Farewell, Seamus Heaney

Ireland's foremost poet Seamus Heaney died today, leaving the world with over half a century of moving poetry, plays and prose.  In honor of Mr. Heaney, I'm re-posting a piece from earlier this year that I shared on the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature winner.  His poem Digging is among my favorites as it speaks to me as a writer.  The world is sure to seem less beautiful without Seamus Heaney in it...or at least less beautifully described.

A Survey of English Literature: William Blake to J. K. Rowling: Seamus Heaney - Digging:                     Irish poet, playwright, and winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature Seamus Heaney has been called the great...

Kate Rusby: First Lady of Contemporary English Folk Music

http://prezi.com/_7mlgxg0fcwk/kate-rusby/?kw=view-_7mlgxg0fcwk&rc=ref-38036675

Hogwarts Called, I'm In!

Not a day goes by that I don't check my mailbox and feel a pang of rejection for not having received a letter from Hogwarts asking...no, begging...for my presence at the start of a new term.  I know that I'm thirty-five, far older than the eleven-year-old First Years, as newbies to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry are called; possess no magical abilities, I'm muggle in every sense of the word; and, perhaps most regrettably, not even British; but a girl--even an almost middle-aged girl--can dream, can't she?  I LOVE ME SOME HARRY POTTER!  J. K. Rowling and her enchanting seven book series changed me as a reader and writer of juvenile fiction and she didn't stop there--Harry Potter changed the whole-wide-world.

The Phenomenon of Harry Potter began in 1997, when struggling single mother J. K. Rowling published the first installment of the fantasy, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (titled Sorcerer's Stone for the U. S. release the following year).  By the release of the second book Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, toy shops and book stores were overflowing with witch hats and Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans.  The Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix followed, and by 2003 the boy wizard was everywhere.  The sixth novel, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince sold 9 million copies the first 24 hours of its worldwide release in 2005 according to BBC News, only to be topped by 11 million copies of the seventh and final installment Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows being sold during the first 24 hours of its release two years later.  The collection constitutes the most popular series of children's books EVER.  The impact of Pottermania on the world is wide and includes the following:

1.  It Made Reading Cool  (Even Reading Fat Books)

Rowling's books have been praised and embraced by parents who watched their kids turn off the TV and read.  And because the content is so irresistible, these kids haven't been deterred by the whopping sizes of the novels that mostly run over 700 pages.  With themes that include death, power/abuse of power, love, and prejudice, readers--even young readers--become entrenched in the plots.

With over 450 million copies of the books being sold worldwide, Harry Potter turned book releases into major events, with children and adults dressing as their favorite characters.  Professor Sprout, anyone?  The anticipation of the next installment turned fans into voracious readers.  Even I waited in line for the midnight release of Order of the Pheonix and I stayed up for 48 hours straight to consume Half-Blood Prince.

2.  It Propelled the Rise of Young Adult Lit

The great demand for Harry Potter books motivated the New York Times to create a separate best-seller list for children's literature in 2000.  By June 24, 2000, Rowling's series had been on the regular best-selling list for 79 straight weeks.  (wikipedia)

Ever hear YA titles being called "the next Harry Potter"?  There's a reason.  I can remember a time when there were no books aimed specifically at young adult readers.  In school I read Ray Bradbury and J. R. R. Tolkien, but Fahrenheit 451 and Lord of the Rings weren't part of their own little sub-genre targeted at teens.  Today, there are entire sections of libraries and book stores where shelf after shelf is reserved for young adult titles.  Without Harry Potter there may have been no Hunger Games, no Mortal Instruments, no Percy Jackson and the Olympians. (DeVera)

3.  It added "Quidditch", "Muggle", "Squib" and "Mudblood" to our Lexicon

Rowling's world building skills are amazing, right down to the language the inhabitants of that world use.  Her character names are fun, place names inventive, and titles of uniquely magical elements of the wizarding world she's created are no exception.  In 2003, the word "muggle"--a term Rowling uses to describe non-magical folk--was added to the online Oxford English Dictionary.

4.  It Made Young Adult Movies Possible

Before Harry Potter children's books were rarely made into movies.  The success of the Harry Potter film franchise paved the way for the Chronicles of Narnia movies and even the Twilight films.  The recent retellings of Oz the Great and Powerful and Alice in Wonderland also owe their success, at least in part, to the Harry Potter movies who built them an audience.  It seems more and more that movie makers are turning to current YA best-sellers for their next projects.  And I, for one, believe the movies based on such works make for great entertainment.

5.  Robert Pattinson aka Cedric Diggory aka Edward Cullen  (Okay, maybe just for me)

Pattinson owes much of his popularity to Dumbledore's Army, who followed him after his demise in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire movie as Cedric Diggory to brooding vamp Edward Cullen in the Twilight film.  Ol' Rob is smokin' hot and we all know how Twilight has influenced pop culture.  The other young actors in the series Emma Watson, Rupert Gint, and Daniel Radcliffe have also risen to popularity, but I dare say not one of them has ever sparkled like diamonds in direct sunlight or stopped a speeding van with one arm, so I don't have too much to say about them.

Critics of the Harry Potter books have argued that they aren't classic literature because their plots are too predictable, their characters underdeveloped, and Rowling's writing style too full of adverbs.  The books have inspired legions of young readers and been the topic of countless dinner conversations and road trips making it a classic in my home and millions of others.  Forever more, J. K. Rowling has changed the world with Harry Potter.


References:

Harry Potter.  Wikipedia.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter.  Origins and Publishing History.

De Vera, Ruel.  How Harry Potter Changed the World.  2011.  http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/5583-how-harry-potter-changed-the-world.  web.

