PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Walcott’s most ambitious book-length poem, Omeros, was published in 1990. Shortly thereafter in 1992, he won the Nobel Prize. “Omeros” which is a corruption of “Homer” refers to a tradition of thinking of the West Indies as a potential site for a new civilization which would aspire to the heights of ancient Greece. The primary setting for Omeros is Walcott’s native St. Lucia, which had earned the epithet, “Helen of the West” in the midst of England and France’s colonial rivalry over the island.
SUMMARY/EXPLICATION:
Omeros is divided into seven books and sixty-two chapters, a kind of dual scheme. Each of the chapters are further divided into sub-sections. Formally, the poem is a hybrid form: it is in loose hexameter much like Homer’s, but with occasional pentameter and tetrameter lines which suggest a more folk-like character. The stanzas are mostly tercets reminiscent of Dante’s Divine Comedy without, however, the strict rhyme of terza rima.
Book 1: This initial book focuses primarily on introducing the major characters on the island of St. Lucia. In the opening scene, Philoctete is hewing trees to make canoes and displaying his work for tourists. We are introduced to Seven Seas the blind man, who doubles as one of the “Omeros” figures throughout the work. Ma Kilman owns the oldest bar in town, and her belief systems are a mix of Obeah African origins and Catholic influences. Major Plunkett and his wife Maud, originally from Ireland, have committed themselves to living abroad, though Major Plunkett adamantly tries to super-impose a Westernized history of St. Lucia, meticulously and obsessively drawing correspondences between St. Lucia and Homeric myth. In particular, Plunkett is obsessed with the pretty native woman, Helen, who for a time was the Plunkett’s maid. Achille is Helen’s lover but he is involved in a rivalry with Hector for her love. Helen is fairly proud of her beauty, and Maud resents her presence and influence on her husband. A cyclone’s destruction is described in great detail in this book, and the difficulty of maintaining order over the landscape greatly bothers Plunkett, whose primary occupation is that of a pig farmer. Finally, the poetic “I” (who is Walcott) intrudes into the first book as a kind of character living alongside the rest of the characters. He is told in this first book by his father in a kind of dream-like vision (Warwick Walcott died when Derek was a one year old) to find a way to give voice to the people of the island.
Book 2: This second book breaks chronological time and space through a flashback to Plunkett’s ancestor, a midshipman during the battle between France and Britain in 1782 over St. Lucia. The French are defeated, though the young midshipman perishes. One of the slaves which the English take is Afalobe, whom they rename Achilles. Back in the present time, there is an election—Philoctete and Hector join Maljo’s “United Love Party,” but they are defeated. The election scene demonstrates a failure of self-government after the colonial encounter, and how elections don’t have much of an impact on the everyday lives of the citizens. Major Plunkett, meanwhile, struggles with his fascination for Helen in a vivid scene where he can’t bring himself to scold her when she takes one of Maud’s bracelets. Helen moves in with Hector, preferring him to Achille. In order to make more money, Hector gives up fishing for the more lucrative (but far more oppressive and constrained) work of driving a passenger van. Helen announces that she is pregnant, though she is unsure whos’ baby it is. She boldly asks Maud to borrow money. At the close of the book, Achille is out on his fishing boat, In God We Troust, and begins to fall into a sort of hallucinatory vision of the Middle Passage. He wonders, for the first time, about his own identity.
Book 3: This shorter book describes how Achille goes back in time to the slave trade and back to his ancestral African village during a kind of dream or hallucination. He meets his ancestor Afolabe and learns about his origins--the different rituals and customs which Achille then realizes to be in the shadows of St. Lucian rituals and customs in his present-day life. Achille also witnesses the brutal scene of his ancestor’s enslavement through a raid. Afolabe enslaved becomes renamed as Achilles, a name which he accepts because, beaten down, it is simply easier to do so. When Achille makes him temporal and spatial return, he evinces a new interest in dispossessed peoples, including the Native Americans. His perspective has become more global.
Book 4: As if matching Achille’s now expanded perspectives, Book 4 opens up new geographic and temporal spaces. The first part includes scenes of Walcott’s own divorce while in New England, the Wounded Knee massacre in December, 1890 and the perspective of Catherine Weldon, a white woman who sympathizes with the Native Americans. Like Achille during the slave raid in his ancestral village, Catherine cannot do anything but witness the massacre of over one-hundred Native Americans by the U.S. cavalry. Walcott links the breach of contract in his own marriage to the breach of contract in the treaties signed between the Native Americans and the United States government. Book four also contains an extended imagining of Walcott’s own father, Warwick (who died when he was one) telling him he needs to visit various capitals of the Old World before he will be able to understand the experience of his colonial native home. Warwick Walcott tells his son that journeys are circular.
Book 5: On is father’s advice, Walcott visits four destinations: Lisbon, London, Dublin, and the Aegean Islands. Each of these four places has unique significance for the poet: Lisbon was an important site for the African slave trade, London bears the weight of being the center of English imperialism, Dublin called up associations with literary forebears like Joyce since Walcott analogized between the colonial subjection of Ireland and of the West Indies, and finally the Aegean Islands represent the cradle of Western civilization. What the poet learns, finally, is not to imitate, or use the structures that belong to these centers of (literary) culture to write the literature of the Caribbean but to focus more on gathering material from the immediate world around him.
Book 6: Back in St. Lucia, Hector is in a fatal accident because of his reckless driving of his passenger van (called the Comet). Achille and Helen reconcile after Hector’s death, and Achille also honors his friends memory. Maud also dies in this section, succumbing to cancer. After his wife’s death, Plunkett realizes the great burden which he has placed on his Irish wife who has always wished to return to Dublin, though she had learned to live in St. Lucia. He realizes too that his obsessive project of trying to find Homeric parallels to “build a history” for St. Lucia was futile: “Why not see Helen as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow?” Walcott, of course, has the same realization and essentially repudiates the methods of his own poem. The other major event which happens in this book is Ma Kilman’s successful healing of Philoctete’s shin wound. She finds a cure by following a trail of ants into the mountains to a specific African herb. Thus, the book is largely about reconciliations, and these reconciliations mirror the poet’s own maturing process and reconciliation to the native colonial landscape.
Book 7: Omeros is a character in this final book that serves as a kind of guide to Walcott. He underscores the lesson which Walcott has already learned, that he should concentrate on what he sees in his surroundings rather than worry about framing his account with appropriately authoritative literary structures. Major characters like Major Plunkett and Achille have also learned to be more present and aware of their surroundings; Plunkett gives up the project of writing a history and bringing English “order” to the land, and Achille returns to his original work of fishing. The final lines suggest a sort of continuity between the lives that these characters now live and the natural landscape: “When he (referring to Achille) left the beach the sea was still going on.”
Showing posts with label nation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nation. Show all posts
Friday, May 13, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Herland Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Edition: Herland and Selected Stories (Signet classics)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Herland published in 1915 in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's own Forerunner Magazine (written, edited, and published all by Gilman herself--at its height of circulation, it had a readership of about 1,500), was the second of her three "Utopian" novels espousing her feminist and socialist commitments. Herland was preceded by Moving the Mountain (1911) and followed by With Her in Ourland (1916).
Gilman's commitments to feminist and socialist causes began around the time that she moved to California with her friend Grace Channing, in order to escape an unhappy first marriage. There, Gilman came into contact with the likes of Edward Bellamy, Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Her subequent travels also put her into contact with the Fabians, in particular, George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Gilman herself became a popular essayist and lecturer on her social and political beliefs.
SUMMARY:
The account is written from memory by one of three male explorers, Vandyck Jennings. Jennings tells the reader that he will not divulge any specifics about the location of their adventures, "for fear some self-appointed missionaries, or traders, or land-greedy expansionists, will take it upon themselves to push in." Jennings begins by introducing himself and his fellow explorers: Terry O. Nicholson is a well-off individual who enjoyed exploration and was good at mechanics and electricity, Jeff Margrave was a poet and a botanist, though he had taken the profession of a doctor. The narrator perceives himself to be the most "scientific" of the bunch; majoring in sociology with a wide interest in all sciences. Terry presents the most problems during their discovery of Herland, a civilization of only women, because of his man's man sexist attitudes towards women.
The idea to find Herland came to them during another expedition the men had been a part of. They had heard from the "savages" that there was such a place and decided to see for themselves. They indeed fly in on their biplane to a civilization of all women. The first women they encounter are three younger women in trees, who outrun the men when Terry has the idea of trapping them by using a necklace to lure them. The narrator describes these women as more like mischievous little boys than shy girls. More breaking of gender stereotypes occur when the men are easily captured by a bunch of older women, made comfortable, and enjoined to learn the women's language and to teach them their own. As comfortable as the women make the men, they decide to escape, through tying together bedclothes and other linen to lower out of the window. The men imagine having made their escape successfully, but it turns out that the women have been surveying their movement and they are brought back and made to understand that they will be treated as guests as long as they promise non-violence and cooperation. The men then apply themselves in greater earnest to their studies. During the course of their studies, they find out that Herland has not had men for two-thousand years: their civilization began with a group of captured women who rose up against male tormentors (who in turn had been enslaved by men who died out from wars and natural disasters). These women created a cooperative society based on united action and sisterhood, and soon a miracle happened: one of their women became pregnant with a girl child. This original mother brought forth four more girlchildren, who in turn brought forth more girlchildren when they reached adulthood. Apparently, parthenogenesis was spontaneously evolved, and this is how Herland came about without men.
As the exchange of information continues between the women and the explorers, it becomes more and more awkward for the men to explain some of their own practices, which clearly shock the women (though they are not judgmental or arrogant). The notions of taking milk away from cattle, killing them for meat, chaining up dogs, women confined to domestic duties, class distinctions, Darwinian economics, and competitive work are completely alien to this utopian, cooperative civilization. Instead, these women are what the narrator terms "Conscious Makers of People" - for them, motherhood and the growth and progress of their civilization make up the raison d'etre of their lives. Of course, not everyone can be mothers in the sense of bearing children; this problem of population is solved by women directing their mothering instincts towards raising children rather than bearing them. As the narrator learns more and more about their society, the more appreciation he has for their ingenuity. As far as education goes, they cultivated two kinds of minds, critics and inventors. The task of educating children is a privileged task reserved for only a chosen elite as education was seen as an essential part of motherhood and people making. As far as innovations in food supply, the women have found a way to enrich soil with waste products, thus preventing depletion. When the narrator asks about criminality, he is told that criminality has been eradicated by a negative eugenics, in which women with flawed tendencies are asked not to bear children.
When the men invited to lecture to young girls so that they might learn about other civilizations, it doesn't go too well for Terry; his narrow conceptions of gender leads him to think them all too boy like. Terry's rigid notions of gender presents significant problems later on when the women allow the possibility of restoring a bi-sexual civilization. The men end up naturally developing attractions for the three women which they encountered in the trees the day they "landed" in Herland. Jennings starts to develop a friendship with Ellador, Jeff with Celis, and Terry with Alima. Terry, seeing girls as a sexual conquest, ends up in many quarrels with the strong-willed Alima. Jeff is another kind of extreme as far as how he views women--he likes to play the role of gallant male, and hence deems women as a sex to be idolized and worshipped. Jennings strongly suggests that his and Ellador's relationship is the most healthful one; the two of them develop a natural friendship consolidated by mutual respect.
