Reimagining ‘The Tempest’: On Jack Todd’s ‘Rose & Poe’
Todd’s reimagining of ‘The Tempest’ treats women as sex objects and stereotypes, and misses its mark in the age of Me Too.
Jack Todd
Fiction | 260 Pages | Reviewed: Paperback
9781770413993 | First Edition | $18.95 CDN
ECW Press | Toronto | BUY HERE
“After the events chronicled here, the tales told about Poe Didelot and his mother, Rose, became darker, but not a whit more true. That they persist to this day is a tribute to the human tendency to cling to a falsehood, even when the unadorned truth stands before us, solid and inconvertible as an oak tree.
(from the prologue)
Certain classical works do not succeed when they are retold in another time or context, as they present a very specific set of circumstances, characters, or setting that functions best in that specific combination. It is their literary fingerprint that makes them so memorable and beloved, and with big names like Shakespeare, the added pressure to do the work justice makes the task more difficult. I had only one brief encounter with The Tempest, so it was difficult to evaluate how true the statement on the back cover was, claiming Rose & Poe is a “glorious re-imagining” of the play. Yet I did not find this knowledge to be entirely necessary — the shortcomings of Rose & Poe’s attempt to recreate The Tempest were not the most glaring ones. Along with its numerous structural faults and failure to weave a strong narrative, the novel’s biggest issue proved to be its portrayal of women and the theme of the outsider. As a result, what would’ve otherwise been a simply disappointing novel became a source of frustration and anger, pointing to the kinds of tactics and tropes in literature that need to be addressed and questioned.
The events of the book take place in the rather insular community of Belle Coeur County, which, despite being called “mythical” in the synopsis, reads more like an assemblage of elements and characteristics one frequently encounters in the way small towns are stereotypically presented. The setting is secondary in the novel, however, as the characters are meant to be the driving force. Yet the way in which the novel goes about introducing and “fleshing out” the characters is through a similar tactic of reinforcing stereotypes and emphasizing the dichotomy of ugly and beautiful that permeates the entire story. Where Poe is the typical outcast, his physical features and intellectual abilities serving as a reoccurring means of characterization, Miranda is the beautiful, sweet, and desirable girl who, apart from a brief mention that she studies geology, does not have any other hobbies or interests. The same is true for Rose and Prosper Thorne, who are inserted into the roles of the loving and self-sacrificing mother and overprotective and sick father, respectively. For a novel that positions itself as an exploration of the complex relationships between people, there is little more to go on than the cliché emphasis on not fitting in, to the point where even the words lack sincerity. With some variations, Poe is frequently described as different, strange, and disgusting. At one point, the novel almost attempts to coerce the reader into the act of violence to come, reinforcing Poe’s characterization by describing how
“[… t]hey’ve been hearing all their lives that the man is a mutant, and for a mutant to do what he did to a beautiful human girl, well, it just won’t do.”
(p. 191).
It is the lines after this that are worth paying attention to, as they point to the other, and in my opinion the biggest, fault of Rose & Poe, which is trying to indirectly deal with poor characterization by defaulting to the objectification of the female characters, presenting such statements as ways of describing physical appearance or personality. In this case, the passage further describes how the crowd of mostly drunken and angry men
“[…] secretly thrill[s] at the thought of the giant taking his gigantic pecker out of those OshKosh B’gosh overalls he wears and impaling the helpless girl with it, but he must pay nonetheless.”
(p. 191).
Whether or not it was a conscious strategy of Todd’s is uncertain, yet the result is apparent. While Poe and Miranda are presented in the coexistence of violence and sexual desire, Thorne is overlaid with incestuous overtones and Rose becomes an object to be used and molded according to the desires of others.