July date for Harry Potter book.  BBC News.  21 December 2004.

V for Vagina Hater



I was looking forward to reading Alan Moore's graphic novel V for Vendetta (1988) as an example of dystopian fiction, my current favorite genre.  The story takes place in a fascist England after the rest of human civilization has been wiped out in WWIII, but the greatest tragedy of Moore's dystopia, at least in my opinion, is what this new world order is like for its female inhabitants.

"As a geeky kind of girl," writes the anonymous author of Remember the Ladies, a wordpress blog aptly titled Tyranny of the Petticoat, (http://tyrannyofthepetticoat.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/v-for-vendetta-everything-thats-wong-about-women-in-comics/) "I tend to approach comics with caution, afraid of how they treat women.  And the classic graphic novel [V for Vendetta] has done nothing to assuage these fears."  The bloggess goes on to say that Moore's first longform work with original characters is "everything that's wrong with women in comics."  While not a huge comic reader myself--The Walking Dead graphic novels are about the only such works I've read as an adult--I'd have to say that I agree with at least the assertion that Moore stomps the female gender into the dirt in V for Vendetta.

The reader first meets Evey Hammond, V's female sidekick and eventual replacement, when she is wrongfully detained by the secret police:  officers called Fingermen.  The Fingermen are preparing to sexually assault Evey, when she is rescued by V, a faceless terrorist in a Guy Fawkes mask.  V's pursuit of two goals:  revenge on those who imprisoned and experimented on him, and bringing down the government will now include the torture of Evey.



"All the women in this comic are hypersexualized to an absurd degree, and made into permanent and willing victims," writes the author of Remember the Ladies, V for Vendetta:  Everything that's wrong about women in comics.  But none so much as Evey.  The methods that V uses to bring Evey to herself, at least that's the motive I saw for Alan Moore's treatment of the character, are unforgivable.  "I'm a baby,"  Evey says to V in one panel of the comic.  "I know I'm stupid."  The goal behind Evey's torture seems to be for Evey to discover who she really is.  "What was done to V was monstrous, and it created a monster."  (Remember the Ladies)  Once V has broken Evey, he's able to rebuild her as he chooses.  It's infuriating to me that in the graphic novel Evey forgives V and never considers leaving this man that has abused and abandoned her.  I did find some satisfaction that the film version of Evey isn't as dismissive of V's torture and refuses to offer forgiveness.

Isaac Butler of The Hooded Utilitarian writes in a post called V for Vile, "[V for Vendetta] manages to be brazenly misogynist, horrifically violent, and thuddingly dull all at the same time."  (http://hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/09/v-for-vile/)  I don't know if I would call the story dull:  the panels are beautifully drawn and I enjoyed some of the thought-provoking sequences about individual and political freedom, but it is definitely misogynistic.  As Remember the Ladies puts it:  "Evy is V's dog.  He picks her up when she's wandering the streets.  He gives her a bed and some food, pats her head and doesn't tell her shit.  When she starts to ask the wrong questions, he abandons her like a puppy.  When he takes her back, against her will, he punishes her in order to train her."

The dystopian world of V for Vendetta is violent and harsh, particularly for the women...and especially for Evey Hammond who is repeatedly brutalized.  If she didn't thank her capture profusely for his bad behavior, I might be able to forgive her and her creator Alan Moore.  As it is, I detest them both, and I'm only half kidding.

Waiting & Waiting & Waiting for Godot

          Let me say right out of the gate that I have never had a firm grasp on the whole idea of existentialism.  I'm just not that deep, people; it's a character flaw I'll admit.  Reading Samuel Beckett's two-act play Waiting for Godot (1953) this week and the research project I embarked on afterwards have helped me understand the concept better as well as identify the work's influence on other absurdist fiction, but don't look for me to be seeking out other examples just for kicks.  Even Kevin Smith's 1994 low-budget film Clerks, which follows a Godot-esque model, left me feeling confused over a lack of meaning.

          "Samuel Beckett never gave much information about his Waiting for Godot, which premiered on January 5, 1953 in Paris," writes the Existential Absurdist in his/her blog titled Modern Literature:  Is Samuel Beckett's Work Existential?  "This has left many people wondering what the play meant, exactly."  While the work has been labeled everything from avant-garde to just plain boring, the Existential Absurdist argues that the play is existential above anything else.

          So what is existentialism?  Philosophyparadise.com defines the term as:  a philosophy that repudiates the idea of religion bringing meaning to life and advocating the idea that individuals are instrumental in creating meaning in their lives.  In an article titled Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a site contributor writes "Waiting for Godot shows that the individual must take action instead of just sitting around waiting for a God that may or may not bring salvation."

          In the film Clerks, main character Dante Hicks, a young retail clerk at a New Jersey Quick Stop convenience store is called into work on his day off.  Dante's day is spent in the purgatory of serving a stream of customers while complaining relentlessly that he's "not even supposed to be here today."  Dante passes time in wide-ranging conversations with his friend Randal, much in the way Vladimir and Estragon pass the time they spend waiting around in Waiting for Godot.  Clerks supporting characters of Jay and Silent Bob also mirror Pozzo and Lucky from the play.

(Jay & Silent Bob)

(Pozzo & Lucky)

          A part of existential thought includes the belief that a loss of identity causes mankind's helplessness.  Blogger Existential Absurdist argues that this is why existentialists emphasize giving one's life a purpose.  He/she writes,  "[Existentialists] would argue that God has not given your life a purpose, and therefore it can mean nothing, unless you give it meaning yourself.  Beckett's play serves as a warning to its readers:  do not do as Vladimir and Estragon do.  Beckett warns against wasting one's life by 'waiting' instead of 'doing'."

