Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

ENG45C, Virginia Woolf "Mrs. Dalloway", "Tradition and…

- - - - This play confronts trying to understand living in a world that feels morally bankrupt. It is essentially a response to the question "What is the point of anything?"
        
        Historically speaking, this play is written after WWII, and Beckett is reflecting on the tragedies and loss that the war brought. There is no going back from the massive shift felt by every person that witnessed the war. Many were left questioning the chaos and death that was brought, including poverty and starvation, and just overall the break in trust between civilians and government.
        
        It mirrored the lack of structure in world order and stability and absurdity that war is
        
        Furthermore, it exceeds expectations of what a play should be, defying expectations and pushing boundaries of sensicality
      - PURPOSE: Beckett stages the absurd and forces an audience to experience the discomfort of a world without stable purpose or resolution, just like the characters are left in purgatory state. They are left in a condition of existence that is meaningless, repetitive, and uncertain. They wait without purpose on end without clear reason, no confirmed identity for who they are waiting for, and the play ends without and resolution. This endless waiting plays on the absurdist idea that humans seek purpose in a universe that offers none. In the end, the waiting becomes self-justified as simply they are waiting because they are waiting.
      - TIME: Time does not progress in a linear way, and rather it works almost circularly and repetitively. There are acts that mirror each other almost exactly and events that are played out repeatedly with only minor and nearly indistinctive differences that have have no driving narrative purposes. This undermines narrative expectations of development or climax and leaves the plot without any structure. This blurring of time suggests that existence is cyclical rather than teleological.
  - - - "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
        
        "And indeed there will be time/For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,/Rubbing its back on upon the window panes;/There will be time, there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;/There will be time to murder and create,/And time for all the works and days of hands/That lift and drop a question on your plate;/Time for you and time for me,/And time yet for a hundred indecisions,/And for a hundred visions and revisions,/Before the taking of toast and tea"
        
        Themes of dealing with isolation and loneliness while navigating a world that our narrator feels has no place for them
        
        While this could be tied to urbanization and its cultivation of isolation, there seems to be more of a focus on the psyche in this poem, often with the narrator grappling with his own identity and place in society. He is dealing with coming to terms of accepting his old age, his indecisiveness to make some sort of action or impact. He is hyperaware of his physical and social inadequacies
        
        He feels unfulfilled, and unable to meet expectations that he feels society demands from him
        
        Essentially, this poem follows an existential way of thinking, perhaps even reflecting Eliot's own anxieties about his place in the universe
        
        This poem overall reflects how one associates identification with guidelines derived from guidelines they have concluded they must follow in order to have purpose, be productive, and make life meaningful
    - - "Eurydice"
        
        captures the essence of the first feminist wave, establishing authority and autonomy over a female's voice who has been condemned by a man's insolence
        
        H.D. does a feminist retelling of this classic Greek mythology but picks up after Eurydice is sent back to the underworld and grants her a sense of self-empowerment that increases as the poem goes on
        
        This is is reflective of women establishing a sense of self during an age where feminism was surging; and H.D. uses this poem to portray the possibility for a woman to create her own environment in certain circumstances where she is condemned by someone else's will:
        "At least I have the flowers of myself,/and my thoughts, no god/can take that;/I have the fervor of myself for a presence/and my own spirit for light;/and my spirit with its loss/knows this;/though small against the black,/small against the formless rocks,/hell must break before I am lost"
      - "Sea Rose"
        
        This poem serves as a song of praise for a flower that withstands the battering of nature and endures such harsh conditions
        -What else could this be symbolic? Well rather one could jump to a conclusion that this mirrors H.D.'s perspective on what women must endure during a century that denies them rights and autonomy
      - H.D. was a prominent feminist writer who centered most of her writing around Greek mythology. Through the modernist era, she is able to have a platform to deliver early new age feminist ways of thinking that ring true of rebellion and the start of enlightenment for women, paving the way for future radical feminist writers
  - - - "In a Station of the Metro"
        
        "The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
        Petals on a wet, black bough"
      - "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste"
        
        "Go in fear of abstractions"
        
        Overall, a call for simplicity in literature
        
        He argues that writers should avoid descriptive and overdone details, and rather "present" your work to the viewer. Bring something that hasn't been done by someone else before in previous prose or by a painter (he uses Shakespeare as a prime example)
        
        He advises to present complex images or ideas instantly rather than "fluffing" things up unnecessarily otherwise it leads to inaccuracies or redundancies: he points at that you don't want to blend concrete with abstractness
        
