The Inside Doesn't Really Count in Victorian Society

          Victorian society is often distinguished by its strict rules regarding morality, propriety, and sex… all of which are satirized by Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. The play centers on Algernon and Jack – two young bachelors who engage in the practice of “bunburying.” As defined by Algernon, Bunburying is the practice of creating an elaborate deception that allows one to misbehave while seeming to uphold the very highest standards of duty and responsibility. In other words, it is the practice of leading a double life in order to escape responsibility, while maintaining your street cred as a prim and proper component of Victorian era society. Just as a child may create an imaginary friend, Jack and Algernon create imaginary loved ones: a brother named Earnest and a chronically-sick friend named Bunbury. While a little kid’s imaginary friend may serve as the child’s trusty companion and secret-keeper, Earnest and Bunbury’s existences are manifestations of Jack and Algernon’s secret deceit.

In The Importance of Being Earnest Wilde utilizes the pseudo-moralic – and highly deceptive – actions of Jack and Algernon to satirize the importance of public image in Victorian era society. For example, it was quite fashionable for people belonging to the upper-middle classes to do their “public duty” by visiting the poor and the sick. By telling people that he is tending to his loosey goosey brother named Earnest, Jack projects an image of moral responsibility for others that is completely fabricated. And when Algernon tells others that he must leave the city in order to care for his invalid friend, Bunbury, he displays a sense of Christian charity. In this way, Jack and Algernon are able to mask their personal impurities with airs of benevolent duty to the public good.  By showcasing characters who exploit values of unselfish morality to the benefit of their public image, Wilde provides a definitive contrast between public appearance and personal identity (this is comparable to both the “seems vs. is” motif in Hamlet and the “public vs. personal identity” motif in The Age of Innocence!).  

            Moreover, the role of food in Wilde’s play is symbolic of the discord between personal identity and social protocol. Judging from the two Acts that we’ve read in class, food seems to be a source of tension between Algernon and Jack. This is highly atypical in the upper class society of the Victorian era, seeing as eating was a common scenario in which people were expected to act courteous and proper. Instead, Algernon consumes food frequently and exaggeratedly, in a highly unsophisticated manner.To make matters even stranger, Algernon seems to do this more when the food belongs to someone else (i.e. the cucumber sandwiches that were intended for Lady Bracknell). This could be an indication of the gender role reversal that pervades Wilde’s play. Men of Algernon’s social class were expected to be the hospitable providers for their guests and the women in their lives. Algernon, on the other hand, is always receiving food from the women in his life, rather than providing for them. It is possible that Algernon’s unruliness in his highly gendered social sphere mirrors Wilde’s personal defiance of traditional gender roles. 

Truck Drivers and Preachers and Holy Spirits Galore in The Grapes of Wrath

Although they may seem disconnected at first, many of the major and minor characters in The Grapes of Wrath complement one another beautifully. Jim Casy and the truck driver – both of whom are introduced in the novel’s beginning chapters - are no exception to this charge.

The truck driver represents the clash between capitalism and innate human kindness. Although the truck’s sign reads No Riders, the driver gives Tom Joad, a total stranger, a ride anyway. In doing so, he displays the altruistic behavior of humans during the miserable conditions of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Yes, the unnamed truck driver is suspicious of Tom, but that suspicion is overruled by the pity he feels for this stranger. Moreover, the action of truck driving serves as a metaphor for the steady, relentless nature of the dust and heat during the Dust Bowl. The driver chews as “rhythmically, as thoughtfully as a cow” (Chapter 2), thus mimicking the dull, perpetual motion of the truck and dust.  

Now, Jim Casy’s pensive wandering is a strong juxtaposition to the truck driver’s forward motion on the highway. Jim wistfully explains to Tom that even turtles have the intention of “goin’ someplace. Me – I don’t know where I’m goin’” (Chapter 4). In doing so, Jim implies there are the two options for people who have lost everything to the Dust Bowl, like Jim and Tom have: 1. Do not leave your land and stay stuck, wandering, in your past. 2. Choose to move tirelessly forward/westward in search of opportunity.

