The meeting will be from 7-7:15pm, the talk 7:15-8:00pm and Q&A from 8-8:30pm. Since there won't be a dinner and we have no space constraints, an RSVP is not required.
Rob Wakeman (Mount Saint Mary College) will give a paper titled "Mud, Blood, and the Naturalization of Carp in All’s Well That Ends Well.”
Abstract:
At the end of All’s Well That Ends Well, when a befouled Parolles enters the stage “muddied in Fortune’s mood and smell,” Lavache supposes he “has fallen into the unclean fishpond of [Fortune’s] displeasure” (5.2.4-19). In this paper, I show that Parolles’ fishiness is linked to the play’s naturalization of the social order. No fish is more routinely marked as a stranger to English waters than carp. Since their introduction in the fifteenth century, fishing manuals and cookery books described the common carp as a fish “not long known in England” but one that “is now naturalized.” Although carp were praised for their fecundity, they were scorned for their muddy flavor. How, then, did they establish themselves, as Izaak Walton puts it, as the “Queen of Rivers, a stately, good, and very subtle fish”? Through a comparison of the play’s attention to mud, blood, and carp with seventeenth-century recipes, I argue that the story of carp in England parallels Parolles’ promise that his “instruction shall serve to naturalize” Helena (1.1.194). The purgative methods that exorcised mud from the bloodstream demonstrate the paradoxical corruption of the body through its purification.
This event will be held online via Zoom. You can access the meeting using this link: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/93466043456?pwd=ckxCVTljNU1QS2J3TTJRcFNtVEg5dz09.
