The Myth of Woman

With the re-release of Titanic, I figured blogging about the Myth of Woman would be a great thing to do.

In the movie, Rose is being forced to live a high society life all because her mother can't let go of her upper-class lifestyle. Rose's fiancé, Cal, is the biggest jerk ever, her mother is a selfish and cold woman, the people they entertain themselves with are snobby and fake, and Rose feels as if her life is "an endless parade of parties and cotillions." At one point Rose's mother remarks, "The purpose of university is to find a suitable husband. Rose has already done that." Rose, who is an articulate, bright, determined young woman, is denied freedom and an education... she's being forced into a mold that 1912 society as placed upon women in her position. Anyway, I digress...
  
[According to the Myth of Woman] Women Are:

• inscrutable
• mysterious
• "natural"
• silent
• irrational, instinctive
• beautiful

I'm no feminist, but women do not need men to steer them in life. We aren't irrational or silent... at least not silent anymore. Rose certainly is not. For example, when the men at her table are talking about how they're so happy that Titanic is so gigantic, Rose retorts with something along the lines of "Are you aware of the theories of Freud, Mr. Ismay? His theories about the male preoccupation with size may be of particular interest to you." As it turns out, Ismay has no idea who Freud is, so the insult is totally lost on him. Like I said, Rose is smart. And witty. Also, we are only as mysterious as men want us to be. Maybe they don't/didn't find us important enough to really contemplate, or maybe they didn't see us as anything complex enough to have dimensions. The fact is, the myth that Simone de Beauvoir proposes really is true. I think it is especially clear in movies/books about women's insecurities/unhappiness/disillusionment in the 50s and 60s. Although Richard Yates's book Revolutionary Road is about the disillusionment of an entire family, I think it's an important book and movie about the fragility and complexity of the female mind (although April, in my opinion, isn't exactly sane...)

As for the Sleeping Beauty myth, I think that April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road and for Rose DuWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet chooses the best roles!) in Titanic did wake up from a dream when they were kissed. I think their dreams were nightmares though. Just because a woman finds out that a man loves her, it doesn't mean that all of life's problems go away, that she is going to devote herself body and soul to her new beau, that all of her previous hopes and dreams are now invalid. I think that used to be the male mentality, and it probably still is to a certain extent because that's what we girls tend to swoon over in movies. It's unrealistic unless the girl's a total pushover. I think it's important to remember that a woman is made of layers, not unlike Shrek, and she isn't going to magically be whole when a man steps into the picture and carries her over the threshold. We have our own logical reasons for doing things, even if men think they're stupid or "irrational." Really, though, if we're so irrational, why can't a man just stop and ask for directions instead of driving around for hours? If that's not illogical, I don't know what is. Especially since gas is nearing $4 a gallon.

The Author Isn't Dead...

I think Roland Bathes's idea that the author is dead and context shouldn't matter is completely and utterly idiotic. No disrespect to Mr. Barthes as I do understand from where his ideas on this topic come from, but I think reading a piece without any knowledge about the author or context would make an accurate reading nearly impossible... unless, of course, the author had written the piece to be read without such knowledge.

Take for example... The Bell Jar, one of my favorites. While one is certainly able to just pick up The Bell Jar at random and begin reading it, it wouldn't be possible to fully understand the meaning of it without at least considering the historical context of the novel. Why would Esther be so hesitant to get married? Why is she so eager to rebel, to release her sexual tension? If the reader didn't know anything about life for women in the 1950s-60s, that women who were often the ideal housewives were unhappy and trapped, how would they fully comprehend Esther's need to break through the social constructs that (help to) encase her in the bell jar? Also, Sylvia Plath's life itself is an important contextual factor. The Bell Jar is autobiographical, and full appreciation/comprehension of the novel is definitely dependent upon Sylvia's struggle with her inner demons and depression.

 Oh, Animal Farm... what on earth is that about? Without knowing something about George Orwell or the time in which he lived, Animal Farm would seem totally ridiculous. Talking pigs? Animals overtaking a farm? The pigs becoming the leaders of the entire farm? What?