        Interestingly, he makes several claims of his professionalism, validating himself and his claims in his own essay
        
        His own poem is a prime example
- - - - A departure from modernity means searching for something that is familiar or as close to as "natural" as possible, returning to nature and healing of the soul and spirit. This implies that with modernization there has been a universal loss of connection to nature. Yeats poems capture this loss and grief of what is not familiar to his generation but yet there is a yearning and search for it.
      - "The Lake of Innisfree"
        
        Seeking Innisfree, embarking on a journey to find nirvana and peace at this lake that offers all that the narrator desires
        
        A fantasy about leaving behind modern society and living in solitude surrounded by nature
        
        The lake supposedly calls and beckons our narrator, they claim to always here the lapping of the lake water on its shore day and night, implying that there is some sort of connection between human and nature
        
        "And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow"
        
        "for always night and day/I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;/While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavement's grey,/I hear it in the deep heart's core"
      - "The Second Coming"
        
        Following WWI, there was a universal loss of a sense of humanity in the world, this poem captures that grief of humanity having any kind of hope at progress or tranquility. There is loss and grief over order and structure--if any--in society and of human lives and land and of the mind. We can no longer return to how we were before the first world war.
        
        "The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned"
      - "Easter, 1916"
        
        This poem is an interesting memorial to the Easter Rising of 1916 in which Irish nationalists led a rebellion against British rule to try and win independence. The type of loss and grief here is unique in which those involved who survive carry the spirit of the rebellion with them and the narrator observes this
        
        The narrator offers an interesting perspective because he contemplates the purpose of the rebellion and contemplates to himself if whether their cause was noble and worth it or not. He respects the rebels but still holds limited and conditional admiration. In the end he holds remembrance for the rebels who lost their lives in the fight.
      - "Sailing to Byzantium"
        
        An old man seeks refugee in Byzantium, a place that is a spiritual resort to him since there is no space for him in this new age world that has left him behind
        
        There is agony and pain in ageing because it is a reminder that you are closer to circling the drain. There is desire from the old man to revitalize his imagination but his old age makes this difficult. Byzantium will offer sanctuary
        
        "An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick"
    - - The Compson family are a focused representation of the deterioration of the Southern aristocratic class prevalent to Faulkner's time. Since the Civil War, the family gradually saw their wealth, land, and status crumble away. There is a pervasive bitterness and resentment towards an unkown source of blame within each family member: something that may have been a consequence of the south losing the war, and the shared collective grief felt in that region.
      - MELANCHOLIA: the family is trapped in melancholia over their loss in the Civil War. This melancholy that has trapped their ego leaves them constantly reminiscing in the past during each character's chapter, blending reality and time. The lack of chronological order throughout the story symbolizes the family's inability to accept the present condition and their struggles to let go of the past.
      - BREAKAGE OF FAMILIAL BONDS: Not only is the family's legacy the one that is disintegrating but so is the family members' relationships with each other. Each family member seems to have their own intentions and motivations, and their is a loss of communication.
        
        Mrs. Compson and her children: Mrs. Compson displays a lack of interest in her family. She is often described as "self-absorbed," but favors her son Jason. In her absence, Caddy becomes a maternal figure for her brothers.
        
        Mr. Compson: Mr. Compson is a detached father who also suffers from alcoholism as a result of the overwhelming burden of knowing that his family's legacy is disappearing and becoming irrelevant. He is apathetic toward and unconcerned with most affairs involving his children.
        
        Quentin: Being the oldest sibling he bears the burden of feeling he holds the most responsibility of the kin to uphold and carry on the legacy. He holds a strange, almost incestual, relationship towards his sister Caddy. He cannot accept her exercising her freedom of sexuality and this crumbles his world.
        
        Caddy: She is the most prominent figure in the novel, yet she is never given a voice. She holds the most conflict with the characters and is eventually disowned by the family. She accepts the grim reality that her family is facing and has an easier time running away. Benjy is completely dependent on her.
        
