Standing Back from Horror: Distancing the Reader in Randall Jarrell’s “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”

          Of all Randall Jarrell’s poems, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is by far the best known and most frequently anthologized. This short poem has come to represent the atrocities of war for generations of post-World War II high school and college students, many of whom experience shock and confusion when they first encounter the work’s sparse and understated imagery. Aside from a simple lack of knowledge about aircraft and aircraft gunners from the era in which the poem is set, there may be a more significant reason why students first react blankly and then slowly begin to process and respond to the poem’s ideas. Because Jarrell’s subject matter – the death and unceremonious disposal of a young ball turret gunner – is so bleak, it requires a delicate balance of veiling and revealing in order to prevent these readers from immediately turning away from the poem and its themes. The subject of “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is so horrific that Jarrell feels the need to create distance between the reader and the speaker’s experience, and it is only this created distance that allows the reader to actually contemplate the poem long enough to discern its deeper and more important lessons.

            Most critics of Jarrell’s work have noted “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’s” brevity and its telescoping of time. Sister Bernetta Quinn, O.S.F., remarks:

Seldom has so much meaning been compressed into five lines, with two rhymes, froze and hose, a chilling and inhuman condensation of the fate suffered by the pilot, of whom not even enough remained to need the “body bag” used after air crashes. (51)

Similarly, Patrick F. Bassett argues that this poem is “perhaps unequaled in the compacted power of its suggestive imagery” (21). Neither critic considers the impact of such condensed and compacted imagery as a buffer for readers; their readings focus only on the more apparent strengths of the poems’ concise structure and expression. However, Suzanne Ferguson does hint at Jarrell’s power to create distance in her consideration of another of his poems, “A Pilot from the Carrier.” In discussing this poem, which also focuses on the death of an airman, Ferguson notes,

A striking quality of the experience is the detachment Jarrell has managed to convey. From the total involvement of the opening lines, the pilot has passed to a state which seems entirely disinterested; even his approaching death is an illusion, born of appearances and helplessness. (50-51)

Excluding the concept of involvement at any point in the poem, Ferguson’s comments about “A Pilot from the Carrier” could, I think, be applied with equal relevance to “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” although Ferguson herself never goes so far as to say so. Like the speaker in “A Pilot from the Carrier,” the ball turret gunner seems detached from his surroundings and disinterested even in his own death. The sense of this detachment, which creates the necessary buffer for the reader, is created through specific imagery and wording that Jarrell very consciously chooses to employ.

            In order to convey the speaker’s detachment, Jarrell first creates a dreamlike atmosphere in the poem, providing immediate distance by removing the speaker’s experience from the realm of waking reality. The first line, “From my mother’s womb I fell into the State,” introduces the dream imagery by connecting the speaker to his mother’s dreams. This line evokes ideas of the mother’s womb, but it also suggests that perhaps the whole scenario is a mother’s nightmare for her unborn or even already grown son. Even at this early point in the poem, the reader can interpret the experience as nightmare or fantasy rather than reality. Later, the speaker describes life as a “dream” (3), implying his feeling that none of his experiences, either in the war or back on the ground as a civilian, are sample. The speaker then tells us that he “woke” to the experience of combat, but even that terrible ordeal is paradoxically only a “nightmare” (4). The importance of these images has been noted by Patrick F. Bassett, who writes,

The irony of the sleep imagery emerges when the reader realizes that life for the soldier is but ephemeral fantasy, a “dream,” whereas reality surfaces in the form of “nightmare fighters.” Hence, the usual connotations of sleep, its release and rejuvenation, are thematically perverted to connote both defenselessness (of mother and soldier) and nightmare horror. (20)

Bassett points out in this passage that the reader has to “realize” what the sleep imagery conveys, implying that the reader does not immediately grasp the full power of the poem’s suggestions. As a result, the reader is removed from the immediate experience, and, as that scenario becomes more dreamlike and less tangible, the reader is more able to withstand the brutality that the poem actually depicts. The poem’s final line, though shocking and gruesome, continues this dreamlike sense by revealing that the speaker is already dead; the image of a dead man rising to relate his story immediately conveys a sense of fantasy and a removal from the “real” world. As a result, the reader can bear to hear the gunner’s tale and ponder its meaning at length, since the gunner is merely a ghost relating the imaginary details of a nightmare.

