There are three paradigms on naming in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
1) Descriptive Naming based on Mannerisms and Personality – The Dwarfs (the country) àsome of these even being so abstract as to be “Doc”
2) Descriptive Naming based on Titles – The Queen and The Hunter (the court and castle), The Slave in the Magic Mirror
3) Descriptive Naming based on physical appearance – Snow White
The used to call me Snow White: women’s strategic use of humor by Regina Barreca
Penguin Books
New York, New York, USA
Copyright 1991
0 14 01.6835 4 (pbk.)
-No overt discussion of Snow White throughout the text.
-Cover also features three images of the Mona Lisa: 1st, the classic, 2nd, grinning closed mouth, 3rd laughing with mouth open
-“The image of the Good Girl was a product developed in a conspiracy among parents, the media, and advertising, with support from the church, educational and economic institutions, and the government in general.” – page 4. “Good Girls didn’t make trouble for anybody. They did what they were told, whether that was keeping their rooms clean, watching TV while they baby-sat on Saturday nights, or buying all the current Cover Girl merchandise… Good girls were taught to believe that everything would continue to be just fine, and that someone else was out there taking care of things.” – page 4
-(from page 14): Quote of Elayne Boosner: “Reagan was against sex education in the schools because he thought there was a connection between promiscuity and sex education--that kids did it because they learned about it. No way. I had four years of algebra and I never do math. These guys say they’re against abortion because birth is a miracle. Popcorn is a miracle, too, if you don’t know how it’s done.”
-Page 40, Barreca discusses Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic. Their discussion of: “the literary convention that forces the good heroine to keep the bad woman locked away” & Jane Eyre.
-178: “Fay Weldon quotes this old joke: “Question: How many radical feminists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: That’s not funny!”
page 23: “Joanna Russ writes in her article ‘What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can’t Write’ about the ways in which, wh en the sex of the protagonists is changed, the plots no longer work, thus proving that the so-called universal plot depends heavily on the sex of the main character. In the supposedly universal plots we’ve all read in ‘great’ literature (that is, literature by men), changing the sex of the main character changes the paradigm so completely it becomes comic. Russ’s examples include the following: “1. Two strong women battle for supremacy in the early West. 2. A young girl in Minnesota finds her womahood by killing a bear. 3. A phosphorescently doomed poetess sponges off her husband and drinks herself to death, thus alienating the community of Philistines and businesswomen who would have continued to give her lecture dates. 4. A young man who unwisely puts his success in business before his personal fulfillment loses his masculinity and ends up as a neurotic, lonely eunuch.”
Russ, Joanna. How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983.
Page 181 – “The mind is much more powerful than the prick – The mind doesn’t go down in two minutes.” Quote of Robin Tyler
Not in bibliography
Page 179: Barreca quotes Kate Clinton: “Men have used humor against women for so long—we know implicitly who is the butt of their jokes—that we do not trust humor. Masculine humor is deflective. It allos a denial of responsibility, the oh-I-was-just-kidding disclaimer. It is escapist, something to gloss over and get through the hard times, without ever having to do any of the hard work of change. Masculine humor is essentially not about change.”
Not in bibliography
Mirror Mirror by Gregory Maguire
Copyright 2003
HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022
ISBN 0-06-039384-X
“I am a girl who did no wrong
I am a woman who slept with my father the Pope
I am a rock whose hands have appetites
I am a hunter who cannot kill
I am a mercenary with the French disease
I am a girl who lived among stones
I am a woman who poisoned my enemies
I am a rock and my brothers are rocks
I am a cleric who trafficked in curses
I am a gooseboy or am I a goose
I am a girl who did little wrong
I am a a gooseboy or am I a boy
I am a farmer who stole something sacred
I am a monster who let the child go
I am a dog with an unlikely past
I am a hunter who followed the coffin
I am a girl who did something wrong
I am the other side of snow
I am a mirror a mirror am I
Mirror mirror on the wall
Who is the fairest one of all”
[last two lines in larger font]
[appears before page 1]
Moulding The Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, University of Toulouse-Le Mirail, France
Copyright 2007
Published by Ashgate Publishing Company, Burlington, VT USA
978-0-7546-6034-7
“Wilkie Collins’s Modern Snow White
Aresenic Consumption and Ghastly Complexions in The Law and the Lady (1875)”
-No overt reference to Snow White in that article?
-Final chapter
-“Like Bluebeard’s wives, Collins’s female characters experience male cruelty and strive to transform themselves to please men—even when the remedies are lethal. While the novel’s main secret lies in a dead woman’s toilet case among her comsetics, the deciphering of the enigma involves decoding the signs of femininity as so many incriminating clues paving the way for truth.” – page 159
-“
Feminist Fairy Tales by Barbara G. Walker
Copyright 1996
HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY
ISBN 0-06-251320-6
-“Snow Night” – page 19
Page 19: “The wicked stepmother is ubiquitous in European fairy tales, whereas any father figure is usually given a good character. Snow White’s stepmother seems to have been vilified because (a) she resented being less beautiful than Snow White, and (b) she practiced witchcraft.
“One might suspect that female beauty was really a larger issue for men than for women, because male sexual response depends to a considerable degree on visual cues. Placing each “fair lady” (or anything else) somewhere on an arbitrary hierarchical scale seems to be a male idea. Women may recognize a thousand different types of beauty without having to make them compete.
“As for witchcraft, the last bastion of female spiritual power fell when the church declare its all-out war on witches, the name they gave to rural midwives, healers, herbalists, counselors, and village wisewomen, inheritors of the unraveling cloak of the pre-Christian priestess. A queen who was also a witch would have been a formidable figure, adding political influence to spiritual mana. Snow White’s stepmother therefore seems to me a porjection of male jealousies. As re-envisioned in this story, she may seem more true to life.”
Page 21: “Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess with skin white as snow and hair black as night, so she was called Snow Night.” (21)
“Her mother died when she was a baby, and her father remarried. Snow Night’s setpmother was a noted sorceress, and also famous for her beauty, of a more mature type than that of the young princess”
-Lord Hunter wants to improve his rank by marrying a royal princess.
-Snow Night escapes the Hunter by kicking him in the crotch
Page 22
“One evening he [the Lord Hunter] found the queen alone in here anteroom, consulting her magic mirror, wh ich always told the truth. He sat quietly while she asked the mirror several questions. Then, as she was turning away, he said, ‘I wonder if Your Majesty has ever asked the mirror who is the fairest lady in the land?’
“The queen smiled. ‘I know the answer it would give, huntsman. Snow Night is the fairest.’
“’Doesn’t that anger you?’
“’No, why should it?’
“’Surely Your Majesty’s great beauty has always been fairest in the land. Wouldn’t that make the princess a usurper and an upstart?’
….
Page 23
“’But don’t stepmothers always hate their stepdaughters?’
“That must be one of the ridiculous traditions about women invented by men.
Page 23
The Huntsman: “According to an old story, the royal stepmother sends another to act for her, such as her faithful huntsman. He is the one charged with killing the stepdaughter and bringing back her heart in a jeweled casket.”
Page 23
“The dwarves’ eyes sparkled like the gems, which dwarves love above everything else.”
Page 25
“As for Lord Hunter, his reason quite gone, he lived confined for the rest of his life as the dwarves’ prisoner. In later years eh sometimes passed the weary hours by writing stories. It is said that he wrote an entirely different version of the story you have just heard.”
--No magic occurs in the story, since the mirror is never actually asked a question
--The dwarves have a Queen of their own, with whom the Queen has diplomatic relations with
--Snow White does not live with nor care for the dwarves (never “learns what it means to become a woman”)
--Prince Charming does not kiss Snow White as she is never left unconscious
--
Moulding the female body in Victorian fairy tales and sensation novels by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
Copyright 2007
Ashgate Publishing Company, Burlington VT
ISBN 978-0-7546-6034-7
“Consumer Culture in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels”
“’Pretty things to sell, very cheap, very cheap… stay-laces of all colours’. – ‘Little Snow White’, the Brothers Grimm”
Page 5: “As Snow White’s wicked stepmother’s irresitible offer illustrates, what we generally learn as children through fairy tales is that all princesses are beautiful and may even try to improve their beauty. In fact, their beauty is their wealth—quite literally, since being beautiful enables them to win a prince and a fortune. Hence, what fairy tales foreground is the idea that femininity is closely linked to aestheticization, and that beauty is a feminine virtue which needs to be cultivated. Whether it be Psyche enticed by Proserpine’s beauty cream or Snow White lured by the wicked Queen’s gaudy stay-laces, these female characters all exemplify how much their own fate depends on their physical appearance, on their power to construct a self which matches male expectations.”
