Meaning of names essay

art careers essay Milwaukee County Historical Society. Meaning Essay! This essay was originally published in Milwaukee History, Vol 16, No. 1 (Milwaukee, WI: Milwaukee County Historical Society, Spring 1993), pp 22-28. Reprinted from Milwaukee History, by permission of the Milwaukee County Historical Society. ISSN 0163-7622. Cellar Analysis Essay! Elsa Ulbricht: A Career in Art. by meaning of names Peter C. Locke Essays! Merrill.

Elsa Ulbricht taught art education in Milwaukee, influencing an entire generation of local artists and craftsmen. Meaning Essay! At the same time she spent her summers at Saugatuck, Michigan, where she had a long connection with the Ox-Bow Summer School of Painting. She was a versatile artist who painted in both oil and watercolor and also did prints, lithographs, and drawings. She was also a master of many crafts, including pottery, handweaving, and bookbinding. Elsa Ulbricht grew up in Milwaukee, where she was born March 18, 1885. She never married and lived almost her entire life in the house at 915 North Twenty-eighth Street which her father, a lumber dealer, had built in 1893. Her grandparents on both sides of the family were immigrants from Germany who became pioneer settlers of Milwaukee.

Henry Buestrin, her maternal grandfather, became a successful building contractor in Milwaukee after arriving from locke essays Pomerania in 1839. Several of the buildings he constructed in Milwaukee are now local landmarks, including the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Building and of names essay the municipal water tower which overlooks Lake Michigan. She donated one of her paintings, Felicity and the Grandmother, to citation analysis thesis, the Milwaukee Public Library to honor her grandparents, the Henry Buestrin and Oswald Ulbricht families, for their civic contribution to Milwaukee. Elsa was originally trained as a kindergarten teacher at the State Normal School in Milwaukee with the class of 1906. Meaning Essay! Much later, in 1930, she received an art degree from Milwaukee State Teachers College. Miss Ulbricht worked as a kindergarten teacher from and management 1907 to 1909 but simultaneously received art instruction at the Wisconsin School of meaning of names Art, a school operated by the Wisconsin Art Students League. There she studied with the essay on food production and management school's director, Alexander Mueller, and with George Raab, Louis Mayer, and Gustave Moeller, the most prominent among the city's artists. Of Names Essay! All four teachers were Wisconsin-born artists who had begun their training in Milwaukee under the German immigrant painter Richard Lorenz and essay on food and management had then gone to Europe for further study. What they had to impart to their students was a mixture of the German academic tradition as taught in Munich and Weimar together with influences such as art nouveau to which Raab, Mayer, and Moeller had been exposed in Paris. Mayer's work, in particular, reflected the influence of the contemporary American art scene, and Moeller's teaching probably contributed something to the brightly colored landscapes which Miss Ulbricht would later paint, By 1909 the school had also introduced instruction in china decoration and of names leatherwork by Martha Kaross, who later become Alexander Mueller's wife. How To! Elsa Ulbricht certainly knew Martha Kaross, but it is not clear whether she was ever one of her students.

In September 1909 Elsa Ulbricht become a student at of names essay, the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, from which she received a degree in art education two years later. Much happened during her absence from Milwaukee. For one thing, the State Normal School moved in 1909 from its original location west of analysis downtown to a large new building south of the campus of Milwaukee-Downer College, a women's college at of names essay, the northeast edge of the city. Alexander Mueller converted his independent art school into a semi-autonomous unit of the Normal School and renamed it the School of Fine and Applied Arts. Upon her return to Milwaukee in 1911 Miss Ulbricht joined its faculty. Essay On Food Production And Management! By 1914 she was teaching such subjects as basketry, weaving, mechanical drawing, bookbinding, clay modeling, and of names essay public school teaching methods. Her art colleagues in thesis, the early days included painters Alexander Mueller, Gustave Moeller, Albert W. Elsner, and meaning essay Albert Otto Tiemann as well as sculptor Ferdinand Koening. In 1923, however, when President Carroll G. Pease resigned, it lost its special status and became simply another division of the on food college. Elsa Ulbricht was to have a long career in art at her alma mater, retiring in of names, 1955. Another new development in Milwaukee was the organization in 1909 of a theater group called the Wisconsin Players. The founder of the group was Laura Sherry, a native of Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin who had been an actress in how to a essay, New York.

She sought to create a new type of of names theater -- intimate, experimental, and non-commercial. The idea soon swept the country and how to similar little theater groups sprang up everywhere. Among its activities the Wisconsin Players had its own school of dramatic art. Upon her return from New York in 1911 Elsa took up the of names study of acting, diction, pantomime, and dancing. She soon became deeply involved in the activities of the Players, designing sets and costumes and appearing in many of the group's productions. Through the thesistools Players, Ulbricht become associated with Zona Gale, the local color writer from Portage, Karl Knaths, an Eau Claire artist who moved on to the Provincetown Players, and Dudley Crafts Watson. Miss Ulbricht continued her involvement with the Wisconsin Players until 1935 and served as its president for seven years. Miss Ulbricht started her academic career as an instructor of art education at the State Normal School. In 1943 she was appointed to take over the Art Division while the regular chairman, Harold Thomas, was on leave. By the time she retired in 1955 she had succeeded Thomas as head of the division.

Elsa Ulbricht's busy teaching career did not prevent her from frequently exhibiting her own work. Meaning Essay! During the 1920s and 1930s her creations were often shown at the Milwaukee Art Institute, particularly at the annual shows held there by the Wisconsin Painters and Sculptors. She exhibited at thesis, the Wisconsin Salon in Madison in 1938 and at meaning, the Milwaukee Art Institute in 1952. An important retrospective show at analysis, the Charles Allis Art Library in 1973 featured sixty-eight oil paintings, ten watercolors, and twenty-four graphics. The show was organized by meaning Jeune Wussow, a former student, who restored and mounted a number of early paintings which had been taken out of essay production storage for of names the exhibition. Root Cellar! Miss Ulbricht was the recipient of several honors during the course of of names her career, including the on food and management Bradford Memorial Prize at the Milwaukee Art Institute in 1925 and other prizes in 1926 and 1930.

In 1966 she received a Wisconsin Arts Foundation Award for service to the arts, and in 1973 was designated Alumna of the essay Year by the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee Alumni Association. Throughout her career in Milwaukee, Elsa Ulbricht played a pivotal role in the activities of local professional associations of artists. She helped organize the essay ballroom Wisconsin Society of Applied Arts in 1916 and served as its president in 1936, at meaning essay, which time it had a large workshop at 628 North Broadway. In 1922 Miss Ulbricht was the treasurer of the Wisconsin Painters and Sculptors and in 1942 was the first woman to be elected its president. She was reelected in 1944. At one time Elsa was on the board of the Milwaukee Art Institute, which served as both a gallery and art school between 1916 and 1955. Miss Ulbricht was also a board member of the Wisconsin Artists Federation, an umbrella organization established to coordinate policy decisions between the Wisconsin Painters and how to start paper Sculptors, the Milwaukee Printmakers, and the Wisconsin Designer Craftsmen. In 1937 the other members of the board were Santos Zingale, Stella Harlos, Howard Thomas, Robert von Neumann, and Alfred Sessler. Of Names Essay! The list reads like a Who's Who of the Milwaukee art scene of the on food Depression era. Several became prominent art educators in Milwaukee, while Zingale and Sessler joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin in meaning, Madison. In 1935, Milwaukee, like the rest of the country, found itself struggling with the effects of the Depression.

The Works Progress Administration, or WPA, was a federal agency charged with providing jobs for millions of root unemployed workers. Harriet Clinton, the director of the WPA's Women's Division in Milwaukee County, was trying to essay, find ways to provide jobs for women who lacked occupational skills and in many cases had never worked outside the home. One of her ideas was to set up a project in which unemployed women would be taught to work with their hands. Citation! She turned to essay, Elsa Ulbricht for help and advice. Elsa thought the idea was feasible and agreed to set up and direct such a project while continuing her activities at how to start a essay paper, the Teachers College.

She insisted, however, that the highest design standards should be maintained and that a qualified instructional staff should be hired to provide training. The program came to be known as the Milwaukee Handicrafts Project, or as WPA Project 1170. It opened its doors on November 6, 1935 with two rooms provided by the Veterans Administration. Although Elsa and her assistants were at first swamped by what the project was growing into, they soon rose to the challenge. Meaning Of Names! Additional space was acquired at several locations, including a large workshop at 793 North Jackson Street in locke essays, downtown Milwaukee. The project ultimately provided jobs for some 5,000 people over a lengthy period of time, including fifty skilled craftsmen who were employed as instructors and project supervisors. Elsa was assisted by two supervising directors, Mary June Kellogg and Anne Feldman.

Kellogg had been one of Elsa's students at the Milwaukee State Teachers College, and Feldman, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, was then teaching evening crafts classes at the Teachers College. Among the meaning of names department heads were Helen Clarke (dolls), Julia Loomis (quilts), Harold Milrath (toys), Barbara Warren Weisman (blockprints), and Aaron Shansky (bookbinding). The Milwaukee Handicraft Project turned out a variety of useful products, including toys, rugs, and printed fabrics for draperies. The items were all for sale, but only to root cellar, tax supported institutions such as schools. The products were soon in such demand that they were being purchased by public institutions all over the country. As time went on the artists began to carry out major interior decoration jobs, studying the spaces to be furnished and designing the meaning of names furnishings. Some of the women who had entered the program with no manual skills became so proficient that they were later promoted to become project directors. For a long time only how to start women were employed by of names essay the project, but when it was decided to locke essays, manufacture furniture, the project began to hire men with cabinet-making skills. Of Names Essay! In February 1937 an exhibit of the project's manufacturers at the Milwaukee Art Institute opened to favorable notices in the local press. By now the project was attracting national attention; and when the Western Arts Association held its national convention in Milwaukee the essay on food production following year, its members had an meaning of names essay, opportunity to see what the craftswomen were accomplishing.

Federal officials at the national level became increasingly enthusiastic about the project's success. And Management! Florence Kerr, the WPA's national director for women's and professional work, was a frequent visitor to of names, the Milwaukee project and recommended that similar programs be set up in thesistools, other states. In 1938 Aaron Shansky and Julia Loomis were sent from Milwaukee to Des Moines, Iowa to set up a project modeled an the one in Milwaukee. Meaning Essay! World War II and the end of the Depression brought drastically changed economic conditions, so that the WPA was entirely discontinued in 1942. With the withdrawal of federal support, the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors decided to how to start, continue a limited program under its own sponsorship. Eventually it became a small vocational rehabilitation program for the disabled.

In 1970 the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee commemorated the thirty-fifth anniversary of the meaning of names project with an exhibit featuring examples of its workmanship. In 1910 the Chicago artists Frederick Fursman and Walter Marshall Clute started a summer art school near the resort town of Saugatuck, Michigan, where there had been a summer art colony since the turn of the century. The school was at first known as the Summer School of Painting and was later called the Ox-Bow Summer School of Painting. Essay On Strictly Ballroom! Elsa Ulbricht began to spend summers in Saugatuck in 1913. She studied figure painting with Fursman and landscape painting with Clute, Albert Krehbiel, and George Senseney. Fursman, in particular, was to become an meaning of names, admired teacher and close friend.

He later became a faculty colleague in Milwaukee, commuting from Chicago three days a week to teach classes at the State Normal School. When Clute died in how to a essay, 1915, Fursman became director of the of names school in Saugatuck, remaining so until his own death in on food production and management, 1943, by which time he had retired from his position in Chicago and had made Saugatuck his year-round home. Fursman's home in Saugatuck was a historic building, dating from before the Civil War. Essay! Elsa Ulbricht often stayed there as a guest during summers in Saugatuck, and she purchased the home and studio after the death of essay ballroom Fursman's daughter in essay, 1948. Along with the studio she acquired a number of and management Fursman's paintings which were stored there.

Many of these were subsequently restored and found their way into retrospective exhibitions of Fursman's work held in of names, Milwaukee in 1968 and 1991. She spent more and more time in Saugatuck after acquiring the home there. She liked to entertain, particularly with cookouts and costume parties. Miss Ulbricht began to teach at the summer school in Saugatuck by 1941, even managing to be on root, hand in 1945 and 1946, although she spent the early summer in those years teaching Crafts workshops at Gatlinburg in the Great Smoky Mountains of meaning of names essay eastern Tennessee. Under the auspices of the University of Tennessee, teachers from some twenty states gathered at the Settlement School in essay, Gatlinburg for six weeks instruction in handweaving and other crafts. In 1945 she was invited to inspect the meaning of names famous handicrafts program at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, where Harriet Gill, one of her former students in Milwaukee, was now teaching. Gill joined her as an assistant at Gatlinburg the following year. During the summer of 1945 Elsa also made a tour of North Carolina, visiting several crafts programs in operation there. Saugatuck played an important part in Miss Ulbricht's life. A Essay Paper! For sixty years she spent her summers there and painted landscapes, outdoor figure studies, and portraits.

Their color and bright illumination reflect Fursman's influence, but the two-dimensional style of the portraits is a personal characteristic of her work. From 1947 to 1958 Miss Ulbricht was director of the summer school in essay, Saugatuck. In 1964 she returned to serve as director for one more summer. The crafts program at Saugatuck was expanded under her leadership, and in 1955 its faculty included two specialists in ceramics, Angelo C. Garzio and essay Bruce Breckenridge. Of Names Essay! Late in life Elsa became something of a local dignitary in root cellar analysis essay, Milwaukee, a much-honored grand lady of the local art world. The Milwaukee Sentinel reported in 1976 that she was still busy at the age of meaning of names ninety and had been making cassette recordings of her remembrances of the early days. She had, of course, outlived many of the people who had figured prominently in the art world of that time.

But there were still a few survivors, people like Alfred George Pelikan, who remembered her as a liberated young woman of the flapper era wearing her hair bobbed and smoking in public. Joseph Friebert, who knew her at the Teachers College in the 1940s, remembers her as a petite, energetic woman with an instinctive sympathy for the underdog. Elsa Ulbricht died in Milwaukee on March 13, 1980, a few days before her ninety-fifth birthday. She is remembered principally as an inspiring teacher whose influence touched the thesistools lives of hundreds of students, colleagues, and other associates. Secondarily she is essay, remembered as a skilled and energetic administrator who successfully ran the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, the Art Division of the Milwaukee State Teachers College, and the Ox-Bow Summer School of Painting in and management, Saugatuck. Of Names Essay! Although she exhibited great mastery of such crafts as handweaving and pottery, this type of work tends to be ephemeral and does not weigh significantly in trying to establish her importance as an artist. Her reputation rests on her work as a painter and printmaker. In these areas Miss Ulbricht deserves to be recognized as a significant regional artist whose work possesses a certain interest as a reflection of locke essays her time and place.

Peter C. Merrill, who currently resides in Boca Raton, Fl, was born in of names essay, 1930 in Evanston, IL. Essay On Strictly! He was affiliated with the Department of Languages and essay Linguistics, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL from 1968 to 1998, retiring as a full professor. Dr. Merrill received a B.A. in Anthropology from Yale University, a M.S. in Linguistics from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Columbia University. He is an expert on 19th-century German-language writers in the U.S., the German-language stage in the U.S. and German immigrant artists in the U.S. Dr. Merrill has authored four books on related subjects and written forty-three articles and numerous book reviews and professional papers. Image of Dr. Merrill and his biographical information courtesy of the author.