Through Ellador, Jennings continues to gain more and more intimacy with Herland. Education is not forced or compulsory, and there are no schools. Everyone learns a set of common knowledge, and then a separate set of specialized knowledge. To check the mind-narrowing aspects of specialization, everyone also takes on a few other branches of knowledge on the side. Because everything is geared towards growth, Jennings finds it odd that there is no real reverence for the past. Hence, their religion is very different, because like everything else, it has thrown of what it has deemed to be "backwards" ideas. Ellador is shocked, for example, to think of a belief in God as polluting infants with original sin as a lasting one. Additionally, the concept of eternal life sounds odious to her because of how natural it is to think of growth and progress through generations. The primary difficulty for the narrator after marrying Ellador is that she has no sense of male-female love. There is only love as mothers, and consequently they assign to fatherhood a similar importance. Try as he might to explain the mutual love between lovers to Ellador, she doesn't feel it. This problem manifests itself much more problematically for Terry, who tries one night to rape Alima because of his belief in having the right to "master" his wife in bed. He is successfully repulsed by Alima and a cadre of strong women, who subsequently decide that he must be sent home. In the end, it is decided that Terry, the narrator, and Ellador will all go to America, while Jeff will stay with his now pregnant wife Celis. The women of Herland also decide that there will be no bridge between the worlds established until Ellador brings back report; after all, they decide that though there are many wonders about the world from which the men came, there seems to be a lot of problems as well which they would best keep themselves apart from until there is more information.
CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
It is clear that for Gilman in these novels, fiction is more of a vehicle for social and political commentary; the story barely matters--the plot isn't particularly riveting or novel, the characters are rather flat caricatures, and formally, the first-person retrospective account of an adventurer is hardly a new format. This is something which Gilman's novels share with the utopian tradition more generally though, in which the conveyance of ideals of that utopian society reigns supreme. Gilman's most famous American antecedent is Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwards (1888) which featured a socialist utopia and which was second only to Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur in popularity.
Gilman's utopia distinguishes itself in two major ways: first, she envisions a true socialist utopia as led by women, and second, for Gilman, the bringing about of a cooperative society requires first an intellectual awakening. Whereas novels like Bellamy's envision utopian social institutions that will carry out the necessary reform, Gilman's Herland advocates changes in thinking within each individual. The major change which she advocates is can be fairly straightforwardly gleaned from Herland: The basis of an ideal society must be cooperative rather than competitive, a shift in thinking which requires a revaluing of women's innate leadership as far as cooperation goes. In other words, the realization of a socialist utopia requires both men and women to re-orient themselves away from notions of marriage and female education that designate women to the domestic sphere and a support to men who accomplish the building of society outside of the home. Though Gilman clearly thinks of women as better at cooperation than men, she claims to have a greater commitment to humanity than a narrow "feminism"--she means to deconstruct false gendered binaries in order that both men and women can come together as people to recognize the constructive properties of cooperative society. When the women recognize Jennings as more like themselves than the other men, they clarify that they mean he is more like a person rather than a male (after all, Jeff and Terry are less whole people because of their stereotypical male behavior as the gallant and the cad, respectively).
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Herland published in 1915 in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's own Forerunner Magazine (written, edited, and published all by Gilman herself--at its height of circulation, it had a readership of about 1,500), was the second of her three "Utopian" novels espousing her feminist and socialist commitments. Herland was preceded by Moving the Mountain (1911) and followed by With Her in Ourland (1916).
Gilman's commitments to feminist and socialist causes began around the time that she moved to California with her friend Grace Channing, in order to escape an unhappy first marriage. There, Gilman came into contact with the likes of Edward Bellamy, Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Her subequent travels also put her into contact with the Fabians, in particular, George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Gilman herself became a popular essayist and lecturer on her social and political beliefs.
SUMMARY:
The account is written from memory by one of three male explorers, Vandyck Jennings. Jennings tells the reader that he will not divulge any specifics about the location of their adventures, "for fear some self-appointed missionaries, or traders, or land-greedy expansionists, will take it upon themselves to push in." Jennings begins by introducing himself and his fellow explorers: Terry O. Nicholson is a well-off individual who enjoyed exploration and was good at mechanics and electricity, Jeff Margrave was a poet and a botanist, though he had taken the profession of a doctor. The narrator perceives himself to be the most "scientific" of the bunch; majoring in sociology with a wide interest in all sciences. Terry presents the most problems during their discovery of Herland, a civilization of only women, because of his man's man sexist attitudes towards women.
The idea to find Herland came to them during another expedition the men had been a part of. They had heard from the "savages" that there was such a place and decided to see for themselves. They indeed fly in on their biplane to a civilization of all women. The first women they encounter are three younger women in trees, who outrun the men when Terry has the idea of trapping them by using a necklace to lure them. The narrator describes these women as more like mischievous little boys than shy girls. More breaking of gender stereotypes occur when the men are easily captured by a bunch of older women, made comfortable, and enjoined to learn the women's language and to teach them their own. As comfortable as the women make the men, they decide to escape, through tying together bedclothes and other linen to lower out of the window. The men imagine having made their escape successfully, but it turns out that the women have been surveying their movement and they are brought back and made to understand that they will be treated as guests as long as they promise non-violence and cooperation. The men then apply themselves in greater earnest to their studies. During the course of their studies, they find out that Herland has not had men for two-thousand years: their civilization began with a group of captured women who rose up against male tormentors (who in turn had been enslaved by men who died out from wars and natural disasters). These women created a cooperative society based on united action and sisterhood, and soon a miracle happened: one of their women became pregnant with a girl child. This original mother brought forth four more girlchildren, who in turn brought forth more girlchildren when they reached adulthood. Apparently, parthenogenesis was spontaneously evolved, and this is how Herland came about without men.
As the exchange of information continues between the women and the explorers, it becomes more and more awkward for the men to explain some of their own practices, which clearly shock the women (though they are not judgmental or arrogant). The notions of taking milk away from cattle, killing them for meat, chaining up dogs, women confined to domestic duties, class distinctions, Darwinian economics, and competitive work are completely alien to this utopian, cooperative civilization. Instead, these women are what the narrator terms "Conscious Makers of People" - for them, motherhood and the growth and progress of their civilization make up the raison d'etre of their lives. Of course, not everyone can be mothers in the sense of bearing children; this problem of population is solved by women directing their mothering instincts towards raising children rather than bearing them. As the narrator learns more and more about their society, the more appreciation he has for their ingenuity. As far as education goes, they cultivated two kinds of minds, critics and inventors. The task of educating children is a privileged task reserved for only a chosen elite as education was seen as an essential part of motherhood and people making. As far as innovations in food supply, the women have found a way to enrich soil with waste products, thus preventing depletion. When the narrator asks about criminality, he is told that criminality has been eradicated by a negative eugenics, in which women with flawed tendencies are asked not to bear children.
When the men invited to lecture to young girls so that they might learn about other civilizations, it doesn't go too well for Terry; his narrow conceptions of gender leads him to think them all too boy like. Terry's rigid notions of gender presents significant problems later on when the women allow the possibility of restoring a bi-sexual civilization. The men end up naturally developing attractions for the three women which they encountered in the trees the day they "landed" in Herland. Jennings starts to develop a friendship with Ellador, Jeff with Celis, and Terry with Alima. Terry, seeing girls as a sexual conquest, ends up in many quarrels with the strong-willed Alima. Jeff is another kind of extreme as far as how he views women--he likes to play the role of gallant male, and hence deems women as a sex to be idolized and worshipped. Jennings strongly suggests that his and Ellador's relationship is the most healthful one; the two of them develop a natural friendship consolidated by mutual respect.
Through Ellador, Jennings continues to gain more and more intimacy with Herland. Education is not forced or compulsory, and there are no schools. Everyone learns a set of common knowledge, and then a separate set of specialized knowledge. To check the mind-narrowing aspects of specialization, everyone also takes on a few other branches of knowledge on the side. Because everything is geared towards growth, Jennings finds it odd that there is no real reverence for the past. Hence, their religion is very different, because like everything else, it has thrown of what it has deemed to be "backwards" ideas. Ellador is shocked, for example, to think of a belief in God as polluting infants with original sin as a lasting one. Additionally, the concept of eternal life sounds odious to her because of how natural it is to think of growth and progress through generations. The primary difficulty for the narrator after marrying Ellador is that she has no sense of male-female love. There is only love as mothers, and consequently they assign to fatherhood a similar importance. Try as he might to explain the mutual love between lovers to Ellador, she doesn't feel it. This problem manifests itself much more problematically for Terry, who tries one night to rape Alima because of his belief in having the right to "master" his wife in bed. He is successfully repulsed by Alima and a cadre of strong women, who subsequently decide that he must be sent home. In the end, it is decided that Terry, the narrator, and Ellador will all go to America, while Jeff will stay with his now pregnant wife Celis. The women of Herland also decide that there will be no bridge between the worlds established until Ellador brings back report; after all, they decide that though there are many wonders about the world from which the men came, there seems to be a lot of problems as well which they would best keep themselves apart from until there is more information.
CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
It is clear that for Gilman in these novels, fiction is more of a vehicle for social and political commentary; the story barely matters--the plot isn't particularly riveting or novel, the characters are rather flat caricatures, and formally, the first-person retrospective account of an adventurer is hardly a new format. This is something which Gilman's novels share with the utopian tradition more generally though, in which the conveyance of ideals of that utopian society reigns supreme. Gilman's most famous American antecedent is Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwards (1888) which featured a socialist utopia and which was second only to Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur in popularity.
Gilman's utopia distinguishes itself in two major ways: first, she envisions a true socialist utopia as led by women, and second, for Gilman, the bringing about of a cooperative society requires first an intellectual awakening. Whereas novels like Bellamy's envision utopian social institutions that will carry out the necessary reform, Gilman's Herland advocates changes in thinking within each individual. The major change which she advocates is can be fairly straightforwardly gleaned from Herland: The basis of an ideal society must be cooperative rather than competitive, a shift in thinking which requires a revaluing of women's innate leadership as far as cooperation goes. In other words, the realization of a socialist utopia requires both men and women to re-orient themselves away from notions of marriage and female education that designate women to the domestic sphere and a support to men who accomplish the building of society outside of the home. Though Gilman clearly thinks of women as better at cooperation than men, she claims to have a greater commitment to humanity than a narrow "feminism"--she means to deconstruct false gendered binaries in order that both men and women can come together as people to recognize the constructive properties of cooperative society. When the women recognize Jennings as more like themselves than the other men, they clarify that they mean he is more like a person rather than a male (after all, Jeff and Terry are less whole people because of their stereotypical male behavior as the gallant and the cad, respectively).
Sunday, April 17, 2011
The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
Edition: The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories (Signet Classics)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Country of the Pointed Firs was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1896. Chapters 1-7 appeared in January, 8-11 in March, 12-15 in July, and 16-19 in September. The eventual book publication included some additions, including the two final chapters. Due to the success of Country, Jewett published a few more Dunnet Landing stories over the course of her lifetime. Country is widely considered to be Jewett's best work and has earned her a place in the canon of American regionalism, a late nineteenth-century literary movement in which authors detailed the history, topography, customs, and lives in a particular locality.
