Literature: Demystified

Power and Sexuality: The Portrayal of 1920s Women

2012-05-21T14:09:00.001-07:00

In The Big Money, by John Dos Passos, Margo Dowling seduces a young guitar player to run away from home, flirts with an American Embassy worker to escape Cuba, sleeps with her casting director in the hopes of getting her own show, convinces a wealthy businessman on his deathbed to sign over a check for cash, and accepts a movie producer’s proposal of marriage to secure a career in Hollywood. In Baby Face, directed by Alfred E. Green, Lily Powers sleeps with a succession of men, from a railroad worker to a hiring clerk to a series of managers to the president of a bank, in order to gain favors, promotions, and material wealth, and then she merely flirts her way out of any trouble she gets herself into along the way—including the deaths of two of her spurned lovers. These women may seem to be anything but typical representations of modern young women in the 1920s. Yet, is this brief summary really all there is to these two women? Or do they have another side, a more rounded and complete identity than that of cold and calculating seductress? A feminist critical analysis of the portrayal of Margo Dowling and Lily Powers reveals the representation of 1920s U.S. women in novel and film as powerful yet ultra-feminine creatures of sexuality, ambition, and nontraditional moral standards—challenging both assumed gender roles and traditional standards of femininity.

Dos Passos wrote The Big Money as a collection of various stories, mini-biographies, newsreels, and streams of consciousness. The result is a conglomeration of 1920s life and thought. One of the ongoing stories is that of Margo Dowling, who grows up with poverty and abuse, vowing never to be weak or dependent like her adoptive mother, Agnes (Dos Passos 133). Margo eventually moves to New York City with Agnes and begins acting, but when her new stepfather rapes her, she rushes into marriage with her boyfriend, Tony, and escapes with him to live with his family in Cuba. Life in Cuba is hell for Margo, as she becomes disillusioned with her ever more controlling husband. When her newborn baby dies because of a sexually transmitted disease that Tony had acquired and passed on to Margo (196), she can no longer endure her situation. Margo decides to use her sex appeal to convince a boy working at the U.S. consulate to smuggle her back into the States. Once there, Margo focuses all her thoughts and energy on gaining independence—from poverty, from weakness, from men. She gets jobs in choruses, modeling, and acting, and eventually makes her way to Hollywood. Tony plagues her, taking her money and causing trouble, while Agnes follows her, helping when she can, as Margo struggles, plots, barters, and pushes her way to the height of status and power: Hollywood stardom.

By the end of the novel, one can almost imagine the character Margo as the actress Barbara Stanwyck, who plays Lily Powers in the film Baby Face. The movie begins with Lily as a beautiful young woman working in her father’s speakeasy, where she is constantly pestered by the male patrons. Her problem is not helped by her father, who actually sells her company to the men. Lily finally runs away, jumping a train for New York City. Caught by a railroad worker, Lily is forced to make the first in a long line of difficult decisions: she seduces him to get out of trouble and remain on the train. Upon arriving in New York, Lily sees the Gotham Trust skyscraper. Impressed, she promptly goes inside and seduces the personnel manager to get a job. From that point on, Lily flirts, seduces, pouts, cries, and otherwise maneuvers her way to the highest position in the firm, finally winning the devotion of the president of the bank himself, Carter. Soon, Lily is living in luxury in a flat paid for by Carter, but disaster strikes when one of her spurned lovers finds her and, in a fit of jealous rage, shoots first Carter, then himself. After the “Love Nest Tragedy” (Baby Face), the new president of the bank, Trenhelm, meets with Lily. He sees through her innocent victim charade, but admires her gumption and determination. Eventually he falls in love with her and they marry—but then the bank crashes and Trenhelm lands in jail for debt. Lily, with her stash of money and jewelry, decides to leave town instead of bailing out her husband. When she realizes her mistake and returns, she finds that Trenhelm has just shot himself. She calls the ambulance in time to save him, expresses her love for him at last, and lets the money fall aside.

These two mediums of novel and film portray similar visions of the new 1920s woman, and, at first, they may not appear to be flattering. A broad mixture of the previous decades’ radical changes had combined to form the social realities of the 1920s. During those turbulent years leading up to the era—and culture—in which we find Margo and Lily, the United States was home to suffragist and women’s movements, a sexual revolution from the strict Victorian doctrine on proper behavior, and the major shift in U.S. lifestyles from rural to urban. Beginning well before the turn of the century, Western culture witnessed the sexual liberation of women from Victorian era ethical values toward freedom from the taboo surrounding a woman’s sexual desire (Cott 42-45). This dramatic shift in social attitudes toward gender roles was still under way in the 1920s, and it was still being explored and tested by women like Margo and Lily. In the year 1920, U.S. suffragists finally won the vote for women, but after that landmark occasion, women’s movements began to fracture and become less prominent (Lemons ix-xi). By the mid-1920s, the height of the “sexual revolution overlapped with the last stages of this century’s first wave of feminism” (Skolnick 42). Margo and Lily represent both of these trends, as demonstrated by their modern attitudes toward sex and their desire and ability to empower themselves.

This transformation of social patterns occurred simultaneously with the move to urbanism, which in turn promoted a shift to a corporate, commercial business world. The urbanization of the U.S. played a large part in the gathering of new ideals and social standards. “The city’s impact [on] national life” and morals was significant as the United States became an “urban nation” and there occurred a “massive exploitation of the city’s power to amuse and entertain” (Boyer 284-287)—as seen, for example, in both The Big Money and Baby Face with their recurring themes of going to New York City or Hollywood to make a living and a life. The economic situation resulting from the shift to a corporate business world offered “new opportunities for women” (Skolnick 41) to work outside the home in office positions. Independence from their families by working and supporting themselves helped lead women “away from the watchful eyes of their traditional and family communities” (Gerhard 16). Thus, the sexual revolution of working-class girls and the shift to urban lifestyles and corporate jobs for young women had paved the way to the so-called Flapper lifestyle of the Roaring Twenties. This made for an interesting and exciting decade, as, “basking in the successes of the suffrage movement, many young middle-class women of the 1920s assumed sexual equality had been achieved and set out to enjoy their newly won prerogatives” (Gerhard 17-18). This is the point at which we meet Margo and Lily.

The preceding historical factors come into play when we analyze the definitions of gender roles and the attributes associated with femininity in The Big Money and Baby Face. During and after times of radical change, it is sometimes difficult to determine precisely what is considered “the norm” in society, and these texts reflect that uncertainty. Dos Passos seems to accept or at least acknowledge the changing roles of women in the 1920s, as he portrays his female characters in a broad range of situations with differing social statuses and varying degrees of inner strength and outer ambition. Minor or semi-minor characters tend to fill in the picture around the ambitious and determined Margo and her counterpart, Mary French. Mary, the main character in another of The Big Money’s many interwoven stories, is a social idealist, caught up in the struggle for immigrant and union workers’ rights. She ultimately ruins her health and loses all personal connections because of her focus on the cause. Other women who appear in the story often provide complex, if brief, studies of contemporary feminine roles: Agnes is the essence of frailty and motherhood (though she never gave birth and outlives two husbands), Gladys is the traditional housewife and mother (though she becomes ruthless and money-hungry in her own sphere of influence), Evelyn is the ultimate socialite, Ada the respectable artist, and so on. Each of these characters, although differing greatly from each other, gives an opposing view of womanhood than that given by Margo and Mary. As seen in the main female characters’ stories, ambitious, independent women end up either miserable and alone or devoid of moral and emotional well-being. Thus, although alternative gender roles are presented in an apparently nonbiased and open-minded manner, the end result is that traditional social expectations are, in fact, confirmed.

Baby Face is much more limited in its presentation of women characters, and may therefore be more straightforward in its portrayal of feminine attributes. The only women the audience becomes acquainted with by more than a cursory glance or a quick comment are Lily and Chico, her African American servant—and Chico is hardly a rounded character herself, appearing mainly as a foil or conscience to Lily’s decisions. Consequently, the film effectively presents us with only a single image of (white) womanhood: one that portrays women as callous, sexual, cunning, and, of course (after all, this is Hollywood), ultimately just in need of a good man in order to see the error of her ways. However, we are not led to believe that this is the norm. In fact, through the isolated comments of other women (for example, when the office girls whisper about Lily behind her back), through the various reactions of the men (primarily, that Lily ought to be fired), and even through Chico herself (as she provides an almost constant morally judgmental soundtrack by singing “St. Louis Blues”[1]), the film’s portrayal of Lily is clearly meant to be that of a deviant. Traditional gender roles are, therefore, reaffirmed through the experience of catharsis that the audience gains while witnessing Lily’s story and through the ultimate satisfaction of conventional moral expectations in the last five minutes of the film.

Given these outwardly clear definitions of womanhood and standards of morally acceptable gender roles, it is interesting to note that those very standards are actually challenged throughout each story and even complicated by the occurrence of conflicting definitions and principles. Before Lily leaves home, she has a single ally at her father’s speakeasy: an old professor, Adolf Cragg, who quotes Nietzsche and urges Lily to escape. The presence of the Nietzsche-bearing professor in Baby Face obscures the easy judgment we are tempted to cast on Lily. Nietzsche wrote about the ever fluctuating interpretations of “good” and “truth,” and about the power of change and the strength to overcome. Adolf reminds us that Lily is in a nearly impossible situation but has the power—through her own inner strength and determination—to rise above her environment rather than becoming a product of it. When the rest of her story is viewed in this light and with an acute memory of her abusive early life, we can more readily sympathize with her decisions and reactions regarding the men she encounters and uses. Lily’s journey, therefore, is not so much a tale of moral degradation as one of a process of learning and healing, through which she must pass before she is able to accept the love that she finds with Trenhelm at the end of the film.