For further biographical information please see America's Distinguished Artists, a national registry of historic artists. This page was originally published in Resource Library Magazine . Please see Resource Library's Overview section for more information. rev. 6/3/11. Search Resource Library for thousands of articles and essay on strictly ballroom essays on American art. Copyright 2011 Traditional Fine Arts Organization, Inc. , an Arizona nonprofit corporation.

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kitsch art essay AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH. This is Greenberg's breakthrough essay from 1939, written for the Partisan Review when he was twenty-nine years of age and at the time more involved with literature than with painting. He came, later, to meaning of names essay reject much of the cellar analysis, essay -- notably the definition of of names essay, kitsch which he later believed to be ill thought out essay, (as, indeed, it is.) Later he came to identify the threat to essay high art as coming from middlebrow taste, which in any event aligns much more closely with the academic than kitsch ever did or could. Root Essay? The essay has an meaning of names essay, air and assurance of on food, '30s Marxism, with peculiar assumptions such as that only of names under socialism could the taste of the masses be raised. But for all that, the on food production, essay stakes out new territory. Although the avant-garde was an accepted fact in the '30s. Greenberg was the first to define its social and of names essay historical context and thesistools cultural import. The essay also carried within it the seeds of his notion of modernism.

Despite its faults and sometimes heady prose, it stands as one of the important theoretical documents of 20th century culture. O NE AND THE SAME civilization produces simultaneously two such different things s a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover. All four are on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts of the same culture and meaning of names essay products of the same society. Here, however, their connection seems to end. A poem by Eliot and citation thesis a poem by Eddie Guest -- what perspective of meaning essay, culture is large enough to on food and management enable us to situate them in an enlightening relation to each other? Does the meaning of names essay, fact that a disparity such as this within the frame of a single cultural tradition, which is and has been taken for granted -- does this fact indicate that the disparity is a part of the root cellar, natural order of meaning, things?

Or is it something entirely new, and cellar analysis essay particular to our age? The answer involves more than an investigation in meaning, aesthetics. It appears to me that it is necessary to examine more closely and with more originality than hitherto the on strictly, relationship between aesthetic experience as met by the specific -- not the generalized -- individual, and the social and historical contexts in which that experience takes place. What is brought to of names light will answer, in addition to the question posed above, other and perhaps more important questions. A society, as it becomes less and less able, in the course of its development, to justify the inevitability of its particular forms, breaks up the accepted notions upon thesistools which artists and writers must depend in large part for meaning essay, communication with their audiences. It becomes difficult to assume anything. Ballroom? All the meaning, verities involved by thesistools, religion, authority, tradition, style, are thrown into question, and essay the writer or artist is no longer able to estimate the response of his audience to the symbols and references with which he works. In the past such a state of affairs has usually resolved itself into a motionless Alexandrianism, an academicism in which the really important issues are left untouched because they involve controversy, and in which creative activity dwindles to virtuosity in the small details of form, all larger questions being decided by the precedent of the old masters. The same themes are mechanically varied in a hundred different works, and yet nothing new is produced: Statius, mandarin verse, Roman sculpture, Beaux-Arts painting, neo-republican architecture.

It is among the hopeful signs in the midst of the start, decay of our present society that we -- some of us -- have been unwilling to accept this last phase for our own culture. In seeking to go beyond Alexandrianism, a part of Western bourgeois society has produced something unheard of heretofore: -- avant-garde culture. A superior consciousness of history -- more precisely, the of names, appearance of a new kind of criticism of citation analysis thesis, society, an historical criticism -- made this possible. Of Names? This criticism has not confronted our present society with timeless utopias, but has soberly examined in the terms of history and of cause and effect the antecedents, justifications and functions of the forms that lie at the heart of every society. Thus our present bourgeois social order was shown to be, not an eternal, natural condition of life, but simply the latest term in a succession of citation analysis, social orders. New perspectives of this kind, becoming a part of the advanced intellectual conscience of the fifth and sixth decades of the nineteenth century, soon were absorbed by artists and poets, even if unconsciously for the most part. It was no accident, therefore, that the birth of the avant-garde coincided chronologically -- and geographically, too -- with the first bold development of meaning of names essay, scientific revolutionary thought in Europe. True, the first settlers of bohemia -- which was then identical with the avant-garde -- turned out soon to be demonstratively uninterested in politics. Nevertheless, without the circulation of essay ballroom, revolutionary ideas in the air about them, they would never have been able to isolate their concept of the bourgeois in order to define what they were not. Nor, without the moral aid of revolutionary political attitudes would they have had the courage to assert themselves as aggressively as they did against the prevailing standards of society. Courage indeed was needed for this, because the avant-garde's emigration from bourgeois society to bohemia meant also an emigration from the markets of capitalism, upon which artists and writers had been thrown by of names, the falling away of aristocratic patronage. (Ostensibly, at production and management, least, it meant this -- meant starving in a garret -- although, as we will be shown later, the avant-garde remained attached to essay bourgeois society precisely because it needed its money.)

Yet it is true that once the avant-garde had succeeded in detaching itself from society, it proceeded to turn around and repudiate revolutionary as well as bourgeois politics. Analysis Thesis? The revolution was left inside society, a part of that welter of ideological struggle which art and poetry find so unpropitious as soon as it begins to involve those precious axiomatic beliefs upon meaning which culture thus far has had to rest. Hence it developed that the true and most important function of the avant-garde was not to experiment, but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence. Retiring from thesistools public altogether, the avant-garde poet or artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing and meaning of names essay raising it to the expression of an analysis, absolute in which all relativities and meaning of names essay contradictions would be either resolved or beside the point. Art for art's sake and pure poetry appear, and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like a plague.

It has been in search of the absolute that the avant-garde has arrived at abstract or nonobjective art -- and poetry, too. The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to locke essays imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape -- not its picture -- is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to meaning of names essay anything not itself. But the absolute is absolute, and the poet or artist, being what he is, cherishes certain relative values more than others. The very values in the name of which he invokes the citation thesis, absolute are relative values, the essay, values of aesthetics. And so he turns out to be imitating, not God -- and here I use imitate in analysis, its Aristotelian sense -- but the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves.

This is the genesis of the abstract.(1) In turning his attention away from subject matter of common experience, the meaning essay, poet or artist turns it in analysis, upon the medium of his own craft. The nonrepresentational or abstract, if it is to have aesthetic validity, cannot be arbitrary and accidental, but must stem from obedience to some worthy constraint or original. This constraint, once the world of common, extroverted experience has been renounced, can only be found in meaning of names essay, the very processes or disciplines by which art and how to start a essay paper literature have already imitated the essay, former. Essay On Strictly Ballroom? These themselves become the subject matter of meaning of names, art and cellar analysis literature. If, to continue with Aristotle, all art and literature are imitation, then what we have here is the imitation of imitating. To quote Yeats: Nor is of names, there singing school but studying. Monuments of its own magnificence. Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse and thesistools Cézanne derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in.(2) The excitement of meaning, their art seems to lie most of all in its pure preoccupation with the how to start, invention and meaning of names arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc., to thesistools the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors. Meaning? The attention of poets like Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, Éluard, Pound, Hart Crane, Stevens, even Rilke and Yeats, appears to be centered on the effort to create poetry and on the moments themselves of poetic conversion, rather than on experience to be converted into poetry.

Of course, this cannot exclude other preoccupations in their work, for poetry must deal with words, and words must communicate. Certain poets, such as Mallarmé and thesistools Valéry (3) are more radical in this respect than others -- leaving aside those poets who have tried to compose poetry in pure sound alone. However, if it were easier to define poetry, modern poetry would be much more pure and abstract. As for of names, the other fields of literature -- the definition of avant-garde aesthetics advanced here is locke essays, no Procrustean bed. But aside from the fact that most of our best contemporary novelists have gone to school with the avant-garde, it is significant that Gide's most ambitious book is a novel about the writing of a novel, and that Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake seem to be, above all, as one French critic says, the reduction of experience to expression for the sake of expression, the expression mattering more than what is being expressed. That avant-garde culture is the imitation of imitating -- the fact itself -- calls for neither approval nor disapproval. Meaning Of Names Essay? It is true that this culture contains within itself some of the very Alexandrianism it seeks to overcome. The lines quoted from locke essays Yeats referred to Byzantium, which is very close to Alexandria; and in a sense this imitation of of names, imitating is a superior sort of Alexandrianism. But there is one most important difference: the avant-garde moves, while Alexandrianism stands still.

And this, precisely, is on strictly, what justifies the avant-garde's methods and makes them necessary. The necessity lies in meaning of names, the fact that by no other means is it possible today to create art and literature of on strictly, a high order. To quarrel with necessity by throwing about terms like formalism, purism, ivory tower and of names so forth is either dull or dishonest. This is not to say, however, that it is to the social advantage of the avant-garde that it is what it is. Quite the opposite. The avant-garde's specialization of itself, the fact that its best artists are artists' artists, its best poets, poets' poets, has estranged a great many of those who were capable formerly of enjoying and appreciating ambitious art and literature, but who are now unwilling or unable to acquire an initiation into their craft secrets. Start A Essay Paper? The masses have always remained more or less indifferent to culture in the process of development. But today such culture is meaning essay, being abandoned by those to whom it actually belongs -- our ruling class. Start A Essay Paper? For it is to the latter that the avant-garde belongs. Of Names Essay? No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. And in the case of the avant-garde, this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold.

The paradox is real. And now this elite is rapidly shrinking. Since the avant-garde forms the only living culture we now have, the survival in the near future of culture in general is on food, thus threatened. We must not be deceived by superficial phenomena and of names essay local successes. Thesistools? Picasso's shows still draw crowds, and T. Essay? S. Eliot is taught in the universities; the dealers in modernist art are still in business, and the publishers still publish some difficult poetry. But the avant-garde itself, already sensing the danger, is becoming more and more timid every day that passes. Academicism and essay commercialism are appearing in the strangest places. This can mean only one thing: that the avant-garde is becoming unsure of the audience it depends on -- the rich and the cultivated.

Is it the nature itself of avant-garde culture that is alone responsible for the danger it finds itself in? Or is that only a dangerous liability? Are there other, and perhaps more important, factors involved? Where there is an meaning of names, avant-garde, generally we also find a rear-guard. True enough -- simultaneously with the entrance of the avant-garde, a second new cultural phenomenon appeared in the industrial West: that thing to on strictly which the meaning of names essay, Germans give the wonderful name of Kitsch : popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc., etc.

For some reason this gigantic apparition has always been taken for granted. It is time we looked into its whys and analysis essay wherefores. Kitsch is a product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the of names, masses of Western Europe and America and established what is called universal literacy. Prior to this the root cellar analysis, only market for formal culture, as distinguished from folk culture, had been among those who, in addition to being able to meaning of names essay read and write, could command the leisure and citation analysis comfort that always goes hand in hand with cultivation of some sort. This until then had been inextricably associated with literacy. But with the introduction of universal literacy, the ability to read and write became almost a minor skill like driving a car, and it no longer served to distinguish an individual's cultural inclinations, since it was no longer the exclusive concomitant of refined tastes. The peasants who settled in meaning of names essay, the cities as proletariat and petty bourgeois learned to read and write for the sake of efficiency, but they did not win the leisure and comfort necessary for the enjoyment of the city's traditional culture. Losing, nevertheless, their taste for locke essays, the folk culture whose background was the countryside, and discovering a new capacity for boredom at the same time, the new urban masses set up a pressure on meaning essay, society to provide them with a kind of culture fit for their own consumption. To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide. Kitsch, using for start a essay paper, raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits.

Kitsch is mechanical and meaning essay operates by formulas. Thesistools? Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of meaning essay, its customers except their money -- not even their time. The precondition for essay ballroom, kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of of names essay, a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from thesistools it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest.

It draws its life blood, so to speak, from this reservoir of of names essay, accumulated experience. This is what is essay on food production and management, really meant when it is said that the popular art and literature of today were once the daring, esoteric art and literature of yesterday. Of course, no such thing is true. What is meant is that when enough time has elapsed the new is looted for new twists, which are then watered down and served up as kitsch. Self-evidently, all kitsch is academic; and conversely, all that's academic is kitsch. For what is called the academic as such no longer has an independent existence, but has become the stuffed-shirt front for kitsch. The methods of industrialism displace the handicrafts. Because it can be turned out mechanically, kitsch has become an integral part of our productive system in a way in of names, which true culture could never be, except accidentally.

It has been capitalized at a tremendous investment which must show commensurate returns; it is compelled to extend as well as to keep its markets. While it is essentially its own salesman, a great sales apparatus has nevertheless been created for it, which brings pressure to thesistools bear on every member of society. Traps are laid even in those areas, so to speak, that are the preserves of genuine culture. It is not enough today, in a country like ours, to have an inclination towards the latter; one must have a true passion for it that will give him the power to resist the essay, faked article that surrounds and how to presses in on him from the moment he is meaning essay, old enough to look at the funny papers. Kitsch is deceptive.

It has many different levels, and some of them are high enough to be dangerous to the naive seeker of true light. Locke Essays? A magazine like the New Yorker , which is fundamentally high-class kitsch for the luxury trade, converts and waters down a great deal of avant-garde material for its own uses. Nor is every single item of kitsch altogether worthless. Now and then it produces something of merit, something that has an authentic folk flavor; and these accidental and isolated instances have fooled people who should know better. Kitsch's enormous profits are a source of temptation to the avant-garde itself, and meaning of names essay its members have not always resisted this temptation. Ambitious writers and artists will modify their work under the pressure of kitsch, if they do not succumb to essay on strictly ballroom it entirely. And then those puzzling borderline cases appear, such as the popular novelist, Simenon, in France, and Steinbeck in this country. The net result is always to the detriment of meaning of names, true culture in any case. Kitsch has not been confined to the cities in locke essays, which it was born, but has flowed out over the countryside, wiping out folk culture. Nor has it shown any regard for geographical and national cultural boundaries. Another mass product of Western industrialism, it has gone on a triumphal tour of the world, crowding out and meaning defacing native cultures in one colonial country after another, so that it is now by on strictly ballroom, way of becoming a universal culture, the first universal culture ever beheld.

Today the meaning, native of China, no less than the essay, South American Indian, the Hindu, no less than the Polynesian, have come to prefer to the products of their native art, magazine covers, rotogravure sections and calendar girls. How is this virulence of essay, kitsch, this irresistible attractiveness, to be explained? Naturally, machine-made kitsch can undersell the native handmade article, and the prestige of the thesistools, West also helps; but why is kitsch a so much more profitable export article than Rembrandt? One, after all, can be reproduced as cheaply as the other. In his last article on the Soviet cinema in the Partisan Review, Dwight Macdonald points out that kitsch has in meaning of names essay, the last ten years become the dominant culture in Soviet Russia.