Page 95-96: “The deceptive nature of glass if ofeten visible when mirrors are used to purvey reflections on feminine representation. In Gubar and Gilbert’s feminist interpretation of Snow White, the magic looking-glass is a cultural weapon that enforces patriarchal sentences on women and locks them up in ‘crystal prisons.’ The Queen’s obsession with her own reflection suggests less the woman’s self-absorption and narcissism than it discloses the King’s appraising gaze. As Gubar and Gilbert posit, ‘His, surely, is the voice of the looking-glass, the patriarchal voice of judgment that rules the Queen’s—and every woman’s—self evaluation.’ Yet, by producing two-dimensional images, the looking-glass also provides a significant means to investigate the relationship between femininity and/as (chimerical) representation.”
Talairach-Vielmas then compares to George MacDonald’s ‘The Woman in the Mirror’ about a woman “unable to choose her setting and unable to phrase her depair, the melancholy female reflection epitomizes objectification and subservience to the male order”
“Female Aestheticism and Criminalit in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale”
Wilkie Collins’s Armadale… Page 147: “… Armadale seems to expose the Victorian underworld of feminine construction, using the fairy tale Snow White and the figure of the narcissitic Queen to offer its readers an insight into the looking-glass of femininity.”
“As in the fairy tale, the mirror becomes the site which encapsulates treacherous female nature, inspiring Gwilt with new plots and reflecting woman as an actress staging the scenes of her life” (154).
155: “Ironically, the Queen’s anxiety over her own loss of physical attractiveness is displaced onto Snow White, her mirror image, with the murder plot reflecting Snow White’s ‘training’ in femininity before marriage. The very plots the Queen invents—especially the poisoned comb, the suffocating set of tight laces, and the poisoned apple cooked ina secret kitchen—all turn out to be feminine weapons in the aresenal of female cosmetics. Thus, the wicked actress, like a Madame Rachel who adds arsenic to her lotions, in fact merely reenacts the controlled male scripts she wanted to wipe off the surface of the glass: Snow White is crystallized by the glass coffin, murdered by her own aestheticization.”
155: “In Armadale, however, Gwilt does not seek to murder Snow White (that is, another version of herself). Unlike the Queen, she projects the sadistic voice of the mirror onto the two male protagonists and plots to kill the two Armadales. … Here, Gwilt intends to undermine the patriarchal ideology expressed by the voice in the mirror”
Politically correct bedtime stories by James Finn Garner.
Copyright 1994
Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, NY
ISBN: 0-02-542730
Page 43: Once there was a young princess who was not at all unpleasant to look at and had a temperament that many found to be more pleasant than most other people’s. Her nickname was Snow White, indicative of the discriminatory notions of associating pleasant or attractive qualities of light, and unpleasant or unattractive qualities with darkness.
44: The queen’s prized possession was a magic mirror that would answer truthfully any question asked it. Now, years of social conditioning in a male hierarchical dictatorship had left the queen very insecure about her own self-worth. Physical beauty was the one standard she cared about now, and she defined herself solely in regard to her personal apperance. So every morning the queen would ask her mirror:
‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who’s the fairest one of all?’
…
45 (response):
‘Alas, if worth be based on beauty,
Snow White has surpassed you, cutie.’
45: “But his [the woodsperson] connections to the earth and seasons had made him a kind soul, and he couldn’t bear to harm the girl. He told Snow White of the oppressive and unsisterly order of the queen and told her to run as deeply as she could into the forest”
---In this version, the dwarfs have a strong bond of brotherhood; 46: “She’ll disrupt our strong bond of brotherhood and create competition among us for her affections. I say we throw her int the river in a sack full of rocks.”
48: “Just like a woman,” grumbled one of the men under his breath, “get a man to do her dirty work.”
“’We are known as the Seven Towering Giants,” said the leader… “We are towering in spirit and so are giants among the men of the forest… To make ends meet, we also conduct retreats for men who need to get in touch with their primitive masculine identities”
“So what does that involve,” asked Snow White, “aside from drinking milk straight from the carton?” 48
50: “Meanwhile, back at the castle, the queen rejoiced at the thought that her rival in beauty had been eliminated. She puttered around her boudoir reading Glamour and Elle, and indulger herself with three whole pieces of chocolate without purging.”
Buying the apple: 51: “In protest against agribusiness conglomerates, she had a personal rule against buying food from middlepersons. But her heart went out to the economically marginalized woman, so she said yes.”
52: “ When Snow White handed over the money for the apple, you would have expected the queen to be gleeful that her plan for revenge was working. Instead, as she looked at Snow White’s fine complexion and slim, taut body, she felt alternating waves of envy and self-revulsion.”
à “You’re so young and beautiful,” sobbed the disguised queen, “and I’m horrible to look at and getting worse.”
“You shouldn’t say that. After all, beauty comes from inside a person.”
“I’ve been telling myself that for years,” said the queen, “and I still don’t believe it. How do you stay in such perfect shape?”
“Well, I meditate, work out in step aerobics three hours a day, and eat only half-portions of anything placed in front of me. Would you like me to show you?”
à53, “Oh yes, yes, please,” said the queen. So they started out with 30 minutes of simple hatha yoga meditation, then worked out on the step for another hour. As they relaxed afterward, Snow White cut her apple in half and gave a piece to the queen. Without thinking, the queen bit into it, and both of them fell into a deep sleep.”
54: “’You know,’ said the prince, ‘this might sound a little sick, but I trust you guys. I find that younger one attractive. Extremely attractive. Would you fellows mind… um.. waiting outside while I…?’”
leader of the dwarfs:…”Does Snow White make you feel like a man again?”
in regard to ‘having’ the Queen, the Prince says: “I don’t want to sound classist, but she’s not high enough caliber for me.”
End (56):
The Queen says: “From now on, I am going to dedicate my life to healing the rift between womyn to accept their natural body images and become whole again.”
Mirror Mirror, Copyrigh 2003 by Gregory Maguire; HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
ISBN 0-06-039384-X
Motefiore, the estate where the primary action takes place, is on top of a steep hill, looking down at the rest of the world.
5: “Like any child, she [Bianca/Snow White] looked out and across rather than in. She was more familiar with the vistas, the promising valleys with their hidden hamlets, the scope of the future arranged int erms of hills nad light.”
52: “The thing about a mirror is this: The one who stares into it is condemned to consider the world from her own perspective. Even a bowed mirror works primarily by engaging the eys, and she who centers herlsef in its surface is unlikely to notice anyone in the background who lacks a certain status, distinction. Or heigh. Like a dwarf, for instance. Or a young child.”
53: “This is a lovely looking glass,” I [Lucrezia/Wicked Stepmother] said to Don Vicente. “It’s only as lovely as what it reflects,” he answered, though his courtliness was studied and heavy.
54: He [Don Vicente/absent father] didn’t look at me. He looked in the mirror instead. “Who is the fairest of all?” he whispered. Did he mean to compare the pair of us, the Lucrezia who stood in the mirror and the Lucrezia who stood before it? A mirrored image has no cologne to seduce; is purer for that. While I had dabbed mself with attar of Persian roses.
[cont] “My sister,” said Cesare at the door, in admiration. “Will you never learn to govern your clothing?”
110: [Lucrezia says]: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who among us is fairest of all?”
[cont] Bianca straightened up and listened, as if the mirror might answer. If it did, it was in a pitch too cerebral or too hushed for Bianca to hear. In any event, Cesare either mocked his sister or echoed the mirror’s answer when he said, “Well, it’s not you, sister. It’s that little mouse child, the daughter of our agent de Nevada. Doesn’t that just make your Borgia blood boil. What’ll you doa bout that?”
“…I’ll be damned if I see you casting glances at a child young enough to be your daughter.”
[..cont] “You’re jealous because she’s lovelier than you,” he said. “You always were a jealous type. I still adore you, Crezia. Come here. Come to Cesare.”
124: “Do as I say. Bring me her heart carved from her chest.” @ Ranuccio
The dwarfs: 140: “The human mind—we have come to observe—tricks out distinctions in principles of opposition. A man more foul will ikely be less benign. A woman with a greedy belly may also be mean with her widow’s migte. The way a man slakes his thirst and a woman slakes her thirst are not identical, for they thirst for different things.”