Margo, too, complicates her own role as anti-moral, emotionally hardened woman through her ongoing relationship with her first husband, Tony. As Margo continually nurtures and cares for Tony, even after he wrongs her in various nearly unforgivable ways, one is presented with another side of a supposedly callous woman. No longer appearing emotionally dead, Margo now seems to have a softer heart than most—she forgives, she empathizes, she aids, she protects. In a strange twist, Tony takes on the role of a child, rather than husband, of Margo, and she accepts the role of mother. Thus, a woman portrayed as almost a cautionary tale of ambition at the heavy price of inner numbness becomes a nurturing, compassionate figure of mercy. The two roles that Margo fills may seem to be irreconcilably opposed, but by joining ambition with heart, Margo shows us that the prescribed standards and definitions identified above may not be flexible enough to encompass the full range of feminine identity. Therefore, while Lily and Margo may at first appear to present cathartic stories of deviancy that eventually reinforce and uphold the audience’s moral expectations, they may actually portray a more accurate reflection of the social realities at the time—the reality of women occupying complicated, changing roles and challenging the notions of “standard” femininity.

On a more basic level of presentation, we may examine the language and film techniques used to portray the two women. Lingering shots of Lily’s body (as when her father “sells” her to a customer and the camera seems to leer at Lily with that customer’s eyes) provide a male-based point of view, ultimately forcing even female viewers to gaze at Lily with a physically—even sexually—appraising eye. In contrast, Margo is rarely physically described, and the language used to depict her is then typically non-gendered. Hence, Lily, the office worker, is presented as an object, a spectacle of womanhood and sexual grace; whereas Margo, the actress, is presented as merely human—obviously lovely but not forced upon the reader as such. Only the fact that Margo is an actress who gains her livelihood through the use of her body relegates her to the same basic level as Lily—a sexual woman.

Nonetheless, these two powerhouses of sexuality are not confined to roles of “mere” objects. Quite the contrary, each of the women seems so overtly aware of this representation of herself that she is able to use the very male-based point of view that objectifies her to her own advantage. She contradicts the gender role into which she is placed by understanding the control it ultimately gives her over the opposite sex: in a strange twist of power, she manages to escape the gender role by utilizing it. Knowing that she is the object of desire, Lily chooses not to be victimized but to take advantage of those who desire her. By doling out sexual favors in exchange for monetary gains and business advancements, Lily plays the object while simultaneously objectifying the men who have thus wronged her. In this way, she shifts the standard view of this behavior, placing blame for the transgression upon the man, not the woman. We can see this in every relationship Lily goes through from her very first “indiscretion” on the train, when she could not have used the train worker if he had not been willing to take what she offered him. Similarly, Margo knowingly presents herself as a feminine object of beauty, something to be looked at and superficially admired. In fact, she becomes almost obsessive about her appearance (both within and outside of her professional life) as she gets a job modeling dresses, spends hours primping and picking out the perfect outfit, makes dubious monetary decisions based solely on appearances (such as going into debt to purchase a Rolls Royce), and so on. While appearing frivolous at first glance, each of these decisions actually assists Margo in gaining greater recognition, which leads to greater status and, ultimately, greater power. As an actress, her appearance is inextricably tied to her success, and she understands this and utilizes it to such personal advantage that the question of whether she ought to be viewed as an object seems, at last, ludicrous. Being an object is perfectly all right with Margo so long as it gets her where she wants to be and where she eventually ends up: on top.

The social realities of the urban United States and the roles of women within it during the 1920s were complex, and they emerged from the juxtaposition of this country’s first experiences with feminism, urbanism, and sexual revolution. Gender roles were being examined, tested, reassigned, and pushed to their limits, while stereotypes of masculinity and femininity were in a constant state of flux. In fact, the novel and film examined here have their own definitions of femininity challenged by the characters within them—Adolf gives Lily a complex background with hints of a deeply rooted moral center, while Tony gives Margo the opportunity to show a softer side of her hardened exterior. The two women even manage to defy their own representations, as they are shown and described in sexual terms but learn to use their objectification shrewdly to their own advantage. These portraits of life in the Roaring Twenties provide a view of women that is quite extraordinary. Lily and Margo exploit themselves and use men to get what they want, their power is gained only through their sexuality, and they seem to rely more on their looks than on their brains. However, in a beautifully understated reversal of expectations, Lily and Margo actually use their brains adeptly in order to get ahead with their looks: they are able to gain power from men through their sexuality only because of the men’s own desire to exploit them. These women emerge as both traditionally feminine and contemporarily feminist, as objects and objectifiers, as powerfully ambitious and inherently decent—in short, they are entirely human.

Works Cited

Baby Face. Dir. Alfred E. Green. Perf. Barbara Stanwyck. Warner Bros., 1933.

Boyer, Paul S. Urban Masses and Moral Order in America: 1820-1920. Boston: Harvard UP,

1978.

Cott, Nancy F. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.

Dos Passos, John. The Big Money. 1933. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Gerhard, Jane F. Desiring Revolution: Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American

Sexual Thought, 1920 to 1982. New York: Columbia UP, 2001.

“St. Louis Blues.” 29 Jan. 2000. Heptune.com. 17 April 2009 <http://www.heptune.com/

stlouisb.html>.

Lemons, J. Stanley. The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s. 1973. Pref. J. Stanley

Lemons. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990.

Skolnick, Arlene S. Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty. New

York: Basic Books, 1991.

[1] Oh, that St. Louis woman, with her diamond rings,
She pulls my man around by her apron strings.
And if it wasn't for powder and her store-bought hair,
Oh, that man of mine wouldn't go nowhere. (“St. Louis Blues.”)

The Many Lives of Oroonoko

2012-05-08T22:38:00.000-07:00

Although Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko is, on the surface, a story about slavery in the Americas, it is much more likely that Behn was writing a treatise on monarchy and the Stuart rule in England than a plea for the end of slavery. However, after Behn’s death Oroonoko took on a life of its own. The story of the enslaved prince was made into a play only six years after Behn died, then over the next two hundred years it was reproduced over and again by numerous authors, each of whom slightly altered the text to fit their own agenda and their own audience’s needs and expectations. The most significant changes to Behn’s story were made by Thomas Southerne, who first transformed Oroonoko into a play in 1695; John Hawkesworth, who in 1759 cut Southerne’s comic subplot and created the play form that others later followed; and John Ferriar, who changed Oroonoko into a thoroughly abolitionist story in 1788 – precisely 200 years after Behn’s original novella was published. By the time it reached its final transformations, Oroonoko was a solidly anti-slavery piece.

Aphra Behn published Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave in 1688, the year before her death. The original intent of her book has been debated, but it was most likely a royalist treatise inspired by the events surrounding the end of the Stuart reign in England. Many scholars compare the predicament of Oroonoko himself to that of King James, noting that Oroonoko “bears in captivity the same name—Caesar—which Behn uses to address both Charles II and James II” (Spencer 225). Truly, Behn condemns the enslavement of a monarch in her novella far more than she does slavery itself. For example, Oroonoko reprimands the slave ship captain who tricks him into captivity not for dealing in the slave trade, but rather for his dishonesty and false Christianity. When departing the ship, Oroonoko utters, “’Tis worth my Suffering to gain so true a Knowledge both of you, and your Gods by whom you swear” (67). Indeed, Oroonoko actually argues for slavery (that is, the traditional tribal dealings with slavery) in Behn’s novella: “Have they Won us in Honourable Battel? And are we, by the chance of War, become their Slaves? This wou’d not anger a Noble Heart” (86). Clearly, Behn’s story is more anti-slave trade (if that) than anti-slavery; but it does create a perfect framework for later authors to use in the fulfillment of their own agendas, which eventually did include abolition.

The first rewrite of Behn’s Oroonoko was by Thomas Southerne, who transformed the novella into a play (Oroonoko: A Tragedy) in 1695, six years after Behn’s death. The most drastic addition to the story is Southerne’s comic subplot, a sexually charged storyline involving two sisters, Charlott and Lucy Welldon (who are in Surinam seeking wealthy husbands), and a lusty widow, the Widow Lackitt. After much cross-dressing and trickery, the three women are happily married by the end of the play. The raunchy comic additions seem strange when placed side by side with the tragic tale of Oroonoko and Imoinda, but this style of tragicomedy was actually popular with the audiences of Restoration theater, and Oroonoko: A Tragedy “was one of the most frequently performed of all London dramas in the first half of the eighteenth century” (Munns 176).

Some of Southerne’s deletions from Behn’s text are just as telling as his addition; among the themes edited out of his play were the entire continent of Africa, almost all reference to (and all appearances of) the Surinam Indians, the presence of the narrator (generally understood to be Behn herself), and Imoinda’s blackness. There are many theories on the reason for making Imoinda white. One of these theories is that Southerne eliminated the narrator and made Imoinda white to combine the characters and play up the sexual tension between the narrator and Oroonoko in Behn’s version (Spencer 233). While there is not much evidence for this in the text itself, it does make for an interesting supposition. Another theory is that “the change in Imoinda’s coloring has as much to do with theatrical traditions as sexual transgressions or racial anxiety” (Munns 177). The argument here is that actors would readily wear blackface in order to portray heroic black men, but since pale skin was seen as the ultimate mark of womanly beauty at this time, in order for Imoinda to be beautiful she must also be white (Munns 177).

In all but eliminating the Surinam Indians (they appear only offstage in the plays), Southerne and all of his successors also eliminate the complex three-way relationship that existed between white colonists, black slaves, and native Indians. In Southerne’s version of the story, Oroonoko proves his loyalty and heroism by rushing to defend the plantation when the Indians attack. This version “avoids the reality of dangerous alliances between indigenous inhabitants and imported African labor. … [The] alteration involves radical simplification and a massive act of forgetting” (Munns 180). It is also possible that the Indians were simply not necessary to Southerne’s play; he was not as interested in promoting colonization in the Americas as he was in box-office results, which were helped along by his addition of the comic subplot, as noted above.

While it is true that Behn’s story is not anti-slavery, it does plant the seeds for that reception. Southerne’s version, on the other hand, moves in the opposite direction, making Oroonoko defend not just tribal forms of slavery but also European slave trafficking. In Behn’s novella, after Oroonoko declares that winning a slave in battle is honorable, he adds, “but we are Bought and Sold like Apes, or Monkeys, to be the Sport of Women, Fools, and Cowards” (86). In Southerne, Oroonoko’s speech is quite different: “If we are Slaves, they did not make us Slaves; / But bought us in an honest way of trade: /… They paid our Price for us, and we are now / Their Property, a part of their Estate” (3.2.122-127). This complete reversal is credited to Southerne’s personal life – he was “seeking patronage from … one of the riches West Indian slave-owners” (Spencer 232) at the time that he wrote this play.

