Subject and Power in “Porphyria’s Lover”

In his pioneering book, Robert Langbaum sees the dramatic monologue as a generic response to nineteenth-century cultural crisis, enabling debate of contending ideas, requiring the reader to respond to its speaking subject with a balance of “sympathy” and “judgement”. Later critics have found in the dramatic monologue a tension between the passionate utterance associated with romantic lyricism and the challenge to idealist notions of the single and essential self, one which gives the poet a political or “interventionist” role. And certainly for Robert Browning, the dramatic monologue seems to have offered a way out of the dilemma of “the subjective poet” as he himself characterized it: a movement out of the solipsism of addressing the state of his own soul, reaching beyond the confessional mode towards dramatization and the attainment of a more authoritative or public vision, dialectical in its strategies, the attainment of “what God sees”. By the end of “Porphyria’s Lover”, “God has not said a word”. And what the reader might see is problematic

Postmodern Tess: Recent Readings of 'Tess of the d’Urbervilles'

No Hardy heroine has divided critical opinion more radically than Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Hardy's defiant sub-title, ‘A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented’, challenges the moral preconceptions of his Victorian readership, insisting that Tess's sexual violation is no bar to her moral purity. The history of the novel's rewritings reflects not only Hardy's negotiation with contemporary sexual mores, but also his own compex feelings about Tess: ‘I have not been able to put on paper all that she is, or was, to me.’ ‘In the light of a critical practice that demands a stable and coherent consolidation of character’, Penny Boumelha writes, Tess can only be read as ‘complex and contradictory.’ Peter Widdowson, postmodernizing Tess, has left behind him any such critical practice, and even perhaps his own modernist reading in which juxtaposed multiple registers of Tess’s character fracture, in Cubist mode, the plane of vision. His up-to-the-minute Tess is one whose inconsistencies make her ‘unknowable’ in a way that explodes the whole notion of character as ‘a humanist-realist mystification’. Instability of meaning, as Terry Eagleton remarks, is the doctrinal obsession of postmodernism

The Fogginess of 'Heart of Darkness'

Imagery of fog and mist is pervasive in Conrad's stories and in his thinking about the nature of "art", described in his Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897) as "like life itself ... inspiring, difficult-obscured by mists". The Preface contrasts the artist's "truth", his attempt to do justice to the visible universe, with that of the thinker or the scientist. The artist, confronted by the enigmatic spectacle of life, "descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife" finds sensory impressions, aspiring to "the colour of painting" and to the magic suggestiveness of music, seeking to revivify "the commonplace surface of words" in fragments that "shall awaken in the hearts of all beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity: of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world"

The Hidden Shame: Telling Hetty Sorrel's Story

Adam Bede, despite its title, is centred on the story of Hetty Sorrel. And yet its essential action, Hetty's seduction and impregnation, and the birth and death of her child, remains untold, or is told only fragmentarily and belatedly in Hetty's 'confession' to Dinah. Brought to trial for infanticide, Hetty remains obdurately silent: 'very sullen... will scarcely make answer when she is spoken to.' Throughout the novel, she is 'never herself articulate and given remarkably little direct speech', Gillian Beer remarks. In what must be seen as deliberate contrast, her cousin Dinah, endowed with the gift of 'speaking directly from her own emotions' (p. 29) is that extraordinary phenomenon, a woman preacher. Their aunt, Mrs Poyser, notably 'Has Her Say Out' in chapter 32, and is much given to voicing it, too, along the way. Adam's mother Lisbeth Bede expresses in her querulous complainings a strong self-centred ego willing itself to be heard

Pip and Estella: Expectations of Love

From the time he first sees her at Satis House, Estella is, for Pip, the source of his most intense feelings, the centre of the dreams and hopes that are to give his great expectations their deepest meaning. And yet, this "centre" is generally regarded as the weakest aspect of Great Expectations-Dickens being notoriously inadequate in his dealings with love between men and women, and Estella, it would seem, lacking not only a heart but also other flesh-and-blood characteristics that might establish her as a credible object of Pip's affections. Furthermore, there is some doubt that it is actually Estella who inspires Pip's feelings: "he doesn't love her, she is unlovable and unloving, he only loves what she represents for him". At any rate, his feelings for her are decidedly curious-romantic, self-lacerating and impotent to a degree that Dickens, it is often argued, does not see

Proliferation and patterning are mediated independently in the dorsal spinal cord downstream of canonical Wnt signaling

AbstractCanonical Wnt signaling can regulate proliferation and patterning in the developing spinal cord, but the relationship between these functions has remained elusive. It has been difficult to separate the distinct activities of Wnts because localized changes in proliferation could conceivably alter patterning, and gain and loss of function experiments have resulted in both types of defects. To resolve this issue we have investigated canonical Wnt signaling in the zebrafish spinal cord using multiple approaches. We demonstrate that Wnt signaling is required initially for proliferation throughout the entire spinal cord, and later for patterning dorsal progenitor domains. Furthermore, we find that spinal cord patterning is normal in embryos after cell division has been pharmacologically blocked. Finally, we determine the transcriptional mediators of Wnt signaling that are responsible for patterning and proliferation. We show that tcf7 gene knockdown results in dorsal patterning defects without decreasing the mitotic index in dorsal domains. In contrast, tcf3 gene knockdown results in a reduced mitotic index without affecting dorsal patterning. Together, our work demonstrates that proliferation and patterning in the developing spinal cord are separable events that are regulated independently by Wnt signaling

