Dracula Notes

“I’m not sure what is going on here.” I said to no one in particular but yet also to the driver and landlady together as they continuously made the sign of the cross when looking at me. “Why is everyone referring to me as Satan, with mention of Hell following declarations such as witch werewolf and or vampire? I am none of these things.”

They did not return my query but instead continued on with their native tongues along with the passers-by and crowd that was forming around the door to the Inn close by where we were. I simply looked to be on with this journey. Finally, those of us journeying together were all loaded up and we started out. It became a wild and bumpy ride as night drew on and we flew through the road with intense energy resonating from the passengers that wanted to pass through this darkened dark land without pause.      
Upon reaching the destination where I was to change drivers, despite the beauty of the land I had just seen, it was becoming slowly clear that it was possibly not me that they were necessarily referring to but that with whom I was going to see. 
We had arrived at the switching point earlier than the next driver and it was all too clear that my first driver was in no way content with waiting as he was talking of leaving the minute we pulled up. As if by some inhuman hearing ability, one only referred to animals having, the second driver appeared before the first driver could successfully depart.

“You are early to-night, my friend.” The man stammered in reply:—
“The English Herr was in a hurry,” to which the stranger replied:—
“That is why, I suppose, you wished him to go on to Bukovina. You cannot deceive me, my friend; I know too much, and my horses are swift.”
“Denn die Todten reiten schnell”— (“For the dead travel fast.”)

With that said and me successfully off the first coach that coach was but dust in the dark night. This told me something was incredibly strange about this new driver as he looked one shade less than dead with his bright eyes that caught red when the light bounced off of them. Though he was instructed to take care of me on this leg of my journey, it was an incredibly uneasy, oddly circling, somewhat confusing, and hauntingly dark last leg of my journey. Oh, how I couldn’t wait to simply be at my destination.   
I chose to do the section where he is in transit from one coach to another as it really solidifies the uneasy weird nature of what is about to take place in the book. Before this part of chapter one we are simply traveling, it is only at this point where it starts to become known where he is going and his naiveness about where he is going. While I understand the importance of the details, I believe that 19th-century literature went far beyond the necessary details to include many I find tedious. Therefore in my rewrite, I kept it short and sweet. (Though it can be noted that 21st-century literature is made for the short attention span, which most of us take into consideration when we write nowadays. Also, I have not read this entire book before so I am not sure if the little nuances of this beginning chapter are all elements for things further in the story.)

                                                               Works Cited:

• Stoker, Bram. Dracula [Ebook #345]. August 16, 2013.  www.gutenberg.org/files/345.  

What Rises From Hate

                                                            What Rises from Hate

        In the early 20th century two world wars, several lesser wars, and an onslaught of narrow-minded discrimination dominated how people lived, died, and thought which allowed the floodgates to open on how people communicated. More people were starting to open up and write their life stories in a fictional or poetic format, as they saw them unfolding. They were looking at life through the perspective of clearer vision seeing that perfection was not reality. The Victorian era was being reshaped by a whole new 20th-century attitude because people were coming to the realization that personal regiment could be traded for platoon regiment with the declaration of war. People needed a way to speak and political correctness in subject matter was no longer at the center of a writer's mind, instead of how the world was changing and the extreme reality of mortality was standing at the forefront. Therefore, it is my plan to explain why war is important to literature. Without the devastation, destruction, and discrimination that wars create we would not be able to compare and contrast our own inner feelings. I will show through various poetic verses, psychological input, and scholarly interpretations how without fears of our unknown differences in humanity we would never have been able to collectively find ways past our fears. Without the imbalanced balance that wrong actions bring us we are left not knowing what really is right.

        Literature with war connotations is everywhere, and for every history buff describing the date by date blow by blows, there is someone writing about the feelings war has brought about due to those dates. “Since 1890, the literature of war has generated almost 23,000 books, essays, theses, dissertations, and other materials” (Calloway). Using the word war truly doesn’t stop with the grenade or the canteen though, it extends to hate crimes that people commit out of discrimination and prejudice too. “A hate crime is an illegal act involving intentional selection of a victim based on a perpetrator’s bias or prejudice against the actual or perceived status of the victim” (Craig 85). Hitler in WWII was synonymous with this, he was one of the leading most hate criminals known to man. How many stories (Number the Stars by Lois Lowry), poetry (“Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath), and prose have been created as a byproduct of those tragedies? Peter Gay author of the book The Cultivation of Hatred summed up so well where aggression that causes tragedies stems from

        “The scars that aggression has left on the face of the past are indelible. Wars and rumors of wars, class struggles, clashes between religious denominations or racial and ethnic groups, rivalries for place and power in politics and business, the hatreds generated by nationalism and imperialism, the ravages of crime…” (Gay 3) 

and that it “offer[s] persuasive testimony that aggression has supplied most of the fuel for historical action and historical change” (Gay, 3).

        All of these scars Gay talks about are plastered within the pages of such books as A Treasury of War Poetry British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 edited by George Herbert Clarke and Poets of World War II edited by Harvey Shapiro. In The Treasury of War Poetry… Clarke starts off by pointing out that “Because man is both militant and pacific, he has expressed in literature, as indeed in other forms of art, his pacific and militant moods” (Kindle Location 149) giving clarity that man can have both kinds of moods within the literature. During WWI most poets of war broke down their feelings with regard to a patriotic obligation-al type feeling that rises from illusions of freedom, wants for justice and safety, and/or just animalistic territorial pride for one's place of residence. Nil Santianez’s article

“Showing What Cannot Be Said” said that “it was the Great War, not the wars fought in the nineteenth century, that truly demonstrated the poverty of language for conveying the experience of modern warfare. As is well known, the Great War affected in fundamental ways the human capacity for understanding”. [So] “[a] crisis of meaning arose as an aftershock of the Great War. Profoundly baffled and traumatized by the magnitude of the tragedy, European and American artists and writers had to figure out… how to represent an experience lived and perceived” (Santianez 301). 

        Within this baffling tragedy, poets rose to the challenge and wrote as the Modernists of the early part of the century started to do, with more feelings to guide their sights. At this point in history, there was still a looming of Victorian proper protocol and procedure lingering in the air and because so few understood the depth of war the two extremes were getting mixed together in the minds of so many They were floating along in the thought processes of those in the war lending an unrealistic, idealistic romanticized dream quality to those lying on the ground staring up at the stars from battlegrounds. George Herbert Clarke provides such picturesque details of his love for England in his “Lines Written In Surrey 1917” poetic explanation for why people would fight for England that displays the unrealistic idealists romanticized vision that even “Death’s extreme” cannot destroy.

“Doves droop or amble; the agile waterfly/ Wrinkles the pool; and flowers, gay and dun,/ Rose, bluebell, rhododendron, one by one,/ The buccaneering bees prove busily./ Ah, who may trace this tranquil loveliness/ In verse felicitous? - no measure tells;/ But gazing on her bosom we can guess/ Why men strike hard for England in red hells,/ Falling on dreams, ‘mid Death’s extreme caress,” (5-13)

        Though there were also questions that followed when death was staring at them from every shadow changing their thought processes to why would a God so mighty allow man to endure such pain. Which is a point that is illustrated in the words of Henry van Dyke’s poem “Liberty Enlightening The World” where he proclaimed

“O dearest country of my heart, home of the high desire,/ Make clean thy soul for sacrifice on Freedom’s altar-fire:/ For thou must suffer, thou must fight, until the warlords cease,/ And all the peoples lift their heads in liberty and peace.” (17-20) 

        These were true men who were not used to hand grenades and scarce rations because before the war they ran the local grocer or counted out money at the bank, or just walked out of high school’s doors. So when Wilfred Wilson Gibson said in “Between The Lines” that they would “…lain/In muddy trenches, napping like a beast/ With one eye open, under sun and rain/ And that unceasing hell-fire…/ It was strange” (30-34) and to them, it was just that “strange”. Most of the poets of this war seemed to keep a hope about them that resonated through their words such as in A. Victor Ratcliff’s “Optimism” where he states “O day, belong and heavy if you will,/ But on our hopes set not a bitter heel./ For tiny hopes like tiny flowers of Spring/Will come” (11-14). The war was hard on these boys and men but they fought with the, some would say, optimism that comes with thinking they are fighting an ending battle. They didn’t think another war was right around the corner. These guys were some of the first to open the flood gates to a literary road full of various stages and forms of fighters that contributed raw emotion and questionable understanding of life into our blossoming literary world.

        As time progressed on people wrote more and more with the intention of gaining some sort of understanding. At this same time that authors in literature were blooming like wildflowers, authors in psychology were blooming as well. So when the Psychological masterpiece Brave New World by Aldous Huxley was written in 1932, right after the First World War and right before the second, boasting what human Utopia would be like in a fictitious way we were not only shown that Utopia but we were cleverly shown that it wouldn’t work. Not everyone can be brought up naïve and happy, we are humans, with tendencies to see things through animalistic lenses. We must have conflict to some degree in an effort to grow. It is through our growing process that psychologists have found we need to communicate our findings and our interpretations of these findings to grow successfully. Laurel Richardson points out that

“All knowledge is socially constructed. Writing is not simply a “true” representation of an objective “reality”, instead, language creates a particular view of reality. All language has grammatical, narrative, and rhetorical structures which create value, bestow meaning and constitute… the subjects and objects that emerge in the process” (Richardson, 116). 

