A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Analysis of a Symbol

Emma appears only as glimpses during most of Stephen’s young life, and he never gets to know her as a person. To Stephen, Emma defines one end of a spectrum of femininity. He seems to apprehend only the extremes of this spectrum. For him, women are either pure, reserved and unapproachable, or poisoned, sexual and ordinary, like the prostitutes he visits in Belvedere. Instead, she becomes a symbol of pure love, untainted by sexuality or veracity. When he goes through his fervently religious phase, he imagines his reward for his piety as a union with Emma in heaven. At the university, we finally see a real conversation characterizing Emma as a real, friendly, and ordinary girl, but certainly not the goddess Stephen earlier makes her out to be. This more balanced view of Emma mirrors Stephen’s abandonment of the extremes of complete sin and devotion in favor of a happy medium, the loyalty to the admiration of beauty.

Analysis of a Scene

      --It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve. Did you believe in it when you were at school? I bet you did. 
      --I did, Stephen answered. 
      --And were you happier then? Cranly asked softly, happier than you are now, for instance?
      --Often happy Stephen said, and often unhappy. I was someone else then.

      --How someone else? What do you mean by that statement?
      --I mean, said Stephen, that I was not myself as I am now, as I had to become. (section 5, page 261)

The declaration that Stephen’s transformation was necessary indicates that perhaps the person he is now is who he was somehow destined to be all along.  The most interesting things to look at, in Portrait of an Artist, are the moments that catalyze Stephen Dedalus in his transformation from child to artist. In five chapters, we're taken through Stephen's early childhood in Ireland and confinement at boarding school, his dalliances with theater and hiring prostitutes, his retreat from sensory excess into religious devotion, his retreat from religious devotion into aesthetic, and, ultimately, his retreat from Ireland and fellowship in favor of destiny. 

This quick snippet from the final pages of Joyce’s novel, finally give way to Stephen’s epiphany, his realization and happiness with his life and where he is headed. Religion was a constant pressure on Stephen, influenced by his parents’ wishes or those of the priest. Throughout this novel, Stephen was struggling to find himself, becoming an individual. From the readers perspective, this passage is an exciting one because after experiencing Stephen’s hardships, we can finally be proud of him; overcoming the oppression of his parents, his peers, and his society.

Opinion

WOW—how do I even describe how I feel? Most of my classmates complained of the complexity and stream of conscientiousness writing style that James Joyce used. Now I am not going to say it was easy, but I will say that I actually loved the language of this novel. The detail work that went into his imagery was astounding. My favorite part is the emotions that I as a reader felt, while experiencing Stephen’s life. For example, the sermon scene legitimately had me scared… Being an Irish Roman Catholic myself, it was hard not to be on the same level as Stephen. I could feel his anxiety and stress and fear and desire to save himself from this horrific ending. Having words on a page do this to me only excites me to read more. 


Often in class it was mentioned that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had no defined plot, but i completely disagree. We can safely assume that Stephen's life parallels to that of James Joyce's. He wrote the experiences in his life that shaped him into the artist and man he is today. It was a long and gradual transformation, but it played out beautifully. I loved how previous emotions, actions and learning experiences, influenced the next steps to this novel. Finally equating to our final product, Stephen or James as a incredibly gifted artist. 

Woman Work

By: Maya Angelou

#200 pg 271

I've got the children to tend

The clothes to mend

The floor to mop

The food to shop

Then the chicken to fry

The baby to dry

I got company to feed

The garden to weed

I've got shirts to press

The tots to dress

The cane to be cut

I gotta clean up this hut

Then see about the sick

And the cotton to pick.

Shine on me, sunshine

Rain on me, rain

Fall softly, dewdrops

And cool my brow again.

Storm, blow me from here

With your fiercest wind

Let me float across the sky

'Til I can rest again.

Fall gently, snowflakes

Cover me with white

Cold icy kisses and

Let me rest tonight.

Sun, rain, curving sky

Mountain, oceans, leaf and stone

Star shine, moon glow

You're all that I can call my own. 