For this he blames the essay on food, political regime -- not only for the fact that kitsch is the official culture, but also that it is actually the dominant, most popular culture, and he quotes the following from essay Kurt London's The Seven Soviet Arts : . . . the attitude of the masses both to the old and citation new art styles probably remains essentially dependent on the nature of the education afforded them by their respective states. Macdonald goes on to say: Why after all should ignorant peasants prefer Repin (a leading exponent of Russian academic kitsch in painting) to Picasso, whose abstract technique is at of names essay, least as relevant to their own primitive folk art as is the former's realistic style? No, if the masses crowd into the Tretyakov (Moscow's museum of contemporary Russian art: kitsch), it is largely because they have been conditioned to shun 'formalism' and to admire 'socialist realism.' In the first place it is not a question of a choice between merely the old and thesis merely the new, as London seems to think -- but of a choice between the meaning, bad, up-to-date old and the genuinely new. Locke Essays? The alternative to Picasso is meaning of names, not Michelangelo, but kitsch. Essay Ballroom? In the second place, neither in backward Russia nor in the advanced West do the essay, masses prefer kitsch simply because their governments condition them toward it. Where state educational systems take the trouble to mention art, we are told to respect the old masters, not kitsch; and yet we go and hang Maxfield Parrish or his equivalent on our walls, instead of Rembrandt and Michelangelo. Moreover, as Macdonald himself points out, around 1925 when the Soviet regime was encouraging avant-garde cinema, the Russian masses continued to prefer Hollywood movies. No, conditioning does not explain the potency of kitsch.

All values are human values, relative values, in art as well as elsewhere. Yet there does seem to have been more or less of a general agreement among the cultivated of mankind over the ages as to what is good art and what bad. Taste has varied, but not beyond certain limits; contemporary connoisseurs agree with the eighteenth-century Japanese that Hokusai was one of the greatest artists of his time; we even agree with the ancient Egyptians that Third and Fourth Dynasty art was the most worthy of essay on strictly ballroom, being selected as their paragon by those who came after. We may have come to prefer Giotto to Raphael, but we still do not deny that Raphael was one of the best painters of his time. There has been an agreement then, and this agreement rests, I believe, on a fairly constant distinction made between those values only to meaning be found in on strictly ballroom, art and essay the values which can be found elsewhere.

Kitsch, by locke essays, virtue of a rationalized technique that draws on science and industry, has erased this distinction in practice. Left: Repin, Cossacks ; Right: Piacsso, Woman with a Fan. Let us see, for example, what happens when an ignorant Russian peasant such as Macdonald mentions stands with hypothetical freedom of choice before two paintings, one by Picasso, the other by Repin. In the first he sees, let us say, a play of lines, colors and spaces that represent a woman. The abstract technique -- to meaning accept Macdonald's supposition, which I am inclined to doubt -- reminds him somewhat of the icons he has left behind him in the village, and he feels the attraction of the familiar. We will even suppose that he faintly surmises some of the great art values the cultivated find in Picasso. He turns next to Repin's picture and sees a battle scene. The technique is not so familiar -- as technique.

But that weighs very little with the peasant, for he suddenly discovers values in Repin's picture that seem far superior to the values he has been accustomed to find in icon art; and the unfamiliar itself is one of the production, sources of those values: the values of the vividly recognizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic. In Repin's picture the peasant recognizes and sees things in the way in which he recognizes and sees things outside of pictures -- there is no discontinuity between art and life, no need to accept a convention and say to oneself, that icon represents Jesus because it intends to meaning of names essay represent Jesus, even if it does not remind me very much of a man. Analysis Essay? That Repin can paint so realistically that identifications are self-evident immediately and without any effort on the part of the spectator -- that is miraculous. The peasant is also pleased by the wealth of self-evident meanings which he finds in the picture: it tells a story. Picasso and the icons are so austere and barren in comparison. What is more, Repin heightens reality and makes it dramatic: sunset, exploding shells, running and falling men. There is of names essay, no longer any question of Picasso or icons. Repin is what the peasant wants, and nothing else but Repin. It is lucky, however, for Repin that the peasant is protected from the thesistools, products of American capitalism, for he would not stand a chance next to meaning of names a Saturday Evening Post cover by locke essays, Norman Rockwell. Ultimately, it can be said that the cultivated spectator derives the same values from Picasso that the peasant gets from of names essay Repin, since what the latter enjoys in Repin is somehow art too, on however low a scale, and he is sent to look at pictures by the same instincts that send the essay ballroom, cultivated spectator.

But the ultimate values which the cultivated spectator derives from Picasso are derived at meaning, a second remove, as the result of reflection upon the immediate impression left by the plastic values. It is only then that the recognizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic enter. They are not immediately or externally present in Picasso's painting, but must be projected into it by the spectator sensitive enough to react sufficiently to plastic qualities. They belong to the reflected effect. In Repin, on the other hand, the reflected effect has already been included in the picture, ready for the spectator's unreflective enjoyment.(4) Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a shore cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art. The same point can be made with respect to kitsch literature: it provides vicarious experience for the insensitive with far greater immediacy than serious fiction can hope to do. And Eddie Guest and the Indian Love Lyrics are more poetic than T. S. Eliot and Shakespeare. If the avant-garde imitates the processes of art, kitsch, we now see, imitates its effects.

The neatness of this antithesis is how to start, more than contrived; it corresponds to and defines the tremendous interval that separates from each other two such simultaneous cultural phenomena as the avant-garde and kitsch. This interval, too great to be closed by all the infinite gradations of popularized modernism and modernistic kitsch, corresponds in turn to a social interval, a social interval that has always existed in meaning essay, formal culture, as elsewhere in locke essays, civilized society, and essay whose two termini converge and diverge in fixed relation to the increasing or decreasing stability of the given society. There has always been on one side the minority of the powerful -- and therefore the cultivated -- and on the other the great mass of the on food, exploited and poor -- and therefore the meaning of names essay, ignorant. Formal culture has always belonged to the first, while the last have had to content themselves with folk or rudimentary culture, or kitsch. In a stable society that functions well enough to hold in solution the contradictions between its classes, the cultural dichotomy becomes somewhat blurred.

The axioms of the few are shared by and management, the many; the latter believe superstitiously what the former believe soberly. And at such moments in history the masses are able to feel wonder and admiration for meaning of names, the culture, on no matter how high a plane, of its masters. This applies at least to plastic culture, which is production, accessible to all. In the Middle Ages the plastic artist paid lip service at least to the lowest common denominators of experience. This even remained true to some extent until the meaning of names, seventeenth century. There was available for imitation a universally valid conceptual reality, whose order the artist could not tamper with. The subject matter of locke essays, art was prescribed by those who commissioned works of art, which were not created, as in of names essay, bourgeois society, on speculation.

Precisely because his content was determined in advance, the artist was free to concentrate on his medium. He needed not to be philosopher, or visionary, but simply artificer. As long as there was general agreement as to what were the worthiest subjects for art, the artist was relieved of the necessity to be original and inventive in his matter and start could devote all his energy to formal problems. For him the medium became, privately, professionally, the content of his art, even as his medium is today the public content of the abstract painter's art -- with that difference, however, that the meaning essay, medieval artist had to suppress his professional preoccupation in public -- had always to on strictly suppress and subordinate the personal and meaning essay professional in the finished, official work of art. If, as an on strictly ballroom, ordinary member of the Christian community, he felt some personal emotion about his subject matter, this only contributed to meaning essay the enrichment of the work's public meaning. Only with the Renaissance do the inflections of the personal become legitimate, still to be kept, however, within the limits of the simply and universally recognizable. And only with Rembrandt do lonely artists begin to appear, lonely in their art. But even during the Renaissance, and as long as Western art was endeavoring to perfect its technique, victories in this realm could only be signalized by success in realistic imitation, since there was no other objective criterion at hand. Thus the masses could still find in the art of their masters objects of admiration and wonder. Even the bird that pecked at the fruit in Zeuxis' picture could applaud. It is a platitude that art becomes caviar to the general when the reality it imitates no longer corresponds even roughly to the reality recognized by the general.

Even then, however, the resentment the common man may feel is how to paper, silenced by the awe in which he stands of the patrons of this art. Only when he becomes dissatisfied with the social order they administer does he begin to criticize their culture. Of Names Essay? Then the plebian finds courage for the first time to voice his opinions openly. Every man, from the Tammany alderman to the Austrian house-painter, finds that he is entitled to his opinion. Most often this resentment toward culture is to be found where the dissatisfaction with society is a reactionary dissatisfaction which expresses itself in revivalism and puritanism, and locke essays latest of all, in fascism.

Here revolvers and torches begin to be mentioned in the same breath as culture. In the name of godliness or the blood's health, in the name of simple ways and solid virtues, the essay, statue-smashing commences. Returning to our Russian peasant for the moment, let us suppose that after he has chosen Repin in preference to Picasso, the root analysis, state's educational apparatus comes along and tells him that he is wrong, that he should have chosen Picasso -- and shows him why. It is meaning of names, quite possible for the Soviet state to do this. But things being as they are in Russia -- and cellar everywhere else -- the peasant soon finds the of names, necessity of analysis essay, working hard all day for his living and the rude, uncomfortable circumstances in which he lives do not allow him enough leisure, energy and comfort to train for meaning of names, the enjoyment of Picasso. This needs, after all, a considerable amount of conditioning. Essay? Superior culture is one of the meaning essay, most artificial of all human creations, and the peasant finds no natural urgency within himself that will drive him toward Picasso in spite of all difficulties. In the analysis thesis, end the peasant will go back to kitsch when he feels like looking at pictures, for he can enjoy kitsch without effort.

The state is helpless in this matter and meaning remains so as long as the problems of production have not been solved in essay on food production, a socialist sense. The same holds true, of course, for capitalist countries and makes all talk of art for the masses there nothing but demagogy.(5) Where today a political regime establishes an official cultural policy, it is for the sake of demagogy. If kitsch is the official tendency of culture in Germany, Italy and Russia, it is not because their respective governments are controlled by philistines, but because kitsch is the culture of the of names essay, masses in these countries, as it is everywhere else. The encouragement of kitsch is merely another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects. Since these regimes cannot raise the cultural level of the masses -- even if they wanted to -- by anything short of a surrender to international socialism, they will flatter the masses by bringing all culture down to locke essays their level. It is for this reason that the avant-garde is outlawed, and meaning not so much because a superior culture is inherently a more critical culture. (Whether or not the essay on strictly ballroom, avant-garde could possibly flourish under a totalitarian regime is not pertinent to the question at this point.) As a matter of fact, the main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of essay, fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too innocent, that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda into them, that kitsch is more pliable to this end. Kitsch keeps a dictator in closer contact with the soul of the people. Should the analysis essay, official culture be one superior to the general mass-level, there would be a danger of isolation. Nevertheless, if the masses were conceivably to of names essay ask for avant-garde art and literature, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin would not hesitate long in essay on food and management, attempting to satisfy such a demand. Meaning? Hitler is a bitter enemy of the avant-garde, both on doctrinal and personal grounds, yet this did not prevent Goebbels in 1932-1933 from strenuously courting avant-garde artists and writers.

When Gottfried Benn, an Expressionist poet, came over to the Nazis he was welcomed with a great fanfare, although at that very moment Hitler was denouncing Expressionism as Kulturbolschewismus . This was at a time when the Nazis felt that the how to start paper, prestige which the avant-garde enjoyed among the cultivated German public could be of advantage to them, and practical considerations of this nature, the Nazis being skillful politicians, have always taken precedence over Hitler's personal inclinations. Later the Nazis realized that it was more practical to meaning of names essay accede to the wishes of the masses in matters of culture than to those of their paymasters; the latter, when it came to a question of preserving power, were as willing to sacrifice their culture as they were their moral principles; while the former, precisely because power was being withheld from thesistools them, had to be cozened in every other way possible. It was necessary to promote on a much more grandiose style than in the democracies the illusion that the masses actually rule. Meaning? The literature and art they enjoy and understand were to cellar be proclaimed the only true art and literature and any other kind was to be suppressed. Under these circumstances people like Gottfried Benn, no matter how ardently they support Hitler, become a liability; and we hear no more of them in of names, Nazi Germany. We can see then that although from one point of view the personal philistinism of Hitler and Stalin is not accidental to the roles they play, from another point of view it is only an incidentally contributory factor in determining the cultural policies of their respective regimes. Their personal philistinism simply adds brutality and double-darkness to policies they would be forced to support anyhow by the pressure of all their other policies -- even were they, personally, devotees of avant-garde culture.

What the acceptance of the isolation of the Russian Revolution forces Stalin to root analysis essay do, Hitler is compelled to do by his acceptance of the meaning essay, contradictions of capitalism and his efforts to freeze them. As for Mussolini -- his case is analysis, a perfect example of the disponsibilité of a realist in these matters. Of Names Essay? For years he bent a benevolent eye on the Futurists and built modernistic railroad stations and government-owned apartment houses. One can still see in the suburbs of Rome more modernistic apartments than almost anywhere else in the world. Perhaps Fascism wanted to show its up-to-dateness, to conceal the fact that it was a retrogression; perhaps it wanted to conform to the tastes of the wealthy elite it served. At any rate Mussolini seems to have realized lately that it would be more useful to him to please the cultural tastes of the locke essays, Italian masses than those of their masters. The masses must be provided with objects of admiration and wonder; the latter can dispense with them. And so we find Mussolini announcing a new Imperial style.

Marinetti, Chirico, et al ., are sent into the outer darkness, and the new railroad station in Rome will not be modernistic. That Mussolini was late in coming to this only illustrates again the relative hesitance with which Italian Fascism has drawn the meaning essay, necessary implications of its role. Capitalism in decline finds that whatever of quality it is still capable of producing becomes almost invariably a threat to its own existence. Advances in culture, no less than advances in science and industry, corrode the essay, very society under whose aegis they are made possible. Here, as in every other question today, it becomes necessary to quote Marx word for word. Today we no longer look toward socialism for a new culture -- as inevitably as one will appear, once we do have socialism. Today we look to socialism simply for the preservation of essay, whatever living culture we have right now. 1. The example of music, which has long been an abstract art, and which avant-garde poetry has tried so much to emulate, is interesting. Music, Aristotle said curiously enough, is the most imitative and vivid of all arts because it imitates its original -- the state of the soul -- with the greatest immediacy. Today this strikes us as the exact opposite root, of the truth, because no art seems to us to have less reference to something outside itself than music. However, aside from the fact that in a sense Aristotle may still be right, it must be explained that ancient Greek music was closely associated with poetry, and depended upon of names its character as an accessory to verse to make its imitative meaning clear.

Plato, speaking of music, says: For when there are no words, it is very difficult o recognize the meaning of the harmony and rhythm, or to paper see that any worthy object is imitated by meaning of names essay, them. As far as we know, all music originally served such an accessory function. Once, however, it was abandoned, music was forced to withdraw into itself to find a constraint or original. This is found in the various means of its own composition and root analysis essay performance. Return to text 2. I owe this formulation to a remark made by Hans Hofmann, the art teacher, in one of of names essay, his lectures. From the point of view of this formulation, Surrealism in plastic art is a reactionary tendency which is attempting to restore outside subject matter.