            Jarrell also creates distance from the horror of the gunner’s experience by rendering him completely passive in the poem. No action takes place in these lines, and this strangely static imagery in a typically kinetic kind of poetry serves to further remove the reader from the immediate scene of war. The speaker never moves as a positive, proactive individual. Instead, he “fell” into the military and the war (1), and he “hunched” in the belly of the bomber (2). Both verbs imply action that is either unintentional or simply reactive. The gunner does not leap or jump into the war; he falls, as if by accident. Suzanne Ferguson has observed that the soldiers in Jarrell’s poems “retreat from heroism even in their wishes… and they face death with bafflement” (56-57). This description is certainly true of the ball turret gunner, who retreats from any action at all. He only wakes in the poem’s last two lines in order to die, and even the actual moment of dying is passed over and veiled from the reader’s view. A more typical war poem might depict a soldier in action, as does Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” but Jarrell’s poem depicts the solder in total inaction. One has only to think of the graphic opening scene of the now famous film, Saving Private Ryan, to grasp the full sense of the action, panic and turmoil of an actual battlefield, whether it be on land or in air. Jarrell’s poem reduces this activity to silence and stillness by focusing on the immobile and uncertain gunner, who merely crouches in the turret and awaits his death. This passivity creates a sense that nothing actually happens in the poem, thus distancing the reader from the hectic activity of real war and real soldiers. If nothing happens in the poem, then there is nothing for the reader to fear from its contemplation.

            A third way in which Jarrell creates distance between the reader and the gunner’s experience is his use of sparse and understated detail. The images in the poem are intentionally vague, and they run together in a way that obscures their meaning and reinforces the poem’s dreamlike atmosphere. The bomber in which the gunner hunches is not described; only its “belly” is mentioned (2), and the structure of the sentence confuses the image even further by logically forcing the noun “belly” to refer back to the “State” of the first line. The gunner’s “wet fur” is another vague image (2); the reader must take a few moments to grasp the detail as a reference to the bomber crew’s heavy, fur-lined leather jackets. Even more thought is necessary to reach the understanding that Leven M. Dawson gleans in his consideration of this image:

This “fur,” of course, is merely the pile of his flight jacket soaked in the early morning mist of takeoff, freezing in the temperature change of high altitude…; but it must also turn the reader’s mind to the fact that man in his natural state does not have fur, and to the fact that the human fetus does, however, go through an “unnatural” regressive “state” in which it is completely covered in down or “wet fur.” (29)

Thus, an image which is initially only confusing to the reader becomes more and more meaningful and clear as the reader considers it. The poem’s other images operate in a similar manner. The only description of the gunner’s fatal air battle comes in the fourth line, where “black flak” and “bombers” are mentioned but not elaborated upon in any way. The scene of the battle is left to the reader’s imagination, and the absence of detail forces the reader to stop again and work out what such a battle must be like. Even the final line of the poem, which is the most direct and the most shocking part of the work, intentionally veers away from concrete images and details; we do not know who “they” are or what kind of “hose” they use to wash the gunner’s remains from the turret. A less skilled and more direct poet might have been tempted to describe the final scene in gory detail, but Jarrell allows the reader to absorb slowly the full impact of the situation by creating an image that is quiet, bloodless and strangely calm. These understated and vague details create a buffer zone for the reader because they force the slow piecing together of the scenario that the gunner describes; a full understanding of the poem’s horror comes only after the reader has worked through the images to create a coherent picture of the experience. 

            “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is not an easy poem to read, but Jarrell is a gifted enough poet to make the task of reading it more bearable by creating a certain amount of distance between the reader and the tragedy that the poem describes. By creating a dreamlike atmosphere, a passive speaker, and a series of vague and understated images, Jarrell slows the reader’s experience so that the poem is never overwhelming, but he does not obscure his meaning so much that the reader is left unrewarded by lengthy contemplation. The implications of Jarrell’s poem unfold slowly, and, when full realization comes, the reader is prepared to accept it.

