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ENG45C, BARTLEBY & OKONKWO: Both end up erased by systems they can'…

- - - - Clarissa performs social grace to maintain coherence. This is seen with her hosting many parties that include a lot of higher class individuals in order to affirm her position in society.
      - "it was a very odd thing how much Clarissa minded about her parties, he thought" (Woolf 180).
        
        Her attention to detail in each of her parties, especially with inviting guests even stuck other people in her life, such as Richard. What he didn't realize was that this was all just a plan to ensure that Clarissa's position in society stayed high and she hosts these parties not just for leisure, but to implant the character she wants to portray on everyone she knows.
    - - Prufrock constructs a social mask out of insecurity and self-consciousness
        
        The narrator constantly imagines how others judge him and feels paralyzed by the fear of being exposed as inadequate. His identity becomes a performance of constant hesitation. The repeated question “Do I dare?” shows that he is trapped in anticipation rather than action. His imagined social gaze: “They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’” becomes a prison that prevents authentic self-expression. Prufrock’s mask is not confidence, but defensiveness which ultimately isolates him from real connection.
      - Prufrock’s identity fractures under social anxiety and self-consciousness, leaving him paralyzed and unable to act. In contrast, Innisfree presents the opposite response to identity strain. For example, instead of paralysis, the speaker imagines an alternative world of peace and autonomy. Both show that when identity becomes unmanageable in modern urban life, the mind either gets pulled inward (Prufrock) or escapes outward (Innisfree).
  - - - Identity splinters through fragmented narration
        
        In Benjy’s section, his sensory-driven perception is presented to the reader, revealing a world without linear time or rational structure. This illustrates how identity as a raw, pre-linguistic experience.
        
        "Caddy smelled like trees" (Faulkner 11).
        
        Quentin’s obsessive memory fractures his present, trapping him in idealized visions of lost purity and impossible honor. This is seen with the many times that he flashbacks to instances where his father gives him advice or talks about everyday things which influence Quentin's every move.
    - - The poem dissolves identity into a collage of broken voices
        
        Instead of a singular speaker, the reader gets a fragmented chorus of cultural echoes and disconnected speakers. This breakdown mirrors a modern self that no longer has a coherent center. The personality of the narrator was assembled from fragments of cultural debris. The instability of voice becomes the instability of identity in a spiritually exhausted civilization.
    - - Human identity is reduced to fleeting perception
        
        Both texts freeze a moment in which everyday people appear only as “faces in the crowd,” de-individualized and momentary. People become visual impressions rather than personalities. Identity collapses into image, reflecting how modern life transforms individuals into anonymous, passing flashes of consciousness.
        
        Where Pound freezes a moment into a static image, Poe unfolds that same anonymity through motion, illustrating how the individual dissolves into a living, shifting urban collective.
  - - - Instead of acting, Barleby withdraws from action by repeatedly stating “I would prefer not to.” His autonomy manifests not as choice-making but as disengagement from choice itself. Bartleby’s passivity becomes a quiet protest against a mechanized, dehumanizing economic system, but it also results in his complete social erasure.
        
        Instead of rebelling openly, he quietly withdraws from copying to moving desks, leaving the office, and eventually from life itself. The lawyer-narrator, who represents the norms of capitalist efficiency, can’t process this kind of refusal. In fact, the system has no category for someone who simply won’t participate, yet also won’t leave. Bartleby’s passivity is both a weird assertion of will and a total surrender of selfhood.
      - Bartleby’s “agency” is negative: he doesn’t choose to act, he chooses not to act. His autonomy becomes refusal, not action.
    - - Okonkwo’s masculine authority and the Igbo community’s autonomy are both gradually stripped away by colonialism and internal rigidity.
      - "Okonkwo’s masculine authority and the Igbo community’s autonomy are both gradually stripped away by colonialism and internal rigidity" (Achebe 130).
        
