|
Elisa Lenssen's Reading
Journal
19 July 2004 at 1:27 AM, post #212
I think we should meet in person to talk about style. I'd like to maybe draw a mock-page so I get a better idea of what the space and aesthetics will require from the style concerns. For example, it would be nice if we could make every 'short entry' appear similar in literal lateral length, you know, have the same screen presence ... but I just don't really *get* how that could work. It would likely require indeed, as Elizabeth thought, a single person going through all the entries and making decisions.
-e
19 July 2004 at 1:23 AM, post #211
on the interface for the bibliography entries, what do I do if I have a book that's been edited by more than one author?
----
Betsey and Elizabeth and I are in the midst of editing eachother's time line entries, and have some quick questions:
--would it be possible for you to create some sort of additional interface to enter specific days right near the place we enter the month? this way we could make the actual text entries more standard looking.
--is there a recommended maximum length for short entries? we were thinking three sentences, but then thought that might be too big.
--do political pamphlets go in the literature category? e.g., Rousseau?
--I (elisa) have several long entries where I directly quote three paragraphs from a source. Is that bad? And in shorter notes, if we are quoting/summarizing, we are supposed to name the reference in the text still, right?
thanks.
-elisa, elizabeth, betsey
14 July 2004 at 1:45 PM, post #207
I don't think Sarah is giving Charlotte too much credit. I do think the novel wants us to sympathize with the titular character and condemn both the seducer and the society which birthed that seduction.
That's not to say, however, that Charlotte shows much spunk. We must still be treading water before that waterfall point in the development of such novels when women start finding their own place and securing an education for themselves, etc. etc.
I know there's literature out there about the emaciated female body in literature of this time period. I'd like to know more about the trends and ramifications and extensions of all these portrayals of the 'fallen' woman wasting away into skeletons. If I have time, I might do this. Rowson's descriptions of Charlotte toward the end are quite ghostly/ghastly/haunt/gaunt.
Rowson certainly does focus on the, um, aesthetics of poverty and the onlookers situation. With all those poor visits and voyeuristic backfires--e.g. Mrs. Beauchamp fainting away when she sees Charlotte near the end.
And hey, did Charlotte really choose? She faints before consenting or refuting, and then wakes up to find herself on a boat with Motraville.
05 July 2004 at 10:25 AM, post #199
In Brown's "To the Public" section, he claims to be a "moral painter", to be depicting American personality. In some ways, I can see how it seems Huntley could represent America's journey towards independence: Huntley wakes up one night in a wilderness cave, not knowing how he got there. This could be like birth from a womb, birth of a new nation that then, as Huntley does, needs to struggle and work its way back to civilization. It's all very nightmarish, as no doubt the revolution was to those involved. That is not to say, of course, that when he returns to familiar territory everything is the same for Mr. Huntley.
In fact, Huntley doesn't end up so well. So maybe he doesn't represent any good. He always misreads other people and events going on around him. He even deceives himself. Oddly and disturbingly clueless. Also, poor Weymouth's problems with being an entrepreneur and merchant don’t shed the best light on individualism and perseverance. I remember Huntley not thinking it was worth it.
Father-son ties don't do so well either, a trend we've seen throughout. The version of the Oedipal conflict with Clithero is interesting. Again, these characters' psychologies are all full of self-hatred and neuroticism.
But Edgar Huntley, more than the others, seemed very much infused with destruction and unnecessary(?) (unpreventable?) violence. Huntley lives by imitating the supposed savages. It's very much an atmosphere of every man for himself.
And what about every woman? Where are they? Mary Waldergrave is perhaps the most visible, but she's still very shadowy. The narrative also leads us to believe she is 'erroneously' lazy, or at least very much against any individual exertion. Queen Mab's depiction gets worse and worse. I can't make much of Mrs. Lorimer. I'm guessing Brown just wasn't that interesting in working his women into his masculine barbaric world of dog eat dog. It's funny how much I still get the sense that nobody is really playing with a full deck. Somehow in this new frontier, the cheese has slipped off the cracker precipice (SO MANY precipices in this book).
18 June 2004 at 3:31 PM, post #184
Sooooo many horrible things determine Amborosio's fate (sin, corrupting power, lust, the supernatural, the devil, etc. etc. etc.) that I wonder if Lewis intended one to be highlighted more than the others. If so, I don't think I quite got the message. That said, I'll use this entry to go out on a limb with one thing i was thinking about.