“Perhaps that is why humans rely on the mirror, to get beyond the simple me-you, handsome-hideous, menacing-merciful. In a miror, humans see that the other one is also them: the two are the same, one one. TH emenace accompanies the mercy. The transcendent cohabits with the corrupt. What stirring lives humans have managed to live, knowing this of themselves. And so we had made a mirror, and in our foolishness lost it, and the one who set out to reclaim it had never returned. Back into our unexamined selves we slunk, until she arrived at our door.”
142: Bianca meant white.
143: The dwarf names: Blindeye, Gimpy, Tasteless, Bitter, Deaf-to-the-World, Heartless, MuteMuteMute.
Events (182-183): Lucrezia eats a slice of the apple; the “stone dog” eats a slice and then gives the rest to the dwarfs
185: “She [Lucrezia] had dismissed him [Vicente], and now faced the mirror. “I must see to my hair,” she spoke, almost to herself, in the way of certain women. She scooped up the single fruit on its silvery bough and held it alongside her face. It was such a feminine gesture, it brought back to him Maria Ines, and his child, Bianca, who would never become a waomn.”
188: In title chapter, “Mirror mirror,” Lucrezia asks the question again. This time it shows Bianca.
In the next chapter, “The return of the prodigal” (191), Bianca sees back at Lucrezia as Lucrezia sees her… she sees Lucrezia through a “circle of mist”
194: “ ‘I’ll make you a meal,’ she said. ‘Why not? I need things, though, things to cook with.’ She realized that though she’d eaten,---occasionally—the sight of that apple in Lucrezia Borgia’s lap had made her hungry as hell. Hungry not to eat, but to feed someone else.
Suddenly she became happy.”
197: She feeds the dwarfs the apple.
200: The dwarfs made the mirror.
219+: Lucrezia does not poison the comb and tempt Snow White with it; she assaults Snow White with the comb.
228: “She didn’t know if it was herself she was seeing. The reflection was imprecise, varnished with mist; but there was a woman’s face therein, and as its lips moved, so Bianca moved hers, as if under a spell. ‘Mirror, mirror,” she said, ‘What is to become of us?’”
228: dwarfs have vague similarities to the dwarfs from “Politically correct bedtime stories.”
236: “The mirror, maddening one minute, was helpful the next. Lucrezia began to realize that it alerted her when the dwarves were ready to leave. They would begin to appear in garb more clearly like human garments. They constructed a clumsy box with wheels and shafts, and practiced hauling it about. They were on a campaign of some sort. What were they up to? No mind, never mind; enough that they were gone.”
247: “They were seven or eight or nine small men, bleeding obstinately toward some kind of humanity, stuck in a process of change that they could no longer vary. They might have used their mirror as an escape hatch, to ask it the single correct question, the only question a mirror ever cares about: not who did I used to be, nor who am I now, but who am I to become?—for the secret act of light that fires a mirror is this: A mirror’s image is always forward of the truth by an instant or so. While a question is formulating—Who is the fairest of us all, say, or How many crow’s feet can I pretend not to have today? or Is this the face of a murderer?—the mirror always knows the answer before the question is asked.
253: “I made to give him a semblance of privacy, and turned to fuss over the heating water. But there was the mirror in which I would glimpse his handsome form, because mirrors don’t lie about men, only women.”
275: Ranuccio, the hunter, occompanies Bianca/Snow White back to Montefiore (her home), implying that she is her prince? (he also kisses her to wake her)
Friday, July 25, 2008
Monday, July 21, 2008
Uncle Vanya
Uncle Vanya
“The passions simmer so faintly, you can hardly tell when its pilot light is on.” – NY Times Review of a production of Uncle Vanya in 1999.
Trivia: In an episode of Family Guy, Lois and Peter are attending a production of Uncle Vanya when Peter yells "For crying out loud, somebody throw a pie!"
There are several ways you may know of Anton Chekhov. You may have heard of “Chekhov’s Gun,” the idea that if a gun is introduced in a piece of literature, it must go off—an example Chekhov used in his writings as a more general rule to only introduce elemetns into a story that will be used later on.
As Wikipedia expands, “For example, a character may find a mysterious object that eventually becomes crucial to the plot, but at the time of finding the object, does not seem to be important.”
As Chekhov wrote: "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." From S. Shchukin, Memoirs (1911)
Supposedly, one example of this is supposed to be Chekhov’s own “Uncle Vanya.” After all, a gun goes off. Admittedly, the gun is so irrevelant earlier on, that I actually can’t even find its existence in my notes. It’s a “pistol” one time and a “revolver” another, but neither of those words nor “gun” appear in any text search I do in project gutenberg’s english translation of the play before the gun actually appears in the play. But maybe I’m just blind.
You might get the impression that since Chekhov would have a rule like this, he might adhere to it. He does not. Most jarringly, there is a map of Africa in one scene that is totally out of place (even the text of the play says so), and furthermore is completely irrelevant to the play.
And there’s the further issue that Chekhov says that the gun must go off, not that someone must be shot by it. Hence the problem of Uncle Vanya, where at the end of the play nothing is reconciled because the villain of the plot triumphs, and the hero returns to his own life of drugery.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Uncle Vanya was not a wholly unsatisfying read. My translation (by Ann Dunnigan) is full of delicious words like “unprepossessing”, “samovar”, “indolent”, “sepulcher”, and others that you just don’t see nearly enough. And it does have some classic lines. For example:
“Elena [sic]: It’s a fine day today… not too hot.
[A pause]
Voinitsky: A fine day to hang oneself…”
I mean, come on, that’s just great.
Further, it would be far too much to say that “Uncle Vanya” has no plot. There are romances all over the place, missed opportunities, longing, etc. And finally the famous climax, where Uncle Vanya manages to avoid shooting his daughter in the face.
However, it’s still difficult to classify, since Chekhov was deliberately flying in the face of traditional Aristotilean narrative structures. It’s a tragicomedy, as most will put it, and I think this can best be explained by the comedic elements largely being a result of Schadenfreude on the part of the audience for the characters in the play, and perhaps possibly even for whatever poor sobs would bother to stage it.
Of course, Virginia Woolf, in traditional style, wants to blame the lack of entertainment that Chekhov presents as the fault of the reader. As she puts it:
“These stories are inconclusive, we say, and proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In so doing we raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and the end emphatic—lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues exposed—as it is in most Victorian fiction, we can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchekov, we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony.”
What Virginia Woolf might have been more aware of, had she been alive and writing after the invention of television and hollywood and MTV and Blizzard Entertainment, is that when a play makes a reader question his or her “fitness as reader,” he may be perfectly fine with that, because it’s almost certainly easier to tune out reading like Chekhov and tune in to The Dark Knight or Metal Gear Solid 4.
That’s not a fair critique and not a fair comparison, but what the unfortunate truth is, is that Uncle Vanya is to The Dark Knight what The Three Sisters is to The Golden Compass. Look at the box office numbers and you’ll get my analogy here.
Some notes for remembering Uncle Vanya (difficult, considering how many characters are forgettable):
[nothing but spoilers for this section:]
The cast of Uncle Vanya with my notes.
Serebryakov, Aleksandr Vladimirovich - a retired professor. – “The bad guy.” In “The Three Sisters” a vaguely similar character is named “Andrei” and is also the first listed; and in “The Cherry Orchard” a not completely dissimilar character is named Andreyevna. Coincidence? I think not. Each is “the landowner”—and as seems to be a motif in Chekhov plays, Aleksandr is thinking about selling his estate. Little does he know that the estate is the last thing keeping Uncle Vanya from going over the deep end, and that his choice to sell it could cost him his life. (It doesn’t. No one dies. This is a family friendly production, bring the kids!)
Elena Andreyevna (or sometimes Yelena) - his young and beautiful second wife, 27 years old. – Elena is sort of like a MacGuffin. Everyone wants her, but she has the libido of a rock. Uncle Vanya wants her, but she really doesn’t want Uncle Vanya. Astroff also wants her, and her inability to reject him fast enough brings Uncle Vanya into a jealous madness that might cost Aleksandr his life. (But won’t. See above.)
Sofia Alexandrovna (Sonia) - his plain daughter by his first marriage. Mostly exists for Astroff to rant at. Largely forgettable.