The chief concern of how to a essay, a painter like Dali is to represent the processes and concepts of his consciousness, not the processes of meaning, his medium. Thesistools? Return to text 4. T. S. Eliot said something to of names essay the same effect in analysis, accounting for the shortcomings of English Romantic poetry. Indeed the Romantics can be considered the original sinners whose guilt kitsch inherited. They showed kitsch how. What does Keats write about mainly, if not the effect of meaning of names, poetry upon himself? Return to text 5. It will be objected that such art for the masses as folk art was developed under rudimentary conditions of production -- and locke essays that a good deal of folk art is on a high level.

Yes it is -- but folk art is not Athene, and it's Athene whom we want: formal culture with its infinity of aspects, its luxuriance, its large comprehension. Besides, we are now told that most of what we consider good in folk culture is the essay, static survival of dead formal, aristocratic, cultures. Our old English ballads, for instance, were not created by the folk, but by the post-feudal squirearchy of the English countryside, to survive in essay on strictly, the mouths of the folk long after those for whom the of names essay, ballads were composed had gone on to other forms of literature. Unfortunately, until the machine age, culture was the exclusive prerogative of a society that lived by the labor of serfs or slaves. They were the real symbols of culture.

For one man to spend time and energy creating or listening to poetry meant that another man had to produce enough to essay production keep himself alive and the former in comfort. In Africa today we find that the meaning, culture of slave-owning tribes is thesistools, generally much superior to that of the of names essay, tribes that possess no slaves. Return to text

13 helpful email templates you can use while job searching. The one thing we are all likely using in the job hunt is meaning email. Yet between cover letters, resumes, interviews, and networking, it#8217;s easy to underestimate how this tool can help us find great opportunities. Below are a few sample emails to how to a essay paper keep handy during your job search. Before jumping in, keep these tips in mind: Good emails are specific, short, and often mention some common ground so the reader is compelled to help out. Of Names! The email is often the last step in a larger process of doing research, reflecting on what you want, and planning your overall job search plan. The articles that accompany the examples often give more advice and information on how to locke essays reach out and plan more effectively before and after you send the email. Of Names! Sometimes the thesistools, subject line can be more challenging to write than the email itself! While a few of the meaning of names, samples below have subject lines included, Business Insider offers tips for subject lines for general emailing and for job applications. These are just examples; tweak according to how to paper position, needs, your personality, and your relationship to essay the sender. If you need help figuring out analysis thesis your next steps: Ask your friends for meaning of names essay insights on your strengths and weaknesses.

Here#8217;s what to say, from pop*forms: I am working on improving myself, personally and at work, and you are someone whose opinion I truly value. If you are willing, I would be so appreciative if you would answer some or all of the questions below to help me gain some insight into my strengths and the things I do best. I really appreciate it, and would be happy to do the same for you if you’d like! What do you think is my greatest strength How would you describe my style What do you think I should let go of start a essay, When do you feel that I am at my best. If you want to essay tell your network that you#8217;re looking for on strictly new opportunities: Be clear about what you are looking for and your expertise. Here#8217;s what to say from Jenny Blake: As I dive into the job search across the meaning of names essay, country , I’d love it if you could keep your eyes open for people I could connect with and/or positions that might be a fit for me. Below is a bit about essay on strictly, my background and what I’m looking for, and you can view my full resume on LinkedIn . These are a few of my ideal scenarios, but if anything related comes to you please keep me in meaning of names essay, mind! If you want to tell specific people that you#8217;re looking for new opportunities: If you have specific people in mind whom you think could be especially helpful in your search, send tailored emails. Here#8217;s what to how to start a essay say from the Daily Muse:

I hope all is well! I saw the photos of the conference you held last month on Facebook—it looked like a fantastic event. I’m reaching out meaning of names essay because I’m currently seeking a new position. Locke Essays! As you know, I have been Smith PR for almost three years, but I’m ready for a new challenge in the tech PR world. I know that you used to do work for Ogilvy, which is on my short list of dream companies. Do you still have any contacts there, and if so, is essay there someone that might be willing to do an thesistools, informational interview with me? Any introductions you could make would be greatly appreciated.

Read the rest of the email and the advice on the Daily Muse. Of Names! They also have a great example of a thank you email to send to people who have offered you advice or information about opportunities. If you#8217;re about to submit a job application: Always follow directions and submit your application accordingly. If you are sending all of your materials as an attachment, mention what#8217;s included, position you are applying for, and essay on strictly ballroom contact information. Here#8217;s an example from the University of Minnesota: I am a first year law student at essay the University of Minnesota Law School applying for a summer clerkship with your firm. I have attached the resume, cover letter and transcript that you requested to this email. Locke Essays! If you have questions or need more information, you may reach me through the phone number or email below.

I look forward to of names hearing from you, If you want to inquire about the status of your application: Wait about two weeks before sending a follow up email and demonstrate your interest, not asking for essay on strictly a response, says hiring expert Alison Green. Here#8217;s what she recommends you say: I recently applied for your __ position, and I just wanted to reiterate my strong interest. I think it might be a great match, and I#8217;d love to talk with you about it when you#8217;re ready to meaning of names essay begin scheduling interviews. Start A Essay Paper! If you want to say #8220;Thank You#8221; after a job interview: The key here is to reference something that came up specifically in the interview. Essay! Here#8217;s an analysis essay, example from Berkeley Law School: Thank you for taking the time to meet with me this past Tuesday. Of Names Essay! After speaking with you and learning more about the structure of Blank, Blank#8217;s summer program, I am even more enthusiastic about the possibility of working at Blank, Blank next summer.

I particularly enjoyed hearing about your work in representing several Latin American companies in trade-related matters. Essay Production! Read the rest of the email and advice from Berkeley Law School. Also, Career Services at West Virginia University provides examples of what to say if you want to add more information (say, a sample of your work) or address a question that came up in the interview. If you want to follow up after a job interview: If you haven#8217;t heard from an employer and the interviewer has given you a timeline, Alison Green recommends this email: Hi Jane, you’d mentioned that you were hoping to be ready to meaning of names move forward on the Communications Manager position by the end of the month, so I wanted to check in with you. I’m very interested in the role, even more so after our last conversation, and would love to thesistools know what your timeline looks like moving forward. Meaning Of Names Essay! LinkedIn is essay on strictly a great place to discover new connections that can help you advance your career. Forbes outlines helpful tips on searching for mutual contacts and crafting a compelling request for an introduction. We met briefly at the Delta Leadership conference last fall, during the round-table discussion. Of Names! To refresh your memory, I am changing careers, from being an accountant to being a fashion merchandiser. You were kind enough to give me advice on companies that might appreciate my background.

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I’m a [your profession]who has worked with [name of thesistools, warm contact]and I’m currently making time to develop my skills and focus on what’s really important in meaning of names, [profession]when it comes to locke essays hiring a [professional]for a project. I’ve had a look through your website and especially enjoyed the essay, [whatever]. I’d love the opportunity to spend 20 mins with you to start discuss your decision making process with regards to [professionals]and what your expectations are when working with them. Meaning Of Names Essay! If you want to thank a new contact or to someone who has helped you: And you should! However, in addition to showing gratitude, you can continue to keep in touch by thesistools, being helpful and showing how their advice has helped you. Here#8217;s a sample of one out of meaning essay, three emails you should send, from Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to Be Rich: Just wanted to thank you again for meeting with me earlier.

I’m definitely going to analysis get in touch with Susan like you recommended. I’ll keep you in the loop, and essay of course, please let me know if there’s anything I can do to repay the favor! If you want someone to recommend you on LinkedIn: It never hurts to essay have people sing your praises in public! Ask someone to write a recommendation for meaning essay you on LinkedIn. How To Paper! Here#8217;s what Indie Business Network recommends: I hope this message finds you well. It was great seeing you at the networking event last week! As we discussed, one of the things I am doing is creating new ways for my prospective customers to quickly see how I can serve them.

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conjugal roles essay Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow. by Veena Talwar Oldenburg (1990) [[1]] When, in 1976, I was doing the research for a study on the social consequences of colonial urbanization in Lucknow, /1/ a city in northern India situated about a third of the way between Delhi and Calcutta, I came across its famous courtesans for the first time. They appeared, surprisingly, in the civic tax ledgers of meaning of names essay, 1858-77 and in the related official correspondence preserved in the Municipal Corporation records room. /2/ They were classed under the citation analysis, occupational category of essay, dancing and singing girls, and as if it was not surprise enough to find women in the tax records, it was even more remarkable that they were in the highest tax bracket, with the largest individual incomes of any in the city. The courtesans' names were also on essay on strictly ballroom, lists of property: (houses, orchards, manufacturing and retail establishments for of names essay food and luxury items) confiscated by British officials for their proven involvement in the siege of Lucknow and analysis the rebeilion against British rule in 1857. These women, though patently noncombatants, were penalized for their instigation of and pecuniary assistance to the rebels.

On yet another list, some twenty pages long, are recorded the spoils of war seized from of names one set of female apartments in paper the palace and garden complex called the Qaisar Bagh, where some of the deposed ex-King Wajid Ali Shah's three hundred or more consorts /3/ resided when it was seized by the British. It is a remarkable list, eloquently evocative of a privileged existence: gold and silver ornaments studded with precious stones, embroidered cashmere wool and brocade shawls, bejeweled caps and shoes, silver-, gold-, jade-, and amber-handled fly whisks, silver cutlery, jade goblets, plates, spitoons, huqqahs , and silver utensils for serving and storing food and drink, and valuable furnishings. The value of this part of the booty of war was estimated at nearly four million rupees (there were approximately two rupees to the U.S. dollar in 1857). These courtesans appeared in other British colonial records as well. They were the essay, subject of frequent official memorandums written in connection with a grave medical crisis that engulfed the military establishment in Lucknow, as well as in start all the major cantonments in British India. A greater number of European casualties during the mutiny and rebellion of meaning essay, 1857, it was discovered, were caused by disease than in combat. On Strictly Ballroom! The shock of this discovery was compounded by the embarrassing fact that one in of names essay every four European soldiers was afflicted with a venereal disease. On Strictly! It became clear that the battle to reduce European mortality rates would now be joined on the hygienic front, to ensure a healthy European army for the strategic needs of the empire. It became imperative that the courtesans and prostitutes of Lucknow, along with those in the other 110 cantonments in India (and in of names several towns in root cellar analysis Britain) where European soldiers were stationed, be regulated, inspected, and controlled. The provisions of Britain's Contagious Diseases Act of 1864 were incorporated into a comprehensive piece of legislation, Act XXII of 1864 in India; it required the registration and periodic medical examination of prostitutes in essay all cantonment cities of the Indian empire. /4/

The British usurpation of the Kingdom of Awadh in 1856, and the forced exile of the king and many of his courtiers, had abruptly put an citation analysis thesis end to of names essay royal patronage for the courtesans. The imposition of the contagious diseases regulations and heavy fines and penalties on the courtesans for their role in the rebellion signaled the gradual debasement of an esteemed cultural institution into common prostitution. Women who had once consorted with kings and courtiers, enjoyed a fabulously opulent living, manipulated men and means for their own social and political ends, been the custodians of essay, culture and the setters of fashion trends, were left in an extremely dubious and vulnerable position under the British. Singing and dancing girls was the classification invented to describe them in of names the civic tax ledgers, and locke essays encapsulates one of the many profound cultural misunderstandings of exotic Indian women by colonial authorities. These new challenges provoked these women to of names intensify their struggle to keep out an intrusive civic authority that taxed their incomes and inspected their bodies. Locke Essays! Characteristically, they responded by keeping two sets of books on their income, bribing the local da'i , or nurse, to avoid bodily inspections, bribing local policemen to avoid arrests for selling liquor to the soldiers, or publicly refusing to pay taxes even when threatened with imprisonment. The tactics were new but the spirit behind them was veteran. These methods were imaginative extensions of the ancient and subtle ways the courtesans had cultivated to contest male authority in their liaisons with men, and add up to a spirited defense of their own rights against colonial politics. Their loyalty to the king of Awadh's regime underscores the position and privileges that were the sine qua non of meaning of names, their existence. Thesis! /5/ In a departure from the conventional perspective on this profession, I would argue that these women, even today, are independent, and consciously involved in the covert subversion of a male-dominated world; they celebrate womanhood in the privacy of their apartments by resisting and inverting the rules of gender of the larger society of which they are part. Their way of life is not complicitous with male authority; on of names essay, the contrary, in their own self-perceptions, definitions, and descriptions they are engaged in ceaseless and chiefly nonconfrontational resistance to the new regulations and the resultant loss of prestige they have suffered since colonial rule began.

It would be no exaggeration to thesistools say that their life-style is resistance to rather than a perpetuation of of names essay, patriarchal values . [[2]] Quite unexpectedly, another set of archival documents led me to a group of courtesans living in Lucknow in 1976, proud descendants of essay, those who had survived first the pressures of a century of systematic harassment by the colonial authorities, and of names essay then the ban placed on their activities by essay, the government of independent India. These documents were the meaning essay, intercepted letters written by locke essays, the Shi'i ruler, Wajid Ali Shah, to meaning of names essay some of his wives, whom he had been forced to abandon in the capital city of Lucknow, after the British annexed the prosperous and fertile Awadh Province in northern India and exiled him in 1856. I engaged a young Persian scholar, Chhote Miyan, /6/ to essay on food help me decipher these Persian letters. He not only provided the entree required to visit this group of courtesans but also, quite fortuitously, the key to comprehending their world. Meaning! He explained why he had only been given a pet name (roughly, Mr. Small) instead of a serious Muslim famiiy name. He was the start, son of a courtesan, and she had never revealed to him the identity of his father. Meaning Essay! Ironically, his sad life story had all the citation analysis thesis, elements of the socialization and upbringing accorded to a girl in a normal household: While I love and meaning essay respect my mother and thesistools all my aunts (other courtesans) and my grandmother, my misfortune is that I was born a son and not a daughter in their house. When a boy is born in the kotha (salon), the meaning of names essay, day is without moment, even one of quiet sadness.

When my sister was born, there was a joyous celebration that was unforgettable. Everyone received new clothes, there was singing, dancing, and feasting. My aunts went from root analysis essay door to door distributing sweets. My sister is, today, a beautiful, educated, propertied woman. Meaning Of Names Essay! She will also inherit what my mother and grandmother own. Thesis! She will have a large income from rents; she doesn't even have to work as a courtesan, if she so chooses. I am educated, but I have no money or property.

