FEATURE
T ales of F o r b id d e n
Stereotypes
Real-Life M en & W omen & the Tragic Loss o f H u m a n Comedy
^A nthony Es o l e n
mong the many nerve-scraping scenes
A in the movie The Lord of the Rings, there’s
one that especially makes clear to me why
much o f our art will be consigned to a
deserved oblivion.
Aragorn, destined to return as the king o f Gon-
dor, is in ponderous conversation with Arwen, the
Elvish woman who renounces im m ortality to be­
come his wife. The lighting is dim, and the col­
ors behind them are forty shades o f somber. Ar­
wen has just played the sweaty warrior princess to
Senior editor Anthony Esolen is Professor o f English at
Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, and the author
o fT h e Ironies of Faith (ISI Books), The Politically Incorrect
Guide to Western Civilization (Regnery), and Ten Ways to
Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (ISI Books). He has
also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House).
24 TOUCHSTONE | N O V E M B E R /D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 4
save Aragorn and his friends from
a surprise attack—though Tolkien
wrote no such thing. Now Aragorn is
wondering whether he has it in him
to be king, so he expresses his pon­
derous doubts to this sharp-boned
Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, 1934
razor o f strength—though Tolkien
assigns to Aragorn no such doubts.
Aragorn’s alias was Strider, not Dith-
erer. Arwen talks to him half-m an
to half-man, after which they kiss
long and dispassionately, w ith all
the electricity o f a piece o f plastic
com ing in contact with a piece o f
plastic.
Or there’s the scene in Titanic
(1997), in which pretty boy Leonardo
DiCaprio, supposedly playing a kid
who has ju st been sleeping under
bridges, is trying to persuade rich
pretty girl Kate Winslet to let him
pull her up over the edge o f the ship,
mid-suicide. “You don’t want to do
this,” he says, as if he were a volunteer on the tele­
phone at the Good Samaritans, and not somebody
with strong arm s who could restrain her on the
instant and holler for help. Later she will ask him to
teach her how to spit like a man. The culmination
o f modern feminism: a semi-girl asking a semi-boy
how to behave like a caricature. She’s going to marry
a rich man, hiss hiss, whom she doesn’t love. What’s
the solution? One two three four, show the villain
out the door, five six seven eight, find a punk and
fornicate.
A R eal M a n & W o m a n
Take by contrast—anything, really, but let’s go to It
Happened One Night. A brash but lonely newspaper
reporter has stumbled upon the socialite story o f the
year. She’s the daughter of a self-made millionaire, on
 the run from her sheltered life and her
father, who does not want her to marry
the rich narcissist who has been court­
ing her. She wants to return incognito
to New York, and the reporter is help­
ing her in exchange for the exclusive
Clark Gable in It Happened One Night, 1934
story, though it soon becomes clear
that they are falling in love with one
another, and th at he really is the man
she ought to marry.
The problem for their secret trip
north is simple enough. They don’t
have any wheels, they don’t have any
food, and they don’t have any money.
So, after a rough night which they
spend sleeping—separately—under
some hay in a field, and after a break­
fast o f a couple o f limp carrots he’s
dug up, he is trying to demonstrate
to her his three sure-fire methods for
hitching a ride. He’s been her protec­
tor, after all, and boys like to show off in front o f girls.
But this time his sure-fire methods fail comically, one
after another, as cars go whizzing by, until he is finally
reduced to a vulgar gesture of frustration.
She’s sitting on a fence, enjoying the scene. “Let me
try,” she says. “I bet I can get us a ride right away.”
“You?” he says. “What do you know about it?”
She replies that she knows a trick o f her own. Sc she
stations herself at the side of the road, and when the next
car comes she leans over and pulls up her skirt along one
The fact is, we never m eet
individuals divested o f age,
sex, profession, an d culture.
Such beings do n o t exist.
0 1
We m eet m en, w om en, and
children.
slender and stylish leg. The car screeches no a halt. The
reporter looks on with wide eyes—and it isn’t just m at
he is surprised th at the strategy worked.
Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert are electric in
their roles, and not because Gable had classic good looks
(he didn’t), or because Colbert was some sultry southern
bathing beauty with parted lips and sand in her hair (she
wasn’t). They were electric because he was a man and she
was a woman.
