Love that Style

For me, Toni Morrison's prose has been more engaging than most of the other styles of writing we've read this semester. Morrison writes so vividly, with a lot of detail and dialogue that comes off the page. Her descriptions are pocketed with these perfect adjectives, and I love how she adds another dimension to her story by playing with the characters' names. Song of Solomon is the first novel I've read that's written by Morrison, and even though our nightly readings are relatively long, her prose demands my attention in a way that the other novels in this course haven't.

I know that some readers prefer a kind of orientation at the start of a novel, but I'm actually a huge fan of how Morrison tosses the reader straight into a really complex situation at the start of her novel; we don't have any concrete ideas about what's going on, and yet the atmosphere of the scene is so dense with clues. She drops all these minute details that color the overall tone with different shades of tension, so that we can feel a certain mood without necessarily being able to name it, and it's only when you go back to these sections that you pick up on the different threads that she's weaving together there. The opening scene of the novel is a great example of this. I think that Mr. Mitchell said in class that Pilate's song in that first section is later explained and brought to its full significance, and Morrison kind of foreshadows/describes the importance of the song when she writes "Others listened to it as though it were the helpful and defining piano music in a silent movie." First of all, that's a great sentence. Secondly, I completely missed that sentence on first reading (idk why I would pick it up on my first reading) and if that song becomes significant later, then what a small, telling, but pretty detail that is.

Some assorted favorite sentences/descriptions/details for you:

"One of the nurses, hoping to bring some efficiency into the disorder, searched the faces around her until she saw a stout woman who looked as though she might move the earth if she wanted to." (6)

"Like a lighthouse keeper drawn to his window to gaze once again at the sea, or a prisoner automatically searching out the sun as he steps into the yard for his hour of exercise, Ruth looked for the water mark several times during the day" (11)

"The bits of Sunday dresses that he saw did not fly; they hung in the air quietly, like the whole notes in the last measure of an Easter hymn." (173)

"It was empty of shoppers that morning -- nothing but the occasional sound of automobiles breaking the graveyard silence of the cars in the lots, lined up like tombstones." (176)

"From where he stood, the house looked as if it had been eaten by a galloping disease, the sores of which were dark and fluid." (220)

"High above the clouds, heavy yet light, caught in the stillness of speed ("Cruise," the pilot said), sitting in intricate metal become glistening bird, it was not possible to believe he had ever made a mistake, or could." (220)

"Sixteen years later he had one of the best farms in Montour County. A farm that colored their lives like a paintbrush and spoke to them like a sermon." (235)

Rochester vs Macon Dead

Working as a sort of bridge between our readings of Wide Sargasso Sea and Song of Solomon, I wanted to think about the class discussion we had this week about Rochester and Macon Dead II as sympathetic and/or similar characters.

Rochester and Macon have the same basic goals in their respective novels: to acquire a lot of wealth, Rochester through his marriage to a rich plantation owner's daughter, Macon through his own work ethic and his marriage to a wealthy doctor's daughter. The main idea for both of the men is to get more money, and their marriages are secondary obligations (that are for solely for pleasure, but only at first). Macon's striving for wealth has more to do with moving up the social ladder, however, (while Rochester's search for money & land is done to keep up his already high social status) and is closely tied with his identity as an African-American who wants to achieve social parity between himself and White Americans. In this way, Macon's desire to own a large house, run a successful business, and drive a nice car is actually the complete opposite of Rochester's, because Macon's story is that of the disadvantaged and traditionally oppressed striving for equality with the oppressors, while Rochester's story is that of the privileged trying to maintain that which makes them privileged (land, wealth, power) and holds them above the oppressed. For this reason, I feel more sympathetic to Macon than to Rochester, but when I think of the two character's personalities and behaviors, my feelings start to change.

Rochester: drives his wife insane then locks her in an attic and pretends she doesn't exist
Macon: has zero tolerance for his wife, is cold towards his family, does whatever needs to be done in order to get his money (ex. kicks an entire family out of their home)

Now let's look at the motivation/back-story to what's listed above.

