Post by mikeindex on Oct 20, 2009 6:03:42 GMT -5
International Chess Master Bill Hartston once quotably wrote, ‘There is no point in looking for specific weaknesses in your opponent’s play if his whole play is one big weakness’, and trying to provide a point-by-point critique of Tomato’s analysis makes one aware of just what he meant. It’s tempting, especially with a busy professional schedule to consider, simply to dismiss this nonsense as not worth wasting time on (as indeed the rest of the forum have done); however perpetrators of this kind of thing tend to brandish a lack of refutation as evidence of an inability to refute, and I don’t think we should let this happen.
First and most self-evidently, Tomato’s claim of ‘proof’ is nothing of the kind. Even if there were a single set of psychological traits which could be shown to link all paedophiles - which of course there is not – the possession by any specific individual of any or all of these traits could prove nothing unless it could also be shown that ONLY paedophiles shared these traits (e.g. no one but paedophiles likes little furry animals, adult women, etc). It could do more than suggest.
Secondly, before such allegations could be taken seriously even as suggestion, a detailed, systematic psychological profile would be required. What we have here, by contrast, consists of a few isolated observations on paedophilia by critics who may or may not have known what they were talking about (I strongly suspect contradictory generalities could be found in other writers on the subject), haphazardly correlated with isolated allegations regarding Carroll, most of which are quite definitely contradicted in writings by or about Carroll which Tomato chooses not to quote.
Tomato is in all probability quite unaware of these contra-indications as he has apparently never read a word of Carroll’s own writings. At all events, almost every example he adduces to back up his claims is not quoted from Carroll’s own writings but from things other people have said about him. I have never heard of some of the quoted commentators; those I have heard of (Empson, Schilder, Skinner) have without exception become bywords for misinformation and fanciful reasoning in the years since they wrote. Certainly none are or would ever have claimed to be ‘biographers’ of Dodgson, despite the writer’s disingenuous allusion to them as such.
Lewis Carroll preferred little girls, and I can prove it.
The writer’s woeful ignorance of what the word ‘proof’ actually means is dealt with above.
Leach did only half of her homework. She read the literature on Lewis Carroll, but she did not read the literature on pedophilia.
As a result, she explains how Carroll's earlier biographers could have conspired to create an image of Carroll as a devotee of little girls.
No she doesn’t – nowhere does Leach ever say or begin to suggest that anyone conspired with anyone else. However, in an age when ‘conspiracy theorist’ has become as cheap and instantly discreditory a gibe as ‘communist’ was in the 1950s I guess it saves the trouble of thinking of anything relevant – August Imholtz used exactly the same technique when reviewing Leach's book in an (at least ostensibly) far more scholarly and professional manner.
She does explain, however, how they could have created an image which so closely resembles such a devotee in real life.
I presume that should be ‘does not explain...’. Nice proof-reading.
Following is a list of traits which Lewis Carroll shared with the prototypical lover of children:
THE prototypical lover of children? There’s just one?
===identification with children===
On page 82, Leach takes a shot at William Empson, who wrote in 1935 in Aspects of Alice that Carroll identified with children.
I'm afraid he didn’t – he wrote it in ‘Some Versions of Pastoral’. ‘Aspects of Alice’ wasn’t published until 1972. This sort of sloppy referencing really does nothing to inspire confidence.
===Yet in his latter years, Carroll often signed his name "Sylvie," Sylvie being the name of the child heroine in his last novel. So stated John Skinner, in an article in 1947 which was reprinted in 1964 in Psychoanalysis and Literature.
Actually he signed letters ‘Sylvie’ twice when he was 35 – at least as far as is known from the surviving sample (Collected Letters, pp. 108-10). And it wasn’t ‘his name’, it was Sylvie’s – the letters (written in minute handwriting with a geographer’s fine-nib pen) purport to come from the fairy character herself. In other words (just to make things perfectly clear), CLD was writing in the character of Sylvie – not under the perverted delusion that he actually was her.
‘So stated John Skinner’ – we are to take it, then, that the writer has not even taken the trouble to do his own very basic research by consulting the readily available published letters. But since John Skinner has found his way into the discussion, let’s look at one or two other things that he stated.