That they are man anc woman, not Hum an Thing
One and Hum an Thing Two. lends force to the moral
structure of their discovery o f one another. Marriage, not
a toss in the blankets, is the central reality of the film, as
the heroine turns from marrying a rich fool to marrying
a real mar. who has to wor.< fcr his food. But marriage
can hardly be so momentous an event if there is nothing
to marry; no separate wavs of being human, no sexes, to
bridge their chasm o f rr.isnncerstandings and form a
union unique in hum an existence and greater than the
sum o f the persons involved
All o f which explains why chastity, implying a due
honor for man as man and woman as woman, is also held
inviolable. It, too, provides for plenty o f electricity.
When the reporter and :he socialite have to snare a
room in a low-class motel, he strings a line between their
beds and drapes a sheet over it. calling it “The Walls of
Jerichc.” Those walls are a recurring motif, comical in
the medieval Christian sense. People who begin ir. error
or sin (she’s a difficult daughter, he’s been drinking too
much) are brought to happ.r.ess. In the final scene, we
don’t even see Gable and Col oerr. They have been waiting
for the official annulment o f hei license of marriage with
the ricn snob, whom she ji.tec at the altar. Finally that
has come in.
So we are at another roadside flophouse, arid the
mom and pop owners are whisoering about tne couple
who have just rented a rconr.
“What did he say he wanted?”
“A bugle!”
“What did he want a bugle for?”
“I don’t know—something about the Walls cfjericho.”
N O V E M B E R / d ECEM BEU 2 0 1 4 I T O U C H STO N E 25
 And the last thing we hear is a cavalry charge played
on that bugle, as the sheet falls to the floor.
R eality & T ypes
At this point I hear that most tiresome objection, that
I am indulging in stereotypes. Children are taught for
twelve years that there is nothing so stupid as falling for
a stereotype; by which is meant that o f all the realities
in this world, the only things that have no characteristic
features are men and women. No teacher or critic will
object if the dog wags his stereotypical tail when the mas­
ter comes home. No feminist will object if the well-fed
Anglican prelate, Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice, flaps
his stereotypical lips about the taste and the excellence
of his eminent patroness. No maven of Correct Thinking
will object if the kindly old man in Two Farthingsfor a Kid
tells a stereotypical tall tale about unicorns to the little
boy Joe, who stereotypically believes it and goes in search
of that fabulous creature who will make everything better
in the lives of the people he stereotypically loves. No, the
only creatures we m ust pretend to know nothing about
are men and women. Alas, since men and women—espe­
cially in their relations to one another—populate almost
all o f the stories o f mankind, that means we will have
nothing interesting to say.
The excuse for this aversion to types is that they
take the place of real thought. They are reductive. But
th at is to mistake the m anner for the form. There is
metered poetry that jigs along like a beggar with fleas,
or th at ticks its dreary length like a metronome; but
th at is because it is bad perse. A painter may deck his
landscape w ith one great patch o f Kelly green, and
we may find it wearisome to behold, bu t th at is not
because grass is n o t green; it is because he is a bad
painter of green. You would never sing in honor o f your
hom eland the grim march th at John Williams com­
posed for the evil Empire in Star Wars; but that is not
because anthems should not sound like anthems. You
would not sing it, because it is (and was m eant to be) an
evil anthem.
What is really remarkable, though, is that for two
and a half millennia, poets, philosophers, and critics have
affirmed that the greatest works o f art deal in types. Here
is a characteristic passage from Samuel Johnson:
Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above
all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet
that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of
manners and of life. His characters are not modi­
fied by the customs of particular places, unprac­
tised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities
of studies or professions, which can operate but
26 TOUCHSTONE | N O V EM B ER /D E C EM B ER 2 O I4
upon small numbers; or by the accidents of tran­
sient fashions or temporary opinions: they are
the genuine progeny of common humanity, such
as the world will always supply, and observation
will always find. His persons act and speak by the
influence of those general passions and principles
by which all minds are agitated, and the whole
system of life is continued in motion. In the writ­
ings of other poets a character is too often an in­
dividual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a
species.