Yes, Rochester was thrown into his marriage and through his narration makes it seem as if he was purposefully saddled with a lunatic-to-be, but his main motivation for marriage was the money, right? So he wouldn't have cared either way, except for the fact that he kind of grows to love her -- kind of. He just lusts after her in the beginning, but there are definitely some moments -- at least a few -- where they seem to connect on a more than physical level. Like the night after he visits Daniel Cosway and Antoinette visits Christophene and they just talk it out in the impartial darkness of the night. He even says "I swear she didn't have to do what she did" (aka use the love potion that he takes to be poison). Weren't they just so close to making it through at that point? But it all just went downhill from there, and it seems like there's still a part of him that retains some of that affection for her and that part of him morphs into an irrational "my mad girl" type of feeling. I feel like Rochester is a sympathetic character, because his motivations are complex and not entirely one-dimensional; I want to hate him for being so cruel in his dehumanization of Antoinette, but I can also see that wasn't necessarily planning to do this to her, in one tragic way or another it just kind of happened. He's is by no means justified in his actions, but I can feel a sort of sympathy for him because he's driven himself mad, in a way.

As for Macon Dead II, he seems cold, harsh, pretentious. His is so emotionally distanced from every single person in his life that it's easy to dislike him, but it's also incredibly sad, if you think about it, that he has no person that he loves or is emotionally attached to, and he also has nobody else who loves him. Pilate is the one person who he deeply cared for, then something happened, and Macon Dead II seemed to have changed after that. It seems like he doesn't trust love anymore, now he believes in respect. And respect, for him, comes through wealth, power, and an elevated lifestyle & attitude.

Rochester at least had some tangible emotion, and because he was narrating we got to understand more of what he was feeling. Macon is a lot harder to understand which makes him harder, thought not impossible, to sympathize with. As the novel goes on, I'd really like to see how his character comes to light.

Page 15

As we've been reading Wide Sargasso Sea, I've slowly been trying to put the pieces of Antoinette together, to figure her out. She seems like one of the most ambiguous characters that I've read this semester, but I think this uncertainty about her personality is something that Jean Rhys is purposely trying to achieve. I feel as confused as Rochester as I struggle to figure out how Part One Antoinette becomes Part Two Antoinette.

At the between-parts break, I felt a huge disconnect between the child Antoinette as I thought I knew her, and the young woman Antoinette who seems even more confusing and distant once we start seeing her through Mr. Rochester's perspective. In part one, Antoinette is confused and conflicted over her place in the complex social world that she is born into. She craves attention from her mother and when her mother pushes her away, she finds a maternal figure in Christophene. There isn't an important male figure in her life (Mr. Mason certainly doesn't fit the bill). She identifies more with black Caribbean culture than white Creole, and not to mention, English culture (exemplified best by the looking-glass analogy we looked so closely at in class).

Then in part two, we learn that she's been married off thanks to Mr. Mason's son and with a laaarge dowry that drew the interest of Rochester. Antoinette loves the feeling of security that Rochester provides ("She'd liked that -- to be told 'you are safe.'") and the happiness she feels at finally being accepted and seemingly loved by someone who can make her feel safe. In this way, she still seems kind of childish or really reminiscent of herself in part one. A lot of her doubts and insecurities from her childhood are still there as a young married woman, and Rochester is able to allay those old uncomfortable feelings, if only for a while.

Antoinette's cultural identity, meanwhile, does seem to have changed from part one. While Rochester sees that Antoinette is obviously comfortable with the black people of the island, Antoinette also seems much more comfortable ordering them around and establishing a definite distance between her and them, as servant and mistress (it's kind of like a role-reversal of her childhood, where she is now wealthier than they are and holds more power over them -- and she seems to be enjoying that turn of the tables, almost in a childish way?). When Antoinette describes Christophene, of all people, to herself as an "ignorant, obstinate old negro woman, who is not certain if there is such a place as England,"  it's apparent that while Antoinette still loves Christophene dearly, the racial tensions that had been confusing her as she grew up have finally forced Antoinette to make a kind of decision about which culture she most identifies with. She seems to be leaning toward not Creole, but English culture, especially with Rochester playing such a big role in her life in part two. She asks Rochester about England a lot in the beginning of part two, and when Christophene advises her to leave Rochester and go to Martinique later on in part two, Antoinette says she would much rather go to England.

As I continue to read part two of the novel, I'm still piecing together Antoinette's dynamic personality because it only seems to change further (but also remain the same) as the book goes on.



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In case anyone is wondering about the title of this post, page 15 in my version of the novel is the page that marks the part-one-to-part-two transition.