Gothic Angels: The Dead, Good Girl in Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” and Alice Cooper’s “Cold Ethyl”

With so many representations of the femme fatale in art, music and literature, a man might consider himself duly warned against the seductive charms of the destructive woman, but being forewarned is no assurance that a man will entirely escape the shame and suffering of betrayal from the one he loves. How does a man make sure that his girl will stay true? Sometimes the sweetest face can disguise a devil’s lying tongue, and the girl who seems loyal might actually be treacherous when the man is not around. In “Porphyria’s Lover” and “Cold Ethyl,” Robert Browning and Alice Cooper offer one solution to this problem that, although grotesque, is remarkably effective. Both the poem and the song feature men who can rest assured that their lovers will always be good girls because they are dead. While macabre in their approach to the problem of women’s fidelity, Browning’s poem and Cooper’s song demonstrate the lengths to which men are willing to go in order to avoid betrayal by a potential femme fatale and ensure the permanent loyalty and “love” of a gothic version of the domestic angel.

In “Porphyria’s Lover,” the lover of the title is frustrated by his relationship because of his inability to control the girl he loves. Porphyria is unwilling to commit, and she prefers to remain beyond the lover’s control and inside her own world of wealth and society. While not exactly a femme fatale on the same level as Keats’ belle dame sans merci, the lover sees Porphyria as a woman who is veering dangerously close to being more whore than virgin because her materialism and vanity take precedence over her emotional attachment to him. The lover summarizes this problem with Porphyria very succinctly; he describes her as

Too weak, for all her heart's endeavour, 

To set its struggling passion free    

From pride, and vainer ties dissever,    

And give herself to me for ever. (22-25)

Angels should care more for love than money, but Porphyria either cannot or will not fit the mold into which her lover wishes to cast her. The lover’s solution to this problem is to render Porphyria completely passive by strangling her with her own hair. Now she can no longer resist the angel role or the lover’s complete control over her; she will remain “perfectly pure and good” forever (37). The fact that she is dead does not cloud the lover’s joy at her newfound perfection; he insists that she is happier this way and that their macabre union has the de facto blessing of God since He “has not said a word” in condemnation of the lover’s actions (60). The lover ends the poem locked in a morbid embrace with his perfect, blonde, angel corpse; the reader, who can imagine the inevitable decay of Porphyria’s remains, recoils in horror, but the lover is satisfied because his conflict was with Porphyria’s will, and that troublesome part of her has been utterly erased by her death.

In the song, “Cold Ethyl,” Alice Cooper provides a logical continuation of Browning’s theme by depicting a man whose perfect girlfriend is also a corpse, although Cooper’s song takes the macabre situation to the next level by highlighting the sexual nature of the speaker’s relationship with the dead body. The speaker blatantly talks about having sex with the deceased woman:

One thing,
No lie,
Ethyl's frigid as an Eskimo pie.
She's cool in bed,
Well, she oughta be 'cuz Ethyl's dead! (Cooper)

The humorous undercurrent that characterizes Cooper’s most lurid songs is obvious in the pun about Ethyl being “frigid,” a term that describes both anything refrigerated or cold and a woman with no sexual passion. The speaker never tells us where he got this corpse, and we do not know if he, like Porphyria’s lover, is a murderer as well as a necrophiliac, but Cooper’s speaker is far more practical about his dead angel because he preserves her by keeping her in a refrigerator. Porphyria’s delusional lover never thinks much about the natural decay of corpses, but Cooper’s speaker clearly understands that his permanently perfect lover will only stay desirable if he keeps her on ice. Like Porphyria’s lover, however, Ethyl’s necrophiliac boyfriend sees a corpse woman as the perfect mate because she is completely passive and permanently available to him. The speaker brags that “everything is my way / Ethyl don’t have much to say.” Like Porphyria’s lover, he has total control in the relationship. The speaker ends the song with the following declaration:

If I live 'til ninety-seven
You'll still be waiting in refrigerator heaven
'cuz you're cool,
You're on ice,
Cold Ethyl,
You're my paradise.