And then there's Picasso's "Guernica." To the naked eye, "Guernica" looks like a bunch of mangled images. A horse, an eye with a lightbulb pupil, an arm with a broken sword, a floating ghostly head. It's a lot more than that, of course, but who would know unless you did a little research?

So, Roland Barthes... what were you thinking? Yeah, books standing alone may have their own meanings (and sometimes the wrong ones), but the meanings are so much stronger with all the background information.


Context... it's important.

Saussure

It's true: the words we assign to objects have nothing to do with the objects. I've often wondered why we call a candle "a candle," but Spanish-speakers call it "una vela" and French-speakers call it "une bougie." Obviously none of these are cognates to each other, and honestly the real reasons why they are called what they are probably has something to do with etymology, but we aren't getting into that. Saussure's point is:

Signifier (Sound-Image)

+Signified (Concept)

Sign

Postmodernism

"According to Billy Corgan, Postmodernism is whatever the f--- you want it to be."

Postmodernism emerged after WWII. In Literature, it's often characterized by questionable narrators, paradoxes, fragments, etc. It's pretty much the opposite of Modernism and its ideals. Ishmael Reed fits into the Postmodernism category because his work definitely rejects and, really, spits in the face of our definition of modernity. In his poem "I Pray to Chevron" he makes fun of the fact that while most people pray to their deities, the speaker, a rich guy, prays to Chevron, which as far as I could tell is a metaphor for wealth. He owns a Mercedes for every day of the week, eats caviar all the time, and sends his kids to Switzerland for no reason other than for recreation. Reed rejects the Rich & Famous's mentality that they can do whatever it is they want while the rest of us go on living our mundane little lives. His poetry reminded me a lot of Kurt Vonnegut and Chuck Palahniuk, who we all know rejects pretty much every value we as a society hold dear.

 

Okay, I'm going to break the rule and talk about Fight Club for a second. As everyone knows, Fight Club is about this weasel of a guy who buys expensive furniture from catalogs in an effort to make some sort of statement. "I'd flip through catalogs and wonder, 'What kind of dining set defines me as a person?'" The Narrator is pushed around by his jerk of a boss and lives a pretty normal life until one fateful night when the mysterious and headstrong Tyler Durdan tells him to punch him in the face. As it turns out of course (SPOILER ALERT!), Fight Club's big plan is to blow up all the major credit card companies, so all the debt goes away... everyone's back at zero. What could be more postmodern than that?

T.S. Eliot: Tradition and Individual Talent

T.S. Eliot believed that a poet's significance is measured in relation to dead poets and artists. This is true. When a new grunge-type band comes along, magazines will compare them to Nirvana. When a band emerges that seems to break new ground and becomes an overnight worldwide sensation, they're compared to the Beatles. But that's not exactly what Eliot was getting at. He believed that tradition may indeed define the contemporary, but that the contemporary changes the essence of tradition that itself owns. Apparently Hollywood has lost its originality because lately all they've been spitting out is remakes. Bewitched, superhero movies, 21 Jump Street, all those awful horror movies that Rob Zombie feels compelled to direct, et cetera, et cetera, ET CETERA.

For example, let's compare The Shop Around the Corner, the 1940 movie starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, and 1998's You've Got Mail starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

 

The Shop Around the Corner is about two coworkers at a small shop who can't stand each other but are falling in love with each other through the mail, as each other's pen pals. The girl, of course, has no idea who her pen pal is but is falling harder for him with each stroke of the pen while the ever-suave and most romantic Jimmy Stewart finds out that he's fallen for his hated coworker. In You've Got Mail it's pretty much the same except Kathleen Kelley (it's so nice to hear Tom Hanks say my name!) and Joe Fox are rival bookstore owners. They have been communicating via e-mail and Joe finds out that Kathleen is his e-mail friend. It's a perfect movie. The point is, though, that You've Got Mail takes a very familiar storyline from a classic movie made 50 years before and puts a modern twist on it by using e-mail instead of snail mail. Defined by tradition, yes. Modern twist, yes. 

