Ellen Malenas Ledoux's "Laboring Mothers"

Ellen Malenas Ledoux is an Associate Professor in the English and Communication Department at Rutgers University-Camden. Her research focuses on transatlantic literature of the eighteenth century. She is the author of two books: Laboring Mothers: Reproducing Women and Work in the Eighteenth Century (2023) and Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764-1834 (2013). She has published widely on women’s cultural history and Gothic writing in journals such as Studies in Romanticism, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Women’s Writing, and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture.

Ledoux applied the “Page 99 Test” to Laboring Mothers and reported the following:

Page 99 of Laboring Mothers falls at the end of an introductory section entitled “Martial Ventriloquism: Crafting the ‘Woman Warrior’ Persona” that is about the ways in which famous (or infamous) female soldiers of the eighteenth century were unable to tell their own stories on stage and in print due to their class status and relative illiteracy. At this point, we find one of the chapter’s heroines, Hannah Snell, signing an affidavit in front of the Lord Mayor of London with her mark, an “+,” to signify the veracity of her story as printed by her handler and amanuensis, Robert Walker. So, while Snell’s narrative purports to be non-fiction—Walker maintains that “we chose to entertain our Readers with Real Facts”—many questions are raised about veracity and representation on this page. These questions have bearing on life writing as a genre in the eighteenth century, and, most importantly, on how issues of class status affect how that life’s story of motherhood is told.

If a browsing reader were to pick up my book at page 99, that reader would have keen insight into one of the book’s main contentions: that the more marginalized a maternal figure is within systems of power and privilege, the less likely she is to be able to parry critiques about her working motherhood. Indeed, the book is divided into 3 main sections—“speaking for herself,” “spoken for,” and “spoken about”—each of which contain 2 chapters delineating the representation of working maternity. In “speaking for herself,” the 2 chapters on mother-actresses and midwives demonstrate how women who had the power to self-fashion through print, portraiture, or public speech leveraged the ideals of eighteenth-century motherhood to frame themselves as better workers or better mothers or both. Contrast this rhetorical sleight of hand with figures such as Snell and Christian Davies whose poverty, illiteracy, and gender nonconformity placed them on the fringes of a society that either sidelined or maligned their respective experience of motherhood. In the ensuing chapter, “Abortive Attempts,” racial oppression runs so deep that imagining or retelling stories of successful mothering within chattel slavery becomes impossible for Mary Prince: the first woman to publish a slave narrative. In the final 2 chapters, itinerant traders and prostitutes become conflated as women whose work in the London streets renders motherhood both an inevitable status but one which paradoxically must be given up for the worker to be successful at her trade. In the book’s Afterword, I trace how these eighteenth-century constructs still pervade our ideas about mothering. Little has changed in how working motherhood is either lauded or demonized based on how closely a woman conforms to a white, middle-class, cisgender, heteronormative ideal in the age of the “supermom.”

Visit Ellen Malenas Ledoux's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathleen M. Crowther's "Policing Pregnant Bodies"

Kathleen M. Crowther is an associate professor in the Department of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Adam and Eve in the Protestant Reformation.

Crowther applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Policing Pregnant Bodies: From Ancient Greece to Post-Roe America, and reported the following:

If you open to page 99 of my book, you will see a picture of a naked woman covered in hair and a Black child. This image [below, left] comes from the 1702 edition of a book called Aristotle’s Masterpiece. First published in 1684, Aristotle’s Masterpiece was a hugely popular guide to sex and reproduction that remained in print until the 1930s. Despite the title, it is neither by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE), nor derived from his writings. Historian Mary Fissell described it as “a mash-up of earlier works on midwifery and natural philosophy.” The hairy woman and the Black baby illustrate the concept of maternal imagination, the notion that if a woman looks at something striking or unexpected at the moment she conceives, or while she is pregnant, that impression will mark the fetus in some way. The hairy woman is hairy, according to the text, because her mother looked at a picture of John the Baptist wearing animal skins while she was having sex. The resulting baby was a girl covered in fur. The Black child refers to an apocryphal story about the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. When a white princess, married to a white prince, gave birth to a Black baby, she faced accusations of adultery. Hippocrates exonerated her of these charges by explaining that the princess had a picture of a “Moor” on her bedroom wall, and that she had seen this picture while having sex with her husband. The impression of the dark-skinned Moor was imprinted on the baby. By the time the hairy woman and the Black baby made their appearance in Aristotle’s Masterpiece, their stories were well-established in medical literature, along with many other similar accounts.