In 1877 Dodgson wrote a letter to the child-actor Bertie Coote (Collected Letters, pp. 276-7), beginning: “My dear Bertie, I would have been very glad to write to you as you wish, only there are several objections...The third and greatest objection is my GREAT dislike for children. I don’t know why, I’m sure: but I HATE them – just as one hates arm-chairs and plum-pudding!...” You really need to read the whole letter to appreciate just how obvious a joke it is, but I’m sure all non-Freudian readers will get the picture from this little snippet. Skinner saw it as an indicator of CLD’s celebrated boy-hatred: ‘Carroll left just one letter to a boy. It is a cold letter, with little friendliness in the tone’. (I’m quoting from memory but I have the gist right.)
Then again, in 1884 Dodgson wrote a letter to Beatrice Earle (Collected Letters, text pp. 527-8, facsimile reproduction p. 529), in a deliberately shaky hand as a joke on how nervous he was at the thought of writing to her (‘The slight tremulousness which you may observe in my writing, produced by the thought that it is you I am writing to...’) Again, you really need to see the whole letter to appreciate the joke, but I can assure those of you without your own Collected Letters that it’s not at all difficult. Skinner – guess what – took this as serious evidence of how nervous CLD got when writing to ‘little girls’ (Miss Earle was 16). So much for the reliability of Tomato’s source.
===In 1930 in the International Journal of Psycho-analysis, and again in 1945 in his book, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, Otto Fenichel wrote that girl-lovers tend to identify with girls.
You may say, "Empson wrote his article in 1935 and Fenichel wrote his article in 1930. Maybe Empson read Fenichel's article and slapped that trait onto Lewis Carroll."
That is possible, but here are some cases in which Carroll's biographers jumped the gun on the psychoanalytic writers:
===idealization of childhood===
Writers have commented on Lewis Carroll's tendency to idealize children. In Image of Childhood, published in 1957, Peter Coveney quoted Carroll as writing about "the eager enjoyment of Life that comes only in the happy hours of childhood, when all is new and fair, and when Sin and Sorrow are but names--empty words signifying nothing!" In Death of Narcissus, published in 1976, Morris Fraser, discussing the same topic, quotes the same passage.
It was not until 1990 that Segal & Stermac, writing in Handbook of Sexual Assault, commented on the tendency of pedophiles to idealize childhood.
Undoubtedly Dodgson tended to idealise childhood. So did everyone else in Victorian culture. Read Dickens, Wordsworth, Blake, Macdonald, Ruskin, Christina Rossetti, even unlikely candidates like Tennyson and D.G. Rossetti. Look at the art of Millais, Leighton, Noel Paton and scores of minor figures. If you don’t have time for that, read Michael Mason, Hugues Lebailly or Karoline Leach’s Chapter 2 (4 in the new edition). If a tendency to idealise childhood is evidence of paedophilia, EVERYONE in Victorian England was a paedophile.
On the other hand, perhaps there are such things as cultural trends as well as psychological ones.
But besides the absurdity of denying the relevance of socio-cultural context to a person’s psychological make-up, I question whether this idealising tendency is as widespread even among modern paedophiles as Tomato would have us believe. My own (thankfully limited) reading suggests that at least an equal number of paedophiles see children in exactly the opposite light, as sexually aware and manipulative beings who never had any innocence to start with (‘She wanted it just as much as I did really’). Check out a few of the nauseatingly-named sites which parade Dodgson as a flagship ‘famous paedophile’ and you’ll see plenty of examples of the attitude. It strikes me that this may well be an instance of the writer cherrypicking the right generalisation to suit his theory when he could have found other commentators in support of precisely the opposite view had he wished.
======role reversal===
Paul Schilder, writing in 1938 in Aspects of Alice, spoke of role reversal in Carroll's relationship with girls. Writing in English Language Notes in 1981, Donald Rackin discussed Alice's protective role to a bumbling knight who keeps falling off his horse.
In 1949, Sandor Ferenczi, wrote about role reversal in pedophile relationships in the International Journal of Psycho-analysis.
Once again the psychological premise seems dubious (does the desire for role reversal really characterise a majority of paedophiles? It seems counter-intuitive), and the evidence for its application to Carroll ludicrously slight, second-hand as always, and wildly inappropriate. I’ve no recollection of what evidence Schilder claimed to produce for role reversal in Carroll’s relationships and can think of none that would be remotely plausible – and let’s not forget that this is the same Paul Schilder who thought a little girl was much the same thing as a male member (imagine the potential for social embarrassment there). And I have to point out gently to Tomato, who evidently has a great deal of difficulty with the concept, that the White Knight is a FICTIONAL character – that means he is NOT THE SAME PERSON as his creator. Have we got that now?