The dead Ethyl makes an ideal lover because she is never going to leave the speaker or betray him by having wishes contrary to his own; her passivity and reliability make her the speaker’s “paradise,” a perfect angel woman who will never break the speaker’s heart. Like Porphyria’s lover, Cooper’s speaker has taken the idea of the angel woman to an extreme that seems horrific, if also grimly comical, to the audience, but he himself seems very well satisfied with the situation.

Both “Porphyria’s Lover” and “Cold Ethyl” rely upon a certain amount of shock value in their appeals to their audiences; necrophilia is a topic bound to give people the willies, either pleasurable or otherwise. Still, both the poem and the song explore the territory of the virgin/whore dichotomy in an interesting way because they show the extreme end of masculine desire to avoid the dominating power of the femme fatale and ensure the sexual and emotional fidelity of the adored angel. The men in both texts want so much control and power over the women in their lives that they find only corpses are passive enough to be satisfactory. Ironically, their frozen gothic angels are the only women who can live up to the expectations of these grotesque and greedy lovers.

NB: All rights reserved by the author. This essay may not be copied, reprinted, or reused without express permission from the author. 

Music, Sex, and Sweetness in THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT (1955)

Jayne Mansfield's legacy has been a doubtful one, most often noted for its tragic ending and Mansfield's failure to eclipse the fame of fellow blonde bombshell, Marilyn Monroe. That's a shame, too, because she really shines in the 1956 musical comedy, The Girl Can't Help It. Far from being a mere decorative element in another actor's film, Mansfield comes across as sexy, yes, but also solid, funny, and genuinely aware of the joke being told at her famously curvaceous body's expense.

The film's plot follows washed up agent Tom Miller (Tom Ewell), whose luck begins to change when he's hired by an equally washed up mob boss to turn the thug's girlfriend into a star important enough to make a suitable bride. The mob boss, Fats Murdock, is played with gusto by character actor Edmond O'Brien; he wants Miller to turn Jerri Jordan (Mansfield) into a celebrity, regardless of whether or not she has any real talent. Mansfield amply fills the role of the emerging star; her figure alone is enough to turn the head of every nightclub owner in town, and eventually she turns Miller's head, as well, creating a series of comic difficulties as the anxious agent tries to resist his charge's all too obvious charms.

The opening sequence of the film announces that this is a story about music, and the musical interludes provide a sort of tour through early rock and roll, with performers like Julie London, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Ray Anthony, The Platters and The Chuckles all making appearances. Even the mob boss gets in on the act with a hilariously bad prison themed number that predicts the fame of Elvis' "Jailhouse Rock," which would become a chart topper a year later in 1957. The movie does a great job putting its finger on the cultural moment of the mid 1950s and showcasing the rise of rock & roll as the dominant form of popular music.

Some of the funniest moments, though, are the sight gags that pop up throughout the picture. The opening itself is one extended joke, in which Ewell breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly in order to draw attention to the film's production in Cinemascope and full color. Later, Jerri's stroll down a city street provokes extreme reactions from the ice man, the milk man, and every other male within range, and a scene in which Jerri holds a pair of milk bottles while discussing motherhood forms one of the movie's most memorable, and most controversial, images.

Director Frank Tashlin might well have intended to make Jayne Mansfield a kind of dirty joke; he is famous for saying that he thought big breasts were the funniest things in the world. However, both the star and the movie escape that gag through their ultimate sweetness. Jerri is only a fiction, after all; her real name is Georgiana, and she ultimately attracts Ewell's Miller because of her sincerity, kindness and native intelligence. He comes to know and love the real person, rather than the bombshell persona that Fats wants her to embody. Viewers should be equally won over by those qualities and should come away from the film with a newfound admiration for Mansfield's less tangible talents. The girl might not be able to help it, but she's charming, savvy and fun throughout the entire film.

See more of Jayne Mansfield in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), also directed by Frank Tashlin. You’ll find Tom Ewell in Adam’s Rib (1949) and The Seven Year Itch (1955). Edmond O’Brien, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), can also been seen in D.O.A. (1950), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and The Wild Bunch (1969).

An earlier version of this review was published on Examiner.com in 2009. The author reserves all rights to both versions of this material.