Analysis:

Maya Angelou sets up the poem using five stanzas; the first has an end rhyme of AABBCCDD, ect. She recites a list of her everyday duties, and the flow of the end rhyme adds to the predictable structure and repetition of this woman’s life. Her life is monotonous with no indication of happiness, joy or fulfillment. The structure of the poem is reflective of the freedom she longs for. This strict structure in the first stanza with end rhyme, also being enhanced with short abrupt lines or (duties) shows the confinement and restriction of this woman; who we can see is a slave by the jobs she must accomplish. Tending to the fields of cotton and sugar cane, the lack of emotion put into the caring for the sick; there is no personal recognition of family that she is doing these things for. Also a big give away is her living in a hut. This cycle is broken in the next four stanzas where she longs for freedom through free verse of thought.

            The rhythm in the first stanza signifies a negative attitude towards work, although the next four stanzas portray an optimistic image. It too is separated into two parts. This first stanza presents a woman pictured as hard working, robust with strength and endurance, yet with little time to rest. She is up to her elbows in dirt, children, food and work. Though the complexity of the lines is simple and abrupt, it clearly paints a busy, sweaty, tough woman. Being able to see this image in your mind now brings emotion. Sadness and sympathy comes to mind. We can feel her unhappiness and stress through this busy image. The pace is once slowed down, so that a greater contrast can be made between stanzas, where the imagery is much more gentle, suggesting that nature is being benevolent towards the woman. Angelou used natural imagery to describe the woman's relationship with nature. In this poem, however, nature is benevolent towards the woman and does not antagonize her. Gentle imagery is used to describe the woman floating during the storm and resting in nature's arms. Nature is described in that way, as it is the only escape from the woman's daily routine. This expresses a vast amount of pessimism towards work, but some optimism towards her life as well.

Reflection:

            At first glance, the title of the poem reminded me of our many controversial arguments in class about the place of a woman in society. But while reading the five short stanzas, I realized it was no longer just speaking of a woman; it was referring to the life of a black woman slave. Like many slavery poems, this one spoke of the troubles they faced and the freedom they prayed for. But this one caught my eye because it creatively spoke of freedom through peace of nature. It swiftly shifted from the routine of a slave to the progression of seasons. Not only did this woman want freedom, but she felt the only way to obtain it was through death. “Let me float across the sky ‘til I can rest again.” She is asking, she is pleading to Mother Nature or to God to release her like a bird from its cage. “Fall gently, snowflakes cover me with white cold icy kisses and let me rest tonight.” Winter usually brings death, and Maya personifies winter snow to give this woman kisses, a peaceful death. Finally the last stanza reveals no matter how hard you try to take things away from her, like her freedom, you cannot take away what doesn’t belong to you. She can still enjoy the sun and rain on her face, the beautiful pleasures of mountains and unending sky. Its beautiful rhythm adds a final pick-me-up leaving me with a combination of hope and sympathy for this working woman. 

281. The Death of a Soldier

Wallace Stevens

Pg. 334

 

Analysis:

“The Death of a Soldier” is expectedly very down to earth and honest in the way that a fallen soldier’s life can end in the large picture of things, not mean a whole lot. The opening stanza, “Life contracts and death is expected, as in a season of autumn. The soldier falls,” goes along in the belief that soldiers are expected to and will give up their lives for whatever they may be fighting for. Stevens compares this thought with the autumn season. This season is unlike any of the others because it is the end of the time that most people enjoy, the warm weather and fully grown trees, etc. Autumn is plant life dies as all the leaves fall to the ground and the bitterly windy and cold weather is rushed in. The loss of life during war and troublesome times can be compared with the loss of mother nature during the autumn season. Also using a soldier’s death as simple in comparison to the falling of leaves shows how expected and it’s so normally thought of. 

            “He does not become a three-days personage, imposing his separation, calling for pomp.” This strictly alludes to the resurrection of Christ after three days. Christians during Easter, use this time to celebrate and rejoice. A fallen soldier has someone who isn’t looking or won’t receive the celebration or fame from society. A soldier isn’t someone who is looking to single himself out from the rest of the army. Stevens writes this to show how simplistic the death of a solider is when compared equally to the season of autumn. 

            In the last two stanzas, Stevens uses imagery to paint a clear picture letting you think of a windless sky with all the clouds moving in one direction. And like a soldiers death won’t make any large impact, neither does the wind stopping in the middle of autumn when the clouds will continue to move without trouble. Death is absolute just like the changing of seasons.