Jobs are very hard to come by, so I live in meaning of names essay a room and essay on food production and management subsist on a small allowance that my mother gives in exchange for running errands for of names her and helping her deal with her lawyers. (She was trying to evict a tenant from locke essays a house she owned.) She paid for my education, but a degree is pretty worthless these days. My only hope is that I may marry a good woman who has money and who gives me sons so they can look after me in my old age, or find a way of getting a job in Dubai, as my cousin did. Otherwise my chances in life are pretty dim. Funny isn't it, how these women have made life so topsy-turvy? In order to appreciate this rather remarkable inversion in a society that blatantly favors males over females, a brief sketch of the historical background of the tawa'if , or the of names, courtesans of Lucknow, is in order. /7/ At all Hindu and Muslim courts in the many kingdoms that made up the subcontinent before the British began to conquer them and displace their rulers, the locke essays, courtesans were an influential female elite. The courtesans of Lucknow were especially reputable. They had established themselves at the Awadh court in the eighteenth century, under the lavish patronage of the chief noblemen, merchants, and the official elite of the capital city. Abdul Halim Sharar, an early-twentieth-century novelist and journalist who constructed a remarkable history of the Nawabs of Awadh, based mainly on the oral testimony of the survivors of the events of 1857 in Lucknow, tells of their compelling role in meaning of names court politics. A cultivated man like Hakim Mahdi, who later became Vazir (prime minister of Awadh), owed his initial success to a courtesan named Piyaro, who advanced her own money to enable him to make an offering to how to a essay paper the ruler on his first appointment as Governor of the Province of Awadh. These absurdities went so far that it is said that until a person had association with courtesans he was not a polished man. At the present time (c.1913) there are still some courtesans with whom it is not reprehensible to associate, and whose houses one can enter openly and unabashed. /8/ While implying that the coming of the British had left these women as a beleaguered community, Sharar was strongly of the opinion that the meaning of names, morals, manners, and locke essays distinctiveness of Lucknow culture and meaning society were sustained by the courtesans.

Ensconced as they were in lavish apartments in the city's main Chauk Bazaar, and in the Qaisar Bagh palace, they were not only recognized as preservers and performers of the high culture of the court, but they actively shaped the developments in Hindustani music and Kathak dance styles. /9/ Their style of entertainment was widely imitated in locke essays other Indian court cities, and of names essay their enduring influence on the Hindi film is locke essays, all too patent. /10/ They commanded great respect in the court and in society, and association with them bestowed prestige on meaning of names, those who were invited to their salons for cultural soirées. Thesis! It was not uncommon for the young sons of the nobility to be sent to meaning of names essay the best-known salons for essay on food and management instruction in etiquette, the art of conversation and polite manners, and of names essay the appreciation of thesis, Urdu literature. [[3]] In Lucknow, the world of the tawa'if was as complex and meaning hierarchical as the society of which it was part. Courtesans were, and still are, usually a part of a larger establishment run by a chaudharayan , or chief courtesan, an older woman who has retired to the position of manager after a successful career as a tawa'if . Having acquired wealth and fame, such women were able to recruit and essay on strictly ballroom train women who came to them, along with the more talented daughters of the household. Typically a wealthy courtier, often the king himself, /11/ began his direct association with a kotha by bidding for a virgin whose patron he became, with the full privileges and obligations of that position. He was obliged to make regular contributions in cash and jewelry, and privileged to meaning invite his friends to soirées and enjoy an exclusive sexual relationship with a tawa'if . His guests were expected to impress the management with their civilities and substance, so that they would qualify as patrons of the women who were still unattached, or at least as regulars of the thesistools, kotha . The chaudharayan always received a fixed proportion (approximately one-third) of the earnings to maintain the apartments; hire and train other dancing girls; and attract the musicians, chefs, and special servants that such establishments employed. Many of the musicians belonged to famous lineages, and much of late-nineteenth-century Hindustani music was invented and transformed in these salons, to accommodate the new urban elite who filled the patronage vacuum in the colonial period. The household had other functionaries beyond the core group of meaning, daughters or nieces of the senior tawa'if . These women, called thakahi and randi , were affiliates of thesistools, a kotha but were ranked lower; their less remarkable appearance and talent restricted them to providing chiefly sexual services in meaning essay rather more austere quarters downstairs. Another interesting group of women secretly associated with the establishment were khangi , or women who were married and citation analysis thesis observed strict pardah , but who, for financial or other reasons, came to the kotha for clandestine liaisons; the chaudharayan collected a fee from meaning them for her hospitality.

Doormen, watchmen, errand boys, tailors, palanquin carriers, and others, who lived in start a essay the lower floors of the house, or in detached servants' quarters, and were also often kinsmen, screened suspicious characters at the door, acted as protectors of the house, and spied on the activities of the police and medical departments. Pimps or other male agents simply did not exist, then or later. It is popularly believed that the chaudharayan's most common mode of recruitment has always been kidnapping; that the tawa'if were linked to of names essay a large underground network of male criminals who abducted very young girls from villages and small towns and sold them to the kothas or nishat-khanas (literally, pleasure houses). This belief was fueled, if not actually generated, by Lucknow's famous poet and littérateur , Mirza Hadi Ruswa, in his Umra'o Jan Ada . The novel first appeared in 1905 [[actually 1899--fwp]], was an immediate success, and production and management was translated into English in 1961. It has been reprinted several times since it was reincarnated as a Bombay film in 1981. The influence this novel has exerted on meaning of names essay, the popular imagination is enormous; it is the thesis, single most important source of information on courtesans of Lucknow, and by extension, the entire profession as it was practiced in the nineteenth century, in northern India. Set in the second half of the meaning, nineteenth century, it is essay production and management, a melodramatic story of a tawa'if , Umrao Jan, who as a beautiful child of five is kidnapped and sold to a tawa'if in Lucknow, where she trains and becomes, after a few complicated twists and turns in meaning essay the plot, a renowned and much-sought-after courtesan. Ruswa uses the classic ploy of writing an introduction wherein he explains that he is merely recording the true story of Umra'o Jan, told to him by the protagonist herself. His use of the thesistools, first person in the memoir, in which the courtesan frequently addresses him by name, makes it all the more convincing. Ruswa was a regular participant at several salons, and the glimpses he provides of the rigorous training and the world view of the courtesan are quite accurate historically.

What is of names essay, less known is that Ruswa had a keen interest in citation analysis thesis crime, and several of his translations and adaptations were of contemporary Victorian and Urdu potboilers. He published a then-popular series of khuni novels (literally, bloody killer), some of whose titles, such as Khuni Shahzada (The killer prince), Khuni Joru (The killer wife), Khuni 'Ashiq (The killer lover), betray his predilection for the sensational. One of the meaning of names essay, older courtesans I interviewed, who had known Ruswa personally, gave the book a mixed review. She commended Ruswa for essay understanding the meaning of names essay, mentality of the courtesan, but blamed him for inventing characters such as the cellar analysis, evil kidnapper and the exploitative madame who became the stuff of later stereotypes. Of Names Essay! /12/ [[4]] The greatest harm was done to the reputation of the kotha , however, by ballroom, British political propaganda. The older courtesans I interviewed, who felt keenly about contemporary politics and had connections among the local power elite, were impressively knowledgeable about the history of their city. In their view it was official British policy to of names malign the courtesans and analysis the culture of meaning of names essay, salons, in order to thesistools justify the British role as usurpers of the meaning of names essay, throne of Awadh in 1856. British high-handedness in this and other policies unleashed a widespread rebellion in north and central India in root essay 1857, which raged for ten months in Awadh until Lucknow was recaptured by the British. To consolidate their rule in the Province of Awadh, the British turned their fury against meaning of names essay the powerful elite of Lucknow, of which the tawa'f were an integral part. Yet when it came to start matters such as using these women as prostitutes for the European garrison, or collecting income tax, the eminently pragmatic British set aside their high moral dudgeon.

It became official policy to select the healthy and beautiful specimens from among the kotha women and arbitrarily relocate them in the cantonment for the convenience of the European soldiers. This not only dehumanized the profession, stripping it of of names essay, its cultural function, but it also made sex cheap and a essay paper easy for the men, and exposed the women to venereal infection from the soldiers. /13/ Kidnapping may have been (and perhaps still is) one of the methods by which girls fmd their way into the tawa'if households, but it is certainly not the most common. From my interviews with the thirty women who today live in the Chowk area of Lucknow, and of names essay whose ages ranged from thirty-five to seventy-eight, a very different picture emerged. In recording the life stories of these women, who spanned three generations, I found that the compelling circumstance that brought the majority of them to essay the various tawa'if households in meaning Lucknow was the misery they endured in either their natal or their conjugal homes. Four of how to a essay, these women were widowed in their early teens, two of whom hailed from the same district and had lost their husbands in of names essay a cholera epidemic; three were sold by their parents when famine conditions made feeding these girls impossible. Seven were victims of physical abuse, two of whom were sisters who were regularly beaten by their alcoholic father for not obliging him by making themselves sexually available to the toddy seller. Three were known victims of rape and therefore deemed ineligible for marriage; two had left their ill-paid jobs as municipal sweeper women, because they were tired of thesistools, collecting other people's dirt; two were battered wives; one had left her husband because he had a mistress; and one admitted no particular hardship, only a love for singing and dancing that was not countenanced in her orthodox Brahmin home.

Three said they had left their marriages without much ado; they saw the advantage of earning their own living and being at liberty to use their resources as they wished, and they did not want to have children. Essay! Only four of analysis thesis, them were daughters of other tawa'if . Not one claimed that kidnapping had been her experience, although they had heard of such cases. Of Names! This assortment of refugees from the sharif , or respectable, world gave a completely ironic slant to the notion of respectability. The problem, according to Saira Jan, a plump woman in her early forties, who recounted her escape from a violent, alcoholic husband at length and thesistools with humor, was that there were no obliging kidnappers in her muhallah [neighborhood]. Had there been such farishte [angels] in of names essay Hasanganj I would not have had to plot and plan my own escape at great peril to my life and my friends, who helped me. /14/ This catalog reflects the wide range of root analysis, miserable circumstances from which these women had escaped. Desertion has been traditionally resorted to meaning of names essay by those trapped in situations they had no other effective means of fighting or changing. To the how to, list of fugitives from oppression, which includes black slaves in the ante­bellum United States, bonded laborers on meaning essay, colonial plantations, and drafted soldiers, can be added women fleeing the quotidian suffering they encountered as daughters, sisters, or wives. /15/ Gulbadan, who was a chaudharayan from root analysis her late thirties (she claims she was born in 1900 and initiated when she was thirteen years old), had been the niece of a tawa'if and was raised in the household she now managed.

She spoke of the kotha as a sanctuary for both women and meaning essay men: women found in it a greater peace and freedom than in the normal world; men escaped the boredom of their domestic lives. She reminded Saira that she was a miserable, under-weight, frightened wretch when she had first appeared at her doorstep. She was thin as a stick, her complexion was blotchy, her eyes sunk in black holes, and she had less than two rupees tied to the end of root cellar essay, her sari. Even these she had to steal, explained Rahat Jan, Gulbadan's partner (her term). Now look at her, we call her our hathini [female elephant], who eats milk and jalebi [syrup-filled, deep-fried sweets] to keep herself occupied between meals, although she argues it is to keep her voice dulcet. Most women told their stories with enthusiasm.

They had wanted to escape hell (the word jahannum , the Islamic hell, was frequently used to describe their earlier homes) at meaning essay, any cost. Thesistools! Learning professional skills and earning their own money helped them develop self-esteem and value the of names essay, relative independence they encountered in Rahat Jan's kotha . It may well be that some of the women exaggerated the horrors of the past, but the kernels of their stories were embedded in the reality of the gender bias in society. Here they could be women first, and Hindus and Muslims in a more mutually tolerant way, because the culture of the kotha represented elements of production, both and was acknowledged as a truly synthetic tradition. [[5]] The story of meaning essay, one of the Hindu child widows, Rasulan Ba'i, thirty-five, is especially compelling, because it exposes the ineffectiveness of the social reform legislation passed in the last 150 years, and the lack of options for young widows even today. Although it is the story of a habitual but covert rebel, it also explains why a courtesan is not willing to thesistools engage in questioning her status as a collaborator in perpetuating patriarchal values in society that keep other women in essay powerless positions. /16/ I was married when I was ten. Thesistools! My natal family was Rajput, my father and uncles owned fifty acres of irrigated land; my mother did not have to work too hard because we had two servants who did most of the meaning, household work. I had attended three years of school, but I barely knew how to recognize the letters that spell my name. My gauna ceremony occurred just three months after menarche. I remember being taken to my husband's house with my dowry and plenty of gifts for my in-laws. My father sent several sacks of wheat, sugar, lentils, and other produce from the farm, because I was married to a young Rajput boy whose father had gambled away most of their wealth.

That summer [19601 there was a very big flood, which washed away the mud huts in the village, the livestock, and our food reserves. While my husband was out root cellar essay, with his brothers trying to salvage some of the meaning essay, food stored in earthenware jars, he slipped and fell into the water, and three days later was dead after a severe bout of start a essay, cholera. I survived, but I often wished I were dead. The local Brahmin said that my ill-starred presence had brought flood and death to the village. My jewels, clothes, and the few silver coins which I had hidden away were all forcibly taken away from me, and I became a widow in white who did all the nasty, heavy chores for the household. I was fed scraps when I cried out in hunger. You talk about the laws that were passed by the British to prevent child marriage, you talk of the rights we won when the Hindu Civil Code (1956) was passed, but I sneer at all that. I had no recourse to the laws, or to lawyers, only to my wits sharpened by adversity. I first tried to get back at them with sly acts of sabotage.

I did the washing up indifferently, leaving a dull film on the metal platters and meaning of names essay the pots. For this my mother-in-law thrashed me. I would sneak into the kitchen when my sister-in-law had finished cooking and add a heuvy dose of salt to the lentils and locke essays vegetables.. I would hide my smile when I heard the yells and abuse heaped on her by the menfolk. She caught me one day and meaning of names thrashed me soundly until I howled with pain.

Her husband came home and analysis thesis gave me another hiding. Life was unbearable, but I was trapped; there was nowhere that I could go. My parents, who had come for meaning essay the funeral to our village, were distressed, but they did not offer to a essay take me back, because they still had my younger sisters to marry. Fights, violence erupted all the meaning essay, time. My sister-in-law kept wishing me dead. When it was discovered that I stole money to buy snacks from the vendor, they threatened to a essay burn me alive. I wanted to of names essay run away but didn't know where I would go, except to the river to drown myself. Locke Essays! Finally when an itinerant troupe of of names, entertainers was encamped in our village, I saw the performance and thought I would secretly apply to locke essays work for them, just do their housework or something.

They agreed to shelter me, after I told them my troubles and showed them the meaning of names essay, bruises on my body. They smuggled me out of that hell, gave me bit parts in their dramas, and finally brought me to the lap of Bibi Khanum (another tawa'if ) in Lucknow, and I have never looked back. Start! I had no option but to run away. Tell me, sister, what would you have done in my place? There were many stories, each with its own flavor of horror, and of courage, and none that did not have a relatively happy ending. Comparable employment opportunities for women simply did not exist then, and are few and far between even now. Gulbadan explained that not all women in need can make the kotha their refuge; some are not talented enough to become courtesans, and some are too anxious about their moral standing. Women, particularly from the of names, higher strata of Hindu and Muslim society, fear violent reprisals if discovered by production, their families, or shrink from exposure to strange men. Of Names! She went on to say that many women flee their homes in the villages and come to thesistools the anonymity of the city to work as domestic servants, as ayahs [nannies] or maids or cooks. Some join road gangs run by government or private building contractors, only to break bricks into meaning of names essay small pieces with a hammer all day in the sun, and thesistools earn in a month what we make in a few hours of meaning of names essay, passing the time in civilized company. /17/ To make ends meet they have to sleep with their employers and the dalal , or middle­men who found them their jobs, and get beaten up by thesistools, their husbands when they find out: Gulbadan explained that a woman compromises her dignity twenty.four hours of the day when she has no control over her body or her money. /18/ This response was unanimously endorsed by the other courtesans. The women who said that their own parents had sold them when they were unable to feed them, much less pay for meaning essay a wcdding and a dowry, felt that their parenls were forced by circumstances to thesistools make such a hard decision.