How to Write Reviews

People often assume that writing a review of something is a very simple process. You watch/read/attend the subject in question, and then you give your opinion about it, right? There's a lot more to it, though, if you want to do it right. The steps aren't particularly hard to follow, but they do require some thought.

I started writing reviews of restaurants, theater performances, and various arts and culture events back in college. I even won an award for my column during my senior year, but the best part was getting free tickets and press passes to events that I could never afford to attend on my own dime. Now I write mostly film reviews for Examiner.com as the National Classic Movies Examiner. Over the years, I have also had to teach review writing to college composition students. At any rate, I've got some experience with the process, and you can probably trust my advice.

First, you need to watch/read/attend the subject in question, but you also need to develop a broader sense of the category to which it belongs. Go to a lot of plays, see a lot of movies, eat at a lot of restaurants before you start reviewing them. Get a sense of the range and the history of your subject. You are more credible as a reviewer and will be able to offer a more balanced opinion.

Second, do a little research to see what other people have to say. I generally read IMDB, look for reviews from respected critics, and spend at least an hour brushing up on material relating to the film before I write. For film reviews, the bonus features and commentaries on DVDs and Blu-rays can be a great resource. Build up a personal library of books and go-to websites that you will rely on when you write. You will not want to repeat what these sources say, but you will want to know what is generally thought and be able to establish your own review as something distinctive but well-informed.

Third, start writing. You review should provide some basic information about the item in question, but it should have a clear structure that targets a few key aspects that you want to emphasize. Do not attempt to exhaust the subject. Pick two or three elements - either good or bad - and explain their effect on the overall experience. For a restaurant these might be service, ambience, and the food itself. For a film, these might be a particular performance, a theme, or a technical aspect. For films, plays, and books, be sure to keep plot summary to a minimum. NEVER tell the whole story! Avoid spoilers as much as possible. All too often I read film "reviews" that are really just extended plot synopses. Make sure that your review has a clear structure with well-defined paragraphs. It ought to go without saying that the review should be grammatically correct and free from any distracting technical problems with spacing, punctuation, font, etc.

Finally, read what you have written! Good proofreading skills are invaluable to writers of every kind. Especially if your work will appear in print or online, you want it to represent your best effort.

Good luck with your review!

Representations of England and George III in 'Schoolhouse Rock'

             Imagine, if you will, the scene of my sophomore survey of American literature. Thirty-some odd students, most of them engineering or nursing majors, filled the room with an absolutely palpable weight of boredom and apathy. I had assigned the introductory material on the Revolutionary Era of American literature for today’s assignment, and its lengthy perambulations on the nature of eighteenth-century colonial economics, European imperial politics, and early American debates about land ownership and the electoral system had proven entirely too much for my class. They slumped sullenly in their desks, barely looking up as I walked into the room. They dreaded the hour-long lecture on this material that I was almost certainly about to give, and they were turned off already, ready to ignore me as much as possible while I droned on about this lifeless and insufferably boring information.

Specialists in the eighteenth century feel a particular need to make this period connect with students, but how does one draw undergraduates, and especially non-majors, into productive discussions of a period about which they generally know very little and care even less? The tactic that I employed in this class, which worked remarkably well, was not to give that dreaded hour-long lecture at all, but to turn to Schoolhouse Rock for an introduction to what the Revolutionary Era meant to the course of American history and national identity.

George III eats a chicken.

Why Schoolhouse Rock? For one thing, almost every American who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s can sing at least parts of numerous Schoolhouse Rock songs. Even today’s freshmen and sophomores are familiar with the cartoon series, particularly enduringly popular numbers like “I’m Just a Bill,” “Conjunction Junction” and “Three is a Magic Number.” They are short enough to show in a class and leave plenty of time for discussion, without leaving anything out or having to explain what happens in the rest of the film. The songs are catchy, the images are striking, and the vision of American national identity that the America Rock songs create is absolutely provocative when it comes to the legacies and contexts of eighteenth-century history and culture.

