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.