Voinitskaya, Maria Vasilievna - the widow of a privy councillor, mother of the first wife of the professor. Totally irrelevant and utterly forgettable.
Voinitsky, Ivan Petrovitch ("Uncle Vanya") - Sonia's uncle, and Maria Vasilievna's son. His snide cynicism makes him the only character enjoyable to read and at all memorable.
Astroff, Michail Lvovich - a doctor. – Mr. Rantsalot. Will not shut up about the forest and the trees. Another motif in Chekhov is a doctor who has recently lost a patient and blames himself for it. Astroff is the token doctor in this play. (After all, Chekhov was a doctor, so he had to have some sort of doctor in the play.) Despite his ridiculous number of lines, Astroff is more a secondary antagonist and less of a sympathetic support character.
Telegin, Ilya Ilyitch - an impoverished landowner, also known as Waffles. Marina - an old nurse. Workman. All essentially forgettable.
I suggest just sparknoting or wikipediaing “The Three Sisters” and “The Cherry Orchard” because both of them I found too dreadful to actually review.
Words:
Unprepossessing: Not overtly impressive; unremarkable; nondescript.
Samovar: a metal urn, used esp. by Russians for heating water for making tea.
Indolent: having or showing a disposition to avoid exertion; slothful.
Sepulcher: a tomb, grave, or burial place.
“The passions simmer so faintly, you can hardly tell when its pilot light is on.” – NY Times Review of a production of Uncle Vanya in 1999.
Trivia: In an episode of Family Guy, Lois and Peter are attending a production of Uncle Vanya when Peter yells "For crying out loud, somebody throw a pie!"
There are several ways you may know of Anton Chekhov. You may have heard of “Chekhov’s Gun,” the idea that if a gun is introduced in a piece of literature, it must go off—an example Chekhov used in his writings as a more general rule to only introduce elemetns into a story that will be used later on.
As Wikipedia expands, “For example, a character may find a mysterious object that eventually becomes crucial to the plot, but at the time of finding the object, does not seem to be important.”
As Chekhov wrote: "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." From S. Shchukin, Memoirs (1911)
Supposedly, one example of this is supposed to be Chekhov’s own “Uncle Vanya.” After all, a gun goes off. Admittedly, the gun is so irrevelant earlier on, that I actually can’t even find its existence in my notes. It’s a “pistol” one time and a “revolver” another, but neither of those words nor “gun” appear in any text search I do in project gutenberg’s english translation of the play before the gun actually appears in the play. But maybe I’m just blind.
You might get the impression that since Chekhov would have a rule like this, he might adhere to it. He does not. Most jarringly, there is a map of Africa in one scene that is totally out of place (even the text of the play says so), and furthermore is completely irrelevant to the play.
And there’s the further issue that Chekhov says that the gun must go off, not that someone must be shot by it. Hence the problem of Uncle Vanya, where at the end of the play nothing is reconciled because the villain of the plot triumphs, and the hero returns to his own life of drugery.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Uncle Vanya was not a wholly unsatisfying read. My translation (by Ann Dunnigan) is full of delicious words like “unprepossessing”, “samovar”, “indolent”, “sepulcher”, and others that you just don’t see nearly enough. And it does have some classic lines. For example:
“Elena [sic]: It’s a fine day today… not too hot.
[A pause]
Voinitsky: A fine day to hang oneself…”
I mean, come on, that’s just great.
Further, it would be far too much to say that “Uncle Vanya” has no plot. There are romances all over the place, missed opportunities, longing, etc. And finally the famous climax, where Uncle Vanya manages to avoid shooting his daughter in the face.
However, it’s still difficult to classify, since Chekhov was deliberately flying in the face of traditional Aristotilean narrative structures. It’s a tragicomedy, as most will put it, and I think this can best be explained by the comedic elements largely being a result of Schadenfreude on the part of the audience for the characters in the play, and perhaps possibly even for whatever poor sobs would bother to stage it.
Of course, Virginia Woolf, in traditional style, wants to blame the lack of entertainment that Chekhov presents as the fault of the reader. As she puts it:
“These stories are inconclusive, we say, and proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In so doing we raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and the end emphatic—lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues exposed—as it is in most Victorian fiction, we can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchekov, we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony.”
What Virginia Woolf might have been more aware of, had she been alive and writing after the invention of television and hollywood and MTV and Blizzard Entertainment, is that when a play makes a reader question his or her “fitness as reader,” he may be perfectly fine with that, because it’s almost certainly easier to tune out reading like Chekhov and tune in to The Dark Knight or Metal Gear Solid 4.
That’s not a fair critique and not a fair comparison, but what the unfortunate truth is, is that Uncle Vanya is to The Dark Knight what The Three Sisters is to The Golden Compass. Look at the box office numbers and you’ll get my analogy here.
Some notes for remembering Uncle Vanya (difficult, considering how many characters are forgettable):
[nothing but spoilers for this section:]
The cast of Uncle Vanya with my notes.
Serebryakov, Aleksandr Vladimirovich - a retired professor. – “The bad guy.” In “The Three Sisters” a vaguely similar character is named “Andrei” and is also the first listed; and in “The Cherry Orchard” a not completely dissimilar character is named Andreyevna. Coincidence? I think not. Each is “the landowner”—and as seems to be a motif in Chekhov plays, Aleksandr is thinking about selling his estate. Little does he know that the estate is the last thing keeping Uncle Vanya from going over the deep end, and that his choice to sell it could cost him his life. (It doesn’t. No one dies. This is a family friendly production, bring the kids!)
Elena Andreyevna (or sometimes Yelena) - his young and beautiful second wife, 27 years old. – Elena is sort of like a MacGuffin. Everyone wants her, but she has the libido of a rock. Uncle Vanya wants her, but she really doesn’t want Uncle Vanya. Astroff also wants her, and her inability to reject him fast enough brings Uncle Vanya into a jealous madness that might cost Aleksandr his life. (But won’t. See above.)
Sofia Alexandrovna (Sonia) - his plain daughter by his first marriage. Mostly exists for Astroff to rant at. Largely forgettable.
Voinitskaya, Maria Vasilievna - the widow of a privy councillor, mother of the first wife of the professor. Totally irrelevant and utterly forgettable.
Voinitsky, Ivan Petrovitch ("Uncle Vanya") - Sonia's uncle, and Maria Vasilievna's son. His snide cynicism makes him the only character enjoyable to read and at all memorable.
Astroff, Michail Lvovich - a doctor. – Mr. Rantsalot. Will not shut up about the forest and the trees. Another motif in Chekhov is a doctor who has recently lost a patient and blames himself for it. Astroff is the token doctor in this play. (After all, Chekhov was a doctor, so he had to have some sort of doctor in the play.) Despite his ridiculous number of lines, Astroff is more a secondary antagonist and less of a sympathetic support character.
Telegin, Ilya Ilyitch - an impoverished landowner, also known as Waffles. Marina - an old nurse. Workman. All essentially forgettable.
I suggest just sparknoting or wikipediaing “The Three Sisters” and “The Cherry Orchard” because both of them I found too dreadful to actually review.
Words:
Unprepossessing: Not overtly impressive; unremarkable; nondescript.
Samovar: a metal urn, used esp. by Russians for heating water for making tea.
Indolent: having or showing a disposition to avoid exertion; slothful.
Sepulcher: a tomb, grave, or burial place.
Monday, July 7, 2008
The Red Badge of Courage
Introduction: Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) tells about an American Civil War recruit named Henry Fleming who leaves his mother to join the Union army. Henry, called “the youth” through most of the novel, struggles throughout the novel against his own cowardice while trying to preserve his honor and survive the Battle of Chancellorsville.
Context: Crane was born after the war and had never seen battle himself. Writing the novel around 1895, Crane had access to veterans of the war and other primary source documents, even though Crane himself lived first in New Jersey and later New York, and worked as a reporter of slum life in New York City.
About: The second sentence in the wikipedia entry for the novel is, “The story is about the meaning of courage.” To me, this is an excellent example of how to avoid getting caught up on the faults of wikipedia. There is no hyperlink at that sentence, or even paragraph, linking it to a critical article that would say “The story is about the meaning of courage.”
The Red Badge of Courage might very well be about “the meaning of courage,” but if it is, it is in an inclusive way, not exclusively. The best short description I could come up with of Crane’s novel I provided in the introduction.
