Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Saint Patrick - Truth Or Fiction?

Christal Cooper – 965 Words



Truth Or Legend Of The Man St. Patrick

Today on Saturday March 17, 2018 all of North America, Europe, Australia, Russia, Singapore, and Japan are celebrating St. Patrick’s Day.  The first ever celebration of St. Patrick’s Day was in 1737 in Boston, Massachusetts, when the majority of the population consisted of Irish Immigrants.




        St. Patrick was born Maewyn Succat to Roman parents who resided in Banna Venta Berniae, Cumbria, England a.ka Ravenglass and/or Glannaventa.  It is not certain of the month or year but some believe he was born on December 16 in 373, 385, or 387 A.D.


Maewyn’s parents were wealthy and educated people.  His father, Calpornius Succat was a deacon in the church, overseeing money issues, particularly for tax incentive reasons.  His grandfather Politus was a priest. 


       Maewyn was kidnapped by Irish raiders/pirates when he was sixteen years old.  Experts are not sure exactly how he was kidnapped.  Some stories state that the raiders/pirates busted into the Succat home, took Maewyn, and sold him into slavery in Ireland.  The question of what happened to Maewyn’s parents is not even addressed.


       It is certain he was in captivity for six years, and that he worked as a shepherd in County Mayo in Ireland.  Some describe his slave-duty as that of a herdsman in the Irish slopes of Slemish and Croaghpatrick.  It is unknown if Maewyn was treated well or severely abused.


Another conflict about Maewyn:  was he a devout Christian before he was kidnapped or did he have his conversion during captivity?  Once again there are two teams who disagree.  One believes Maewyn was a devout Christian before he was kidnapped and that his faith is what made him endure those six years.  Others believe that he was not a Christian, or at least did not take it seriously, until during his captivity, when he had nothing else to turn to but God.


There are two documents, letters, written by Maewyn.  In the first letter, The Letter Of Declaration, he writes of his own experiences, particularly visions sent from God.


The first vision was a voice telling him that he needed to escape and go home.  Maewyn responded to these voices by walking nearly 200 miles from County Mayo across the Irish coast, boarded a ship, and returned home to his parents, in Britain.



While in Britain, Maewyn experienced the second vision in which another Saint, Victoricus spoke to him. 


“I saw a man and heard a voice coming, as if it were from Ireland.  His name was Victoricus, and he carried many letters, and he gave me one of them.  I read the heading:  “The voice of the Irish. As I began the letter I imagined in that moment that I heard the voice of those very people who were near the wood of Foclu, which is beside the Western Sea and they cried out as with one voice:  “We appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us.”


       For the next 10 to 15 years Maewyn wandered the European countryside, visiting numerous monasteries, learning from great devout Christian men.


       Maewyn became an ordained bishop, perhaps explaining his new name of St. Patrick.  Becoming a bishop was not a bed of roses for St. Patrick.  According to his own words, he was beaten, robbed, and put in chains awaiting execution.  It is not known what he was he found guilty of.


       There was a time where he was officially accused of mishandling financial matters.  It is not clear on the specifics of the allegations.  One clue could be that St Patrick refused money and other gifts from prestigious people of Ireland, where as before, previous bishops accepted these gifts.


       Most of St. Patrick’s days as a bishop were rewarding and fruitful and well received.   The majority of Ireland did not practice Christianity but pagan religions of mother earth and other gods.   St. Patrick decided not to replace their mother religion’s symbols with his own Christian ones; and instead, incorporated the nature-based-religion symbols into his sermons of Christianity. 

 
An example of this is that he included the pagan symbol the sun into the Christian symbol the cross – thus the Celtic cross was born.  


The believers of these pagan religions also would start huge fires to honor their pagan gods.  St Patrick incorporated the fires into the Easter celebrations.  The reason for this is that St. Patrick wanted his new converts to think of the Christian symbols as natural and not totally foreign.


Two of the greatest legends about St. Patrick is that he used a shamrock to teach his new converts the Trinity.   The legend states that he picked a shamrock, three-leaf clover, from a plant in the ground, explaining to his congregation that each of the three leaves represented the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.


It is not sure what specific three-leaf clover, shamrock this was.  Some believe it was of the clover family, the small hop clover, the European Wood Sorrel, the White Clover, or the Black Medic.  This story could very well be true, but this story was first told 1000 years after St. Patrick’s death.