Southerne’s version of the tale also plays down Oroonoko’s royal honor and plays up his love of Imoinda – he is now motivated to rebel only because of his love for her, as any good Restoration hero might do. After his speech to Aboan on why they should not revolt (see above), Oroonoko is finally persuaded to anger by the thought of Imoinda being ravaged by the Governor. Aboan tells him that the Governor “Will know no bounds, [there is] no law against his Lusts” and Oroonoko at last replies “Ha! thou hast roused / The Lion in his den … / I’ll undertake / All thou would’st have me now for liberty” (3.2.221-240). While Behn’s Oroonoko was appalled at being enslaved and having his son born into slavery, Southerne’s Oroonoko seems fairly content with his lot until the thought of his lover’s innocence lost convinces him otherwise. With this, Oroonoko takes his first steps in Southerne’s play toward a less powerful presence; he is portrayed, in a way, as “a proper English gentleman who just happens to be black” (Munns 179). At the end of the play, he does not even possess the uncivilized emotion necessary to murder Imoinda, who is forced to kill herself and leave Oroonoko to follow suit.

John Hawkesworth was the next author to recreate Oroonoko’s tale with his version of the play, Oronooko: A Tragedy, As it is now Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane, which was produced in 1759. The only major change from Southerne’s version was his deletion of the comic subplot. Later reproductions of Oroonoko generally followed Hawkesworth’s version of Southerne’s play, rather than Behn’s original storyline: they all cut the comic subplot because of contemporary audience expectations. The sexual innuendo and broad comedy accepted during the Restoration period was considered lowbrow and vulgar to the 18^th-century Sentimentalism crowd (Spencer 244-45). In an anonymous Prologue added to Hawkesworth’s play for its first performance, “Southerne is chastised for tainting the serious material with the comic: ‘Slave to custom in a laughing age, / With ribald mirth he stain’d the sacred page’” (qtd. in Trooboff 123).

Another change toward sentimentalism was the making of Oroonoko into a true tragic hero, deserving of pity and dying for love. Hawkesworth’s Oroonoko, like Southerne’s, cannot be encouraged to rebel by his friend Aboan alone, and is only compelled once Aboan’s urgings are combined with the thought of his unborn child with Imoinda. He goes further in becoming a victim of circumstances, however, by resolving not to strike first and by leaving his enemies alive at the end; after finally agreeing to lead the slave revolt, Oroonoko adds, “The Means that lead us to our Liberty / Must not be bloody – no – must not be bloody /… And not a Life shall fall” (3.2.249-260).

The play is not abolitionist, but it does evoke some of those feelings in its audiences by “emphasizing the brutality of the planters … creating sympathy for all the enslaved and not just for the noble prince” (Munns 181). The other slaves are given more lines and stage directions in this version, and emphasis is placed on the suffering caused by the entire system of slavery. For example, just before Oroonoko leads the rebellion, three slaves converse about their deplorable situation and their hope for Oroonoko to lead them to freedom:

2^nd Slav. … when I look

At him, and hear him talk, I think I’m free already.

3^rd Slav. Why aye, to be sure; such Men as he may do much.

2^nd Slav. Why we were all such Men, ‘till Slav’ry broke us.

(3.3.4-7)

Sentimentalism is certainly achieved by portraying all the slaves – not just princes – as human and emotional. This is a drastic change from Behn’s original novella, wherein the other slaves are portrayed at best as cowardly automatons.

Oroonoko was recreated again the following year by Francis Gentleman with his Oroonoko: or the Royal Slave, A Tragedy. Altered from Southerne. His play is actually altered from Hawkesworth’s version more than Southerne’s, as there is no comic subplot, and his additions are restricted to more sentimentalism and two new antagonists. Gentleman’s new characters are Massingano, a slave in Surinam whom Oroonoko had previously defeated and sold into slavery, and Zinzo, a newly arrived slave and cohort of Massingano. In this version, Massingano – with his desire for revenge – tricks Oroonoko into rebellion against the planters. The kind planter Blandford (first added to the play by Southerne as “Blanford” and kept in all subsequent versions as “Blandford”) comes to the rescue and stems the violence on both sides, making Oroonoko appear not only naive but also somewhat demure. His character takes another step on his path towards conventional protagonist and away from unique hero.

Yet another version of the play was written the same year by an anonymous playwright. Oroonoko, A Tragedy. Altered from the Original Play of that Name, Written by the late Thomas Southern, Esq. was published in 1760 but was never acted. The only major additions are those of new minor characters: Maria, daughter of the Lieutenant Governor and confidant of (still white) Imoinda, and Heartwell, President of the Council. The anonymously written version begins tending more toward anti-slavery, but is mostly simply patriotic (pro-British). Heartwell’s character, for instance, can be interpreted as the counterpart to the ruthless Lieutenant Governor, providing the play “with a benevolent representative of British colonial authority” (Spencer 252). In fact, the play still includes Oroonoko’s argument for slavery and the European slave trade. His rebellion seems directed not against slavery in general, but against the Lieutenant Governor in particular. It has been argued that this change in subtext was probably due to the era in which it was produced: the audience would have been “less troubled by Restoration and early 18^th-century concerns with anarchy and tyranny than by issues of order and riot” (Munns 183). The Lieutenant Governor’s actions are seen in this light as inciting riot and disorder and therefore worthy of the audience’s disdain.

By 1780s England, the anti-slavery movement was beginning to appear not just in newspapers and pamphlets, but also in literature, art, and poetry – and John Ferriar’s version of Oroonoko (entitled The Prince of Angola), published in 1788, was one of the stories that was reworked to fit the theme of the times (Spencer 224-58). Ferriar’s title page to the play even included a note on the usefulness of the arts in the abolitionist movement: “Drama is a powerful weapon in the war to change minds and redress a terrible grievance” (qtd. in Trooboff 125). In fact, older versions of the story were not just being rewritten but actually reinterpreted in their original forms to fit the perspective of contemporary audiences. In other words, “Oroonoko was being replaced by the Oroonoko myth” (Spencer 255). The first plays by Southerne and Hawkesworth were beginning to be perceived as abolitionist propaganda in and of themselves; therefore, Ferriar’s version was a logical extension of that trend.

This abolitionist version – like other contemporary anti-slavery writings, including the narrative of Olaudah Equiano – seems meant to personalize and individualize the suffering of slaves in order to more effectively engage the audience’s pity and thereby rouse them to action. The character of Blandford, for example, gives audiences a course to follow in Ferriar’s version by changing his own stand on the matter from benign acceptance of slavery to extreme abolitionist. When Blandford appears in the opening scene of the play, he speaks to the Lieutenant Governor not of abolishing slavery, but of treating the slaves in a more benevolent manner: “Give them proper food and sufficient cloaths; destroy your instruments of torture; abridge your overseers of the pleasure of the flogging” (1.1.24-26). After befriending Oroonoko, Blandford begins to see the wrongfulness of slavery and seems to speak directly to Ferriar’s audience when he cries to Oroonoko, “Your history / Must redden each European cheek with shame” (2.2.192-193). Finally, Blandford’s declaration to Stanmore (and the audience) in the last scene, moments after Oroonoko kills himself, exemplify his total commitment to the eradication of slavery: “But you who mutely eye this scene of horror, / Curse not the erring arm – the guilt is ours; / For deeds like these are slav’ry’s fruit; the chain / And bloody whip bring punishment upon us” (5.4.170-173).

While Ferriar’s is the first purposefully abolitionist version of the story, by the time Oroonoko is fully transformed to an anti-slavery play the character himself has lost his original powerful presence. Ferriar eliminates many of Oroonoko’s soliloquies, violent tendencies, and references to his African origins (along with any plot-complicating references to having owned or dealt with slaves in his own country), and in so doing, he creates a version of the character that has taken the final step in becoming an anonymous white stage hero in blackface. Almost nothing remains of the original Oroonoko’s personality at this point, and Ferriar’s incarnation of the story is compellingly yet merely a framework on which to establish his anti-slavery rhetoric.

In fact, Ferriar changes even the motivation of the other slaves in Surinam, who now give up the rebellion and turn on Oroonoko not because of their own low rank (and therefore character), as in Behn’s novella and the successive plays, but because of what they have been put through by the cruel and ruthless slave owners (as hinted at in Hawkesworth’s version). Where Behn writes Oroonoko’s scornful speech that the other slaves “were by Nature Slaves, … Dogs, treacherous and cowardly, fit for such Masters” (90), Southerne keeps the sentiment (and almost the exact words) with Oroonoko’s lines that they “were by Nature Slaves; Wretches design’d / To be their Master’s Dogs, and lick their Feet” (5.2.64-65). This exchange remains in the later plays, until Ferriar reverses the response and completely abandons the original speech, making Oroonoko speak first directly to his fellow slaves, and then address the Lieutenant Governor: “And is it thus? is this to be a Slave, / To be a man no more in ought but shape? / Now, Tyrants, I perceive your lashes cut, / Ev’n deeper than I knew; they mark the soul” (4.1.59-62). The surrendering slaves’ cowardice is portrayed not as their own fault, but the fault of slavery and those who practice it.

The numerous reproductions of Oroonoko have created countless changes, some of them major, such as the presence of the African continent, the race of Imoinda, and even Oroonoko’s motivation to revolt, and some of them minor, such as the presence of the narrator, the role of the other slaves, and the presence or absence of minor characters. Besides these factors of content, however, one could argue that the grandest changes of all were the transformations in Oroonoko’s subtext: the underlying reason for the work ebbs from monarchical justification to abolitionist appeal, while the hero himself morphs from dominant sovereign to demure slave.

Works Cited

Anonymous. “Oroonoko, A Tragedy. Altered from the Original Play of that Name,

Written by the late Thomas Southern, Esq.” Oroonoko: Adaptations and Offshoots. Ed. Susan B. Iwanisziw. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. 185-202.

