and miles to go before i sleep

He endeavoured to pronounce the name, but could not manage it; and compressing his mouth he held a silent combat with his inward agony, defying, meanwhile, my sympathy with an unflinching, ferocious stare. "How did she die?" he resumed, at last—fain, notwithstanding his hardihood, to have a support behind him; for, after the struggle, he trembled, in spite of himself, to his very finger ends.

I usually tell my students that “close reading” means looking at what is actually on the page, reading the text itself, rather than some idea “behind the text.” It means noticing things in the writing, things in the writing that stand out. To give you some idea of what this means, I’ve made up a list of five sorts of things that a close reading might typically notice: (1) unusual vocabulary, words that surprise either because they are unfamiliar or because they seem to belong to a different context; (2) words that seem unnecessarily repeated, as if the word keeps insisting on being written; (3) images or metaphors, especially ones that are used repeatedly and are somewhat surprising given the context; (4) what is in italics or parentheses; and (5) footnotes that seem too long. This list is far from complete—in fact, no complete list is possible—but the list is meant to begin to give you an idea of what sorts of things we notice when we’re doing close reading.

Around the time of the American Civil War, books about sentient dolls increased in popularity, and dolls in these books discuss their racial status, their duties to their owners, and even their relationship with enslaved people of African descent. The doll narrator of Julia Charlotte Maitland’s The Doll and Her Friends (published in 1852, the same year as Uncle Tom’s Cabin) describes dolls as “a race of mere dependents; some might even call us slaves.” The narrator pointedly informs the reader, however, that she is “not a n- doll, with wide mouth and woolly hair.” In this children’s book and many others, dollness itself is a racial category that denotes servitude. White-authored dolls in literature asserted their race’s natural servitude exactly as abolition and later Emancipation challenged the belief that African Americans were constitutionally enslaveable. In the anonymously published A Doll’s Story (also published circa 1852), two dolls, one of whom has just been purchased, discuss their relationship to American slavery. “It is not pleasant to be sold, is it?” said little Minna; “so like slaves, of whom Emilie often tells me tales as I sit on her lap.” “I never heard much about slaves. To be sure, you don’t mean blacks?” said Fanny. “I hope you don’t mean to compare pretty wax dolls to n-? There was a doll or two of that sort in the Exhibition, but we never took any notion of them.” “Did you not? Why, they were made of wax, I suppose, just like ourselves, and Emilie says black slaves are made of flesh and blood just like herself, and that no one has the right to buy or sell a fellow creature” “You have some very odd notions,” said the Exhibition doll. Dolls provide especially effective safe houses for racial ideology because dolls are emblems of childhood that attach, through play, to the bodies of living children. Thus dolls refer in two distinct ways to childhood innocence (and when a doll represents a child, it gains a third level of reference). Dolls’ ability to appear innocent was understood by the Confederate military, which recruited white girls to act as smugglers: Confederate soldiers stuffed dolls with quinine, calomel, and morphine; and white girls held these dolls and passed by northern soldiers unchallenged. This literal, conscious act of smuggling drugs to support the system of slavery was possible only because dolls, the childhood they referenced, and the girls holding the dolls contained historical memory while performing innocence, performing obliviousness to history and to race. Dolls are crucial props within the performance of childhood because they are contriv- ances by which adults and children have historically played innocent.

Q: One of the most fascinating uses of costuming in the show is with Claudia and how her style evolution stands in for her physical development from child to teen, to young lady. Her fashion choices speak volumes and really highlight the growth of her confidence. How did you map out this journey for Claudia and what were some of your favorite looks of hers this season?  A: I just remembered how many times Anne Rice writes that Claudia’s a doll when we first meet her. A magnificent doll. So of course, the first place I looked for inspiration was Edwardian dolls. I was specifically thinking about the type of doll that Claudia probably never owned, but the type of doll that was definitely in Louis's house and that his sister owned. We first see her in this beautiful nightgown with fine lace and ruffles to the wrist, long to the floor, this beautiful white nightgown. That was one of my faves. Then there’s her sailor suit. It's absolutely iconic children's wear, for both boys and girls. So, I started her in those doll clothes. You could very much tell that it was Louis that was dressing her and that it was his dapper style sense at work. He also was the first one to pull Lestat into current fashion with his makeover and taking him in from menswear. When the 1920's start to hit Claudia’s getting very restless and starting to branch out on her own and get a mind of her own. Like I said, that beautifully coincided with what she was going through as a young woman and her bid for independence.

Nelly Dean when finally getting asked why Heathcliff is like that after twenty years of knowing the juiciest gossip