SUMMARY:
The novel opens with the narrator revisiting the coastal town of Dunnet in Maine where she had been two or three summers ago which she describes as "unchanged" and with "the same quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities." She lodges with a Mrs. Todd, an eccentric herbalist and widow who had for a long time been in love with someone other than her husband, a man above her station that she had been unable to marry. The narrator is a writer, and in order to get work done, she frequently takes herself away to an old schoolhouse. One time, after the funeral of an old woman named Mrs. Beggs, the narrator is interrupted at the schoolhouse by one Captain Littlepage, an old, retired sea-captain who many regard as a bit "flighty" in his advanced age. Captain Littlepage makes an audience of the narrator, telling her a story about when he was once shipwrecked while on their way to Fort Churchill on the Hudson Bay. There, he was rescued at an old missionary station, where he lodged with a man named Gafett, who told him a story about how his own ship had been wrecked, after he and his men met with some strange encounters in the arctic. They had seen a foggy town beyond where ships usually ventured, with foggy-shaped men: Gaffet posited that it was a sort of purgatory for souls crossing to the next world. The story clearly affects the narrator, though she is inclined to view his story as apocryphal.
One morning, the narrator agrees to accompany Mrs. Todd to Green Island, where her eighty-six year old mother lived. They take a boat out, catching a haddock fish on their way. The narrator spends some pleasant times at Green Island, meeting the bashful but gentle William, Mrs. Todd's brother, in addition to her mother the gracious hostess. They make chowder together, drink tea, and at Mrs. Todd's suggestion, they sing some songs. It seems that there is evidence of some strain between Mrs. Todd and William's relationship; the sister is much more sociable and living at Green Island wouldn't be enough for her, as pleasant as it is. At Green Island, Mrs. Todd shows the narrator some old daguerrotypes of her family and also shows her a spot where she and her husband Nathan frequented during their courtship. Nathan had been lost at sea before he could find out that her heart had already belonged to someone else.
A visitor named Mrs. Fosdick, whom the narrator describes as like a "strange sail" come upon the horizon, arrives at Mrs. Todd's. Though Mrs. Fosdick proves inconsiderate as far as her not giving exactly when she was going to arrive, she is an old girlhood friend of Mrs. Todd's. Together, they reminisce on old times and tell the narrator a story about "poor Joanna." Joanna was a cousin of Nathan Todd's, who decided after being jilted by her young lover to live all alone on an island called Shell-Heap Island. No one could convince her to live elsewhere, and she made do all alone, with friends sometimes sending her some gifts. Mrs. Todd recalls visiting her once soon after her marriage to Nathan. Joanna received her kindly, but reiterated her commitment to staying on the island as a kind of penance for having committed sin of being apart from everyone else. Sometime after Mrs. Fosdick's visit, the narrator, out of curiosity, visits the place of Joanna's old dwelling on Shell-Heap Island. There, she muses how in everyone "there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness."
In the third section, the narrator tells of going on a "great expedition" out to the Bowden family reunion. Mrs. Blackett, Mrs. Todd's mother, has come for the occasion. Together, the three women ride out on a country road over to the Bowden family reunion. The reunion is a grand affair, showcasing the "hidden fire of enthusiasm in the New England nature," an occasion for sharing old family anecdotes, history, and touching base with old acquaintances. The narrator is impressed particularly with some baked goods with "elaborate reading matter" on them pertaining to the Bowden family. Leaving the reunion, the narrator feels as if she has been amongst old acquaintances as well and muses on how "it is the old who really value such opportunities [as reunions]; as for the young, it is the habit of every day to meet their comrades--the time of separation has not yet come."
The final two chapters tell of the narrator getting to know an old fisherman, Elijah Tilley, near the end of the summer. He isn't used to much company after his wife died eight years ago, and up until that afternoon, the narrator and others had found men such as himself inaccessible and secretive. The two end up becoming friends, however, in the brief span of the afternoon. It is soon time for the narrator to depart for the summer was over. Mrs. Todd doesn't allow for an emotional goodbye, but takes care to put together all of the narrator's packages neatly, including with them a coral pin which she was supposed to have given Joanna years ago during her visit, but which Joanna refused. Joanna had told Mrs. Todd to wear it and to remember her by, for the "love of both of us" (referring to Nathan and herself).
CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:
The Country of the Pointed Firs is classed as an exemplary piece of local color fiction or regionalism, genres which are generally thought of as builders of national identity after the trauma of the civil war. Such works often detail the diversity of the American landscape, sketching out the customs, landscapes, and peoples of a particular local area, often referring to these locales with a sense of reverence, nostalgia, and sentimental feeling.
Characteristic of local color fiction, Country has no sense of an unfolding plot, but reads more like a series of sketches, and certainly the narrator embodies much nostalgia for the kind of community which she describes. According to Willa Cather later on, Jewett had referred at times to her work as the "Pointed Fir Papers" and "sketches," but not ever as stories. These designations are important because they give the sense of the work as a kind of archival account of a particular area at a particular time--in this case, the dying, maritime coastal communities of Maine. Jewett's narrator's goal in compiling this archive of her summer amongst the inhabitants of Dunnet is not, however, a project to revive or bring back a way of life which she comes to have so much affection for. The community's valuation of old acquaintances, tradition, old family stories, and the imaginative accounts which come out of a wandering maritime life deeply strikes a chord with the narrator, but she does not seek to carry these values back to her city life. As she steams away from Dunnet after the summer, she makes a point of how the Dunnet coasts were "lost to [her] sight." Indeed, it seems that it is Dunnet's isolation, its difference and disconnection from modern city life that makes it special for the narrator. The story of Joanna might serve as a kind metonym for Dunnet: Joanna's story is more precious for the fact that she had chosen to remain alone until her death. Captain Littlepage's account of the isolated arctic town, or the life of Elijah Tilley might be additional metonyms that convey a similar sense of affective power which adheres in isolation. Looking at Mrs. Todd from a distance as the narrator departs, she finds her "mateless and appealing," ascribing an almost mystical sense to her apartness and wholeness, though unmarried and disconnected. As an "archive," these "papers" mimic this contradiction of affective cohesiveness and isolation: they tell of a deeply moving experience, but at the same time the "past-ness" of this experience isolates it from the world to which the narrator will return.
It is interesting, finally, to think about this kind of archival account of New England in relation to earlier, pre-civil war ones like Hawthorne's. Hawthorne's accounts (see entry on Twice Told Tales) are less nostalgic and instead posit a kind of living history, in which ghosts of the American past continue to haunt the present. Stories are passed on from generation to generation; an assumption of historical continuity underlies them. Nostalgia (as opposed to continuity) in Jewett's post-civil war era work posits a break with the past. This important difference suggests Jewett recalibrates contemporary America's relationship to New England, the place of its origins, as one which values yet definitively breaks with the past.
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Country of the Pointed Firs was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1896. Chapters 1-7 appeared in January, 8-11 in March, 12-15 in July, and 16-19 in September. The eventual book publication included some additions, including the two final chapters. Due to the success of Country, Jewett published a few more Dunnet Landing stories over the course of her lifetime. Country is widely considered to be Jewett's best work and has earned her a place in the canon of American regionalism, a late nineteenth-century literary movement in which authors detailed the history, topography, customs, and lives in a particular locality.
SUMMARY:
The novel opens with the narrator revisiting the coastal town of Dunnet in Maine where she had been two or three summers ago which she describes as "unchanged" and with "the same quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities." She lodges with a Mrs. Todd, an eccentric herbalist and widow who had for a long time been in love with someone other than her husband, a man above her station that she had been unable to marry. The narrator is a writer, and in order to get work done, she frequently takes herself away to an old schoolhouse. One time, after the funeral of an old woman named Mrs. Beggs, the narrator is interrupted at the schoolhouse by one Captain Littlepage, an old, retired sea-captain who many regard as a bit "flighty" in his advanced age. Captain Littlepage makes an audience of the narrator, telling her a story about when he was once shipwrecked while on their way to Fort Churchill on the Hudson Bay. There, he was rescued at an old missionary station, where he lodged with a man named Gafett, who told him a story about how his own ship had been wrecked, after he and his men met with some strange encounters in the arctic. They had seen a foggy town beyond where ships usually ventured, with foggy-shaped men: Gaffet posited that it was a sort of purgatory for souls crossing to the next world. The story clearly affects the narrator, though she is inclined to view his story as apocryphal.
One morning, the narrator agrees to accompany Mrs. Todd to Green Island, where her eighty-six year old mother lived. They take a boat out, catching a haddock fish on their way. The narrator spends some pleasant times at Green Island, meeting the bashful but gentle William, Mrs. Todd's brother, in addition to her mother the gracious hostess. They make chowder together, drink tea, and at Mrs. Todd's suggestion, they sing some songs. It seems that there is evidence of some strain between Mrs. Todd and William's relationship; the sister is much more sociable and living at Green Island wouldn't be enough for her, as pleasant as it is. At Green Island, Mrs. Todd shows the narrator some old daguerrotypes of her family and also shows her a spot where she and her husband Nathan frequented during their courtship. Nathan had been lost at sea before he could find out that her heart had already belonged to someone else.
A visitor named Mrs. Fosdick, whom the narrator describes as like a "strange sail" come upon the horizon, arrives at Mrs. Todd's. Though Mrs. Fosdick proves inconsiderate as far as her not giving exactly when she was going to arrive, she is an old girlhood friend of Mrs. Todd's. Together, they reminisce on old times and tell the narrator a story about "poor Joanna." Joanna was a cousin of Nathan Todd's, who decided after being jilted by her young lover to live all alone on an island called Shell-Heap Island. No one could convince her to live elsewhere, and she made do all alone, with friends sometimes sending her some gifts. Mrs. Todd recalls visiting her once soon after her marriage to Nathan. Joanna received her kindly, but reiterated her commitment to staying on the island as a kind of penance for having committed sin of being apart from everyone else. Sometime after Mrs. Fosdick's visit, the narrator, out of curiosity, visits the place of Joanna's old dwelling on Shell-Heap Island. There, she muses how in everyone "there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness."
In the third section, the narrator tells of going on a "great expedition" out to the Bowden family reunion. Mrs. Blackett, Mrs. Todd's mother, has come for the occasion. Together, the three women ride out on a country road over to the Bowden family reunion. The reunion is a grand affair, showcasing the "hidden fire of enthusiasm in the New England nature," an occasion for sharing old family anecdotes, history, and touching base with old acquaintances. The narrator is impressed particularly with some baked goods with "elaborate reading matter" on them pertaining to the Bowden family. Leaving the reunion, the narrator feels as if she has been amongst old acquaintances as well and muses on how "it is the old who really value such opportunities [as reunions]; as for the young, it is the habit of every day to meet their comrades--the time of separation has not yet come."
The final two chapters tell of the narrator getting to know an old fisherman, Elijah Tilley, near the end of the summer. He isn't used to much company after his wife died eight years ago, and up until that afternoon, the narrator and others had found men such as himself inaccessible and secretive. The two end up becoming friends, however, in the brief span of the afternoon. It is soon time for the narrator to depart for the summer was over. Mrs. Todd doesn't allow for an emotional goodbye, but takes care to put together all of the narrator's packages neatly, including with them a coral pin which she was supposed to have given Joanna years ago during her visit, but which Joanna refused. Joanna had told Mrs. Todd to wear it and to remember her by, for the "love of both of us" (referring to Nathan and herself).
CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:
The Country of the Pointed Firs is classed as an exemplary piece of local color fiction or regionalism, genres which are generally thought of as builders of national identity after the trauma of the civil war. Such works often detail the diversity of the American landscape, sketching out the customs, landscapes, and peoples of a particular local area, often referring to these locales with a sense of reverence, nostalgia, and sentimental feeling.
Characteristic of local color fiction, Country has no sense of an unfolding plot, but reads more like a series of sketches, and certainly the narrator embodies much nostalgia for the kind of community which she describes. According to Willa Cather later on, Jewett had referred at times to her work as the "Pointed Fir Papers" and "sketches," but not ever as stories. These designations are important because they give the sense of the work as a kind of archival account of a particular area at a particular time--in this case, the dying, maritime coastal communities of Maine. Jewett's narrator's goal in compiling this archive of her summer amongst the inhabitants of Dunnet is not, however, a project to revive or bring back a way of life which she comes to have so much affection for. The community's valuation of old acquaintances, tradition, old family stories, and the imaginative accounts which come out of a wandering maritime life deeply strikes a chord with the narrator, but she does not seek to carry these values back to her city life. As she steams away from Dunnet after the summer, she makes a point of how the Dunnet coasts were "lost to [her] sight." Indeed, it seems that it is Dunnet's isolation, its difference and disconnection from modern city life that makes it special for the narrator. The story of Joanna might serve as a kind metonym for Dunnet: Joanna's story is more precious for the fact that she had chosen to remain alone until her death. Captain Littlepage's account of the isolated arctic town, or the life of Elijah Tilley might be additional metonyms that convey a similar sense of affective power which adheres in isolation. Looking at Mrs. Todd from a distance as the narrator departs, she finds her "mateless and appealing," ascribing an almost mystical sense to her apartness and wholeness, though unmarried and disconnected. As an "archive," these "papers" mimic this contradiction of affective cohesiveness and isolation: they tell of a deeply moving experience, but at the same time the "past-ness" of this experience isolates it from the world to which the narrator will return.
It is interesting, finally, to think about this kind of archival account of New England in relation to earlier, pre-civil war ones like Hawthorne's. Hawthorne's accounts (see entry on Twice Told Tales) are less nostalgic and instead posit a kind of living history, in which ghosts of the American past continue to haunt the present. Stories are passed on from generation to generation; an assumption of historical continuity underlies them. Nostalgia (as opposed to continuity) in Jewett's post-civil war era work posits a break with the past. This important difference suggests Jewett recalibrates contemporary America's relationship to New England, the place of its origins, as one which values yet definitively breaks with the past.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Selections from Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Hawthorne's collection of Twice-Told Tales was published in two volumes: the first in 1837 and the second in 1842. All of these tales had previously appeared in magazines or annuals. The collections were only moderately successful, though the stories were praised by the likes of Poe and Longfellow in critical reviews.
SUMMARY/MAJOR FEATURES:
The Gray Champion: A ghostly old warrior reappears during times of trial, specifically, when the people of New England were under oppression. This "Gray Champion" fends off the tyranny of Royal Governor Edmund Andros in April of 1689.
The Wedding Knell: Like many of the other stories in this collection, this is a frame story: the narrator tells his grandmother's testimony of an incident in a church in New York years ago. An old widow was to marry an old scholar. At her wedding, funeral bells ring ominously, and a ghastly procession of old men and women enter, with the bridegroom entering finally in a shroud. She grimly accepts this marriage as a "marriage of eternity."
The Minister's Black Veil: This is one of the most famous and anthologized stories of the collection. One day, the reserved Reverend Hooper began to wear a black veil without explanation. The mystery gradually threatens to degenerate into scandal, but the minister refuses even to tell his wife why he wears it, only saying that it is a "type" or "symbol" of his sorrow. The minister finds that sinners are attracted to his veil, perhaps imagining their own sins as a kind of black veil. The minister won't even take off his veil on his deathbed, and he is buried with it. Oddly, though the minister says on his deathbed that it is indeed a symbol for the evil that is in every human, the story ends with people fearing something very material rather than the abstract--the mouldering face under the veil.
The Maypole of Merry Mount: This account is framed by the narrator's guarantee that what follows may be verified in "Strutt's Book of English Sports and Pastimes." The narrator proceeds to describe a scene of the Maypole celebrations in the New England colony: a lord and lady of the Maypole are crowned, and all are happy; suddenly, though, "care and sorrow" enters into the countenances of the couple because they "truly loved." Here, a historical account of the Puritan settlers and the Merry Mount colonists interrupts. The account, though seeming to go for an "objective" tone, paints a pretty grim picture of the austere Puritans. Governor Endicott himself stops the Maypole celebrations, cutting down the maypole itself in a castrating stroke. He takes the lord and lady prisoner, and punishes the rest of the revelers. He does take some pity on the two young lovers though, and decides to take them up and indoctrinate them into Puritanism. The narrative ends by suggesting, however, that some part of their "early joys" remained in them.
The Gentle Boy: This is a story of the Quaker-Puritan encounter in New England in the colonial days. The narrator isn't particularly kind to either group--the Quakers are represented as overly-eager martyrs, and the Puritans are over-stern in their persecution of other faiths. The exception is a Puritan named Pearson, who takes in a Quaker boy named Ilbrahim whose father has been killed by the Puritans. Pearson and his wife take care of the boy, and prepare to raise him as their own. In church, they are shunned by their peers. Pearson eventually becomes a Quaker himself, but his new faith is tried when Ilbrahim falls ill. Ilbrahim dies just as his biological mother returns from exile to say that the King has issued a mandate to stay Quaker martyrdoms.
Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe: This is a markedly more comical story than most, in which a tobacco pedlar spreads a rumor that he hears from a traveler on the road that Mr. Higginbotham has been hanged. It turns out that Higginbotham is not dead. However, there are several men that still seem to corroborate that Higginbotham has in fact been hanged. To get to the bottom of it all, the pedlar follows Higginbotham home one day, and actually catches someone in the act of hanging him. The mystery is solved: three men plotted Higginbotham's robbery and murder, but two of them delayed the act because they lost their courage. The pedlar had run into both of these men. The third he caught in the act.
Wakefield: This is one of the more formally interesting stories: the entire "plot" is told in the first paragraph. Basically, a man in London leaves his new wife, lives next door to her undiscovered for twenty years, and then finally returns and lives out the rest of his life as a loving spouse. The narrator uses this story to construct a speculation as to what happened. The speculation is that Wakefield didn't plan his long absence--that one day, he just sort of left and then got used to blending into the London crowd. Similarly, the narrator doesn't think that Wakefield's return was pre-meditated. If there is any sort of moral that the narrator offers, it is this: "Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that by stepping outside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever."
The Great Carbuncle: This story reads a bit like a fairy tale: eight people are seeking "the great carbuncle" (a precious jewel) in the mountains of Maine. They are a cynic, a poet, a merchant, a scientist, a "seeker" (someone who has just been ambitious since his youth about seeking this jewel), a lord, and a humble, rustic young couple named Matthew and Hannah. They all have different reasons for seeking the great carbuncle. At night, Matthew and Hannah go to seek it and nearly perish in the attempt because they have gone so far up the mountain. They finally find it, and they see that the seeker has perished beneath it. The cynic has made it up there too: he doesn't see the carbuncle at first, but Matthew and Hannah tell him to take of his spectacles. He does so, and he is blinded by the light of the jewel. Matthew and Hannah decide to return home without the carbuncle; they don't need such an extravagant light for their humble cottage.
David Swan: A Fantasy: This story is about events that come close to happening that we are unaware of. David Swan was on his way to Boston to work for his uncle, the grocer. He falls asleep under a tree and doesn't wake as various people pass by him. A couple nearly takes him in to be their own charge, a potential lover passes by, and a couple of "rascals" nearly rob (and potentially murder) him. David wakes up, and eventually goes on his way to Boston not knowing anything of what might have happened.
The Hollow of the Three Hills: A young woman meets with a old crone with psychical powers in order to listen to the voices of people she's "left behind." She has left behind aged parents, an estranged husband, and a defenseless child. She dies from the spell.
Dr. Heidegger's Experiment: The doctor conducts an experiment on four aged friends of his. Apparently, he has discovered the fountain of youth--not in Europe, as might be expected, but in Florida. The aged friends, a widow and three men who have loved her in her youth, drink the water and forget the lessons of old age when they find that they are young again. They are reckless, and shatter the vase with the water in it. The effects of the water are only temporary. Having seen the "results" of his experiment, Dr. Heidegger gives up on pursuing this project.
Legends of the Province House: This is a group of stories that are linked to a province house that the narrator visits. It is the old mansion of the royal governors of Massachusetts. The narrator essentially says that these stories are likely to have a foothold in truth as well as in legend. In the first story, Howe's Masquerade, Sir William Howe, who would be the Commander-in-Chief of the British army during the American Revolution, has a masquerade party in the mansion. At this party, a funereal procession of former Massachusetts governors enters. Howe beholds himself at the end of this train. The legend says that on the anniversary of the British loss to power, these ghosts frequent the province house. Edmund Randolph's Portrait is framed as an account of one Mr. Bela Tiffany, whom the narrator encounters. The Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson makes the mistake of not listening to his niece's warnings that the portrait of Edmund Randolph hanging in the province house registered the man's agony of having done evil against the people. He decides to sign an order to allow British troops to occupy the Castle William. Years later, Hutchinson is said to have died with the same frenzied look on his face that the portrait of Edmund Randolph revealed. Lady Eleanor's Mantle is about the haughty Lady Eleanor, who arrives to live at the province house because she is the relative of one Colonel Shute who lived there. She wears a mantle which symbolizes pride and the mantle brings smallpox to New England. The crazed suitor of hers, Jervase Helwyse, ends up burning the mantle. This story is also told by Bela Tiffany. The final story, Old Esther Dudley, is told by an old and somewhat senile royalist who has joined their circle. After Howe left the province house, the old Esther who had lived there all her life decided to stay behind. It became rumored, long after the revolution had happened, that she would have ghosts from colonial times over at the house. When the Republican governor Hancock comes to the province house, she mistakes him for the royal governor. She dies soon afterwards, loyal to the king to the end.
The Ambitious Guest: This is the harrowing tale of a family living in the mountains of Maine. They are shown as rustic and happy, until an "ambitious guest," a young man who dreams about doing things worthy of a commemorative monument comes to seek shelter. He inspires the members of the family to also desire more--the father thinks about political office, the eldest girl thinks of love, and the Grandmother thinks of what she wants for her burial rites. A landslide rolls down the mountain and obliterates them all.
Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure: A reckless speculator named Peter Goldthwaite believes that there is gold hidden under his house by an old relative of his. Peter lives with an old housekeeper named Tabitha. Peter tears apart the house, confident that he will find something. He finds nothing but old, devalued currency. He is rescued by his partner, John Brown, who offers to buy his property and to put them up at a nearby place in the meantime.
Shaker Bridal: Much like the stories of other religious sects, the narrative offers a critical account. Two Shakers, a woman and a man, have been too poor to marry even thought they are in love. Instead, the two decide to commit their lives to leading the Shaker community together: as the Shaker elder dies and passes on his authority two these two, other members of the community are skeptical and are afraid that these two will submit to "carnal desires." The man, Adam, vows at length that he will not, but Martha, the woman, is too in touch with her own real feelings to venture more than a quick response. The story points out the hypocrisy of the Shaker men who have libertine pasts and require strict sexual mores of others.
CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
The importance of creating American historical myths cannot be too much emphasized in any discussion of this collection. The story frames, the linking of stories to specific places, the emphasis on passages of time all contribute to the sense that Hawthorne is deliberately making American historical myths. America has its own myths separate from Europe. And though these "myths" are centered in New England, which functions in Hawthorne's stories as a kind of sacred and mysterious originary place, it is clear from moves like locating the fountain of youth in Florida in Dr. Heidegger's Experiment that Hawthorne means to create national and not just local myth. Even the title, Twice-Told Tales signals re-telling and the passing down of stories. Publication in different serials and annuals renders the short stories transitory and fragmented; Twice-Told Tales regroups them into a unified body of American myth to be passed down throughout the generations.
Hawthorne's collection of Twice-Told Tales was published in two volumes: the first in 1837 and the second in 1842. All of these tales had previously appeared in magazines or annuals. The collections were only moderately successful, though the stories were praised by the likes of Poe and Longfellow in critical reviews.
SUMMARY/MAJOR FEATURES:
The Gray Champion: A ghostly old warrior reappears during times of trial, specifically, when the people of New England were under oppression. This "Gray Champion" fends off the tyranny of Royal Governor Edmund Andros in April of 1689.
The Wedding Knell: Like many of the other stories in this collection, this is a frame story: the narrator tells his grandmother's testimony of an incident in a church in New York years ago. An old widow was to marry an old scholar. At her wedding, funeral bells ring ominously, and a ghastly procession of old men and women enter, with the bridegroom entering finally in a shroud. She grimly accepts this marriage as a "marriage of eternity."
The Minister's Black Veil: This is one of the most famous and anthologized stories of the collection. One day, the reserved Reverend Hooper began to wear a black veil without explanation. The mystery gradually threatens to degenerate into scandal, but the minister refuses even to tell his wife why he wears it, only saying that it is a "type" or "symbol" of his sorrow. The minister finds that sinners are attracted to his veil, perhaps imagining their own sins as a kind of black veil. The minister won't even take off his veil on his deathbed, and he is buried with it. Oddly, though the minister says on his deathbed that it is indeed a symbol for the evil that is in every human, the story ends with people fearing something very material rather than the abstract--the mouldering face under the veil.
The Maypole of Merry Mount: This account is framed by the narrator's guarantee that what follows may be verified in "Strutt's Book of English Sports and Pastimes." The narrator proceeds to describe a scene of the Maypole celebrations in the New England colony: a lord and lady of the Maypole are crowned, and all are happy; suddenly, though, "care and sorrow" enters into the countenances of the couple because they "truly loved." Here, a historical account of the Puritan settlers and the Merry Mount colonists interrupts. The account, though seeming to go for an "objective" tone, paints a pretty grim picture of the austere Puritans. Governor Endicott himself stops the Maypole celebrations, cutting down the maypole itself in a castrating stroke. He takes the lord and lady prisoner, and punishes the rest of the revelers. He does take some pity on the two young lovers though, and decides to take them up and indoctrinate them into Puritanism. The narrative ends by suggesting, however, that some part of their "early joys" remained in them.
The Gentle Boy: This is a story of the Quaker-Puritan encounter in New England in the colonial days. The narrator isn't particularly kind to either group--the Quakers are represented as overly-eager martyrs, and the Puritans are over-stern in their persecution of other faiths. The exception is a Puritan named Pearson, who takes in a Quaker boy named Ilbrahim whose father has been killed by the Puritans. Pearson and his wife take care of the boy, and prepare to raise him as their own. In church, they are shunned by their peers. Pearson eventually becomes a Quaker himself, but his new faith is tried when Ilbrahim falls ill. Ilbrahim dies just as his biological mother returns from exile to say that the King has issued a mandate to stay Quaker martyrdoms.
Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe: This is a markedly more comical story than most, in which a tobacco pedlar spreads a rumor that he hears from a traveler on the road that Mr. Higginbotham has been hanged. It turns out that Higginbotham is not dead. However, there are several men that still seem to corroborate that Higginbotham has in fact been hanged. To get to the bottom of it all, the pedlar follows Higginbotham home one day, and actually catches someone in the act of hanging him. The mystery is solved: three men plotted Higginbotham's robbery and murder, but two of them delayed the act because they lost their courage. The pedlar had run into both of these men. The third he caught in the act.
Wakefield: This is one of the more formally interesting stories: the entire "plot" is told in the first paragraph. Basically, a man in London leaves his new wife, lives next door to her undiscovered for twenty years, and then finally returns and lives out the rest of his life as a loving spouse. The narrator uses this story to construct a speculation as to what happened. The speculation is that Wakefield didn't plan his long absence--that one day, he just sort of left and then got used to blending into the London crowd. Similarly, the narrator doesn't think that Wakefield's return was pre-meditated. If there is any sort of moral that the narrator offers, it is this: "Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that by stepping outside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever."
The Great Carbuncle: This story reads a bit like a fairy tale: eight people are seeking "the great carbuncle" (a precious jewel) in the mountains of Maine. They are a cynic, a poet, a merchant, a scientist, a "seeker" (someone who has just been ambitious since his youth about seeking this jewel), a lord, and a humble, rustic young couple named Matthew and Hannah. They all have different reasons for seeking the great carbuncle. At night, Matthew and Hannah go to seek it and nearly perish in the attempt because they have gone so far up the mountain. They finally find it, and they see that the seeker has perished beneath it. The cynic has made it up there too: he doesn't see the carbuncle at first, but Matthew and Hannah tell him to take of his spectacles. He does so, and he is blinded by the light of the jewel. Matthew and Hannah decide to return home without the carbuncle; they don't need such an extravagant light for their humble cottage.
David Swan: A Fantasy: This story is about events that come close to happening that we are unaware of. David Swan was on his way to Boston to work for his uncle, the grocer. He falls asleep under a tree and doesn't wake as various people pass by him. A couple nearly takes him in to be their own charge, a potential lover passes by, and a couple of "rascals" nearly rob (and potentially murder) him. David wakes up, and eventually goes on his way to Boston not knowing anything of what might have happened.
The Hollow of the Three Hills: A young woman meets with a old crone with psychical powers in order to listen to the voices of people she's "left behind." She has left behind aged parents, an estranged husband, and a defenseless child. She dies from the spell.
Dr. Heidegger's Experiment: The doctor conducts an experiment on four aged friends of his. Apparently, he has discovered the fountain of youth--not in Europe, as might be expected, but in Florida. The aged friends, a widow and three men who have loved her in her youth, drink the water and forget the lessons of old age when they find that they are young again. They are reckless, and shatter the vase with the water in it. The effects of the water are only temporary. Having seen the "results" of his experiment, Dr. Heidegger gives up on pursuing this project.
Legends of the Province House: This is a group of stories that are linked to a province house that the narrator visits. It is the old mansion of the royal governors of Massachusetts. The narrator essentially says that these stories are likely to have a foothold in truth as well as in legend. In the first story, Howe's Masquerade, Sir William Howe, who would be the Commander-in-Chief of the British army during the American Revolution, has a masquerade party in the mansion. At this party, a funereal procession of former Massachusetts governors enters. Howe beholds himself at the end of this train. The legend says that on the anniversary of the British loss to power, these ghosts frequent the province house. Edmund Randolph's Portrait is framed as an account of one Mr. Bela Tiffany, whom the narrator encounters. The Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson makes the mistake of not listening to his niece's warnings that the portrait of Edmund Randolph hanging in the province house registered the man's agony of having done evil against the people. He decides to sign an order to allow British troops to occupy the Castle William. Years later, Hutchinson is said to have died with the same frenzied look on his face that the portrait of Edmund Randolph revealed. Lady Eleanor's Mantle is about the haughty Lady Eleanor, who arrives to live at the province house because she is the relative of one Colonel Shute who lived there. She wears a mantle which symbolizes pride and the mantle brings smallpox to New England. The crazed suitor of hers, Jervase Helwyse, ends up burning the mantle. This story is also told by Bela Tiffany. The final story, Old Esther Dudley, is told by an old and somewhat senile royalist who has joined their circle. After Howe left the province house, the old Esther who had lived there all her life decided to stay behind. It became rumored, long after the revolution had happened, that she would have ghosts from colonial times over at the house. When the Republican governor Hancock comes to the province house, she mistakes him for the royal governor. She dies soon afterwards, loyal to the king to the end.
The Ambitious Guest: This is the harrowing tale of a family living in the mountains of Maine. They are shown as rustic and happy, until an "ambitious guest," a young man who dreams about doing things worthy of a commemorative monument comes to seek shelter. He inspires the members of the family to also desire more--the father thinks about political office, the eldest girl thinks of love, and the Grandmother thinks of what she wants for her burial rites. A landslide rolls down the mountain and obliterates them all.
Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure: A reckless speculator named Peter Goldthwaite believes that there is gold hidden under his house by an old relative of his. Peter lives with an old housekeeper named Tabitha. Peter tears apart the house, confident that he will find something. He finds nothing but old, devalued currency. He is rescued by his partner, John Brown, who offers to buy his property and to put them up at a nearby place in the meantime.
Shaker Bridal: Much like the stories of other religious sects, the narrative offers a critical account. Two Shakers, a woman and a man, have been too poor to marry even thought they are in love. Instead, the two decide to commit their lives to leading the Shaker community together: as the Shaker elder dies and passes on his authority two these two, other members of the community are skeptical and are afraid that these two will submit to "carnal desires." The man, Adam, vows at length that he will not, but Martha, the woman, is too in touch with her own real feelings to venture more than a quick response. The story points out the hypocrisy of the Shaker men who have libertine pasts and require strict sexual mores of others.
CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
The importance of creating American historical myths cannot be too much emphasized in any discussion of this collection. The story frames, the linking of stories to specific places, the emphasis on passages of time all contribute to the sense that Hawthorne is deliberately making American historical myths. America has its own myths separate from Europe. And though these "myths" are centered in New England, which functions in Hawthorne's stories as a kind of sacred and mysterious originary place, it is clear from moves like locating the fountain of youth in Florida in Dr. Heidegger's Experiment that Hawthorne means to create national and not just local myth. Even the title, Twice-Told Tales signals re-telling and the passing down of stories. Publication in different serials and annuals renders the short stories transitory and fragmented; Twice-Told Tales regroups them into a unified body of American myth to be passed down throughout the generations.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Selections from William Butler Yeats
Yeats is often described as one of the last Romantics whose poetic career signaled a transition into modernism. M. Rosenthal writes in his introduction to his selected poems: "He began as a sometimes effete post-Romantic, heir to the pre-Raphaelites, and then, quite naturally, became a leading British Symbolist; but he grew at last into the boldest, most vigorous voice of this century." Yeats's biography is helpful for contextualizing some of the elements in his poetry which Rosenthal mentions. John Butler Yeats, his father, was an intellectual cosmopolitan, and his mother came from the countryside. Rosenthal suggests that this mixture of backgrounds produced in Yeats highly intellectual commitments on the one hand and natively patriotic, and often spiritual commitments on the other hand (in his later life, Yeats became part of Mme. Blavatsky's circle, developing interests in the occult and philosophies on the supernatural). Politically, Yeats was committed to the Irish nation, but often the realities of politics seemed "by its very nature inimical to [his] uncompromised idealism." Maud Gonne, whom Yeats was in love with but whom he never ended up being with, becomes an antithetical figure for Yeats: she found passion in political action, and he in poetry. More often than not, Maud (though unnamed in the poems) rebuffs Yeats's world of words and ideas. Yet ideas are deeply important for Yeats--the oppositions that he sets up (action versus ideas included) show his mistrust of fixed, calcified orthodoxies; in setting up oppositions, he affirms a Blakean philosophy of necessary antagonisms and avoids falling into the trap of self-created orthodoxies.