Furthermore, Jim serves as the novel’s Scapegoat (by definition, a sacrificed animal or human who takes on the sins and punishment for others). In this way he is closely linked to the “martyr” archetype or Jesus figure that appears often in literature. The first, and most obvious, piece of evidence for this is that Jim Casy and Jesus Christ share the same initials. Jesus began his mission after a period of withdrawal into the wilderness for meditation and consecration; Jim parallels this action when he leaves preaching, wanders the wild country, and muses over traditional ideas of God, holiness, and sin (Chapter 4). Also like Jesus, Jim Casy takes upon himself the sins of others.

The pivotal moment – the moment that cements Jim’s role as the “spiritual martyr” of The Grapes of Wrath – is when Jim sacrifices himself when Tom is about to be arrested. Between the policemen, Jim “sat proudly, his head up and the stringy muscles of his neck prominent. On his lips there was a faint smile and on his face a curious look of conquest” (Chapter 20).

Finally, Jim plays the part of Jesus when he rejects an old religion and tries to replace it with a new gospel. The rejection occurs when Jim recalls the days when he would preach Christianity. He is frustrated with the traditional principles of sin and guilt that made him feel wicked and despicable when he slept with women. Entirely fed up with traditional virtues, Jim exclaims, “The hell with it! There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing” (Chapter 4). Instead of simply talking about his frustration, Jim takes definitive action by replacing the religion he has rejected with one he has devised himself. Jim Casy’s new religion is an interpretation of Ralph Emerson’s concept of an ‘Oversoul.’ It states that God exists in the soul of each person, and that the souls of all people are connected in the “Holy sperit…the human sperit” (Chapter 4). Casy knows that these ideas defy traditional worship. Though he halts his career and lifestyle as a preacher, Jim continues to spread his teachings of transcendentalism, humanism, and socialism. 

Women = Sex ; A Closer Look at the Role of Women in Hamlet

While Hamlet Jr. may be the star of Hamlet, he would seem far less vibrant without the help of his supporting actors. Characters who are roughly the same age as him – Ophelia, Laertes, and Fortinbas – serve as foils to Hamlet. While Laertes, Fortinbras and Hamlet all wish to avenge their fathers’ deaths, Ophelia parallels Hamlet in a more subtle, yet more arguably more powerful, way. Like Hamlet, Ophelia encounters “madness”….but only after her father, Polonius, is murdered and her lover, Hamlet, tells her he never loved her. While Hamlet’s madness consists of perpetual scheming and connivery, Ophelia’s madness is more piteous and innocent. She has an air of genuineness that Hamlet lacks, making her madness seem more reasonable and her eventual suicide more justifiable. “Madness” is a key element of Hamlet in the sense that each character has it, but no character reacts in the same fashion to it. The variety of actions and emotion – grief, anxiety, lunacy, childishness, plot-making, and hallucinating – serve as extensions of the sensations real people encounter after tragedy, making Hamlet one of the most relatable and enduring works of all time.  

Ophelia’s madness consists of singing nonsensical songs and drowning the world out…and eventually drowning herself. Of course, Ophelia was not always crazy; she entered lunacy as a response to the many outside forces that acted against her. From the very beginning, she is severely passive and obedient. When Ophelia’s father instructs her to stop seeing Hamlet, she automatically heeds his orders; when Hamlet scathingly commands her to “get thee to a  nunnery,” she does not lash back with cruel words of her own; and when she finally falls into the water, she does not resist the weight of her clothes, but compliantly succumbs to death. Her passive death is extremely significant in the context of Hamlet, seeing as the play’s male characters tend to correlate death with passion, fervency, vengeance, and deep sorrow. By welcoming death with such agreeability, Ophelia validates the role of women in this play as complacent objects rather than real, sentient people.