 

And as much as I HATE Across the Universe, I can't help but love what they did to "She's So Heavy." Across the Universe took Beatles' songs from yesteryears and put them in a context relevant to when the Beatles were writing and performing them, transforming the world's youth from a "Leave It to Beaver" kind of perfect to rebels who wouldn't hesitate to "stick it to the man" but they also re-recorded all the songs and had the actors sing them and they messed with the instruments. All in all a very individual move using one of the most prolific bands in the history of music.

Androgyny

Tilda Swinton was one of the first people I thought of when I found out what androgyny is. Of course Virginia Woolf and Samuel Coleridge weren't talking about physical androgyny, but Tilda's androgynous all the same. It's eerie. 

Virginia Woolf was convinced that Coleridge was right: a creative mind should be androgynous. A writer shouldn't just write from the point of view from which they have always biologically seen.

I think Nicholas Sparks's writing is DEFINITELY androgynous. Let's think about it for a second: who goes to see his movies? Women. Who reads his books obsessively? Women. Who swoons over the male lead in the stories? Women. What is Nicholas Sparks? A man. For a man to write in such a way that women spend oodles of money going to the Friday night premieres for his movies and buying hardcover copies of his books, he must be pretty in-touch with his feminine side.

The Notebook was Sparks's BIG break (even bigger than the movie Message in a Bottle, which came out in 1999) was 2004's The Notebook, which is still a movie that girls freak out about. For Nicholas Sparks to appeal to women on such a deep level, and for him to have written so passionately about a young couple is amazing. Noah is every girl's DREAM, and Allie acts just like most of us girls would have. 

Even though Sparks doesn't possess the kind of androgyny that Virginia Woolf would've approved of (she probably would have found him mediocre at best...I know I do), it is definitely a kind of androgyny that strikes a chord with women everywhere and with many men's feminine sides.... If Sparks wasn't an androgynous writer, none of his books would have become the sensations that they are.

WEB Du Bois and Art

WEB Du Bois wasn't an idealist. He lived his life fighting for equal rights for African Americans, but, from the very beginning, he knew the fight would be long and hard. He knew that even after the African Americans achieved their equal civil rights that life wouldn't be all rainbows and sunshine, that they would still have to deal with "the inevitable suffering that always comes with life" (p. 871). I like this about Du Bois; idealism always has its costs to a person's morale... idealism is having reality up on a high pedestal.

Because Du Bois was so dedicated to his cause and because he knew that the journey was going to be very strenuous, he wanted to make sure that nothing was pointless. "[A]ll art is propaganda," he says, "and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent."

Du Bois was an early member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but later became disillusioned with the NAACP's motives as well as with American society in general. He was very opposed to Booker T. Washington's pacifistic attitude (as seen in Washington's Atlanta Compromise Address in which he was willing to sacrifice equality for economic opportunity) and was a strong voice in the Civil Rights Movement. Du Bois was certainly not willing to make any compromises in this battle for equality, and he was willing to take big strides in order to reach the goal.

Du Bois's history and his ardent feelings about African American rights explain in no uncertain terms why he "doesn't give a damn" about art that doesn't serve a purpose other than being aesthetically pleasing. To Du Bois, art that doesn't serve any constructive purpose is wasted... it's stupid for an African American to paint pictures if the pictures don't say something. As my favorite dead guy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, once said, "You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say."

Adolf Hitler and Hegemony

Hegemony is all about "the 1%." According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, hegemony is defined as "the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant class." In class, Vince described it as the 1% convincing everyone else that what they (the 1%) want is what is good for everyone. During the Nazi regime, Adolf Hitler (and the high-class, high-ranking Nazi officials, too) used hegemony in order to brainwash the German people into believing that yes, minorities such as Jews, Gypsies, etc really were out to get them.* All of this was an effort to reach a Weltanshauung, or a German worldview.  As this video shows, Hitler used the power of words to sway the youth of Germany into adopting his view of what a country should be; as history shows, Hitler used brainwashing and his own charismatic charm to create in Germany's youth the idea that what they were doing was good, when every word Hitler says is contradicted by Germany's action. And although this video doesn't explicitly describe hatred for minorities and even though "altruistic" is used to describe German society, it's important to think of this video and Hitler's words in context with his ideology and the world events around this time. (The subtitles are hard to read, so I typed them out for you.)