======Finally, here are a few observations of my own:
===attraction to an androgynous image===
Lewis Carroll dedicated "The Hunting of the Snark" to a girl who was "Girt with a boyish garb for boyish task."
In 1962, J. H. Fitch wrote that girl-lovers tend to seek masculine traits in girls.
Again the premise is flawed – ‘Fresh Petals’ and similar emetic websites stress quite opposite tastes – and its application on the grounds of a sentiment expressed in a single line of poetry, and echoed nowhere else in Carroll’s work, is at best an absurd over-generalisation.
=========attitude toward animals===
I. B. Weiner, writing in the 1962 issue of Psychological Quarterly, reported a finding that pedophiles tend to be attracted to small and docile animals whereas male homosexuals tend toward the reverse.
Er – what? Don’t all gay men own poodles? Aren’t we getting our stereotypes a little mixed?
======In Sylvie and Bruno, there is a chapter in which the narrator takes a walk through the woods with Sylvie, talking about hunters. In this conversation, Weiner's dichotomy becomes obvious.
Once again, even if we are generous enough to accept the premise, the evidence for its application to Dodgson – while first-hand for a change – is selective in the extreme. While I don’t for a moment accept these airy generalisations as having any validity, IF a liking for big fierce animals is to be taken as evidence against paedophilia there is plenty in Carroll’s work – the Gryphon, the Jabberwock, the Jubjub bird, the Bandersnatch, the lion Sylvie and Bruno ride on, the big dog they befriend.
I guess that proves he must have been gay after all. Well spotted Jonathan Miller.
=========feeling of discomfort around other men===
Leach repeatedly tells us that Carroll associated with other adults, especially women. Yet if she studied the literature on pedophilia, she would know how strongly she was confirming that Carroll was a pedophile. In 1967, Kurt Freund wrote in Behavioral Research and Therapy that men attracted to children tend to feel uncomfortable around other adult males.
[material deleted due to inappropriate content]
It becomes a little embarrassing to have to point out the painfully obvious quite this frequently, but social ease around women is not actually synonymous with discomfort around men; it is perfectly possible to be comfortable with both, and there is plenty of evidence that Dodgson was. Collingwood writes that he was the SCR member always chosen to show distinguished visitors round college; a younger colleague described Vere Bayne as Dodgson’s ‘inseparable companion’; T.J. Prout wrote to France Jane Dodgson after CLD’s death, ‘I shall forever miss your dear brother, whom I saw more than any other member of College’.
Once again the writer has revealed his gross ignorance of the subject on which he pronounces. He knows nothing about Lewis Carroll, nothing about Victorian culture and nothing about logical argument, academic method or the nature of proof. I also strongly suspect that he knows next to nothing about psychoanalytic theory, or if he does, that he has been quite deliberately selective and manipulative of the authorities he cites.
Not knowing the man personally, I have no idea what can have motivated his bizarre and, even on its own terms, frankly incompetent twisting of fact and logic; and I have the good manners not to indulge in baseless conjecture.
First and most self-evidently, Tomato’s claim of ‘proof’ is nothing of the kind. Even if there were a single set of psychological traits which could be shown to link all paedophiles - which of course there is not – the possession by any specific individual of any or all of these traits could prove nothing unless it could also be shown that ONLY paedophiles shared these traits (e.g. no one but paedophiles likes little furry animals, adult women, etc). It could do more than suggest.
Secondly, before such allegations could be taken seriously even as suggestion, a detailed, systematic psychological profile would be required. What we have here, by contrast, consists of a few isolated observations on paedophilia by critics who may or may not have known what they were talking about (I strongly suspect contradictory generalities could be found in other writers on the subject), haphazardly correlated with isolated allegations regarding Carroll, most of which are quite definitely contradicted in writings by or about Carroll which Tomato chooses not to quote.
Tomato is in all probability quite unaware of these contra-indications as he has apparently never read a word of Carroll’s own writings. At all events, almost every example he adduces to back up his claims is not quoted from Carroll’s own writings but from things other people have said about him. I have never heard of some of the quoted commentators; those I have heard of (Empson, Schilder, Skinner) have without exception become bywords for misinformation and fanciful reasoning in the years since they wrote. Certainly none are or would ever have claimed to be ‘biographers’ of Dodgson, despite the writer’s disingenuous allusion to them as such.
The writer’s woeful ignorance of what the word ‘proof’ actually means is dealt with above.