Sexual identity and the sexual body are confused and conflicted all over the novel. Ambrosio "regretted Rosario, the fond, the gentle, and submissive; he grieved that Matilda preferred the virtues of his sex to those of her own." Later, when Ambrosio first sees the devil, the devil is described in feminine ways--"He beheld a figure more beautiful than fancy's pencil ever drew. It was a youth seemingly scarce eighteen, the perfection of whose form and face was unrivalled. He was perfectly naked; a bright star sparkled upon his forehead, two crimson wings extended themselves from his shoulders, and his silken locks were confined by a band of many-coloured fires." It's odd that in a book that uses a lot of violent sexual imagery to describe everyday actions that these distinctions are drawn: why make the devil so female? Is this supposed to lessen the shock of the rape of Antonia? And why does the narrator delight so horrifyingly in the destruction and torture of the Prioress or Agnes, just to name a few? From what I can gather most critics acknowledge that Lewis is sort of adolescent in his writing but go on to say that still the book triumphs as a story that ensnares and wows us. Um, I'm not so sure. I just feel severely uncomfortable with the male-female relationship, even the less ambiguous ones. Why do we have Lorenzo literally descending through and moving inside a female (the statue) at the end of the book to find Agnes? He isn't finding safety inside this place (to not support a psychoanalytic reading of 'going back to the womb' or something) -- he's rescuing a woman. From the insides of a woman. Ack ack ack. I don't understand.
So: maybe Lewis is arguing for universal androgyny. (!). We have evil that occurs when the males are all sequestered all together (the monastery); we have evil that occurs when the females are all sequestered all together (the convent). Though the book is called "The Monk" and not "The Nun", or "The Monk and the Nun" or "God's bride and groom" or something. Seriously though. From what I can gather, the actually physical layout of the book's backdrop is the convent on one side and the monastery on the other. In between is the graveyard and all the weird underground tunnels. Again, this seems a symbol designed to say something ... but what? I wonder if there's a history of authors arguing against gender as a detrimental social construct this far back. Probably not, but something to think about.
17 June 2004 at 5:16 PM, post #177
At this point in time, I've been tracing the appearance of the word "unguarded". The adjective appears a lot, but in different contexts and often for different characters.
"He [Ambrosio] depended upon finding Antonia in some unguarded moment" (229). Either it's passions or curiosity that seem to get Ambrosio when his 'guard' is down, though what exactly is this guard? Earlier, the books reads "Conscience painted to him in glaring colours his perjury and weakness" (206). Perhaps the guard is just simple self-constrait, keeping everything inside so you don't even risk perjury?
I wonder if this relates to a lot of business imagery and motifs in the story, in surprising places (a true portrayal of 'minding one's own business') -- the convent comes off as a kind of scary, bitchy place of back-stabbing business ("she is infatuated with the idea of rendering her convent the most regular in Madrid, and never forgave those whose imprudence threw upon it the slightest strain. Though naturally violent and severe, when her interests require it, she well knows how to assume an appearance of benignity" p.201).
In my first quote above about Ambrosio, I can't quite understand how to reconcile his plotting about catching the unguarded Antonia -- if he can recognize the unguardedness, when and why would he be unguarded?
yeah. these guys are just really weird. I feel weird trying to make actual statements or conclusions about them. I do enjoy the extensive dicussion of chickens on p. 278-79. Why? Because I like chickens.
16 June 2004 at 4:52 PM, post #171
Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure" and "The Monk" are associated in many ways, more so than just the explicit references I think.
I know that the "precise" in the opening quote from Measure for Measure was, in Shakespeare's day, an unsympathetic synonym for a puritan, for people often exposed to be hippocrytes. Like Matilda dressing up as a monk, the Duke in Measure for Measure disguises himself as a friar in order to witness what happens when he quits the throne. This relates to Matilda having that portrait painted and disguising herself in order to witness Ambrosio's response (note: both parts of the portrait scandal -- Ambrosio's first falling in love with the picture of the Virgin Mary and then the fact that Rosario/Matilda had the Virgin Mary painted to look exactly like her -- disturb me greatly). Voyeurism plays out in interesting ways in both works. We have all these people who are psychologically intimate with eachother yet under disguise. Is this forgiveable, in everyday life or religious beliefs about the afterlife?
I was trying to draw parallels between Angelo and Isabella from Measure for Measure, and Ambrosio and Matilda from the Monk. The names are almost similar enough to draw direct associations. And all four characters in their respective stories have supposedly forworn love and embraced celibacy, only to later reveal themselves at least vunerable.