Furthermore, Ophelia’s madness is a direct result of her desire to please others. For years, she tolerated domination and abuse by the male figures in her life – Polonius, Laertes, and Hamlet. In Act I, Ophelia’s brother attempts to call the shots on his sister’s body, as he advises her not to get physical or too involved with Hamlet. By claiming that a non-virgin is a woman with damaged goods, Laertes implies that Ophelia will lose her worth if she has sex before marriage. Time and time again, Ophelia is treated as an object of sexual desire rather than a person with intricate thoughts and feelings. She has no control over her body, relationships, or decisions, so it comes as no surprise that she finally snaps under the pressure she has endured her whole life. By remaining voiceless in the presence of men, she loses her sanity when her actions fail to please the men – Hamlet, Polonius, and Laertes – who assign worth to her.

Even when she goes mad in the final Acts, Ophelia maintains a girlish, childish, and innocent appearance. Instead of plotting to kill or honoring the death of her father, she regresses into her youth. She sings songs, she acts like a toddler…but she also gives away flowers. This is a literal “deflowering” that represents her singular role to men as a sex object, no matter the state of her mind; it signifies that no matter how tortured she is, her thoughts will always meaningless to those around her.  

(Re)introductions

With my first semester of senior year complete, I can’t help but think it may be wise of me to reconfigure the way I’ve been doing things. I’ll be in college in less than eight months, and I’m terrified that my perpetual struggle to manage my own time will get the better of me.  Right before final exams, all AP Lit students were given one last writing assignment: a self-reflection paper. The objective was simple – sit down and evaluate your progress as an AP Lit student over the course of this semester. What I didn’t expect was how useful this paper would be in helping me pinpoint my strengths and weaknesses from both a personal and educational level. I don’t want my last semester of senior year to be inflicted with the infamously viral case of ‘senioritis.’ Instead, I’m taking this semester as a golden opportunity to be aware of my weaknesses, improve upon them, and see if I have what it takes to survive the academic rigor and personal responsibility which come with being a college student.

I think my biggest problem from last semester was a lack of self-discipline; I tend to think more emotionally than logically whenever I start papers or timed-writing exercises. I can get completely carried away during the pre-write period, and I’m realizing now that my meticulous planning hurts the quality of my writing far more than it helps it. My obsession with excessive planning puts me at a disadvantage from the very beginning, because I dedicate more than half of my writing period to only - what appears to be - the first paragraph. Although the self-inflicted time crunch sometimes makes for more fluid, less agonized-over body paragraphs, I see now that the AP Lit exam values deep, clear analysis far more than it does stylistic writing. By making a conscious effort to minimize my planning period, I think I can write more analytical papers which are better-suited for AP Lit.

I’ve also noticed that I don’t always spend enough time developing each individual point in my essays. Oftentimes, I’ll freak out when I realize I don’t have enough time left, and I’ll try to hit all the points I laid out for myself during the planning period. By hastily introducing new points, my arguments seem weak and relatively unsupported. A skill I definitely want to improve upon this semester is keeping my thoughts simple and clear and logical. I tend to preoccupy myself with the tiny details of a passage instead of focusing on the big picture. By keeping my pre-planning stupid-easy, I’ll have more time to expound on my points when I’m actually writing what I’ll turn in.

Overall, I think that having more confidence in myself and my abilities will significantly help me improve my writing this semester. I still think that taking this class is one of the best academic decisions I’ve made in all of high school. It’s put me back into the habit of reading for pleasure, and I feel more intellectually curious than I have in ages. Because of it, I feel motivated and inspired to keep feeding this curiosity and make my final semester of high school one to remember.

"Poor Grendel!" the lonely hypocrite

          John Gardner opens Grendel with an image of an old ram minding his own business and staring intently into the distance. Grendel characterizes this ram as “stupidly triumphant” (5), in the way that it ignores Grendel completely. Hating this treatment, Grendel stomps and yells and even throws large rocks at the ram, but it doesn’t budge. This irritates Grendel to no end, because it’s tells the story of his sad life: being either ignored or feared by all creatures. The ram’s apathy represents the detachment Grendel feels from the world and all the creatures that inhabit it. When Grendel asks bold questions about his existence, he is met by the unresponsiveness of the sky, which “ignores [Grendel], forever unimpressed” (6). Like the ram, the sky symbolizes all the forces that isolate Grendel; in turn, he is tormented by the futility of a purposeless, lonely, and charge-less life.