Reflection:

            Stevens is making quite a big statement in the poem. I can see his argument on behalf of the Unknown Soldier. Is it too much for all of us to expect some sort of recognition of our lives when we die? After analyzing the meaning of the death of this soldier, I continuously thought of the little recognition we give to our soldiers who have given their lives in this current war. Yes, we celebrate Veterans Day, and yes, many do pray for the families who have lost loved ones. But we watch the television everyday on the side lines to this war today, and rarely to never are the lives that were given up for our country praised. The media doesn’t report the news, it reports gossip. Who cares how many times Lindsey Lohan has been in rehab or how many mistresses Tiger Woods had? Wallace Stevens’s poem reminds of my disappointment in this country’s moral compass. 

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Theme of Language abused as a Instrument of Power

In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Gilead creates an official vocabulary that ignores and warps reality in order to serve the needs of the new society’s elite. The world of Gilead uses titles as more than a way to differentiate one person from another, it uses titles to distinguish the very worth of the person. By making this “vocabulary” an official language, the society at Gilead successfully locked the citizens into an unyielding system defining the female and male roles as completely separate and discriminatory.  Having made it illegal for women to hold jobs, Gilead creates a system of titles. Whereas men are defined by their military rank, women are defined solely by their gender roles as Wives, Handmaids, or Marthas. Stripping them of permanent individual names strips them of their individuality, or tries to. Blacks and Jews are defined by biblical terms “Children of Ham” and “Sons of Jacob,” respectively that set them apart from the rest of society, making their persecution easier.  The Handmaid’s Tale carries on the tradition of the dangers of a totalitarian society. Gilead maintains its control over women’s bodies by maintaining control over names.

"How I used to despise such talk. Now I long for it. At least it was talk. An exchange, of sorts" (Atwood 11).

Restricting the language of the people is restricting how much of their identity can be expressed because language is a key aspect in expressing your individuality. Yet, since it is regulated, it will be easier to control the people for without language, certain inhabitants of Gilead are left with little to no identity, and those without an identity are easier to control.  Offred loses majority of identity when she sees her little girl happy without her. Towards the end, she begins to accept Gilead as her home whereas earlier she wanted to escape and find her family.

Favorite Quote

“Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary” (Atwood 33).

This quotation is from the end of Chapter 6. Offred and Ofglen are standing by the Wall, looking at the bodies of people who have been hanged by Gilead. The sight horrifies Offred, but she strains to push aside her revulsion and substitute an emotional “blankness.” As she represses her natural disgust, she remembers Aunt Lydia’s words about how life in Gilead will “become ordinary.” This is actually my least favorite quote, but I feel it sums the entire objective of the men in this society; conforming the women to their demands.  Aunt Lydia’s statement reflects the power of a totalitarian state like Gilead to transform a natural human response such as revulsion at an execution into “blankness,” to transform horror into normalcy. Aunt Lydia’s words suggest that Gilead succeeds not by making people believe that its ways are right, but by making people forget what a different world could be like. Torture and tyranny become accepted because they are “what you are used to.”

My Thoughts

Surely the essential element of a cautionary tale is recognition. Surprised recognition, even, enough to administer a shock. We were warned, by seeing our present selves in a distorting mirror, of what we may be turning into if current trends are allowed to continue. That was the effect of The Handmaid’s Tale with its scary dating, not 40 years ahead.  It’s a harrowing tale and no mistake. Atwood presents a future that had me shuddering with dread. Of course, one likes to think that it could never happen, but the plaintive tone of the narrator makes it all seem distressingly possible.  This novel seems ever more vital in the present day, where women in many parts of the world live similar lives, dictated by biological misogyny.  The ending was somewhat abrupt and ambiguous. I would have found it unsatisfying, but a well-crafted epilogue serves to soften the blow and answer some lingering questions.  Overall I found this book incredibly inventive, moving and really quite frightening.