The Introducer: Again we experience the hour that makes us proud and happy. By your order here stands a youth-- a youth that knows no class distinction. The youth of our nation is shaped in your image. Because you are the epitome of altruism... this youth wants to be altruistic. Because you are the ideal of loyalty... we also want to be loyal. Adolf Hitler, leader of the German youth, will speak!

Adolf Hitler: My German youth, after a year I again greet you. You here today are only a part of what is spread over all Germany. We want you, my German boys and girls, to absorb all that we expect of Germany. We want to be one people, and you, my youth, are to be that people. In the future there must be no ranks or classes. And you must not let them [be able?] to grow in you. We want to see one nation and you must educate yourselves for it. We want this people to be obedient, and you must practice this obedience. We want this people to be peace-loving and also to be courageous. You must be peaceable and courageous at the same time. We want this nation to be hard, not soft, and you must steel yourselves for it in your youth. You must learn to accept privations and never collapse. No matter what we create today or what we do today... we will pass away. But in you Germany will live. And when nothing remains of us, then you must hold in your fist this flag we tore from nothing. I know this cannot be otherwise because you are the flesh from our flesh and the blood from our blood. The same spirit that dominates us burns in your young minds. As the columns of our movement sweep through Germany today, then I know you will join with them. And we know around us is Germany, in us Germany marches, and behind us Germany followed.

In 1939, Hitler was eager to take control of Poland. He couldn't do this without reason. He staged an attack on a Poland-based German radio station. The German people had already been told via propaganda that Germans in Poland were being abused by native Poles, so they believed Hitler when he blamed the Poles for the attack. The photographs of the Poles doing this helped Hitler's argument (although the "Poles" in the pictures were actually Germans dressed in Pole clothes). On the last day of August 1939, war on Poland began with the full support of Germany.*

As a way to reach the common people, propaganda is a useful tool of hegemony. Hitler, of course, knew this. "All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach," he says in his book Mein Kampf. Clearly, Hitler had hegemony figured out.

*Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow. New York: Scholastic, 2005. Print.

The Uncanny

Sigmund Freud says that the uncanny "is undoubtedly related to what is frightening-- to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term" (825). In other words, the uncanny is something that appears in real life but is presented in such a way that evokes a feeling of dread and discomfort-- it is the return of repressed memories/experiences.

In our world, I think one of the most uncanny things that has happened in recent history is the Jewish Holocaust during World War Two. It is uncanny because, although we see and hear about killings day in and day out, seeing such horrible brutality happen in real life made our families then and makes us today so uncomfortable that some people find it easier to ignore that it happened altogether. As much as people deny it, most people are somehow racist/xenophobic/prejudiced, and we DO NOT want to identify with the Nazis. In a way, the memories of the Holocaust in the minds of many people in the world have become repressed, and when those memories resurface... no one wants to confront them; confronting them would mean acknowledging them.

http://www.history.com/topics/the-holocaust/photos#

This is the famous gate from Auschwitz: "Work will make you free." This, to me, is very uncanny because it is a motto we have all sort of adopted. While most diligent people don't believe that work might make them physically free, as in liberated, they do believe that work will set them free from the stress of taking out loans, having to use food stamps, being on unemployment. "Work will set you free" is something we all tell ourselves when we need motivation to keep on keeping on, to work harder than we did yesterday because harder work means more freedom. What's uncanny about this gate is that work did not set the victims free. Work bought them time, maybe... and in some cases, work killed them. Many of them worked themselves to death because their bodies didn't have adequate nutrition to work as hard as they were. Something that is generally thought of in a positive light turns into something that wears a mask; you're told work will make you free, so you work, but it only ends up making you exhausted. And then you die anyway.