          In Waiting for Godot, Estragon and Vladimir are called only by their nicknames:  Gogo and Didi.  The two do not seem to know who they are or even remember their pasts.  In  Clerks, Jay's friend is known only as Silent Bob and the pair are stoners, notorious for short-term memory loss, procrastination and lack of motivation.

          In Clerks, Dante blames the day's misfortunes and problems on his friend Randal, whom he claims does nothing for him but make his life miserable by getting him fined, offending his customers, and ruing his relationship.  Randal answers that Dante's actions are to blame. (wiki) This same situation of allowing oneself to be controlled can be seen in the way Lucky allows himself to be tied up and controlled by Pozzo in Waiting for Godot.  Lucky lives without meaning or purpose because he allows himself to be controlled by another.  Dante misses out and loses his girlfriend because he doesn't take responsibility for himself and his life.

          Waiting for Godot has been called the "most important English-speaking play of the 20th Century".  This may very well be true, but I can tell you it doesn't even rank in my top 20 as far as enjoyability.  I'm a terrible person.  Probably an even worse critic.   Clerks made me laugh with its never ending sexual humour, but I felt a little dumber for having watched it.  I will say that I agree in part with the philosophy of existentialism.  I believe we are responsible for creating true meaning in our own lives.  That doesn't mean that I don't believe God isn't rooting for us from on high or that we shouldn't seek to better understand His will and hopes for His people.  I just think that if we wait for Divine intervention in our lives, we'll be waiting and waiting and waiting just like Vladimir and Estragon.


References:

Existential Absurdist.  Modern Literature:  Is Samuel Beckett's Work 'Waiting for Godot' Existential?.  http://existentialabusurdist.blogspot.com/2010/01/is-samuel-becketts-work-waiting-for.html.  2010.  web.


Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.  http://www.philosophyparadise.com/essays/waitingforgodot.html.  web.

Clerks.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerks.  web.

A Study in Pastiche...Say What?

          I was thrilled to see a title by Neil Gaiman on my English Literature syllabus.  I have a mad crush on the British fantasy and graphic novel author dating way back to the early 1990's when singer/songwriter Tori Amos started talking about him in several of her songs.  Gaiman is an utterly fabulous writer.  If you've never listened to him narrate one of his works on audiobook, you are missing out ladies--his voice is magic!  As a writer of juvenile and young adult stories, I find myself more drawn to his titles for children:  The Graveyard Book and Coraline are my favorites.  However, I have also greatly enjoyed Gaiman's Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods and now A Study in Emerald.

(Neil Gaiman)



          From the opening paragraphs of A Study in Emerald (2003) the reader is able to draw very direct similarities between one of the main characters "London's only consulting detective" and another, well-known, character from English literature, Sherlock Holmes.  The story is, in fact, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. A pasti-what, you say?  Well, that was precisely my reaction, too, as I was previously unfamiliar with the pastiche [pa-steesh].  Dictionary.com defines the term as 1.  a literary, musical, or artistic piece consisting wholly or chiefly of motifs or techniques borrowed from one or more sources.  2.  an incongruous combination of materials, forms, motifs, etc., taken from different sources; hodgepodge.  A Study in Emerald is an award-winning short story written in the style of a classic Holmes pastiche and roughly follows the plot of the first Homes novel A Study in Scarlet while mixing in a little of the Cthulhu Mythos universe of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft.  (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AStudyInEmerald)



          "As a Holmes pastiche, A Study in Emerald borrows strongly, liberally and enjoyably from the Holmes mythos to produce a tale that is a ridiculous amount of fun," says Ian Holloway of The Steam Punk Review.  While none of the characters are explicitly identified in the text, it is strongly hinted that the detective and his veteran friend are Professor James Moriarty and Colonel Sebastian Moran (who, in Doyle's original stories, are the criminal mastermind arch nemesis of Holmes and his right-hand man/accomplice).  (http://enwikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_in_Emerald)  Some similarities include:

• The detective character has written a paper on "The Dynamics of an Asteroid".  In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original, Moriarty is the author of this paper.  (Doyle, The Valley of Fear)
• The narrator signs his name a the end of his story, which takes the form of a Victorian periodical or newspaper in its online version, with the initials 'SM', indicating that he is Sebastian Moran.
• The 'detective' character is described to have a 'thin smile', a physical characteristic Doyle repeatedly used to describe villains in his stories.
• The narrator mentions on several occasions what a crack-shot he was before being injured.  In the original story, Moran is described as an expert marksman.  (Doyle, The Return of Sherlock Holmes)
• In Gaiman's story, 'Sherlock' is a gifted actor.  In Doyle's A Scandal in Bohemia, Sherlock is said to be a master of disguise and Watson laments "The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime."

          What makes the story brilliantly Neil Gaiman, however, is his infusion of another genre, namely H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos universe of horror.  Cthulhu mythos is another odd term I was unfamiliar with.  It was coined by writer August Derleth to describe the works of H. P. Lovecraft and writers influenced by him including Neil Gaiman.  (http://www.yog-sothoth.com) The world in which Gaiman's A Study in Emerald takes place is one that has seen war between humanity and the Great Old Ones (an alien race and Lovecraft example), who now rule Earth.  The detective's investigation surrounds the death of a member of the Bohemian royal family and leads him to a "restorationist", an anarchist who believes that the "Old Ones are not the benevolent rulers they are portrayed as, but vicious, soul-destroying monsters feeding on madness and death, and that humanity should be master of his own affairs." (wikipedia)

          At its core, A Study in Emerald is the continuation of a "great game", one that has been going on for decades, in which various authors come up with creative and absurd ways of placing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's beloved Holmes and Watson in "new" adventures.  (Britt, Ryan) By introducing some of H. P. Lovecraft's classic trophes, perhaps Neil Gaiman does this amongst the best of them.

