When a student hands in an essay for my English class in which the foundation of critical analysis is based on Prufrock’s demeanor, or Bartleby’s demeanor, we’re probably headed for a C+ at best.
Gov. Nathan Deal just signed a law requiring applicants for welfare or food stamps to take a drug test, at their own expense, if their “demeanor” suggests drug use.
Demeanor is a maddeningly fuzzy word and a highly subjective tool for appraising a fictional character, let alone an actual living person. Of course, when we are drawn to the most complicated and engaging literary figures, we try to piece out and critique their characters, histories, motivations, psychological manifestations, cultural and symbolic resonances, actions, and words, as they proceed through plots and narratives.
But it’s not a simple task to define a demeanor, and it probably says as much about the observer as it does about the observed.
J. Alfred Prufrock’s demeanor is overwrought, writes the (overwrought) student; his demeanor is heroic, according to the young man who thinks he is too good for any of the women in his circle; it is dignified (in the eyes of the prig) or desperate (in the opinion of the free spirit). It is awkward or introspective, somber or insane. I’ve found in my 25 years as an English professor that T. S. Eliot’s poetic celebrity has a lot of different demeanors, which is to say, he has a lot of different readers. Prufrock strikes different people in different ways.
The Jim Crow era offers a more historically ominous perspective. “I don’t like your demeanor” is something a white person could say about a black person in the 1890s or the 1950s, not as an assessment of character but as an assertion and imposition of power. Someone who does not conform to a particular type of behavior or deportment might be identified as socially undesirable, even socially inferior, by the majority and empowered “models” of “proper” demeanor.
I wonder what kinds of improper demeanor the victims of this new law might exhibit to trigger drug testing. People on drugs might look quiet, sleepy, confused, angry, desperate. There are a lot of possible demeanors that might (or might not) indicate drug use.
I’ve seen people on drugs whose demeanors seem hungry. And I’ve seen people on food stamps whose demeanors seem hungry. Hungry people, too, have a pretty wide range of demeanors. So do bus drivers, construction workers, and … everyone else. “Demeanor” is simply inadequate as a binary determination of whether a person is drugged or sober.
There are some pretty subtle indicators that civil servants are now legally required to gauge for food stamp recipients. If they want to sit in on my English classes, I can help teach them how to tease out the subtleties of context, background, dialogue and evidence — along with careful attention to sarcasm and irony, which can be red herrings when it comes to assessing demeanor — so they don’t make C+ decisions, or worse.
Randy Malamud is chairman of the English Department at Georgia State University.