Also like Shakespeare's play, there's sort of the collapsing of the holy and the disgusting at points.
Unrelatedly, I noticed that dark skin color once again seemed to function as a way to convey low morals or signify the bad exotic.
I quite enjoy Matthew Gregory Lewis. Though he also disturbs me.
14 June 2004 at 5:25 PM, post #165
Some of the very basic/ancient foundations of philosophical thought undergird discussions in "The Power of Sympathy" (I use 'basic' to denote that my knowledge is just grinnell's intro philosophy class). Questions of experience as knowledge or ignorance, for instance, and whether judgments are made in the mind or in matter or a mixture of both, and what exactly constitutes simple superficial shadows of the truth and what is Truth. Aesthetics, of course, also dominate the conversation. Is pleasure the greatest good? I think they think not.
"The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano" read, in numerous parts, like an implicit endorsement of utilitarianism -- e.g., Equiano literally uses the argument that "it has no advantage to atone for it" when referencing the breaking up of slave families, as opposed to exploring other more emotional aspects of the argument. His descriptions of females are also in the utility vein. I just find these utilitarianism hints a bit surprising, as the theory is all about how all action should be directed toward achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. That is, it might be a good theory to use for slavery.
I felt at some points that, in "Sympathy," Harrington verged on the blasphemous. When he's writing to Harriot and says "I had rather adore you a present mortal, than an absent divinity" (37). I know he follows up that statement with another in jest about being a misinformed disciple yet devout all the same ... but the religion in the second qualification isn't even Christianity, right?
I did, however, appreciate the portrayal of an old man shedding tears. I was glad it wasn't a woman.
10 June 2004 at 5:27 PM, post #148
Judith Sargent Murray wrote "On the Equality of the Sexes" two years before Wollstonecraft wrote "Vindication on the Rights of Women." I find that fascinating.
I wonder if we must be quite careful not to think that women's education was still supposed to serve the same purpose as men's. It's not that they want women to become the same gun-toting, solitary nature walk-loving men we see Jefferson writing about; that would make the whole enterprise fail. No, instead it's still women, even Murray, wanting education to improve the female capacity to be wife, to be mother. Maybe. Probably.
But I still don't wholly *get* the last few lines in "On the Equality...". Why does she choose to connect male and female perceptions of the family by choosing a negative, choosing annoying suffering? Is she meaning scathing sarcasm? I'm not sure she's as successful in rhetoric there as some others we've read.
Should we be skeptical of a male writing "so strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities" (543)? Maybe. Probably.
How long has SOUL been around as a thing capable of mobilizing an argument? I'll think about this more and see what I can say. Maybe. Probably.
09 June 2004 at 7:01 PM, post #146
First, I want to ask what is probably a silly question: is there a historical/social reasoning behind Abigail Adams' capitalizations? were the transcriptions just guessing with letters that appeared bigger than others? "That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend" (504) seems to show that capitalization follows emphasis, but I just wanted to be sure. And when did that trend change?
yeah.
John Adams seems to echo Godwin's suggestion in "Caleb Williams" that chivalry and dignity are actually just illadvised means to a detrimental end, i.e. aggressive indignation and vengeful revolution, when he writes "The source of all these evils was a thirst of power ... Revenge, not limited by justice or the public welfare, was measure only by such retaliation as was judged the sweetest; by capital condemnations, by iniquitous sentences, and by glutting the present rancor of their hearts with their own hands ... " and further, in the second full paragraph on page 464. (on a silly note, the neurotic impulses of these men make "Such were the fashionable outrages of unbalanced parties" an enjoyable pun).
I'm wondering what Adams would have to say about Jefferon's 'social dispositions' idea (459). If the introspective dignity=>aggressive indignation is not a social disposition, I'm not sure what is. Certainly Jefferson is grouping personal philosophies more in his fluff category of beauty, of products of the eye and the imagination (458). What I don't understand is why Jefferson, a guy whose prose style and content I was surprised to really enjoy and admire, would think it safe to say "Take from man his selfish propensities, and he can have nothing to seduce him from the practice of virtue" (also 458). What a gloss! Would he not argue that the very nature of selfishness comes from interaction, and would he not argue against raising every American citizen in perfect solitude to avoid it? This could be the very keystone of the dubious American Dream ideology of making it on your own merit (even though this is wholly confounded by other things Jefferson says in golden-rule-esqueness ... as the Dream is itself prevented by our own government's sanctions).