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko. Ed. Catherine Gallagher. Boston: Bedford, 2000.

Ferriar, John. “The Prince of Angola.” Oroonoko: Adaptations and Offshoots. Ed. Susan

B. Iwanisziw. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. 203-257.

Gentleman, Francis. “Oroonoko: or the Royal Slave, A Tragedy. Altered from

Southerne.” Oroonoko: Adaptations and Offshoots. Ed. Susan B. Iwanisziw. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. 163-184.

Hawkesworth, John. “Oroonoko, A Tragedy, As it is now Acted at the Theatre-Royal in

Drury-Lane.” Oroonoko: Adaptations and Offshoots. Ed. Susan B. Iwanisziw. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. 104-162.

Munns, Jessica. “Reviving Oroonoko ‘in the scene’: From Thomas Southerne to ‘Biyi

Bandele.” Troping Oroonoko from Behn to Bandele. Ed. Susan B. Iwanisziw. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. 174-197.

Southerne, Thomas. “Oroonoko: A Tragedy.” Oroonoko: Adaptations and Offshoots. Ed.

Susan B. Iwanisziw. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. 1-80.

Spencer, Jane. Aphra Behn’s Afterlife. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.

Trooboff, Rhoda M. “Reproducing Oroonoko: A Case Study in Plagiarism, Textual

Parallelism, and Creative Borrowing.” Troping Oroonoko from Behn to Bandele. Ed. Susan B. Iwanisziw. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. 108-140.

Anne Sexton the Feminist

2012-05-01T21:20:00.000-07:00

A shining example of the postmodernist era, Anne Sexton displays a heavy dependence upon oral tradition and the spoken word in her poetry—along with almost every other major aspect of postmodernist style and themes. Her poems express irony, anger, and loneliness, and she takes on an intimate, almost confessional tone—popularized by the apparent movement of writers in the ’50s first to the psychiatrist’s office and then directly to the typewriter to share their most private findings with the world at large.

When Sexton’s contemporary Allen Ginsberg writes, “Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love,” he is reflecting the postmodernist feeling that our most human values—love, compassion, wonder—are threatened and even on the verge of extinction in our unfeeling, impassive modern culture. Sexton picks up this same line of thought and carries it further in the poem Self in 1958—her own reaction to the uniform “plasticness” of the people and the world around her. In this poem, Sexton seems to yearn for a real world, a real life, but is not able to even summon the emotions necessary for such an awakening anymore: “I would cry / … if I could remember how / and if I had the tears.” She is bearing witness to the so-called “death of feeling,” a very real postmodernist fear that the drive toward power, outward success, and the accumulation of wealth were stifling the truth of domestic feelings and personal emotions. Sexton is trapped in an unreal world; perfect in all appearances, but actually a sham—a cover-up so powerful that it becomes ultimately inescapable.

Sexton writes powerfully as a response to the pressures of gender role conformity (as in Self in 1958). She uses a kind of heated irony and dark humor (demonstrated piercing in Her Kind), and she often reveals the Freudian influence of imagining a horrific inner life, which she couples with confessional, “therapist’s couch” overtones (painfully illustrated in For My Lover, Returning to His Wife). She is also beautifully talented at utilizing her own, personal “voice” in natural American vernacular and intimate sounding speech (portrayed with heartbreaking exquisiteness in The Truth the Dead Know).

In an important contribution to the emerging admiration and respect for women in the literature world, Anne Sexton gives a brutally honest, painfully self-aware account of a woman’s life in “picture-perfect” 1950s suburbia. Opening the secret gates that kept the female sex locked into a mold of male-envisioned womanhood, Sexton reveals complex layers of excruciating confusion, stifled emotion, and suppressed needs: “What is reality / to this synthetic doll / who should smile, who should shift gears, / … and have no evidence of ruin or fears?”

Deconstructing the Boundary of Right/Wrong in Urban Black America

2012-04-24T20:44:00.000-07:00

Judgments seem to come quick and easy to most of us, especially when we look as outsiders onto a scene without regard for context or with only our own values and perceptions in mind. Marvella, the young, single, African American mother in Edward P. Jones’ short story, “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,” is painfully aware of the judgments being passed upon her by white passersby as she disciplines her children. She knows that those passing judgment are not privy to the entire situation, and that simply seeing a black woman scolding her children is deemed as wrong when taken out of context. Like those white passersby, the readers of Lost in the City, a collection of short stories by Jones, and the viewers of Do the Right Thing, the classic Spike Lee film on racial tension, may be quick to pass judgment on the characters’ actions that can hastily be assessed as wrong. If we do so, however, then we, too, are taking the actions out of context and without consideration of alternative viewpoints. Jones and Lee both strive in their works to illustrate the entire situation in which their characters find themselves. Though the actions taken may never be considered right, the context in which they occur and the alternative perspectives with which they are included are shown to be extremely significant, and the boundaries between right and wrong are so blurred that attempting to render any judgment is made into a nearly impossible and certainly unreasonable endeavor.

In “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed,” one of the first stories in Lost in the City, Cassandra mercilessly berates Melanie for liking boys, or, in Cassandra’s words, for being “the leader of … girls [who] pull down their panties and give up the booty just cause some boy is cute” (48). She yells and swears at Melanie so much that Melanie eventually gets out of the car and begins to walk home in order to escape being subjected to this treatment by her friend any longer. Was Cassandra wrong to treat her friend this way? Did she go so far in her criticism of Melanie that her point can no longer be seen as right, but simply as harsh and cruel? The text seems to tell us otherwise. During the events leading up to this schism between friends, Cassandra (and the reader) see an endless parade of women whose hopes and dreams for their future lives had been broken by the realities of single parenthood. The entire car trip takes place due to a request by Gladys’ recently single mother, who Gladys holds up as cruelly wronged by her father. On their way to Anacostia, the girls meet with Pearl and Joyce, two pregnant teenagers who recently dropped out of high school and who are visibly distressed by their situation. Cassandra, who grew up in a broken home of her own, reacts strongly to these women’s predicaments. When her actions are seen with this context in mind, Cassandra seems merely to be reacting as per her usual principles to Melanie’s habitual flirtatiousness. Her admonishments are a form of tough love, meant to protect Melanie from a future that Cassandra sees as terrifying and hopeless. This may not make her methods right, but it certainly casts doubt on their being judged as wrong.

In the next story, “Young Lions,” we meet a criminal named Caesar. Caesar turned to his life of crime as a teen and seems to feel little, if any, regret about his immoral and illegal actions. However, even this supposedly hardened criminal is shown in a light that many of us would generally never take the time to consider. Caesar is capable of showing a surprisingly sensitive side at times: he doesn’t like the sound of Manny’s voice because Manny always sounds “inappropriate” and “obscene” (56); when he breaks into his father’s house to retrieve his things, he lovingly touches and looks at family heirlooms and trinkets; he pays close attention to a tourist family’s interactions while visiting DC; he is conscious of the innocence and child-like wonder of the retarded people he watches; and he often thinks of his dead mother and is even moved by his cousin Angelo’s gesture of stealing flowers for her grave. None of this is enough to redeem Caesar’s shortcomings, but it does create a rounded portrait of a whole man rather than a flat stereotype of a tough criminal. Caesar is revealed to be lonely, scared, and unsure of himself—as when he is frightened by being shut out of the house by his father. This is a particularly important scene, as it portrays a transitional moment in his life both from childhood to adulthood and from innocence to crime: Caesar was kicked out by his father and taken in by a criminal, who then acted as a role model for him during an impressionable age and a transitional time in his life. Caesar is indeed a malicious and corrupt young man, but can we really step in and judge him instantly as being entirely bad? Is there ever a circumstance that could justify such behavior as his? Jones does not attempt to answer these questions, but he seems determined to raise enough complications to suspend any snap judgments on the reader’s part.

Another young man whose course in life was forever altered by his father’s actions appears in “The Sunday Following Mother’s Day.” Sam Williams leaves his sister and aunt—the only family he knows—and begins acting violently (getting into bar fights) and using women as objects (hiring prostitutes). His choices could be considered questionable at best, depraved at worst. However, as with the other situations we have examined, we cannot judge Sam’s actions solely on their own grounds, without a bigger perspective. Sam was a young and impressionable ten-year-old boy when his father brutally murdered his mother and subsequently left the family (for prison). Even though he views his father as reprehensible, Sam has no other male figure from whom to learn. Therefore, his later actions in life can be seen as shaped at least in part by both a traumatic experience as a child and the lack of a suitable father figure as he grew up. Either of these alone would certainly be enough to make Sam’s choices understandable; put together, they make Sam a sympathetic character—and attempting to draw negative conclusions about him becomes an absurd pursuit.

Sometimes the reasons for a character’s actions are not so clear at first glance. In the title story of Jones’ collection, Lydia—a wealthy lawyer—habitually lies about who she is to the men with whom she sleeps. When she is woken in the night, she actually resorts to leafing through her day planner in order to remember who is in her bed, and she does not know the name she used with the man until he calls her “Cynthia,” at which point she recalls the lines she had given him the night before: “My name is Cynthia and I come from Washington” (143). Is Lydia a bad person for treating men this way? Is lying to them wrong? Certainly some may come to Lydia’s defense simply because she is a woman, though the same people would think that a man acting that way toward women is undoubtedly blameworthy. However, even if we place Lydia on a level playing field with men, there are still signals within the rest of the text that point to a reasonable explanation for her behavior. Lydia is rich and lives in a nice gated community in the Southwest area of DC. Her mother had once told her that she “knew folks who lived in Southwest before they threw the colored out and made it for the wealthy” (147). This comment highlights the fact that Lydia is out of place where she lives. As the cab driver follows Lydia’s request to get her “lost in the city” (148), he drives deeper and deeper into the black neighborhoods with which Lydia is intimately familiar. Yet she is not at home here, either, and her wealth would make her out of place in the poor community in which she grew up. She realizes that she has no links to her past, that “in the world there was now no one from whom she could get that full medical history” or “write down her mother’s recipe for that wondrous beef stew” (148-149). In short, Lydia has no sense of personal identity, making it impossible for her to supply that identity to the men she picks up. Lydia cannot be judged for her failure to provide others with her true identity when she is not capable of supplying it even to herself.