Trying to define the "Normal"

The Stranger has proven to be the toughest book of the semester for me to think about (and certainly to write/talk about). The complicated issue of murder aside, I really just don't know how to feel about Meursault. I've been trying to figure him out since I read the first three sentences, and I feel like I still haven't come to a consensus now that I've finished the novel. I almost feel bad, because I'm scrutinizing Meursault in the same way that the Algerian court is, by largely ignoring his crime and focusing on his character instead. But really I feel like I have to understand his character to some degree before I can understand his crime. So what follows is an attempt to understand why I feel so uncomfortable and confused about Meursault (and I don't think I'm the only conflicted one, right?).

I sort of have a theory, let's say theory-in-progress, that's based on the Platonic understanding of the individual (and Freud eventually develops a similar theory of the psyche, that I think is more well-known). Basically, there are three parts to a soul (Plato uses "soul" in The Republic, but the idea applies to human life on earth and is less spiritually related) which are the appetitive, the spirited, and the logical. The appetitive part consists of your elemental desire (food, water, sleep, sex, etc.); the spirited part contains your passion, emotions, the things that compel you to act; the logical part is your sense of reasoning, your rationale.

According to Plato, ideally the logical part of you should be in charge, and should also be allied with your spirited part to control the appetites. Internal conflict occurs in human beings when these parts are at odds with each other.

Okay, so the ideal person should be acting primarily using reasoning and partly using emotion, while paying moderate attention to their appetite. Can we say that this internal balance is representative of what a "normal" person acts like?

A large part of the prosecution's argument against Meursault is aiming to show how Meursault is not normal by showing how he is internally out of balance in this way. The prosecutors emphasize  Meursault's lack of emotion over his mother's death (which shows that Meursault's spirited part is missing in action) and explain that his murdering the Arab occurred without any reasoning on his part (which shows that the logical part of himself is not in command like it should be). This leaves his appetitive part to be in control, and Meursault even tells the reader that, "I explained to him, however, that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings."

I think that because Meursault's personality doesn't fit the model by which a "normal" person is supposed to act, I feel (and the Algerian court feels) thrown off by his behavior in the novel and almost feel like there's something wrong with him. The prosecution argues that since his appetitive part is in control, he behaves outside the boundaries of reason without feeling any remorse and thus poses a threat to society (if he killed once and felt no guilt, then what stops him from killing again and again?)

As a reader of the novel, however, I get to see Meursault's story from his point of view, and for the most part Meursault's appetitive part rules his desire for simple pleasures (a swim on the beach, a night with Marie, a lazy afternoon of people-watching) and not violent inclinations. Meursault is made out to be "a monster," as the prosecutor says, by being accused of being so abnormal that he is a threat to society's well-being.

Guilty Gregor & Culpable Cohn

I know that we're only a few pages into Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, but while we were talking in class yesterday about Gregor's qualities as a character (human, not bug!) I kept making connections between Gregor and, of all people, Robert Cohn.

The scene where the manager is chastising Gregor through bedroom door #1 about being late to work kind of reminded me of Mike getting angry at Cohn for not being able to pick up on the social cue that he was unwanted on the trip. I think it's mostly the fact that both characters seem to get beat up on by the other people in their lives that makes me sense a connection between them. Cohn is just disliked by everyone in the novel even though they seem to agree that for the most part, Cohn is a "nice" guy. Meanwhile Gregor seems to be the poster-child for traveling salesmen and when, for the first time in five years, he's late to work, everyone flips out. Before Gregor even manages to get out of his room we have his parents insisting that something must be wrong with him if he's this late, his sister starts crying, his manager shows up eight minutes past seven, the doctor and locksmith are sent for, and who knows how worried the maid might even be at this point.

Then, with all this happening, Gregor, not seeming to completely register the many complexities of being unwilling transformed into an arthropod, worries about disappointing everyone else by not going to work (if he could only manage to catch the next train!). He feels guilty when he himself, Gregor Samsa, was thrust into this position, wronged in his own right, robbed of the duty of going to work. Why should he be feeling guilty? Now remember, Cohn the middleweight boxing champion got angry, beat Jake up, and then apologized profusely to Jake, (who says "that's alright" quite a few times as Cohn's apologizing) no doubt because he feels intensely guilty for throwing a few punches at people who didn't really like him anyway. Cohn's sense of guilt arises more out of his own perception of having been "crazy" just as Gregor's sense of guilt arises out of his own idea that he should be going to work to support his family even though he's a bug that's not physiologically capable of doing that.

Cohn's sort of alienation from from his group of "friends" and Gregor's literal and figurative alienation from his family, combined with the sense of mostly unjustified guilt that they both harbor, make Cohn and Gregor an unlikely pair of similar characters. I think it'll be interesting to see if this similarity still stands as the novel goes on.

