Reflections on Blog

Mr. Mitchell,

___________________________________________.

         This is how the beginning of a blog entry feels.  I need to fill in the blank, and I can fill it in any way I want to.  It seems almost like the open genre creative project, except that I usually feel like I should just use the writing genre (although I guess that's not really the case).  I often wrote on the books we were reading, but I tried to branch out sometimes, because I wanted to write about related essays or books or ideas.
        For me, I really enjoyed the blog process, because it did allow me to simply fill in the blank in an essay-type form.  I think this was very beneficial for me, because I would also be thinking constantly about writing something in a blog as I read the books.  This kept me alert to more than just surface-level qualities of the books we read.  However, since some students did not write except at the end of each mid-quarter, I don't know if the blog actually helped them think about the book on their own (I guess I can't say this for sure, though).  To help students be more active on the blogs, I would actuallly suggest biweekly checks with fewer entries required per check, because it would force students to work on the blog in the middle of books instead of at the end of them.
        I think I would prefer the blog to a possible return to journaling, because that way I can edit my work easily (a few times, I would post, and then decide I wanted to edit something, and this was very easy).  While writing in a journal, I usually just start somewhere, and keep rambling on, never going back to check if what I wrote actually made sense, because I knew that editing would be difficult.  Also, I can get my ideas down faster with a blog, and thus produce more work in a given amount of time.
        However, because it's easier to edit and because it's typed, I feel more pressure to write a coherent and deep post.  I think it's important that students rid themselves of the idea that each blog post has to be a mini-essay.  I feel that in saying this I am being hypocritical, because I like the mini-essay form, but I think that the act of typing into a blank slate feels awfully like typing into a blank word document at the beginning of an essay and that this might cause some people to dislike the blogging.  There is some quality to the time-tested journaling experience that gives a more relaxed and personal feel to expressing your ideas.  I think it's hard to get that feeling when writing a blog entry.
        Another thing is that I think it would be interesting/beneficial/cool if students started utilizing all of the media forms that the blog offers.  Did anyone post a video of themselves discussing the book if they didn't feel like typing?  That might interesting, and maybe some people might have preferred other media forms (I don't, and again, maybe I'm being hypocritical, but I feel think some might feel constrained to this form).
        Lastly, I think it would be beneficial to have everyone write a blog post on panel presentations, because that's still a very open-ended prompt but it would make people be more active during panel presentations and make them think about the literary criticisms.
        I don't know if I really got across what I'm trying to say.  I really like the blogs, because it gives me a half-formal way of writing about the books that doesn't feel too intense (but not too relaxed either).  I think some alterations are necessary so that everyone takes full advantage of their own blogs.  Yet at the same time, for someone who enjoys writing entries (and can be pretty long-winded as is evident here), I really appreciated the open-endedness of the idea.  Just...write a blog.  On anything.  Somewhat daunting, but nice.

Thanks,
Chelsea

Antoinette = Milkman?

As I was writing the previous blog entry, I had one final thought that relates to Song of Solomon.  Milkman, just like Antoinette, was born into a privileged household with history that he wants to escape but has to live through instead.  He tries to make friends with Guitar, because in some ways he simply does not want to be part of a rich household which both the poor blacks resent and the whites resent (if they are racist).  This is very similar to how Antoinette reaches out to Tia.  Yet the class tensions between the friends are much more pronounced in Antoinette's case, because she does not even have the option of fitting into any community.  And just like Guitar tries to hang Milkman, Tia throws a rock at Antoinette.

Yet Milkman, as a male in a modern-day society where he therefore has more mobility, has some chance of escaping his situation.  He can buy a plane ticket and fly away.  Though he was protected and stuck in his situation for a long time as a boylike 30-yr-old and wanted to get out, this would have probably been preferable to Antoinette's scenerio.  She was made to come of age way too fast for her own good.  And as a female in a ante-modern era, she was not able to simply leave.  She had to marry, and thus was stuck forever.  Milkman was therefore more resentful of being stuck in the situation than the situation itself, because he knew he could escape if he could be given the chance to fly away.  Antoinette, on the other hand, was resentful of the situation itself rather than being stuck in it, because never would have expected any sort of chance to fly away.  This could explain why it never occurs to her to actually leave, even though she could easily get out of the room at night.