        Writing all of how they felt and what was going on was extremely hard for the soldiers as Marian Eide states in her article Witnessing and Trophy Hunting: Writing Violence from the Great War Trenches because “journals or diaries [were] expressly forbidden… and letters home were carefully censored” (Eide 86). So it seems that they had to decide what it was they were going to accept and what they weren’t. Though we all interpret these situations in life differently we all ultimately make collective decisions as to whether or not to accept what a leader may order or we choose to counter that order in protest or defiance and while it was hard those soldiers wrote whatever they could and they wrote it with as much detail and feeling as they were allowed. They choose not to conform completely but fight for their right to express what they were going through because they were constantly internalizing what was going on. As through language they were “creat[ing] [their] own particular view of reality” as Richardson said.

        The same was true about WWII and now as Lucinda Dyer states in her piece “The Lives of Wars” “shelves [were] continuing to groan under the weight of titles about WWII, [so] publishers [were] constantly looking for stories that [could] offer readers a new perspective on the now seven-decade-old conflict” (Dyer 23) So we see in Poets of World War II edited by Harvey Shapiro stating in his introduction that “Poems about any war share a subject that Simone Weil identified, in an essay about the Iliad that she wrote during World War II, as “force”: “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him” (Shapiro, xix). Shapiro decided to collect and present his readers with poetry from old and new soldiers. New soldiers that had not seen war but heard all about it from their parents and/or siblings mixing with returning older soldiers who fought not too long ago. Essentially veterans who collectively already knew of the travesties that test a man’s will to live out on the front lines who were now returning as ranked officers. These were men who at first saw the fight as nobility and honor for one's country but were now looking at new recruits as an encroachment of one's personal space in uncomfortably close quarters because they no longer felt they understood what they were fighting for exactly. The whole of war became so large that they could not wrap their minds around what was going on. What made it worse was that during the military downtime the roaring twenties kicked it heals up in victory and people got lost in the huge party of indecision about what was better security and money or expatriate uncertainty and lavishly lush extremes. So when WWII reared its face at these industrial revolutionaries, existential thinkers, and philosophical literary minds it was like a bucket of ice water thrown in everyone’s face. Making Robinson Jeffers cynicism seems truthful in his assessment of the situation in his poem titled “Pearl Harbor” where he states “The war that we have carefully for years provoked/ Catches us unprepared, amazed and indignant. Our…/…leaders make orations. This is the people/ That hopes to impose on the whole planetary world/ An American peace” (24-31) “But now I am old…” (17).

        It was the old and the young, toe to toe and back to back swapping un-relatable stories “because we all live out narratives in our lives and because we all understand our own lives in terms of the narratives that we live out” that is what we feel is “appropriate for understanding the actions of others.” as quoted by M. Hyvarinen of Jerome Bruner’s words from his piece Life as Narrative. This quote essentially puts into words the personal measuring stick we use for others in an unfair bias but one that we have a hard time controlling. These become the differences by which we measure ourselves creating the gaps in society that feed warring attitudes. Lincoln Kirstein put this bluntly in his poem titled “Rank” where he said

“Differences between rich and poor, king and queen,/ Cat and dog, hot and cold, day and night, now and then,/ Are less clearly distinct than all those between/ Officers and us: enlisted men.” (1-4) 

        Where he not only defined the difference but defined the mood with his use of capital letters and profanity in his poem titled “P.O.E” where he clearly packs up the hope WWI poets tried to maintain as he states

“We strive to fake a grateful note/ But goddamn duffle bag and pack,/ Gas mask, rifle, helmet, coat/ Too heavy are, so each sad sack, Must flop and gripe: This is some shit./ Up On Your Feet, our orders crack./ It’s All Aboard for THIS IS IT.” (18-24) 

        Which it seemed to be in metaphorical terms even if it wasn’t an “it” in literal terms, in the sense that when WWII was over the nightmares of the battle lingered long after everyone stepped foot in their home. During WWII most poets of the war broke down their feeling as well but what we saw was less of the leftover Victorian facade and more of the nightmare reality. So floating now in the thought processes of those in the war were realistic non-idealistic warped beauty elements that were told in a dream quality from those lying on the ground staring up at the stars from battlegrounds. Yvor Winters in his poem “Moonlight Alert” captures the realism of the non-ideal nightmare with such poetic rhythmic flow that it softens the unbelievable of death with mother nature’s beauty.

“The sirens, rising, woke me; and the night/ Lay cold and windless; and the moon was bright,/ Moonlight from sky to earth, untaught, unclaimed,/ An icy nightmare of the brute unnamed./ This was hallucination. Scarlet flower/ And yellow fruit hung colorless. That hour/ No scent lay on the air. The siren scream/ Took on the fixity of shallow dream./ In the dread sweetness I could see the fall/ Like petals sifting from a quiet wall,/ Of yellow soldiers through indifferent air,/ Falling to die in solitude. With care” (1-12)

        Our bookshelves were now filling up with works that talked about feelings and works that talked about experiences, ones that gave detailed accounts and ones that fantasized about how things in the future could go due to the outcomes of these first two wars, books that talked about the parties in between the wars, the victories and the loves, books that explained it all and also invented it all. New worlds were opening up and new fears were now arising that previously were not known let alone dwelled upon. PTSD was beginning to form with each passing governmental, social and economic conflict and psychology was gearing itself up to deal with this new onslaught of mental instabilities that were coming home along with the soldiers with their own set of books. Each passing and developing conflict created more and more opposing sides for people to feel akin to based on how they were raised and what they were exposed to. Psychologists needed to map out the person sitting in front of them so that they could gather more data to better help the individual but always keeping in the back of their mind also society as a whole. So they would gather...

“Life histories, informants’ oral accounts, in-depth interviews, case studies, historical documents, and participant observation[s] as these would help them “gain entre, ask questions, listen” as they would then “fashion these accounts into a prose piece” which “requires complex decision making” (Richardson, 116) 

...all in an effort to help the individual and/or group of people better understand themselves. Psychologists even started telling their patients/participants to keep detailed journals, life accounts, and/or notebooks of whatever they thought of, whatever they saw, and most of all whatever they felt. Psychologist’s discovered that “notions such as “story” and “narrative” to be especially useful in conveying the coherence and the meaning of lives” (McAdams, 100). This seemed to resonate with so many as a coping mechanism for their PTSD, depression, anxiety, and generalized confusion about life now that so much tragedy was being brought to their attention more and more as society grew, time went on, and even as technology made it easier and easier to know what was going on outside of one's personal circles of friends and family.

        During and after both World Wars people were literally swimming in thoughts about what they could not control leaving them more confused and powerless than ever before. The rising hate between what was unknown about each other had become magnified on global levels all the while populations were increasing and even though wars were fought to stabilize the prejudice, that prejudice was still remaining and spreading. People were now coming face to face with cultural and ethnic differences they had never known existed and fears rose to new heights. It seems to be our human instinct to fight what we do not know and try to make others conform to our own thought processes in order to create order, the fact is, what we actually create is discrimination through racism and sexism, miscommunication and ultimately wars. Though without war wrought hopefuls from WWI who started to lose their hope with the onset of WWII who came home questioning more than before we wouldn’t have near as many books to read as we do today, or movies, or song lyrics and so on. Prior to WWI, we had far less written words in print with accounts of how it felt to be facing mortality while staring at the wide-open expanse of a common sky we all share. With all the words that have been written since WWI we have continued steadfast to evolve into a society of individuality within a multitude of expressive outlets; outlets that allow all of us to depict the wars of our own lives; allowing us to show the triumphant good that can come from our dyer conditions. We have found the written word as a suitable way to get our thoughts and emotions across to so many. Without those warring tortures that we experienced and still do set ourselves up to the experience, we would be far less attuned with what constitutes right since we wouldn’t have experienced such wrongs to have for comparison. Consequently, we would have/ have had far less written words expressing our emotional experiences but instead would have/ have had more flat stories full of rainbows we have no idea how to enjoy because without horrible conditions how can we appreciate the blissful conditions. While we should ultimately learn as an evolved society to express our aggressive differences in more constructive non-violent ways let's face it, it is easier to place blame and war over reasons of shallow vanity of gods unknown then to accept we are all human, we all feel the same at some point in our lives, and we all live under the same domed sky.

Works Cited:

• vanDyke, Henry. "Liberty  Enlightening The World." A Treasury of War Poetry British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917, The Riverside Literature Series, Kindle Location. 225.
• Gibson, Wilfred Wilson. “Between The Lines.” A Treasury of War Poetry British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917, The Riverside Literature Series, Kindle Location. 1830. 
• Ratcliff, A. Victor. “Optimism.” A Treasury of War Poetry British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917, The Riverside Literature Series, Kindle Location. 1618. 
• Shapiro, Harvey. Poets of World War II. New York, Library of America, 2003. Pgs. 13, 52, 55-56. 
• Gay, Peter. The Cultivation of Hatred. New York. W.W. Norton, 1993. Pgs. 3,4.
• Calloway, Catherine. War in Literature and Drama. Oxford Bibliographies, 2013. www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791279/obo 9780199791279-0004.xml. Accessed September 28, 2017.
• Craig, Kellina M. Examining Hate-Motivated Aggression: A Review of the Social Psychological Literature on Hate Crimes as a Distinct Form of Aggression. Aggression and Violent Behavior. Vol. 7. Issue 1. Jan-Feb 2002. Pg. 85.
• Richardson, Laurel. Narrative and Sociology. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Sage Publications. Vol. 19. No. 1. April 1990. Pg. 116. 
• Hyvarinen, M. Life as Narrative Revisited. Partial Answers: Journal o Literature and the History of Ideas. Project Muse 2008. Vol. 6. No. 2. Pg. 261. Doi: 10.1353/pan.0.0020 
• McAdams, Dan, P. The Psychology of Life Stories. Review of General Psychology. Educational Publishing Foundation, 2001. Vol. 5. No. 2. Pg. 100.
• Santianez, Nil. Showing What Cannot Be Said. The Manchester Review. Summer, 2016. Vol. 57. Issue 2. Pg. 301. 
• Dyer, Lucinda. The Lives of War. Publishers Weekly. August 20, 2012. Vol. 259. Issue 34. Pg. 23. 
• Eide, Marian. Witnessing and Trophy Hunting: Writing Violence from the /great War Trenches. Criticism. Winter, 2007. No. 1. Pg. 86.  