        This line captures both cultural and personal disempowerment. The “knife” is colonial intervention (missionaries, courts, new laws, etc...) that cuts through the fabric of Igbo tradition. The community loses control over its systems, whether religious, moral, and even legal. Okonkwo built his identity on traditional ideas of honor and thepatriarchy, which highlights how his loss of cultural scaffolding is also a loss of his self. He can no longer act in a way that is both meaningful and effective: violence makes him a criminal to the new regime, and compromise feels like betrayal. His suicide marks the final collapse of agency and proves that he cannot live within the new order, and he cannot save the old one.
    - - Janie moves through relationships where men try to script her life. Her arc is the slow, often painful reclamation of her own choices and voice. This can be seen in two key scenes:
        
        Joe forces Janie to conceal her hair and restricts her speech in public, treating her like a decorative possession rather than an equal partner. Female hair was seen as a symbol of freedom and desirability, therefore underscoring how Joe essentially stripped Janie of her autonomy with his strict rules.
        
        "She woke up with Tea Cake combing her hair and scratching the dandruff from her scalp. It made her more comfortable and drowsy" (Hurston 144).
        
        CONTRAST FROM JOE: Tea Cake sees her hair as something to be cherished, not hidden.
        
        Tea Cake brings love and laughter into Janie’s life, but he still exposes her to risk. This is through his impulsive decision of gambling, putting her in real physical danger. This reveals that even affectionate relationships can compromise her autonomy. His love gives her room to grow, but does not fully free her from being shaped by a man’s choices.
  - - - Janie’s selfhood is not just “found,” it’s built through resistance to expectations of wifehood, and respectability.
      - Janie letting her hair down in the mirror after Joe dies: Joe’s control over Janie’s hair is symbolic. This is because her hair is a representation of desirability and individuality. When he forces her to cover it, he’s literally veiling her identity. After his death, Janie taking her hair down for herself (not for another man) is a visual reclaiming of self. Her final return to Eatonville, wearing overalls instead of fancy dresses highlights that she no longer needs public performance to validate her worth.
        
        JANIE & CLARISSA & EURYDICE All three feel the gap between their inner selves and the roles they’re supposed to play.
        Janie & Eurydice fight for voice openly; Clarissa’s resistance is quieter, almost entirely internal.
    - - H.D. rewrites classical and natural imagery so that feminine figures speak and resist instead of just being looked at.
      - EURYDICE: In myth, Eurydice is mostly silent; Orpheus is the great singer.
        In H.D.’s version, Eurydice speaks back from the underworld, furious at being dragged into and out of life according to Orpheus’ desire.
        
        Eurydice’s voice reframes her as a subject with her own angry perspective. She is no longer a passive prize, but resents being the object of a male narrative and asserts the value of her own experience in the underworld.
      - ORDEAD and SEA ROSE: The rose isn’t soft and perfect; it’s “harsh,” “sparse,” weather-beaten.
        The nymph (Oread) doesn’t sit prettily in nature, but she commands the sea to crash like pine-trees.
        
        By roughening the rose and energizing the nymph, H.D. rejects the typical, decorative femininity of romantic poetry. The female figure is no longer a fragile ornament but a resilient force.
    - - Clarissa's identity is constrained by domestic femininity
        
        She is valued for hosting, grace, and social performance rather than intellect or agency. Her role as wife and hostess becomes a mask that limits her inner self, replacing personal autonomy with social obligation. Her longing for youthful freedom (e.g., Sally Seton) contrasts with the genteel constraints of her married life, revealing how her public persona suppresses her private desires.
- - - - The festive Epiphany party seems to preserve a stable Irish middle-class world with details of partying and dancing, but Gabriel’s inner life gradually reveals how thin that stability is. His sense of superiority, based on education and cosmopolitan identity crumbles when Greta’s memory of Michael Furey surfaces. The revelation that a dead boy once loved her with a passion Gabriel has never mustered exposes the emotional poverty of his curated identity. The final image: Snow falling “upon all the living and the dead” suggests an emotional neutralization, causing his cultural pretentiousness to distinctions to dissolve and cause Gabriel to realize his universal limit to pride. Irish cultural life, with its songs and gatherings, is conveyed to be both deeply meaningful and fragile. In essense, the collapse of Gabriel's culture here is subtle, yet highlights that while culture continues to function externally, the surface level ego that he had were stripped away within his consciousness.
        