Yet they sent money home every month to take care of their impoverished families, which was gratefully received, and meaning of names whatever resentment they may have felt for being abandoned as children had dissipated through understanding the limits imposed on women in this world. Gulbadan, who spoke more aphoristically than the others, explained that even fifty years ago there was very little scope for how to start a essay women to change the of names essay, lives they grumblingly led: What they couldn't change they called their qismat , their fate. Here, in our world, even though things are not as good as they were before the thesistools, British came, women change their qismat . Even philosophers and poets will tell you that no one can change their qismat . Of Names Essay! Ask these women, who have lived and worked together for more than twenty years, whether or not they think that I taught them how to mold their own fate like clay with their own hands. I did, and they agreed, with laughing nods, while they celebrated Janmashtami (birthday of the Hindu god Krishna, the patron of their dance) and the Muslim festival of 'Id, on the third floor of Gulbadan's impressively large building. On Food! And this was the very essence of their world view.

[[6]] Gulbadan had tossed this off as she sat on the large platform covered with an old Persian rug and velvet and brocade bolsters that propped her up. Watching her deft fingers prepare a paan , or betel leaf, with its half-dozen nut-and-spice fixings, I felt I was in the presence of an alchemist who had transformed base fortunes into gold. She, along with her septuagenarian friends, had inherited a way of life and struggled to preserve it, quite selfishly, in the face of an essay increasingly hostile future. Their business was neither to exploit women, nor to on strictly ballroom transform the lot of the generality of womankind, but to meaning liberate and empower those with whom they were associated. Root Cellar Essay! The high level of camaraderie, wit, teasing, and affectionate interaction that I observed and participated in on several visits to the apartments of the older women over ten years affirmed this impression repeatedly. The process of changing one's fate ( qismat badalna ) is, under closer scrutiny, a psychosocial process through which the social construction of gender (and sexuality, as we shall see) is stripped bare. The chaudharayan acts in several capacities, the essay, most challenging being to inspire in the women who come to her a confidence in their own ability and how to a essay worth, restore shattered nerves, set about of names, undoing the socialization they had received in their natal homes. This delicate and difficult task, at one level, is not unlike the task modern psychotherapy purports to perform in Western society. Thesistools! The problem, according to Rasulan, was to forget the expectations inherent in the meaning of the of names essay, word 'aurat , or woman, as it obtained in the larger society: The notion woman was dinned into my mind and had shaped my behavior from the day I was born.

Fortunately I was still a child (thirteen or fourteen), so forgetting was not as difficult as it might have been even a few years later. I forgot my misery upon arriving in a house where a different meaning of that word was already in start place, where Amina Ba'i and Zehra Jan [Gulbadan's granddaughters] were acting out those meanings for us all. They did not fear men because they were admired and praised by meaning essay, men; nor had they ever been nagged by their mother and grandmother about not doing this or that or they would not be able to get married, nor slapped by a father for being immodest. They had never been upset at being a burden to their parents, since the shadow of root cellar analysis, dahej [dowry] has never darkened their lives. Essay! I resented them to begin with, thought them spoilt and on food selfish, but slowly 1 began to realize that they were of a different mold.

I would have to break my own mental mold and recast myself. Meaning Of Names! I got a lot of love from Gulbadan, Rahat Jan, and Amiran. They would listen to me, and I would regurgitate all the sorrow, pain, and poison I had swallowed, again and again. Now when I tell you my story, it is as if I am telling you another's tale. Thesistools! Really, I didn't know that I was capable of doing anything, being anyone, or owning my own building and employing seventeen men in a charpa'i karkhana [wooden cot workshop]. I had the mentality of a timid and ugly mouse; now I am accused of being too arrogant and am envied for the property I own. /19/ The process of rehabilitation for meaning these women is rapid, since they generally arrive young and are plunged into a welcoming environment. Thesistools! The self-affirming ethos of the kotha makes it possible for them to assimilate their newly revised perceptions and behavior patterns, while living among a host of nurturing and supportive women, and without the fear of men. Freedom from the pressure of the marriage market where grooms were for sale to the woman with the largest dowry, they unanimously agreed, gave them the essay, inner courage to on strictly develop their skills and treat men as equals, or even as inferiors. [[7]] There are other therapeutic devices invented over meaning essay, the ages that are still in use in these salons. Novices are introduced to a secret repertoire of satirical and bawdy songs, dances, informal miming, and dramatic representations, aimed at the institution of marriage and heterosexual relations.

These entertainments are privately performed only among women. These matinee shows, as they jokingly call them, are not only crucial for the solidarity and well­being of the group, but they also help the newcomers to discard the old and thesis internalize the new meaning of being an 'aurat . I recognized this, when in answer to one of my early (and very naive) questions I was treated to essay a vignette on the joys of essay on strictly ballroom, marriage. Essay! /20/ VTO: Gulbadan, since you are a handsome woman, so well educated, with all this money and property and on strictly ballroom jewels, why didn't you marry a sharif [respectable) nawab (there are several descendants of noble families in meaning of names essay Lucknow who use this honorific) and citation thesis settle down to meaning a life of respectability? Gulbadan: Your use of the word respectable is thoughtless. Thesistools! Is marringe considered the only respectable alternative for of names essay women in cellar essay America? Are married women not abused? Well, let us show you what marriage is before you wish it on an old and respectable woman like myself, or any of us here. Let us dispel the darkness in meaning of names your mind about the nature of marriage. Root! Of what they then played out for me I can only offer an inadequate summary, because it is difficult to essay capture the visual details of the half-hour-long satirical medley of song, dance, dialogue, and mime that followed.

Rasulan immediately took her dupatta [long scarf] and locke essays wound it around her head as a turban to meaning essay play the husband. Elfin Hasina Jan took her cue as the wife, others became children and members of the extended family, while Gulbadan remained on her settee amid the locke essays, bolsters, taking occasional drags from the huqqah , presiding, as a particularly obnoxious mother-in­law, over a scene of domestic disharmony. The wife/mother first surveys the multifarious demands on her energy and time: the of names essay, children squall, ask for food, drink, and want to be picked up; the mother-in-law orders that her legs, which have wearied from analysis sitting, be massaged; the husband demands food and attention; the father-in-law asks for his huqqah to be refilled; and a sister-in-law announces that she cannot fmish doing the essay, laundry, nor knead the analysis, chapati dough, because she is not feeling too well. Hasina is of names, defeated, harried. Muttering choice obscenities /21/ under her breath, she begins, in a frenzied way, to do the job of cellar analysis essay, a wife. She lights the coal stove, dusts and tidies the room, cooks, presses the legs of the mother-in-law who emits pleasurable grunts, tries to soothe the baby who is now wailing, and puts plates of food in front of the demanding husband. She finally collapses, her hands striking her own brow as she croaks a hai tobah or never more. Meaning Of Names! A little later the din subsides and locke essays she, choked with sobs, says that her qismat is terrible, that she would do anything not to have to be the bahu , or daughter-in-law, in this or any other household, if she only had a choice. She is trapped. The rest of the household snores noisily while her husband, belching and hiccupping after his food and essay drink, makes a lunge at her for some quick sex.

She succumbs, and after a few agitated seconds he appears satisfied. He grudgingly parts with twenty rupees he owes her for household expenses. She complains that the money is just not enough for the groceries, ducks a blow, cries some more, and finally falls asleep, wretched and hungry. Apart from the cathartic value of such a representation, it transmuted grim reality into locke essays mordant comment, marked with their own brand of exaggeration and mockery. The women pointed out the meaning, several morals embedded in the story to me. Locke Essays! Those who dare to hold moral objections to the life of a tawa'if should first examine the thankless toil of an average housewife, including her obligation to satisfy a sometimes faithless or alcoholic or violent husband for the sake of a meager living.

Such an of names essay existence is without dignity, and was not the citation, situation of the meaning of names essay, housewife tantamount to that of a common prostitute, giving her body for money? /22/ It is we who are brought up to live in sharafat [genteel respectability], with control over on strictly ballroom, our bodies and meaning of names our money, and they who suffer the degradation reserved for lowly [ nich ] women. /23/ Such vivid reversals of social perception and analysis essay logic are stock idioms in the courtesans' speech and essay song. How To Start A Essay! Male affines, particularly fathers and brothers-in-law, are caricatured in countless risqué episodes enacted regularly and privately among women. They mock the repressive relationships and meaning essay male sexuality in the conjugal home, even as they amuse, educate, and edify the denizens of the kotha . /24/ The routines, studded with subversive and irreverent jokes and obscene gestures, are performed like secret anti-rites /25/ which have been carefully distilled and historically transmitted from essay on strictly generation to generation, to form the core of their private consciousness and oral heritage. [[8]] I had also seriously questioned the courtesans' use of the burqa' , which is a long overcloak that Muslim women in pardah wear for extended seclusion outside the home. This cloak, usually black or white, is meaning of names, worn over regular clothes and covers the on strictly, wearer from head to foot. It has a small rectangular piece of netting that fits over the eyes that enables the wearers to see, while they cannot be seen at meaning, all. It is certainly an artifact of a male-dominated society, where men could dictate that women keep themselves covered so as not to provoke male lust. /26/ It was, at first, inexplicable why tawa'if not only used the burqa' to move around when they went visiting or shopping, but actually insisted that I too should wear one as they led me to locke essays other kothas in the vicinity, because injunctions about female modesty did not apply to them. Of Names Essay! It was precisely because they were not expected to be in pardah , they reasoned, in another classic reversal of patriarchal logic, that they chose to block the gaze of men. It was an extension of the autonomy they enjoyed in their living space and their jism [bodies], unlike normal women whose bodies were the property of their husbands and who were secluded but lacked privacy in their own homes. The latter were kept in pardah to maintain (and increase) khandani 'izzat , or family honor; for them to show their faces in public would bring disgrace to paper their families.

Ah, but our case is meaning of names, just the opposite, said Saira, men long to see our faces. If they could brag among their friends that they had seen Gulbadan or Amiran in the bazaar without a covering, they would go up in the esteem in which their friends hold them. We are not in the business of giving them cheap thrills. While we walk freely and anonymously in public places, looking at the world through our nets, they are deprived because we have blinkered them. We do not, as you know, bestow anything on men without extracting its price. /27/ I would have disputed this had I not experienced the freedom the burqa' gave me to walk along the winding alleys in a very old­fashioned and gossip-filled city, where I formerly never passed without being accosted with vulgar taunts from the idle youths who mill on the streets. These women had appropriated the power of the gaze, while eluding the leer of sexually frustrated men. A great deal has been said, and is known, about the rigorous training and education courtesans undergo to ultimately please and entertain their patrons. /28/ What has never received discursive treatment, because of its very nature, is their secret skill – the art of nakhrah , or pretense, that courtesans have to master in on food and management order to spare no opportunity of coaxing money out of their patron and his friends. Their avowed and unabashed purpose is to amass a tidy fortune as early in their careers as possible, so that they can invest the surplus in income-producing properties or enterprises and retire comfortably at the age of thirty-five or so. Meaning Essay! To achieve their material ambitions, they use, in addition to locke essays their exorbitant charges, an meaning essay arsenal of devious routines that make up the hidden text of an essay on strictly evening's entertainment. These are subtly deployed to of names essay bargain, cajole, and extort extra cash or kind from their unsuspecting clients. /29/ Some of these are learned, some invented, some even improvised, but nuances are refigured with care to suit the temperament of a client, or the mood of the moment, to appear spontaneous.

Repeated rehearsals by on strictly, the trainee are evaluated by the adept tawa'if , until no trace of the pretense is discernible. [[9]] These well-practiced ploys – the feigned headache that interrupts a dance or a song, feigned anger for having been neglected, a sprained ankle, tears, a jealous rage – have beguiled generations of men to lose thousands of extra rupees or gold coins to these women. The tawa'if's refusal, at a critical juncture, to complete a sexual interlude with a favorite patron is a particularly profitable device, because feigned coital injuries or painful menstrual cramps involve expensive and patient waiting on the part of the patron. Gulbadan said she often carried the essay, game a step further by allying herself with the patron against locke essays the offending courtesan, to set the seal of authenticity on the scene. She would scold and even slap her till the patron begged her not to be so harsh. Gulbadan was the privately acclaimed champion of these more serious confidence tricks, and meaning essay others cheerfully confessed to having blackmailed, stolen, lied, and cheated for material gain as soon as they acquired competence in essay and management this art. This may sound more like self-enrichment than resistance, but because society has virtually denied women control over wealth or property, it is essential to establishing a countercultural way of life. The formula, Gulbadan confided, is to essay win the complete trust of the and management, man. This they do by first mastering all the information about the man – his public reputation, his finances, his foibles and vanities, his domestic life, and the skeletons in his closet. Not many come here openly any more, because our salons are regarded as houses of ill-repute in these modern times.

Most come to drink and for sexual titillation. We know how to get a man drunk and pliant, so that we can extort whatever we want from him: money, even property, apologies, jewels, perfume, or other lavish gifts. Industrialists, government officers, other businessmen come here now; they have a lot of meaning of names essay, black money [undeclared cash] that they bring with them, sometimes without even counting it. We make sure that they leave with very little, if any. We know those who will pay large sums to on strictly insure secrecy, so we threaten them with careless gossip in the bazaar, or with an anonymous note addressed to their fathers or their wives.

We do not act collectively as a rule, but sometimes it may become necessary to do so. We once did a drama against of names a money lender who came and analysis thesis would not pay us the money he had promised for holding an exclusive soirée for him. Meaning Essay! So when a police officer who had fallen in love with me came by. we all told him tales of how the wretched man would not return jewels some of us had pawned with him. We filed a police report, he was arrested, and some of the pawned items (which the jeweler had taken from some of our recently straitened noble patrons) were made over to essay on food production and management us by the lovelorn officer; others of his debtors sent us sweets and meaning of names essay thanks for bringing the hated Ram Swarup to justice. Analysis! But our biggest gambit of all is the game of love that makes these men come back again and meaning of names essay again, some until they are financially ruined. A Essay! They return every evening, like the flocks of homing pigeons, in the vain belief thnt it is we who are in love with them. /30/ In Ruswa's 1905 novel about Lucknow's courtesans, this particular nakhrah is meaning essay, insightfully described by the protagonist, Umra'o Jan : I am but a courtesan in whose profession love is a current coin. Whenever we want to ensnare anyone we pretend to fall in love with him. No one knows how to thesistools love more than we do: to heave deep sighs; to burst into tears at the slightest pretext; to go without food for days on end; to sit dangling our legs on the parapets of meaning of names, wells ready to jump into them; to threaten to take arsenic. All these are parts of our game of love.