Three of the America Rock cartoons are particularly relevant to a classroom discussion of the eighteenth century and the formation of American national identity. “No More Kings,” “Fireworks,” and “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World” all depict the American Revolution and the British response to it. Each demonstrates the ways in which American culture has created a story about how the Revolution began, what colonial Americans were like, and what England and especially King George III appeared to be like from an American perspective. Because my own scholarly background is in the British eighteenth century, I am understandably very alert to the cultural bias of the cartoons’ representations of England and King George, and it was this aspect of the cartoons that I drew to the class’s attention and encouraged discussion of throughout our viewing. This focus ultimately proved useful to the entire survey course, as we later returned repeatedly to discussions about how particular texts imagined America or Americans and how they imagined other nations or national representatives in contrast to themselves.

Not surprisingly given its title, “No More Kings” offers the most developed representation of eighteenth-century England and George III in contrast to colonial America and its colonists. The song and its accompanying images present a very abbreviated, populist and – of course – historically erroneous account of American settlement, with 1620 rapidly giving way to 1776 and the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock moving so quickly to colonial rebellion that a single Pilgrim settler looks around in astonishment to find himself surrounded by a large crowd of late eighteenth-century colonists. The cartoon then outlines some of the most celebrated events of the American Revolution and its aftermath, most notably the Boston Tea Party and the creation of the first American flag. In the course of its three minute trip through American colonial history, the cartoon also provides a tremendous amount of material for classroom discussion; its treatment of historical time and emphasis, its use of irony for comedic effect, and its visual representation of the English monarch and his forces all work together to create a very particular story about America and England in the eighteenth century, one that is both intensely problematic for the knowledgeable viewer and seductively persuasive for the general American populace. The ultimate value of the cartoon, however, is in its ability to make both its problems and its appeal readily apparent to a class of undergraduate non-majors, so that they can grasp and discuss the ways in which eighteenth-century history and national concerns are framed and packaged for cultural consumption.

Time, irony and caricature merge as the central narrative elements that dominate the cartoon’s version of Revolutionary history. The use of abbreviated time in the cartoon means that an awful lot of colonial history gets left out completely, with only the most significant or desirable elements of the American story left in. My class picked up on the omission of Jamestown from this narrative immediately, since we had just finished reading works by John Smith and other Jamestown settlers, and their early recognition of problems with the story that the cartoon was telling made it easier to get them to question the rest of the narrative’s perspective. The ironic distance between the images and the lyrics being sung while they appeared also caught the students’ attention. As the happy, hard-working colonists sing, “If the king could only see us now / He would be proud of us today,” King George III is watching these same colonists through a telescope from across the ocean and emitting high-pitched squeals of maniacal laughter at their efforts, even wringing his hands in stock villain fashion.

Both the sped-up time and the ironic juxtaposition between lyrics and images are played for laughs in the cartoon, but they also contribute to the seriously problematic way in which the English monarchy is represented in the person of George III. The cartoon’s time progression is too fast for an accurate representation of changes in the monarchy as the Pilgrims become the established colonists and then the revolutionaries, so George III ends up being depicted as king of the entire business, from 1620 right on until 1776. Only the color of his costume changes from scene to scene, and the repetition of the same colors over the course of the cartoon means that the outfit color does not actually correspond to a sense of a different king being the person depicted. Thus, it’s George III who vulgarly eats a chicken while the Pilgrims build the colony, it’s George III who laughs maniacally at the established colonists who hope for his paternal approval, and of course it’s George III who oppresses the American colonists until they are left with nothing but barrels for clothing and a strong urge to dump their over-taxed tea into the harbor. The English monarchy is therefore represented in the cartoon as consistently neglectful of and hostile to American colonial interests, so the eventual Revolution seems that much more like a noble uprising of long-suffering, good-hearted colonists against an inherently nasty and unlikable tyrannical ruler, one who had apparently been oppressing these poor people personally for over one hundred and fifty years.