        Both The Dead and The Sound and the Fury portray cultural collapse as the slow erosion of inherited social traditions that once defined identity and meaning. In Joyce’s text, Irish bourgeois culture continues its rituals, but Gabriel realizes their emotional hollowness when Greta’s memory of Michael Furey exposes deeper truths that the polite social performance cannot contain. Likewise, Faulkner’s Compson family clings to the fading legacy of Southern aristocracy, but those traditions have lost their real authority thus leaving Benjy and Quentin psychologically unanchored. Gabriel’s collapse is moral and emotional, while Quentin’s is existential and fatal.
      - In The Dead and Things Fall Apart, cultural collapse happens when inherited identities fail to maintain their coherence against changing historical conditions. For Joyce, the collapse is internal and quiet, but Gabriel’s revelation at the end shows that its emotional foundation has weakened. For Achebe, the collapse is external and forceful. For example, British colonialism violently replaces Igbo institutions, creating a rupture that leaves characters like Okonkwo culturally dislocated. Gabriel realizes the emptiness of the culture he thought he understood, while Okonkwo realizes the culture he relied on has been overwritten.
        
        "'Does the white man understand our custom about land?' 'How can he when he does not even speak our tongue? But he says that our customs are bad, and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad'" (Achebe 129). This reveals how colonial domination is based on ignorance, not mutual understanding or respect and yet still claims authority.
  - - - I. The Burial of the Dead
        
        The Waste Land presents cultural collapse as a shattered collection of voices that start cohesive, but fragment and lose their unity. The opening: “April is the cruellest month” immediately overturns the traditional association of Spring with rebirth, signaling a world where old symbols have lost their grounding.
      - Throughout the poem, religious and literary allusions appear, but they feel like broken pieces in a ruin rather than living elements of a unified tradition. The speaker(s) move through scenes of the mechanized alienation of urban life, where sexuality becomes sterile and routine becomes automatic, all of which suggest that modern life has drained meaning from once-sacred structures like marriage and other cultural rituals. Even the famous closing fragments in different languages underscore the impossibility of returning to a single, authoritative voice. Cultural collapse here is not emptiness but overload. In essence, there is too much inherited material, and yet none of it can be fully believed in, so the poem’s form enacts fragmentation as the new normal.
    - - Yeats compresses cultural collapse into one apocalyptic vision. The line “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” has become shorthand for the feeling that spiritual structures are breaking down (3).
      - “The falcon that cannot hear the falconer” suggests a world where the guiding voice (tradition, authority, God) no longer reaches the human world (2). As the gyre widens, history spins away from its former order, ushering in a “rough beast” slouching toward Bethlehem (21). Thus, instead of Christ’s redemptive return, we get something monstrous and unknown. Cultural collapse in this poem isn’t just decay, but the terrifying sense that a new order is coming that will not be governed by the old moral logic.
      - The Second Coming: collapse births terror and uncertainty (“rough beast”).
        
        Easter, 1916: collapse creates national identity (“a terrible beauty is born”).
        