The Page 99 Test works very well for my book, because the picture of the hairy woman and the Black baby encapsulates a central theme; for centuries people have believed that the greatest threats to fetal life and well-being come from their mothers. By “people,” I mean physicians, scientists, philosophers, politicians, moralists, and the general public. For centuries, the most common explanation of congenital deformities and disabilities was maternal imagination. Cleft lips, once called “harelips,” were caused when a pregnant woman was startled by a rabbit. Babies could be born resembling monkeys or frogs or some other animal their mother saw or touched or encountered while pregnant. Unsatisfied cravings could also imprint themselves on fetuses. If a pregnant woman craved a certain kind of food and could not get it, her baby might be born with birthmarks in the shape of this food.

And maternal imagination was only one way that pregnant women harmed the fetuses they carried. In the second century CE, the Roman physician Soranus claimed that the fetus could be harmed if the mother ate the wrong kind of foods, ate too much or too little food, got drunk, had sex, got angry, sneezed too hard, went dancing, carried heavy weights, or fell. For two thousand years, medical opinion has held that women are irrational and emotional, and as such, poor caretakers of fetuses. From the ancient Greeks to the 21st century, physicians have dictated regimes of diet and exercise to pregnant women and advised them to avoid stressful or unpleasant situations. And they have blamed women for poor pregnancy outcomes.

The belief that fetuses need protection from the people that carry them is deeply rooted in our culture and continues to inform law and policy. Even before the Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision on June 24, 2022, many states had begun to criminalize miscarriage and to punish pregnant people harshly for drug and alcohol addiction. And yet, if we really want to improve the alarming rates of infant and maternal mortality in this country, and foster the health and well-being of fetuses (and babies), we should not focus on policing women. Instead, we should work to ensure that all pregnant people have access to medical care, healthy food, clean water, safe housing, and supportive communities.

Learn more about Policing Pregnant Bodies at the Johns Hopkins University Press.

--Marshal Zeringue

Arthur Versluis's "American Gnosis"

Arthur Versluis is Professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. He has published numerous articles and books on the intersection of religion, the humanities, and politics. He is the editor of JSR: Journal for the Study of Radicalism and serves as president of Hieros Institute, a non-profit organization devoted to understanding the sacred.

Versluis applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Gnosis: Political Religion and Transcendence, and reported the following:

The 99th page of American Gnosis is in the midst of the first ever extended scholarly discussion of the work of Dr. Charles Musès (1919-2000), “The Enigmatic Dr. Musès.” Charles Musès studied mathematics and went on to Columbia University, where he received a PhD for his doctoral dissertation on the mysticism of Dionysius Andreas Freher (1649-1728). From the Christian theosophic tradition, he went on to explore Egyptian religion, established a pioneering publishing house, published numerous articles and books in a wide array of fields, developing an area of mathematics termed “Musean hypernumbers,” and in his later years published on shamanic spirituality and time theory, developing what he called “The Lion Path.” What I show in this chapter is that neo-gnostic concepts played a significant role in Musès’s thought, in such works as his 1986 book Destiny and Control in Human Systems: Studies in the Interconnectedness of Time (Chronotopology), but also in the development of his “Lion Path.”

This chapter on Musès's work is one of several chapters devoted to exemplary figures of neo-gnostic thought in the United States and Latin America. Other figures discussed include Miguel Serrano, exponent of what he termed “esoteric Hitlerism;” Samael Aun Weor, an explicitly neo-gnostic author whose work and thought is widely dispersed in Latin America, and even globally; and many other figures and topics are featured as well, far too many to discuss here. The 99th page is as good a place as any to begin to delve into these studies of exemplary and influential exponents of neo-gnostic thought in the contemporary world.

Christopher McIntosh, author of Occult Russia and many other books, summarized American Gnosis this way: “In this compelling book, Arthur Versluis looks at many aspects of modern America in terms of the neo-gnostic world view. In it, we encounter multidimensionality, hyperspace, immortal avatars, sexual magic, Tibetan Buddhism, Shambhala, psychedelic drugs and much else. American Gnosis is a heady rollercoaster journey that leaves the reader pondering profound questions about the struggle for freedom of the human spirit and the challenges that it faces in the present age.” That's the best summary as I've seen of this unusual book that provokes, challenges, and surprises readers throughout.

Visit Arthur Versluis's website.