Rochester and Antoinette/Bertha in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

I have been putting off this post for a long time because I've wanted to get as far as I can through Jane Eyre before writing about the depictions of Rochester and Bertha=Antoinette in that book as opposed to in Jane Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.  Unfortunately, I am just now ready to start Part 3 of the novel, so we haven't gotten to the burning-and-jumping-out-the-window part yet.

I began reading this book because there were so many references to it during our Wide Sargasso Sea discussions that I was becoming really interested in the book itself and in what Rhys was basing her characters and character relationship on.  I will explore this in the following.

When we are first learning about Rochester in Bronte's novel, he begins to discuss how he has "plenty of faults of [his] own" but that he likes to "lay the half the blame on ill-fortune and adverse circumstances" because "nature meant [him], on the whole, a good man" (173...Chapter 13, Volume 1).  This is an interesting statement from the perspective of Wide Sargasso Sea.  He lays the blame for his own faults on circumstance.  Is sex with Amele purely circumstance?  Possibly...but what is circumstance?  I would argue that the cause for this action is actually a string of decisions that are based on circumstance.  Antoinette is born into resentment and craziness.  This circumstance is what makes Sandi write the letter, which is what makes Rochester pull away from Antoinette, which is what makes Antoinette decide to get Christophine to help her using obeah, which is what in turn makes Rochester angry and causes him to have sex with Amele only separated from Antoinette by a thin wall, which is really the last straw for Antoinette.  I would not call this ill-fortune.  I would call it negative reactions to adverse circumstances that have dire consequences.  Both Rochester and Antoinette may have had good intentions, but they most definitely made unintelligent decisions.

The idea that Rochester takes adverse circumstances and makes the wrong decisions with it is entirely consistent with his character in Jane Eyre.  He is attracted to Jane because of her constancy and pureness, so much so that he decides he wants to marry her even though she has no class and even though he is already married.  Thus, Jane's own father objects.

The portrayal of Antoinette/Bertha in Jane Eyre is interesting when compared to that at the end of Wide Sargasso Sea.  When Bertha cuts and bites at Mr. Mason, he said "she said she'd drain my heart" (269).  In Jane Eyre, she seems to be associated with blood and killing.  Jane tells Rochester that she reminds him of a vampire, after their failed marriage ceremony.  Yet in Wide Sargasso Sea, she is always focusing on fire.  She derives her heat from the fire, because England is cold, and she dreams of fire and reds seem to be associated with fire for her.  Her red dress symbolizes her old life where she used to live in freedom, and she thinks all the way back to when she might have really found love, with Sandi.

At the end of Wide Satgasso Sea, Bertha thinks of herself as mentally strong and physically weak.  She is physically trapped and physically unable to get her way with Mr. Mason.  Yet mentally, she is relatively held together, but simply cannot communicate her true thoughts because there is no one who could possibly come close to understanding her perspective.  She can think straight, though, because she managed to have an interaction with a lady to get the knife.  She plays the mental game to get out of her cell: wait until Poole is drunk and asleep, and then steal the keys.
However, in Jane Eyre, we see that Bertha is an extreme physical menace, who has absolutely unknown mental capacities.  Jane notices when seeing her for the first time that she is "in stature almost equalling [Rochester] and corpulent besides" (368).  Mentally, while the characters treat her like she cannot think or speak for herself, they acknowlege her "cunning" (368), and her action of ripping Jane's bridal clothing seems very reasonable.  She is portrayed like an animal, described as a hyena and as having a mane, and as moving on all fours.  She may be strong mentally, but is assumed to have less mental capacity, yet how are we to know for certain?  Why, if she can get out of the room, would she not simply leave the house completely?  Why would she go to Jane instead of to Rochester?  She does burn Rochester's room, though.