Connecting F. Scott Fitzgerald to Sylvia Plath

        In the Modernist era of the beginning of the 20th-century hemlines became shorter, woman's hair became shorter, and everyone's morals were a loose subject that was perspective to each individual. The Victorian era was meeting its successors and two of them came by way of the names Fitzgerald and Plath. These two writers were not interested in being politically correct all the time, nor did prim and proper hold significant roles in their decision making. What mattered to them was a truth to thyself and that what they wrote was what they saw and felt. How others interpreted it was up to the reader. Reader’s flocked to these two writers in droves for that reason; an entertaining and heartfelt way to say how oppressive Victorians kept women caged inside a man's world and how Fitzgerald's Roaring Twenties was going to be the start to liberating a woman's place among men and Plath's continuation of this. With this said it is my objective to compare and contrast the psychoanalytical aspects of Modernist works from Fitzgerald and Plath to define the differences in thought that came from repressed feminine Victorian to form liberated Modernist writing by way of its cultural shifts; what worked in terms of Modernist thoughts and what was hard to give up from the Victorian securities.

        Just before 1900 Sigmund Freud, leading European Neuropsychologist, abandoned his work with hypnosis to concentrate solely on Psychoanalysis of human cognition. This helped to start a new field that analyzed human psychology in literature; where psychoanalysis is used to decipher why an author chooses to write a certain way. So “rather than give expression to libido or instinctual drives, they will come to be seen as representations built up in the self as a way of securing for itself the benefit of relations with others that have become unstable or insecure.” (Rivkin and Ryan, 415) which is something an author will need in order to create in-depth characters that stem from suppressed emotions that become attached to certain individuals we meet throughout our lives. “According to… Sigmund Freud, the unconscious mind... consists of the processes in the mind that occurs automatically and is not available [for] introspection, and include thought processes, memory, affect, and motivation.” (Gholipour and Sanahmadi) which lend an explanation to how an author starts to form a story out of these suppressed emotions and in-depth characters. Throughout the Victorian age, many people were suppressing all of their emotions with little availability to release what they were building up, which created an expanse of negative energy that cultivated in the youth of the early 1900s with the desire to just let loose. So with the end of the 1st World War what wasn’t said before was now up for release.

        Time was now being spent expressing how people saw their world around them with their ever-expanding social circles, which many times would seem to those less fortunate as bragging and cause for jealousy. “To flaunt one’s possessions or overcome one’s rivals in love is an act of aggression no less than to provoke a duel... The practice of invidious social comparisons is awash with aggressive impulses.” (Gay, 4) It is these “aggressive impulses” of “social comparisons” that ensue territorial thinking among humans, mainly men, which can allow our jealousies, more accurately our fears, to consume us. In Fitzgerald’s stories titled Winter Dreams, and The Great Gatsby we see women portrayed in a very specific vanity that expresses their desire for rebellious sexual exploration but their comfort in the Victorian structure that men must maintain the upper hand in securing their futures for them. Judy Jones, the central most prize in Fitzgerald’s Winter Dreams, objectifies men like they are usable toys in a search for lasting entertainment. Fitzgerald viewed women no differently than women viewed themselves in that day, as flighty, albeit they were creatures of mass appeal and astounding beauty, but they were flighty. “There was no divergence of method, no jockeying for position or premeditation of effects – there was very little mental quality in any of her affairs.” (Norton Anthology D, 667) Judy Jones never knew what she wanted; she only knew what men wanted. Much as Daisy Buchanan, from his critically acclaimed The Great Gatsby, didn’t know if she wanted to live lavishly with Gatsby or securely with Tom, but she did know that Gatsby would do anything to have her unlike her husband Tom who simply held secure “old money”. There was an intoxication about men that intrigued Judy Jones and Gatsby that intrigued Daisy immensely, though Judy Jones blew threw men like a cold wind through November leaves, Daisy only blew through one man and it was her warm breeze that captivated and killed Gatsby. Is it not human nature to want what we cannot have? Modernism explores that statement to its fullest potential through Fitzgerald’s fingers as they sculpt the true insanity that flows through our veins when our ability to love gets a hold of us and refuses to let us live without it. “Contemporary sensibilities, if actually transported into the physical world in 1900, would experience both a sense of oppression and a queer kind of emptiness and freedom.” (Bogan, 99) It was in that “oppression” that birthed the “queer” (happy) “emptiness” that came from “freedom” which all stemmed strongly from the Victorian way of thinking. A way of thinking that closed off one's feelings for the appearance of perfection within “social comparisons” that stirred “aggressive impulses” like those aggressions that ultimately killed Gatsby. “Social Comparisons” did not diminish with the shortened hemlines and hair, they actually grew stronger in emotional aggression between men and women. Fitzgerald knew this and as a result, he tended to want to mimic life through literature by allowing his characters to question the validity of repressing such innate feelings. For this reason, the Modernist view started to surface because the truth was “In literature “life” [had] not yet been thoroughly examined on the realistic level; “both sides” [had] not been clearly seen or dramatically juxtaposed…” (Bogan, 100) In doing this “they found notions such as “story” and “narrative” to be especially useful in conveying the coherence and the meaning of lives” (McAdams, 100) They were conveying the feelings that embodied emptiness when one was without love and freedom when one was with love. It did not matter what the love sprang from, whether it was lips, eyes, voice, subtle movement or grand gesture it was from another desired human being and the mind could not relinquish the intoxication of the feeling. They were also the “Fragmentary insights, broken examples of self-knowledge, [that were] about to surface and to merge; and the time [was] almost at hand when the true operations of the imagination and of the despised instinctual life of man [would] be laid bare.” (Bogan, 100)

        Judy Jones and Daisy Buchanan were created to embody the actual transitional gap. They were symbolic of all women, of all rich women, of all women wrapped up in the glitz and glam of a showy life of that time period but still unable to completely give up the Victorian regime roots that gave them the security to stay rich. They both still, at the end of their respective stories, go with the social class norm of being the homemaking wife that forgives the husbands indecencies and provides them continual security. 

“Joe Simms has gone to pieces in a way. I don’t mean he beats her, you understand, or anything like that. But he drinks and runs around…” “He treats her like the devil. Oh, they’re not going to get divorced or anything. When he’s particularly outrageous she forgives him.” (Norton Anthology D, 674)

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…” (Fitzgerald, 187-188)

        Women, though they seldom at times understand their own powers, can change men in ways that are incomprehensible but yet infinitely permanent. “No disillusion as to the world in which she had grown up could cure his illusion as to her desirability. Remember that- for only in the light of it can what he did for her be understood.” (Norton Anthology D, 669) Judy Jones was Dexter’s light for on page 664 Fitzgerald wrote twice at the top and bottom of the page “There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the lake were gleaming.” Judy is the “star” light that made his heart start “jumping” and his whole body start “gleaming”. When Dexter heard that Judy had lost her luster his “star” light, “jumping” heart, and “gleaming” body became the “…long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone.”; for Dexter knew, “That thing will come back no more.” (Norton Anthology D, 675) Fitzgerald understood that when significant time has passed between two people usually what becomes of them is never what was; as we all are creatures of continual evolution. Fitzgerald knew the crippling effects that happen to a person (as they happened to Judy and Daisy as well) when trying to stay still in hopes that what once happened could still happen again and again at any given chance and could repeat itself forevermore. He also understood the deadly effects on a person when one blindly devotes his whole life to one pretty little thing like a daisy, when that daisy has devoted her pretty little life to survival in the securest sense. “Fitzgerald associates her affections for Gatsby with sunlight” (Sutton, 103) “but also identifies her as the sun…In the first chapter of the novel, Daisy is repeatedly associated with the sun.” (Luft and Dilworth, 84) Gatsby was “winking ferociously toward the fervent sun” (Fitzgerald, 14) as he looked upon Daisy’s face and “the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face” (Fitzgerald, 15) In this we see that “Writing is not simply a “true” representation of an objective “reality”, instead, language creates a particular view of reality. All language has grammatical, narrative, and rhetorical structures that create value, bestow meaning, and constitute… the subjects and objects that emerge in the process.” (Richardson, 116) Judy Jones and Daisy were through “grammatical, narrative and rhetorical structures” the “subjects and objects” that Fitzgerald created as a “value” for how much meaning men put on women.

          Fitzgerald was a Modernist writer who gave little caution to how the truth would be accepted (though it was accepted greatly) by his generational peers, he simply wrote what he knew and he knew of the difference between rich and poor and the insecurities women had from their Victorian upbringings as they danced their way into roaring freedoms and the differences between those cultural extremes. He wrote about what it felt like to desire what one could not have, what it felt like to touch the tangible serenity that came with absolute beauty, and how it felt to lose it when the world shifted and fate stepped in with flighty indecision.