The Page 99 Test: American Gurus.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Eastman Attebery's "As Legend Has It"

Jennifer Eastman Attebery, professor emerita of English at Idaho State University, is the author of Pole Raising and Speech Making: Modalities of Swedish-American Summer Celebration and Up in the Rocky Mountains: Writing the Swedish Immigrant Experience.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, As Legend Has It: History, Heritage, and the Construction of Swedish American Identity, and reported the following:

A reader using Ford Madox Ford’s Page 99 Test to get a quick take on my book As Legend Has It would come away with an accurate but incomplete picture of the book’s aims and evidence. Page 99 reveals the book’s focus on historical legends as shared by Swedish Americans of the 19th and 20th centuries. Readers might be surprised to see that these legends include narratives about Jesse and Frank James and Wild Bill Hickok—legends that one might expect to be outside of ethnic American experience. Yet, page 99 also refers to Big Gust, a quintessentially Swedish American strongman character. So page 99 browsers would understand that Swedish American legendry is a mixed repertoire in which mainstream lore intermingles with ethnic lore.

On page 99, my analysis of legends focuses on how men and women were depicted, especially the stereotypical depiction of Swedish American men as “sturdy and strong.” I also comment on the degree to which the James brothers and Hickok were seen as benevolent characters, the James brothers fitting the Robin Hood niche in American outlaw lore. Readers of page 99 would also see that my aims include categorizing legends as well as analyzing them, with many of the legend texts quoted at some length as evidence for my generalizations.

These page-99 indicators give readers only a partial glimpse, though, of the gist of As Legend Has It. The book looks not just at historical legends of the Swedish Americans but also at how these narratives were used by local communities to write local histories in which they framed a sense of hyphenated ethnic and American heritage. Chapters about historical legend and local history writing describe the structure and textual qualities of these two vernacular genres using a combination of methods from folkloristics and Swedish American studies. The analysis reaches well beyond merely categorizing and identifying gender stereotypes to develop how legends and local histories use rhetorical strategies to argue for heritage and how these genres can become the basis for ostensive action.

I hope that a reader using the Page 99 Test with As Legend Has It would be tantalized to read further about this topic that I find fascinating: how ordinary people use their own stories to express a sense of community heritage.

Learn more about As Legend Has It at the University of Wisconsin Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Leslie Butler's "Consistent Democracy"

Leslie Butler is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College and the author of Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Consistent Democracy: The "Woman Question" and Self-Government in Nineteenth-Century America, and reported the following:

Page 99 places the reader in the 1850s—and the book’s third chapter—when discussions of the “woman question” have intensified thanks to the emergence of a women’s movement. The page discusses: Lucy Stone, who became a “celebrity” of sorts on the lecture circuit (and for keeping her own name upon marriage); fictional treatments (generally hostile) of the women’s movement; and the way disagreement over women’s rights, roles, and responsibilities entered into partisan politics in this decade.

In some ways, page 99 is misleading. The book does not follow a “movement” narrative. Nor is it primarily concerned with partisan politics (a topic that is handled quite well by other scholars—most recently by Lauren Haumausser in The Democratic Collapse (2022). As a work of intellectual and cultural history, Consistent Democracy instead tracks discussions of women’s role in society and the polity wherever they occurred. That means that many voices outside the women’s movement drive the narrative, from foreign observers to domestic advice gurus to antislavery activists, moralists, commentators, educators, journalists, and countless others. I call this extensive print discussion “published opinion” (to mark its distinctiveness from the more familiar concept of public opinion). In the pages before and after page 99, canonical thinkers (e.g. John Stuart Mill) share space with lesser-known figures including Harriet Martineau, Catharine Beecher, William Alcott, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and many others.

But in another way, page 99 does a nice job highlighting two of the book’s central claims: that discussions of the “woman question” permeated every aspect of nineteenth-century culture and that those discussion were vital to the theory and practice of American democracy. The political exclusion of women (white and Black, free and enslaved, single and married) provoked scrutiny over the meaning of “the consent of the governed” and (by the 1830s) “universal suffrage.” As Americans (and others) debated women’s rights, roles, and responsibilities, they grappled with key aspects of their political experiment. “Woman questions,” the book contends, were thus at heart “democracy questions.”

Learn more about Consistent Democracy at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Whitney Barlow Robles's "Curious Species"

Whitney Barlow Robles is an award-winning writer, historian, and curator based in Raleigh, North Carolina. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University. Her work has appeared in venues such as William and Mary Quarterly, New England Quarterly, and Commonplace.

