Overview

""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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Biel shows--with style and wit, as well as scholarship--how the sinking of a ship nearly a century ago resonates through popular culture today.

STEVEN BIEL'S MASTERFUL cultural analysis ... is brimming over with wit and insight. Biel shows--with style and wit, as well as scholarship--how the sinking of a ship nearly a century ago resonates through popular culture today.

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)

Author Information

Steven Biel is the executive director of the Mahindra Humanities Center and a senior lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University.

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