        As alcoholism, the Great Depression, and World War II capped off what Fitzgerald coined the “Roaring Twenties” a new little beauty was born, Sylvia Plath. What women once were flighty about now became surrealistically clear and a new woman’s voice was born. “She knew that becoming successful would be difficult if she were to remain true to her artistic convictions and to her own poetic voice. That knowledge angered her…” (Martin, Kindle location 52) but she prevailed against the odds. “One of the extraordinary things about Sylvia Plath’s early texts is how precisely they inscribe a world not only beyond words but in some ways antithetical to them.” (Axelrod and Dorsey, 78) She was able to see the world clearly enough to be able to change it as she saw fit. She could weld the power of her words to create the unimaginable in a completely explanatory way. She was now the voice for all the women Fitzgerald found so extraordinary and much like those women that Fitzgerald wrote about “whenever she was dissatisfied with a situation, she tried to leave it, to find some more exciting new world.” While it was a flighty nature when Fitzgerald described it for his readers, it was explanations to the angst women were wrought with to her readers. An angst that came from preconditioned notions of how a wife and daughter were supposed to act and be at all times; angst that came from what a woman’s life was supposed to incorporate, perfect daughter, attentiveness, hard worker and continual mother; so essentially a human-machine that ran around the clock. “As American women of the post-war generation came of age, they began to understand the repression their mothers had suffered, and as they imagined lives beyond the family, ownership of their own subjectivity followed.” (Moore, xvii) and Plath was no exception to this subjectivity as she was a woman in the public’s eyes being scrutinized and criticized about how she was balancing all these titles. She rose to the societal challenge and became a beacon of light for women. With her incredible ability to weld sarcasm with educated, soft, respectful diction she wrote one of her most famous poems The Applicant in response to the fallen progress women lost. In all the exploration that came from the 1920s, in the 1950s women were right back to where they started from. As Plath alludes to in The Applicant women now felt again as if they were applying for the position of wife. “First, are you our sort of a person?” (1) “Stop crying./ Open your hand./ Empty? Empty. Here is a hand” (8-10) “Will you marry it?/ It is guaranteed” (14-15) “In fifty, gold./ A living doll, everywhere you look./ It can sew, it can cook,/ It can talk, talk, talk./ It works, there is nothing wrong with it.” (32-36) “My boy, it’s your last resort. Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.” (39-40) Does she have a “glass eye” so she cannot see clearly, “a crutch” so she cannot stand on her own two feet, “a brace” to keep her from falling, “false teeth”, “Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch” (5) in which she can “hook” that potential mate on? At first, we all start out “Empty” and “stark naked” but in the end, it’s the woman’s responsibility regardless of what she has or doesn’t have to live longer and “thumb shut” her husband’s eyes in a suit that’s “Black and stiff”. (Norton Anthology E, 635) As it is the men who never really cared whether the woman was satisfied; this is how Plath expressed how she knew it was a man’s world. Therefore, all that fun Fitzgerald’s Judy and Daisy represented about how women could free themselves and wear what they wanted, dance with whom they wanted and sleep with whom they wanted in flighty disregard of the person’s feelings came crashing back to longer hemlines covered with aprons in mandatory home economics classes to prepare women to be what their husbands needed. Thus, the same cage that always allured with its safety and security that men at work could provide was back and Plath “…resented having to do the marketing and cooking as well as the housework.” (Martin, Kindle location 2307) So she wrote in her journal and published the true thoughts that women dared not speak aloud but felt when they realized the chauvinistic trap was back.

“The hurt going in, clean as a razor, and the dark blood welling… Sitting in nightgown and sweater in the dining room staring into the full moon, talking to the full moon, with wrongness growing and filling the house like a man-eating plant. The need to go out. It is very quiet. Perhaps he is asleep. Or dead. How to know how long there is before death…” (Martin, Kindle location 2307)

        The oppression of the Victorian era ran deep before the 1920s, so deep that it was easily resurrected in the 1950s and ’60s. Unfortunately, a psychosis of depression began to run deep within Plath. With all the titles she was to wear within her working mother and public title of beacon of light for emerging women she at times fell prey to the oppression after she got married which caused her inner conflict. Though, this psychosis was a double-sided coin and played to her advantage because through her own psychoanalysis of her self; as she was awe-inspiringly in-tuned with her own inner emotions; she was able to channel them into writings that captivated her audiences. She had the ability to capture her pain. No woman truly wants to feel the “razor, and the dark blood welling” but Plath was able to feel every tiny neurological impulse as it was occurring and attach it to the emotion it was producing. “Dying/ Is an art, like everything else/ I do it exceptionally well.” (Norton Anthology E, 626) She wrote this stanza in her poem Lady Lazarus (Norton Anthology E, 625-627) where she compares depression to that of a Nazi murdered Jew. While we are all not Jewish with our bones and tortures on display at the Holocaust Museum, many of us have imagined “The peanut-crunching crowd” staring at us in our own darkest days. When we are depressed our attempts to end our lives can become comparable to “the cat” and with each failed attempt we are the phoenix rising up and “Out of the ash” of our own despair. A despair we feel has been brought upon us by “Herr Doktor” and/or our immediate “Herr Enemy”. Plath shed her skin to her bones to assure people she knew what internal pain felt like. Plath was able to make an art form out of her pain. “The imaginative intensity of her poems is her own triumphant creation out of the difficult circumstances of her life.” (Norton Anthology E, 624)

“The world of the unconscious is not easily made accessible; its contradictory and intense feelings resist light. Feelings of primal powers are truly terrifying and absolutely real to [a] child, and they survive intact in the adult unconscious, retaining their original fairytale proportions and prehistoric power. We may remember such things only in dreams, or we may bring them up for painful weeks at a time to face them down, or we may use them as the impetus for creative acts. Freud argued in The Interpretation of Dreams that “dreaming is a piece of infantile mental life that has been superseded,” adding that dreams and poetic creation alike manifest, though in different ways, the “fulfillments of unconscious wishes”.” This is where “an object-loss” can become “an ego-loss”. (Axelrod and Dorsey, 78, 79)

        Plath was a Modernist literary writer who was caught up in the societal confines that many decades usher people into. A person in a comfortable chair coins a few phrases that send the media into a frenzy and people fall prey to the opinions of the influential because it’s easier to believe the fiction than to digest the truth. Plath was able to understand this about society subconsciously through her continual psychoanalysis of her self and she was able to serve up the truth in an imaginative way that allowed her truths to be relatable in the metaphorical way that brings people to clearer understandings of what is not understood about the worlds we all live in. She inspired authors such as Fran Winant who said women were “never helped by the institutions/ that imprison us” (40-41) “you’ll have to forgive me/ but there’s only so much time/ energy money concern/ to go around/ I have to think of myself/ because who else will/ I have to save things for myself/ because I’m not sure you could save me”. (55-62) So it is through these“Vocabularies of motives, protocols of intentions, and images of selfhood that are expressed in the philosophic anthropologies...” (Brown, 29) that all allow for “semiotics of selfhood” giving the author the ability to “examine the vocabularies of motives and the grammars of interest that are encoded in and realized through various forms of [self] discourse.” (Brown, 58) It's within the discourse of hardships, trials and tribulations such as the one’s Plath went through that were able to influence women like Winant because “an author, at once creating and ‘authorizing’ her own experience, while at the same time emerging from and merging into a pre-given structure of text, context, audience, and interpretation” (Brown, 58) has the power then to externalize what has been internalized for far too long. Unlike in the Victorian era, women were now gaining the right voice and it was stiffening to their male counterparts creating competition with every word. It was the old versus the new, the Victorian verses the Modernist, men versus women always and seemingly forever.

        Much like her predecessor Fitzgerald, Plath was connected to her emotions and a wonderful welder of words, so just as Fitzgerald brought voice to the Victorian suppressions of the 20th century, Plath brought a voice to its returned oppressions of the Donna Reed era that portrayed a very similar unrealistic norm where anti-depressants became the Nazi replacement and men were again trying to stipend a woman’s growth.

        In conclusion, the Modernist era of the beginning of the 20th century not only shortened hemlines bobbed women's hair and subjected everyone's morals to a whole new perspective on life, but it also gave way to the future where women gained vocal ground in illustrating their inner thoughts and feelings. The Victorian era was indeed meeting its successors with Fitzgerald opening the literary world to interpretation and Plath furthering its progression. They wrote solely based on how they felt the world around them was, they attuned their senses and they let the words just pour out of them. Each of them brought a new psychoanalytical aspect to Modernist's writing in their respective time periods that defined the differences in their thoughts from other writers that were writing alongside them. Fitzgerald took the repressed feminine Victorian views and liberated them to express their flighty indecision with whether they could handle complete emancipation or only partial emancipation. This started a cultural shift that influenced those who inspired Plath, who modernized the feminine voice further allowing women to let go of the apron strings of the Victorian securities of an imagined perfection that never existed and enter into a world full of insecurities and the non-guaranteed.