References:

A Study In Emerald-Television, Tropes & Idioms.  http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AStudyInEmerald.  web.

Holloway, Ian.  A Study in Emerald.  The Steampunk Review. August 2008.  http://thesteampunkreview.blogspot.com/2011-08-study-in-emerald-html.  web.

Doyle, Arthur Conan.  The Valley of Fear.

Doyle, Arthur Conan.  The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

Doyle, Arthur Conan.  A Scandal in Bohemia.

Britt, Ryan.  The Great Pastiche Game:  Notable Non-Doyle Holmes Books.  http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/12/the-great-pastiche-game-notable-non-doyle-holmes-books-html.  web.

Grace Nichols, Fat Black Women & Other Real Women of the World

As a woman it can seem as though you can’t go anywhere or do anything without having some ridiculous and unattainable standard of beauty shoved in your face.  Our culture is and seems to always have been inundated with messages to young girls and women that we aren’t enough.  Our skin isn’t smooth enough or appropriately hairless enough.  Our eyelashes aren’t thick enough.  Our teeth don’t gleam bright enough to be seen from outer space.  Our stretch marks from carrying say a kid or five can never be masked or surgically altered enough.  And we are never ever thin enough. 

Should you happen to be of a minority race and female, be prepared for a multitude of other ways in which you just don’t quite measure up to what’s most desirable and fashionable according to television, magazines, movies, billboards, etc.  Grace Nichols's poem The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping (1984) addresses the plight of a "fat" immigrant woman facing such criticisms in London.

Shopping in London winter

Is a real drag for the fat black woman

going from store to store

in search of accommodating clothes

and de weather so cold

Look at the frozen thin mannequins

fixing her with grin

and de pretty face salesgals

exchanging slimming glances

thinking she don’t notice

Lord is aggravating

Nothing soft and bright and billowing

to flow like breezy sunlight

when she walking

The fat black woman curses in Swahili/Yoruba

and nation language under her breathing

all this journeying and journeying

The fat black woman could only conclude

that when it come to fashion

the choice is lean

Nothing much beyond a size 14

                On its surface, the poem appears to be simply about the difficulties of a plus-sized woman shopping for clothes in fashionable London.  She trudges from store to store where she is mocked not only by “pretty face salesgals” but also the “frozen thin mannequins” in the stores that offer nothing in the way of something either “accommodating” or better yet “soft and bright and billowing” for someone of the speaker’s size.  With further analysis, however, one can also deduce that the poem is also a criticism of how minority women in particular were treated by London society during the 1980’s. 

                The language of the poem does much to convey to the reader that the speaker is an immigrant to England.  For example “de” is used several times instead of “the” and the speaker talks about cursing in “Swahili/Yoruba and nation language” under her breath.  Additionally, she refers to a desire for clothing that is “soft and bright and billowing to flow like breezy sunlight” giving the impression, at least in my mind, that the speaker is African or Caribbean and longing for their native climates as opposed to the frigid English Winter.

                Written during the 1980’s when London had seen riots caused by racism and social discrimination, The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping was part of a compilation called The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, and  has been seen as criticism of the conditions that black women, especially immigrant black women, found themselves living under.  (http://www.swopdoc.com/the-fat-black-woman-goes-shopping-by-grace.html)  The message in the poem doesn’t speak to me specifically in that way, though.  I understand that an English standard of beauty may have differed vastly from an African or Caribbean standard of beauty, but I think the last line of the poem also makes the discrimination the speaker feels universal to other women of her size.

                In the consumer culture in which we live, we aren’t likely to hear any messages from the media that the average American woman at 5’4” with a waist size of 34-35”, weighing between 140-150 pounds and wearing a dress size between 12 and 14, is the picture of feminine perfection.  (http://www.blogs.webmd.com/pamela-peeke-md/2010/01/just-what-is-an-average-womans-size-anymore.html)  The producers and manufacturers of the world will never stand for us feeling happy and comfortable in our own skin for very long—no matter how slightly flabby and probably utterly fabulous that skin really is.  Poems such as Grace Nichols’s The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping can help us see size discrimination for what it is:  unfair and mostly unattainable standards of beauty that have little if nothing to do with what the average real woman of the world looks like.

Seamus Heaney - Digging

         
          Irish poet, playwright, and winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature Seamus Heaney has been called the greatest poet of our age.  With works that often deal with the local surroundings of Northern Ireland, his books made up two-thirds of the sales of living poets in the U. K. in 2007 according to a BBC report.  His first collection Death of a Naturalist (1966) begins with the poem Digging, a reflective look back at the achievements of the poet and speaker's father and grandfather who toiled in the soil of their homeland  and the difficulties Heaney's desire to write and thereby choose his own future creates.  (McIntyre)  Because there is such a lot of "work" going on in the poem, I have chosen to adopt the Marxist role for analysing it.




          Digging opens with the poet sitting at his writing desk looking out on his father digging in a flower bed.  Heaney likens the pen he holds in this scene to a weapon, a weapon with which he protects himself from criticism about his choice of career.  Stella McIntyre of helium.com suggests that Heaney looks down into the garden where he is digging from an elevated position, suggesting that the poet feels superior to manual work and that he is not comfortable with this feeling.  In the third stanza, Heaney imagines his father twenty-years before as a potato farmer.  He then goes on to describe his father's skills.  In the fifth stanza, Heaney takes the reader even farther back in time to describe his grandfather's work as a turf farmer.  Here the reader learns that working the land is a tradition in Heaney's family--a tradition that Heaney breaks by becoming a writer.  The seventh stanza addresses the difficulties Heaney's desire to write causes.  "The 'curt cuts through living roots' are not only the sharp edge of a spade cutting through living turf," writes McIntyre.  "They are the sharp words spoken as Heaney cuts his ties with his family's traditional means of earning a living."

