An intriguing appreciation of how the sociocultural significance of
the sinking of the Titanic has been shaped to a variety of ends
down through the years. In assessing what he deems the contingent
and contextual meanings of the resonant maritime disaster,
historian Biel, who teaches writing at Harvard, provides only a
summary of its details, i.e., that at 11:40 P.M. on April 14, 1912,
the largest ocean liner ever built struck an iceberg off
Newfoundland on her maiden voyage and went down, with the loss of
over 1,500 lives. Noting how commentators and interest groups vied
energetically to frame the ways in which the great ship's loss
would be remembered, the author asserts that the Titanic first
functioned as a commodity, the raw material of news stories, books,
films, sermons, and even advertising pitches (e.g., by Travelers
Insurance); the doomed vessel also has served as the centerpiece of
commercial ventures (including at least one video game) and a
couple of scientific expeditions. Biel goes on to document how over
time the calamity's protean particulars have been employed by
advocates as well as opponents of women's suffrage, immigration,
advanced technology, mainstream religions, free speech, and other
great causes or issues. So far as America's black community was
concerned, he reports, the tragedy was an all-white affair and thus
- as expressed in folk songs from Huddie Ledbetter (a.k.a.
Leadbelly) and others - a source of relief, if not pleasure.
Concurrently, the author observes, the Titanic Historical Society
has fostered a high level of amateur scholarship, while the
successful effort by oceanographer Robert Ballard to locate the
sunken wreckage continues to give the catastrophe and its mythic
metaphors new leases on life. Indeed, as Biel points out in
closing, the ship's multifaceted saga begs for resolution and
always resists it. Thought-provoking perspectives on the myriad
uses to which one of the world's epic misfortunes has been put.
(Kirkus Reviews)
"I suggest, henceforth, when a woman talks women's rights, she be
answered with the word Titanic, nothing more just Titanic," wrote a
St. Louis man to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He was not alone in
mining the ship for a metaphor. Everyone found ammunition in the
Titanic suffragists and their opponents; radicals, reformers, and
capitalists; critics of technology and modern life; racists and
xenophobes and champions of racial and ethnic equality; editorial
writers and folk singers, preachers and poets. Protestant sermons
used the Titanic to condemn the budding consumer society ("We know
the end of . . . the undisturbed sensualists. As they sail the sea
of life we know absolutely that their ship will meet disaster.").
African American toasts and working-class ballads made the ship
emblematic of the foolishness of white people and the greed of the
rich. A 1950s revival framed the disaster as an "older kind of
disaster in which people had time to die." An ever-increasing
number of Titanic buffs find heroism and order in the tale. Still
in the headlines ("Titanic Baby Found Alive " the Weekly World News
declares) and a figure of everyday speech ("rearranging deck chairs
. . ."), the Titanic disaster echoes within a richly diverse,
paradoxical, and fascinating America."
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