                                                                          Works Cited: 

• Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine.The Norton Anthology of American Literature. D, New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 2012. Pages. 664, 667, 669, 674-675.
• Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine.The Norton Anthology of American Literature. E, New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 2012. Pages. 624, 625-627, 634-635 .
• Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. “Chapter 3: On Narcissism Sigmund Freud.”Literary Theory: An Anthology Second Edition, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, 2004, p. 415.
• Gholipour, A Mojtaba, and B Mina Sanahmadi. “A Psychoanalytic Attitude to The Great Gatsby.” A Psychoanalytic Attitude to The Great Gatsby, Academia.edu,
• s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/32901543/final.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1493536636&Signature=sFl%2FYx6gJegX2YP95isS7OMbe6w%3D&response-content disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DA_Psychoanalytic_Attitude_to_The_Great_G.pdf. Accessed 13 July. 2017.
• Bogan, Louise. “Modernism in American Literature.”American Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 2, 1950, pp. 99–111. www.jstor.org/stable/3031447. Accessed 13 July 2017.
• Fitzgerald, F. Scott.The Great Gatsby. London, Penguin Books, 2000. pp. 15, 187-188.
• Sutton, Brian. “Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. ”The Explicator, vol. 58, no. 2, 2000, pp 103. Accessed 13 July 2017.
• Luft, Joanna, and Thomas Dilworth. “The Name Daisy: "The Great Gatsby" and Chaucer's Prologue to "The Legend of Good Women".”The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, vol. 8, 2010, pp. 79–91. www.jstor.org/stable/41583156. Accessed 14 July 2017.
• Gould-Axelrod, Steven, and Nan Dorsey. “The Drama of Creativity in Sylvia Plath's Early Poems.”Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 32, no. 1, 1997, pp. 78-79. www.jstor.org/stable/1316781. Accessed 14 July 2017.
• Wagner-Martin, Linda. Sylvia Plath: A Biography. Kindle ed., Simon and Schuster, 1987. locations 53, 2307, 3607, 3872.
• Gay, Peter. The Cultivation of Hatred. New York. W.W. Norton, 1993. Pgs. 3,4.
• Moore, Honor. Poems from the Women’s Movement. New York. Library of America. 2009. Pgs. Xvii, 70, 71.
• Brown, Richard Harvey. Society as Text: Essays on Rhetoric Reason and Reality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pg. 29, 58.
• McAdams, Dan, P. The Psychology of Life Stories. Review of General Psychology. Educational Publishing Foundation, 2001. Vol. 5. No. 2. Pg. 100.
• Richardson, Laurel. Narrative and Sociology. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Sage Publications. Vol. 19. No. 1. April 1990. Pg. 116.

The Storyteller: Book Comparison of Powers' "The Yellow Birds" and Hosseinis' "The Mountains Echoed"

The Storyteller: Book Comparison of Powers' "The Yellow Birds" and Hosseinis' "The Mountains Echoed"

  In the stories The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers and And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini, we are introduced to two very decisive men. In The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers introduces us to his main character Bartle, who makes the decision to follow in his family's footsteps and join the armed forces, that send him to war. Bartle not only decided to do this but then he decided to tell his friend Murph’s mom, he would make sure to bring Murph home. These decisions to make such strong promises give Barte a strong burden to carry. A burden we hear within his chosen words. In And The Mountains Echoed Khaled Hosseini introduced us to one of his main characters Saboor, father of (sister) Pari and grandfather to (daughter) Pari, who makes the decision to give up his daughter (sister) Pari that sets the stage for all the lives that decision ultimately affects. Both men are strong and hard-working but they are also very naive to the implications and ramifications that their choices make to the greater picture, to themselves, and to those around them.
         In The Yellow Birds, Bartle (a characterization of Powers himself) was given a voice that spoke of unsureness and questions for answers to what he had lived through and why. “I’ve come to accept that parts of life are constant” (Powers, 32) we wake up, we eat, we go to the bathroom, we sleep, and we think. The degree of effort put into these things can vary tremendously but the constant is still there as these are survival constants. “[N]o matter how long I live, and no matter how I spend that time, those scales aren’t coming level.” (Powers, 32)They couldn’t in Bartle’s mind because Bartle made decisions that he thought at the time were the best and right decisions with little projection of what the future could possibly hold for him and those around him. However, a catch 22 of our minds is that we have the capacity for overactive imaginations that can consume us. So while some religions would say that the universe was balancing itself out by taking Murph’s life, Bartle cannot see that personal balance, he can only see the broken promise and the tragic loss. “Murph’s always going to be eighteen, and he’s always going to be dead. And I’ll be living with the promise that I couldn’t keep.” (Powers, 32) In this paragraph, we are wrapped up in all the truth that accompanies one person’s decision to do what they feel and think is the right thing to do. “I never intended to make the promise that I made. But something happened the day Murph pivoted and moved through the open rank of our formation, took his place in the squad next to me, and looked up. He smiled.” (Powers, 32) Bartle was in this instant taken by the innocence of someone his age but smaller than him. Possibly taken by a big brother instinct and camaraderie that shown within Murph’s smile giving Bartle something to hang on to in this new world of unknown outcomes. Therefore, when the lies of war reared their ugly heads on the battlefield and the truth that Bartle couldn’t keep his promise to Murph’s mom and bring Murph home safely the pain set into a debilitating point that kept Bartle a slave to his own memories. “I’d eat a half-cooked meal and drink enough window-chilled beers to fall asleep.” (Powers, 178) “That was more or less my life.”... “I didn’t require much of myself. L might return a small trinket from the war back to a shoebox, take another out. Here a shell casing, there a patch from the right shoulder of a uniform: articles that marked a life I was not convinced had needed to be lived.” (Powers, 179) In And The Mountains Echoed Saboor started out the book by telling the story of Baba Ayub and the div which was a precursor to what he was about to do with his daughter Pari. In this first chapter, we are simply told the story without much additional thoughts and commentary by Saboor as to how he personally feels about this type of sacrifice.
        However, volumes are spoken that Saboor would even entertain the thought of giving up one of his children, therefore, giving him a reason to feel a need to tell the story in the first place. We are all wrought with decisions we feel we must make in life, in the name of what we feel is right and best at the time, but much like with Bartle’s decision, it is hard to ever see the whole scope of the future implications and ramifications of these decisions. Saboor, despite “From the small red wagon up ahead, Pari cried out his name, her voice high, shaking with apprehension. “Abollah!” (Hosseini, 17) was completely dead set and headstrong that he was separating his twins Pari and Abdullah for good reason. They were poor people who lived in a hut, giving Pari up was for the better, she would be given a better life, Saboor had convinced himself of that. Because Saboor “whacked the side of his head”, “hit him again, harder”, and “threw a rock at him” (Hosseini, 17-18) wanting him so desperately to “Go home” we know that he knows how deep and connected his twins are; but again despite this knowledge, Saboor still thinks what he is doing is best. He is giving his daughter, in theory, to the div, and by legend, the div will give Pari a better life than he can. Unfortunately, life isn’t exactly like the stories we tell, while legendary and biblical type stories all have their morals and points to be made and had people shouldn’t live their lives by their words because all lives are different. It pained Saboor though, that he “saw only indifference. Endless toil.” that “Nothing good came for free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.” (Hosseini, 24) That because he could only see these harsh realities he was a slave to work “As long as Abdullah could remember, father was out searching for work, knocking on doors for a day’s labor.” (Hosseini, 27) As a slave to the hard indifference on the life he felt “Father was always too exhausted from work when Pari pulled on his sleeve and asked him to make her fly on the swing” so when he would turn her down and “she would give up” “father’s narrow face collapsed in on itself as he watched her go.” (Hosseini, 28) It was through these lies that Saboor told himself so much that begins to contrive a truth that he felt he needed to live by. Within his concocted truth he issued his twin's undue pain that even though he knew it would literally and figuratively rip them apart, he selfishly unburdened himself under the pretext that he was giving Pari a better life.
         Both of these stories deal with decisions that we would think we do not face and make on a daily basis but the truth is that we do. We all face decisions that incorporate other people’s lives because that fact is that we all do not live alone. Even if we think we do, and even if it is only one other person to us, that other person has other people in their life as well. Bartle made the decision to follow in the footsteps of his family and in doing so that introduced him to Murph and also Murph’s mom. Bartle didn’t have to make that promise to her but he did and in doing so he took on a pressure he had no idea the magnitude of. Bartle is the same as Saboor in that they made decisions that affected other people’s lives but Bartle’s decision became an internal conflict that he had to work through himself. Saboor on the other hand worked through his conflict then made his decision without caring for the emotional lives of those he was affecting. His burden was lifted and placed on his son Abdullah, who in turn placed on his daughter.     
        All in all, the point remains that no matter who is fronting the brunt of the decisions, one’s self or an echoing through a generational line, we should take more care in thinking about the whole picture of how many lives our simple decisions interrupt and if the interruption is going to be the best in the long term.

Works Cited: 

• Powers, Kevin. The Yellow Birds. Little, Brown and Company. New York. 2012. Pgs. 32, 178, 179. 
•  Hosseini, Khaled. And The Mountains Echoed. Riverhead Books. New York. 2013. Pgs. 17, 18, 24, 27, 28.

 

       

Women Move In Poetic Unison

Women Move In Poetic Unison

During the Women’s Movement, women were trying to shed the layers of oppression that their mothers and grandmothers were so accustomed to being scrutinized by. A woman was supposed to be an extension of a man, there to make life easier for him, conferring with his decisions and opinions, not having an opposing point of view or desires of her own. Through the publicity that came with Sylvia Plath’s marriage to Ted Hughes and her strictly structured but revealing words, women started to realize that they were not alone in feeling overwhelmed as adults and that they were allowed to feel this way. As time progressed on more and more women started to voice their disagreement with having to be bound to the house all day and night with little ability to pursue things they were interested in, which amongst many things one happened to be other women. Marilyn Hacker beautifully illustrated the allure that women possessed and that other women were finally starting to become openly fascinated within a structure that mimics the looser standards women were starting to adhere to. By the time the 1980s came around Jana Harris’s summarization of how women were taking every inch and running miles with them was a completely justified summarization. Structure was becoming a long distant memory as future generations put themselves out there in what was becoming an overly loose morale way of self-expression. The Women’s Movement stood for so much with regards to the freedom of women however, much like with anything, too much of one thing becomes just as bad as too much of something else and the balance is still lost. All three women had a collective stance that they wanted to be able to think for themselves and do as they pleased but in each poem, I analyze below it can be clearly seen that there is a strong progression in thought process throughout the years pushing the movement to an extreme that far exceeds where movement originators thought it would go. 