        Miss Quentin: She is taken in after Caddy has to give her up to her family and is severely mistreated by her grandmother and uncle Jason. Her story ends with her family who took her in driving her away and escapes.
    - - COLONIALISM: Colonialism holds a special type of grief. It creates melancholia in those who were colonized and have witnessed their land or nation lose its autonomy. They are stripped of their identity; colonialism makes one question who they are. Colonialism in this novel functions as the central disruptive force that dismantles Igbo society--politically, culturally, spiritually, and psychologically. Achebe doesn't portray colonialism as a single event but rather as a slow, corrosive process that works by exploiting internal fractures and pillars within a community.
        The arrival of Christian missionaries challenge the tribe's belief systems that organize their social life. The shift that they try to influence fractures their community. Furthermore, they replace their political system and completely undermines their indigenous governance. It causes divide and brings death and destruction.
      - LOSS:
        
        Okonkwo is driven by the death of his father, and lives the rest of his life trying to remove himself of the shame brought by his father's legacy. However, as Achebe portrays it, the more he tries to escape it, the more he enacts it.
        
        Okonkwo kills Ikemefuna and as a result loses a surrogate son and this killing marks a pivotal turning point and emotional rupture for Okonkwo. This act reveals how sometimes sticking to tradition is detrimental for one's emotional stability and causes grief and pain. His later conversion to Christianity may have offered a language for mourning that his culture did offer for him but this further alienates him from his origins in addition to him already being exiled.
        
        His exile makes him lose a home and a place of familiarity. From this, he is driven to a foreign culture that aims at removing his indigeneity and any aspect of his identity that makes him indigenous.
        
        Lastly, there is the haunting fact here that colonialism takes away a world that cannot be recovered. A pre-colonized way of thinking and understanding of the world cannot exist anymore after being colonized. You cannot be uncolonized and therefore the mindset and ideologies forced upon you always penetrate your mind and thoughts.
  - - - A sense of melancholia and rumination lingers throughout the story, it clings to the walls of our narrator's mind
        
        His inability to stay present, constantly reflecting on the past encourages his feelings of disconnection and isolation
        
        Once the narrator snaps back to the present, his wife is left in the past. Unbeknownst his wife's mind also lingers on someone else's memory
      - MEMORY: immortality exists within memory, remembrance allows for those who have passed or are no longer around to exist nonetheless
        "'Our path through life is strewn with so many such sad memories: and were we to brood upon them always we could not find the heart to go on bravely with our work among the living'"
      - FORM: The narration follows the narrator's stream of consciousness, mirroring the way memory works, webbing out and prominent in our ways of thinking. The narration works through free indirect discourse, allowing readers to see how detached but highly perspective our narrator's voice is, permitting precise yet selective details about the lives of the character's in the story.
      - "One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live. Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw a form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling."
        
        Gabriel experiences his wife own lingering memories of someone from her past. In this case the memory of her past lover lingers in his and blends with reality, he intrudes on Gabriel's psyche. This past lover now lives on in Gabriel's mind, continuing to afflict confusion and pain beyond the grave.
- - - - Bartleby embodies an absurd, isolated modern individual existing in a meaningless world where his only value comes from his production value
        
        The story's setting takes place in Wall Street, at the center of a capitalist pushing machine
        
        He serves no other purpose other than his job's tasks
        
        Bartleby completely rejects authority that asks him to continuously be productive, defying and disrupting the status quo that capitalism relies on
        
        The story is essentially timeless as it feels ahead of its time and not fixed to its date of publication. The rapidity of industrialization is reflected in this story's portrayal of the modern office atmosphere.
  - - - Themes of alienation that submerge from living in a large overcrowded city like London--the center of bustling city life and productivity
        
        Overpopulation in a city that drew in people for various work opportunities encouraged fragmentation and disconnection from one another and themselves, people no longer see themselves as individuals with their own autonomy but rather cogs in a machine
        
        The characters described in this narrative sense a division between themselves and others who are part of different hierarchical structures in terms of class, age, race, gender, appearance, and work occupation
- - - - "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"
        
        "I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human/blond in human veins."
        
        Firstly, the narrator uses "I" proudly, establishing a proud sense of identity and calling attention from anyone who will listen.
        
        The narrator tells that he has visited grand rivers, insinuating that he has been on long journeys. The rivers progress from the Euphrates to the Mississippi river, which follows a chronological telling of history: in the bible, the Euphrates river is the boundary of the Garden of Eden, and the Mississippi river takes us to modern America. During the time that this poem was written the Great Migration was happening. Hughes likely had this in mind; reflecting on the massive repopulation that took place amongst African Americans and black people due to slavery, colonization, and reconstruction.
        