Reading Rose & Poe quickly turned into an exercise of underlining every moment that made me uncomfortable with the way women were depicted or talked about, which proved to be an alarming amount of times. These ranged from characters outright stating that Rose was “easy” to a scene where nurses are giggling and talking about how many men believe that a nurse is “the horniest type of woman” there is. The most unsettling passages were those related to Miranda and the way Thorne talks about his own daughter, describing how
“[… h]e has a brief, disturbing image of her naked in the shower, of water streaming over her breasts and her brown belly and thighs and the thatch of dark silky pubic hair like her mother’s.”
(p. 14).
I could find no plausible explanation for why such a scene would be written, especially where it is a father sexualizing his daughter for at least a couple of pages. The other standout was a scene that attempted, perhaps, to make the book seem open-minded and diverse, yet only worsened the situation. In the passage,
“[… a]s the night wears on, some of the dancers cop a feel here and there, squeeze her bosom, or grope her buttocks. Rose doesn’t begrudge them their pleasures. There’s precious little solace for a working man or woman, never has been [. …] Now and then the wandering hand on her bosom belongs to a woman, and Rose will accommodate her, too […] because we’re all God’s creatures, no matter how the twig was bent, and we all have our needs.”
(p. 72–73).
Considering recent events, Rose & Poe reads as not only insensitive to the debates that have been ongoing for at least a couple of years prior to this recent explosion with the Me Too movement, but also as simply wrong on the grounds of simple human decency. Todd’s writing is reminiscent of the same privileged male gaze that is currently being questioned in literature and the Canadian Lit scene in particular. It is even more disheartening to note how long the list of examples is, turning the experience of reading into an exercise of “spot the examples of sexual assault and men abusing their power.” To see it so prominently put on display and in such an unapologetic way, where there is such a clear lack of self-consciousness on the writing’s part, is incredibly sad and disappointing.
In comparison to this, the rest of the book’s faults feel almost forgivable, problems related to the plot itself, as well as to the way Todd tried to rework The Tempest. Rose & Poe could have easily been its own autonomous novel. Instead, it awkwardly tried to recreate characters like Ariel, who becomes the ridiculous delivery man, Airmail, pestering Thorne by drinking all his beer, speeding around on a motorcycle, and engaging in a conversation with Thorne at the end to criticize the latter’s attempt to find mysticism in the storm, a dialogue that sounded almost like the book was talking to itself. There is even a brief moment when Rose & Poe slips into a quasi-Shakespearean tone out of nowhere, as if remembering what it originally set out to be, but drops the attempt after a page or so.
Rose & Poe could have been the kind of moving and powerful book that its cover, and several reviews, try to make it. If Todd had been more consistent with carrying through characters or scenes he introduced into the plot, fleshing them out, and making them relevant as opposed to creating a literary collage of disjointed and inconsequential events, the novel would have had more weight to it. The mistake that plagues the novel most, however, is much more severe than simply structural and stylistic downfalls. Rose & Poe is a reminder of the dual power of literature, capable of empowering but also of harming. It is an example of the kind of literature it is time not only to move away from, but also to call out for its misconduct. In the words of Rose Didelot, herself:
“If my Poe is in as much trouble as you seem to think, he’ll need a real lawyer. No offense, son, but any lawyer with a lick of sense would know better than to take an umbrella outdoors when it’s blowing a gale.”
(p. 102).
MARGARYTA GOLOVCHENKO is a Staff Book Reviewer for The Coil and an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, Canada, where she serves as an editor for the campus’ only speculative fiction journal, The Spectatorial. Her work has appeared in publications such as Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Contemporary Verse 2, Dear Damsels, Half Mystic, and Luna Luna Magazine, and she is the author of the poetry chapbooks, Miso Mermaid (words(on)pages press, 2016) and Pastries and Other Things History Has Tried to Kill Us With (dancing girl press, 2017). She is the recipient of the Vic One Chamberlin-Goodison Prize in Poetry and the Northrop Frye Undergraduate Research Award and Fellowship, both from Victoria College at the University of Toronto. When not maneuvering around her mountain of to-be-read books, she can be most often found sharing her (mis)adventures on Twitter.