The Applicant by Sylvia Plath that was written on October 11th, in 1962 described the transitioning female so well. In this poem, it was her clever way of making women the applicant to men in such a sarcastic way that made the point about how women are changing so strong. "My boy, it's your last resort./ Will you marry it, marry it, marry it." (39-40) which is located on page 2 in Poems from the Women's Movement edited by Honor Moore. In those two lines, Plath didn't even end it with a question is in the 1960s there was no question that the man would marry, marry, marry his last resort. While most of the lines are transferable from decade to decade, when she rattles off a woman's symbolic qualifications as "It can sew, it can cook/It can talk, talk, talk." the reader could use that to date it back as women today have a different list of symbolic qualifications that would probably be stated instead of number one sew, number two cook and three four and five talking. Plath built her theme on the fact that women were entering the workforce and being interviewed primarily by the men who owned the companies. Plath accompanied this theme with a traditional style of 5 line stanzas in what seems to be an effort to say it was a traditional woman who was being forced to apply for the job of wife much like they were having to apply for jobs. 

In "Elegy" by Marilyn Hacker found on pages 113-116 a dedication to Janis Joplin was made which dates the piece within the '70s, "velvet, Janis, you/ overpaid your/ dues, damn it, why are you dead?" (26-28). "I wanted to write your/ blues, Janis, and put my/ tongue in your mouth that way." (71-73) As its historical backdrop is that of symbolic Janis Joplin with references made to random traveling, drugs and as I quoted the desire to love one another freely regardless of sexual preference the difference can be noted that from the '60s women are pulling even further away from wanting to be a part of an "applicant" process. While both Plath and Hacker write about the changes in the thought process of a woman's mind, there is a significant difference how Hacker portrays the random thoughts women are now having, although still conformed to a set 14, 14, 14, 14, 14, 14, 10 structure she breaks each line at specific yet random places allowing the style to shine brighter than the uniformity. Plath wrote with complete uniformity that was still mostly standard in woman's thinking in the '60s.   

In "Don't Cheapen Yourself" by Jana Harris found on page 170, we are presented with the contradiction that became symbolic of the 1980s, paying to look cheap. Harris presents us with "three-inch platform sandals/ and this I. Magnin snake dress?" (9,10) and "college prep or a pointy bra,/ ratting a bubble haircut/ with a toilet brush." (16-18) which lays the historical backdrop for the sentiment that people thought women of the prior generations thought the younger generation was going overboard saying "You look like a skag" (26). By using these terms as symbolic references to the time period she was able to capture the significant difference that was taking place from the uniformity of thought displayed in Plath's poetry and then the free form thinking in Hacker's poetry to the narrowed this is who I am thinking of the '80s in Harris's poetry. Which, prior to the 1960s women were actually cheapening themselves due to their lack of a voice. They were the ones who were being allowed to be put in a position to have to apply to have a husband. After the 1960's women may have started to show more skin and do things their male counterparts thought of as uncharacteristic, but those things were not ever what made a woman cheap, quite the opposite, "You got any idea/ how much it costs/ to do cheap these days?" (5-7). While “ma” had a standard of “Shakespeare” and “college prep” thinking that lingered from her generation making “three-inch platform sandals”, “Magnin snake dress”, “red waxed lips” and “pointy bra” look cheap to her, how one looked actually had nothing to do with the value of one’s self. Which, while it was taken to the extreme by people like Madonna with her “pointy bra” that sent mixed signals to the unmoved male mind, it still expressed the point that the value one is given should come from within, not materialistically. Women in the ’80s were so proud to be “doin' cheap” that they didn’t realize the actual message that was being received by their male counterparts, and if they did realize they were so intent on their mission they dismissed the confusion. 

Within the theme of liberating women, we see the gradual decade change that enabled women to be more expressive in thought and action giving each poem a less uniform order but still a hard hit at just what was going on and being achieved. Though thirty years later women are still trying to move male-dominated societies to be more equal in their thinking we are still making progress though slow it is steady. All three women Plath, Hacker, and Harris opened and continued to hold the door open for women of all kinds to find their way through on their journey to bettering the equality of human life for all future generations. They each had their own form and their own idea of what freedom from oppression was but their points of becoming free from oppression remained consistent. Though as times have changed and progressed on and we have realized that everything is subjective to a personal perspective it’s hard to completely understand anyone’s true thoughts because we mask the literal in veils of rhythmic and lyrical verses instead of speaking clearly of how we want to be treated. However as long as we keep making steady progress and keep making ourselves more and more clear with time, eventually a mutual equality should be achieved and all will not be for naught. 

Works Cited:

• Moore, Honor. Poems from the Women's Movement. American Poets Project The Library of America. 2009. Pgs. 1, 2, 113-116, 170, 171.   

Understanding "Sing for Freedom. The Story of the Civil Rights Movements Through Its Song" by Carawan, Guy, and Candy

        Civil Rights historical legacies root themselves in social injustices that occurred to African American individuals throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Singing roots itself back to a date not specifically known by any human record. It is widely known that social injustices are cruel in nature and aim to harm those they are being projected at. Singing, however, is widely known to have stress-releasing endorphins that soothe and calm the anxieties of the person singing and have a rejoicing, affiliating power to those listening. Within these two realms, one experiencing cruel social injustices could find considerable solace in singing about the hard times with those experiencing the same sorts of harsh realities. In doing so a bond gets created that carries on through song through many generations. Specific wording allows these songs to become specific to their group of suffers. The wording doesn’t create interference in their succession to the future though it does hold close to its past roots, instead, it creates a bridge that connects future generations to the reasons our nation is the way it is today. I will use “Ballad For Bill Moore” and “Why Was The Darkie Born” from the book Sing For Freedom to illustrate this assessment.

        Back in the day, there was no advanced technology that allowed us to stream live posts of prejudicial and discriminating acts as they were happening, instead, those who felt wronged would sing about it. Newspapers were not interested in printing how many men and women who died due to prejudicial reasoning, not all news mattered as not all lives mattered. So it was interesting that “Ballad For Bill Moore” words by Don West (found on page 95) was sung, but not unusual, Bill Moore was a man who believed in equality and died for that belief, although his skin color was white. “The lyncher’s bullets know no color/ As they come whining thru the night/ They’ve brought death to many a Negro/ And William Moore whose skin was white.” (Chorus 3) This was equivalent to the morning news when workers would start their day. One person started to sing the lyrics of the happenings around them and others working near would start to sing along; word of mouth was at work in its finest hours. This was a song binding its legacy to the historical slavery origins by stating within its lyrics that Bill Moore “… walked for peace, he walked for freedom/ He walked for truth, he walked for right,/ End segregation in this country/Eat at Joe’s, both black and white.” (Chorus 7). These songs were a testament to what was going on in the world as they knew it. They were songs that had powerful word combinations that gave strength to their feelings of overwhelming injustice.

        It was as important then as it is now for people of any DNA make-up to get out how they felt and it has always been true that humans have a need for affiliation with other humans, so it is no wonder that less fortunate people of a less fortunate time would do whatever they could, which happened to be singing. They sang sweet and they sang low, they sang with passion and they sang with a beat, it made the day go by and it made the hard times a smidge less hard, it even made explaining the fate they were dealt a little less harsh. In “Why Was The Darkie Born?” by James Bevel and Bernice Reagon (found on page 154) it is portrayed that a young child is asking its mother why were dark-skinned babies born and the mother gives an honest reply, “Somebody had to pick the cotton/ Somebody had to pull the corn/ somebody had to build a great nation/ and that’s why the darkie was a-born” (Line 3-6). Truth that was riddled with discrimination and prejudice so much that it became traditional for them to sing their feelings in an effort to cope. By the written account of the history of this time period, it seems to be the one thing that they were, to a larger than normal extent, allowed to have as they worked; so they took this inch of slack and ran a mile with it embedding it into their culture. In this song, its reference to picking cotton and pulling the corn was part of its legacy to the historical slavery origins. Also by stating within its last stanza “Come here my little baby,/ Sit on your mama’s knee/ And I will try to tell you/ Why your Ma ain’t free.” (53-56) we know this is an attempt to cope with slavery, an attempt to accept it through explanation. It is always the case that what we try to justify through our best attempts at common sense explanation what we feel is wrong or don’t understand in an effort to soften the feelings of injustice.

        Without such telling lyrics and rhythmic poetic beats, these songs would simply be stories that would get changed throughout the years by horrible word of mouth gossip. These two songs, like many others, work well to remind future generations of all the struggles and harsh realities that came before them to ensure a better tomorrow.



                                                                         Work Cited:

• Carawan, Guy, and Candy. Sing for Freedom. The Story of the Civil Rights Movements Through Its Song. New South Books. 2007. Pgs. 95, 154.

WWI to The Beats: Connecting The Dots

        During WWI those defending our country sat in the trenches with other soldiers, sat alone, or sat with soldiers of like countries fighting to save human freedom from power-hungry individuals that focused on turning humans into robots. Back then advanced technology didn’t consist of the words internet, cell phones, and streaming entertainment; it came by way of the words they thought of in their minds as they lay awake at night. Whether it was those on the front lines or those behind the lines, those aiding from home fronts or those aiding from tents with peroxide and bandages, back then everyone had a thought and something to say and a great many of them wrote those thoughts on whatever type of paper they could find. During WWII the need to remember all the tragic events wasn’t as prominent as it was during the First World War but there were still those who retold what they saw to be their reality at that time and how it made them feel. After both these wars came to their respective ends and people trickled home to their loved ones or sometimes no one, many became wrapped up in a Beat Movement to escape the horrible memories that plagued any media form from schools to coffee shops. Everyone had a story to tell, everyone had an opinion, everyone had a thought and a theory as to why this and why that, it was virtually impossible to live under an innocent naïve rock. Victorian proper was no longer an option of popular interest and complete freedom was always a pipe dream because when it comes down to it we are all just waiting for that call to duty, war duty, parental duty, societal duty, and/or educational duty. It is my point to connect the dots from WWI to The Beats on a yellow brick road paved by good intentions.