18th-century representation of George III

George’s appearance in the cartoon is pure caricature, designed to provoke laughter and disgust. His lips are thick and purple, with matching spots of livid purple on both cheeks. He has a huge nose, awful teeth, and a short, fat body. The royal motto, “Dieu et mon Droit” appears ironically over his ugly, swollen head as part of the decoration of his throne, emphasizing in a more subtle way the king’s claim to absolute power as divine right, although that level of detail generally needs pointing out for the benefit of undergraduates. His gross consumption of the chicken while the colonists work emphasizes England’s role as the consumer of American labor and goods. His crazy laughter at their demands for fair treatment is both hilarious and disturbing. He is villain and madman, fink and tyrant, the absolute cartoon ideal of perverted power and corruption. The lyrics of the song reinforce the cartoon’s visual representation by putting some very damning words into George’s purple, thick-lipped mouth:

They knew that now they'd run their own land,
But George the Third still vowed
He'd rule them till the end.
Anything I say, do it my way now.
Anything I say, do it my way.
Don't you get to feeling independent
'Cause I'm gonna force you to obey.

He taxed their property,
He didn't give them any choice,
And back in England,
He didn't give them any voice.
(That's called taxation without representation,
and it's not fair!)
But when the Colonies complained
The king said: "I don't care!"

Coupled with the repellent visual image, these lyrics make George III seem utterly callous and dictatorial. When he declares, “I don’t care!” in response to the colonists’ complaints, he suddenly stops snickering and draws himself up to his full height, assuming an uncharacteristically regal pose to signify his superiority to the colonists and his ability to refuse their demands and assert his own power. He then sends an army of leering, purple soldiers to crush the revolution, their purple color making them an undifferentiated mass existing only as extensions of the purple faced, purple clad king.

18th-century representation of George III

I asked my students what they noticed about George’s appearance after we watched the cartoon, and they invariably understood the general aspects of his representation as markers for ridicule, as cartoon short hand for the bad guy, but of course there’s a lot more going on in the image than that. A quick look at some of James Gillray’s caricatures of George III shows that the Schoolhouse Rock image owes much of its construction to a very specific public representation of that monarch during his own lifetime. Even the way that George holds an item in his hand in each picture is strikingly similar. It’s one thing for a twentieth-century American cartoon to present an English king as a fat, ugly lout, but it’s quite another for his own country, in his own time, to do it. When I offered the Gillray images to my class for comparison, the students realized that the cartoon was, in spite of its silliness, actually borrowing its visual vocabulary from the period itself, and we entered into some discussion of George’s reputation as a monarch in England and the popularity of cartoons as a way of packaging certain versions of history and politics in the eighteenth century as well as the twenty-first. Of course, a scholar of the period knows perfectly well that our image of George III has altered considerably over time, and we see Gillray’s caricatures as part of the machinery that helped to create the myth of George III as oafish lout that Schoolhouse Rock continues. In more recent years, scholars like Linda Colley and Christopher Hibbert have complicated and brightened our view of this beleaguered English king, and I made a point of telling my sophomores that, from a British perspective, George III was ultimately one of the most popular and even beloved monarchs ever to rule the British Empire, an idea which they certainly would not have gotten from watching “No More Kings.” The image, therefore, proved to be a very productive starting point for a whole set of conversations about period politics and culture.

Far from being a “cop-out” tactic to amuse bored students rather than teach them, my showing of the Schoolhouse Rock cartoon was very much a calculated effort to engage a varied group of sophomores in some very sophisticated conversations about the eighteenth century.  The issues that “No More Kings” makes apparent form some of the most vital concerns of eighteenth-century studies. Even the most basic discussion of the cartoon with a group of undergraduates will necessarily get into problems of representation, national identity, historical “truth” and political propaganda, and popular culture. These are the same issues that scholars of the period are currently exploring with great enthusiasm, as the number of academic publications about such topics clearly proves. Undergraduate students, even non-majors, can tackle these topics with thought and energy if the material is introduced to them in a way that is familiar, interesting and “modern” enough to resonate with their own sense of culture and identity. If the Schoolhouse Rock cartoon contains glaring historical errors, grossly exaggerated characters, a maddeningly catchy tune, and silly visual gags, then it does so to the benefit of conversation about what all of that is supposed to mean. The America Rock cartoons all sell a particular story about the formation of the United States and the nature of American identity, and “No More Kings” is a part of that project, but students are able to enjoy the cartoon while still questioning it, and that habit of questioning the nature and purpose of the narrative being presented is one that every college student ought to develop.

NB: This paper was originally presented at the annual meeting of the Southeastern American Society for 18th-Century Studies in 2008. Please give proper credit when citing this material.