As a result, she explains how Carroll's earlier biographers could have conspired to create an image of Carroll as a devotee of little girls.
No she doesn’t – nowhere does Leach ever say or begin to suggest that anyone conspired with anyone else. However, in an age when ‘conspiracy theorist’ has become as cheap and instantly discreditory a gibe as ‘communist’ was in the 1950s I guess it saves the trouble of thinking of anything relevant – August Imholtz used exactly the same technique when reviewing Leach's book in an (at least ostensibly) far more scholarly and professional manner.
I presume that should be ‘does not explain...’. Nice proof-reading.
THE prototypical lover of children? There’s just one?
On page 82, Leach takes a shot at William Empson, who wrote in 1935 in Aspects of Alice that Carroll identified with children.
I'm afraid he didn’t – he wrote it in ‘Some Versions of Pastoral’. ‘Aspects of Alice’ wasn’t published until 1972. This sort of sloppy referencing really does nothing to inspire confidence.
Actually he signed letters ‘Sylvie’ twice when he was 35 – at least as far as is known from the surviving sample (Collected Letters, pp. 108-10). And it wasn’t ‘his name’, it was Sylvie’s – the letters (written in minute handwriting with a geographer’s fine-nib pen) purport to come from the fairy character herself. In other words (just to make things perfectly clear), CLD was writing in the character of Sylvie – not under the perverted delusion that he actually was her.
‘So stated John Skinner’ – we are to take it, then, that the writer has not even taken the trouble to do his own very basic research by consulting the readily available published letters. But since John Skinner has found his way into the discussion, let’s look at one or two other things that he stated.
In 1877 Dodgson wrote a letter to the child-actor Bertie Coote (Collected Letters, pp. 276-7), beginning: “My dear Bertie, I would have been very glad to write to you as you wish, only there are several objections...The third and greatest objection is my GREAT dislike for children. I don’t know why, I’m sure: but I HATE them – just as one hates arm-chairs and plum-pudding!...” You really need to read the whole letter to appreciate just how obvious a joke it is, but I’m sure all non-Freudian readers will get the picture from this little snippet. Skinner saw it as an indicator of CLD’s celebrated boy-hatred: ‘Carroll left just one letter to a boy. It is a cold letter, with little friendliness in the tone’. (I’m quoting from memory but I have the gist right.)
Then again, in 1884 Dodgson wrote a letter to Beatrice Earle (Collected Letters, text pp. 527-8, facsimile reproduction p. 529), in a deliberately shaky hand as a joke on how nervous he was at the thought of writing to her (‘The slight tremulousness which you may observe in my writing, produced by the thought that it is you I am writing to...’) Again, you really need to see the whole letter to appreciate the joke, but I can assure those of you without your own Collected Letters that it’s not at all difficult. Skinner – guess what – took this as serious evidence of how nervous CLD got when writing to ‘little girls’ (Miss Earle was 16). So much for the reliability of Tomato’s source.
You may say, "Empson wrote his article in 1935 and Fenichel wrote his article in 1930. Maybe Empson read Fenichel's article and slapped that trait onto Lewis Carroll."
That is possible, but here are some cases in which Carroll's biographers jumped the gun on the psychoanalytic writers:
===idealization of childhood===
Writers have commented on Lewis Carroll's tendency to idealize children. In Image of Childhood, published in 1957, Peter Coveney quoted Carroll as writing about "the eager enjoyment of Life that comes only in the happy hours of childhood, when all is new and fair, and when Sin and Sorrow are but names--empty words signifying nothing!" In Death of Narcissus, published in 1976, Morris Fraser, discussing the same topic, quotes the same passage.
It was not until 1990 that Segal & Stermac, writing in Handbook of Sexual Assault, commented on the tendency of pedophiles to idealize childhood.
Undoubtedly Dodgson tended to idealise childhood. So did everyone else in Victorian culture. Read Dickens, Wordsworth, Blake, Macdonald, Ruskin, Christina Rossetti, even unlikely candidates like Tennyson and D.G. Rossetti. Look at the art of Millais, Leighton, Noel Paton and scores of minor figures. If you don’t have time for that, read Michael Mason, Hugues Lebailly or Karoline Leach’s Chapter 2 (4 in the new edition). If a tendency to idealise childhood is evidence of paedophilia, EVERYONE in Victorian England was a paedophile.
On the other hand, perhaps there are such things as cultural trends as well as psychological ones.