        During WWI most poets of war broke down their feelings with regard to a patriotic obligation type feeling that rises from illusions of freedom, wants for justice and safety, and/or just animalistic territorial pride for one's place of residence. There was still a looming of Victorian proper protocol and procedure lingering in the air of those in and affected by the war which lent its idealistic romanticized thought processes to those lying on the ground staring up at the stars from battlegrounds, Red Cross stations, and USO benefits everywhere. Poet’s minds were dripping with what was waiting back home and the questions that follow of the realization that death stares at them from every shadow just to cap the thought process with why would a God so mighty allow a man to endure such pain. In A Treasury of War Poetry British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 of The Riverside Literature Series, we are introduced to Henry van Dyke early on as he proclaims in rhythmic up-lift in his poem “Liberty Enlightening The World” “O dearest country of my heart, home of the high desire,/ Make clean thy soul for sacrifice on Freedom’s altar-fire/ For thou must suffer, thou must fight, until the warlords cease,/And all the peoples lift their heads in liberty and peace.” (Kindle Location 225) These are men who are not used to hand grenades and scarce rations as they are men who before the war, ran the local grocer or counted out your money at the bank, or better yet just walked out of high school doors. So when they would “…lain/In muddy trenches, napping like a beast/ With one eye open, under sun and rain/ And that unceasing hell-fire…/ It was strange” (Kindle location, 1830) as Wilfred Wilson Gibson said in “Between The Lines”. Though most of the poets of this war seemed to keep a hope about them that resonated through their words such as in A. Victor Ratcliff’s “Optimism” where he states “O day, be long and heavy if you will,/ But on our hopes set not a bitter heel./ For tiny hopes like tiny flowers of Spring/Will come” (Kindle Location, 1618). The war was hard on these boys and men but they fought with the, some would say, optimism that comes with thinking they are fighting an ending battle. They didn’t think another war was right around the corner.

        When along came WWII quite an animosity had built inside the soldiers whose minds fill the pages of Poets of World War II by Harvey Shapiro. These were new soldiers who have not seen war but heard all about it from their parents and/or siblings mixing with returning soldiers who fought not too long ago. All of them collectively knowing of the travesties testing man’s will to live during the First World War. What returning soldiers first saw as nobility to fight for one's country now is a crouching of one's personal space where they no longer feel they understand what it is they are fighting for exactly because the whole of it all is so large that they cannot wrap their minds around what all is going on. During the military downtime, the roaring twenties "kicked its heals up" in the face of the prim and proper Victorian regimented lifestyle and people got lost in F. Scotts Fitzgerald’s huge party of flighty feminine indecision (stay with old Victorian security and money or dive into ex-patriot uncertainty and lavishly lush extremes) and overly mothered men who indulged these women. So when WWII reared its face at these industrial revolutionaries, existential thinkers, and philosophical literary minds it was like dad just pulled the entire breaker box, not just the switch, on the rebel party people still had going on inside their heads. “The war that we have carefully for years provoked/ Catches us unprepared, amazed and indignant. Our…/…leaders make orations. This is the people/ That hopes to impose on the whole planetary world/ An American peace.” (Shapiro, 13) Robinson Jeffers seemed to be a little cynically truthful in his assessment in his poem titled “Pearl Harbor” where he states “But now I am old…”

        It was the old and the young, toe to toe and back to back swapping un-relatable stories that defined what Lincoln Kirstein put so bluntly in his poem titled “Rank” where he said “Differences between rich and poor, king and queen,/ Cat and dog, hot and cold, day and night, now and then,/ Are less clearly distinct than all those between/ Officers and us: enlisted men.” (Shapiro, 52) Where he not only defined the difference but defined the mood with his use of capital letters and profanity in his poem titled “P.O.E” where he clearly packs up the hope WWI poets tried to maintain as he states “We strive to fake a grateful note/ But goddamn duffle bag and pack,/ Gas mask, rifle, helmet, coat/ Too heavy are, so each sad sack, Must flop and gripe: This is some shit./ Up On Your Feet, our orders crack./ It’s All Aboard for THIS IS IT.” (Shapiro, 55-56) Which it seemed to be in metaphorical terms even if it wasn’t “it” in literal terms, in the sense that when WWII was over the nightmares of the battle lingered long after everyone stepped foot in their home.

        Post Traumatic Stress Disorder became a driving force to The Beat Writer. While not all Beat writers were ex-military, it seemed that the ex-military post-war feelings behind the first and second World Wars were mixing unkindly with the looming Vietnam War creating anxiety for what the world was turning into, which was apparently a big fighting ball of testosterone. So, animosity rose even higher between people who expressed political opinions, people who worked the institutionalized government-imposed grind, people who didn’t look the same, and all the –isms man-made language could create. Beat Writers were not necessarily the creators of these hypocrisies in life but more so the ones who felt all of what came from them. All of their feelings mixed horribly with these experimental drug addicts and alcoholics looking to escape the sad realities of life. The un-funny funny thing about life is that when you try to escape the problems and the fears they only come back twice as bad, if not exponentially more, however, what does that truly matter when literary masterpieces are born to try and explain and unify those who should never have been divided, to begin with.

        The Beat Writer’s seemed to glorify alcohol and drug use in The Portable Beat Reader by Ann Charters when Gary Snyder puts it as, “a good deal of personal insight can be obtained by the intelligent use of drugs” (Charters, 306) in his “Note On The Religious Tendencies”. They also opposed governmental reasoning and solutions, like how Tuli Kupferberg wrote 1001 WAYS TO BEAT THE DRAFT where “Flying to the moon and refus[ing] to come home”, “Becom[ing] Secretary of Defense” or “State” or “Health” rank up there with death, and menstruating. (Charters, 387)

         It seems that the facts are fairly easy here since history always has a way of repeating itself somehow, someway, when laying the yellow bricks for that intended road to humanities salvation from all things evil, remember to start Victorian. Starting Victorian will ensure that all women have no opinion to oppose man's will when he says that he is feeling like jumping into battles just to preserve peace. Then when that false peace finally tuckers out the brilliant minds who thought it up, to begin with, go jazzy, go glitzy, go glamorous and go in debt. By acting cocky to ragtime music while ticking off creditors one will ensure that some bomb is inevitably going to drop from the sky and start that whole feeling of jumping into battles to preserve peace thing will occur again. Once that mass genocide of testosterone has subsided go drink some more, go get high on drugs instead of music this time and then go rehab it up with the best brains roaming around so that when the next departure into battle occurs people can write about science fiction as reality because we will have all lost our minds with anger and individuality by then.



                                                                         Works Cited:

• vanDyke, Henry. "Liberty Enlightening The World." A Treasury of War Poetry British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917, The Riverside Literature Series, Kindle Location. 225.
• Gibson, Wilfred Wilson. “Between The Lines.” A Treasury of War Poetry British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917, The Riverside Literature Series, Kindle Location. 1830. 
• Ratcliff, A. Victor. “Optimism.” A Treasury of War Poetry British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917, The Riverside Literature Series, Kindle Location. 1618.
• Shapiro, Harvey. Poets of World War II. New York, Library of America, 2003. Pgs. 13, 52, 55-56.
• Charters, Ann. The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books, 1992. Pgs. 306, 387.

A Feminist Psychoanalysis of Conrad's Heart of Darknesss

  Describe how a psychoanalytic reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness would differ from a feminist reading. Select a passage from Conrad’s text as a basis for the comparison. What are the benefits of a psychoanalytic reading of the passage? Of a feminist reading? What are the disadvantages of a psychoanalytic reading? Of a feminist reading? This discussion will allow you to become familiar with these theories and apply them in a less formal, interactive environment.

Respond to at least two of your classmates. Identify differences between your application of the feminist and psychoanalytic theories and theirs. What elements of the text (e.g., plot, imagery, and character development) did your colleagues focus on? How did the feminist or the psychoanalytic approach contribute to an understanding of these elements?

For the passage in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad that I chose to compare this passage that Conrad wrote early on in the story along with a follow up passage he wrote in section two of the story. Since we are to analyze this passage within the scope of feminism and psychoanalysis I felt Charlie's reaction to his aunts words was the most fitting for comparison.  

     "You forget, dear Charlie, that the labourer is worthy of his hire, ' she said, brightly. It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over." 

     "I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie," he began, suddenly. "Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it -completely. They- the women, I mean- are out of it- should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse."

     According to Wikipedia feminism "is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or, more broadly, by the politics of feminism. It uses feminist principles and ideology to critique the language of literature. This school of thought seeks to analyze and describe the ways in which literature portrays the narrative of male domination by exploring the economic, social, political, and psychological forces embedded within literature." 

     With that being said, readers can view Charlie's statement as sexist. "...out of touch with truth..." Conrad writes this in a piece that is about one mans story, his decisions as a man and his feelings about everything going on around him. Therefor by allowing his main character to say this passage it allows the reader to believe that the main character has no use for a womans beautiful world, that apparently women live outside the realm of reality, a reality where only men live. Not only does Conrad narrate Charlie to say this once but then again in the second part of the story reiterating his feeling that women live in a world all of their own when he says "We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse." Conrads insinuation through Charlie that women could not manage the stresses of reality and therefore live only in a beautiful facade is the exact passage that feminism works to negate.

"In general, feminist literary criticism before the 1970s—in the  and of feminism—

was concerned with women's authorship and the representation of women's condition within literature; including the depiction of fictional female characters." (Wikipedia)

     The benefits of looking at this passage through the feminism lens is that we can see how women were treated in the past and work to correct it for the future, as we are not just creatures of naive fantasies living in a realm that is not reality alongside our human counterparts.