Another interesting concept is Antoinette's relationship with Grace Poole.  Why, in Jane Eyre, would such a violent, senseless, bloodthirsty animal never attack Poole?  Obviously, she has some sort of positive relationship with Poole...and yet Poole talks to Rochester and the rest of the wedding party as if Bertha is a wildebeest.  In Wide Sargasso Sea, however, Grace's italicized thoughts at the end show a certain amount of sympathy for Antoinette.  She feels that she is probably protecting Antoinette from a world: "which, say what you like, can be a wicked and cruel world to a woman.  Maybe that's why I stayed on" (178).  In Antoinette's case, the world is definitely wicked and cruel, but yet Antoinette would rather live on in it.

Having read Wide Sargasso Sea, I found Jane Eyre's portrayal of Antoinette to be a little maddening.  She has neither a voice nor a say, and never has had one in her life despite her privilege.  I would really call her situation circumstance, or maybe bad luck, much more than Rochester's.

White Peacock

        As Milkman and Guitar are "sauntered down route 6, stopping frequently...bantering each other about the best way to burglarize a shack that, as Guitar said, 'didn't have a door or window with a lock'" (177), a white peacock appears on the roof of a building all of a sudden.  It has no name, is actually very unimportant to the matter at hand and in the wider city, and it comes from nowhere.  Yet it acts important, knows that it can show off to others, and acts like it comes from somewhere important.  The two men actually speculate where it comes from (the zoo?  no), as well as one about its behavior, and it is this discussion that might lead us to the symbolism of the peacock.  The peacock seems to symbolize something, but what it symbolizes is not served to the reader on a silver platter.
        Milkman describes its flying as "jive" (178), which is an odd descriptor because Google dictionary defines jive, the adjective as "decietful, worthless," whereas Morrison states the Milkman "felt again his unrestrained joy at anything that could fly" (178) just before Milkman describes the flight as "jive."  This almost implies that Milkman is actually decieved by the material qualities, in a sense, that the peacock possesses, and that he realizes it.  Milkman is liable to like anything that has the ability to fly, something that he doesn't possess.
        Whereas Milkman focuses on the fact that the peacock can't fly but acts like it can, Guitar focuses on its "tail full of jewelry" (178).  The peacock opens its tail, and Guitar's instinct is to catch it; when the peacock closes its tail, "the two men stood still" (179).  Guitar interprets the peacock's tail as something he can't have, and so he wants to chase it.  Similar to Milkman, he realizes that the peacock is just showing off, and really doesn't have anything special.  He, too, is liable to be attracted toward the peacock because it possesses that quality he can't have.
        Morrison ties together the two qualities of this peacock together, and manages to twist them in with racial tensions.  Milkman asks why the peacock can't fly, and Guitar replies: "All that jewelry weighs it down.  Like vanity. ... Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down" (179).  As Guitar addresses Milkman's question about something important to him, flight, he implies that Milkman has something that weighs him down, too.  Just like Milkman, the peacock seems like it should have the potential to fly, but it cant.  What is behind it holds it back, just like Milkman's past holds him back.  And in both cases, it is something that would be very difficult to cut oneself from.  In answering Milkman's question, Guitar also realizes that what he was attracted to, the riches, is deceitful, showy, and does the peacock no good.  And since the peacock is white, he connects the wealth, color, and ostentatious air of the peacock and labels the peacock as a "white faggot" (179).  Just like the whites that Guitar is so violently against, the peacock has something that he wants, and has this because of fate: it was born into it.  And Guitar holds this against the peacock, just like he holds it against the whites.
        It is important that the peacock seems to embody all of the qualities that either man might want, but actually doesn't embody them whatsoever.  It seems like it could fly but it is incapable.  It seems like it has riches, wealth, but all it really has is vanity and feathers.  And it likes to show off what it has, strutting along the pavement and opening its tail.  Because the peacock has what both Guitar and Milkman are tempted to get from the money they are stealing (Guitar hopes to use a lot of money and Milkman hopes to buy himself a ticket to fly the heck away from his hometown), it leads them to think about the final outcome of the gold, not how to procure the gold in and of itself.  When Milkman and Guitar finally get back to planning how to get the gold, the final decision is that they would not plan anymore, and simply go for the stealing the next day.  Just get riches and flight without thinking: the peacock, here, spreads its tail.  Its action shows that the two of them are eager to fulfill their wishes, but implies that they will never really be able to get what they want.  The peacock is neither actually rich, nor can it actually fly.