Two other women in Jones’ stories act out of feelings of frustrated expectations and lost hopes. In “Gospel,” Vivian proclaims herself a good Christian woman, yet she shows spiteful envy toward her best friend, Diane, for having a desirable lover. It would be easy to say that Vivian is wrong to be envious, but through her memories the reader learns that she has always held an ideal figure of a gentleman in her heart, and that her yearning for such a man has remained unfulfilled through five unsuccessful marriages. Seeing Diane achieve Vivian’s own lifelong dream is too much for her to bear, and her reaction to the situation becomes tolerable, if not particularly right. In a story about another, similarly disappointed woman, Marie finds herself battling the Social Security Administration for her SSI checks. At the end of her patience one day, she slaps the receptionist, Vernelle—obviously not a particularly good action to take. But it is only after this takes place that the reader slowly begins to learn Marie’s history. Marie had come to the city as a very young woman, with dreams handed down from her mother “that everything could be done in Washington, that a human bein could take all they troubles to Washington and things would be right” (241). When Marie moved there, her mother thought she “had managed to make it to heaven” (241). However, after a lifetime in the city, Marie is haunted by a “sense of loss” (240), and the city has turned out to be not heaven, but an endless supply of difficulties and frustrations. Slapping Vernelle was not so much a malicious act toward the woman, but a reaction to the dashing of a lifetime of hopes…and who are we to judge that?

In Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, the entire film seems determined to set the viewer up for a conflict of sympathies. Each ethnic group portrayed in the film is shown in an unbiased light, and each of their concerns is played out as understandable—even the most heinous actions are ultimately seen as almost inevitable and hard to judge as either right or wrong, given the circumstances. For example, Buggin Out would have us believe that it is racist and wrong of Sal to not hang any pictures of African Americans on the wall of his restaurant. However, throughout the film we are reminded that Sal, an Italian American and private business owner, has as much right to be proud of his own heritage (and to show that pride within his own restaurant) as any African American has a right to be proud of his or her heritage. Should Sal be punished or condemned for showing pride in his ethnicity, when that is exactly what Buggin Out wants to do? Perhaps he is not entirely in the right by not showing appreciation for his customers, but he certainly cannot be considered wrong for showing appreciation for his culture.

At the same time, it could be argued that Buggin Out is wrong for boycotting Sal’s because of the lack of black representation on the walls. Given the argument above, Buggin Out may be seen as a troublemaker for disturbing the peace and hindering a man’s business for what could be considered no good reason. Again, we see through other signs in the film that the answer is no quite so unambiguous. Buggin Out feels that the predominantly African American clientele of Sal’s is underappreciated, so he uses Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent protest techniques, which are generally viewed as commendable, to show his displeasure with the situation. He, like Sal, displays his feelings through his First Amendment right to freedom of speech. It would seem, in this case, that both men are in the right.

Of course, the argument escalates and does not end in the relatively diplomatic and law-abiding way in which it began. Eventually, Radio confronts Sal in a more aggressive manner and Sal reacts by destroying Radio’s boom box. Surely Sal is wrong for reacting with such violent behavior in a situation that was, at the time, still nonviolent (if not exactly peaceful). Nevertheless, this action, too, is portrayed in moral shades of grey rather than clear black and white. It must be remembered that Sal is running a place of business and has every right to refuse service to a customer who is disrupting the peace and acting as belligerently as Radio was; in this case, Sal did try persuasion and threats before resorting to destruction of the boom box. Still, was destruction necessary? Obviously, Sal felt personally threatened by the powerful African American man before him (as demonstrated by camera angles that show Radio from below, making him look larger, and Sal from above, making him look small and vulnerable) and by the community that was rising up behind Radio and his cause (again, seen in the camera angles and rapid cuts between shots of Sal and the crowd). If we are to believe Malcolm X’s statement that violence as self-defense is acceptable, perhaps Sal’s actions at this point can be seen as acceptable as well.

Even so, those actions do lead to more violence, and Radio ends up being killed by the police. The African American community takes this as an outrage, and they believe that the officers are completely and reprehensibly wrong. It would be very easy to agree with that sentiment, but Lee refrains from doing so. He is careful to show that the police officers were outnumbered by an angry mob on the brink of rioting, and that it took three of them just to subdue the extremely large and strong Radio. With racial tension high, the white officers undoubtedly felt threatened by the angry black crowd around them and were concentrating on keeping Radio from fighting and starting an actual riot. Nevertheless, we have to ask ourselves: If Radio had been white, would they have held him so tightly or for so long? Perhaps not, and if this is the case, Radio’s death was due to his skin color—but it still occurred in an impossible situation and was obviously accidental. This does not excuse the officers or make Radio’s death right by any means, but it does confuse the issue enough to say that we cannot judge it as simply and clearly wrong, either.

Finally, we reach the climax of the film and an action that poses possibly the most difficult question of right and wrong with which the viewer has to struggle: Mookie throwing the trash can through Sal’s restaurant window. Although the action is certainly not as serious as killing a man, the reasons and arguments for and against Mookie taking this action are so ambiguous that it is nearly impossible to decide whether it was the right thing to do—which is exactly the response Lee was aiming for. Throughout most of the film, Mookie tries following Dr. King’s admonition to maintain nonviolence; but at this point, after Radio was killed and Sal’s restaurant seemed to be the cause of his friend’s death, Mookie turns to Malcolm X’s claim that resorting to violence in self-defense is necessary and even vital. Mookie, like the police officers and so many others in Lee’s film and Jones’ stories, found himself in an impossible situation, torn between doing what he thought was the “right thing” by holding down a job for Sal despite his friends’ protests over Sal’s perceived racial discrimination, and doing what those friends thought was the “right thing” by showing Sal that he cannot expect to get away with racial discrimination in an ethnic neighborhood. When both of these tensions came to a head after Radio’s death, Mookie did what he felt was an act of self-defense on behalf of Radio and the black community by retaliating against the cause of Radio’s death. Whether his act was right or wrong is, once again, impossible to judge.

Edward P. Jones and Spike Lee show us through their works that even ideals such as right and wrong, that may at first seem clearly black and white, are not so unambiguous after all. There is no right/wrong binary, but only various points on an infinite continuum of morality. Like the white onlookers in the train station, judging Marvella on her parenting techniques without any knowledge of the whole situation, many of us often find ourselves coming to conclusions for which we have no basis. We are encouraged by Jones and Lee to open our minds to other perspectives, to consider that there is always more to a situation than we can easily gauge, and to remember that right and wrong are as subjective as light and dark, warm and cool, or simple and complex.

Works Cited

Do the Right Thing. Dir. Spike Lee. Perf. Spike Lee, Danny Aiello, Giancarlo Esposito, John

Turturro. 2001. DVD. 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, 1989.

Jones, Edward P. Lost in the City. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

Social Criticism in "Midnight News"

2012-04-17T21:55:00.003-07:00

The beautifully crafted science fiction short story, Midnight News, by Lisa Goldstein, is not only an endlessly entertaining tale of invasion from outer space, it also offers a sharp criticism of modern American and Western culture. In it, just below the surface of the tale, Goldstein satirizes everything from the power of the media to the ways in which seniors and women are treated, from violence on television to crime and war between nations. Amid the seemingly outrageous circumstance of aliens threatening humankind’s very existence, Goldstein forces us to take a much harder look at that existence—and what we find isn’t always pretty.

The story begins with the arrival of an alien force with massive powers of destruction, whose first order of business is not to go to the president or the military or any other obvious choice for the leaders of our world, but to the media. After apparently observing the human race for a month, they call a meeting, “and only twenty reporters would be allowed on board” (Goldstein 820). Already, we have a potent statement on the condition of our country: the highest status of authority and influence belongs not to the government, but to the press. Whether or not this is a good thing depends entirely on the press itself, of course, but today’s mass media seems obsessed with sensationalism and pop culture—perhaps not always the best “news” for the public interest.

Next in the story, we are introduced to the aliens’ choice for humanity’s savior: eighty-four year old Helena Johnson. Here, too, Goldstein subtly portrays the conditions to which we subject our elders. Helena was found living alone and neglected “in a state-sponsored nursing home” (821) in Arizona, going without treatment for an ulcer on her leg and without diagnosis of her hearing loss. We also learn, from Helena’s stories of her past, about the unsavory situations in which a woman in America is placed throughout her lifetime. She speaks of circumstances still commonly occurring to this day, such as sexual harassment at her workplace and being left by her husband to raise her son alone. She talks of the ingratitude of that son, who “left [her as] soon as he could get a job” (822), and of the difficulties of life “growing up during the Depression” (823).

Perhaps even more telling than her anecdotes, however, is the reaction that she gets to these stories from the male reporters; that of disdain, impatience, scorn, and repulsion. “She’s a horror” (823), one of the reporters says of Helena, and “She’s senile, on top of everything else” (819). As an elderly woman, Helena recognizes that nobody honestly cares about her; she comments that “none of [the reporters] were interested” (827) in her, and that they only listened to her stories in order to placate her, in the hopes of gaining something from it.

And listen they do. The world seems to stop for Helena’s benefit: “newspapers stopped reporting crime and wars—crime and wars had, in fact, nearly disappeared” (821). Goldstein attempts to prove the pointlessness of war and strife among nations by demonstrating that when working together for a common good, the countries of world no longer have the time or energy to spend warring with one another. Crime comes to a standstill in the face of greater and more pressing needs; in this case, that of pleasing the old woman into making the choice they want.

In the end, Helena is influenced by a question that the young female reporter, Gorce, had posed about her feelings on being forced into making the ultimate judgment on the fate of the world, on “the way [the aliens] want to make our decisions for us” (826). She decides not to decide; she has learned from the mistakes of others, and she knows firsthand what it feels like to have someone else make the most important decisions of her life for her. She says, “All my life, people have decided for me . . . but that’s all over with now” (828), and she refuses to provide an answer.

Sadly, despite everything he could have learned from this woman, the male reporter, Stevens, seems to have gleaned nothing from the experience, and he walks away from the entire situation treating his female coworker in exactly the same manner that Helena had been treated all her life, deciding not to go out with Gorce because she was “too bony, and her chin and forehead were too long” (828-829), while completely disregarding her intelligence and personality.