Robles applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History, and reported the following:

Readers who open at random to page 99 of my new book, Curious Species, will find it split in half. The page begins with the tail end of a section showing how rattlesnakes evaded the gaze of scientific inquiry in the eighteenth century; in the words of French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, they were “either too dangerous in reality, or . . . objects of too great terror, to admit of being observed with sufficient attention and perseverance.” Then begins a new section on campaigns to exterminate rattlesnakes despite resistance from Native people and a small contingent of naturalists—not to mention mixed feelings, in the early modern scientific community, over extinction’s very possibility. In short, this page has two faces: one a history of science, one an environmental history. One a history of knowing, another a history of being in the world.

This broken page is actually a decent barometer of the whole—or at least half of the whole. Curious Species tells the stories of four specific animals: corals, rattlesnakes, fish, and raccoons. Animals put real limits on human efforts to master the natural world during the eighteenth century, an age of exploration, empires, and enlightenment. They bit, stung, stole, ate scientific specimens or lucrative slave-grown crops, died, decayed, and in some cases literally jumped ship. But beyond these everyday tragedies, animals were slippery and on some level not fully knowable to science. They commanded hostile environments. They communicated in tongues apart. They processed their worlds in alien fashion and bucked human desires for understanding. Rattlesnakes, as both metaphorically and literally potent animals, scared some naturalists so dearly that they declined to study them.

But the book doesn’t confine itself to the eighteenth century or to the academic study of animals. It’s also deeply concerned with ecology and biodiversity loss—and hence, with environmental history. In the case of timber rattlesnakes, systematic destruction of dens in the early modern period led to the local endangerment, and sometimes extinction, of timber rattlesnakes throughout Canada, New England, and other regions.

What a single page can’t capture is the hybrid nature of my book, whose chapters weave, snake-like, back and forth between the eighteenth century—natural history’s formative years—and the present day. Not shown on page 99 is the modern-day coda to this history of serpents: a narrative of my journey with a wildlife conservationist to see the last remaining population of rattlesnakes in New Hampshire during the fraught early days of the pandemic, to consider the many echoes between past and present. The eighteenth-century study of animals created an impasse about their nature that we inherit today.

Visit Whitney Barlow Robles's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alexandra Lindgren-Gibson's "Working-Class Raj"

Alexandra Lindgren-Gibson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. Her work has been published in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History and has been supported by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture, and Society, and the University of Rochester's Humanities Center.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Working-Class Raj: Colonialism and the Making of Class in British India, and reported the following:

Page 99–the first page of Working-Class Raj’s fourth chapter–begins with the story of what Ada Lee did on her summer vacation:

When George Lee’s commanding officers learned that his wife had lost their baby, they summoned him to the orderly room. Mrs. Tucker, the district commissioner’s wife, was planning to spend the summer in the foothills of Nanga Parbat and needed a new lady’s maid. Would Lee’s wife like to go along? Ada Lee wanted to get away from the plains and spend the summer out of the heat, but men of her husband’s rank were only offered time in the hills every other year. She decided to join the Tuckers and their staff for the summer. For Mrs. Lee, this was part vacation, part job. She occupied a special position in the family – one determined by strict demarcations of race and malleable borders of class. Mrs. Tucker liked to employ European lady’s maids. The woman Mrs. Lee replaced had returned for the summer to her native France. As likely the only white servant in the Tuckers’ household, Mrs. Lee was responsible for providing companionship to her employer as much as a stylish coiffure and well-looked-after wardrobe. She would also serve as an object of conspicuous consumption; European help was hard to find in India. A European lady’s maid provided not simply the usual benefits of personal care and grooming, but added ones – companionship, familiarity, and the luxury of a white servant in a country where even poor whites could afford help.

The Page 99 Test works (almost) perfectly for Working-Class Raj because Ada Lee’s story encapsulates many of the central themes of the book–the interplay between racial and class hierarchies, the instability of status in colonial India, the way longing for home could at once strengthen and threaten relationships. Working-Class Raj asks what happened when British men and women from working-class backgrounds went to Victorian India and found their social position changed by new hierarchies of race and class. For a woman like Ada Lee, from a working-class background and married to an NCO, life in India meant a dramatic change in both social position and material conditions. She could hire a cook if she felt like it; her husband George had servants to look after his clothes. Because of the exploitative nature of British rule in India, working-class British men and women did not live like the British working class “at home”. But, as we see from this opening anecdote, racial hierarchy alone cannot capture the complexity of British working-class experience in India. Women like Ada Lee could be at once servant and mistress, a duality that flummoxed British elites and forms an untold part of the history of the British working-class. Working-Class Raj draws on stories like those of Ada Lee to uncover these histories of change in social status, material conditions, and life experiences among the British working-class in India–and their effects on the working-class in Britain. The one essential element missing from Ada Lee’s story on page 99 is the importance of communication between working-class men and women in Britain and their family and friends in India. Letters, sent across vast distances and often written by correspondents with limited literacy, attempted to sustain relationships, maintain family incomes, and bridge the gulf between those living very different versions of working-class lives in Britain and India.