Johnson does not mean that every m an in Shake­
speare is like every other man. He means that Shake­
speare penetrates to the essential features o f mankind,
understandable by all people, wherever and whenever
they live. We know the sprightly Rosalind. We have met
the pure and tart-tongued Imogen. We have seen the
manly diam ond in the rough, Orlando. We have had
converse with the wise and sometimes too wise Friar
Lawrence, with the generous hothead Capulet, with the
prim boy Paris; with Romeo, whose stirrings o f nobility
alternate with youthful heedlessness; with Juliet becom­
ing a woman before her time.
T h e P o w er of B oldly
D r a w n D if f e r e n c e
Johnson’s contemporary, Henry Fielding, taking a cue
from Horace’s Ars Poetica, gives us through the learned
and poetry-loving Parson Adams a similar encomium
on the genius o f Homer. Here the emphasis is on the in­
dividual as representing a type that is recognizable once
the artist shows it to us:
How accurately is the sedate, injured resentment of
Achilles, distinguished from the hot, insulting pas­
sion of Agamemnon! How widely doth the brutal
courage of Ajax differ from the amiable bravery of
Diomedes; and the wisdom of Nestor, which is the
result of long reflection and experience, from the
cunning of Ulysses, the effect of art and subtlety
only! ... Indeed, I might affirm that there is scarce
a character in human nature untouched in some
part or other.
But to be a brilliant portrayer o f the characters o f m an­
kind is to portray also their strongest feelings:
And, as there is no passion which he is not able to
describe, so is there none in his reader which he
cannot raise. If he hath any superior excellence to
the rest, I have been inclined to fancy it is in the
 pathetic. I am sure I never read with dry eyes the
two episodes where Andromache is introduced in
the former lamenting the danger, and in the latter
the death, of Hector. The images are so extremely
tender in these, that I am convinced the poet had
the worthiest and best heart imaginable.
We are expected to recall that fine mom ent in the
Iliad when the brave Hector, as much husband and man
o f peace as he is a warrior, meets his wife Andromache,
who begs him to let the other men for one day take the
brunt o f the battle. She is holding their baby boy, whom
the Trojans have given the nickname Astyanax—Lord
o f the City. It’s a tragic name, since th at boy will be
hurled to his death from the ramparts when the Greeks
finally burn the city to the ground. She gives him the
child to hold, b u t the baby sees his father’s flashing
helmet and its waving plume, and they frighten him.
He cries, the m other and father smile, Hector removes
his helm et—which any good m an would do, though
the gesture is telling—and dandles the boy in his arms,
saying th at he hopes the Trojans will say o f Astyanax
that the father was a good man, but the son far better.
It is not to be.
Now, no one in Fielding’s day was so mad as to believe
that men and women were interchangeable, and indeed
the power of the scene between Hector and Andromache
depends upon the boldly drawn difference. We have the
tall, broad-shouldered Hector, who goes to war for the
honor o f his family and his country, bu t who m ight
have been happier had there never been any war at all;
gentlemanly Hector, who never reproaches his sister-in-
law Helen, the cause of the war; and Andromache, whose
name suggests the battle o f men, but who has eyes only
for her husband and her son; whose hopes are bound up
in them, now that she has no other family; who does not
wheedle, as Helen does, but whose pleading is open and
heartfelt; with whom one can imagine evenings of peace
and gentle laughter.
The fact is, we never do meet individuals divested of
age, sex, profession, and culture. Such beings do not exist.
We meet men, women, and children. We meet youths and
lasses, priests and lawyers, rich city dwellers and pig farm­
ers. We realize ourselves as individuals only within and
through types, deeply founded in nature, as culture itself
is founded in nature: culture is m an’s nest. To complain
that Andromache is “socially constructed” is not simply
ridiculous anthropology, since Andromache is immedi­
ately recognizable by men and women from all kinds of
places and conditions in the world, and will be so as long
as men can breathe and eyes can see. It is to commit to a
false dilemma. Our cultures themselves spring from our
nature, and give that nature room to flourish.