          Ireland in the early 20th Century was a poor country.  The levels of poverty in many isolated rural areas were exceptional by western standards. (http://www.muckross-house.ie/library-ireland-1930s-1940s.html) The majority of Ireland's population, including Heaney's father and grandfather, occupied small agricultural holdings during this time.  Life was hard for these farmers and their willingness and ability to labor made the difference between providing for their often large families and having them starve.

          In Digging, Seamus Heaney pays tribute to his ancestors ability to work with their hands--work and tradition are important to the poet and he is obviously proud of his father and grandfather--but he also cuts through his traditional roots with a career path that is vastly different.

          "But I've no spade to follow men like them," Heaney writes in the second to last stanza of the poem.  "Between my finger and my thumb, the squat pen rests.  I'll dig with it."

References:

McIntyre, Stella.  Poetry Analysis:  Digging, by Seamus Heaney, helium.com. web.

Faces of the Week, BBC News, BBC, 19 January 2007.

Ireland in the 1930's-1940's, Muckross House, Gardens and Traditional Farms, muckross-house.com. web.

Picasso's Lasting Anit-War Symbol

(Guernica, Spain 1937)

 

               The destruction of war on innocent lives is hard to fathom for someone who has not experienced such horror first-hand.  Creative works like Pablo Picasso’s monochromatic painting Guernica (1937) serve as perpetual reminders of the tragedies of war and have also become powerful anti-war symbols.

                Painted as an immediate response to Nazi Germany’s devastating bombing practice on the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, Guernica would become arguably Picasso’s most famous work.  (pablopicasso.org)  The political message of the mural—the suffering of people and animals, and buildings wrenched by violence and chaos—is a powerful one.

 



(Guernica mural 1937)

 



                The overall scene painted in grey, black and white oil on canvas sets a somber mood.  The newspaper print used in the painting is said to reflect how Picasso learned of the massacre in the town of Guernica.   The images of the work are contained within the walls of a room where, on the left, a wide-eyed bull stands over a woman grieving over a dead child in her arms.  The mother screams and screams, but nothing will bring her child back. (news.bbc.co.uk)  The centre of the painting is occupied by a horse that has been run through with a spear or javelin.  The large gaping wound in the horse’s side is a major focus of the work.  The animal’s terrible pain and suffering pulls viewers in.  Picasso was asked whether the horse represented the Spanish people, but he refused to answer. (bbc)  The horse contrasts sharply with the other animal in the painting:  the bull, which appears calm and dispassionate as it watches the drama unfold.  A light bulb blazes in the shape of an evil eye at the top of the mural and is believed to symbolize the Spanish word for light bulb, bombilla, which also means bomb in Spanish.  Daggers that suggest screaming replace the tongues of all the figures in the painting.

 

(Picasso at work on Guernica, June 1937)

                The horrors that befell Guernica in the form of saturation bombings certainly weren’t the last—of WWII and every war since.  As S. Mathews of Erie Pennsylvania comments on the BBC News website, “Guernica resonates with every generation—from the nightmarish qualities of the twisted bodies frozen in time to the flower of hope clutched in dying fingers.  Does man ever learn that war is futile—or are we destined by our leaders to repeat our mistakes in some kind of macabre symphony, each succeeding movement more devastating than the next?”  Picasso’s most political painting is a powerful visual statement against the suffering war inflicts upon innocent individuals.

 

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(painting), Guernica, web.

http://www.pablopicasso.org/guernica.jsp, Guernica by Pablo Picasso, web.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7986540.stm, BBC News Magazine, "Piecing Together Guernica" (2009)

 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Crossing the Bar into YA Dystopia

          When I saw Tennyson's Crossing the Bar (1889) on my reading schedule this week I got super excited.  I've had experience with this poem--very recent experience as it turns out--and I was eager to learn more about it.

          Crossing the Bar is a poem of peaceful and calm acceptance by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, thought to be written as his own elegy.  The extended metaphor in the poem of "crossing the bar" represents traveling serenely and securely from life through death. (wikipedia)  It is enjoyed by many readers for its picture of peaceful tranquility, and for these reasons it has been used by many at funerals and memorial services. (allpoetry.com)  The tranquility of the work is what contrasts so dynamically with the themes of the contemporary Young Adult novel series Matched by Ally Condie which incorporates and references the poem again and again.

          Tennyson wrote Crossing the Bar after suffering a serious illness at sea.  According to Robert W. Hill, Jr., editor of Tennyson's poetry; authoritative texts, juvenilia and early responses, criticism, Tennyson said the words of the poem "came in a moment", and before his death he instructed his son to include Crossing the Bar as the end of all editions of his poetry.  In Ally Condie's Matched series, a set of three young adult dystopian fantasy novels, the poem stands in stark contrast to life as it is dictated by the Society.

          (For an overview of dystopian fiction, please see Through the Wormhole: Confessions of a Bookworm: It's the End of the World As We Know It...And Why ...)

          Like all dystopian fiction, the world of Matched is governed by a society with very rigid rules.  Think Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, The Giver--each of these is a classic dystopian tale.  In Condie's novels, Officials of the Society decide who you love, where you work and when you die.  In exchange, Citizens are given a long life, the perfect job and the ideal mate. (matched-book.com)  People are happy in this regime.  They are healthy, free from disease and turmoil and die exactly at age 80, surrounded by loved ones at a Final Banquet.  This new, efficient way of living, which seems like Utopia to some, is turned on its head in part when main character Cassia finds two poems hidden in an artifact.  The Society has culled all of culture into a manageable number:  One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Paintings, One Hundred Songs; and Cassia's "new" poems are considered dangerous.  One of these is Tennyson's Crossing the Bar.