The Rose (1893)
The influence of Romantic poets is very strong in these early poems. In "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," the poet declares that he will go to Innisfree and build a cabin there among nature, and find peace. The final stanza particularly evokes the Romantic notion of memory and inner perception, particularly of nature, as a salutary reprieve amidst other settings: referring to Innisfree, the poet writes: "I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray / I hear it in the deep heart's core." "The Two Trees" also privileges an inner vision, contrasting "the holy tree" which is growing in his beloved's heart with the "broken boughs and blackened leaves" in the "bitter glass" which she looks at. In the ardent "To Ireland in the Coming Times," the poet philosophizes that poetry, beyond its measured structure, needs to reach an ancient, unmeasured nature, "the-red-rose-bordered hem / Of her, whose history began / Before God made the angelic clan, / Trails all about the written page." The poet importantly makes the following distinction: "My rhymes more than their rhyming tell," signaling the deeper importance of sound (elemental, natural) rather than structural function (systematic, rational) in a poem.
The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)
The Romantic influence is clear in this collection as well -- in "Into the Twilight," nature serves as a reparative force for the "Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn." "Your mother Eire is always young, / Dew ever shining and twilight grey," the poet tells the heart. This distinction between modern times' weariness and the past's greater connection to nature (and also tradition) will remain important for Yeats throughout his career.
In the Seven Woods (1904)
"Adam's Curse" specifically imagines one symptom of modern weariness as losing "the old high way of love." To Maud (presumably), the poet writes: "I had a thought for no one's but your ears: / That you were beautiful, and that I strove / To love you in the old high way of love; / That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown / As weary-hearted as that hollow moon."
The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)
This collection has a few striking poems about Maud, and the antithetical force with which Yeats set great value on. In "A Woman Homer Sung," the poet chronicles his own time wasted over writing words and thoughts on her, himself grown grey and "That coming time can say, / 'He shadowed in a glass / What thing her body was.'" The next stanza continues, "For she had fiery blood / When I was oung, / And trod so sweetly proud / As 'twere upon a cloud." The physical world of the body, of action (trodding) triumphs in this poem over the representational world of Yeats's words. "No Second Troy" reflects more negatively on Maud; the poem compliments her in calling her a "Helen," but the Helen in a modern world does harm rather than good: "Why should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery, or that she would of late / Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways." Though the poet doesn't blame this fiery Helen, for her beauty was "not natural in an age like this," she nevertheless does harm.
Responsibilities (1914)
This collection marks a turning point in Yeats's career--the onset of World War I and the brewing of conflict which would result in episodes like the 1916 Easter Uprising necessitated a new poetics that would account for modern political violence. No longer could this be a world he could reject; of the year 1900, he famously said, "everybody got down off his stilts." "The Coat," explicitly refers to a new poetics: "I made my song a coat / covered with embroideries / Out of old mythologies," he writes, but believes from then on that "there's more enterprise / In walking naked." An earlier poem in the collection,"September 1913," idealizes the past--the line, "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone / It's with O'Leary in his grave" ends every stanza--but this repetition also consolidates that this is an unrecoverable past. The final stanza suggests the possibility of bringing back these Romantic exiles, but ends pessimistically: "But let them be, they're dead and gone, / They're with O'Leary in the grave." "To a Shade" is similarly pessimistic, addressing Parnell's ghost and effectively telling him not to come back because the people have not appreciated his "passionate serving kind" and so as it were, he would be "safer in the tomb."
Wild Swans at Coole (1919)
Wild Swans continues to engage, as Responsibilities has, more poignantly and directly with the struggles of the modern world. Some poems, like "Wild Swans at Coole" maintains Yeats's faith in nature's goodness, but unlike in some of the earlier poems, there seems to be a greater gulf between himself and nature. Nature's reparative force doesn't reach him because nature's hearts, unlike man's, don't "grow old." In the past, the poet writes, "I have looked upon those brilliant creatures, / And now my heart is sore." Other poems in the collection reflect the turn towards direct engagement with modern times, often on a very personal level as with "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory" and "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death," both poems about his friend Lady Gregory's son, killed in war. "In Memory" actually mostly discusses many disparate people who have been important to Yeats, all of whom he has brought together in his head, even though they are dead. He brings together Lionel Johnson, John Synge, George Pollexfen, all "my close companions many a year" who, in a way, find unity in Yeats's mind even if they may have fought if they were instead alive together. One person, however, fails to be so simply assimilated--Robert Gregory: "Soldier, scholar, horseman, he," "I had thought...to have brought to mind / All those that manhood tried, or childhood loved / Or boyish intellect approved, / With some appropriate commentary on each; /...but a thought / Of that late death took all my heart for speech." On a broader level than a tribute to Robert Gregory, it seems that the poem also comments on the difficulty of unifying the Irish nation, even when so many individuals were so good, each in their own right. "An Irishman Foresees his Death" is in the voice of Robert Gregory, whom Yeats sees as oddly yoking together the world of words (art) and the physical world. Yeats has this Irish airman rejecting politics, law, and duty ("Those that I fight I do not hate, / Those that I guard I do not love...Nor law, nor duty bade me fight. / Nor public men, nor cheering crowds") and embracing an artistic impulse in the act of dying. He says: "A lonely impulse of delight / Drove to this tumult in the clouds; / I balanced all, brought all to mind...In balance with this life, this death." Yeats's personal engagement with Maud in relation to working out his own place in the world continues in poems like "The People" which imagines the two of them in dialogue. Yeats says that he might have earned more renown and made a bigger impact as a poet in an age and place like Ferrara's Italy, to which Maud rebuffs him the statement that she has never "[c]omplained of the people." Yeats literally has the last word in this poem, saying that he "can neither close / The eye of the mind nor keep my tongue from speech" but he finds in the final lines to himself that he is "abashed" when thinking back on this dialogue nine years later. Continuing with the personal engagements of this collection, Mabel Beardsley (Aubrey Beardsley's sister) appears also in this collection in the heartbreaking poem, "Upon a Lady Dying" recording her resilient decorum and courage before her friends in her dying days (Mabel died of cancer)--the poem suggests Yeats's continuing admiration of traditional, old values that have gone from the modern age, and records Mabel as embodying these. Other poems in this collection are more abstract, though they still reflect struggles of the modern age, though perhaps less directly since less personally: "The Scholars" critique the "old, learned, respectable bald heads" who "edit and annotate the lines / That young men tossing in their beds / Rhymed out in love's despair / To flatter beauty's ignorant ear." "On Being Asked for a War Poem" envisions an unbridgeable gap between the poet and the statesman, the poet humbly admitting that he feels it "better that in times like these / A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth / We have no gift to set a statesman right." "Ego Dominus Tuus" records a dialogue between "Hic" and "Ille" in which Ille critiques the modern age, wherein "[w]e are but critics, or but half create, / Timid, entangled, empty and abashed," leaving his books and manuscripts behind to seek an "image" (an "anti-self," he says, while before nature). The poem seems to criticize those who are entangled amongst books as highly selfish in their supposed individualism, hence the need for an "anti-self" that will be less timid, more engaged with the physical world. In "The Phases of the Moon"a fictional character named Michael Robartes charts Yeats's belief in more occult philosophy (elucidated in "The Vision") of the soul's progress through twenty-eight incarnations, the final incarnation being "The Fool," a nameless, mindless figure blown around by the wind.
The Tower (1928)
In his 1925 essay, "A Vision," Yeats talks about a cyclic theory of civilization, and his sense that the current age was a declining age--that out of the ruins of this Christian age would be another pagan ascendancy. Unlike Eliot, Yeats's solution was not a return to Christian orthodoxy, but a turn to art as eternity. This is the usual interpretation of the inaugural poem in this collection, "Sailing to Byzantium," in which the aging poet leaves his declining, inhabitable modern world, where "whatever is begotten, born, and dies" to go to Byzantium, a place with "the artifice of eternity."
"The Tower" is a further reflection on old age and ruin, but also an imagination of potential continuity through bequeathing something to the next generation. The poet reminisces on the work which he has created in the past, thinking now that "[s]trange, but the man who made the song was blind," though upon consideration, realizes that Homer too was blind. Of his prior creations he singles out Hanrahan, a folksy character, until returning again to an idea which he began with, asking if "all old men and women, rich and poor, / Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door, /whether in public or in secret rage / As I do now against old age?" Accepting old age, in the third stanza the poet says that "It is time that I wrote my will," bequeathing his "faith and pride / To young upstanding men / Climbing the mountain side." "Meditations in Time of Civil War" is a collection of poems which reflect on the possibilities of continuity amidst difference, ending the penultimate section pessimistically with, "We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The heart's grown brutal from the fare; / More substance in our enmities / Than in our love; O honey-bees, / Come build in the empty house of the stare." In the very last section there seems to be a solution only via abstraction: "I turn away and shut the door.../ The abstract joy, / The half-read wisdom of daemonic images, / Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy." "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" also muses on civil war, the failed "fine thought" or "master-work of intellect or hand" deteriorating into days that "are dragon-ridden," in which violently, "a drunken soldiery / Can leave the mother, murdered at her door, / To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free." The fifth stanza is a kind of warped unity, in which a chorus is unified in its mockery of pretty much everything: it mocks those who have "toiled so hard and late / To leave some monument behind," the wise, and the good. The Tower also contains the two famous poems, "Leda and the Swan," which imagines the rape of Leda by Zeus in the form of the swan (the encounter a symbol of the birth of a new historical period, as signaled by "the burning roof and tower" of Troy following out of the birth of Helen) and "Among Schoolchildren," inspired by a visit to St. Oteran's school in his later career as a senator of the Irish free state, chronicling how he imagined Maud amongst the children, launching him into a reverie on the pangs of creative work.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
The Playboy of the Western World by J.M. Synge
Edition: The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays (The Complete Plays of J. M. Synge)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
J. M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World premiered in 1907 at the Irish National Theater and has become famous largely because of the riots surrounding its performance. The play was nearly shut down by radical nationalists (Sinn Fein was founded in 1905 by Arthur Griffith) who felt the play to be an offensive portrayal of Irish identity.
SUMMARY:
All three acts of Playboy take place at a public house owned by Michael James Flaherty.