The Dandy: Jay Gatsby

Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby in the 1974 version of the Great Gatsby

All the while I was reading Baudelaire's section on The Dandy and all the while Vince talked about Dandies in class, I couldn't get The Great Gatsby out of my head. I think Jay Gatsby is a perfect example of the Dandy because he makes great efforts to integrate himself into a crowd without actually being a PART of the crowd. Throughout the novel, Gatsby throws lavish parties to which he invites hundreds of strangers. All of the party guests have heard of Gatsby and know who Gatsby is, but none of them have ever seen him or could point him out in a crowd. At one such party, Nick Carraway, Gatsby's narrator, stumbles upon Gatsby: "[M]y eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to another with approving eyes. His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day. I could see nothing sinister about him. I wondered if the fact that he was not drinking helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased"* (Fitzgerald 50). Gatsby seems like a 1920s version of George Clooney-- quiet and withdrawn yet somewhat... intriguing in a way that is irresistible.

Baudelaire says, "Whether these men [Dandies] are nicknamed exquisites, incroyables, beaux, lions or dandies, they all spring from the same womb; they all partake of the same characteristic quality of opposition and revolt; they are all representatives of what is finest in human pride, of that compelling need, alas only too dandies obtain that haughty exclusiveness, provocative in its very coldness" (687 of our textbook).

Dandies have an elegant quality about them that seems effortless and perfect.Style, for the Dandy, is a way of life-- it is a function. However, it is my suspicion that the Dandy's effortless beauty is not effortless at all. Being a Dandy is in fact a hard feat to accomplish, and I think it exemplifies a sadness in the character-- particularly in Jay Gatsby: "He smiled understandingly-- much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced-- or seemed to face-- the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed  in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished-- and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I'd got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care" (Fitzgerald 48).

Gatsby's life in a nutshell.

 

I think Gatsby is a Dandy to a fault. He has spent who knows how much money on who knows how many parties in hopes that his long lost love, Daisy, will drop by... he makes sure that he is withdrawn enough from his own parties to be able to scout her out on the off chance that she will actually make an appearance. His perfection is heartbreaking, his eloquence is carefully thought out, his hair is perfectly arranged. Gatsby is so perfect, the Dandy is so perfect, that I don't think he will be able to comfortably function in real life. I think being a Dandy would create hollow relationships and would mean putting yourself so high on your own private pedestal that you are essentially untouchable and unable to associate with anyone in a meaningful way.

*Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925. Print.

In Praise of Shakespeare

"Shakespeare is about all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life." -Samuel Johnson in his Preface to Shakespeare (page 374 in our book)

Samuel Johnson praised William Shakespeare as being a maker of classics. Even today, we can find this to be true because we're still reading his plays and watching movies that are inspired by his plays. We love Shakespeare, we feed off him, we quote him, we believe him. His works, so ancient, still ring true in our culture today, even if we don't get the same things out of them that Queen Elizabeth did. While Aristotle would have found Shakespeare's plays to be absurd because they don't follow the strict Aristotelian Laws of Unity, Johnson claims that Shakespeare's total disregard for the unities is forgivable: "The necessity of observing the unities of time and place arises from the supposed necessity of making the drama credible" (382 of our textbook).

I've always had trouble with Aristotle because he is so cold. I know he was a physician and therefore was very scientific and calculating, but I never understood why literature and poetry, by Aristotle's standards, has to be so... rigid. Literature and other media, in my opinion, wouldn't be as enjoyable if they were "believable" and if they obeyed the rules set forth by Aristotle. Hamlet, for example, breaks the Unities of Time and Space (Hamlet's travels would take far longer than the time it takes to perform the play; Hamlet's scenes take place mostly in Elsinore, but also at Hamlet's college); Johnson, I think, understood that Hamlet needed to break the Unities in order to provide backstory and suspense. It's become commonplace in today's movies and books to have flashbacks and long breaks in time (e.g: in James Cameron's 1997 movie Titanic, most of the movie takes place 80 years in the past while being interrupted throughout by the present), and this disobedience does nothing but ADD to the story.

 Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet is a classic because it stands the test of time. On the left is a clip from the 1968 version of Romeo & Juliet, performed in the style we always associate with Shakespeare's time and culture. On the right is the 1996 version, which is set in modern day-- even though the movie takes place some 400+ years after the play was written, it still stays faithful to the dialogue and scenes.