          The dispassion Grendel encounters in the natural world contributes to his view that life is unnecessarily harsh. He views animals as stupidly simple in their joyful repetition of tasks, such as mating and growing, year after year. However, Grendel’s criticism of the mechanical actions of the “brainless budding trees, these brattling birds” (6) around him are juxtaposed with his own, repetitive deeds of murder. Whenever he kills a Dane at the mead hall, the action is mindless, just like the mating of rams or the growing of grass. Grendel is aware that he is trying to fool himself “with thoughts that I am more noble” (6). Anguished, conflicted, and confused, Grendel searches for meaning in a world that he wants to both abandon and enter.

          Of course, Grendel isn’t entirely alone: he has his mother. Although she is described as miserable and lethargic, Grendel’s mom might actually be in better shape than Grendel, in the way that she refuses to dwell on the “dusty mechanical bits of her miserable life’s curse” (11). But, seeing as Grendel’s mom is entirely incommunicable, she cannot properly articulate to her young son the occasional necessity of apathy. Frustrated by extreme loneliness, Grendel assumes the archetype of a crazy old man who yells at unassuming pigeons in the park.

Despite his frequent outbursts directed at the sky, Grendel is very aware that what he feels may not be genuine anger. For example, Grendel says, “I toy with shouting some tidbit more – some terrifying, unthinkable threat, some blackly fuliginous riddling hex – but my heart’s not it” (10). Grendel fakes powerful emotions in an effort to feel something, anything; he would rather feel flares of artificial rage than acknowledge that he numb of all feeling. In fact, a slight tweaking of the Lumineers’ song “Stubborn Love” matches Grendel's scenario rather well:

It's better to feel pain, than nothing at all
The opposite of life’s indifference

Now, George Willard employs a very similar concept in “An Awakening” (what is a blog post without a connection to Winesburg, Ohio?). Like Grendel, George is also an adolescent male who has trouble deciphering his personal role – or lack thereof – in the grand scheme of existence. Ceaselessly racking his own brain for answers, George walks the streets at night and shouts “words without meaning, rolling them over his tongue and saying them because they were brave words, full of meaning” (An Awakening, 155). Similarly, Grendel tries to prove to himself that he is capable of having emotion by screaming angry, impassioned words to the skies. Exaggerating his emotions is Grendel’s way of affirming that he is a sentient being. In this sense, Grendel tries to be more human, despite the fact that he outwardly ridicules the lunacy of human emotions. 

Fish scare me, but so does growing old and ugly

Mirror

by Silvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Fish are fast – much quicker and smoother swimmers than humans, who power through water with calculated strokes and breaths. Ubiquitously, they bullet past us, around us, and underneath us; the sea is their terrain, and fish know exactly how to navigate its waters. Humans, on the other hand, do not. Wading hip-deep in unclear water, I feel alarmed, taunted, and teased, when a fish brushes against my unsuspecting leg. It’s as if the creature’s saying, ‘I know you can’t see me from up there, that you’re basically blind. Why don’t you do yourself a favor and leave?’ By comparing a woman’s fear of senility to a “terrible fish”, Sylvia Plath delivers maximum impact at the end of her poem. Like the alien fish whose unblinking eyes inch closer and closer to my paranoid body, the concept of growing old and ugly is an unwelcome, nagging, and utterly irrational fear for many women.