All of this deeper meaning makes Goldstein’s story into so much more than a formulaic sci-fi tale of alien invasion—it makes us actually contemplate our own lives and lifestyles, in our own, current era, and perhaps it even has the power to influence a little change for the better.

Work Cited

Goldstein, Lisa. “Midnight News.” The Norton Book of Science Fiction. Ed. Ursula K.

Leguin. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993. 819-829.

The Original American Scholar

2012-04-10T20:05:00.001-07:00

In1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson published an address called The American Scholar, in which he expressed his strong opinions of just who this American scholar should be. In his address, he encompasses what the scholar’s ideal influences are and what his moral duties as a learned man include. Seven years later, in 1845, Henry David Thoreau undertook a two year experiment of living by himself in a small cabin in the woods by Walden Pond. Here, Thoreau lived the life of Emerson’s American Scholar, presumably without that particular intention in mind, and later wrote a detailed description of his time in the woods in his masterpiece, Walden. Using only these two great authors’ own works as evidence, and measured against each point that Emerson makes in The American Scholar, Thoreau can be used as a perfect and obvious illustration of this model Man Thinking.

Emerson asks us to “consider [the scholar] in reference to the main influences he receives” (515). Among these influences are nature, books, and action, by which the scholar is to have obtained his education and is to continually expand his knowledge of the world around him. In each of these methods, we find that Thoreau is inherently versed; as he expresses his personal opinions, principles, and actions in Walden, he is unwittingly symbolizing everything that Emerson wished to see in his own ideal scholar.

Nature is considered by both Emerson and Thoreau to be the most essential influence that a man can ever have, one that stays with him throughout his entire life because of his relationship to and in nature. As Emerson says, it is “the first in time and the first in importance. . . Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. . . . The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages” (515). Thoreau, too, was completely convinced of the significance of nature in our lives, and of the link that nature provides us to our past and, therefore, to the primal soul of mankind. Speaking of man’s basic need of shelter, Thoreau writes,

We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold. . . . It was the natural yearning of that portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in us. (615)

He goes on to lament the fact that most contemporary societies are moving away from their ancestral connection to the wilderness, and that consequently, “We know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think” (615). His ideas in this respect are closely related to Emerson’s thoughts on the scholar’s relationship with nature, and how that relationship is of utmost importance. Thoreau seemed to believe that modern man knows nothing about life in its most essential sense, because he has never truly experienced the life that occurs in nature. He thought that reliance on new technologies and advancements was in fact detrimental to a scholar’s life, which should be spent in pursuit of higher meaning and higher gratification than that allowed by the lifetime of toil required to supply those luxuries: “For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors” (Thoreau 607).

Another significant connection to mankind’s history, and a second influence necessary for the American Scholar’s educational background, is to be found in books. Emerson considers books to contain “the mind of the Past” (516), because the authors of ancient texts transformed the world around them into their own visions and then put these visions into manuscripts, which can be accessed even today as a glimpse into the past. As Emerson himself so beautifully describes the process of an author’s labor, “[The world] came into him life; it went out from him truth. It came to him shortlived actions; it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it went from him poetry” (516). However, he also warns that the reader should not rely solely on books for his opinions on the ways and workings of the universe. The scholar must always be careful to use books only for motivation and to formulate his own views and hypotheses instead of merely reciting others’ which he has read. “Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst . . . They are for nothing but to inspire” (Emerson 517).

Thoreau, also considering the impact of books, mourns the fact that the crumbling remains of the great architecture from ancient civilizations are more revered than the works of the brilliant minds that came from the same era. “It should not be by their architecture, but why not even by their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves? How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta [sic] than all the ruins of the East!” (630) It is apparent throughout all of Thoreau’s writings that he relies heavily upon his knowledge of the works of significant historic novelists, dramatists, scientists, and theologians. In the true manner of Emerson’s American Scholar, though, these authors’ texts are invariably used only as an introduction for his own views and to exemplify his own ideas.

The final influence that Emerson mentions is that of action. He states that one cannot learn through books alone, and speaks about living life as directly related to understanding it, or even being the inspiration for us to strive for understanding. We cannot write well without having some knowledge of what we write about, and we cannot have that knowledge without experience, and through experience we gain character enough to write well. As Emerson put it so succinctly, “Life is our dictionary” (519). All authors’ best—if not only—work originates from events in their lives, usually ones that affected them greatly and personally, and years of reflection upon those past experiences. Emerson says of the scholar, “Without [action] he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen into truth . . . Only so much do I know, as I have lived” (518); meaning that one cannot truly know that part of life which one has not experienced. Thoreau almost repeats Emerson’s words exactly in his interpretation of the usefulness of action in a student’s life:

I mean that [students] should not play life, or study it merely . . . but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? . . . Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month—the boy who had made his own jack-knife from the ore which he had dug and smelted . . . or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile? (627-628)

Not to be so shallow as to speak such words and hold such views hypocritically, Thoreau undertook to prove this very idea when he lived his own “experiment” at Walden Pond. In building his own home, growing his own food, and sustaining and supporting himself wholly, Thoreau was determined to prove that this was not just a theory by living the lifestyle which he know in his heart to be better. The very fact that he did this epitomizes the ideal behavior an American Scholar should exhibit: “[Living] is a total act. Thinking is a partial act” (Emerson 520).

Emerson went on in his address on the American Scholar to comment on some of what he called the scholar’s “duties.” These are qualities that the scholar should possess and traits that he should exhibit, which will prove to elevate him above the inconsistent character of society. Above and throughout the scholar’s duties is that of self-trust: “It becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and only he knows the world . . . In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended” (Emerson 521). Thoreau did not seem to have a problem with this particular virtue. Some critics have gone so far as to call him arrogant, though the case is more likely that he was simply a brilliant man with an idea that he had supreme faith in and wished to share. In one line he writes, “I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely” (Thoreau 638). This one sentence encapsulates Thoreau’s convictions, his experiment at Walden Pond, and his subsequent writings on the same in a minimally basic yet impeccable manner.

The first duty that Emerson lists as being an essential attribute of the American Scholar is the “slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation” (Emerson 520). Emerson considers it the scholar’s responsibility to “guide men by showing them facts” (520), to give up a life of social interaction and companionship in favor of a life of learning, of examining, of cataloguing the world for the benefit of all humanity. He could easily be describing Thoreau in his cabin at Walden Pond when he says,

In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time—happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly . . . He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature . . . He is the world’s eye. He is the world’s heart. (Emerson 521)

We can clearly see Thoreau in this passage, patiently and steadfastly cutting timber for his home, leveling the ground for its foundation, carting rocks from the pond for his chimney, clearing a field for planting, harvesting his crops, and baking his bread over an open fire in the rain. Through it all, he was content to observe the natural world around him, and to compare the surrounding environment to that of civilization, which he renounced for over two years. Thoreau was unceasingly fascinated by nature’s wonders: “So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind . . . For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms” (610), and he was appreciative of the close interrelationship between abstract science and tangible nature: “The same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours . . . The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! . . . Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions” (606). Observation was a talent that Thoreau not only excelled at, but also thoroughly enjoyed.

Finally, Emerson listed as a duty of the scholar the virtue of being both free and brave. It was his opinion that “fear always springs from ignorance” (521), and therefore the scholar, by his very definition, should never be allowed to show fear or cowardice, as this would betray him as something less than scholarly. Hence, the American Scholar must not run and hide from danger but face it head on and scrutinize it; “Let him look into its eye and search its nature, inspect its origin . . . he will then find himself a perfect comprehension of its nature . . . and can henceforth defy it and pass on superior” (522). Thoreau, again, obviously felt this same way. He, too, believed that men fear what they do not understand, and that knowledge and understanding are the greatest tools a person can possess. Speaking of the “lives of quiet desperation” (605) that he believed most of society to lead, Thoreau says, “The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well nigh incurable form of disease . . . When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis” (606-607). He plainly believed that courage stems from comprehension, furthering Emerson’s supposition that a scholar, given his nature, should necessarily be brave.

Thus, when compared with each of Emerson’s key concepts of the fundamental influences and duties of the American Scholar, Thoreau is the perfect embodiment of these ideals: his influences of nature, books, and action are portrayed again and again throughout Walden, as is his belief in the importance of self-trust, observation, and bravery as the essential duties of an intellectual mind. If Emerson was looking for someone to fill the role that he laid out in The American Scholar, he need have looked no further than his own backyard to find Thoreau, the Man Thinking at Walden Pond.

Works Cited

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” The Harper Single Volume American

Literature. Eds. Donald McQuade, et al. New York: Longman, 1999. 514-525.

Thoreau, Henry David. “Walden.” The Harper Single Volume American Literature. Eds.

Donald McQuade, et al. New York: Longman, 1999. 602-696.

Walt Whitman, A Kosmos

2012-04-03T07:41:00.001-07:00

Reading the poetry of Walt Whitman is a unique experience. His poetry extends far above and beyond the reach of most other contemporary poets because of the vast scope that his work encompasses. He not only writes about life, but he virtually lives life within his poems—they resonate with his very essence; they are overflowing with the powerful force of his life. Whitman was so incredibly alive, and so incredibly aware of life, that life itself is imbedded in everything he wrote.

A particular favorite poem of mine that Whitman wrote is I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing. This poem is beautiful in its simplicity and its undemanding tone, and yet it is simultaneously wonderfully complex. First, it is a nature poem, which I adore; nature poetry is easily my favorite kind, and Whitman does an exquisite job with it in this particular piece. The descriptive quality is absolutely perfect, and he paints a magnificent mental picture of a giant mossy oak standing alone in the swamplands of the South. But the real miracle of this poem is how seamlessly Whitman transcends the basic descriptive nature poem and turns it into so much more—he ties this tree in to his own soul; he relates it to himself, and in it he sees his own qualities as well as others. In anthropomorphizing the oak, he makes it both representative of himself and a contrast to his own needs and desires—he admires the tree for its sturdy stature, then proceeds to admire it for the differences it shows from him: that it stands alone, “solitary,” with no one near to keep it company, which he himself could never do.