But I tell you truthfully, no man ever really loved me nor did I love any man. /31/ [[10]] A discussion of the feigning of essay production and management, love for essay men (a discussion which occurred only after several visits) brought perhaps the most startling hidden text to light. It was difficult to imagine that these women, even though they were economically independent, educated, and in control of their lives, would spurn the on food and management, opportunity for real intimacy and emotional stability. Everyone agreed that emotional needs do not disappear with success, fame, or independence; on the contrary, they often intensify. Almost every one of the essay, women I interviewed during these many visits claimed that their closest emotional relationships were among themselves, and eight of them admitted, when I pressed them, that their most satisfying physical involvements were with other women. They referred to themselves as chapat baz , or lesbians, and to chapti , or chipti , or chapat bazi , or lesbianism. Citation Analysis! /32/ They seemed to attach little importance to labels, and made no verbal distinctions between homosexual and heterosexual relations. There was no other serious or poetic term for lesbianism, so I settled for the colloquialisms. Meaning Of Names! Their explanation for this was that emotions and acts of love are gender-free. Serious words such as muhabbat (Urdu) or prem (Hindi) or love (English) are versatile and can be used to describe many kinds of love, such as the love of analysis, man or woman, the love for country, for siblings, parents of either sex, so there was no need to have a special term for love between two women. There are words that suggest passionate love, like 'ishq ; these have the same neutral capability and are used by either gender. Although their lesbianism is a strictly private matter for them, the absence of a specialized vocabulary makes it a simple fact of life, like heterosexual love, or the less denied male homosexual love.

The lack of terminology or the scrambling of pronouns may also be interpreted as the ultimate disguise for essay it; if something cannot be named, it is easy to analysis deny its existence. In Urdu poetry, ambiguity about gender is not uncommon, and homosexual love often passes for heterosexual love. /33/ The frank discussions on the subject of their private sexuality left some of my informants uneasy. Meaning Essay! I had probed enough into their personal affairs, they insisted, and how to start they were not going to satisfy my curiosity any further; they were uncomfortable with my insistence on of names essay, stripping their strategic camouflage, by root cellar, which they also preserved their emotional integrity. Meaning Of Names! Their very diffidence to talk about their lesbianism underscores the thesis that they believe in a quiet, but profound, subversion of patriarchal values. It became clear that for many of them heterosexuality itself is the ultimate nakhrah , and feigned passion an occupational hallmark. My ardor for precise statistics faded as the real and theoretical implications of their silences and their disguises began to how to paper emerge. /34/ And it is to these that I now turn. [[11]] What do all these stories signify? Does the courtesans' presentation of their life-style add up to a subversion of existing gender relations in heterosexual marriage? Can their beliefs and behavior be seen as feminist by modern standards, or are they just another example of that widespread affliction, false consciousness? How do we reconcile the horizontal stratifications of class with the of names, vertical divide of gender, and cellar analysis their anomalous position in either group?

Do they qualify as a subaltern group as women, or as an elite group by virtue of their power and connections? Does this life-style not signify that sexuality, including lesbianism, is indeed socially constructed? Let me begin to meaning of names essay hack at this thicket by citing Romila Thapar's perspective on analysis, Hindu ascetics. In taking ascetics (an equally unlikely-seeming group of rebels) both as individuals or in organized groups, as dissenters, she sees in their rejection of the of names essay, grahasta-ashrama , or the cellar, householder stage in a prescribed four-stage cycle (student, householder, recluse, and ascetic) of an upper-caste Hindu male's life, the essence of their rebellion. An aging grahasta [householder] taking to samnyasa [the ascetic life] was merely conforming to the ideal vita. The negation of the family as a basic unit of society is evident from the opposition to of names the grahasta status and essay on strictly specially the insistence on celibacy. [Inherent in] the act of opting out of the meaning of names, existing life­style and substituting it with a distinctively different one. [is that] the characteristics of the new life-style be seen as a protest against the existing one. To this extent such movements may be regarded as movements of dissent. But the element of protest was muted by the wish, not to change society radically, but to stand aside and create an locke essays alternative system. /35/ The life-style of female ascetics could not be reckoned as a true counterpart because, as Thapar points out, female ascetics, with few exceptions, were always subordinate to the authority of males. They were not really autonomous, and their right to moksha (spiritual liberation) as Hindu women is dubious, if not entirely denied. I would argue that the true female counterpart of the rebellious ascetic,and perhaps the far more daring, is the tawa'if . By listening carefully to the stories the courtesans tell, it becomes undeniable that they too are rebelling, all the more explicitly, against the housewifely stage, since this is the only .stage of life implicitly mandated for all women in both Hindu and Islamic cultural systems. It is in this stage that the woman must achieve total fulfillment, because she does not graduate, as the man does, to meaning a more mature level.

The informal student stage for citation analysis thesis a girl used to be, and still is for meaning the majority, the acquisition of practical experience in housework and childcare. Her gurus are the sternly admonishing older generation of similarly trained mothers and aunts. Modesty, obedience, and other subordinate behavior patterns are drilled into her until she comes to hold the single-minded belief that her eligibility for marriage is the only index of start paper, her worth. It is the meaning of names essay, normal woman's social and sexual regimen that courtesans-in-the­making must unlearn and supplant by undergoing a radically different socialization process and adopting the life-style that gives them the a essay, liberation they desire, without jerking the reflexive muscle of a repressive system. Although life-styles of the meaning of names, male ascetic and the female courtesan are both modes of social dissent, the sexual differences, and the social prescriptions on which they are predicated, produce interestingly contrasted strategies and citation analysis thesis ideologies. The former emerges from a religious interpretation of grahasta with the denial of sexuality, lineage, and property ownership, as its strategic thrust to meaning essay gain spiritual liberation.

The latter, on the other hand, emerges from the secular and domestic context in thesistools which women's lives are enmeshed. Of Names! The courtesans seek material and social liberation by reversing the constraints imposed on women's chastity and economic rights, and by establishing a female lineage of selected and ascriptive members who make up their gharana . The male becomes celibate, renounces property and the privileges of his gender in this world of other-worldly rewards; the locke essays, female becomes sexually active and aggressively acquisitive, prefers autonomy to virtue, and seeks this-worldly women's liberation. Yet some consequences of of names, these divergent paths are strikingly similar. Both life-styles subvert the hierarchies of caste and class, because in both groups lower caste and root economically disadvantaged persons find refuge. The tawa'if have created a secular meritocracy based on talent and meaning of names essay education, accepting Hindus and Muslims alike. They too, like the ascetics, hold positions of locke essays, respect by the society at large, and both countercultures exist by maintaining vital links to the overarching patriarchal culture, while consciously inverting or rejecting its values.

Although neither group has the pretension of changing the entrenched notions of the householder stage, both serve their own personal ends by meaning of names, elaborate strategies of avoidance. By opting for essay ballroom the institutional security of a monastery or a brothel, both groups wielded political power in meaning of names essay the past through the powerful heads of sects in ancient Hindu kingdoms in the subcontinent or through the chaudharayan in precolonial Lucknow and essay ballroom other court cities, such as Hyderabad, Rampur, Banaras, Bijapur, and Golkonda. In unfavorable historical circumstances, both groups lost political power, but their patented life-styles still remain viable modes for women and essay men to elude the shackles of patriarchy and seek their own brands of liberation. [[12]] During the reign of the nawabs of Awadh, these women could manipulate powerful courtiers and the nawabs themselves, and even the most powerful patron did not have any authority over the women's lives. The executive authority and managerial functions were the exclusive preserve of the chaudharayan and her appointees. An angered patron had few options, because of the material investment he had made in a kotha (there are no refunds or exchanges); and his honor, too, would be on the line (gossip about him would quickly circulate in the bazaar). It is therefore not the patron who is ultimately significant but the matron, who creates the ethos, reputation, and the quality of life and services in her establishment. The courtesan's position is of course much diminished by the events and reconfigurations of power in the colonial and post­colonial periods. Fully aware of this history, these women find hope in other educational and citation analysis thesis employment opportunities that have recently opened up for women, for their basic goal is to free themselves from direct economic dependence on men.

They already had daughters or nieces competing for and obtaining posts in meaning essay the banking system, or as pleaders in the local courts, but these professions were not, as Chhote Miyan, the Persian-speaking son of one of the courtesans and my first informant, pointed out, a way of life. Thesis! Women might become financially independent, but without the refuge of the kotha they would again be forced to marry and possibly suffer the degradation at the hands of unsympathetic husbands. Amiran's daughter, a banker, chose to marry. We were wary of this alliance, Amiran recollected, and meaning of names sure enough her husband took up with another woman, and thesis my daughter and granddaughter are back with us. Essay! She looks after our investments and bank work, so that she does really contribute to essay on food the household with her labor just as we all do. In other words, they shrewdly recognized that while financial independence was important, it did not solve the meaning, central problem of the gender inequality inherent within marriage in locke essays a patriarchal society. Some of the covert strategies of courtesans that I have described earlier defy analysis, for meaning of names they do not fit the scholarly definitions of on food and management, protest and resistance. The defections of abused daughters, child widows, or unhappy wives to high-class prostitution are indeed unorganized, sporadic, individual attempts prompted by thoughts of meaning essay, self-preservation or self-interest rather than by analysis, hopes of essay, wider social change. The courtesan's nakhre , which include blackmail, theft, confidence games, and even feigned heterosexuality, smack more of a sleazy underworld than of the acts of thesistools, determined rebels, particularly because the consequences of essay, such acts neither threaten nor change the overall power relations against which they are aimed. Most of my analytical and definitional qualms have been dealt with in essay on strictly James C. Meaning! Scott's study on everyday forms of peasant resistance, Weapons of the Weak . He refutes theoretical objections and accusations of thesistools, excessive romanticism so compellingly that I find it pertinent to of names essay quote him at some length: Real resistance, it is argued, is (a) organized, systematic, and cooperative, (b) principled or selfless, (c) has revolutionary consequences, and/or (d) embodies ideas or intentions that negate the basis of domination itself.

Token, incidental, or epiphenomenal activities by contrast, are la) unorganized, un­systematic, and individual, (b) opportunistic and self-indulgent, (c) have no revolutionary consequences, and/or (d) imply, in their intention or meaning, an accommodation with the system of domination. These distinctions are important for any analysis. [but my] quarrel is with the on strictly, contention that the latter forms are ultimately trivial or inconsequential, while only the of names, former could be said to constitute real resistance. This position, in locke essays my view, fundamentally misconstrues the very basis of economic and political struggle conducted daily by subordinate classes – not only slaves, but peasants and workers [and, I would add, women] as well – in repressive settings. It is based on an ironic combination of meaning of names essay, both Leninist and bourgeois assumptions of whot constitutes political action. The problem lies in what is a misleading, sterile, and sociologically naive insistence upon distinguishing self-indulgent,. individual acts, on the one hand, from presumably .principled, selfless, collective actions, on essay, the other, and excluding the former from the meaning essay, category of real resistance. /36/ [[13]] If traditional constructs of class and class struggle are not directly relevant to the clandestine and unorganized struggles of the peasants in Malaysia whom Scott studied, they are even farther removed from the arena of gender relations and on strictly the courtesans' style of reversing an oppressive order. One does not use a hammer to prune a rose bush. Women's struggle obviously cannot be a class struggle:, for the gender divisions are vertical, not horizontal, and cut through class lines, so the validity of the courtesans' struggle cannot be refuted on the grounds that it is engaged in at a private, unobtrusive level. The courtesans have uniquely combined the elements of meaning of names, struggle for their material needs with those of an ideological struggle against patriarchal values, by creating and hiding behind their many masks. Thesistools! They live in essay outward harmony with male power and male sexuality, for the struggle can only thesistools be effective if their subterfuges are mistaken for compliance, and meaning of names essay their true intentions as collusion with men against other women. Analysis! Their cooperation with some women outside the of names essay, kotha , such as the khangi , or the married women to whom they rent space so that they too can earn (undisclosed) extra money, is thesis, also little known, and meaning of names essay it would be no longer politic or possible if it were uncovered. It is for on food these reasons that courtesans have had to resort to outward conformity and the partial transcript, as Scott calls the off­stage behavior of Sedaka peasants: That the poor should dissemble in the face of meaning of names, power is root essay, hardly an occasion for surprise.

No close account of the life of subordinate classes can fail to distinguish between what is said 'backstage' and what may be safely declared openly. /37/ If it can still be argued that no matter what the tawa'ifs' self-perceptions, actions, goals, and ideology are, they were and meaning are still complicitous in perpetuating patriarchal relations in society, it is to insist on the ideal instead of the root essay, possible in a struggle for power. As Gulbadan, the oldest courtesan I interviewed, responded to this question: I know we are blamed for enabling men to perpetuate their double moral standards and dominating women. Must we desert our own interests, give up our own strategy, for the dubious cause of women who suffer such men as husbands, fathers, and brothers? Today we are silent, we are despised, and the law has cracked down on us; has that helped the cause of women, or only made life harder for us? /38/ In fact, their silence is so complete that for all official intents and purposes (such as taxation), this category of women is no longer acknowledged in postcolonial India. This for meaning essay them is a mixed result. It is a small triumph, because their professional incomes are no longer taxed, yet among their patrons are a large number of public officials.

It is a larger defeat, because officialdom can piously claim that they have banned female sexual exploitation while converting their once-proud profession into a species of vice. [[14]] And finally I return to the question of sexuality, as reality and as a nakhrah , because there is the larger question, that of the essay on food production, social construction of sexuality, that may well be illuminated by meaning, analyzing the world view of courtesans of Lucknow. Thesistools! It is obvious that hegemonic gender relations are effectively perpetuated, and sexuality itself constructed, through the process of differential socialization of women and men. I would (tentatively) argue further that by systematically reversing the socialization process for females, in order to meaning essay combat the disabilities inherent in women's existing social and sexual roles, the courtesans have logically constructed lesbian existence as a legitimate alternative, just as much as Indian society at large constructs and enforces, through the citation, institution of compulsory marriage, heterosexuality as normative behavior. Of Names! Heterosexual relations for most of the courtesans was work, not pleasure. Right from birth, if we recall the production and management, testimony of Chhote Miyan, the of names, female is celebrated, empowered, cherished; those who arrive as adolescents in the kotha are methodically reeducated within the context of citation thesis, this parallel and exclusive society of women, and meaning essay its woman-centered vision of power relations. Thesistools! Their relationships with men in essay the kotha are congenial but businesslike; except for kin, only very few ever become emotional bondsmen. Essay On Food And Management! Men play diverse roles: not only are they servants, cooks, watchmen, and musicians, but they are also wealthy, generous, powerful patrons.

The latter relate on equal terms with the courtesans precisely because power is meaning of names essay, genuinely shared in that cultural setting. Arguably, it is therefore in citation thesis the kotha , rather than in the normal world, that female sexuality has the chance of meaning of names, being more fairly and fearlessly constructed by thesistools, women. I do not have the space to essay explore the subject cross-culturally to offer, in support of this contention, the growing evidence of on food and management, lesbianism in brothels, salons, geisha houses, and apartments of essay, call girls in international capitals, which is a universal common denominator across time and space. That sexuality competes with economics for priority in the struggle against gender inequality is thesistools, not surprising, That male sexual control and meaning of names essay aggression is ballroom, neutralized in a setting where the heterosexual sex act is meaning of names, mere routine, and passion and pleasure are simulated or distanced, is perhaps an essential mechanism that women, both wives and prostitutes, have universally used to root analysis essay preserve their emotional integrity and dignity. All the courtesan's nakhre , particularly the sexual pretenses, are brilliantly echoed in the following interview Studs Terkel conducted, in meaning of names essay the early 1970s, with a Chicago hooker, Roberta Victor: Of course we faked it. The ethic was. You always fake it. Analysis Essay! You're pulling something over on him and he is of names, paying for analysis essay something he really didn't get. That's the only way you keep any sense of self-respect.

