Investigations of a Dog

A couple of weeks ago George Simmers at Great War Fiction posted about some problems with applying the Marxist concept of ideological hegemony to the outbreak of the First World War. He criticized some vaguely Marxist influenced historians and literary critics who said that people were tricked by propaganda into supporting the war and then became disillusioned. I wanted to reply to his post, but every time I drafted a comment in my head it just ended up saying “I don’t really know”. I do know that George is right to say “These are words to be used with care.” Like many things, the concept of ideology can be useful if used well but can also be counterproductive if used badly. So in this post I’m going to try and explain what ideology means to me, and how it’s useful in my own work. Bear that in mind while reading, as when you see the words “ideology is”, that’s shorthand for “I think ideology is”, and not the definite assertion that it looks like. (more…)

[cross-posted at The horse in history and culture]

When I started my comeback as a historian in 2006, after a 5 year career break, I wanted to push myself in new directions. Therefore I challenged myself to come up with the most way-out research question possible. What I came up with was: do people construct gender for horses? I decided to look specifically at the roles of horses in war, partly because I’m a military historian, and partly because war is one of the most heavily gendered things in history. I first wrote a blog post about the project in October 2006, but since then I’ve changed my mind about lots of things. I followed up with two posts about how cavalry drill books specified criteria for good war horses. While the books I looked at didn’t always explicitly say that stallions were always best, there was a definite male bias, and mares were never mentioned. This post is a look at where I’ve got to now, and where I need to go next. (more…)

Andrew Hickey linked to a post at the Universe of Discourse about syntax, arguing against a syntactical rule which says that the hypothetical verb “to flimp” can’t exist. Go and read that post for more explanation. While reading it occurred to me that the search for a universal syntax often ignores culturally specific meanings, and that sometimes arguments against it do too. David Dowty suggests the counter-example that “to cuckold” is “to have sexual intercourse with the woman who is married to”. For example, in the sentence “Peter cuckolded John”, John is the direct object. But if you expand it to Dowty’s version (“ Peter had sex with the woman who is married to John”) the woman is now an object (I’m a bit vague on whether she’s direct, or whether “sex” is the direct object and she’s indirect!), and John has been relegated to an adjectival clause which describes the woman. That’s one way of defining cuckold, but it seems to be very specific to modern Western liberal individualism. Having sex (probably consensual) with a woman who happens to have a husband. But things were different in cultures and societies which used the word cuckold more frequently than we do, such as early-modern England. In early-modern gender ideology wives were supposed to be subordinate to husbands. To cuckold a man was to take his property, and undermine his authority and masculinity. To put it another way, it was to injure him by using his wife, just like to stab someone is to injure them by using a sharp object. The indirect object implied by the verb is what is used to carry out the action. In Latin we would use the ablative of means to describe this relationship. A wife is necessary for cuckolding to take place, but she is absent from that sentence. Not even an object. Of course this is horribly misogynistic, but cuckold is a horribly misogynistic word from a horribly misogynistic culture.

This does not prove that “flimp” can’t exist. In fact Dowty’s cuckold example proves that it is syntactically possible. His interpretation is more possible now than it was 400 years ago, but that’s all down to social and cultural changes. It isn’t a syntax issue. Syntax allows many possibilities which aren’t used in practice, perhaps because they’re just not useful enough. But what is useful can be heavily influenced by social, cultural and political context, and therefore can change quite a lot. Taking “cuckold” and “stab” as starting points, I’ve been wondering how many others verbs there are which strongly imply an indirect object, and how this implication might be specific to certain times and places. There are some obvious modern examples where the verb is the same as, or derived from, the noun. You can’t phone someone without using a phone. But I’m pretty sure that cuckold isn’t derived from a word for wife. In order for the concept to make sense there has to be a social and cultural context which at least includes marriage (perhaps a specific form of marriage), and certain norms of sexual behavior. In the context of early modern England patriarchal hierarchy and definitions of masculinity add extra meanings which are not necessarily apparent today. These meanings have very little to do with syntax.

Following on from this, I think “pray” might be another example. An ancient Roman might pray to one of many gods. Catholics only have one god, but they could also pray to saints. But when a protestant prays, there is only one possibility. Feudal homage might be another source of examples. I’m a bit vague on the details, but there were probably circumstances where “I am going to pay homage” could only mean paying it to one specific person. It’s starting to look like power might be very significant here. A person would have to be very important to a lot of people before it was worth combining their name into a verb in the manner of “flimp”. (This is starting to remind me of a post at Babel’s Dawn about how semantics is now looking more important than syntax, but I can’t remember exactly which post it was.)

(Incidentally, I don’t think the wank example given at Universe of Discourse really works because “to wank to” has the preposition “to” tacked onto it, and requires the indirect object to be explicitly included in order to make a complete sentence.)

Back in October 2006 I posted about my speculative (and slightly mad?) project about gendered perceptions of war horses. In a follow-up post I looked at a selection of four early seventeenth-century cavalry drill books to see what they said about requirements for war horses. Only Gervase Markham explicitly stated that a war horse should be a stallion, but all four authors habitually referred to the war horse as “he”. There was a particularly intriguing passage in Robert Ward’s Animadversions of War about using cats and hedgehogs to encourage lazy horses. He specifically mentioned the horse’s testicles, which shows that he had a stallion in mind. At the time I wondred why he referred to the horse and hedgehog as male but the cat as female. Now I think I have a possible answer: it could be connected with the gender of the equivalent Latin nouns. Equus (horse) and echinus (hedgehog) are masculine but feles (cat) is feminine. That doesn’t entirely solve the problem, it just moves it further back. Now I want to know why the Romans thought horses should be masculine and cats should be feminine.

Since that first post I’ve discovered that my assumptions about non-human species not having culture or gender were wrong. Joshua Goldstein’s War and Gender has lots of examples of culturally specific learned behaviour and gendered dominance hierarchies among animals. But I think I’m onto something with looking at whether human gender ideology led to gendered roles being imposed on other species. Samantha Hurn has found evidence of gendered roles being imposed by breeders of Welsh cobs. I haven’t been able to get hold of a copy of her article yet, but it looks very relevant.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading Shakespeare’s Henry V again as there are plenty of mentions of war horses in it. But I still can’t work out what’s going on with the Dauphin and his horse. Bestiality? Idolatry? Just the general arrogance and ridiculousness of the French?

1. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).
2. Samantha Hurn, ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It?’, Society & Animals, 16 (March 2008), pp. 23-44.
3. Robert Ward, Anima’dversions of vvarre; (London : Printed by Iohn Dawson [, Thomas Cotes, and Richard Bishop], and are to be sold by Francis Eglesfield at the signe of the Marigold in Pauls Church-yard, 1639., 1639).