        Together: collapse as nightmare vs. collapse as rebirth.
    - - “Easter, 1916” depicts cultural collapse as a violent but generative rupture. Yeats begins from a position of skepticism about the rebels, describing how he used to exchange trivial greetings with them. Yet after the Easter Rising, their deaths force a revaluation of Irish identity. The refrain “A terrible beauty is born” captures the paradox that the old, casual social order has been destroyed, and in its place stands an intensely unified sense of national purpose despite being at enormous human cost (16).
      - The poem wrestles with whether the rebels’ sacrifice was necessary or fanatical, suggesting that movements which rebuild culture often do so by first tearing apart what existed. The cultural collapse that is seen here is a transformation so violent that the poet cannot fully endorse or reject it.
    - - The collapse in “Waiting for Godot” is metaphysical, because the play imagines a world stripped of any purpose. The odd pair, Vladimir and Estragon, filled their days with trivial talk and repetitive gestures in the hope that Godot would arrive with instructions or salvation. Yet, Godot never comes. The structure of the play, with two acts that are almost identical portrays the futility of expecting change when one’s just waiting in stagnation. Even the memory of the past is unstable because the characters can’t agree what happened the day prior. Cultural collapse here is the exhaustion of meaning-making stories. Thus, when none of the stories are believable, all that is left is bare existence and the constant questioning of one’s purpose.
    - - On the surface, Marvell portrays this as a carpe diem love poem, but underneath it marks a cultural shift from religious time to secular urgency. The narrator imagines an impossible world: “I would love you ten years before the flood” only to remind the mistress that in reality, “time’s winged chariot” is hurrying near (Marvell 7-8, 22).
        
        Eternity is not a promised realm of spiritual reward, but a grave filled with “dust” and “worms” (Marvell 27, 29). The answer is not prayer or virtue but intensified physical pleasure in the present. Cultural collapse here is the erosion of eternal frameworks that once gave human life moral shape. In essence, the poem dramatizes a worldview that no longer leans on divine justice and instead negotiates meaning on the short timeline of life.
      - Godot: no purpose, no change, no divine order
        
        Coy Mistress: no eternity, so embrace sensual immediacy.
        
        Together: nihilism vs. hedonistic urgency.
  - - - The deindividualization of the people in the crowd aren't just a representation of fracture in society, but a full depersonalization of the culture that surrounds them. Cultural collapse here is the loss of personal legibility. Instead of a social world where individuals are known by name and story, we have a transit space where humans pass each other as fragments in motion.
        
        Man of the Crowd: The narrator, fascinated by the stream of people in the city, reads their social types from clothes and demeanor. Despite this, when he encounters one enigmatic man, his interpretive system fails. He follows this man all night through different districts and social environments, yet never discovers who he really is or what he represents. The story ends with the conclusion that “the man of the crowd” is unreadable and fundamentally resistant to categorization. Urban modernity here produces not just anonymity but a kind of epistemological collapse.
  - - - Hughes writes against the cultural collapse produced by slavery’s attempt to sever African Americans from their past. Instead of accepting the story that slavery “broke” Black history, he anchors Black identity in precious ancient histories.
        