Johnson also praises Shakespeare for writing characters who could be any normal person. It's hard to feel sorry for characters like Odysseus or Hercules or even Superman because we can't really relate to them-- their tragedies are not the same as our tragedies. Shakespeare's characters, although they are often in high places in society, could be identified with our next door neighbors, our sisters, our friends, or ourselves. Shakespeare's plays probably wouldn't have become "classics" by Johnson's standards if the characters didn't have qualities that we can all relate to. And, let's face it, even though The Odyssey is considered to be one of the great Classics of all history, it is rare that anyone would feel more for Odysseus than he or she would for Macbeth or Ophelia.

Maimonides: Misinterpretation

 

Miss Rhode Island misinterprets Stan Fields's question at the Miss United States Pageant in the 2000 movie Miss Congeniality

 

"[Y]ou should not hope [to find some signification corresponding to every subject occurring in the parable][.]" -Moses Maimonides (pp. 172-173, Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism). 

The thing that hit me most while reading our portion of Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed was his belief about parables and their deeper meanings. As a lover of literature, I was often frustrated in my high school English classes because no one understood what the eyes of Dr. TJ Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby mean or what the ducks symbolize in The Catcher in the Rye. Although I was glad that neither Fitzgerald nor Salinger come right out and say what their respective symbols mean, I couldn't help but wish that they had put notes in the backs of their books to explain it so that my class wouldn't disagree with our teacher. With everything, we have to take into account a certain amount of misinterpretation.

I like Maimonides's idea that the reader must only be allowed a glimpse of the truth at first, and he or she will be able to have his or her own ideas about it, and then, later on, the truth will be revealed in its full form. In my opinion, this is a good philosophy because it still allows a little room for the reader to see things from his or her own perspective, for at least a little while, and then be shown the work from the writer's point of view. Sylvia Plath sort of does this in the seventh chapter of her iconic 1963 novel The Bell Jar, "I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet." It's pretty obvious what the symbolism is here, but I like Sylvia's use of it because she makes it clear without saying exactly what it is. She leaves room for someone to misread it, while others understand exactly what she means. There's freedom in that; she allows room for perspective in that.

Vincent van Gogh's last (speculated) painting, Wheatfield with Crows

In Art Appreciation last year, Dr. Zurinsky told us that Vincent van Gogh had finally reached the breaking point after years of depression, health problems, and unrequited loves. Although no one is 100% positive, it's widely accepted that his 1890 painting Wheatfield with Crows is the last painting he ever did. Dr. Zurinsky told us, in the delicate and soothing way she has, that the crows symbolize the depression and years of failure flying away from van Gogh, leaving behind the beautiful, radiant field of windblown wheat. Now, if you were to look at this painting without knowing it was his last painting and without knowing anything about his depression, you'd probably think it is just another wheat field. Like Maimonides says, looking at the painting at face value is just the outer shell, which is "beautiful as silver" (p. 171) as it is. After you learn about van Gogh's life, though, and after hearing what Dr. Zurinsky said about it, the inner meaning is golden. 

In the age of political correctness in which we live, misinterpretation plays a major role in our lives. To this day Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl is being challenged, "due to the complaint that the book includes sexual material and homosexual themes" (http://tiny.cc/on16b) and Mark Twain's The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn is being challenged because of its "racial slurs and the use of ungrammatical dialect (100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature by Karolides, Bald, and Sova). Most recently, the American Congress has been trying to pass a bill which would allow the censorship of the Internet, SOPA & PIPA. Although I certainly do not believe that one should use racial slurs or try to purposefully offend someone, it is my strong belief that the reasons Diary of a Young Girl and Huckleberry Finn have been banned/challenged over the years is from a complete misinterpretation of their content. Even though most coming-of-age teenagers don't say it out loud (and neither did Anne Frank, technically), they all struggle with their sexuality-- no matter the orientation. At least the girls reading Anne's Diary can relate. Huck Finn's challengers are completely ignorant, in my opinion, because they don't take into consideration that 1.) Twain is a Regionalist, and therefore captures the dialect of his locale, 2.) Huck Finn, despite his use of the n-word, maintains a close, brotherly relationship with the Black character, and 3.) Twain's purpose is not to offend, but to show that Blacks and Whites COULD be friends in time when people of different races weren't supposed to even speak to one another. Misinterpretation: a crippling force in this day and age. It would certainly have been helpful if Twain or Anne Frank had included a disclaimer with their works... maybe then people wouldn't completely miss the point.