The second legend is that St Patrick, holding his wooden staff and standing on a hilltop, cast all of the snakes out of Ireland.  It is true that there are no snakes in Ireland, but not due to St Patrick’s holy powers; for snakes do not and have never existed in Ireland, nor New Zealand, Iceland, Greenland, and Antarctica.  The reason being that the geography is not habitable to snakes.   More than likely this was not literal and instead a way to describe how the pagans abandoned one of their pagan symbols, the snake, for Christianity, and Christianity triumphed.


He ministered to the Irish for 30 years, retiring to Saul, where he lived the remainder of his life until his death on March 17 of 462 or 493 A.D, which places his death between ages 75 to 120.




Photograph Description and Copyright Information

Photo 1A
Painting of St. Patrick
Unknown attribution
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

Photo 2C
Union Army Irish Brigade holds a steeplechase race in honor of St. Patrick
Photo taken March 17, 1863
Photo attributed to Edwin Forbs (1839 – 1895)
Library of Congress
Public Domain

Photo 3A
New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day parade in 1871.  A float featuring a bust of Daniel O’Connell passes through Union Square
Library of Congress
Public Domain

Photo 4B
Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in New York’s Fifth Avenue in 1909
Library of Congress
Public Domain

Photo 5S
This is believed to be the birthplace of St. Patrick
WallsCastle, Ravenglass
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

Photo 6GG
Drawing of St. Patrick
Fair Use under the United States Copyright Law

Photo 7T
Art piece depicting St Patrick’s kidnapping by Irish pirates.
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

Photo 8N
Slemish, County Antrim
CCBYSA2.0

Photo 9U
Stained glass window depiction of Saint Patrick’s conversion while enslaved.
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

Photo 10 V
First writings of St. Patrick to be printed.
Public Domain

Photo 11W
Painting depicting Saint Patrick hearing the voice of God telling him to escape.
Attribution unknown
Public Domain

Photo 12X
Catacomb of Saint Victoricus.
Public Domain

Photo 13J
Traditional Saint Patrick’s Day badges from the early 20th Century
Located at the Museum of County Life In Country
CCBSA3.0

Photo 14H
Strained Glass art of St. Patrick
Saint Benin’s Church in Kilbennun, County Galway, Ireland
Photograph of art attributed to Andreas F Borchert
Public Domain

Photo 15K
Saint Patrick stained glass window from Cathedral of Christ the Light
CCASA2.0

Photo 16P
Painting of St. Patrick
Attribution Unknown
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

Photo 17R
Painting of St. Patrick
Attribution Unknown
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

Photo 18Y
A Christian high cross with a Celtic cross design located at Monasterboice in Ireland
CCBYSA2.0

Photo 19Z
Image depicting St. Patrick setting fires for the Easter celebration
Public Domain

Photo 20I
Shamrock
GNUFDL and CCASA3.0P

Photo 21AA
Stained glass image of St Patrick surrounded by Shamrocks
Public Domain

Photo 22BB
Painting of St. Patrick with a banished snake.
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

Photo 23CC
Image of Saint Patrick on his deathbed
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

Photo 24OO
Statue of St Patrick in Saul, the place St. Patrick died.

Photo 25EE
Saint Patrick’s gravesite
Reputed site of burial of Saint Patrick, in churchyard of cathedral in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland
Photo taken on August 31, 2006
Photo attributed to Man Vya
Public Domain


Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Mystery Writer Joanne Dobson on THE KASHMIRI SHAWL, 1850s India & 1860s New York, and Poet Anna Wheeler Roundtree

Christal Cooper


Article/Excerpts 4,141 Words


The Kashmiri Shawl by Joanne Dobson:
The Epiphanies & Metamorphoses
of Anna Wheeler Roundtree


         She experienced the oddest sense of having become two different souls inhabiting the same body, the timid writer of inoffensive verses and emerging as from a cocoon a bolder more self-confident literary woman

         Excerpt from The Kashmiri Shawl
         Page 125
         Copyright granted by Joanne Dobson



Joanne Dobson’s first historical novel, The Kashmiri Shawl, published by Cobb Hill Books, is 360 pages, each individual page a page turner in every sense of the word: Heroine Anna Wheeler Roundtree is a woman of many secrets who experiences numerous epiphanies and metamorphoses throughout her 360-page life, the first of which is revealed within the first five pages of the book.


