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Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel, ed. Paul Budra & Betty A. Schellenberg: Moving beyond the question of why sequels appeal to readers, this collection also addresses the material conditions of their production and the piercing critical stance that a sequel is inherently lesser, whether because it is created precisely because the original was commercially successful or for some more psychoanalytic reason. Essays that taught me something: Alexander Leggatt’s discussion of Tamburlaine and Falstaff considers the appeal of “exhilarating monsters,” free from conventional constraints. Given the apparent unstoppability of their characters, it’s no surprise that the audience wants to see them again. They resist closure, insisting that there are still worlds to conquer. But their creators bring them back to do what otherwise cannot be done: to kill them. “Tamburlaine and Falstaff are both highly performative characters, and when they come back they try to keep their old performances going. But the plays in which they are embedded have moved on.” And theatrical sequels (like films) tend to be “metatheatrical,” acknowledging the audience and its familiarity with the characters. Leggatt hypothesizes that, by killing such powerful characters, Marlowe and Shakespeare – working precisely at the time when authorship is becoming important – are asserting their ownership of those characters as property, an ownership that can only be complete if there can be no more Tamburlaine or Falstaff stories. Either the character’s power (to resist closure) or the author’s power must, in the end, fail.
Schellenberg’s essay on eighteenth-century English sequels by women was also very interesting. The book market was turning writers into professionals, and not incidentally sequels were becoming common – they were a distilled form of “by the Author of …” Schellenberg argues that professionalization contradicted expectations about feminine behavior, which was supposed to be domestic, private, non-capitalistic, and non-routinized. Successful women authors used sequels more often than their male counterparts, she suggests, as a result of both external pressures and “some inherent generic appeal commonly felt by these women.” A sequel “performed a strategic career function” by “portraying itself as written to please an already established readership,” preserving “the pretence of the modest woman’s writing only for her intimate circle, while allowing the author a bold claim to moral and narrative authority as the established instructor of those readers.” By contrast, male authors wrote sequels to assert property rights and to react to “problem readers” whose responses to the original led them to create illegitimate sequels. Given the weakness of copyright law, “the author could hope to prove literary paternity only by producing a second offspring displaying irrefutable resemblances to the first.” (Mother’s baby, father’s maybe?)
The property owner/paterfamilias model, while legitimating for male authors, would have marked female authors as transgressive, so they didn’t make the same claims, instead proposing an imaginary community they were leading in private conversation. “For the female author, the figure of a refined, disembodied conversational community could allow even women, who were in general barred from actual coffee-houses, a legitimate cultural authority.” The sequel allowed authors and readers to overcome or deny the anonymity of print because it could be positioned as a reaction to readers and a continuation of a conversation, and the author could also gently assert her authority, correcting mistaken readings. By building a network of female friends, authors could win financial success – as long as they disclaimed the desire to do so.
Mary Ann Gilles contributes a fascinating essay about the influence of literary agents on authors in getting them to produce sequels, specifically focusing on one Edwardian writer. Relatedly, Carole Gerson writes about the contractual and other pressures that led L.M. Montgomery, mostly unwillingly, to write a number of sequels to Anne of Green Gables. Both essays are worthwhile if you’re interested in the material conditions of sequel production and authorial intent.
Paul Budra’s essay on movie serial killers is probably the most fun of the bunch, as he tries to explain the appeal of Freddy, Michael, and Jason: “The monsters of the early Universal horror movies were threatening because they were chaotic outsiders who challenged a homogenous stable society…. Postmodern monsters, on the other hand, inhabit a society that is chaotic. This makes them heroes, in the sense that, while we are confused, denied simple answers and distinctions in a bewildering cultural condition, monsters are not. Monsters have priorities. Monsters are motivated. The principles that govern them are firmer than our own: do not go out in the sunlight; kill anything that giggles.”
Schellenberg’s essay on eighteenth-century English sequels by women was also very interesting. The book market was turning writers into professionals, and not incidentally sequels were becoming common – they were a distilled form of “by the Author of …” Schellenberg argues that professionalization contradicted expectations about feminine behavior, which was supposed to be domestic, private, non-capitalistic, and non-routinized. Successful women authors used sequels more often than their male counterparts, she suggests, as a result of both external pressures and “some inherent generic appeal commonly felt by these women.” A sequel “performed a strategic career function” by “portraying itself as written to please an already established readership,” preserving “the pretence of the modest woman’s writing only for her intimate circle, while allowing the author a bold claim to moral and narrative authority as the established instructor of those readers.” By contrast, male authors wrote sequels to assert property rights and to react to “problem readers” whose responses to the original led them to create illegitimate sequels. Given the weakness of copyright law, “the author could hope to prove literary paternity only by producing a second offspring displaying irrefutable resemblances to the first.” (Mother’s baby, father’s maybe?)
The property owner/paterfamilias model, while legitimating for male authors, would have marked female authors as transgressive, so they didn’t make the same claims, instead proposing an imaginary community they were leading in private conversation. “For the female author, the figure of a refined, disembodied conversational community could allow even women, who were in general barred from actual coffee-houses, a legitimate cultural authority.” The sequel allowed authors and readers to overcome or deny the anonymity of print because it could be positioned as a reaction to readers and a continuation of a conversation, and the author could also gently assert her authority, correcting mistaken readings. By building a network of female friends, authors could win financial success – as long as they disclaimed the desire to do so.
Mary Ann Gilles contributes a fascinating essay about the influence of literary agents on authors in getting them to produce sequels, specifically focusing on one Edwardian writer. Relatedly, Carole Gerson writes about the contractual and other pressures that led L.M. Montgomery, mostly unwillingly, to write a number of sequels to Anne of Green Gables. Both essays are worthwhile if you’re interested in the material conditions of sequel production and authorial intent.
Paul Budra’s essay on movie serial killers is probably the most fun of the bunch, as he tries to explain the appeal of Freddy, Michael, and Jason: “The monsters of the early Universal horror movies were threatening because they were chaotic outsiders who challenged a homogenous stable society…. Postmodern monsters, on the other hand, inhabit a society that is chaotic. This makes them heroes, in the sense that, while we are confused, denied simple answers and distinctions in a bewildering cultural condition, monsters are not. Monsters have priorities. Monsters are motivated. The principles that govern them are firmer than our own: do not go out in the sunlight; kill anything that giggles.”
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