Act I: As the play opens, Pegeen (Margaret Flaherty, Michael's daughter) is ordering supplies for the pub and for her wedding. Shawn, whom she is set to marry once a bishop's dispensation has been received, comes in and it is revealed that he is no match for her. He fears that the parish priest, Father Reilly, will disapprove of his visiting, and also fears a man that he has heard outside. Pegeen's father arrives, with his friends, Jimmy and Philly. They are off to Kate Cassidy's wake, where they plan on getting drunk; Shawn is afraid to go with them and the men make fun of him. Suddenly, Christy Mahon breaks in, a shy, timid and "slight young man" who asks for a glass of porter. Christy asks if the police come by there, and so they all begin to speculate about what he has done to be running from the police. Christy can barely get a word in but finally he admits he has killed his father. Amazed, more speculations follow as to what weapon he has used; it turns out to be a loy (a club). Christy immediately becomes of great interest to the party, and potentially even useful, as Jimmy notes, "Bravery's a treasure in a lonesome place, and a lad would kill his father, I'm thinking, would face a foxy divil with a pitchpike on the flags of hell." They decide to let him stay with them as their pot-boy, and the men leave. Shawn tries to stick around, but Pegeen sends him away, clearly interested in Christy. Encouraged by Pegeen's imaginings that he has been on the road regaling many girls with his story, and that he is a fiery soul much like a poet, Christy begins to come out of his shell. He tells her that his father ill treated him. The Widow Quin now arrives, and is also interested in Christy; the two women argue over who should keep him, and timidly, Christy expresses a preference to stay with Pegeen.
Act II: In the morning, Christy is cheerfully cleaning a pair of boots, when a group of village girls come in, having heard from Shawn that a murderer was at the Flaherty's. They too are delighted with Christy, and bring him suggestive gifts--"I brought you a little laying pullett--Feel the fat of that breast, mister," one village girl says. The widow comes in again, and proclaims that she is going to engage him in the sports of the town. Christy, happy with the attention that he is getting, tells them that his father was going to wed him to an old, overweight widow who had suckled him, and that thus he had gotten up the courage to kill him. Pegeen returns, and is angry at the visitors, and with Christy for entertaining them. Christy talks to her about how he is lonely in the world, but she dismisses him as merely posturing. They come to an understanding of their mutual interest in each other and Pegeen says she is single, when Shawn comes running in to tell Pegeen that the sheep are eating cabbages in Jimmy's field. She goes out, and Christy "with a new arrogance" (as the stage directions indicate), resists Shawn who tells him that he will give him some of his nice clothes if he will quit the town. The widow, meanwhile, has re-entered and she suggests to Shawn that she marry Christy, and then in return, Shawn should give her some material rewards. Shawn leaves, and as the widow and Christy are talking, Old Mahon bursts in--he is not dead but merely injured. Christy hides and the widow gets from Mahon that his son is a poor, timid idiot. The widow sends him off of Christy's track. She then finds out that Christy is stuck on Pegeen, so makes a deal with him that she won't reveal his secret and aid him, if he will promise her "a right of way I want...a mountainy ram, and a load of dung at Michaelmas" after he becomes master.
Act III: Jimmy and Philly come into the pub later in the day, drunk, and encounter Mahon lurking around. Widow Quin allays their suspicions that this may be Christy's father by suggesting that Mahon is mad. Meanwhile, Christy has been engaged a race, which he triumphantly wins atop an old mule. Mahon discerns Christy and runs after him. The widow, thinking quickly, gets the men to restrain him and manages to convince Mahon that he is mad, because he had said his son was an idiot, and clearly, the man on the mule was "the wonder of the Western World." Mahon is sent on his way as Christy returns, victorious, with Pegeen, other girls, and men surrounding him. Pegeen sends them all away, and Pegeen and Christy exchange some loving words. Pegeen's father returns drunk from the wake (with Shawn in tow) and informs them that the bishop's dispensation has been gotten, so that she must then marry Shawn. Pegeen rejects him and informs her father that she will be marrying Christy instead. Michael and Shawn fight over who should attack Christy--Shawn, of course, is too cowardly to do so and flees. Michael, seeing how cowardly Shawn is, agrees to the marriage: "A daring fellow is the jewel of the world, and a man did split his father's middle with a single clout, should have the bravery of ten." Just then, Mahon rushes in and all is revealed. A crowd, which has accompanied Mahon to the pub, eggs Chrsity and Mahon on in a fight. Outside, it seems that Christy has killed his dad this time for sure. Horrified, and fearing that they will be accomplices, Pegeen, Michael and the others decide to hang Christy with a rope. Christy by this time seems a changed character; fierce, and insolent. Mahon returns one more time, still not dead. He tells his father that they are taking him off to be hanged because he has killed his father. Mahon suggests that he and his son go away together, and so off they go, but in the words of Christy, "like a gallant captain with his heathen slave," himself ascendant over his father. Shawn expects to wed Pegeen after all, but the play ends with her lament that she has "lost the only Playboy of the Western World."
CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century was politically wracked with competing sentiments as to how the Irish were to define themselves independently of British colonial subjugation. Fervent nationalists resented Synge's portrayal of Irish peasant life because they felt he was suggesting that they possessed such degraded and savage morals that they would deem a murderer of his own father a hero.
As George Cusack points out, however, the villagers make Christy in a hero largely because there is such a lack of bravery in the town--Pegeen makes fun of Shawn and upholds the likes of "Daneen Sullivan" and "Marcus Quinn," two figures who oppose British authority (Source: LitEncyc). The biggest surprise in Synge's drama is that this desire actually has a transformative effect: Christy begins a timid man but then actually becomes confident (in love and in fighting--he becomes both a poet and a warrior) because everyone has believed him to be so. Synge's play reveals the power of words in forming identities even when these words are not actively intended to form any sort of identity. Although the hero leaves town, Pegeen's lament that she has lost "the only Playboy of the Western World" suggests her awareness of Christy's transformation by their words--perhaps Synge suggests to his audiences a more conscious and careful use of language to forge a lasting Irish identity. As he indicates in his own preface to the work (January 1907), his own words are chosen carefully: "In every good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple, and such speeches cannot be written by anyone who works among people who have shut their lips to poetry." He is talking about the "joyless and pallid words" of modern drama such as that, specifically, of Ibsen and Zola--against this, Synge draws from the "fiery and magnificent" quality of the "popular imagination," locating in Irish peasant life the power necessary for forging together a Irish identity that they all might be proud of.
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
J. M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World premiered in 1907 at the Irish National Theater and has become famous largely because of the riots surrounding its performance. The play was nearly shut down by radical nationalists (Sinn Fein was founded in 1905 by Arthur Griffith) who felt the play to be an offensive portrayal of Irish identity.
SUMMARY:
All three acts of Playboy take place at a public house owned by Michael James Flaherty.
Act I: As the play opens, Pegeen (Margaret Flaherty, Michael's daughter) is ordering supplies for the pub and for her wedding. Shawn, whom she is set to marry once a bishop's dispensation has been received, comes in and it is revealed that he is no match for her. He fears that the parish priest, Father Reilly, will disapprove of his visiting, and also fears a man that he has heard outside. Pegeen's father arrives, with his friends, Jimmy and Philly. They are off to Kate Cassidy's wake, where they plan on getting drunk; Shawn is afraid to go with them and the men make fun of him. Suddenly, Christy Mahon breaks in, a shy, timid and "slight young man" who asks for a glass of porter. Christy asks if the police come by there, and so they all begin to speculate about what he has done to be running from the police. Christy can barely get a word in but finally he admits he has killed his father. Amazed, more speculations follow as to what weapon he has used; it turns out to be a loy (a club). Christy immediately becomes of great interest to the party, and potentially even useful, as Jimmy notes, "Bravery's a treasure in a lonesome place, and a lad would kill his father, I'm thinking, would face a foxy divil with a pitchpike on the flags of hell." They decide to let him stay with them as their pot-boy, and the men leave. Shawn tries to stick around, but Pegeen sends him away, clearly interested in Christy. Encouraged by Pegeen's imaginings that he has been on the road regaling many girls with his story, and that he is a fiery soul much like a poet, Christy begins to come out of his shell. He tells her that his father ill treated him. The Widow Quin now arrives, and is also interested in Christy; the two women argue over who should keep him, and timidly, Christy expresses a preference to stay with Pegeen.
Act II: In the morning, Christy is cheerfully cleaning a pair of boots, when a group of village girls come in, having heard from Shawn that a murderer was at the Flaherty's. They too are delighted with Christy, and bring him suggestive gifts--"I brought you a little laying pullett--Feel the fat of that breast, mister," one village girl says. The widow comes in again, and proclaims that she is going to engage him in the sports of the town. Christy, happy with the attention that he is getting, tells them that his father was going to wed him to an old, overweight widow who had suckled him, and that thus he had gotten up the courage to kill him. Pegeen returns, and is angry at the visitors, and with Christy for entertaining them. Christy talks to her about how he is lonely in the world, but she dismisses him as merely posturing. They come to an understanding of their mutual interest in each other and Pegeen says she is single, when Shawn comes running in to tell Pegeen that the sheep are eating cabbages in Jimmy's field. She goes out, and Christy "with a new arrogance" (as the stage directions indicate), resists Shawn who tells him that he will give him some of his nice clothes if he will quit the town. The widow, meanwhile, has re-entered and she suggests to Shawn that she marry Christy, and then in return, Shawn should give her some material rewards. Shawn leaves, and as the widow and Christy are talking, Old Mahon bursts in--he is not dead but merely injured. Christy hides and the widow gets from Mahon that his son is a poor, timid idiot. The widow sends him off of Christy's track. She then finds out that Christy is stuck on Pegeen, so makes a deal with him that she won't reveal his secret and aid him, if he will promise her "a right of way I want...a mountainy ram, and a load of dung at Michaelmas" after he becomes master.
Act III: Jimmy and Philly come into the pub later in the day, drunk, and encounter Mahon lurking around. Widow Quin allays their suspicions that this may be Christy's father by suggesting that Mahon is mad. Meanwhile, Christy has been engaged a race, which he triumphantly wins atop an old mule. Mahon discerns Christy and runs after him. The widow, thinking quickly, gets the men to restrain him and manages to convince Mahon that he is mad, because he had said his son was an idiot, and clearly, the man on the mule was "the wonder of the Western World." Mahon is sent on his way as Christy returns, victorious, with Pegeen, other girls, and men surrounding him. Pegeen sends them all away, and Pegeen and Christy exchange some loving words. Pegeen's father returns drunk from the wake (with Shawn in tow) and informs them that the bishop's dispensation has been gotten, so that she must then marry Shawn. Pegeen rejects him and informs her father that she will be marrying Christy instead. Michael and Shawn fight over who should attack Christy--Shawn, of course, is too cowardly to do so and flees. Michael, seeing how cowardly Shawn is, agrees to the marriage: "A daring fellow is the jewel of the world, and a man did split his father's middle with a single clout, should have the bravery of ten." Just then, Mahon rushes in and all is revealed. A crowd, which has accompanied Mahon to the pub, eggs Chrsity and Mahon on in a fight. Outside, it seems that Christy has killed his dad this time for sure. Horrified, and fearing that they will be accomplices, Pegeen, Michael and the others decide to hang Christy with a rope. Christy by this time seems a changed character; fierce, and insolent. Mahon returns one more time, still not dead. He tells his father that they are taking him off to be hanged because he has killed his father. Mahon suggests that he and his son go away together, and so off they go, but in the words of Christy, "like a gallant captain with his heathen slave," himself ascendant over his father. Shawn expects to wed Pegeen after all, but the play ends with her lament that she has "lost the only Playboy of the Western World."
CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century was politically wracked with competing sentiments as to how the Irish were to define themselves independently of British colonial subjugation. Fervent nationalists resented Synge's portrayal of Irish peasant life because they felt he was suggesting that they possessed such degraded and savage morals that they would deem a murderer of his own father a hero.
As George Cusack points out, however, the villagers make Christy in a hero largely because there is such a lack of bravery in the town--Pegeen makes fun of Shawn and upholds the likes of "Daneen Sullivan" and "Marcus Quinn," two figures who oppose British authority (Source: LitEncyc). The biggest surprise in Synge's drama is that this desire actually has a transformative effect: Christy begins a timid man but then actually becomes confident (in love and in fighting--he becomes both a poet and a warrior) because everyone has believed him to be so. Synge's play reveals the power of words in forming identities even when these words are not actively intended to form any sort of identity. Although the hero leaves town, Pegeen's lament that she has lost "the only Playboy of the Western World" suggests her awareness of Christy's transformation by their words--perhaps Synge suggests to his audiences a more conscious and careful use of language to forge a lasting Irish identity. As he indicates in his own preface to the work (January 1907), his own words are chosen carefully: "In every good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple, and such speeches cannot be written by anyone who works among people who have shut their lips to poetry." He is talking about the "joyless and pallid words" of modern drama such as that, specifically, of Ibsen and Zola--against this, Synge draws from the "fiery and magnificent" quality of the "popular imagination," locating in Irish peasant life the power necessary for forging together a Irish identity that they all might be proud of.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf
Edition: Between the Acts
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Woolf began Between the Acts, initially titled Pointz Hall in 1938. The process of writing continued through the Dunkirk evacuation in May 1940, the Battle of Britain, and the London Blitz. The book, set in the summer of 1939, is about as "of its moment" as possible.
Woolf's suicide in March 1941 left the manuscript without final revisions. Leonard published her manuscript posthumously later that year.
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Woolf began Between the Acts, initially titled Pointz Hall in 1938. The process of writing continued through the Dunkirk evacuation in May 1940, the Battle of Britain, and the London Blitz. The book, set in the summer of 1939, is about as "of its moment" as possible.
Woolf's suicide in March 1941 left the manuscript without final revisions. Leonard published her manuscript posthumously later that year.
SUMMARY:
The novel opens with Bartholomew Oliver, Mrs. Haines, and her son Rupert (a gentleman farmer), at the Olivers' countryside estate known as Pointz Hall. They are discussing a cesspool, and the year is 1939. Isa, the wife of Giles Oliver (a stockbroker and Bart's son) interrupts the conversation and her thoughts indicate that she is in love with Rupert. The narration skips to describe Mrs. Swithin, Bart's widowed sister who stays with them in the summer. Mrs. Swithin is fascinated by a book, The Outline of History, which details the history of the earth in geologic terms, stretching back to prehistoric times. It soon becomes clear that she is very different from her brother: he is rational, reasonable, and reads the Times, and she is pious, imaginative, interested in superstition, and reads about London in prehistoric times. Consequently, they get into a bit of a quarrel wherein Bart snubs Mrs. Swithin's faith and superstitious tendencies.
Isa interrupts Bart as he is reading the Times to let him know that she has ordered a fish but that she worries it is not fresh. In her mind, Isa repeats lines of poetry. When she glances at the newspaper, reflecting on how newspapers were the literature of the day and not books, she is for a moment imaginatively transfigured by some lines describing a sexual assault of a woman in the barracks. Meanwhile, Mrs. Swithin is preparing for an annual pageant which she puts on; the cook, Mrs. Sands is preparing in the kitchen, and some class tensions are revealed when Mrs. Swithin tries to help out in the kitchen. Mrs. Manresa, a cosmopolitan, gossipy woman who lives in London has stopped by Pointz Hall with William Dodge (a younger man whom she says is an artist, though he keeps rejecting this label). Though many of the characters at Pointz Hall resent Mrs. Manresa's forwardness and uncensored speech, she is a kind of breath of fresh air at the otherwise stagnant Pointz Hall.
Giles Oliver arrives at Pointz Hall. Giles bears a silent rage against Aunt Lucy because she seems "foolish, free" while he has ended up as a stockbroker. He would have wanted to be a farmer. When Giles arriges, Mrs. Manresa and Bart are talking about some old portraits, one of an ancestor of Bart's, and one depicting a lady which Bart bought simply because he had liked it. Some tensions are apparent from their seemingly lighthearted conversation; Giles is attracted to Mrs. Manresa's charm, Isa is jealous and feels love and hate for Giles at the same time, Giles feels hatred towards Mr. Dodge whom the narration hints is gay. Meanwhile, Miss La Trobe, the producer of the pageant, is busy directing the preparations. Miss La Trobe has sexually transgressive qualities, a Slavic look, and a mysterious occupational history--like Mrs. Manresa, they don't quite fit in with the rest of the villagers.
The conversational tensions prove too much for Isa, who keeps thinking that she desires a beaker of cold water. Mrs. Swithin decides to get up and show the house to the guests; only Mr. Dodge follows. Mrs. Swithin shows Dodge the rooms where she grew up, and in a moment of intimacy, Dodge wishes he might confess his life to her, but he doesn't. While the two of them are up at the house, the pageant begins. It is to be a pageant which traces the great scenes of English history and literature, and a little girl begins, calling herself England. She is shortly replaced by a slightly older girl who is England at the time of the Canterbury Tales. Villagers sing in the background, and the history moves into the Elizabethan era, in which a play within the play is acted out. The play within the play tells of a baby left in a basket and an old crone in later years recognizing that the baby is the rightful heir. Between the acts, the audience shuffles, talks, laughs, and snippets are given of their conversations.
The end of the Elizabethan era is followed by an "Interval." The audience disperses as the grammophone repeatedly wails, "Dispersed are we." Giles, full of lust for Mrs. Manresa, and hatred for Lucy and William Dodge, sees a snake choking on a toad which it cannot swallow. He crushes the head of the snake and the toad, feeling that "[a]ction relieved him." The audience members commence tea at the barn; behind the scenes (or perhaps, "between the acts") servants prepare everything. Mrs. Manresa and the gentry are the first to take their teas. At the barn, Mrs. Swithin is fascinated by the movement of swallows up above. Isa continues to recite poetry to herself as others talk about what they read in the newspapers. Dodge looks upon Giles and seems transfixed by his virility. Mrs. Manresa, too, is interested in Giles and brings him over to the Barn--she feels snubbed, however, when Giles leaves the barn on account of avoiding Mrs. Swithin, who is there talking of swallows with Bart. Isa and William reach a kind of unspoken understanding, as they are both "seekers after hidden faces" (for both, their authentic lives are lived inside).
The play begins again, with a Restoration comedy. In the comedy, an older lady tries to sell out her niece by getting a male conspirator to marry her niece and then share the niece's inheritance with her. The niece, however, runs away and marries her lover, and so the aunt asks her conspirator if perhaps they should just marry. The conspirator leaves her in disgust, and moreover, her servant leaves her too. During the play, nature supplements in the form of cows bellowing--the affect of their "primeval voice" actually helps retain the emotion of the play even when its words are snatched away by the wind. At the end of this act, Miss La Trobe frantically gets her players in order for the Victorian Age; between the acts, Mrs. Manresa and Giles go off together and Isa looks on jealously.
As the Victorian Age plays out, older women of the village remember bits and pieces of the era, trying to piece together whether what they were seeing was faithful to their remembrances or not. They note the loss of a community in the present-day. The pageant's representation of the Victorian era is satirical: a constable waves his truncheon, speaking of empire, English purity, and prosperity; a young woman confesses that it is her life struggle to "convert the heathen"; an older woman is obsessed about marrying her daughters off to the new clergyman. The gramophone blares out "there's no place like home," celebrating Victorian domesticity.
The final act of the pageant is "present day," and for a while, the audience is left pondering why nothing is happening. They fidget, and Miss La Trobe panics that she is losing her audience. Suddenly, it rains, and once again (as with the bellowing cows), "nature...had taken her part." Following this, children rush out holding scraps of metal, using them as mirrors to capture the faces of the audience. The audience is indignant, and most of them turn away, except Mrs. Manresa, who uses the occasion to powder her face. Miss La Trobe's voice rings out in a didactic speech which suggests that all are sinners, regardless of class or position in life, but that also there is kindness to be found everywhere too. She says that they are all "orts, scraps, and fragments"--to recognize this requires an act of humility. After La Trobe's speech ends, a clergyman hesitatingly gives his interpretation and collects money to go to the lighting of his church. After the effect that the pageant has had on the audience, his words seem inadequate and his project trivial. The audience eventually disperses, and as they leave, the people make critical remarks about the play, trying to assay its meaning and its worth. They return to their ordinary lives, speaking also of logistical issues like parking.
Back at Pointz Hall, Lucy Swithin and Bart disagree again: Lucy would like to thank Miss La Trobe for the performance, but Bart thinks that all La Trobe will want to do is to seek shelter at a tavern. It turns out Bart is right, for that is in fact what she does. Lucy looks upon the lily pool, and imagines the lilies on the surface are nations: she imagines also the depths below, of faith, mystery, and the primeval past. The narration gives that the two of them will remain opposed to one another: "He would carry the torch of reason till it went out...For herself, every morning, kneeling, she protected her vision." Isa and Giles end the novel with their strange reconciliation--though she knows (and he knows that she knows) that he has lusted for Mrs. Manresa, in the dark, "they must fight; after they had fought, they would embrace."
CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
As many critics have noted, completed just before WWII, Between the Acts is closely concerned with questions of history, and history in relation to art. As Woolf's biography bears out, it was an anxious period of time for herself and Leonard--she had made suicide plans that were contingent on if the Germans should occupy England. We should be cautioned, however, against back-reading bleaker commentaries in Woolf's novel as prophetically critical and opposed to "grand" history; alongside revisionist critical accounts like Jed Esty's, I think that Woolf's novel reveals a hopeful turn towards "cultural solidarity" (even if it is a rather strange and cautious one).
And now to some more specifics on this. Miss La Trobe's pageant, which follows history through literary genres and subjects, deliberately opposes the history of wars, conquests, and commercial advances which are part and parcel of "grand" history. This tension between literary and grand history is loosely mapped in the oppositional relationships which structure the novel "between the acts": Lucy versus Bart, Isa versus Giles, Dodge versus Mrs. Manresa. Lucy, Isa, and Dodge are united in their contrapuntal attitudes towards grand history. Isa's focus on a fragment from the Times and digestion of this fragment into the world of her poetics and imagination resists the masculine, national, jingoistic ideology of the newspaper. Lucy reads Wells's Outline of History which offers another alternative history, one which traces primeval forces which underly all relationships and considers humans as part of rather than separate from nature. Though Dodge doesn't literally "read" as Isa and Lucy do, what he senses (or knows?) about his own sexuality counters the masculine scripts by which Giles and Bart abide.
It seems, both in the momentary unity which Miss La Trobe effects upon her audience ("Dispersed are we, who have come together") made up of "orts, scraps, and fragments," and the intimacy which underlies Bart and Lucy's as well as Isa and Giles's quarrels with one another, that a kind of synthesis is possible. The final coming together of Isa and Giles which ends the novel is violent but it is the violence that is a necessary requisite for the embrace. The terms of such a cultural synthesis which the novel imagines is fraught, messy, and ambiguous, but nevertheless there.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)