Joanne Dobson first conceived the idea of The Kashmiri Shawl in April of 1985.  Dobson had just completed her Ph.D. in American Literature and was in the process of finding a position as an English Professor, when she came across a National Geographic illustrated article on nineteenth-century narrow-gauge Indian railroads, and, thus, Anna Wheeler Roundtree of The Kashmiri Shawl was conceived.


“The scene came into my imagination whole: a narrow, sooty, 19th-century steam-railroad compartment somewhere in India. Anna rode, alone and terrified, fleeing her husband and the mission compound where they lived. Just when she’s beginning to feel she’s finally at a safe-enough distance from him, the train is ambushed by a mob protesting British rule, burning and looting, killing Europeans. I speed-wrote three or four pages, delighting in the myriad story possibilities.”




Nightfall was sudden as the train sped back briefly into the jungle, then out into a mountain-enclosed valley.  After an immeasurable time, Anna fell into a muddled sleep, only to jerk awake when, from somewhere down the track came a sudden crack of gunfire, then another, then a volley of shots.  Heavy steps traversed the train’s footboards, and porters shouted.  A mob had destroyed a railroad bridge directly ahead.  Inside the compartment, the air was thick with humidity and horror.  Anna jumped up from her berth and brittle specks of soot scattered to the floor.  And then the train jolted to an abrupt halt.  Anna staggered, righted herself.
In the distance the engine chugged to no effect.  The steam whistle sounded once again, a long, lamenting cry.  Still the train did not move.  Shouts in the distance.  The howl of the mob.  A line of torches advancing.  Anna would die here, on this train, at the hands of a people she had worked so hard to heal.
“Oh, my God,” Anna prayed aloud.  “Send me to hell – I don’t care.  Just let me live . . .”  Her sobbing voice trailed off into an inarticulate wail.  Footsteps halted abruptly on the boards outside her door, and someone tried to turn the handle of the bolted door.  It remained fast shut.
“Are you English, Madam?” asked an urgent voice.
“American,” she responded, her heart now hoping.
“Open the door, the voice commanded.
Ands thus it was that Ashok Montgomery stood there, outlined against the lurid light, aghast at the sight of her.

Excerpt from The Kashmiri Shawl
Page 173
Copyright granted by Joanne Dobson

 “Then, almost immediately, I got a phone call.  Amherst College was offering me a teaching job. The four-page scene went into a manila file folder, not to be seen again for twenty years.”
In 2005, Dobson opened the manila file folder again and began writing, this time she was also influenced by Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, the same novel she taught in her classes whenever she had the chance.

  

She was particularly influenced, not by the romantic Mr. Rochester, but by Jane’s other suitor, the missionary St John Rivers. His marriage proposal to Jane doesn’t promise love, but requires duty. He insists God made her to be a missionary wife, and therefore she should piously labor by his side in the wilds of India.  


“Jane turns him down. Her reason is interesting: “If I were to marry you, you would kill me. You are killing me now.” But she deflects the cause of her demise away from the man himself and onto India: “I am convinced that go when and with whom I would, I should not live long in that climate.”


I came away from my reading of Jane Eyre with the assumption that the Indian climate must be even deadlier than Jane’s would-be husband. What, I asked myself in a frenzy of inspiration, would have happened to Jane if she’d said yes to St. John Rivers and gone to India as his wife?


And thus was the second birth of Anna Wheeler, missionary wife, fleeing her own “deadly” husband by train through a lethal Indian landscape.


But though in Josiah’s eyes Anna does not flourish as his wife, much less as a human being, she actually does flourish in India – falling in love with the people, their land, their religion, their customs, and even the country’s climate—and all of India falls in love with her.


“Anna Wheeler thrives in India. And so, too, with her intelligence, determination, and integrity might have her inspiration, Jane Eyre.”


Having at last returned to New York, Anna Wheeler Roundtree struggles to survive as a poet, barely making ends meet, only able to afford renting a room at the unfashionable Manhattan house owned by Mrs. Chapman.


         It’s August of 1860 and Anna is in the process of sharpening her quill with a penknife when she hears banging at her door. 


She is annoyed – part of the appeal of Mrs. Chapman’s boarding house is its obscurity and isolation –so why would anyone be pounding at her door?  She tries to ignore it but the pounding persists and she has no choice but to open the door, to be is greeted by the young redhead Irish woman Bridget O’Neill. 