http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/m/misinterpret.asp

Breaking the Mold

e.e. cummings is my favorite poet because he doesn't conform to the rules that traditional poets do-- capitalization, punctuation, sentence structure... none of it matters to e.e. cummings. Because of his refusal to fit into the mold, he broke through a lot of walls and that is why he became unique and loved by so many. 

Horace tells us that poetry, because it is an art, should abide by certain rules, or decorum. A few of these rules are: 

• the characters must act according to their ages and places in life (pp. 125-126)
• be inspired by life and keep your writing as close to life as possible (p. 129)
• don't let everything be obvious; leave a little mystery so that your work will be compelling and the audience will have to analyze the plot/characters (p. 126)

Although Horace seems very dedicated to his idea of the decorum, he does give the writer room to wiggle around and create something singularly his or her own. Horace's decorum, I think, is more of a suggestion, and that is what I like about him. I do agree with most of what he says, especially the three points I've listed above. 

Audrey Hepburn in a modest dress for the Oscars

Lady Gaga in a meatdress at the VMAs

However, while I, personally, like to have a guide to follow when I'm doing... well, pretty much anything, I think self-expression is more important than following a rubric. I think too much structure restrains the writer, and, if all writers followed Horace's decorum, we'd have thousands upon thousands of years of poetry that is just the same old same old. As much as I don't like Lady Gaga and her painfully strange costumes, I must applaud her for being "original" in a way that I don't believe anyone else has. On a larger level, breaking rules does a lot for society. If MLK hadn't broken the societal rules in the 1960s, we'd probably still be segregated. If the American revolutionaries hadn't fought back against British oppression in the 1700s, we'd speak with British accents. So, while I'm personally glad to have rules by which to go, I'm also glad that there exist rebels who are willing to break out of that quaint little box and do something totally ridiculous. What are rules if they aren't broken once in a while?

Aristotle: Action is Character

Although I usually don't like Aristotle, I believe much of what he says about tragedy in Poetics is true: "For (i) tragedy is a representation not of human beings but of action and life. [...] [P]eople are of a certain sort according to their characters, but happy or the opposite according to their actions. So [the actors] do not act in order to represent the characters, but they include the characters for the sake of their actions" (Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism 93). As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his notes on his last novel, The Last Tycoon, "ACTION IS CHARACTER." And, as the saying goes, actions speak louder than words. When we see a movie or a play, we don't really have the knowledge we need to judge a character on who they are as a person. All we're given is what they do. Hamlet, for example, is probably not someone many playgoers see as being level-headed or right; on the contrary, it's likely that we wouldn't see Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird as a villain, because everything Atticus does in the book is in order to help his children or his doomed client. Atticus says on page 33 of To Kill a Mockingbird, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." Since we, as the viewers or readers, aren't able to know characters on a personal level, viewing these characters by their actions is the only way we're able to "climb into [their] skin." Apart from soliloquies, which are few and far between, in a play we're not given too much insight into someone's soul. Aristotle's demand that a tragedy include defining action for a character is vital for the development of a character in the eyes of the viewer or reader. As Aristotle says in On Rhetoric, "[C]haracter is almost, so to speak, the most authoritative form of persuasion."