mysteriously cynically yours,
elisa
08 June 2004 at 4:14 PM, post #136
I was thinking more today about the absence of any overwhelming or even pinpointable setting in the novel. How, then, exactly, does "Caleb Williams" fit with the Gothic novel category? There is no substantial harrowing descriptions of the prisons or the woodlands traversed to spook us. The suspense does not at all revolve around the physical. It's all mental. Oooo. We aren't so much enchanted by social twists as we are individual meantal ones (I enjoyed in the appendices Godwin's elucidation of this social/individual binary and where in it he places weight). This works to help us understand more how Godwin saw the actions of men: this physical-less suspense takes up over 300 pages of very particular diction and syntax, and so it would seem, then, (we hope), that Godwin traces all abstractions to the cellular level of consciousness.
Is it the rage and anger that infatuate Godwin, or is he more concerned with the previous synapses rather than those subsequent? I'm leaning toward the previous synapses.
And if THIS is the case, and Godwin wants us to think about plot and action as working backward into the mind, then its seems to suggest that language itself is the only way we can understand our thoughts. Which came first, the understanding or the words? "Williams" seems to want to say words. Note the novel's heavy emphasis on speech as power, and how Caleb is a master of dialects (albeit to his detriment) and a master copier of others.
Williams and Falkland leave me wondering by what means Godwin wishes individuals to feel worth. Should they not feel any at all? It seems the dignity and chivalry, etc., felt by these characters only leads to a resentment that lets no progress be made. What should inspire revolution? Serenity? Massage militias? That seems unlikely, though Godwin's other writings assert things loud and clear ...
Updated 11 June 2004, 7:41 PM
07 June 2004 at 4:03 PM, post #131
The essential absence of mothers (in the sense of caretaking and supposed natural irrefutable bonds) deserves some inspection. I was startled at first when, after Laura spurns him, Caleb refers to her with an outcry of “my mother!”. The use of Amazon description and other such lamentable characteristics of the female ‘caretakers’—is it an argument, or is it simply the manifest disinterest of Godwin? The book felt overwhelmingly male to me, though not in the plumber/lumberjack way, but more in the sense that there exists in it the implicit argument that male-male relationships are what are important and what should demand all the attention of any society, whether looking for justice and any other abstractions.
Freud would have fun with Mr. Williams.
A Venn Diagram would not be an apt choice with which to represent the Gothic personality. Passion and reason don’t, it seems, have any gray area at all. The outrageous transformations from uncontrolled passions to passionate repentance join the later choruses of Jekyll and Hyde, and Caleb calls humans “Those twin-births that have two heads indeed, and four hands.” The math here makes me wonder why Godwin has every alliance in the book fail: we often talk about our left hand not knowing what the right is doing, so it would seem to me that two sets of two mismatched hands would make one set of matched hands.
Likewise, what’s with the oft-innocuous yet sometimes heavily highlighted setting of the story? Frequent mention is made of Caleb feeling the need to transgress country bounds. I’m afraid I didn’t very successfully follow the political or geographical implications … perhaps we can talk about this together.
Is the law supposed to be seen as an entity just as ineffectually monomaniacal as these gentlemen?
04 June 2004 at 3:25 PM, post #124
And I thought I was neurotic! I don't know if it was Godwin's explicit intention to write a novel that reads like a psychological study of neuroses, but I gather from what I've read so far that that's mostly what this is.
The style is somewhat wooden and occasionally made me chuckle out loud (particularly the transition between Chapter I and II, and the first three sentences of II). Yet what impresses me the most is that despite these occasional concrete-like barriers of cliche and the wild plot points, I do still want to run along behind trying to keep up with it and *understand*.
Certainly the battle between guilt of the individual and the greater social dictates form the crux of the novel. Rationality seems obliterated by whims and scary passions, in several layers actually, as the scary plots of Mr. Tyrell are frequently foiled by 'expected events' ... but then he always rebounds with a new subjective decision and outlook ... it's knotty.
I am, as I suspect to book wants me to be, a bit skeptical about the legitimacy of Falkland's story and his representation. If I rolled my eyes at anything, it was the perpetual angst in which he was shown as a supposed result of his morals -- "He raved, he swore, he beat his head, he rent up his hair", e.g. He probably leaps over tall buildings in a single bound, too.
We have animal metaphors used in derogatory ways, as Grimes, "boorish and uncouth ... scarcely human ... total stranger to tenderness," is picked to be an antithesis to Falkland (though this is complicated by the fact the Grimes slithers away in defeat, perhaps suggesting that there is no antithesis at all but that modern hunk and imbecile brute are one and the same).
I suspect I am just on the verge of big plot turns. So I'll go turn more pages.
03 June 2004 at 2:33 PM, post #118
----Satire! Prophecy! Apocalypse! Brimstone! "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" somewhat blew me away.
The depiction of and traits of the Satan we find here must no doubt must be a grand departure from others before or of the time period (those I can name easily are the Bible's, and Milton's). That is, I suspect we have a response to a type of cultural or social or political propaganda that is itself of the same form, as we've seen throughout our readings so far with Wollstonecraft and Burke and the conversations of the group. Blake is writing a Satan story blended with ideology about embracing revolution, establishing new morals, and inevitable apocalypse--he has converted christianity's useful tool and tale.
In doing some other reading, one work of criticism noted how Blake felt christianity, by drawing lines between good and evil, e.g., destroyed one half of life. Thus the marriage of heaven and hell would restore life as it *should be*, a whole.
It's interesting to note how Satan is a vehicle of desire and energy, two abstractions dealt with in quite a different way in "Visions of the Daughters of Albion."
I like the cinematic qualities of the art. I was trying to figure out some rationale for the constantly switching of where heaven and where hell was on each plate's plane, but couldn't.
---pictoral notes on "America: A Prophecy"
- In the illustrations, geometric images and images of science were frequent.
- The text and the images on Plate 9 seem in discord: frightened questioning in the lines, peaceful pastoral in the print. Of course the next Plate is accordingly terrifying in response, though it might be significant that Blake split it as he did. American colonies in discord with England, likely.
02 June 2004 at 4:27 PM, post #112
Mobilizing notions and language of slavery as argument/interpretations and presentations of hypocrisy and its oppresive nature
‘Slave,’ the word, litters Wollstonecrafts “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”. Wollstonecraft says she is able to hold her indignant view of the “mistaken notions that enslave my sex” because God granted her that right, that power-- “Thanks to that Being who impressed them on my soul” (147). In other words, her powers to determine the subjugation of female peers, she imagines, come from a God presumably seeb by Wollstonecraft as male: that is, in her argument, there’s a bit of a Bermuda triangle going on with gender, society, and subjective imagination—certain amounts of angst and appreciation go in, and yet never come out the same again.
This shadows my segue into the powerfully political triangles in “The Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” More explicit violence of enslavement is present, with “Bromion rent her with his thunders” identifying the event that is the rape of Oothoon. There is the obvious perverse love triangle, with Bromion post-rape seeing Oothoon as his property that he is sort of leasing to Theotromon (politics here, with notions of the lust for empire paralleling notions of lust for women) and no one satisfied with the situation (please note that I do not, of course, mean to objectionably understate the ramifications of rape in any context). Unlike Wollstonecraft, however, here the enslaved women indicts a patriarchal god for creating hypocrisy, for oppressing women’s desire.
There are African slaves in Blake’s work. This complicates, forward and backward: is slavery subordinated to abuse of women in European marriage market? How is it that one form of slavery is being used to discuss another form, and what are the concerns that come with that? Certainly the same problems of gender, society, and subjective imagination exist in this drama, but in Blake it seems we have more of a racial complication. Perhaps this was not an issue at all of that time. But it is important to note that exoticism appears in Wollstonecraft, very close to the passage I quoted earlier: “if women be, by their very constitution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws in nature.”
If Wollstonecraft is implying men misunderstand women, I wonder where in that set-up she would situate, as Blake put it, “worlds over another kind of seas, and in atmospheres unknown.”
02 June 2004 at 2:24 PM, post #103
| one potato |
two potato |
| three potato |
no more! |
02 June 2004 at 2:22 PM, post #101
02 June 2004 at 2:17 PM, post #95
| suspicion |
concern |
failure |
02 June 2004 at 2:13 PM, post #88
| suspicion |
concern |
failure |
02 June 2004 at 2:12 PM, post #86
| suspicion |
concern |
failure |
02 June 2004 at 2:01 PM, post #76
Things I like
- chickens
- tapioca
- motorcycle sidecars (anybody have one?)
- the gong
02 June 2004 at 1:55 PM, post #74
Word.
02 June 2004 at 1:48 PM, post #64
Q: What did the zero say to the eight?
A: "nice belt"
02 June 2004 at 11:31 AM, post #60
Test
Back to main menu
| 