        There is a sense of collectiveness for the black identity and culture, specifically the bringing together that migration allows for in similar communities
      - "Nude Young Dancer"
        
        The narrator in this poem is describing an erotic dancer and her silohuette that he appears to be entranced by, and begins to imagine about her person. Seemingly, just based on the narrator's voice, it comes off as a young male, which is very likely Hughes projecting his own young self and voicing his own thoughts
        
        Furthermore, the lines "What jungle tree have you slept under,/Night-dark girl of the swaying hips?" implies that the dancer is also a dark skinned person like our narrator--if we assume Hughes is assigning his racial identity to his speaker. Thus, there is a feeling of connection and familiarity as she is seen almost as kin
        
        Interestingly, the speaker asks if she has ever offered her lips to a "clean boy," which we can make the assumption is about a white man, almost like the speaker is expressing jealousy or insecurity about being a black man. Perhaps this fellow black woman is not searching amongst her people for companionship but rather from her "subordinate," or he is projecting his own feelings of "inadequacy" that have been implemented in him through centuries of slavery and conditioning
      - "The Weary Blues"
        
        This poem was written during the Harlem Renaissance, so it is very reflective of the jazz scene that was surging throughout the African American community that became a distinct and important medium for expression. This poem reflects how much passion and emotion was transmitted through the music and felt by those who listened
        
        It also taps into some struggles that African Americans faced in a post slavery country and still suffering from forces of oppression and racism:
        "'Ain't got nobody in all this world,/Ain't got nobody but ma self./I's gwine to quit my frownin'/And put ma troubles on the shelf."
        
        The trauma and emotional impact that racism and oppression has on those that are victims is presented in the jazz players lyrics that tell his tales of woe and pain
      - "Let America Be America Again"
        
        "I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,/I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars./I am the red man driven from the land,/I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--/And finding only the same old stupid plan/Of dog eat do, of mighty crush the weak."
        
        This poem feels like a grand criticism for America's system that fails to support its citizens and inhabitants, specifically towards the forces that have implemented these oppressive structures that harm people
        
        This poem also has the voice of a black man, who has seen and experienced the intricate and violent racism against black people in America, he even shares not exactly empathy but concern for white poor people who are also victims of the government's corruption
        
        Part of his racial identity comes from his struggles that he faces as an African American, native, and child of slaves, which fuels his motivation and anger
        
        By giving a voice to all of those who have come to America for change and success, he blurs the lines of division that separate each group
      - "Harlem"
        
        This poem feels like asks a central question about what happens to dreams and aspirations of specifically black folks who are constantly postponed and held back by race and racism
        
        Harlem was a stage for prime black artistic cultural expression, and there was a lot of black musical success and rich culture that was primarily concentrated in this city. Because of this, it was mostly restricted to the city, with very little opportunity outside of Harlem for African Americans to succeed due to there being less support from community. That isn't to say that Harlem was perfect, because indeed there was poverty, starvation, and discrimination
        
        The final line "Or does it explode?" feels like a reference to Harlem and the art boom that happened there. Despite the oppression that African Americans are faced with, Harlem served as a pocket of possibility for them when they had no other outlet for their art and culture
    - - AWARENESS OF IDENTITY: Something prevalent in this story and a driving factory of the story is the main protagonist Janie becoming aware of her blackness, how she fits into society, and how others see her because of her race.
        "'Ah was wid dem white chillum so much Ah didn't know Ah wuzn't white till Ah was round six years old. We wouldn't have found it out then, but a man came long takin' pictures and without askin' anybody, Shelby, dat was de oldest boy, he told him to take us. Round a week later de man brought de picture for Mis' Washburn to see and pay him which she did, then give us all a good lickin'. So when we looked at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn't nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair standing by Eleanor. Dat's where Ah wuz s'posed to be, but Ah couldn't recognize dat dark chile as me."
        Up until she was six years old, Janie was unaware of her being black. It was only really pointed out to her by others. She was already cognizant of what it meant to be colored, but wasn't fully aware of its depth and weight that it carried. She just knew that it had negative connotations. Hurston depicts a broad and relatable experience unique to people of color who grow up in America or places where they are not the dominant group where there is a clear racial hierarchy.
      - RACE AND GENDER: Hurston explores race and gender intertwine to shape black women's lives. She uses Janie's voice and search for a stable identity amidst rampant racism and sexism that surrounds her as she tries to find freedom from such tribulations. She attempts to reject oppressive roles that are placed upon her by black and white men that she comes across. By doing this, Hurston shows how race--like colorism--and gender create unique struggles Black women.