Learn more about Working-Class Raj at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Zachary Brodt's "From the Steel City to the White City"

Zachary Brodt is an archivist and historian in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and author of From the Steel City to the White City: Western Pennsylvania and the World’s Columbian Exposition. He has also published articles and presented on a variety of history and archives-related topics. His article “Strike Out: A Pirates Pitcher at the Battle of Homestead” won the 2016 Arline Custer Memorial Award from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference.

Brodt’s research interests include post-Civil War Pittsburgh, urban history, and industry and labor. He is also interested in the history of the University of Pittsburgh and its off-campus impact.

Brodt holds a B.A. in History and Classics and a Master of Library and Information Science degree, all from the University of Pittsburgh. He applied the “Page 99 Test” to From the Steel City to the White City and reported the following:

Page 99 challenges the notion that turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh was only concerned with heavy industry. The page begins with the close of a section that describes Western Pennsylvania’s contributions to the Columbian Exposition that highlighted the region’s efforts in science, education, and social movements, noting that “This glimpse into the achievements of individual scientists and engineers placed a greater emphasis on the people behind the inventions, unlike the manufacturing exhibits, which focused on processes and outputs.” Advancements in astronomy, electrical engineering, and the women’s and temperance movements demonstrate that Western Pennsylvania’s achievements extended beyond mill yards. This was no more evident than in the impact of Pittsburgher George W.G. Ferris’ great wheel, which debuted at the fair.

The remainder of the page builds on this idea with the introduction of a new section that discusses Pittsburgh’s art exhibits at the world’s fair, remarking that “Western Pennsylvanians also contributed examples of art that spoke to a developing culture that many visitors attributed to older, grander metropolises like Philadelphia and New York City and not an industrial center like Pittsburgh.” Popular local artists like George Hetzel and Thomas Shields Clarke exhibited at the fair, but this section goes on to explain that the most notable Western Pennsylvanian artist to have works on display was Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt. Her mural Modern Woman in the exposition’s Woman’s Building drew criticism from fairgoers and art critics alike due to its feminist message.

Page 99 is an appropriate sample from this book in that it confronts preconceived ideas about the nature of Pittsburgh in the 1890s, mainly that the city was solely America’s crucible. Readers encountering this page with ideas of a grimy, smoky city lit by steel furnaces will be surprised to see references to scientific discoveries and comparisons to the cultural contributions of cities like New York.

The fact that Pittsburghers identified the Columbian Exposition as an opportunity to showcase attributes other than its industries is present throughout much of the book; however, this page neglects to address other key discussions such as the experiences of Western Pennsylvanian visitors at the 1893 World’s Fair and its influence on the development of the region in the early twentieth century. Overall, the book seeks to explain how Pittsburgher’s experiences at the fair helped turn the Steel City into its own version of the Columbian Exposition’s White City through architecture and social and cultural initiatives.

Visit Zachary Brodt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar's "America's Black Capital"

Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar is professor of history and founding director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music at the University of Connecticut. He earned his PhD in US history from Indiana University Bloomington and his BA in history from Morehouse College in Atlanta.

Ogbar applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, America's Black Capital: How African Americans Remade Atlanta in the Shadow of the Confederacy, and reported the following:

The first full paragraph on page 99 of America’s Black Capital: How African Americans Remade Atlanta in the Shadow of the Confederacy outlines the core thesis and argument of my entire book—which is 457 pages (not counting notes and index):

…what occurred in Atlanta was an especially virulent expression of neo-Confederate politics. The legacy of the Civil War was profound in shaping virtually every aspect of the city’s character. In doing so, there emerged a particularly acute notion of racial subjugation. African Americans responded with ambitious efforts at black self-determination that did not advocate for racial integration of social space. Instead, black leadership, across generations, demanded more in the way of resources for black people than shared resources with whites.