The Use of Violence: Pilate vs. Macon Dead (the Elder)

Today in class, we were comparing the differences between Milkman's father and Pilate.  An idea, which was difficult to express in chalkboard-worthy shorthand occurred to me, and we expanded upon the idea in class.  I am writing ideas about how both Macon Dead and Pilate are violent, but their violence is somehow different.

Macon Dead is portrayed as slapping his wife before he even drops his fork, because he is so angry in the moment.  Macon is not controlled at all in his action.  He is trying to communicate with his violence, but since he is communicating an emotion for his own good (instead of common sense for someone else's good like Pilate is doing), his violence does not have any sort of good effect.  His communication effort is aiming toward opinionated disapproval, and comes off as seeming abusive to Milkman.  (As a side note, when Milkman retaliates, his efforts are also unsuccessful at changing the situation because he is also trying to communicate opinionated disapproval, which in turn simply appears to his father as "abusive").

However, when Pilate uses violence (the knife incident), she is very calculated in her actions, and acts not in the moment of her rage, but as a method of controlled rage in place of her daughter's potential momentary anger that could backfire (like it does for Macon).  She acts violently to try and protect her family to try and make her family safer and happier.  She uses violence because she knows that potentially lethal actions will really make the threatening man listen to her.  Unlike Macon, when she wields the knife, she seems totally in charge of her actions.

The family dynamics of Pilate's household and Macon's  household tie into the way their violence manifests.  Since Pilate is all about equality and representation for her daughter and granddaughter (both of whom she treats relatively the same way in terms of importance: no hierarchy), she can act for their own benefit, but would never do anything to be violent to her own family members.  Yet if Pilate is the protector, then Macon is the dictator: he acts as if all of his family are subordinates, with his wife at the bottom of the ranking.  Thus, he can punish her for her actions, since she is so subordinate and she is not fitting his definition of how she should be thinking and talking.

Societal Perceptions - Antoinette vs. Meursault

Yesterday during the panel presentation, the idea arose that Antoinette was not fully mad by the end of the book.  Several students were saying that of course Antoinette is mad, that you cannot argue otherwise, because obviously society claims that she does not act normally, and therefore she could not be sane.  It does not matter how she became mad or why, but simply that she is mad.
I would like to dispute this argument by drawing a connection between societal perceptions of Antoinette and Meursault.  Society writes off Antoinette as mad because she tries to kill her uncle and because she says weird things and acts oddly; society writes off Meursault as guilty because he killed a man, and therefore must be guilty.  Society cannot understand either of their actions, and it decides that the character is guilty or mad by default.  But society only tries to figure out why, and to what extent, in Meursault's case.  Unfortunately, in Antoinette's case, they feel secure in simply writing her off as mad, and not trying to legitimize or figure out why: they think of it as a hereditary issue.  She has no trial, no defensive attorney, just a world of prosecutors to face.  This in itself could drive her mad: in fact, I think it does.
Anyways, I think it is difficult for society to believe, to conceive, or to explain Antoinette's saneness for the same reason it is difficult to accept Meursault's innocence.  Yet this does not mean that Antoinette is in no way sane, that Meursault is in no way innocent.  Yet because we occupy Meursault's consciousness as he becomes guilty (during the murder scene), we can become easily frustrated by his prosecuting attorney.  I see that Antoinette is in a similar situation as Meursault, but it is more difficult for the class to become frustrated with the society labeling her solely insane because we did not inhabit her consciousness during the transformation and thus do not have her perspective