In Place of an Introduction: I’ve often felt that one of the reasons I have always had a hard time liking The Great Gatsby was because I made the mistake of reading the introduction to the book. Despite what many of the people who write introductions to books seem to think, some people a) might actually like to be introduced to the book, and b) like reading books cover to cover, not slogging through a heap of steaming, shit-covered crticism that belongs in Hell.
My version comes with an introduction by Donald Gibson, professor at Rutgers at time of publication (my copy - 1996). Gibson makes no attempt to hide the fact that he’s aiming the book at middle and high school “required reading” students: “Every story has to be told by someone and from someone’s point of view,” Gibson tells us, leaving us astounded by his overwhelming capacities of observation, “Crane chooses to tell his story from what is called the third person limited point of view.” Wow, Mr. Gibson, tell me more! I’ve never heard of this breath-taking new concept, “the third person limited point of view.”
But even by those standards, Gibson’s introduction is offensively bad at several points. Introductions like Gibson’s are so bad that they actually leave a profound and personal impact on me: should I actually go to grad school if it means dealing with professors at universities who think this is good enough to be an introduction? Or on the other hand, should I instead endeavor even more to go to grad school, to make it my personal quest to make sure that introductions this bad are never published again?
I’m being hyperbolic, but I would like to discuss some of the ways that Gibson’s introduction fails, because I think it fails in ways that can be informative to some people working on papers and whatnot. But I want to emphasize that Gibson’s cumbersome introduction holds far more problems than I can possibly list here right now; indeed, my objections to it range from the first sentence of his introduction to the last.
For instance, Gibson hijacks his own introduction with a paragraph starting, “Given Crane’s inclination to question convention, it is no wonder that he was heavily influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.” Gibson spends no time after this linking Darwin and Crane directly, or explaining how Darwin’s specific ideas influenced specific parts of the work. Instead, he uses this page-long paragraph to link lead into an even more obtuse discussion of animals in the book. I can see how an argument might be made that Darwin’s work could be significant to understanding Crane—after all, Crane was raised by Methodist minister. But that sort of nuanced discussion has no place in an introduction, and Gibson’s discussion is anything but nuanced.
Further, Gibson has a habit of making tedious points, especially considering he’s supposed to be writing an introduction. For instance, Gibson tries to argue, “Crane’s language challenged the traditional distinction between the language of poetry and the language of literary prose.” Even if this point was worth making, I’m not even entirely sure that it’s true. Yes, Crane uses colloquial English for his dialogue, and that is remarkable, but language is always steeped in metaphor and other figurative language. Gibson makes as if there was some epic wall between poetry and prose with armed guards making sure nothing crossed between. To me, Gibson’s stance borders on lunacy.
To prove his point, Gibson points to a block quote at the end of Chapter 17 of Crane’s novel.
The block quote: “The forest still bore its burden of clamor. From off under the trees came the rolling clatter of the musketry. Each distant thicket seemed a strange porcupine with quills of flame. A cloud of dark smoke, as from smoldering ruins, went up toward the sun now bright and gay in the blue, enamled sky.
Gibson’s gloss: “The personification of the forest, the reference to it as though it were a person, the highly colorful and original reference to gunfire as ‘rolling clatter,’ the metaphors likening burning bushes to ‘porcupine[s] with quills of flame’ and describing the blue sky as ‘enameled,’ all reflect characteristics more commonly belonging to poetry than to prose.”
First of all, shame on Gibson for block quoting the book he’s introducing! More than that, Gibson’s entire interpretation is if not outright false at least clunky and poor scholarship.
“The personification of the forest,” Gibson says. Is the forest personified? “Burden” is not a word that presumes humanity. Consider this, the first entry at dictionary.com for “burden”: “that which is carried; load: a horse's burden of rider and pack.” In nautical usage, burden can refer to the carrying capacity of a ship. Although Gibson might say that the nautical usage is also personification, that still would not explain Gibson’s second clause where he says, “the reference to it as though it were a person.” I see no explicit reference to the forest as a person. I might agree that what seperates a burden from weight is the sense that it is “difficult to carry,” I nevertheless am left with the impression that Gibson doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.
Now, even if I agreed that referring to gunfire as “rolling clatter” was “highly colorful” and “original” [note: I don’t], it nevertheless makes me wonder why Gibson called it a “reference to.” Possibly because he didn’t know what to make of it. I am tempted to label it synesthesia (the figurative trope, not the neural condition). (Alternatively, you might argue it’s a dead or submerged metaphor—calling it a submerged metaphor might actually be a better description than synesthesia.) However, I would hardly describe it as revolutionary; “rolling thunder” as a phrase had been in use for, at bare minimum, decades before Crane’s work was published. (A speech by Frances Gage in 1851 includes the phrase, “her voice to a pitch like rolling thunder”. I suspect earlier examples can be found.)
Next Gibson mentions “the metaphors likening burning bushes to ‘porcupine[s] with quills of flame’”. There’s only one, no need for the plural. Further, is something even a metaphor if something (the burning bushes) “seems” to be something else (porcupines with quills of flame) as opposed to actually being them? What does it mean, from a figurative perspective, for something to seem to be something else? This has always bothered me. Of course the easy answer is to just accept it as a metaphor (since most figurative language is rooted in the concept of the metaphor). What is interesting about Crane’s method, what he does with the “seeming” here, is that it roots the metaphor under the guise of being a realistic, literal description rooted in Crane’s 3rd person POV. It is a metaphor, but it’s a metaphor to the character as well as the audience; thus, Crane underscores how central the metaphor is not only to the audience but also to the characters within the world he describes, giving them a richer psychological depth.
Gibson treats his audience as middle schoolers; no, wait, I might be detracting from the average middle schooler’s literary understanding. It might very well be that he’s aiming his introduction to 4th graders. I appreciate that presenting an introduction for a book that may very well be sold to young readers, but that still is far from justifying Gibson’s introduction.
Episodes and Techniques:
“He tried to mathematically prove to himself that he would not run from a battle.” I’m still wondering what formula Henry would use to try to pull off this mathematic equation.
Crane uses descriptive naming; the same essential method Disney uses in many of its motion features (taken to dramatic extremes in Snow White where the description of the character is regarded as their actual name). In Crane’s case (as it would be for many future American writers), he gives them single qualifiers. “the youth”, “his tall comrade”, etc.
"He had pictured red letters of curious revenge."
Stepping Back: Using Crane as a Learning Resource: Cane’s novel is problematic. The discussion of courage is central to the book, but even it is clouded by the fact that it discusses courage in the face of military action; yet, that military action is detatched from the domain of causality. The war in Crane’s novel is a spectacle.
What Crane explores is dwarfed by what Crane omits. The novel is about the American Civil War yet slavery is not discussed, nor mentioned at all. If Gibson makes one poignant comment, it’s this: “Neither the author nor any character in the book expresses attitudes about politics or about any social issues.” It might be argued that although the novel appears to be historical fiction, the civil war is a venue. In fact, that may very well be my main critique of the novel.
It comes across as sightseeing fiction. In part, this is an element of realism. Henry joins because he wants to win in combat. He wants prestige and glory. When combat is over, it is a nightmare that he has escaped from, or a sickness that he has recovered from. And as a result, he leaves wanting images of tranquil skies. He never really invested himself in understanding the larger context of the events he engaged himself in or the world around him.
Crane is argued to succeed because of the power of the images he evokes. Like the war he describes, Crane’s novel itself is a spectacle. Crane is not a theoretician; Crane is no Tolstoy. It’s as though he regards history as boring. This makes the novel difficult to teach, and quite frankly, difficult to become fully immersed in.
The positive side of Crane’s ambiguity about events and terrain is that it means he does not use proper nouns and official dates as crutches to avoid or ignore the need for prose description. Crane has to describe the conditions of roads that are travelled on. For one chapter, the major threat is not the enemy, but the risk of a soldier falling in the road and being crushed by the wagons behind him. This is realism, and it’s gripping—but it’s also a superficial problem, with little to be said about it.
I am a firm believer that approaching a text with the assumption or even impression that it’s a masterpiece is always a mistake. In a classroom setting, I get the impression that teachers feel compelled to defend novels as masterpieces; after all, they’ve devoted themselves to studying the text and therefore don’t want to appear to have wasted their time. Professors of science teach the periodic table because it is a useful tool; yet, combined with this truth, is the fact that they are aware that the periodic table may on any given day be revised due to a new element being discovered. The periodic table is always open to refinement and improvement.