The call girl ethic is very strong. You were the lowest of the low if you allowed yourself to of names essay feel anything. Citation Analysis! The way you maintain your integrity is by acting all the way through. Here I was doing absolutely nothing, feeling nothing, and in twenty minutes I was going to of names walk out with fifty dollars in my pocket. How many people could make fifty dollars for twenty minutes' work? [and] no taxes, nothing.

The overt hustling society is the microcosm of the citation thesis, rest of society. Of Names! The power relations are the same and the games are the locke essays, same. Only this one I was in control of. Essay! The greater one I wasn't. /39/ Roberta's philosophy of life and her indictment of contemporary American society matches, in startling detail, that of the courtesans of Lucknow, and this coincidence, including a lesbian lover, gives their stories a timeless, transcultural resonance. In quest of a room of their own and considerably more than five hundred pounds a year, these women had taken control of on food production, their lives by reversing not only the social rules but even the sexual fantasies of patriarchy.

The research for this paper was conducted in of names India and in Britain between 1976 and 1986 and was funded by the American Council for Learned Societies, American Institute for Indian Studies, and the Social Science Research Council, for which I am very grateful. Citation Analysis! I thank Douglas Haynes, Philip Oldenburg, Frances Pritchett, Catherine R, Stimpson, Romila Thapar, Judy Walkowitz, Judy Walsh, and Gauri Vishwanathan for their prompt and insightful comments, The responsibility for the interpretive framework is my own. /1/ Lucknow, situated 300 miles southeast of Delhi, was the capital of the Muslim Kingdom of Awadh, 1775-1856. Awadh was annexed by the British in 1856, the court was disbanded, and the king was dethroned and exiled. In the following year, the great rebellion of 1857, which began as a mutiny of Indian sepoys (soldiers) against the British, broke out. It was suppressed in 1858 and meaning essay sweeping changes were made in the city of Lucknow and the provincial government to start a essay avoid such uprisings in the future. Meaning! Lucknow remained a seat of essay on strictly, regional power under the British, 1856-1947, and is today the capital of meaning, Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in the Republic of India.

/2/ For a detailed history of the city and an account of these sources, taxation policies, and thesistools the subtle and overt forms of resistance and evasion adopted by the citizens of Lucknow, see my book, The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856-1877 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), chap. 5. I have referred freely to of names my earlier work to construct the thesistools, history of the courtesans in the colonial period. A full analysis of meaning essay, earlier interviews, especially those conducted in 1980-81, 1983, 1984, and 1985-86, is presented here for the first time. Names have been changed to keep their identities private, as they had requested. /3/ The last Shi'i nawab , or King, of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, had acquired a large harem of singers and dancers by using a Shi'i variant of Islamic marriage called mutah . This allows a man to enter into numberless marital contracts, which expire when the stipulated time elapses. It saves men and women from the accusation of adultery, and in Wajid Ali Shah's case, gave him the opportunity to be a true patron of these talented women by bestowing on them some of the best real estate in Lucknow. He married both Hindu and on strictly ballroom Muslim women, and the courtesans I met in 1976 were also of both faiths. /4/ Oldenburg, passim. For a detailed account of meaning, British reaction to the mortality statistics in the colonial army and their control of prostitutes, see Kenneth A. Ballhatchet, Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1980).

/6/ This scholar requested anonymity, so I have referred to him as Chhote Miyan. The interview occurred in January 1976. /7/ This section is summarized from and management Oldenburg, 131-42. Corroborative evidence from other sources will be noted. The term tawa'if is the word most commonly used (both as singular and plural) for courtesan in Lucknow. Other terms used to designate these women are kothewali , nachwali , and the honorific baiji . I will use the first term, and this will also distinguish the courtesans from common prostitutes, whose main service was to provide sexual services to their clients. /8/ Abdul Halim Sharar, Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture , trans. and ed. Of Names! E.S. Harcourt and Fakhir Hussain (London: Paul Elek, 1975), 192.

/9/ Peter Manuel, Courtesans and Hindustani Music, Asian Review 1 (Spring 1987):12-17. In this brief piece, Manuel sketches the role of the courtesans in enriching the musical traditions of India and describes the development of root analysis, thumri and ghazal , semiclassical genres of singing, by the courtesans of Lucknow in their bid to adapt to the taste of their new patrons, the taluqdars of Awadh, after Wajid All Shah and his chief courtiers were exiled in 1856. I have discussed the role of the rural taluqdars (large landowners) and their transformation into an urban elite in great detail in my Making of Colonial Lucknow , 215-30. /10/ Most Hindi films, called masala , or formula, films, are popular because of the songs and dances in meaning them. The very notion of the romantic musical owes its inspiration to the style of essay ballroom, entertainment at the kotha . It goes without saying that a film will fail at the box office if it has no songs. /11/ The romantic and generous patronage of Wajid Ali Shah, who fell in love with a large assortment of essay, female palanquin bearers, courtesans, domestic servants, and citation women who came in and out of the palace, in short with hundreds of. beautiful and dissolute women, is legendary and retold by Sharar.

He goes on essay, to say (p. 631) that soon dancers and singers became the pillars of state and favorites of the realm. /12/ Interview with Gulbadan, aged eighty-three, in August 1980, at locke essays, her kotha in Lucknow, after the release of the essay, film Umra'o Jan Ada . Four other retired courtesans in their late sixties and early seventies were present at this visit. Thesistools! They had not seen the essay, film but had read the novel (Mirza Mohammad Hadi Ruswa, Umrao Jon Ada , trans. Khushwant Singh and M.A. Husaini [Madras, India: Sangam Books, 1982]); two of them claimed to have known Ruswa in their youth. All the interviewees that I cite have been given names by me to disguise their real identities. I have translated into English the thesistools, substance of the unstructured interviews I conducted more in of names the form of conversations in Urdu with these women. Root Cellar Essay! The following paragraph is constructed out meaning of names, of the conversation we had on this occasion. /13/ See Oldenburg, 138-41, for a detailed account.

The courtesans' version of these events conformed closely to what I reconstructed from the archives. /14/ Saira Jan spoke to me for two hours on 2 Nov. Root Analysis Essay! 1976, at the kotha in Lucknow, and never failed to add her opinion to those being voiced on countless other occasions, if she was within earshot. /15/ An extremely interesting article by Raymond A. Bauer and Alice H. Bauer, Day to Day Resistance to Slavery:, The Journal of Negro History 27 (October 1942) presages much of the literature on what they call less spectacular and indirect retaliation for essay their enslavement. It was very useful in formulating the argument that I present here, and I wish to thank Geraldine Forbes for the reference. /16/ This story is the story of the courtesan I call Rasulan Ba'i, The other widows whom I interviewed were from the same clan of Rajput Hindus from western Uttar Pradesh, and the outlines of the stories were similar. No story was ever told without comments or interruptions from the locke essays, others present. Essay! This life story was related to me in November 1980. /17/ In the 1860s In Lucknow a randi . charged a nightly rate of five rupees and often more; tawa'if insisted on essay on food, a hundred rupees a night and also received lavish gifts of jewelry and property. Meaning Of Names! (A male laborer was only paid two to four annas (one rupee = 16annas) and a female laborer only half that.) See Oldenburg, 138. A century later, with the start a essay, number of essay, generous patrons on the wane, the disparities in income were only slightly less ridiculous. A contractor pays women laborers between seven and ten rupees a day, and start a essay a well. known tawa'if charges three thousand rupees for a muscial evening.

Most have regular income besides, from investments, rents, and of names essay sale of produce from analysis orchards or shops. /18/ Interview with Gulbadan, November 1980, at meaning, her kotha in Lucknow. /19/ Interview with Rasulan, thirty-five, Amina Ba'i, forty-two, and Zehra Jan, forty-eight, in locke essays December 1980, at meaning essay, Gulbadan's kotha in Lucknow. /20/ I was not allowed to take notes or record this performance, play-cum-mime, nor any of my conversations with these women, because this is cellar essay, part of of names, kotha life that is not shared with male patrons or outsiders. So what I present here is paper, reconstructed from memory and essay the notes I wrote after the meeting. This event occurred in September 1976 and was repeated in thesis a slightly modified version (because oral tradition is not bound by a text) at my request in meaning essay July 1984. /21/ These are not the run-of-the.mill obscenities heard in the bazaar; they are special gaaliyan , poetic, funny, stylized terms and how to a essay phrases of meaning of names essay, abuse. An example: Is kohri ka ghar sar bal ja'e (let the house of this leper burn to the ground). Male genitalia were also a popular target for verbal abuse. /22/ Similar sentiments are expressed about the bourgeois housewife in essay Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto . /23/ Rasulan Ba'i, November 1980, at Gulbadan's kotha in Lucknow. Meaning! Elsewhere, prostitutes also express a strong aversion to marriage.

Geraldine Forbes brought to my attention a late-nineteenth-century account of the profession in thesistools Bombay that reiterates these sentiments: No Bhavin (very degraded catcgory of prostitute) would consent to contract matrimony with a person of her own caste, or remain in his keeping. as prostitution in essay their view, is more honorable; it enriches and makes them sole mistresses of cellar, their liberty and property, and of names essay their protectors are ever ready to ballroom be at their command: See.K. Raghunathji Bombay Dancing Girls, Indian Antiquary 13 (June 1884):165-78. A great many of the Bombay prostitutes had left their husbands willingly for a better life. /24/ Ruswa has Umra'o Jan flatly deny the existence of these obscene routines performed privately among the courtesans, but informs her that there are eyewitnesses' reports to the contrary. She finally concedes that such things do go on, but refuses to meaning of names explicate any further (Ruswa, 321). Less risqué versions of locke essays, such songs form the repertoire of village women, and they are sung at weddings or as women go about doing their daily chores. /25/ Mary Douglas, in an interesting analysis of joking rites, in her essay entitled Jokes (see her Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology [London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1975], 90-114), writes: The message of a standard rite is that the ordained patterns of social life are inescapable. Meaning Essay! The message of the joke is cellar analysis, that they are escapable. Of Names Essay! A joke is by nature an anti-rite. Recall that a joke connects and disorganizes. It attacks sense and hierarchy.

The joke rite then must express a comparable situation. Locke Essays! If it devalues social structure, perhaps it celebrates something else instead. It could be saying something about the value of individuals as against the value of social relations in which they are organized (103-04). /26/ The most comprehensive treatment of the subject of pardah in India is to be found in Hannah Papanek and Gail Minault, eds., Separate Worlds: Studies of Purdah in essay South Asia (Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1982). /27/ Interview with Saira Ba'i, July 1984, at analysis thesis, Gulbadan's kotha in Lucknow. /28/ The Kamasutra of Vatsyayana (trans. Sir Richard F. Burton [New York: E.P. Dutton, 1962]) describes the sixty-four arts the meaning of names essay, courtesan was supposed to master as a skilled practitioner of her profession (69ff). Ruswa describes in great detail the musical and formal education of Umrao Jan Ada (119-23), and essay ballroom throughout the of names, book comments on her mastery of locke essays, Urdu poetry and the styles of the leading poets, her ability to write poems and converse with wit and wisdom. /29/ Only after I was accepted as a friend and confidant among the women were they willing to meaning apprise me of their many stylized nakhre , or feigning games. The acting ability of how to a essay, some of these women is astonishing, and it is no accident that some, like Nargis, moved on to becoming famous film stars of the Bombay screen.

/30/ Interview with Gulbadan, November 1980, at her kotha in Lucknow. /32/ I am grateful to Catherine R. Meaning Essay! Stimpson for informing me that the word lesbian did not come into the English language until the late nineteenth century and that history has constructed its meaning. I was unable to find another Hindi or Urdu equivalent. Platt's Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English Dictionary does not give a root or even an English definition of these terms. It only defines them with customary bashfulness in Latin: capat , s.f. [feminine] = capti (used in comp.): capat baz , s.f. Locke Essays! Femina libidini sapphicae indulgens: – capat bazi , Congressus libidinosus duorum mulierum. The Kama-sutra refers to this practice being rampant among courtesans but docs not give it a nnme (198). No term is in of names common usage, and an organization of Indian lesbians in the United States tellingly calls itself Anamika, i.e., nameless. /33/ This is discussed in C. Thesistools! M. Naim, The Theme of Homosexual (Pederastic) Love in Pre-Modern Urdu Poetry, in Studies in the Urdu Gazal and Prose Fiction , ed. Meaning Essay! Muhammad Umar Memon, South Asian Studies Series, no. 5, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 120-42.

Shaikh Qalandar Bakhsh Jur'at, an Urdu poel from analysis thesis I.ucknow (1749-18091, wrote a poem, Chapti Namah , in which he describes the sexual intimacies shared by meaning of names, two married women lovers, who elude their husbands every afternoon nnd speak wistfully of the frequent gatherings with other married women who are of the how to paper, same persuasion. I am grateful to C. M. Meaning Of Names! Naim for the reference. /34/ I have to confess that I wanted a precise head count of the lesbians, because I wanted to bolster these facts with figures, but the women refused to oblige, for it militates against on food their interest to have me as a credible witness who might want to meaning of names essay testify in writing one day. I roughly estimate that there were at least one in thesistools four who admitted to sexual relations with other women, some from beyond the kotha . Does this 25 percent estimate reflect the life and values of the kotha only, or can it be extrapolated to the women in Indian society at large? This will remain a question until women agree to talk about their sexuality, not as a matter or duty bounded by normative riues, but as a matter of experience and preference. Although the thirty women I have spoken to over the meaning, past decade is a somewhat self-selected sample from that society, this finding has interesting implications about female sexuality in general, because that is the truly hidden text, which defies investigation even by women scholars of South Asia. Certainly women in the normal world use their sexuality, by denying it, by making it available, or by disguising it entirely, to gain varying measures of autonomy in a world dominated by men.

/35/ Romila Thapar, Ancient Indian Social History (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1978), 73-86. The essay is entitled Renunciation: The Making of a Counter-culture? (63-104). /36/ James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 292-93, 295. How To Start! The theoretical implications of his analysis of meaning of names essay, everyday forms of peasant resistance are contained in the two final chapters of this exceptionally lucid and compelling work. /38/ Interview with Gulbadan in July 1984, at her kotha in Lucknow. /39/ Studs Terkel, Working (New York: Ballantine Books, 1974), 94-103. This electronic version of the article is presented here through the generous permission of the how to start, author. The original print version was published in Feminist Studies 16, 2 (Summer 1990). This present version contains minor adjustments of punctuation for clarity, and minor improvements in of names essay transliteration, made by FWP.

The numbers in double square brackets, for convenience in classroom discussion, have been added by FWP. All editorial comments in double square brackets are by paper, FWP, May 2008. -- Umrao Jan index page -- fwp's main page --