     The disadvantage would be the other side of the double edged knife. While sexism is not right, we run the risk of loosing chivalry to a notion that we of the female race, know is not true, but when we fight to change how men see us after seeing us for so long as helpless, it creates a backlash of inequality. Women know men need us to need them whether we really need them or not but did we/do we really need to scream inequality for all when not all feel the same way. Some women are proud to be of a beautifully naive mind set. Also aanalysis of books can strip them of their chauvinistic ways only to put great literature under scrutinity for something that was a factual reality of the male thought processes of years past. Also picking apart an authors words, meaning, theme ect. is an attempt to understand what the author meant when we all read things differently. 

     To psychoanalyze these connected passages under the psychoanalytical umbrella that says  psychoanalysis of literature "can be the psychoanalysis of the  or of a particularly interesting character in a given work." (Wikipedia) leads us to question why Charlie thinks the way he thinks by way of Conrad's mind. We have to ask whether Conrad was simply describing how it was at that day in age or was that truly how he felt about life around him.

     The advantages to looking at this passage through the psychoanalytical lens is that we can get a better picture as to why the story was written. What the significance is to having this story published and read by the masses. It allows us to look deep within the context of Charlie's words for the meaning to how he feels and why."The chief function of the psychoanalytic critic is to reveal the true content, and thus to explain the effect on the reader of a literary work by translating its manifest elements into the dormant, unconscious determents that make up their suppressed meaning." (Devardhi)

     The disadvantages of looking at this passage through that lens is that we strip away the enjoyment of just reading the words and allowing ourselves to simply be engulfed by the authors characters, settings, tones and themes. Sometimes picking something apart is helpful and other times it just takes away from the simplicity of reading for light minded fun.  

Works Cited

"Feminist Literary Criticism."Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 31 Mar. 2017. Web. 13 Apr. 2017.

"Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism."Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 05 Apr. 2017. Web. 13 Apr. 

Devardhi, J. "Application of Freudian Concepts to the Explication of Literary Texts: A Case Study of Walt Whitman’s “The Sleepers”."African Research Review3.1 (2009): n. pag. Web. 13 Apr. 2017.

Conrad, Joseph. "Heart of Darkness."Gutenburg.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2017.

Amy Semrau 

RE: Heart of Darkness

Hi Maria,

         I couldn’t agree with you more about the condescending and limiting view that this story takes on women. I also agree that the narrative of a beautifully naïve mindset is one that some women adopt willingly. The difference in literature is the overwhelming representation of a single idea of what women can be and a lack of representation of alternatives. It is fine to have a woman aloof and naïve, but the problem arises when this portrayal is shown time and time again until it feeds into a narrative that dictates this to be the ‘natural’ disposition of all women. I think literary criticism tries to make this clear but the difficulty lies in the availability of female characters and the lack of presenting them as anything but a device for male actualization. You chose to point out the overall tone of the excerpts from a feminist standpoint; they are sexist. That is a stance which is only possible now, in the context from which it is written such a statement would have seemed ‘out of touch’ and foolish. I think the choice to use the feminist lens adds perspective that allows us to see how women were treated in the past, as you stated. The extent of women’s subjugation and lower status is contained not just in the presentation of female characters, but also in the use of the feminine in other ways. I focused this on the need to personify boats as women and the way women are used only to further the story of men. When I read the passages you presented and consider the point you made about Marlow not needing a woman’s beautiful world, it cements the idea that women are not privy to their own stories or whole existence. Nothing is expected of them but to be the object of a man and remain a paragon of beauty or a tool in their conquest.  

Hi Amy,

Thank you for agreeing. However, despite my stated point of view above, I will now play devils advocate to my own words. As I am quirky like that. So from a feminism stand point, yes, the passage is sexist and paints women in a less then flattering light intellectually speaking, but when you read the whole story and read the women symbolically then a whole new light is shed on Conrads story.

The story is, while still in a somewhat sexist way, literally all about a man and his journey, though literature is full of these kinds of stories about women too, where the male roles of the story are symbolic for the womans journey. Conrad seemingly, specifically, made only a select few things in this story feminine. Two of which were Kurtz women, which much like the whole stories paralleling good vs evil nature, Kurtz had one woman of bright lighted purity and one of savage intensity. The third would be the 

feminine named vessel that carries Charlie along the river and deep within himself.

Though I completely stand behind what I wrote above, I felt I needed to further state my feelings on the book to clarify that I do understand the immense symbolic nature of this novella. I do agree that many literary pieces do take an extreme sexist approach in describing women within their stories, however, I believe the sexist parts of this story are to aid the symbolic nature of how Kurtz viewed woman with regard to the standard views of women of this novellas time period. Charlie actually, in one respect feels women are better then men if you read into the words through a psychoanalytical lens that follows the thinking that by not wanting women to have their beautiful worlds tainted by the possibilities of a mans worse world he is helping to preserve womans beauty. It's a doubled edged knife, in stripping woman of their ability to handle the nitty gritty, he is allowing women to be in a category that doesn't need to be amongst the nitty gritty, which men tend to think is complimentary while some women think it's insulting.

Perspective is always subjective to an individuals personal views on life. Open mindedness allows for vast interpretations of all things tangible and non. That's the true beauty in life, to me of course.

~Maria 

Amy Semrau 

RE: Heart of Darkness

Hi Maria,

         Kurtz women certainly do lend themselves to the symbology of the story and I agree that, within the era this books is written, he has presented them in accordance with ideas of the time. From a feminist standpoint, the irony is not lost on me that he writes about women as peripheral tools, in this case only as symbols on the man's journey, in much the same way women are seen of as tools primarily for reproduction or possession in the Victorian era. The use of women as objects and symbols in men's narratives mirrors the perception of women only as objects in the real world. Placing women on a pedestal has multiple functions, one is to exclude her from decision making and power in society, another is to remove choice in their behavior by promoting a metanarrative: if a woman is quiet, sweet, beautiful and innocent, a good man will come along to protect and cherish her... so long as she remains obedient, accepting, virtuous and respectful. I know this is getting a little deconstructionist, but I think part of the importance of understanding benevolent sexism is that it exists to remove choice by perpetuating one view of womanhood.

 

         His adoration for women is akin to his view of them as less than human, they are pretty little creatures  

without the will or intellect to comprehend or understand. What I found interesting was evidence that he had no desire to attribute anything to women, even when it benefited him. At one point he mocks the idea that he turned to 'the women' to try to help him get a job. The result is he was able to get a job through his Aunt. How does he respond? He still mocks the idea of getting help from a woman even though it worked, then he simplifies her attitude as a mindless drone eager to make him happy and get him his appointment as though she has nothing better to do (which I imagine he believes to be true). When she does offer some interesting, she is dismissed as 'out of touch' and getting carried away with buzz words. At the same time, he calls her his excellent aunt and relishes in her enthusiastic attitude and pretty ideas of the world. The reflective telling of this story casting his attitude in more sever light since he knows how it will end but is still dismissive of the foreshadowing hinted at by women in the story. Perhaps Conrad as the author is making a statement about this dismissal of women by including the details of there conversations int eh story, or perhaps he was just intent on creating foreshadowing and an ominous presence.

 

         Sorry to go on. You brought out some thoughts in this discussion and I wanted to share them. I don't know if they are 'right', or even if there is a 'right', but it is enjoyable to explore them with you. Thanks

I really enjoy exploring this with you too. Part of the reason why I wanted to go back for my masters was so that I could talk to intelligent people who enjoy using their brains as much as I do. So thank you!

I cant say I disagree at the moment with anything that you have stated or how you have stated it. In literature I don't believe their is a right or wrong per-say because it is all subjective to how the reader wants to interpret the written piece. However there is always the way that the author intended to write it but some authors don't always give up their intentions because they like hearing the debate. From the little bit I have read on Conrad I think he definitely intended his women to be symbolic statues that embodied that time period for exactly what they were supposed to stand for at that time period. While I think that this was a story specifically written by a man about a mans journey I don't think women mattered much more then they needed to matter which is why he left them symbolic and nameless, I cant say I haven't written a character as such because the character was important to the story but not enough to have a life, just a presence and a purpose. However in doing that, it does allow for many doors to open up with questions and possible reasonable answers as to why it was written that way. 

I believe Conrads women were symbolic of good and evil as he presented polar opposites and that due to the nature of the stories events and the relationship between Krutz and Charlie that surrounded them, I can see the women being foreshadowing of those ominous events in a way that paralleled the actual voyage into the darkness that was central Africa where Charlie was faced with Krutz's darkness and finding his way out of it back to the beauty. 

I really enjoyed reading your interpretations and having you read my thoughts as well. Thank you very much Amy!!!

~Maria

Taylor Wikowsky 

RE: Heart of Darkness

Maria, 

I found your interpretation of this text very interesting. When I read the selection the first time, I didn't find it to be sexist. Your post was a whole new perspective for me to look at the text from, which is a huge factor in my enjoying it so much. You mentioned in a later post that a lot of stories have very strong male characters and contain sexist undertones. This got me thinking that perhaps that is why I didn't find the comments of Conrad to be sexist. Your post really made me think about how much we accept from society, right down to our unwavering acceptance of the undertones in what we watch, and read. 

Hi Taylor,

I didn't mean that all stories had a strong male character and contain sexiest undertones, I mean that all stories have a strong character (either male or female) with sexiest undertones. Sorry if I didn't convey that properly. However, you took from what I wrote what I was hoping you would take from it and that is that we become desensitized. Glad I could give you another way to see the text 

~Maria