One of the reasons the humanities are starving (and the humanities are starving) is the tendency among teachers and professors to defend as text as though it is flawless. Yet, the opposite problem can also be the case, often even more so. If a professor admits that they do not regard a work as flawless, or that they do not like a book, they become uninterested in it. They don’t engage with it on anywhere near the same level that they would otherwise.
I think that the difficulty of teaching Stephen Crane is easily and perfectly reversed if the teacher takes the time to differentiate the qualities that make good fiction good from the qualities that make other forms of writing effective.
I’m going to take it as an a priori fact that people learn by imitation. As such, people model their writing on their reading. The problem with assigning Crane as an author is that the reader might actually like him. If the reader has to turn around and write an essay, they might not realize that the best thing they can do is forget how Crane writes. This is particularly problematic because idiotic English professors like Gibson are so busy lauding how beautiful Crane’s language is.
Teaching Crane is a problematic task because Crane’s novel is not streamlined; it is meandering and episodic. Cowardice and fear are central to the novel, perhaps, and those subjects are easier to write about than anything else. But, beyond that, certain considerations have to be kept in mind: When Crane published his novel, there were many living veterans of the American Civil War. Crane’s audience, if they were not veterans themselves, may very well know a veteran. The American social consciousness was aware of the American Civil war. Those who did not participate might feel enchanted by Crane’s evocative description.
Today’s evocative description is often overpowered by the sight and sound of theater. Films about the American Civil war now dominate the public imagination of the civil war. I think it might be an interesting experiment to have a class read The Red Badge of Courage directly following Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In Morrison’s text, the white man is nothing but evil. In Crane’s text, the black race is omitted. A civil war text published today without mention or awareness of slavery would be blasphemy.
Certainly there is no rule that anything with the Civil War must always and only discuss slavery. But, imagine as a teacher you give the following assignment to your class: Pretend you’re Stephen Crane trying to submit the novel to a publisher today. Why is now the time to publish this text? It would be a cruel test, because Crane’s text, despite being a “masterpiece,” would be self-published today just as Crane’s first novel was self-published in 1893.
The passive voice of the book, the awkward metaphors and synesthesia, and the unclear "purpose" of the book can make it a frustrating read. Link to the facebook group for hating the book: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2212989754
Context: Crane was born after the war and had never seen battle himself. Writing the novel around 1895, Crane had access to veterans of the war and other primary source documents, even though Crane himself lived first in New Jersey and later New York, and worked as a reporter of slum life in New York City.
About: The second sentence in the wikipedia entry for the novel is, “The story is about the meaning of courage.” To me, this is an excellent example of how to avoid getting caught up on the faults of wikipedia. There is no hyperlink at that sentence, or even paragraph, linking it to a critical article that would say “The story is about the meaning of courage.”
The Red Badge of Courage might very well be about “the meaning of courage,” but if it is, it is in an inclusive way, not exclusively. The best short description I could come up with of Crane’s novel I provided in the introduction.
In Place of an Introduction: I’ve often felt that one of the reasons I have always had a hard time liking The Great Gatsby was because I made the mistake of reading the introduction to the book. Despite what many of the people who write introductions to books seem to think, some people a) might actually like to be introduced to the book, and b) like reading books cover to cover, not slogging through a heap of steaming, shit-covered crticism that belongs in Hell.
My version comes with an introduction by Donald Gibson, professor at Rutgers at time of publication (my copy - 1996). Gibson makes no attempt to hide the fact that he’s aiming the book at middle and high school “required reading” students: “Every story has to be told by someone and from someone’s point of view,” Gibson tells us, leaving us astounded by his overwhelming capacities of observation, “Crane chooses to tell his story from what is called the third person limited point of view.” Wow, Mr. Gibson, tell me more! I’ve never heard of this breath-taking new concept, “the third person limited point of view.”
But even by those standards, Gibson’s introduction is offensively bad at several points. Introductions like Gibson’s are so bad that they actually leave a profound and personal impact on me: should I actually go to grad school if it means dealing with professors at universities who think this is good enough to be an introduction? Or on the other hand, should I instead endeavor even more to go to grad school, to make it my personal quest to make sure that introductions this bad are never published again?
I’m being hyperbolic, but I would like to discuss some of the ways that Gibson’s introduction fails, because I think it fails in ways that can be informative to some people working on papers and whatnot. But I want to emphasize that Gibson’s cumbersome introduction holds far more problems than I can possibly list here right now; indeed, my objections to it range from the first sentence of his introduction to the last.
For instance, Gibson hijacks his own introduction with a paragraph starting, “Given Crane’s inclination to question convention, it is no wonder that he was heavily influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.” Gibson spends no time after this linking Darwin and Crane directly, or explaining how Darwin’s specific ideas influenced specific parts of the work. Instead, he uses this page-long paragraph to link lead into an even more obtuse discussion of animals in the book. I can see how an argument might be made that Darwin’s work could be significant to understanding Crane—after all, Crane was raised by Methodist minister. But that sort of nuanced discussion has no place in an introduction, and Gibson’s discussion is anything but nuanced.
Further, Gibson has a habit of making tedious points, especially considering he’s supposed to be writing an introduction. For instance, Gibson tries to argue, “Crane’s language challenged the traditional distinction between the language of poetry and the language of literary prose.” Even if this point was worth making, I’m not even entirely sure that it’s true. Yes, Crane uses colloquial English for his dialogue, and that is remarkable, but language is always steeped in metaphor and other figurative language. Gibson makes as if there was some epic wall between poetry and prose with armed guards making sure nothing crossed between. To me, Gibson’s stance borders on lunacy.
To prove his point, Gibson points to a block quote at the end of Chapter 17 of Crane’s novel.
The block quote: “The forest still bore its burden of clamor. From off under the trees came the rolling clatter of the musketry. Each distant thicket seemed a strange porcupine with quills of flame. A cloud of dark smoke, as from smoldering ruins, went up toward the sun now bright and gay in the blue, enamled sky.
Gibson’s gloss: “The personification of the forest, the reference to it as though it were a person, the highly colorful and original reference to gunfire as ‘rolling clatter,’ the metaphors likening burning bushes to ‘porcupine[s] with quills of flame’ and describing the blue sky as ‘enameled,’ all reflect characteristics more commonly belonging to poetry than to prose.”
First of all, shame on Gibson for block quoting the book he’s introducing! More than that, Gibson’s entire interpretation is if not outright false at least clunky and poor scholarship.
“The personification of the forest,” Gibson says. Is the forest personified? “Burden” is not a word that presumes humanity. Consider this, the first entry at dictionary.com for “burden”: “that which is carried; load: a horse's burden of rider and pack.” In nautical usage, burden can refer to the carrying capacity of a ship. Although Gibson might say that the nautical usage is also personification, that still would not explain Gibson’s second clause where he says, “the reference to it as though it were a person.” I see no explicit reference to the forest as a person. I might agree that what seperates a burden from weight is the sense that it is “difficult to carry,” I nevertheless am left with the impression that Gibson doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.
Now, even if I agreed that referring to gunfire as “rolling clatter” was “highly colorful” and “original” [note: I don’t], it nevertheless makes me wonder why Gibson called it a “reference to.” Possibly because he didn’t know what to make of it. I am tempted to label it synesthesia (the figurative trope, not the neural condition). (Alternatively, you might argue it’s a dead or submerged metaphor—calling it a submerged metaphor might actually be a better description than synesthesia.) However, I would hardly describe it as revolutionary; “rolling thunder” as a phrase had been in use for, at bare minimum, decades before Crane’s work was published. (A speech by Frances Gage in 1851 includes the phrase, “her voice to a pitch like rolling thunder”. I suspect earlier examples can be found.)
Next Gibson mentions “the metaphors likening burning bushes to ‘porcupine[s] with quills of flame’”. There’s only one, no need for the plural. Further, is something even a metaphor if something (the burning bushes) “seems” to be something else (porcupines with quills of flame) as opposed to actually being them? What does it mean, from a figurative perspective, for something to seem to be something else? This has always bothered me. Of course the easy answer is to just accept it as a metaphor (since most figurative language is rooted in the concept of the metaphor). What is interesting about Crane’s method, what he does with the “seeming” here, is that it roots the metaphor under the guise of being a realistic, literal description rooted in Crane’s 3rd person POV. It is a metaphor, but it’s a metaphor to the character as well as the audience; thus, Crane underscores how central the metaphor is not only to the audience but also to the characters within the world he describes, giving them a richer psychological depth.