        The line “My soul has grown deep like the rivers” associates Black cultural memory with rivers that predate the colonization and oppression his culture has suffered (Hughes 4). This re-centers African diasporic identity within a lineage of humanity’s oldest civilizations. In all, Hughes insists on a timeline that cannot be erased or overwritten.
    - - Hughes’ “The Weary Blues” dramatizes the psychic weight of Black survival in a racist society. The blues singer suffers from isolation (“Ain’t got nobody in all this world / Ain’t got nobody but ma self”), economic hardship, and emotional exhaustion (Hughes 19-20). Yet the poem shows how Black art becomes a way of preserving inner life in a world that tries to drain or erase it.
      - The musician’s performance: “He made that poor piano moan with melody” converts suffering into sound, turning social pain into cultural expression (Hughes 10). The act of singing asserts Black subjectivity while the broader structures of racism remain unchanged. This suggests that cultural conditions as seen in the conditions of black life are met with cultural endurance. In essence, art becomes a lifeline that carries historical memory forward.
      - COMPARISON: In both poems, they confront the weight of black history, just from different emotional states. In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Hughes situates Black identity within a deep continuity, using rivers to evoke an almost spiritual connection to the origins of civilization. By contrast, “The Weary Blues” shows the present-tense exhaustion of Black life in America. In this case, it conveys the racial oppression produced with loneliness and despair, yet also giving rise to transformative artistic expression. While “Rivers” affirms a historical rootedness that resists cultural erasure, “Weary Blues” captures the daily struggle of survival and the emotional burden that history has placed on the present. Together, they reveal both the strength inherited from the past and the pain endured in the present.
- - - - The poem imagines a pastoral retreat of solitude and harmony that exists more powerfully in desire than in reality. The idea that the narrator will have complete and solitary peace at Innisfree is an unrealistic expectation because life is filled with many emotions that come and go, a location cannot grant limitless bliss.
      - “And I shall have some peace there” (Yeats 5).
    - - “Spring and All” crafts a liminal natural landscape that slowly regenerates from winter. It describes an imagined world of rebirth from emerging decay. Unlike “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” this poem describes the nature as a fresh, realistic rebirth instead of an impossibly perfect fantasy.
    - - Whitman uses nature as the foundation for a radically expansive sense of self. The narrator images his identity as an ever-growing form linked with the natural world’s rhythms. He continually merges his body with the grass, soil, animals, and seasons. This suggests that individual identity is not isolated, but a part of vast ecological continuity.
      - Lines like “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love” frame nature as both origin and destination (Whitman 61). The message passes from narrator to reader that nature is not merely a backdrop but the medium through which identity endlessly renews and enlarges itself.
      - Whitman imagines a self that expands infinitely through poetic utterance, claiming “I am large, I contain multitudes,” which turns the poem into a spiritual act of self-transcendence. The speaker constructs a visionary world where the boundaries between self and universe collapse through artistic imagination. In this realm, poetry becomes the medium for personal and cosmic transformation.
  - - - Yeats imagines Byzantium as a sacred artistic realm where the soul escapes the “dying animal” of the aging body (Yeats 22). The narrator longs to be remade into an eternal crafted form “set upon a golden bough to sing,” revealing how art becomes a means of transcending time and mortality (Yeats 30). This imagined world functions as a spiritual escape from the limitations of flesh and the disappointments of the physical world.
      - (2) By contrast, works like “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Nude Young Dancer” seek transcendence not in nature but beyond it, through art, spiritual transformation, or the idealized body.
        
        (1) Nature poems like “Innisfree” and “Spring and All” imagine escape through immersion in the physical world. Thus, they return to simplicity and grounded peace.
        
        (3) Where the nature poems root the self more deeply in the earth, the artistic poems attempt to lift the self into realms untouched by mortality or decay.
    - - The dancer being limited by the narrator to her body, with her “swaying hips” and “lips” which he wonders if any “clean boy” has ever kissed conveys the societal limitations set on women. In the poem, her image is based on her innocence. This confines her into the sphere women are in at the time, being seen only for their bodies and purity with no option of escape. She is only given the option to conform which she does by dancing, essentially just showing off her silhouette.
      - The dancer’s body becomes an aesthetic world unto itself as her movement transforms physical space into art, with her rhythmic and almost mythic movements. Her body is described not as flesh but as form and motion, suggesting an imagined realm where beauty replaces ordinary human constraint. The poem transcends the literal body by making it a symbol of vitality and expressive freedom.
  - - - The nature poems imagine landscapes that restore, soothe, and bring clarity, offering escape into environments of harmony or gradual rebirth. However, “The Turn of the Screw” imagines a psychological landscape built from fear and uncertainty, where the mind invents ghosts and threats that distort reality. Thus, while the nature poems imagine worlds that heal, the novel imagines a world that fractures perception and traps the self within its own anxieties.
      - The governess constructs a psychological reality where ghosts seem real, but their existence depends entirely on her perception. This creates a world shaped by fear and desire rather than objective truth. She repeatedly insists on the danger the children are in, even though the text withholds any external confirmation, creating an imagined inner world that overrides reality. Her mind becomes the setting itself, blurring the line between external events and internal fantasy.
      - The governess in “Turn of the Screw” creates a psychological world of ghosts as her imagination tries to restore Victorian moral control through fear. In “Mrs. Dalloway,” Septimus’ psychological collapse exposes the spiritual bankruptcy of postwar Britain. Thus, his hallucinations reveal what polite society represses. Both texts convert cultural instability into inner worlds of destabilized perception.