Anna doesn’t recognize Bridget until Bridget tells Anna that’s she’s a midwife. She also tells Anna something else . . .


         “A girl?”  Something caught in Anna’s chest, a fist on her heart.  “A girl?  And . . . crying?”  She could still feel the coarse weave of the birthing sheet between fingers cold and strained.  “Bridey, you must be mistaken.  Miss Parker said the infant never took a breath.”
         “And sure that lie has been on my soul ever since that day. I’ve never seen a child so full of life.  But it was just that--” She averted her gaze as if about to address a most shameful issue.  “Well, Miss Parker and the housekeeper was all big-eyed, ye know – hissing to each other in corners, like I didn’t have ears to hear.”  Then she looked directly at Anna.  “If I can speak plainly t’ye, Mrs. Wheeler, from the looks on their faces ye’d of thought yourself had give birth to a dog.  But she was a pretty little thing, that child.  Looked me right in the eye smart-like when I was washing her up.  Like she’d know me again if she seed me.  Soon’s I got her clean and wrapped, Miss Parker grabbed me arm and dragged me into the back room.  ‘Too bad the child’s so poorly,’ she blathered.  And when I give her the fish eye, she pulls out her purse and pays me off –double.  ‘Far’s poor Mrs. Wheeler knows, this child was born dead,’ she says, and stands n the front door and watches me till I turn down Worth Street.  Later that night I was out to the grocery for . . . for a growler.”  She cast Anna a sideways glance.  “And I seen her slipping around the corner of the Mission with a bundle clutched to her chest.”  Bridey’s eyes were bright with meaning.  “Just so.”  And she crossed her arms loosely as if she were cradling an infant.  “And it were screetchin’ fit to beat the band.”
         “But –“
         “Twas just, ye see, she couldn’t understand it – and, mind ye, I’m not saying how it come about . . .”  Her gaze left Anna’s face uneasily and migrated to the beautiful Kashmiri shawl she clutched. “Ye see, I’m not one who has a right to cast blame on any other woman – if ye understand what I’m about saying.  But somehow, for whatever reason…”  Her eyes snapped back to Anna’s. “. . .that child was born a darky.”

         Excerpt from The Kashmiri Shawl
         Pages 5- 6
         Copyright by Joanne Dobson
          
         Anna, then, pursues her daughter, whom she christens India Elizabeth, and it is through this search that her secret love affair is revealed and her epiphanies and metamorphoses are experienced and realized.


She also relives her past, that of being crushed by her domineering and, now, supposedly dead husband Reverend Josiah Roundtree for ten full years, while he led a mission in India. 


To escape the domination of her husband, Anna writes poetry in notebooks that she successfully hides from her husband in her petticoat pocket.  It is during one of her husband’s sermons that she experiences another epiphany, not because of what he preaches but because of a miraculous green lizard.

        

         From outside came the familiar tweet and trill of a bird, one she knew was small and green, but for which she had no name.  And with the sure and certain note of that green song, something akin to a miracle came to pass in Anna’s soul:  In the breathless air, between one pass of the punkah and the next, a green lizard jumped from the wall and flickered across the toe of Anna’s buttoned boot, and it was as if all things changed, as if she had woken with a start from a long, cold New England dream to find herself here in the midst of a life so fecund it spoke not in the print on Josiah’s page, but in the scent of bougainvillea, in birdsong.
         She shuddered, cold and hot at the same moment.  She felt momentarily lifted out of her body.
         A lifetime’s doctrine drained from her as wine might spill from a cast-off communion cup, only to be replaced by a new revelation.  Life!  Here!  Life!  Now!  Life!
         She had heard of Christians who had lost their faith; now, in “the twinkling of an eye,” as the Bible said, something equally cataclysmic had happened to her.  She felt as if she’d been stunned by a celestial hammer.  It was all she could do to keep herself seated in the pew, all she could do to keep from shouting out:  Life.  Here.  Life.  Now.  Life.
         It was as if her mind had leapt beyond its education and entered a larger sphere.  As if she hadn’t lost faith, but had simply been liberated from icy dogma.  As if finally she knew what she’d been born to know:  life was not simply some anxious, sin-fraught anteroom to salvation or damnation; existence was itself salvation, warm and bright, throbbing with energy.
         In that moment, after years of numb obedience, she decided to leave Josiah, and the dry closed universe of his world.