Jake & Brett, Brett & Jake

  warning: this post is kind of messy, and I apologize in advance

I have to admit that while I was reading Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, I was in the anti-Brett camp. Every page had me annoyed at Brett not because she decided to hook up with any guy she fancied, but because she seemed like she was using Jake. She knew that Jake was so emotionally invested in her (just calling this "love" seems hollow) and she seemed to take complete advantage of that. Every time she said "darling" I cringed. It was almost like a damsel-in-distress cry for Jake to listen to / help her with her problems -- which in and of itself is perfectly fine; it's just that I didn't see her doing the same thing for Jake. Jake sacrifices so much for Brett, he completely loses the respect of Monotoya (and Monotoya's regard for him as an afficionado is important to him!), he gives up his mini-vacation in San Sebastian where he finally seems like he's content, and he puts her feelings before his own, always. Maybe that's admirable or damned nice of him or something, I don't know (I thought for a while about it, and I can't decide if Jake is a pushover or just a rare personality).

Then a controversial (within my own mind) thought that developed during Friday's class discussion: is Jake just being a good friend? Uh, if friendship is supposed to be a one-sided thing then sure. I really can't see this friendship as a two-way street, because Brett always talks about herself. Jake never says "darling, I've been so miserable," not that he should because that isn't his style, I mean that in the way sense that Brett unburdens herself to Jake but Jake doesn't ever discuss anything personal with Brett. Jake is Brett's confidant, but Brett doesn't seem to be Jake's. But I can still see the side of this question that says: Brett cares about Jake just as much as he does for her, but she just doesn't show it and we as readers don't see these feelings in the same way we see Jake's because she isn't narrating the story. Okay. Pair that with the idea that Jake seems to be Brett's only genuine friend/support and vice versa. The "vice versa" part doesn't make sense because what about Jake and Bill and their moments during the fishing trip? But Jake might never see Bill, or any of the other characters for that matter, again ("so long Jake" says everyone). Brett is there after everyone else walks out of this story. So vice versa works, I guess.

Meeting the Characters: The Hours and Mrs Dalloway

One of the things I loved about watching The Hours was being able to see the written characters in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway come to life. While each character in Woolf's novel doesn't necessarily have a counterpart in the film, there are parts of each character that become more visible and tangible on screen. Most characters in the film are a complex medley of the personalities and back-stories of the characters from the novel, but I think that in some cases, characteristics of a personality in the text became much more real to me when I saw them on screen.

I felt a lot of Septimus as I watched the character of Laura Brown baking a cake, going to answer the door, stepping in the hotel room. It was that smile, that smile that was supposed to be the icing on the cake in terms of her happy-50s-homemaker designation: it was lacking something. Her smile wavered on a line between self-assured and anxious, and it made me think of how Septimus must have looked to Reiza, to Dr. Holmes, to people on the street. I was reminded of the passage where Woolf describes Septimus's "hazel eyes which had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers apprehensive too." Laura's smile had that exact effect -- it was unnerving but for no tangible reason, because she was smiling wasn't she?

In Dan Brown's character I felt like I met another good representation of a character from the novel, and this time I saw Richard. When I was reading Mrs. Dalloway I feel like I had never developed a solid image of Richard and his personality in my mind. I think I actually overlooked his character, because I was so into the personalities of Septimus and Clarissa and Mrs. Kilman. When I saw Dan on screen, though, I felt like I was watching Richard interact with Clarissa in the novel. He was hard to dislike when I got to know him, like Richard Dalloway, and I hadn't even expected to like him at first because I had assumed that he treated Laura badly since she seemed upset with him (and I expected the same of Richard since Clarissa was thinking so much of Peter for most of the beginning of the novel). Hearing Dan tell Laura how much he appreciated the cake and how happy he was to have her reminded my so much of how Richard rushed home to Clarissa to "tell her he loved her in so many words." Dan's content and completely oblivious attitude is a lot like Richard's in the novel; just like Dan has no idea that Laura is thinking about suicide, Richard has no idea that Clarissa is spending her entire day thinking of how her life might have been different if she had married Peter (a much milder oblivion).

While all of the characters in the movie represented some parts of all the characters from the novel, watching Laura and Dan in the film helped me build up a more tangible mental image of Septimus and Richard, respectively. It was great to be able to see with my eyes what Septimus and Richard might have looked like on that June day.