Now, I’d bet money that ‘fear’ and ‘apprehension’ are AP exam-worthy ‘tone’ words for this timeless poem; although it was written fifty years ago, “Mirror” continues to be relevant to our glossy, airbrushed world. Told from the honest perspective of a mirror, the piece pinpoints the crippling insecurities of girl- and womanhood. “Unmisted by love or dislike”, the frank reflection of the mirror agonizes the woman who stares so intently at it. Through the mirror, she might see a wrinkle, a gray hair, a pimple, a frown line – all of which fade away in the presence of “those liars, the candles or the moon.” The lights cast by the moon and candles symbolize romance as much as they do deception. The woman knows this. No matter how many times lovers and friends tell her she is beautiful, she assumes that they do not know enough about her, the ‘true’ her. Their compliments are as ill-defined as candlelight is on her features and as fickle as promises made by ‘lovers’ under the moon.

In an effort to differentiate the real from the sugar-coated, the woman trusts only the mirror that is “silver and exact....not cruel, only truthful.” But no matter how truthful the mirror is, it cannot speak to the woman. If we really wanted to be technical, we’d see that nothing would be beautiful or ugly, black or white, right or wrong, good or bad, trite or fresh, in a view that is 100% 'true' . Everything would just be. A view that has zero preconceptions does not hold an opinion of any kind; therefore, a reflected image only means something – anything – if someone's there to interpret it. The irony of the poem is that the woman turns to the mirror for an unbiased perspective, only to batter it with her own, critical judgment. She seeks validation from a mirror that holds no opinions, thereby setting herself up to be disappointed, time and time again, by her own preconceived notions of herself. 

Art isn't a privilege; it's a necessity.

As a female, I’ve always prided myself in having an interest in Science. I feel like there isn’t enough support for girls who want to pursue careers in math/science/technology, and I want to be part of the change that is this generation (I never said this blog post wouldn’t be cheesy. Take this as a warning). But even though I dream of being an oncological researcher one day, I can’t ignore the fact that my interests in the arts also define me. For years, I’ve been slightly embarrassed by my love for reading and writing and music, because I felt like it was just too stereotypical girl. It fit the gender roles I loathed far too well: little boys play with trucks, little girls tend to ‘crying’ baby dolls; teenage boys learn to solve the world’s problems, teenage girls write poems about their feelings; grown-up boys hold a briefcase, grown-up girls hold Windex. I detested the prospect of seeming less intelligent than a male, because I would rather read a book than solve a Calculus problem.

In recent months I’ve realized the utter idiocy of this insecurity. All my life, I’ve been told that scientific and mathematical knowledge are the avenues to actually making a tangible difference in this world. From the invention of the light bulb, the steam engine, the telephone, who can argue that careers in numbers change the world? But, I felt like I was missing some integral part of the equation. Does the development of civilization depend only on mechanical calculations, or do the softer sides of our brains play an equal role?

These questions had lingered in the recesses of my mind for years, but did not come to fruition until I heard Professor Cook-Gailloud deliver a presentation dealing with the processing of language and learning at Johns Hopkins University. She began her presentation with eight simple words: “Art is not a privilege; it’s a necessity.” She explained how the spread of language fostered communication and a sense of community among disparate people thousands of years ago, and how it continues to do so. Many evolutionary biologists, even, hold the view that a high level of communication between Homo sapiens led to the extraordinary development of cognitive intelligence that distinguishes our species from all others in the animal kingdom. Before humans had invented the wheel, men and women were producing cave paintings in an effort to understand the natural world that they belonged to; before the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution, people were singing and telling stories around fires, spiritually linking themselves to each other through the art produced by their own voices. The point I’m trying to make out of all this is that art precedes mechanics. If humans cannot sit and think and make sense of the world we live in – as our ancestors once did – our sense of purpose will cease to exist.

My encounter with Professor Cook-Gailloud helped me understand the vital importance of Literature as a means for expression; instead of being ashamed of my fascination with the arts, I’ve come to truly embrace it. I realize that Science and Language have similar aims: to make sense of the world. While Physics achieves this purpose through means of formulas to explain concrete occurrences, Language describes both the abstract and the tangible through words and ideas.