Gibson treats his audience as middle schoolers; no, wait, I might be detracting from the average middle schooler’s literary understanding. It might very well be that he’s aiming his introduction to 4th graders. I appreciate that presenting an introduction for a book that may very well be sold to young readers, but that still is far from justifying Gibson’s introduction.
Episodes and Techniques:
“He tried to mathematically prove to himself that he would not run from a battle.” I’m still wondering what formula Henry would use to try to pull off this mathematic equation.
Crane uses descriptive naming; the same essential method Disney uses in many of its motion features (taken to dramatic extremes in Snow White where the description of the character is regarded as their actual name). In Crane’s case (as it would be for many future American writers), he gives them single qualifiers. “the youth”, “his tall comrade”, etc.
"He had pictured red letters of curious revenge."
Stepping Back: Using Crane as a Learning Resource: Cane’s novel is problematic. The discussion of courage is central to the book, but even it is clouded by the fact that it discusses courage in the face of military action; yet, that military action is detatched from the domain of causality. The war in Crane’s novel is a spectacle.
What Crane explores is dwarfed by what Crane omits. The novel is about the American Civil War yet slavery is not discussed, nor mentioned at all. If Gibson makes one poignant comment, it’s this: “Neither the author nor any character in the book expresses attitudes about politics or about any social issues.” It might be argued that although the novel appears to be historical fiction, the civil war is a venue. In fact, that may very well be my main critique of the novel.
It comes across as sightseeing fiction. In part, this is an element of realism. Henry joins because he wants to win in combat. He wants prestige and glory. When combat is over, it is a nightmare that he has escaped from, or a sickness that he has recovered from. And as a result, he leaves wanting images of tranquil skies. He never really invested himself in understanding the larger context of the events he engaged himself in or the world around him.
Crane is argued to succeed because of the power of the images he evokes. Like the war he describes, Crane’s novel itself is a spectacle. Crane is not a theoretician; Crane is no Tolstoy. It’s as though he regards history as boring. This makes the novel difficult to teach, and quite frankly, difficult to become fully immersed in.
The positive side of Crane’s ambiguity about events and terrain is that it means he does not use proper nouns and official dates as crutches to avoid or ignore the need for prose description. Crane has to describe the conditions of roads that are travelled on. For one chapter, the major threat is not the enemy, but the risk of a soldier falling in the road and being crushed by the wagons behind him. This is realism, and it’s gripping—but it’s also a superficial problem, with little to be said about it.
I am a firm believer that approaching a text with the assumption or even impression that it’s a masterpiece is always a mistake. In a classroom setting, I get the impression that teachers feel compelled to defend novels as masterpieces; after all, they’ve devoted themselves to studying the text and therefore don’t want to appear to have wasted their time. Professors of science teach the periodic table because it is a useful tool; yet, combined with this truth, is the fact that they are aware that the periodic table may on any given day be revised due to a new element being discovered. The periodic table is always open to refinement and improvement.
One of the reasons the humanities are starving (and the humanities are starving) is the tendency among teachers and professors to defend as text as though it is flawless. Yet, the opposite problem can also be the case, often even more so. If a professor admits that they do not regard a work as flawless, or that they do not like a book, they become uninterested in it. They don’t engage with it on anywhere near the same level that they would otherwise.
I think that the difficulty of teaching Stephen Crane is easily and perfectly reversed if the teacher takes the time to differentiate the qualities that make good fiction good from the qualities that make other forms of writing effective.
I’m going to take it as an a priori fact that people learn by imitation. As such, people model their writing on their reading. The problem with assigning Crane as an author is that the reader might actually like him. If the reader has to turn around and write an essay, they might not realize that the best thing they can do is forget how Crane writes. This is particularly problematic because idiotic English professors like Gibson are so busy lauding how beautiful Crane’s language is.
Teaching Crane is a problematic task because Crane’s novel is not streamlined; it is meandering and episodic. Cowardice and fear are central to the novel, perhaps, and those subjects are easier to write about than anything else. But, beyond that, certain considerations have to be kept in mind: When Crane published his novel, there were many living veterans of the American Civil War. Crane’s audience, if they were not veterans themselves, may very well know a veteran. The American social consciousness was aware of the American Civil war. Those who did not participate might feel enchanted by Crane’s evocative description.
Today’s evocative description is often overpowered by the sight and sound of theater. Films about the American Civil war now dominate the public imagination of the civil war. I think it might be an interesting experiment to have a class read The Red Badge of Courage directly following Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In Morrison’s text, the white man is nothing but evil. In Crane’s text, the black race is omitted. A civil war text published today without mention or awareness of slavery would be blasphemy.
Certainly there is no rule that anything with the Civil War must always and only discuss slavery. But, imagine as a teacher you give the following assignment to your class: Pretend you’re Stephen Crane trying to submit the novel to a publisher today. Why is now the time to publish this text? It would be a cruel test, because Crane’s text, despite being a “masterpiece,” would be self-published today just as Crane’s first novel was self-published in 1893.
The passive voice of the book, the awkward metaphors and synesthesia, and the unclear "purpose" of the book can make it a frustrating read. Link to the facebook group for hating the book: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2212989754
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House"
Hook: Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” is one of his most famous plays and arguably one of the most famous plays of the late 19th century. It follows the story of Nora, who is keeping a secret from her husband—she took out a loan that she has yet to pay back to pay for their last vacation, and in doing so committed a forgery from her father. During the 1870s in Norway, it was illegal for a woman to take out a loan without her husband or father’s permission. Things heat up when her husband, still in the dark about her secret, fires the banker who she took out the loan from (Nils Krogstad). Nils threatens to reveal Nora’s secret unless she gets him his job back… what can a woman do in a society dominated by men who see women not as people, but as dolls to be played with?
Context: My version is translated by Michael Meyer from the Norwegian and comes with an introduction from him. Meyer, in traditional form, writes an introduction that made me want to slam my forehead against a nearby table. Of course, as is his required punishment to the reader for daring to read the introduction before reading the play, he spoils the ending.
As with almost all introductions, Meyer’s serves better as an afterword. And as that, it gets the job done (which is more than can be said for giving it the title “introduction”). Meyer works hard to explain how Ibsen’s play is modeled on a real event, the main difference in the stories being the ending. (In real life, the “Nora” character goes to an asylum). But this connection is unclear until after the play is read. If Meyer were writing a good introduction, he’d say his thoughts outright:
Since A Doll’s House is based on an actual incident that Ibsen (for the most part) was aware of and witnessed parts of, the events in the story are given more credence and serve as a representative example of growing concerns people in the late 19th century (1870s) were feeling—feelings that contributed to the women’s rights movements that occurred worldwide. In this way, it serves as a testament to how imbalanced our social institutions and practices once were, and in some ways how far we have come.
But, unlike Meyer, I am far from arguing the point Meyer oh-so-poorly argues in his Foreword, that, “Yet today, when the social content of A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and An Enemy o the People is no longer topical and interests us only as history, their power is, if anything, greater, because we can see their true theme more clearly; the need of every individual to discover the kind of person he or she really is, and to become that people.” I disagree with this sentiment in more than one way.
First of all, I am far from believing that the social content of A Doll’s House is no longer topical. I am willing to say that the obvious social content, i.e. the superficial “it is illegal for women to take out loans without the permission of their husbands” is no longer in place. However, to presume that that is the only social content of the play is superficial and naïve. The real social content is the nature of the marriage between Nora and her husband Torvald and of the representation of Mrs. Linde as an independent, working woman who (possibly despite Ibsen’s intentions) embodies the spirit that “anything a man can do, a woman can do too.”
Although the specific misogynistic banking practices are no more, the nature of marriage will be a topic presumably as long as the institution persists. At its worst, Ibsen’s play comes close to being an unusually dark episode of “Everybody Loves Raymond.” At its best, Ibsen’s play is one of the most thought-provoking discussions of marriage staged in the last three centuries.
Personal Thoughts: I actually didn’t like it all that much. The main conflict, Krogstad’s threatened revelation of Nora’s secret, gets wrapped up much too cleanly in the last act. It was borderline Deus Ex (but, admittedly, well done Deux Ex). And despite Ibsen’s modicum of hinting that Nora was thinking of leaving, I feel like Nora’s explosion at the ending comes a little too far out of left field to be satisfying dramatically. This play not only is Ibsen’s first major success, it feels like Ibsen’s first major success—with that lingering hint of amateurish plotting.