         Excerpt from The Kashmiri Shawl
         Pages 141 – 142
         Copyright granted by Joanne Dobson

Anna escapes, but barely, the violent Indian Rebellion in 1857, and finds herself impoverished living in that boarding house in lower Manhattan where she writes voraciously in her three notebooks:  one dedicated to poetry that only her religious readers will read; the other dedicated to her experiences in India; and the last dedicated to her innermost secrets and thoughts.                 


         Anna is faced with a dilemma – to earn some much-needed money, she must come up with 12 new poems within a month to submit to Larkin & Bierce Publishers.  The only problem is she has no new “moral,” conventional poems; only poems from her secret notebooks. 
        

         She would write only what poems she knew she could sell to Larkin & Bierce.  But how could she possibly come up with a dozen within a month?  She hesitated.  Did she dare use the unguarded lines she had written in India?  No.  Never.
         But as soon as she wrapped herself comfortably in Ashok’s shawl, his memory enfolded her.  Covering the cherished wrap with a writer’s smock against the inevitable ink stains, she began to write.

Simoom

As murk as midnight is the sky, sultry and still the air.
Dust flings death’s veil around them, the lost and wandering pair
She looks at him with frightened eye.  He says, “We are together.
The only storms to kill us now will be the heart – not weather.”

So deep a darkness neither knew.  They brave it, hand in hand.
Until, at last, deliverance viewed – the sun through floating sand.
The song of bird is heard again.  Heav’n’s air restored to earth.
And they who thought that they would die, now taste each other’s breath.

         Even as she wrote, she understood that this poem was not for Mr. Larkin.  Although – she must say – she doubted that the poor man would recognize passion if he saw it.  But, no, she could not risk discovery; she set the poem aside.
         At the moment Anna could do nothing about finding her child.  She must concentrate on her poetry.  Caroline was going to ask Mrs. Fiske to make inquiries in the city’s African community.
         Leaving her desk only for a few fugitive hours of sleep and a snatched meal provided by Nancy, the Irish house girl, she wrote for the next two days straight.  She wrote until her arm ached, her ink-stained fingers cramped around the scratchy steel-nib pen, and the words swam upon her retinas.  Eventually she did find herself plundering the Indian notebooks – for monsoon, suttee, and creeping scorpion.  For the savior of ginger, turmeric, and cardamom.  For images of jasmine and languid evenings in the mountain air.
         She wrote until she could write no longer.

         Excerpt from The Kashmiri Shawl
         Page 87-88
         Copyright granted by Joanne Dobson

Anna is just as obsessed and passionate about her writing as she is about reading but due to her impoverished state she has only four volumes of books:  a three volume edition of Jane Eyre; the blue cloth covered copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poems; a dime copy of Charlotte Temple; and Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.








         She experiences another epiphany as she stands in front of the Appleton Bookstore on Broadway.   Even after she understands the cruelty she’s experienced in her life and the damaging deception in the loss of her daughter, Anna finds hope in books, particularly the expensive Lydia Sigourney’s poems and Mrs. Southworth’s The Curse of Clifton. 






She tries to resist the temptation of spending her advance money from the publisher on books, but some force is driving her to purchase these two books, and she does.  Purchasing the books is more than a book shopping spree, but permission to be independent, self sufficient, and to recognize the power of words, even words that are not her own. 


         Stepping out of the shop with her impulsive purchase added to her other parcels, she felt an energy radiating into her, as if it were through the soles of her boots in their contact with the sidewalk paving.  At the corner of Catherine Lane, with its mint sellers, buttermilk stands and hot corn vendors, she purchased a paper cone of grapes and popped one in her mouth.  For a moment she felt totally mindful of all around her:  the deep, rich hue of the fruit, the stark lettering of the signs on the buildings, the rank smell of the gutters, the cries of the vendors, the bold aspirations of the people.  For a moment she saw herself not as an isolated being, but as part of the teeming multitudes of this great city.  For a moment, in spite of her fears for India Elizabeth, she felt almost giddy with life.
         Excerpt from The Kashmiri Shawl
         Page 128
         Copyright granted by Joanne Dobson

         Anna searches for her daughter for months, walking all over New York City, from Five Points, to Broadway, to the East River waterfront, but she finds no sign of the child.  Then she experiences another metamorphosis.