Whitman marvelously turns this nature poem inward, forming something that is both descriptive and introspective at once. This is a wholly amazing feat to accomplish, and yet he does it so flawlessly, so eloquently, so tantalizingly, and most of all, so beautifully.

It is obvious throughout Whitman’s work how much he purely loved life and everything in it—people, nature, art, weather, buildings, animals—and how he seems to have found joy and beauty in everything he saw, felt, smelled, and heard, but I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing brings out another quality: his almost child-like wonder of the world, which is his most endearing trait of all. It celebrates his connection and intimacy with nature and with his natural, “primal” self, both of which made him the irrepressible, irresistible man that was “Walt Whitman, a kosmos.”

Clashes and Commonalities in "The Man to Send Rain Clouds"

2012-04-02T12:26:00.002-07:00

Although I have written about Leslie Marmon Silko’s brilliant work, The Man to Send Rain Clouds, at least once before, there is something I find simply irresistible about this story’s timeless and universal pull toward something greater, something just beyond perception. Every time I reread the story, I feel as Father Paul does as he sprinkles the holy water over Teofilo’s red blanket – that an element of the experience seems almost familiar, that something about it is tugging at the back of my mind and yearning to be heard and understood.

While there is a striking “clash of cultures” presented in this story between the missionary Franciscans and the native Pueblos, I do not think that it would be truly accurate to describe the occurrence as a clash of values. The story centers on these two vastly different cultures’ unique traditions involving burial of the dead, and we are able to perceive through Silko’s gentle and unassuming narrative that both the Priest and the old man’s family are primarily concerned about Teofilo’s well-being in the afterlife. Indeed, they may have completely differing views of what that afterlife is like, but they both agree on the major leap of faith that it does exist, and that what they do to the body now will affect how the soul proceeds after burial. Taken from a viewpoint of neither Christianity nor Native American mythology, these two clashing cultures seem to be in a near harmony of values – their major concern is the same, and the minor differences between their desires occur only in the actual undertaking of individual ceremonial rituals.

Given this understanding of the story, it takes on an almost entirely new meaning. The heart of the story lies in its universal humanity; Silko is portraying what it is to be human, to care for each other, to deal with agonizing issues of life and death and who we are and where we may go. Whatever force there is in the world that drives us to religion, she shows us, has driven every culture in the history of mankind. We are not so different after all. All cultures, no matter how far separated by time and space, have come to the same answers – that there is a force greater than us in the universe, and that we continue on in some form after death. The Man to Send Rain Clouds presents for us not a story of conflicting values, but of universal ones; reading this work, we see that both the Pueblos and Father Paul are able to overcome their personal differences in the face of something higher than either of them. They come together for the good of someone they have cared about in life, putting aside worldly disparities and focusing, just for the moment, on their mutual love and concern. Ultimately, instead of telling a tale of strife, clashing cultures, differing values, conflict, or intolerance, Silko gives us a beautiful account of one thing we all share – our humanity.

The Inane Life of Walter Mitty

2012-04-01T17:24:00.001-07:00

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” takes place in one short winter afternoon and shows us the fantasies of an unhappy man. The story begins with Mitty and his wife driving through slushy roads into town, as Mitty imagines he is the commander of a Navy hydroplane and his wife admonishes him to drive more slowly. From there we follow along on Mitty’s mini-adventures of the mind throughout his day of errands, as he becomes a famous surgeon, a defendant in a trial, a skilled dogfighter in Europe, and, at the last, a condemned man up against a firing squad—anything to escape his wife’s nagging and his own uneventful life.

With this story, what could have easily been a confusing or disconcerting work has instead proven itself to be involved and clever. It was very well written, with perfectly timed and flawless transitions between reality and fantasy; for example, soon after Mrs. Mitty mentions Dr. Renshaw, Mitty drives by a hospital, which invokes a fantasy about being a skilled physician. Later, he hears a newsboy shouting out headlines about a current trial, and Mitty imagines he is involved in a major case as a rogue defendant. And so on. The wordplay is always perfect, the details always tie in nicely to the rest of the story, and the unity is always impeccable.

Having said that, I didn’t care much for this story. I agree that it is indeed a well-crafted piece of work, and I am not, as some modern feminists seem to be, insulted or offended by reading it. I think that the story is timeless, which is why it is still widely read and included in anthologies, but it seemed a bit too commonplace to be really provocative. Other enduring subjects, such as love, hate, conflict, etc., are about the deepest emotions, which we can all relate to—the “human condition.” To me, the subject of husbands and wives nagging and/or ignoring each other, while entertaining to the rest of us, is not truly worthy of being called “great.”

Perhaps we could stretch our literary imaginations as far as Mitty does, and we could claim that this story is about a feeling of being trapped in our situations and not knowing how to change the world outside, instead resorting to altering our perceptions. It could also be about the duality within us all, and the inner conflict between our own personalities: our perceived selves versus our presented selves. However, I don’t believe this is what Thurber had in mind when he wrote “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” I think he wrote a story about a man who would rather be anywhere than with his nagging wife, and he did a perfect and humorous job—it simply didn’t strike me as being particularly moving, inspiring, or thought-provoking.

Death and Dickinson

2012-03-31T16:27:00.000-07:00

Emily Dickinson is endlessly fascinating, both as a poet and as a human being. Her unique style of poetry and her reclusive behavior have spawned controversy after controversy for the past hundred years. One thing I find interesting to note is that her poems were barely published while she was alive; in fact, she wished all her papers burned after her death, and it is only because her sister went against her wishes that we are lucky enough to know of Emily Dickinson’s talent.

Dickinson seems obsessed with the dangerously narrow lines between life and death, existence and oblivion, heaven and earth, mortality and eternity. Ironically, since they are so closely associated now, her poems give the reader almost the exact opposite feeling than does the poetry of Walt Whitman—her hymn-like words echo with thoughts that are dark, lonely, enclosed, oppressive, and introspective, as opposed to his bright, exuberant, lively, and almost bawdy verses. Reading their poems one after another is nearly an experience of night versus day, or even simply loud versus quiet.

Dickinson often meditates on the interconnectedness of life, death, nature, and religion (and all combinations of these themes) in her poems, and she presents these ideas beautifully by taking a moment in life and then describing a tiny detail or a unique view of the scene, giving the reader a strange perspective, and perhaps, in this way, inviting one to look closer, with fresh eyes and open minds, at everyday life and experiences.

She certainly seems to have done this herself: in her work, she will take note of and describe the smallest essentials of existence—a dust mote, a fly, a shaft of light, frost on a flower—and then use these minutiae to open up the idea of far greater truths; of the fundamental questions of life (and death) itself. For example, in “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—” Dickinson relates death, the greatest unknown, the last true mystery, to the most negligible everyday occurrence in the room. In the instance of death, the tiniest sound or movement is amplified and brought to the forefront of awareness as being of the utmost importance. Everything is portrayed as interconnected in the most vital of ways—everything is part of the web of life.

To me, the most significant aspect of Dickinson’s poetry is her ability to write on such a deep and personal level that it touches a part of the soul that is shared by all of us. The raw emotions that she is able to portray so vividly—so eloquently—are those with which everyone can relate, which everyone has felt at some time before, and are, therefore, those which possess us and grip our imagination in such a way that only experience and remembrance can. When Dickinson writes, “Pain—has an Element of Blank— / It cannot recollect / When it begun—or if there were / A time when it was not—” who is not able to relate to those words? Who is not torn apart by those feelings, by the memory of such a pain that overwhelms all else? The poem is so simple, and yet so deeply, fundamentally true—it works its way to the very core of the soul, only to find itself already there.

A Violent Outlook is Easy to Find

2012-03-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” by Flannery O’Connor, is a story about a self-righteous woman known as “The Grandmother,” her son Bailey, and his family. None of the characters are made particularly lovable, but they are all believable as they set out on a road trip to Florida for a family vacation. Along the way, partially due to the Grandmother’s senility and obstinacy, the car overturns on a dusty back road, leaving the family injured and stranded. Finding them there is an escaped convict called “The Misfit,” whose gang gradually executes the family members while he and the Grandmother discuss redemption. The story ends after the Misfit shoots and kills the Grandmother, remarking of her attitude for the last moments of her life that “She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

This story portrays the search for God, and represents the Grandmother as a standard Christian woman who believes in her own virtue as much or more than she believes in the power of Christ. What she doesn’t realize is that she is in need of salvation every bit as much as the Misfit is, and only in the last seconds of her life, when she instinctively reaches out to the Misfit in pure love and kindness, does she really know what it means to be saved and thereby gains her standing in God’s graces.

O’Connor attempts to show us that being prim and proper does not necessarily make one spiritual, and, conversely, that being spiritual does not exclude one from a life of crime and antipathy. The Misfit, as a polar opposite to the Grandmother, is deeply spiritual but not a believer; he wishes he could believe in his Savior and know that God is going to take care of him in the end, but he cannot bring himself to accept faith, and he therefore surmises that without God, there is no point in compassion.

“A Good Man” does make its point clear to the reader, and in O’Connor’s world, seemingly, there is no other way to get these characters to reveal their true emotions and identities than through violence. I find this hard to believe, however, and am vaguely disturbed that so many people would think it true. Violence does, indeed, alter our attitudes and behaviors, but does it really make known whom we are inside? I propose that possibly mere bad luck, not physical violence, reveals a person’s true character. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” Notice that he did not say, “…in times of extreme violence.” In conclusion, I found that the violence in this story merely detracted from the basic concepts that O’Connor was trying to get across, and rather than engaging me in the ideas presented, the grotesqueness of it alienated me from the entire account.

Robert Frost: American Poet

2012-03-29T12:13:00.000-07:00

Robert Frost is as beloved an American icon as apple pie, as revered an American figure as Neil Armstrong, and as talented an American poet as Edgar Allen Poe. Though he may be popular because of the accessibility and seeming simplicity of his poetry, Frost never fails to hold our attention as we peer deeper, owing to the actual complexity and insightfulness he intricately winds into his lyrically mesmerizing poems. Frost manages to seamlessly blend traditionalist poetic styles and forms with modernist ones, and the result is unforgettable poetry that displays an uncanny ability to be at once personal and universal; immediate and timeless.