        For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place

  The flood may bear me far,

    I hope to see my Pilot face to face

   When I have crost the bar.

 

 

          The poem reflects a placid and accepting attitude.  The narrator (and Tennyson) was accepting of his death.  He hopes the ocean will be calm, that there will be no sadness at his farewell, that he will look upon the face of his Pilot (God).  In Condie's novels, her teenage characters rage against the Society that dictates their entire lives right down to the very moment of their death.  They desire knowledge and experience that those who rule over them deny them.  To this end they teach one another secreted poems like Crossing the Bar.  In the second installment of the series, Crossed, the last stanza of the poem is recited over the graves of fallen soldiers who revolt against the Society for the freedom to choice:  choice in who they love and the choice to not go gently toward a predetermined death.  (Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night is another poem referenced in Condie's books.)

 

          It's intriguing to see how many contemporary American authors, especially those who write juvenile and young adult fantasy, incorporate classic works from English literature into their stories.  While they give the contemporary works more depth, they also serve to breathe new life and interest into the classic works they incorporate.  I'll be on the look out for another such literary reference the next time I pick up a new YA title.

 

References:

 

Wikipedia, Crossing the Bar, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Bar

 

Hill, Robert W., Jr., ed (1971) Tennyson's poetry; authoritative texts, juvenilia and early responses, criticism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company

 

AllPoetry.com, Crossing the Bar by Alfred Lord Tennyson, http://allpoetry.com/poem/8473301-Crossing_the_Bar-by-Alfred_Lord_Tennyson

 

Condie, Ally, Matched (2010), Speak-Penguin Group

 

Condie, Ally, Crossed (2011), Speak-Penguin Group



         

Welcome to the Cool Kid Club: Wuthering Heights' Influence on Modern Culture

          If you're an avid fan of the television shows Madmen, Sex in the City, Family Guy, The Vampire Diaries or Sabrina the Teenage Witch, singers Kate Bush or Pat Benatar, the band Death Cab for Cutie or the movies Cold Mountain or Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, you've no doubt heard at least one modern reference to Emily Bronte's only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847).  Apparently it's the book all the cool kids love to remind you that they've read.  In the Sex and the City movie, Carrie mentions Wuthering Heights in her late library books.  In the 2004 film Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Lindsey Lohan's character sees her favorite singer in NYC and remarks "except for the garbage and cars, it's like following Heathcliff on the moors."(wikipedia.org, Categories:  Victorian novels)  Perhaps most recognizably of late is the classic tale of stormy passion's reemergence in popular culture via the contemporary Gothic love story Twilight by Stephenie Meyer.

          Readers of the Twilight Saga first get the message that main character Bella Swan (and by default author Stephenie Meyer) is, in fact, a member of the Wuthering Heights Cool Kid Club in Chapter One, Book One, Twilight which makes reference to Bella reading the novel.  This reading takes place on and off between her google searches on vampire and werewolf legends throughout the book, but I digress.  In Book Three, Eclipse there are several direct quotes used to compare Bella's relationships with sparkling vamp extraordinaire Edward Cullen and smoldering love puppy Jacob Black to Catherine's relationships with Heathcliff and Edgar.  For example, Bella quotes from WH:  "If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger."  Likewise, Edward quotes Heathcliff:  "I cannot live without my life.  I cannot live without my soul!"  Holy diamond encrusted bloodsuckers, Batman!  That Edward is as smooth as a baby's bottom, isn't he?

          A central conflict in the Twilight Saga's plot is Bella's struggle to let go of Jacob aka Edgar Linton.  Like Catherine, Bella is passionate, stubborn and, let's be real, selfish.  Bella eventually sees more and more of Catherine's selfishness in herself according to shmoop.com in the online article Bella and Edward-Cathy and Heathcliff?.  "I was selfish.  I was hurtful.  I tortured the ones I loved.  I was like Cathy, like Wuthering Heights, only my options were so much better than hers, neither one evil, neither weak.  I couldn't allow what hurt me to influence my decisions anymore," Bella professes in Eclipse, Chapter 23, pages 158-159.

          Aside from the quotes, there are other similarities between Wuthering Heights and Twilight.  Both stories take place in gray, lonely, rainy places:  WH in the moors of England, Twilight in the Pacific Northwest town of Forks.  Both are about forbidden, obsessive love.  In the case of WH, it's all in the family:  Catherine and her adopted brother Heathcliff fall in love as teenagers and must deny their passion for the rest of their lives [Donna Kaufman, Is 'Wuthering Heights' the New (or Old) 'Twilight'?], while in the case of Twilight, teenage Bella Swan falls in love with a 107 year-old vampire.  Like Edward Cullen, Heathcliff is a bad boy with a good-guy rival.  Joelle, blogger of The Real Pretend makes the following observations about the ways in which Edward and Heathcliff are similar in a post entitled How Wuthering Heights was 1847's Twilight:

• dark, creepy personalities
• pasty skin
• terrifying eyes
• poorly styled hair
• obsessive about the woman they love to the point of death

          So, what is Meyer trying to accomplish here?  Her literary references to WH certainly help to give her own story about a passionate teenage girl in a love triangle of doom a level of depth it may have otherwise lacked, but the similarities don't necessarily translate in reverse.  For example:  "Characters in Wuthering Heights set out to inflict pain on others, but that's not the case with Edward and Bella," writes Brooke from Witchita Falls, Texas on twilightseriestheories.com (2008).  Brooke points out that Edward leaves Bella to spare her what he thinks will be inevitable pain.  Edward places Bella's happiness above all else.  Brooke also notes that Bella is honest with Jacob from the beginning that her feelings for Edward will not change, unlike Catherine who leads both Heathcliff and Edgar on.  WH is a masochistic love story whose characters destroy themselves and the lives of the people they touch. (Passionate Destruction:  a Comparison of Wuthering Heights and Twilight, 2012).