         And, then one February morning, footsore, Anna woke up to the tap-tap of small, mean snowflakes on her windowpane.  Something had altered; Anna didn’t know precisely what.  She was stronger.  It was as if steel had entered her soul as solid as that framing Manhattan’s great new buildings.  That day she ceased walking and, in her clean, comfortable fourth-floor room, she began to write again.
         She sat down at the cherry-wood desk, and the lines that emerged from her pen she did not recognize as poems.  They were not rhymed.  Their meter was neither iambic nor trochaic nor spondaic. The words flowed; they came out cold and bright, obdurate and angry.

Thirty long years, and countless spinning centuries,
Gabriel shining by the bedside,
The fear of being smothered in his wings.
It seems there was a birth
And swaddling clothes
Being bound, or binding,
Shepherds with uncomprehending eyes,
A star and no lack of wise men
But that was endless cycles of stars ago.
For this nativity I am alone.

         Anna recognized a new genius to her work, but these were not pieces for Mr. Larkin or for Godey’s Ladies book.  They were neither inspirational nor comforting.  They were poems for herself, and she kept them to herself, hiding the fragments of verse away in the secret compartment of the travel desk.

         Excerpt from The Kashmiri Shawl
         Pages 271-272
         Copyright granted by Joanne Dobson

         The greatest epiphanies and metamorphosis - romantically, motherly, and poetically - Anna Wheeler Roundtree experiences are bountiful and not shared in this article, in order to avoid spoil alerts for would be readers.


         Just like it took Anna Wheeler Roundtree ten years to face the light and leave her husband, it took Joanne Dobson ten years to finish The Kashmiri Shawl, a rare faceted gem with lightning constantly running through its veins.


“Anna and I are both born writers, and one thing we have in common is that it took each of us a long time to realize that writing was a vocation as well as simply a talent. I write because it’s what I want to do. I feel happiest when I have a writing project going on. Anna, poor thing, writes out of desperation, both emotional and financial. In some ways she writes for her life, and her writing saves her. 



When she found a forgotten Indian diary full of poetic writings in her dresser drawer, I almost shrieked for joy; I wasn’t expecting that!”


Dobson not only writes a compelling story but also uses the real New York City of 1860s as its backdrop – no tourist attractions are mentioned but only places that real New Yorkers would be aware of, New York City at its most authentic.  Dobson, a New Yorker herself, accomplished this by intense research in her own family of New Yorkers and New York archives.


“I did an enormous amount of research for The Kashmiri Shawl. My scholarly specialization is in 19th-century American women’s literature, so I had a good jumping-off place.


Then I was granted a Research Fellowship for Creative Writers at the wonderful American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts.



For four weeks, I immersed myself in their comprehensive collection of American books, magazines, broadsides, posters, etc. I read original copies of 19th-century books with titles such as Hindoo Life: With Pictures (1866) and The Mysteries and Miseries of the Great Metropolis (1874). After that delightful plunge into the past, I had, of course, the Internet to fill in the gaps.



While I was doing on-site research in New York, I felt like I was walking the streets of Manhattan in two different centuries at the same time. I loved it! I’m a New Yorker. I was born in Manhattan, raised in the Bronx until I was 12, when we moved to Peekskill, New York. It’s a railroad town about 30 miles north of the city (or The City. I always think of it capitalized!), so Manhattan was always only an easy train ride away.”


Dobson completed the first draft of The Kashmiri Shawl, originally titled The Missionary’s Wife, in 2009, but she was not pleased, and the rough-draft manuscript lived in her filing cabinet for several years.  
It wasn’t until she was back at Amherst College teaching a two-week course on Emily Dickinson that she rescued the manuscript from her filing cabinet and began writing it again, this time with scissors, staples, luck, and note cards.
Alone, in a small faculty-housing apartment, I literally (not philosophically) deconstructed the manuscript tome—with scissors.
Taking it apart, scene-by-scene, and stapling the pages of each scene together, I reduced the doorstop to a multitude of variegated stapled sections.  
        Then, sucking in a deep, terrified breath, I tossed those sections high in the air and let them fall, higgledy-piggledy, all over the scarred maple dining-room table.  
       Once chaos—the true element of creation—was
achieved, I began to make index cards briefly describing each scene, and attempted to organize those cards into a completely new structure, with plot development and suspense in mind.  And the second incarnation of The Kashmiri Shawl began.”