My book, a story of the long arc Atlanta’s history, explores how the Gate City became an important cog in the Confederacy war machine in the Civil War, was left a desolation by Union bombardment and rose like a phoenix in the postbellum era. The city has had many nicknames, but none that reflect how much Atlanta has evolved than “Imperial City” of the Ku Klux Klan (in the 1920s) and the “Black Mecca” (after the early 1970s). Today, the former Confederate stronghold has more black millionaires and black-owned businesses per capita than any city in the country. The book explores how we arrive at the latest moniker from a city that was once the “heart” of the Confederacy.

Until this exercise, I had never heard of this “page 99 test.” In fact, when I first learned of it, I thought it was highly improbable and so random that it could not possibly apply to this book of eleven chapters and over 450 pages. I was clearly surprised that the 99th page captures the central argument of my book! I will be curious about the 99th page of books throughout my library now!

Learn more about America's Black Capital at the Basic Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Adam Parkes's "Modernism and the Aristocracy"

Adam Parkes is Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he has taught since 1993. His publications include Modernism and the Theater of Censorship (1996) and A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing (2011). Parkes was president of the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America in 2021-22 and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association in 2022-23.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Initiating the novel’s falling action, the death of John Andrew [Last] also launches alternative ways of imagining aristocratic boredom, especially as it relates to the time and place of waning empire. Taken utterly for granted by Waugh’s characters, intimated by the narrator only in occasional indirect references to the “global context,” the imperial dimensions of aristocratic boredom remain largely unspoken in the first half of A Handful of Dust. Waugh may be playing on expectations created by his previous novel, Black Mischief (1932), which, as Jonathan Greenberg has argued, puts colonial-imperialist boredom front and center. But when Tony Last leaves England, the complacency underpinning such reticence is exposed to view. In Handful’s later chapters, Waugh develops a three-fold portrait linking boredom to heartless cruelty (Mrs. Rafferty), intellectual stupidity (Dr. Messinger), and animal cunning (Mr. Todd), each in turn subjecting Tony to an intolerable period of waiting. Charting an ironic history of colonial imperialism, the unholy trinity of exiles associated with these boredoms sums up what Waugh portrays not only as the lapsed condition of the British aristocracy but also as the spiritual emptiness of modern humanity as a whole.

The picture emerges gradually, as Waugh begins by consolidating Hetton’s position as the scene of interminable waiting, a purgatorial boredom. Shirking his duty to break their terrible news to [his wife] Brenda, who is still in London with Beaver, Tony sends [his friend] Jock, precipitating the cruelest of all comic moments in English fiction when Brenda, realizing that it’s her son not her lover who has died, exclaims “Oh thank God . . . ” and bursts into tears. Tony meanwhile stays at Hetton to “see” to things; almost instantly, time seems to stretch over a void. “What are you going to do while you’re waiting?” asks Mrs. Rattery, Jock’s straight-talking mistress. Echoing the Madame Sosostris episode in The Waste Land (1922), the acknowledged source of the novel’s title, Mrs. Rattery proposes playing patience, “a heartbreaking game”, as she informs Tony in a cold-hearted declaration that sounds in tune with the novel’s anti-humanist strain.

Ford is very much on target as far as my own page 99 is concerned. First, it discusses Evelyn Waugh, who (like Ford himself) appears in two separate chapters. Second, this particular page offers a fair snapshot of the manner as well as the matter of my book. It occurs in the middle of the second chapter, which pairs Waugh with the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen to examine representations of aristocratic boredom in British fiction written between the world wars.

The emphasis here is on literary responses to a more general sense of the British aristocracy – deprived of much of its traditional power, land, and purpose by social, political, and economic changes at home and in the wider global-imperial system – as marooned by history. But this is also a literary emphasis. My focus remains on the expressive opportunities that such perceptions presented to writers still trying to “make it new” (in Ezra Pound’s well-worn phrase) even if some of them (like Waugh) wanted to make the new look old. My attention is directed accordingly to the structural organization, affective design, and generic interplay of Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust as it probes the expressive possibilities of waiting: making readers wait as his characters wait through extended episodes that combine comedy, satire, and cruelty.

In this way, the account of boredom given here looks backward and forward to other chapters of my book: back to Chapter 1, which considers stupidity, and forward to Chapter 5, which dwells on cruelty and kindness. Other chapters focus on nostalgia and sophistication, which, though not explicitly present on page 99, might be inferred from my commentary on Waugh’s handling of boredom, cruelty, and stupidity.

Learn more about Modernism and the Aristocracy at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue