Paper and Bugs

I began The Yellow Wallpaper slightly confused. I was trying to figure out what exactly was making her sick, and had initially come to the assumption that it was depression. But as things progressed it quickly became something more like schizophrenia, as she was seeing these women “creeping” around her from this wallpaper. I was trying to solve a sort of puzzle as I read, picking up pieces of clues as to what it was she had. But post-reading, that felt not quite right to me, so I reread it. The madness that she has at the end of the story isn’t something she had all along, it’s something she’s driven into. Her husband seemed to want the best for her, but the strict guidelines he forces her to follow, hoping they will help her, are in fact was drive her into insanity it seems. I found the progression of her becoming more and more paranoid and obsessed with the wallpaper actually quite incredible, and subtly well done. On a side-note, I read this on a train at night and was actually a little bit freaked out, as my imagination got the better of me as I was reading the final page with all the “creeping women” outside her window. Looking out the window into this dark forest rushing by… seemed like the perfect place for creeping. Maybe I’ve just seen too many ghost stories. Anyway, I was quite fond of the story and all it’s delicacies.

            The Metamorphosis also had me slightly confused at the beginning… and also slightly bored. I got into later, but it was a slightly slow start. I was trying to figure out what was going on, if he was a human-sized or small insect, what type of insect he was, and if he could talk or not. I had heard he was a cockroach, so that’s how I pictured him, but the story never explicitly says. Relating to the yellow wallpaper, this transition is also very subtle and well done. Though George is quite suddenly and inexplicably turned into an insect, he slowly changes from a very human bug to a very buggy… bug. He clings to his humanity, but looses it in many aspects. There is a moment when he wants his furniture removed to allow for crawling about, but quickly feels a great sense of panic about letting go of these objects which tie him to his old self. But at the end we see a very significant change in him when he hears his sister’s music again. He once thought of her and wanted to send her to music school, but at the end he merely wants her to stay with him always, and play for him alone. He stills seems human because of the way his thoughts are presented, and is certainly not at all the same person he was at the beginning. He seems to stay the same as we are with his thoughts most of the story, but at the same time changes greatly.

Hope everyone had a great reading week, see you tomorrow!

The Waste Land

When I opened up the poem and looked at the first line, I was immediately thrown back to grade 12. Not because I’d read it before, but because in my writer’s craft class the teacher used to give us prompts to begin writing something at the beginning of most classes. One of these prompts was “April is the cruellest month…”. I don’t even remember what I wrote to follow it anymore, but I’m sure it’s still somewhere at home, on a scrap piece of paper buried under piles of notes. I almost wish I could go find it now, but I guess I’ll just have to wait until the summer, if I remember that long. I feel like my teacher may have mentioned it was the first line to a famous poem, but I had never heard of it before so it didn’t register. Now I’m stuck with a feeling of nostalgia for a poem I recently read for the first time, and a curiosity that can’t be solved at the moment. It’s odd though, how much the memories that first line brought about impacted how I read the poem. I had a sense of fondness all throughout, and it felt like a secret was being revealed, the secret of what’s meant to follow “April is the cruellest month”.

This poem was certainly tricky to navigate, and not easy to understand at first glance. But then again, as mentioned in the seminar today, maybe poetry isn’t meant to be “understood”. A poem is not a vault of secrets that can be opened by a select few with the right perspective. Or maybe it is? Did Eliot have something specific he wanted each reader to take away from this poem? The thing with poetry is it’s open to interpretation, and frequently means something different to every person. The teacher previously mentioned once gave a group a bad mark on a presentation for “interpreting the poem wrong”. We, of course, were all up in a fuss about this, as the idea that one can interpret a piece of art the “wrong way” just seems ridiculous. Perhaps it’s not that poetry has no meaning, but in fact has too much meaning. I’m sure we all connected differently with different passages. For example, lines 315-318 are some of my favourites, along with the first stanza.

Secret meaning or not, it’s certainly a beautiful poem. Looking forward to the lecture, see you all there!

Freud– Civilization and its Discontents

I’ll begin by saying that although I don’t often read the introductions to our texts (shamelessly, I skim through them at best) there was no way of avoiding reading this one. I’m quite fond of Christopher Hitchens, and keep meaning to read a book of his, though I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Some of his opinions on religion are a little too aggressive for me to wholeheartedly agree with (that’d be the Canadian in me), but I definitely think he’s an intelligent man with more than a few points to be taken note of. Anyway, point being, I read the introduction and found it quite helpful. He brought up Plato’s Republic and Oedipus Rex, and although the later is frequently associated with Freud, the former was a less expected connection for me. All-in-all it was a nice transition into the text, and I especially liked the quotes he brought up, such as the one by Ernest Jones. He said that “Human happiness, therefore, does not seem to be the purpose of the universe”. Surprise surprise.

Getting into the text itself, I found myself entering it with many preconceived notions about Freud. Mostly I knew that he put quite a lot of emphasis on sex and sexual desire. Then of course I knew about the id, ego, and superego, terms which he coined himself. I put a small note at the front of my book, however, as I had to keep reminding myself about the meanings of each. Got it all down pat though now. I learned a little about him in grade 11 for a class on psychology, sociology and anthropology. I don’t think knowing about him and his theories beforehand hindered my reading in any way though, as it was mostly just helpful to recognize a few ideas throughout the text. I was frequently reminded of Rousseau and Hobbes as read through “Civilization And Its Discontents”. For one thing I held a wary eye as I saw him criticizing civilization for much unhappiness in humanity, and was waiting for him to propose “going back to nature” in some form. However, he quickly surprised me by criticizing the vary people who believe this. On the second page of chapter 3, he says its “astonishing” that people would take up “this strange attitude of hostility” toward civilization. Though he doesn’t believe things should stay exactly as they are, he doesn’t believe we should abandon it completely. He later makes a point Rousseau would wholeheartedly agree with by saying (on page 73) that we should not believe that civilization is synonymous with perfecting. This also brings up Frankenstein, and the belief that pursuing science too aggressively is not necessarily “progress”.

I also felt hints of Hobbes’ Leviathan at certain parts as he mentioned that civilization requires the removal individual power in exchange for communal power, a power “bigger” than the individual. Though he is not an advocate for the civilization that Hobbes wants us all to believe in, Freud saw some truth in this understanding of it.

Though I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about some of his arguments, I found this to be a text I enjoyed. He’s certainly interesting and I didn’t frequently find my self lost, as I have with many of the past texts.

Looking forward to the lecture, hope everyone had a great weekend!