Frost’s poetry can be considered traditional in both its form and its subject matter. He carefully and meticulously constructed his poems, using rhyme and meter religiously—in fact, he openly opposed the use of free verse—and he wrote about such topics as would seem rooted in transcendentalist thought. His works consist predominantly of nature poetry, with many links to the transcendentalist theme of spirituality found in and of the natural world—as in the temptation of a nearly attainable great truth or divinity waiting in the mirrored surface of still water, portrayed tauntingly in “For Once, Then, Something.” He also held a deeply heartfelt and moving appreciation of the beauty to be discovered in small, everyday scenes, items, or occurrences—such as the observation of the eternal loveliness of snow falling gently on dark trees in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” or the indulgent joy found in spotting a grove of birch trees and imagining childhood pleasures, as affectionately described in “Birches.”

For all this, Frost was also inarguably a product of the modernist era. His visually descriptive poems, along with their great respect of natural splendor and consciousness of the divine in the world around us, take on a new, modern twist; he fears, it seems, that the divinity he sees imbuing nature may not care about him—that the powerful forces at work in the universe mightn’t be so benevolent and loving after all… We can almost see his heartbreaking transition from hopeful to discouraged by noting the difference in tone from the calmly joyous “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” to the desperately frightened and lonely “Desert Places,” written 13 years later. The unsympathetic “rage” of the ocean in “Once by the Pacific” is a reminder that Mother Earth believes in tough love at best, or even that God may be angry and vengeful still: “There would be more than ocean-water broken / Before God’s Put out the Light was spoken.” Frost’s uncertainties about the indifference or even existence of a supreme being were typical of the disillusion many modernist artists were facing at the time, and his use of poetry as a response to feelings of isolation, loneliness, and ambiguity was, in itself, a modernist reaction.

Along with this darker side of Frost’s poetry, his work was modernist in structure and technique, as well. His experimentation with form, which made wonderful use of blank verse, was international in origin: his poems are reminiscent in tone of Shakespeare’s prose combined with lyric English verse. He used playfulness and adopted a humorous quality in his work when broaching serious and profound subjects, such as the mental and physical isolation found in the outwardly amusing “Mending Wall.” And, of course, Frost’s poetry is ceaselessly American in its ringing accolade to freedom—freedom from boundaries, freedom from restraint, and freedom of choice: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by…” You know the rest—after all, it’s Frost.

Images of Mortality Along "A Worn Path"

2012-03-28T16:50:00.002-07:00

“A Worn Path,” by Eudora Welty, follows an ancient black woman on her journey through the cold countryside. Phoenix Jackson makes her painstaking way through dark woods, up steep hills, across streams, through fields, and down a lonely road on her mission to town to get medicine for her ailing grandson. She is met with many obstacles along the way, including thorny bushes that catch and snag her, a loose dog who runs her down, a hunter who admonishes her to return home, and, mostly, her own imagination. When she at last reaches her destination, she receives the medicine for which she came, and without hesitation she turns and begins her long journey back home.

On the surface, this is a story of love and devotion, but as we look more carefully at the details of what Phoenix encounters along her journey, we may come to wonder whether this is a story of mortality, or more specifically, illusions of immortality.

We can begin with the most obvious connection, Phoenix’s namesake. The character of Phoenix Jackson closely resembles the mythic bird in many ways: she wears a red scarf and has gold skin, which are the traditional colors of a phoenix; her hair is the odor of copper, which smells burnt and acrid; her tapping cane sounds like “a solitary…bird”; and her face is described throughout the story as glowing, illuminated, radiating, and shining, all conjuring images of the fiery bird. She also describes her grandson as a baby bird, and tells the hunter she cannot turn back because she is “bound” to go to town, since “the time [has] come around,” as if she is fulfilling her destiny to complete this cycle.

Phoenix’s love of her grandson is the driving force behind her routine journeys into town, but there are clues to suggest that her powerful love has tainted her grasp of reality, and that the mission bringing her to town is stemming from self-delusions. Phoenix is described as “solitary” as she walks, and even given her insistence that her grandson is still living, we can divine from her reactions to other occurrences that he may have died years ago, leaving her, indeed, solitary. For instance, when she rests by the side of the creek, Phoenix imagines that she sees a little boy offering her a piece of cake, but when she reaches for it, the apparition disappears. Just after this, she sees a scarecrow in a field and immediately takes it for a ghost, perhaps another indication that she is almost aware of the futility of her errand. Later, when the nurse asks her about the health of her grandson, Phoenix is confused and struck into a rigid silence for long moments until she regains her foggy and uncertain memory. There are also smaller clues throughout, including the appearance of a mourning dove (at which she comments that it’s “not too late for him”), and a buzzard (where she remarks, “Who you watching?”).

All of this implies that Phoenix is trapped in her cycle of walking this path, and within this cycle she is also somewhere between the recognition of mortality and the delusion of immortality. Until the end comes for her, too, she is compelled to continue this journey again and again out of her powerful love and her equally powerful denial.

I found that I had to read this story several times in order to fully gain any real insights on it. Because of the richness of the details and descriptions, it was too much to take in the first time, but I grew more attached to and appreciative of the story each time I read it. With the revelation at the end of the motive for Phoenix to make this journey, I was able to go back and better understand all the foreshadowing that takes place during the bulk of the story. I am amazed at the style and depth of this work of art, and I can only dream that someday I will write anything that may compare.

My Dear "Neighbor Rosicky"

2012-03-27T15:36:00.000-07:00

Willa Cather’s Neighbor Rosicky is quite possibly the most beautiful, fulfilling, and moving short story that I have ever had the privilege to read. Besides the magically perfect and poignantly vivid descriptions of the farmlands and countryside—the High Prairie—of Nebraska that me feel as though I might have looked up from my book at any moment and seen the open fields and softly falling snow, Cather’s impeccable mastery of the subject matter she presents through these characters is profound. The ideals of a simple country life, of personal freedoms and independence of spirit, and of the longing for a deeper happiness that is unattainable to those too busy working for it to actually discover, are here brought to life in a more eloquent and lyric way than I could ever have possibly imagined.

Rosicky himself is made so real, so round and fully developed as a thinking, feeling human being (and all in the space of just a few brief pages), that when he speaks I am captivated, when he acts I admire him, when he remembers my heart breaks, and when he dies I feel as though I have just lost my own grandfather. After finishing the last and most wrenchingly beautiful words on the page, I find myself turning back to the beginning of the story only to be in Rosicky’s company again, or else I lose myself in simply gazing out the window at a willow branch moving slowly and gently as the early evening breeze stirs the air, entranced and sensing a feeling of deep gratification by the simple sight.

Neighbor Rosicky is a work of Modernist fiction in many ways and on various levels. Firstly, it is centered around a poor immigrant farmer—one of the “common people” or minorities (either ethnic, gender, racial, class, or otherwise) who were increasingly at the forefront of Modernist literature as subjects, authors, or intended audience. Also, the story integrates local and regional dialects, with Rosicky’s urban Bohemian accent even differing slightly from his wife’s country Czech pronunciations: a feat begun by Mark Twain’s groundbreaking Huckleberry Finn and, although certainly difficult to accomplish, making a strong impact in Modernist works. Finally, Neighbor Rosicky encompasses the grand themes of simplicity, nature, spirit, determination, and freedom that began in American literature in earnest with Emerson and Thoreau and the Transcendentalists, and which were carried on with much enthusiasm and renewed vigor by the Modernists.

As the editors of the Harper Single Volume American Literature say of Modernist writers’ contributions to the magazines of the day, one could also say of Willa Cather on her work in this story: “[She] examined the consequences of the quickened pace of urban life and the flood of modern technological inventions on the moods of people and on the landscape.” I believe that statement summarizes the essence, if not the magnitude, of Neighbor Rosicky.

Huck Finn: The Original All-American

2012-03-26T15:42:00.000-07:00

In my freshman English course on American Literature, I was truly devastated to learn that we would have only a single week in which to read and absorb the beautiful intricacies of one of my favorite authors, Mark Twain, and, in my opinion, the epitome of American Literature, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This amazing piece of work is absolutely American in that it could never have come about in any country but the United States, with any influence other than the South, or under any better authorship than that of Mark Twain. If asked to name an American book, I think that this would be the first one to come to my mind.

Twain, much as Dickinson and Whitman did with poetry, broke all the rules of prose. He turned the world of American Literature on its head by letting his characters tell the story themselves, in their own words, with their own dialects, providing their own points of view, which were colored by their own values and morals, and all without explanation or remorse. Twain resists the temptation to narrate or provide any excuses for what he writes, even though—if taken at face value—the tale can be extremely controversial. He simply lets the story unfold by depicting it without embellishment, and lets the reader do the rest.

And that depiction is truly incredible: every single thing that Huck encounters in his adventures along the river, he obediently describes with perfect accuracy, giving us a sense of Twain’s deep knowledge and understanding of his setting for this story. Because of the ease with which Huck portrays his surroundings, we can easily see in our imaginations the two runaways rafting along the Mississippi, coming across small river outposts, meeting the various characters in a Southern “backwoods” society, and so on. We are whisked away to another time and place, and completely immersed there in every detail: the language, the morals, the landscape, the philosophies, the relationships—everything is there, perfectly reconstructed, and we are lost within that world.

Although Huck faithfully describes the events and interactions in his journey, he actually understands very little of what is going on around him. In another masterfully executed element of his writing, Twain manages to give us the most profound wisdom “out of the mouths of babes.” He depends heavily on the use of irony to get his messages across to the reader. When Huck speaks perfectly innocently and without comprehension about some of the most atrocious and unspeakable acts that Americans have ever committed, we are not meant to believe that Huck (or Twain himself) is a racist, a bigot, or a white supremacist! Rather, it is intended to challenge the reader; to make us question what we take for granted or what we let slip by without taking issue, and to open our eyes as to whether this prejudice is really all in the past, or if it is still around us, going unnoticed, avoided, or ignored.