It took her another two years to reach the final editing process; but she still faced one dilemma:  her character Satish Ghosh, Anna’s banian, who assists Anna in her search for her daughter, would not come to life for her.


“On the page he was paper-thin.  Since the banian’s presence was so very important to the crucial final chapters of the story, I was in despair; I needed a character capable of guiding Anna through this vast alien country.


Then, one day, I was shopping at Target, when a short, plump Indian man caught my attention. He was standing in the toiletries aisle studying the various brands of condoms, picking the boxes up one by one, reading the descriptions. Finally he was down to two particular brands, reading first the one package, then the other, weighing them in his hands. Such scrupulous attention to detail … such fussiness.


Yes! This was Satish Ghosh! In my imagination, this stranger was whirled back to the mid-19th-century, had five daughters, was desperate to provide dowries for them, and was … fussy. At that moment he came alive for me—knowledgeable and scrupulously attentive to detail, as well as fussy, but with a good heart, and I had a great deal of fun writing him.”


“’The memsahib without a soul.’ That is what the missionary wallahs are calling you,” Satish Ghosh, said, as he and Anna walked in the garden of her Farrukhabad hotel. All around them oleander bushes hung lush with clusters of pink and white blossoms and a delicate perfume suffused the air.  “Or so the kansamah at the Baptist Mission House is telling me he has heard as he waits upon the dinner table.”
“Without a soul?” She frowned, perplexed, then gave a short, bitter laugh. “Ah, a lost soul!” The missionaries think I am a lost soul! That must be what the butler heard.”
Satish looked at her sideways with his dark eyes. “Soulful, I am thinking. Not soul-lost. Madame is filled with soul.”
She laughed again, this time without the bitterness. “Thank you, Satish.” She smiled at him.
He looked astonished. Thanking me? For what, Madame?”
“You have just said a lovely thing.”
“Ah. I am meaning it.”

Excerpt from The Kashmiri Shawl
Page 329
Copyright granted by Joanne Dobson

Some readers might view Anna’s epiphanies and metamorphoses as the abandonment of her Christian faith, but Dobson insists that is not the case.


I think Anna has grown into a new understanding of Christian life, even if she might not yet see it that way. She’s been traumatized by the institutionalized Christianity of her childhood—a strict, literalistic Puritan dogma of fear and hellfire. Rather than rejecting the teachings of Christ, however, the mature Anna has evolved into a more transcendent understanding of Christianity as a religion of love, compassion, and spiritual healing.”


         Unlike most literary novels, The Kashmiri Shawl has a happy ending – Anna in the end returns home triumphantly – but that triumph is not complete – for there is still the battle against the enemy that is never ending – the enemy being sexism and racism.


         The only unfortunate thing about Joanne Dobson’s The Kashmiri Shawl is that the same battle and the same enemies are still being fought today.
         Dobson presently lives in Brewster, New York, which she described as quiet, woodsy, beautiful, and more country than suburb.  She commuted from Brewster to New York City’s Fordham University for 20 years where she taught American literature and Creative Writing.


         Presently Dobson teaches fiction writing at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, which is located right on the Hudson River in Sleepy Hollow, the birthplace of American fiction.  




Photograph Description And Copyright Information

Photo 1
Joanne Dobson
Copyright granted by Joanne Dobson

Photo 2
Front jacket cover of The Kashmiri Shawl  

Photo 3
Back jacket cover of The Kashmiri Shawl

Photo 5
Jacket cover of National Geographic issue June 1984

Photo 6
Troops of the Native Allies', 1857-1858 (c).
Coloured lithograph from 'The Campaign in India 1857-58', a series of 26 coloured lithographs by William Simpson, E Walker and others, after G F Atkinson, published by Day and Son, 1857-1858.
Although the Bengal Army rebelled during the Indian Mutiny (1857-1859), the East India Company's Madras and Bombay Armies were relatively unaffected and other regiments, including Sikhs, Punjabi Moslems and Gurkhas, remained loyal, partly due to their fear of a return to Mughal rule. They also had little in common with the Hindu sepoys of the Bengal Army. All three groups helped capture Delhi and took part in its subsequent looting. They were helped by the soldiers of those native states that opted to support the British. NAM Accession Number
NAM. 1971-02-33-495-20 Copyright/Ownership
National Army Museum Copyright Location
National Army Museum, Study Collection
Public Domain

Photo 7
Front jacket cover of The Kashmiri Shawl  

Photo 8

Photo 9a
Charlotte Bronte
Public Domain

Photo 9b
Three volume edition of Jane Eyre
1847 2nd edition

Photo 10
St John Rivers admits Jane to Moorehouse
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

Photo 11
Jane turns down St. John Rivers’s marriage proposal
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law.

