their readers what they want than talk over their heads. Most rock fans are satisfied to know who their favorite musicians’ influences may be, and the process of sampling hooks and fragments of lyric is rarely more than a matter of pastiche anyway. Hopps, however, applies his critical skills to place Morrissey in context with the British canon, including John Betjemen and Philip Larkin.
Perhaps Hopps’ most perceptive remarks concern the relationships between Morrissey and Oscar Wilde and William Browning. Of course, Hopps is very far from the first person to compare Morrissey and Wilde; Morrissey himself has done so repeatedly. However, Hopps does an excellent job throughout the book of explaining many aspects of Wilde’s relevance viz. Morrissey, whereas other commentators often seem to merely use “Oscar Wilde” as a signifier for Morrissey’s dandyism, or as a midbrow strategy to imply that he is gay. Hopps provocatively compares The Smiths’ “The Boy With the Thorn In His Side” to Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose,” in which the songbird is only able to sing its most beautiful song when a thorn pierces its heart. Hopps’ comparison of Wilde and Morrissey works particularly well in reference to the conspicuous use of flowers by Morrissey and his fans. Hopps explains that the two Irish-English artists both play with flowers to underscore the ironies of nature, since it is often unnatural for a man to associate himself with something so natural, and hothouse creations such as Wilde’s beloved green carnations are always already unnatural. Floral details are among the ways Hopps ties the Morrissey oeuvre to Wilde’s De Profundis:
“[W]here he speaks of Christ as the first to say that people should live ‘flower-like lives.’ Morrissey, as we know, picks up the phrase in ‘Miserable Lie’; although we should notice that the speaker applies it to himself, and subtly alters its connotations in the process (‘you have destroyed my flower-like life’). This statement is typical of Morrissey’s early lyrics and contributes to a pervasive impression of vulnerability. “(20)
In Morrissey’s time the idea that to be truly masculine a man should also be emotionally vulnerable is still not a universally accepted truth in Western society, making the work of these two artists all the more profound.
Comparisons to Wilde of course help Hopps place Morrissey in the camp tradition, since Wilde so clearly influenced Susan Sontag’s conception of camp. Of course, one way to define camp is as the dominant employment of lightness in Anglo culture, and Hopps successfully defends the lightness of Morrissey. “Lightness,” writes Hopps, “has had an extremely bad press and has oddly come to be a term of abuse” (96). Exhibiting the kind of disgust for popular culture that Andrew Ross describes in No Respect, Hopps shows that rock critics, in arguing for the artistic importance of pop music, exalt the heaviest of the genre in expense of the lightest. As Hopps argues so effectively:
“There is obviously something quite crazy about this. It is like criticizing Beaujolais for not being Claret. In many cases, lightness isn’t a deficiency of seriousness or an anemic version of something else, it is its own thing. Its delicacy, its mobility, its ‘only’ being this or that, its repudiation of gravity or heaviness may be – as it is in the finest china, the movement of Galina Uvanova, or the passing of David Beckham – the result of the most exquisite skill and evidence of alternative aims. ” (97)
Following this logic, Hopps argues for the merits of songs and passages of songs that may make even Morrissey’s most ardent fans cringe, such as: Carry On inspired numbers like “Vicar in a Tutu” and “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others”; outsized puns like “Roy’s Keen”; falsetto indulgences, such as the final two minutes of “Miserable Lie”; yodeling, as in the coda of “The Boy With The Thorn In His Side”; and the Bakhtinian carnivalesque grunts, belches, and other noises that punctuate songs throughout the Morrissey catalog and often fill gaps between songs in concert.
However sad the necessity of it may be, Hopps’ comparison of Morrissey’s lyrics and the dramatic monologs of Robert Browning is valuable. Part of Hopps’ frustration with rock critics’ condemnation of lightness is that they expect songs to be clearly about something, judging the songs by how well they represent worthwhile subjects, and light songs may either be about nothing at all or something very silly. Meanwhile, Morrissey also gets in trouble when his songs are fairly heavy but are grounded in a seedy perspective, particularly the unseemly nationalism of “We’ll Let You Know,” “Bengali in Platforms,” and “National Front Disco.” Of course, Morrissey is no more an English racist than the poet who wrote “My Last Duchess” and “Porphyria’s Lover” was a murderous misogynist, but even the most erudite Morrissey listener might fail to extend him the charity of ironic distance. One need not hold degrees in literature to understand that Morrissey’s greatest artistic gift has been the ability to consistently defend the validity of outsider perspectives, yet we might forget that reactionary conservatism is itself an outsider perspective worthy of artistic treatment.
The final two chapters are the most difficult for Hopps’ project, since they deal with Morrissey’s allegedly bleeding heart without attempting to delve into the man’s soul. The penultimate chapter explores the complexities of Morrissey’s sexuality. It is unlikely that anything relating to Morrissey has been discussed more, since he has steadfastly insisted upon his celibacy to interviewers throughout his career while evincing himself to be a sexual polymath, though at other times championing abstinence, in his lyrics. Here, as elsewhere, Hopps portrays his subject as an artist capable of occupying multiple positions with equal dexterity, often within the same song, while very little of Morrissey may be in there at all.
Some of Hopps’ most nimble scholarship comes through in this chapter, as he deploys Slavoj Zizek’s commentary on the impossibility of satisfaction to explain Morrissey’s overdetermined sexual frustrations. According to Zizek, desire desires not satisfaction but the perpetuation of desire itself. “[W]hether or not [this theory] adequately explains what’s going on,” explains Hopps, “it helps us to discern certain patterns of nonsatisfaction in Morrissey’s lyrics,” because he repeatedly, in songs such as “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” depicts subjects who want something until they obtain it and find it to be ultimately undesirable or illusory (202).
The final chapter is more problematic, because it deals with issues of spirituality in Morrissey’s musical catalog. Given the title of this book and Hopps’ position as a fellow at a divinity school, one might have expected the entire book to be a hagiography; in fact, The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart is far from that, directly opposed to Simpson’s Saint Morrissey. The fact that Morrissey’s most recent albums have included songs such as “Dear God, Please Help Me” certainly invites a critic to conclude that, in his own way, Morrissey has come around to confront the role of religion in his life. Hopps, however, provocatively claims that Catholic faith has always been “The Light That Never Goes Out” for Morrissey, as it was for his idol the “weird lover” Wilde.
Hopps is most convincing in this regard when offering a close reading of Morrissey’s “I Have Forgiven Jesus,” in which the singer asks his creator why he tortures him with love that he cannot express, causing him to hate himself. Hopps compares these lyrics to the lamentations of Job. One may be shocked by the video for this song, in which Morrissey appears in the figure of a priest saying his morning prayers, but Hopps assures his reader that when Morrissey makes the sign of the cross he is not just thumbing his nose, for to be sacrilegious is still to be religious. His faith may not be orthodox but it is genuine, according to Hopps, as expressed through his lyrics and his performance of them.
Note that Hopps’ title promises to examine the pageant, not the passion, of Morrissey’s bleeding heart. The subject under examination is not a saintly pop singer. Morrissey is a complex mass culture simulacrum of saintliness within our secular society that contains genuinely spiritual elements, including the willingness to be unflinchingly vulnerable.
Work Cited
[1] Rodman, Gilbert. “A Hero to Most?: Myth, and the Politics of Race.” Cultural Studies, 8(3), 1994, pp. 457.
Richard E. Otten is an adjunct professor of American Studies at Anne Arundel Community College and a Cultural Studies Ph.D. student at George Mason University.