Yet, the plotting, breakages in character, and occasional awkward dialogue (which, hey, can be blamed on Meyer), although still relevant to a fruitful discussion of the role of A Doll’s House in the “canon of modernity,” nevertheless is overshadowed by my reaction to the ending. That’s the part that really interests me, because that’s the part of the story that made the play gain so much notice as a controversial play, and one of the reasons I find some of Meyer’s comments so off-center. The thing is, Nora’s decision at the end of A Doll’s House is still controversial.
This is a play that I don’t like, but I like disliking. And thus I am tempted not only to defend my dislike of the play, but also of the play’s position in canonicity simultaneously.
Teaching It:
[Encourage students to read the introduction after they finish reading the play.]
WARNING SPOILERS BELOW
Prompts, essay question or otherwise:
(The moral debate): Choose EITHER Nora’s decision to leave her children and Torvald at the end of the play OR Nora’s decision to hide the truth from Torvald for so long. In regard to your choice, defend your answer to this question: Did Nora do the right thing?
(For pre-law students): Was Nora justified in forging her father’s signature and breaking the law? Why or why not?
(The aesthetic debate): Nora argues that Torvald tries to treat her like a doll in the final scene. What exactly is Ibsen’s critique of this behavior? Define what it means to be a doll in Ibsen’s world so that if necessary, you could explain why one character is a doll and why another is not.
(For discussion): In the introduction, Meyer includes Ibsen’s “Notes for a Modern Tragedy.” In this there is the following line: “A mother in modern society, like certain insects, goes away and dies once she has done her duty by propagating the race.” Does Ibsen’s simile that a mother in modern society is comparable to insets complicate the notion even further that Ibsen was a feminist writer? Further, does this imply that Ibsen regarded Nora as subhuman for her actions at the end of the play?
Vocabulary Words:
(From the quote by Gunnar Heiberg in the Introduction): Panoply
(From the prose description of the opening scene): Bric-a-brac
Alternate Ending:
Wikipedia has the text for the alternate ending. I’m amazed there exists a less satisfying ending than the original:
NORA ... Where we could make a real marriage out
of our lives together. Goodbye. [Begins to go.]
HELMER. Go then! [Seizes her arm.] But first you shall see
your children for the last time!
NORA. Let me go! I will not see them! I cannot!
HELMER [draws her over to the door, left]. You shall see
them. [Opens the door and says softly.] Look, there they
are asleep, peaceful and carefree. Tomorrow, when they
wake up and call for their mother, they will be -
motherless.
NORA [trembling]. Motherless...!
HELMER. As you once were.
NORA. Motherless! [Struggles with herself, lets her
travelling bag fall, and says.] Oh, this is a sin against
myself, but I cannot leave them. [Half sinks down by the door.]
HELMER [joyfully, but softly]. Nora!
[The curtain falls.]
Context: My version is translated by Michael Meyer from the Norwegian and comes with an introduction from him. Meyer, in traditional form, writes an introduction that made me want to slam my forehead against a nearby table. Of course, as is his required punishment to the reader for daring to read the introduction before reading the play, he spoils the ending.
As with almost all introductions, Meyer’s serves better as an afterword. And as that, it gets the job done (which is more than can be said for giving it the title “introduction”). Meyer works hard to explain how Ibsen’s play is modeled on a real event, the main difference in the stories being the ending. (In real life, the “Nora” character goes to an asylum). But this connection is unclear until after the play is read. If Meyer were writing a good introduction, he’d say his thoughts outright:
Since A Doll’s House is based on an actual incident that Ibsen (for the most part) was aware of and witnessed parts of, the events in the story are given more credence and serve as a representative example of growing concerns people in the late 19th century (1870s) were feeling—feelings that contributed to the women’s rights movements that occurred worldwide. In this way, it serves as a testament to how imbalanced our social institutions and practices once were, and in some ways how far we have come.
But, unlike Meyer, I am far from arguing the point Meyer oh-so-poorly argues in his Foreword, that, “Yet today, when the social content of A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and An Enemy o the People is no longer topical and interests us only as history, their power is, if anything, greater, because we can see their true theme more clearly; the need of every individual to discover the kind of person he or she really is, and to become that people.” I disagree with this sentiment in more than one way.
First of all, I am far from believing that the social content of A Doll’s House is no longer topical. I am willing to say that the obvious social content, i.e. the superficial “it is illegal for women to take out loans without the permission of their husbands” is no longer in place. However, to presume that that is the only social content of the play is superficial and naïve. The real social content is the nature of the marriage between Nora and her husband Torvald and of the representation of Mrs. Linde as an independent, working woman who (possibly despite Ibsen’s intentions) embodies the spirit that “anything a man can do, a woman can do too.”
Although the specific misogynistic banking practices are no more, the nature of marriage will be a topic presumably as long as the institution persists. At its worst, Ibsen’s play comes close to being an unusually dark episode of “Everybody Loves Raymond.” At its best, Ibsen’s play is one of the most thought-provoking discussions of marriage staged in the last three centuries.
Personal Thoughts: I actually didn’t like it all that much. The main conflict, Krogstad’s threatened revelation of Nora’s secret, gets wrapped up much too cleanly in the last act. It was borderline Deus Ex (but, admittedly, well done Deux Ex). And despite Ibsen’s modicum of hinting that Nora was thinking of leaving, I feel like Nora’s explosion at the ending comes a little too far out of left field to be satisfying dramatically. This play not only is Ibsen’s first major success, it feels like Ibsen’s first major success—with that lingering hint of amateurish plotting.
Yet, the plotting, breakages in character, and occasional awkward dialogue (which, hey, can be blamed on Meyer), although still relevant to a fruitful discussion of the role of A Doll’s House in the “canon of modernity,” nevertheless is overshadowed by my reaction to the ending. That’s the part that really interests me, because that’s the part of the story that made the play gain so much notice as a controversial play, and one of the reasons I find some of Meyer’s comments so off-center. The thing is, Nora’s decision at the end of A Doll’s House is still controversial.
This is a play that I don’t like, but I like disliking. And thus I am tempted not only to defend my dislike of the play, but also of the play’s position in canonicity simultaneously.
Teaching It:
[Encourage students to read the introduction after they finish reading the play.]
WARNING SPOILERS BELOW
Prompts, essay question or otherwise:
(The moral debate): Choose EITHER Nora’s decision to leave her children and Torvald at the end of the play OR Nora’s decision to hide the truth from Torvald for so long. In regard to your choice, defend your answer to this question: Did Nora do the right thing?
(For pre-law students): Was Nora justified in forging her father’s signature and breaking the law? Why or why not?
(The aesthetic debate): Nora argues that Torvald tries to treat her like a doll in the final scene. What exactly is Ibsen’s critique of this behavior? Define what it means to be a doll in Ibsen’s world so that if necessary, you could explain why one character is a doll and why another is not.
(For discussion): In the introduction, Meyer includes Ibsen’s “Notes for a Modern Tragedy.” In this there is the following line: “A mother in modern society, like certain insects, goes away and dies once she has done her duty by propagating the race.” Does Ibsen’s simile that a mother in modern society is comparable to insets complicate the notion even further that Ibsen was a feminist writer? Further, does this imply that Ibsen regarded Nora as subhuman for her actions at the end of the play?
Vocabulary Words:
(From the quote by Gunnar Heiberg in the Introduction): Panoply
(From the prose description of the opening scene): Bric-a-brac
Alternate Ending:
Wikipedia has the text for the alternate ending. I’m amazed there exists a less satisfying ending than the original:
NORA ... Where we could make a real marriage out
of our lives together. Goodbye. [Begins to go.]
HELMER. Go then! [Seizes her arm.] But first you shall see
your children for the last time!
NORA. Let me go! I will not see them! I cannot!
HELMER [draws her over to the door, left]. You shall see
them. [Opens the door and says softly.] Look, there they
are asleep, peaceful and carefree. Tomorrow, when they
wake up and call for their mother, they will be -
motherless.
NORA [trembling]. Motherless...!
HELMER. As you once were.
NORA. Motherless! [Struggles with herself, lets her
travelling bag fall, and says.] Oh, this is a sin against
myself, but I cannot leave them. [Half sinks down by the door.]
HELMER [joyfully, but softly]. Nora!
[The curtain falls.]
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