Photo 12
Jane Eyre
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

Photo 13
Train
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

Photo 14
Chromolithograph of Delhi, India published in The Illustrated News in November of 1857
Public Domain

Photo 15
19th century painting of woman with shawl
Public Domain

Photo 16
The kind of boarding house (hers is on Liberty Street) in which she hears momentous news and begins her quest.
Public Domain

Photo 18
19th century quill and pen knife
Public Domain

Photo 19
Jo, The Beautiful Irish Girl
1860
Attributed to Gustave Courbet
Public Domain

Photo 20
Front jacket cover of The Kashmiri Shawl  

Photo 21a
The Epiphanies & Metamorphoses of Anna Wheeler Roundtree
Modeled by Janlyn Diggs
Photographed by Christal Rice Cooper 

PHoto 21b
Wesleyan Mission Chapel in Bangalore, India in 1864
Attributed to J. Rozairio
Public Domain

Photo 22
Lizard – bronchocela cristatella
Public Domain

Photo 23
Front Jacket cover of The Kashmiri Shawl

Photo 24
19th Century portrait of woman writing at desk
Public Domain

Photo 25
Front Jacket cover of The Kashmiri Shawl

Photo 26a
Three volume edition of Jane Eyre
Public Domain

Photo 26b
Jacket cover of Poems Before Congress by Elizabeth Barrett Browning


Photo 26c
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Public Domain

Photo 26d
1814 Edition of Charlotte Temple

Photo 26e
Walt Whitman (age 37) photo in the inside cover of Leaves of Grass
Public Domain

Photo 26f
1883 Edition of Leaves of Grass with Walt Whitman on cover.

Photo 27a
Appleton’s Building on Broadway belwo Grant Street
1860
Albumen print

Photo 27b
Lydia Sigourney (9/01/1791 - 06/10/1865)
Photo by Matthew Brody
Photograph taken somewhere between 1855-1865
Public Domain

Photo 27c
Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
Quarter plate daguerreotype in 1860
Public Domain

Photo 27d
Jacket cover of The Curse of Clifton

Photo 28
Front jacket cover of The Kashmiri Shawl

Photo 29a
Five Point sin 1859
Public Domain

Photo 29b
1860 New York City Street Scene of Broadway looking north from Broome Street.  The intersection in the center of the photo is Spring Street.
Public Domain

Photo 29c
Image of the frozen East River from New York to Brooklyn
1871
Public Domain

Photo 30
Front jacket cover of The Kashmiri Shawl

Photo 31
19th Century painting of woman with shawl
Public Domain

Photo 32
Joanne Dobson
Copyright granted by Joanne Dobson

Photo 33
Image of Ally Heathcote’s 1874 diary
Public Domain

Photo 34
Joanne Dobson’s mother, Mildred Abele, who worked as a private duty nurse in New York City and left a treasure trove of letters she wrote to her family in Canada about what it was like to live In Ne York City.
Copyright granted by Joanne Dobson

Photo 36
The American Antiquarian Society building in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Public Domain

Photo 37a
Jacket cover of Hindoo Life:  With Pictures  

Photo 37b
Jacket cover of The Mysteries and Miseries of the Great Metropolis

Photo 38
1940s or 1950s Photograph of woman walking in New York City
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

Photo 44
19th Century Painting of woman wearing a shawl.
Public Domain

Photo 45
Sage Jajali is honoured by the Vaishya Tuladhara.
Attributed to Ramanarayanadatta astri Volume: 5 Publisher:

Photo 46
Photograph of India in the 1860s
Public Domain

Photo 47
India man in 1860s photograph

Photo 48
Front jacket cover of The Kashmiri Shawl

Photo 49
Joanne Dobson
Copyright granted by Joanne Dobson 

Photo 50 
The Spiritual Healing of Anna Wheeler Roundtree 
Modeled by Janlynn Diggs
Photograph by Christal Rice Cooper 

Photo 51
Little India Girl
Public Domai

Photo 53
Joanne Dobson
Copyright granted by Joanne Dobson

Photo 54
Drawing of The Hudson Valley Writer’s Center
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law