          I can't help wondering about the scores of young girls and women known as Twi-hards that have picked up Wuthering Heights, either hoping to join the Cool Kid Club or looking for a similar tale to Twilight.  Publishers are capitalizing on this phenomenon and a new edition of WH has been released with a Twilight-esque cover.

          At their cores, WH and Twilight both romanticize obsessive relationships.  When you're young and inexperienced with matters of the heart, it's easy to equate the kind of obsession that drives a guy to creep into your bedroom at night to watch you sleep with true love.  "Neither WH or Twilight are sweet 'I'll die without him' love stories," says Joelle from The Real Pretend.  "They are creepy, restraining order, medication-requiring stories."

          Whatever your take on Emily Bronte's only novel, feel free to enlighten your friends, family and the general public with your opinions about it.  It's one of the perks--ok, the only perk--of belonging to the Wuthering Heights Cool Kid Club. 

References:

Wuthering Heights, www.Wikipedia.org, Victorian novels.

Bella and Edward-Cathy and Heathcliff?  www.shmoop.com.

wraithziodex, Passionate Destruction:  a Comparison of Wuthering Heights and Twilight,

          www.studymode.com

(2012)

Brooke, In what ways do you think Wuthering Heights and Eclipse parallel?,

          www.twilightseriestheories.com (2008)

Joelle, The Real Pretend, How Wuthering Heights was 1847's Twilight, www.blogspot.com (2011)

Kaufman, Donna.  Is 'Wuthering Heights' the New (or Old) 'Twilight'?, www.ivallage.com, (2010)

Meyer, Stephenie.  Twilight, Little, Brown & Company (2005)

Meyer, Stephenie.  Eclipse, Little, Brown & Company (2007)

         

Mary Shelley & Gothic Feminism

 

 

As the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and a political philosopher named William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley may have been destined for intellectual greatness.  In many ways she did fulfill the philosophical and literary visions her mother once had, but she championed for the female sex in a manner far removed from her mother’s ideals.

When people think of English novelist, biographer, short story and travel writer Mary Shelley, chances are they do not equate her with feminism.  By contemporary standards she would not be considered a feminist  were she alive today, nor is it believed that she ever considered herself to be a feminist.  Shelley did, however, consistently use her writing to highlight the social system underlying 19^th Century British culture that dictated the legal, financial, class, religious, and education realities of women.  According to Diane Long Hoeveler, author of Gothic Feminism: the Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes, female novelists like Shelley weren’t trying to reshape their worlds subversively through their writing.  Instead, they sought to construct a literary setting that would “allow their female characters and by extension their female readers a fictitious mastery over what they considered an oppressive social and political system.”  For these reasons, Shelley’s most popular work, the Gothic novel Frankenstein:  or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), as well as many of her other works including the short story The Mortal Immortal, function as “a coded and veiled critique of all of (the) public institutions that have been erected to displace, contain, or commodify women”. (Hoeveler)

Raised by her father after Mary Wollstonecraft died 11 days after childbirth, young Mary adopted her father’s liberal political views.  At seventeen she developed a romantic relationship with one of his political followers and future acclaimed author, the married Percy Bysshe Shelley.  The two would eventually marry, but M. Shelley remained a sort of political radical throughout her life, facing ostracism from much of society for her views on marriage as much as those she held on societal reform.  Best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein, Shelley made other literary contributions in regards to feminism.   The Mortal Immortal (1833), one of several short stories written for money years after Frankenstein, tickles readers’ imaginations with the possibility of making mortals immortal, and was written during a time when many women, including Mary Shelley, hoped to believe that there may be a way to equate women with men.

In Iconoclastic Departures:  Mary Shelley After ‘Frankenstein’, edited by Syndy Conger and Frederick Frank, it is stated that “if Wollstonecraft could barely imagine a brave new world for women inhabited by sensitive men, Mary Shelly puts her fictional women into that world and reveals that the sensitive male hero is a mad egoist intent on corrupting feminine values and destroying all in his despotic quest for mastery.”  Such a hero can be found in both male characters of The Mortal Immortal, the philosopher Cornelius and his hapless assistant Winzy—Conelius seeking to master death with eternal life, and Winzy seeking to master love in order to forget his beloved Bertha.   Both quests end up destroying any true happiness for Cornelius, Winzy or Bertha.

 While Wollstonecraft urged women to effectively “masculinize themselves and shun ‘feminine’ values as weak and debilitating, M. Shelley understood all too well the consequences of such behavior for both men and women.” (Conger & Frank) She wrote in her journal, written 21 October 1838 and published by Oxford: Clarendon, 1987, “the sex of our material mechanism makes us quite different creatures [from men]—better though weaker.  In TMI, the physical body of Winzy is valued.  It is an object to be preserved for eternity.  Bertha’s body, along with the other women described in the story—the Old Crone, for example—are devalued and flawed to worthlessness.