Relevant Images

         

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Analysis of a Symbol

In Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, the novel takes place in a city called One State, where inhabitants see it as an Utopia. The overall structure of One State is cold; everything is made of glass, from tools to buildings. There is no privacy, and a Green wall surrounds the whole state. There is one exception to the glass though, the Benefactor - ruler of One State - is made completely out of iron. He is described as having a "slow, cast-iron echoing voice," and "cast iron hands upon His knees which moved with the weight of a hundred tons" (Zamyatin 205). Iron is a repeated image and symbol throughout the novel because it represents the oppressive weight of the Benefactor. Iron is strong, chains are made out of iron, and the people of One State were oppressed by these chains. 

Another imagery of iron exists between the city's current state of freedom and its mood of the weather. At the beginning of the novel the sky is described as:

"Blue, unblemished by a single cloud. (How wild the tastes of the ancients, whose poets could be inspired by those absurd, disorderly, stupidly tumbling piles of vapor!) I love - I am certain I can safely say, we love - only such a sterile, immaculate sky" (Zamyatin 5).

A world without cloud or storm is one of order, and conformity. Where the people are subservient and tame, just as the sky is tame. The most significant cloud imagery is in the storm just before the attempted theft of the Integral and the Great Operation. Here the weather is described with great frequency as being "Wind. Sky made of racing cast - iron plates" (Zamyatin 199). Here in their moment of fury, just before freedom will be obliterated forever by the great operation, the clouds are described as Iron; Wind, a representation of freedom, is described as iron. In the end of the novel, when the people of One State are transformed into mindless drones, the skies once again become calm and tame "It is day. Clear. Barometer at 760" (Zamyatin 224).

Favorite Passages

"Closer - she leaned against me with her shoulder, and we made one, she blended into me - and I knew: This is how it has to be. I knew this with every nerve, every hair, with the sweet pain of every heartbeat. And what a joy it was to give in to this has to be. A piece of iron probably feels just as glad to submit to the precise, inevitable law and clamp onto a magnet. A stone thrown up in the air hesitates for a moment and then plunges down headlong to the earth. And after the final agony a man is glad to breathe his last - and die" (Zamyatin 70-71).

D-503 talks about the inevitability of his desire for I-330. There is no logical reasoning that brings him to the conclusion that he has to be with her, yet he claims to feel complete confidence in this conclusion. This is one of the first times, if not the first time, that D-503 truly feels anything. Before he gets the "soul" disease, all of his conclusions are reached through logic and everything depends upon reason. In this case, he actually feels something without knowing why. D-503 tries to draw parallels between this emotional inevitability and things that can be explained through logic, such as magnetism and gravity. However, the final analogy compares his love to the final breath before death. OneState, as far as the reader knows, has no table for death. Excepting those executed for heresy, it seems that people in OneState still die naturally. Although there are medical reasons for death, it seems arbitrary in comparison to the strictly regimented patterns of eating and sleeping.

"And I hope we'll win. More - I'm certain we'll win. Because reason has to win" (225)

This quote, for me, makes the ending an unwanted one. Caught by the guardians, D-503 undergoes the Operation and becomes an empty, smiling, "happy" person again. What struck me about these closing words is that there is not a convincing explanation for why reason must win, any more than there is a convincing reason why D-503 must be with I-330 in the first passage.  Letting reason win might be one way of living life or organizing society, but it is clearly not the only way. There is also a strange reversal of death here. While the original, soul-less D-503 would have considered the soul-infested D-503 as the destruction of reason and therefore death, the D-503 with a soul would consider the final D-503 dead as well. D-503 first experiences the death of reason, and then experiences the death of emotion. Like a computer wiped of its memory, he is now ready to be re-inserted into society and continue in his utility.

My thoughts of the Novel

            Overall I loved reading this novel. I enjoyed the contrasting life styles to our own. The true nightmare   of We is not its grim picture of society, but the fact that so many of the ciphers, D-503 included, find it a delightful way to live. It quickly sparked conversation in class and was argued with much debate.  There are exceptions, however, including the seductive and mysterious I-330 with whom D-503 falls in love. Such attachments are, of course, forbidden, and D-503 is in anguish over his inability to control his feelings. I felt the connection to his struggle of understanding his own feelings. This constant back and forth frenzy that played in D-503’s head kept me intrigued throughout Zamyatin’s novel We.