N o A l t e r n a t iv e
But doesn’t this submission to nature tie the artist’s
hands? Far from it. It is the natural that allows for free­
dom and flourishing. I can walk on my hands, but not
well. I can plant a maple tree in swampy land, and it will
grow, but not tall. I can give my daughter an ax and tell
her to cut down a great oak, and maybe, one time in a
hundred, it will get cut down, but not w ithout blisters
and blood and many wasted hours. Throw nature out
the door, said Horace, and she will leap in again at the
The p o in t o f recognizing
m en an d w om en is n o t to
reduce th em to p asteb o ard
caricatures. It is to h o n o r
th e ir n atu re , an d give them ,
th ro u g h th e ir n atu re, the
best chance for flo u rish in g ,
an d gloriously m yriad ways
in w hich to flo u rish .
window. You can respect it and flourish, or scorn it and
suffer the consequences o f your folly. You can pretend all
you like that there are no such things as men and women,
just as you can pretend to suspend the law o f gravity, but
if you step over the brink o f a cliff, your cartoon fantasy
will not save you.
The point o f recognizing men and women is not to
reduce them to pasteboard caricatures. The point of rais­
ing boys to be men and girls to be women is not to reduce
them to two brands o f robots. It is to honor their nature,
and give them, through their nature, the best chance
for flourishing, and gloriously myriad ways in which to
flourish. To say “There are such things as dogs” is the
first step towards recognizing the many fascinating ways
in which the canine nature is realized. To pretend that
dogs and cats are alike is to indulge in a willed refusal
to look closely at either. If you raise a dog like a cat, you
will not get a cat or a very interesting dog; you will get a
dull failure.
Now, nobody really does that, just as it is impos­
sible for any artist to dissociate him self from types.
To believe that there are no classes of things, but only
this and that, is just this side o f chaos. So even contem­
porary artists who believe they are bold in rejecting our
N OV EM B ER /D E C EM B ER 2 0 1 4 I TOUCHSTONE 27
 1
inherited wisdom—sniffing at the supposed stereotype in
Andromache—cannot help turning to types of their own
imagining. There is no escape.
T h e R eal S ocia l C o n s t r u c t i o n
So, in a diagnostically awful movie, A Perfect Murder, star­
ring Michael Douglas and man’s best case for a neuter
gender, Gwyneth Paltrow, she and he are on the floor
of an apartment, and he’s out to kill her. Miss Paltrow
does not have a feminine body. She has cultivated the
unnatural, the body of a skinny prepubescent boy with
asthma. Somehow this collocation of matchsticks, from
a sitting position whence she cannot muster the full force
of her ninety pounds, delivers a blow to Douglas’s head
that sends him reeling across the floor. That gives her a
chance to grab a meat thermometer and plunge it into
his neck. No, this is not a cartoon.
The director, Andrew Davis, has not turned away
from types. He has only rejected Woman (think of Grace
Kelly in the original, Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder)
in favor of Strange Stridulodental Female, such as is only
to be seen in film. The part writes itself. I am not com­
plaining that Davis has fallen for a type. I am complain­
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S u b s c rib e to E-Notes, o u r e n e w s le tte r, a t
ing about the type he has fallen for: it is phony, shallow,
and stupid.
And since it is counter to nature, it is the thing that is
socially constructed, a wholly artificial product of a most
particular place and time (contemporary Hollywood),
and a particularly odd group of people (male feminists).
As such, it must be flat and predictable, just as there’s
really only one kind of maple tree growing in a swamp
(half-dead), and only one kind of walking down the street
on your hands (difficult and absurd). So, too, when aca­
demics complain about stereotypes and the sexes. They
have nothing interesting to say about men and women,
and I can write their sentences for them, or finish their
shouts as they cry “Diversity!” in unison, ignoring the
greatest and most fascinating human diversity, which is
ever before their eyes.
Not much fun in that.
Frank Capra knew better, as did Gable and Colbert.
The self-made man has finished haggling with his daugh­
ter’s ex-fiance, and has just gotten word: annulment
settled. A secretary comes in with a funny telegram. “Sir,
all it says is that the walls are shaking.”
“Send a telegram back,” barks the father. “Let ’em
fall!” ♦
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