First do no harm overlooked: Analysis of COVID-19 clinical guidance for maternal and newborn care from 101 countries shows breastfeeding widely undermined

BackgroundIn March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) published clinical guidance for the care of newborns of mothers with COVID-19. Weighing the available evidence on SARS-CoV-2 infection against the well-established harms of maternal-infant separation, the WHO recommended maternal-infant proximity and breastfeeding even in the presence of maternal infection. Since then, the WHO’s approach has been validated by further research. However, early in the pandemic there was poor global alignment with the WHO recommendations.MethodsWe assessed guidance documents collected in November and December 2020 from 101 countries and two regional agencies on the care of newborns of mothers with COVID-19 for alignment with the WHO recommendations. Recommendations considered were: (1) skin-to-skin contact; (2) early initiation of breastfeeding; (3) rooming-in; (4) direct breastfeeding; (5) provision of expressed breastmilk; (6) provision of donor human milk; (7) wet nursing; (8) provision of breastmilk substitutes; (9) relactation; (10) psychological support for separated mothers; and (11) psychological support for separated infants.ResultsIn less than one-quarter of country guidance were the three key breastfeeding facilitation practices of skin-to-skin contact, rooming-in, and direct breastfeeding recommended. Donor human milk was recommended in under one-quarter of guidance. Psychological support for mothers separated from their infants was recommended in 38%. Few countries recommended relactation, wet nursing, or psychological support for infants separated from mothers. In three-quarters of country guidance, expressed breastmilk for infants unable to directly breastfeed was recommended. The WHO and the United Kingdom’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists were each cited by half of country guidance documents with the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention directly or indirectly cited by 40%.ConclusionDespite the WHO recommendations, many COVID-19 maternal and newborn care guidelines failed to recommend skin-to-skin contact, rooming-in, and breastfeeding as the standard of care. Irregular guidance updates and the discordant, but influential, guidance from the United States Centers for Disease Control may have been contributory. It appeared that once recommendations were made for separation or against breastfeeding they were difficult to reverse. In the absence of quality evidence on necessity, recommendations against breastfeeding should not be made in disease epidemics

Effective Communication About Pregnancy, Birth, Lactation, Breastfeeding and Newborn Care:The Importance of Sexed Language

On 24 September 2021, The Lancet medical journal highlighted an article on its cover with a single sentence in large text; “Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.” This statement, in which the word “women” was replaced with the phrase “bodies with vaginas,” is part of a trend to remove sexed terms such as “women” and “mothers” from discussions of female reproduction. The good and important intention behind these changes is sensitivity to, and acknowledgment of, the needs of people who are biologically female and yet do not consider themselves to be women because of their gender identity (1). However, these changes are often not deliberated regarding their impact on accuracy or potential for other unintended consequences. In this paper we present some background to this issue, describe various observed impacts, consider a number of potentially deleterious consequences, and suggest a way forward

Potentially Heterogeneous Cross-Sectional Associations of Seafood Consumption with Diabetes and Glycemia in Urban South Asia.

Aims: In this study, we aimed to estimate cross-sectional associations of fish or shellfish consumption with diabetes and glycemia in three South Asian mega-cities. Methods: We analyzed baseline data from 2010-2011 of a cohort (n = 16,287) representing the population ≥20 years old that was neither pregnant nor on bedrest from Karachi (unweighted n = 4017), Delhi (unweighted n = 5364), and Chennai (unweighted n = 6906). Diabetes was defined as self-reported physician-diagnosed diabetes, fasting plasma glucose ≥126 mg/dL (7.0 mmol/L), or glycated hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) ≥6.5% (48 mmol/mol). We estimated adjusted and unadjusted odds ratios for diabetes using survey estimation logistic regression for each city, and differences in glucose and HbA1c using survey estimation linear regression for each city. Adjusted models controlled for age, gender, body mass index, waist-height ratio, sedentary lifestyle, educational attainment, tobacco use, an unhealthy diet index score, income, self-reported physician diagnosis of high blood pressure, and self-reported physician diagnosis of high cholesterol. Results: The prevalence of diabetes was 26.7% (95% confidence interval: 24.8, 28.6) in Chennai, 36.7% (32.9, 40.5) in Delhi, and 24.3% (22.0, 26.6) in Karachi. Fish and shellfish were consumed more frequently in Chennai than in the other two cities. In Chennai, the adjusted odds ratio for diabetes, comparing more than weekly vs. less than weekly fish consumption, was 0.81 (0.61, 1.08); in Delhi, it was 1.18 (0.87, 1.58), and, in Karachi, it was 1.30 (0.94, 1.80). In Chennai, the adjusted odds ratio of prevalent diabetes among persons consuming shellfish more than weekly versus less than weekly was 1.08 (95% CI: 0.90, 1.30); in Delhi, it was 1.35 (0.90, 2.01), and, in Karachi, it was 1.68 (0.98, 2.86). Conclusions: Both the direction and the magnitude of association between seafood consumption and glycemia may vary by city. Further investigation into specific locally consumed seafoods and their prospective associations with incident diabetes and related pathophysiology are warranted