By the time TMI was written, a Female Gothic formula had evolved.  “The female Gothic heroine became the figure to purge the world of aristocratic corruption.  Such a woman, virginal, innocent, and good, assumed almost religious significance because within the system of the novel, everything at stake was represented by her and her intact body,” writes Jennifer H. Williams in Literature by Women, Mary Shelley.  Williams further states that Gothic Feminism was born when women such as M. Shelley realized that women had not only formidable and varied external enemies, but an internal enemy in the form of their own sexual difference, perceived by others as a weakness.  TMI can be read as a critique of the female Gothic formula as well as a departure from the feminist ideals of Shelley’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft.   Almost everyone in Mary Shelley’s stories is a victim, but her female characters are victims of victims and thus doubly pathetic and weak. (Conger & Frank)

 

References:

Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Feminism:  The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes"

Mary Shelley and Gothic Feminism:  The Case of 'The Mortal Immortal' in Iconoclastic Departures:  Mary Shelley after 'Frankenstein' 150-163. eds. Syndy Conger and Frederick Frank.  (Rutherford:  Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997)

(21 October 1838) The Journals of Mary Shelley, ed. Paul R. Feldman & Diane Scott-Kilvert. [Oxford:  Clarendon, 1987] 2:553-54)

Williams, Jennifer H.  Questions Concerning Religion:  Literature By Women, Mary Shelley.  http://questionsconcerningreligion.org/E290/10-23-mary-shelley. Web

 



The Prints & Propaganda of James Gillray

     The 18th century's Age of Enlightenment saw the introduction of the political and satirical cartoon.  These hand-coloured etchings or engravings were both highly topical and engaging.  No illustrator played a more important role in the propaganda campaigns of the time than England's James Gillray.  Gillray's grotesque and fiendish depictions of French revolutionaries as dangerous sans-culottes took the stereotype of the revolutionary projected by many anti-radicals across the Channel to the extreme.

     Born in 1757, James Gillray was apprenticed to a letter engraver in London during his youth.  When he began to find the work boring, however, he deserted his master to join a troupe of strolling players.  When that endeavour failed, Gillray returned to London and eventually became a student at the Royal Academy before setting himself up as a portrait painter.  When he received no commissions, he returned to producing engravings for print shops.  While his first prints were devoted to social subjects, in 1782 Gillray began to concentrate on political caricatures.  Party warfare among Whigs and Tories was carried on with great vigor and bitterness during Gillray's time--much as it is today in American politics.  Gillray's wit and humor along with his keen sense of the ludicrous earned him a top place among political caricaturists.  Following the years of the 1789 French Revolution, English satirists, including James Gillray, focused their attention more and more past internal Whig and Torie party disputes and toward the mobs of "mad, bloodthirsty revolutionaries" in France.

The Zenith of French Glory: the Pinnacle of Liberty (1793)

     Following the publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), James Gillray produced the piece pictured above.  Influenced by Burke's opposition to the fervour of revolution in France, (Burke's work did much to alter the English conservatives' views of the typical Frenchmen from a "poor, frog-eating laughing-stock", as PT from Propagandatheory.com writes in a post entitled Propaganda of the French Revolution--Satire From England, to that of a dangerous fiend) Gillray set about illustrating his own dismay at the progress of the French Revolution. 
     The Zenith of French Glory's primary figure, the sans-culotte (translated literally as having 'no trousers') is noticeably without the fashionable knee-breeches that characterized the wealthy of England and sits atop a city lamp bracket.  Three members of the clergy are hanging below him, and he rests his foot on one of their heads.  He is wearing a Phrygian cap, or liberty bonnet, and plays a fiddle while Paris burns in the background.  In the middle distance, Louis XVI is facing his execution by guillotine.  The mob gathered to watch the spectacle are differentiated only by the outlines of their red liberty bonnets.  At the bottom of the illustration is scrawled:  "The Zenith of French Glory:  The Pinnacle of Liberty, Religion, Justice, Loyalty & all the Bugbears of Unenlightened Minds, Farewell!"

Un petit souper a la Parisienne:  or A Family of Sans Culottes refreshing after the fatigues of the day (1792)

  Following the September Massacres of 1792, a series of mob violence that overtook Paris and marked the start of the 'radical phase' of the French Revolution, Gillray composed Un petit souper (above).  The piece confirms the widely held English notion of French barbarity.  The sans-culottes are even more grotesque, obscene, and fearsome.  The character at the head of the cannibalistic feast sits atop the "Properite de la Nation", the prosperity of the nation, and eats an eyeball.  Corpses litter the floor.  Young sans-culottes devour intestines while an elderly grandmother roasts an infant's body on a spit.  Gillray's picture of depravity conveys the message that the revolution is to blame for producing such monsters.  In Propaganda of the French Revolution--Satire from England, PT argues that "Most of the 'golden boys' of the Revolution would eventually be devoured by the forces they helped unleash," in the same way that the figures in Un petit souper cannibalize their victims.  At the bottom of the piece appears the following poem:

"Here as you see, and as tis known,

Frenchmen mere cannibals are grown;

On Maigre Days each had his dish,

Of soup, or Sallad, Eggs, or Fish;

But now tis human flesh they gnaw,

and every day is Mardi Gras."

     Analyzed from an historical perspective, James Gillray is among the most popular and prolific print satirists of the golden age of English caricature.  While he is much revered, he is also much reviled for the way he portrayed French Revolutionaries during a time when shock waves of fear and anxiety traveled to England from France.  Like most Englishmen, Gillray believed that life was better in his part of the world and he feared that the Revolution could turn that world upside down.  His prints, along with those of similarly minded artists', heavily influenced his countrymens' ideas about the Revolution and the French people in general.  Sometimes blatant and other times more subtle, James Gillray's techniques are still being employed by satirists today seeking to draw attention to political issues and personalities.

References:

PT, Propagandatheory.com, Propaganda of the French Revolution--Satire from England (2012)

James Gillray www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk Web

Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911) Encyclopedia Britannica (11th ed.) Cambridge University Press