But besides the absurdity of denying the relevance of socio-cultural context to a person’s psychological make-up, I question whether this idealising tendency is as widespread even among modern paedophiles as Tomato would have us believe. My own (thankfully limited) reading suggests that at least an equal number of paedophiles see children in exactly the opposite light, as sexually aware and manipulative beings who never had any innocence to start with (‘She wanted it just as much as I did really’). Check out a few of the nauseatingly-named sites which parade Dodgson as a flagship ‘famous paedophile’ and you’ll see plenty of examples of the attitude. It strikes me that this may well be an instance of the writer cherrypicking the right generalisation to suit his theory when he could have found other commentators in support of precisely the opposite view had he wished.
Paul Schilder, writing in 1938 in Aspects of Alice, spoke of role reversal in Carroll's relationship with girls. Writing in English Language Notes in 1981, Donald Rackin discussed Alice's protective role to a bumbling knight who keeps falling off his horse.
In 1949, Sandor Ferenczi, wrote about role reversal in pedophile relationships in the International Journal of Psycho-analysis.
Once again the psychological premise seems dubious (does the desire for role reversal really characterise a majority of paedophiles? It seems counter-intuitive), and the evidence for its application to Carroll ludicrously slight, second-hand as always, and wildly inappropriate. I’ve no recollection of what evidence Schilder claimed to produce for role reversal in Carroll’s relationships and can think of none that would be remotely plausible – and let’s not forget that this is the same Paul Schilder who thought a little girl was much the same thing as a male member (imagine the potential for social embarrassment there). And I have to point out gently to Tomato, who evidently has a great deal of difficulty with the concept, that the White Knight is a FICTIONAL character – that means he is NOT THE SAME PERSON as his creator. Have we got that now?
===attraction to an androgynous image===
Lewis Carroll dedicated "The Hunting of the Snark" to a girl who was "Girt with a boyish garb for boyish task."
In 1962, J. H. Fitch wrote that girl-lovers tend to seek masculine traits in girls.
Again the premise is flawed – ‘Fresh Petals’ and similar emetic websites stress quite opposite tastes – and its application on the grounds of a sentiment expressed in a single line of poetry, and echoed nowhere else in Carroll’s work, is at best an absurd over-generalisation.
I. B. Weiner, writing in the 1962 issue of Psychological Quarterly, reported a finding that pedophiles tend to be attracted to small and docile animals whereas male homosexuals tend toward the reverse.
Er – what? Don’t all gay men own poodles? Aren’t we getting our stereotypes a little mixed?
Once again, even if we are generous enough to accept the premise, the evidence for its application to Dodgson – while first-hand for a change – is selective in the extreme. While I don’t for a moment accept these airy generalisations as having any validity, IF a liking for big fierce animals is to be taken as evidence against paedophilia there is plenty in Carroll’s work – the Gryphon, the Jabberwock, the Jubjub bird, the Bandersnatch, the lion Sylvie and Bruno ride on, the big dog they befriend.
I guess that proves he must have been gay after all. Well spotted Jonathan Miller.
Leach repeatedly tells us that Carroll associated with other adults, especially women. Yet if she studied the literature on pedophilia, she would know how strongly she was confirming that Carroll was a pedophile. In 1967, Kurt Freund wrote in Behavioral Research and Therapy that men attracted to children tend to feel uncomfortable around other adult males.
[material deleted due to inappropriate content]
It becomes a little embarrassing to have to point out the painfully obvious quite this frequently, but social ease around women is not actually synonymous with discomfort around men; it is perfectly possible to be comfortable with both, and there is plenty of evidence that Dodgson was. Collingwood writes that he was the SCR member always chosen to show distinguished visitors round college; a younger colleague described Vere Bayne as Dodgson’s ‘inseparable companion’; T.J. Prout wrote to France Jane Dodgson after CLD’s death, ‘I shall forever miss your dear brother, whom I saw more than any other member of College’.
Once again the writer has revealed his gross ignorance of the subject on which he pronounces. He knows nothing about Lewis Carroll, nothing about Victorian culture and nothing about logical argument, academic method or the nature of proof. I also strongly suspect that he knows next to nothing about psychoanalytic theory, or if he does, that he has been quite deliberately selective and manipulative of the authorities he cites.
Not knowing the man personally, I have no idea what can have motivated his bizarre and, even on its own terms, frankly incompetent twisting of fact and logic; and I have the good manners not to indulge in baseless conjecture.