Fyodor Dostoevsky's Underground Man in his novel Notes from Underground is the prototype for the Anti-hero, who is paralyzed by his or her fear of action. We are told the story of the Underground Man from the Underground Man himself, so we are seeing who he is by his thoughts and words. Although it's obvious that the Underground Man yearns to have companionship, he is paralyzed by the fear that he will be humiliated and judged. On one occasion, the Underground Man coaxes Liza, a prostitute, to his home under the pretense that he is interested in more than just sex. Liza thinks that he sees her as a person. The Underground Man, almost threatened by the possibility that he and Liza could be friends or even lovers, ends up blasting Liza with insults, which crushes her. From Liza's point of view, the Underground Man is simply cruel, but we know that he is using his cruelness as a defense mechanism. It is the Underground Man's INACTION that causes him to plummet even deeper into isolation, and this is why, I think, Aristotle makes such a big deal out of characters being defined by their actions rather than the other way around; at the end of the day, it's not what we believe that makes a difference-- it's what we DO.

Ode to the Anti-hero

Plato and Today's Culture

Although Plato lived 2,300 years ago, his ideas about poetry and knowledge are still very relevant today, not only to today's literature, but to the way in which human nature functions. "The point is that a young person can't tell when something is allegorical and when it isn't, and any idea admitted by a person of that age tends to become almost ineradicable and permanent," Plato argues. "All things considered, then, that is why a very great deal of importance should be placed upon ensuring that the first stories they hear are best adapted for their moral improvement." In today's world, when violence has become a major theme of TV shows, movies (like this [VERY VIOLENT] clip from American Psycho), video games, and even music, Plato's argument  certainly still holds some ground. Does early exposure to violent videogames like Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty help to program kids to be violent people? Should the violence we watch for entertainment value be held accountable for killing sprees and other acts of violence? Plato's view on this subject plays a major role in the Nature vs. Nurture debate, even if he isn't given his due credit. Futhermore, his argument can be supported by cases of domestic violence. According to the Domestic Violence Roundtable, children who experience domestic violence are more likely to develop abusive and violent tendencies; boys who witness their fathers abusing their mothers are likely to grow up and abuse their wives and children too-- as children, they learned from their fathers that abuse is a simple way to get what they want and to resolve issues. Clearly, Plato's idea about a youngster's learning/environment is something that is important to consider even in today's world, and the question is still being raised: should violence and other indecent acts (sex between unmarried persons or teenagers, thefts, etc.) be allowed to be portrayed in the media? What are these portrayals' long lasting effects on the world?

Plato also theorizes that writing will cause people's minds to be foggy. "Trust in writing will make them remember things by relying on marks made by others, from outside themselves, not on their own inner resources, and so writing will make things they have learnt disappear from their minds." While this can be read on a much deeper intellectual level, when I first read this passage, my thoughts immediately jumped to movies and books. In 2012, when movies have become a staple to weekend leisure and a way to escape, it's often hard to keep a clear, realistic head. For instance, while girls, like myself, KNOW that romance isn't always the I-waited-for-seven-years-and-now-I-have-you Notebook story, or the perfect damsel in distress scenario in which the handsome prince sweeps us off our feet and carries us off to a better life, we keep telling ourselves, "It happened for Noah and Allie, maybe it can happen for me too..." While being an idealist isn't necessarily all bad, it certainly leads to quite a bit of disappointment. We let books, magazines, and movies generate this picture in our heads that Mr. Right will be our Romeo, when he will most likely be just as flawed as everybody else; we expect Bradley Cooper and end up getting Rob Schneider. There aren't enough Abercrombie & Fitch models for all of us. So, the fact that Billy broke Sally's heart in 9th grade, and again in 10th, and yet again in 11th and 12th won't matter when Billy shows up in Sally's yard throwing pebbles at her window, because people in movies mess up all the time, habitually, and end up being the much sought after "One." The media causes us to not only think about, but BELIEVE with the utmost strength, that what is written is reality. Plato's argument was relevant in his time, sure, but, in my opinion, its relevance has only intensified with the widening of availability of media.

This clip from the movie (500) Days of Summer is a perfect example of this. Tom, a (literally) hopeless romantic who was influenced at a young age by The Graduate and sad British pop songs, is in love with Summer, a girl who doesn't believe in love or relationships.  Obviously, Tom's let his dreams of perfection make him fly so high in the clouds that reality completely crushes him.