The Relative Inevitability of Relationship Breakdown in The Wide Sargasso Sea

Today in class, we discussed the possibility that Rochester has an inferiority complex.  This is definitely a possibility, because he often longs to write a searing letter to his father, whom he partially blames for this mess.  He has spent his whole life feeling wronged an inferior.  He is thus very compassionate to anyone who sympathizes with him, and indulges this feeling in him.  He likes to hear that people feel bad for him.  This is why he is immediately taken by Cosway's letter: he loves Antoinette very much, but as soon as he reads the letter, he stops physically loving her (which seems to be the only love he has with her, except maybe a small flame of "mental" love in danger of burning out).
He is pretty compassionate with Antoinette when she begins to tell him her story, but he does not feel very connected with her, still.  It is almost as if they are struggling to give life to the flame of "mental" that has been almost stamped out.  And then, the next morning, he realizes immediately that he has been wronged, again, from his point of view, because Antoinette has put a love potion in his drink.  He is addicted to this feeling, and immediately relapses, because it is difficult to shake this off after his whole life of this worldview.  In light of this, to get back at Antoinette, he goes to the girl who has always sympathized with him...does he feel that she understands him better than Antoinette does?  In any case, she sympathizes with him, and he is attracted to this sympathy, as one of the few people who expresses sympathy for him in his entire life.  His act with Amelie also makes him feel superior, something that he has long wanted.
And yet, in this act, he has spurned Antoinette, who wanted to love-potion him simply to improve their relationship.  She has been struggling her whole life to have someone love her, truly, and hsi subsequent act with Amelie makes her madly angry.

Thus, both Antoinette and Rochester are, in a sense, looking toward similar goals, but in ways that are not compatible.  Rochester is trying to stop feeling wronged and start being told truths; Antoinette is trying to stop feeling wronged and start being loved.  Yet their thoughts about the way they are being treated are based on their perceptions.  Since both tend to percieve themselves as statically deceived/unloved, and it would be difficult for anyone to change their perceptions about the way they are being treated, their happiness and fulfillment of their wishes is neigh impossible.  When one perceives the relationship to be on the upward slope in terms of their personal goals about how they are treated as an individual, the other is usually questioning.  Neither has enough faith in the relationship to make it work.  Neither one knows or understands the other, so neither can believe that the other could fulfill their wishes about how they should be treated.

When the steps relationship finally does inevitably fail, it could (theoretically) have had a chance for recovery.  Yet the relationship does not recover, because of the extreme one-sidedness of the blame that is placed on the mishap.  In the end, Rochester places none of the blame on himself, and Antoinette places all of the blame on herself.

The reason for this difference is derived from their childhood situations.  Both Antoinette and Rochester grow up feeling that they should be considered innocent, but only Rochester is able to fully legitimize this feeling of innocence in his childhood mind.
Antoinette is constantly being told that she is somehow direly guilty, even though she could not possibly be guilty of her parents’ deeds.  She cannot simply brush these people off in a racist manner, since she loves Christophine and Tia.  Yet she also cannot blame her parents for what they did, because she loves her mother.  She therefore internalizes the guilt partially, but gets a mixed message about her innocence.
Thus in the relationship between Antoinette and Rochester, Antoinette is constantly wavering between feeling and acting innocent in the relationship problems, and taking full self-blame, that she was not good enough for him.  She never blames her historical setting for anything that happens, and she never blames Rochester, or her family, or Christophine for the failure of the potion.  Even at the end of the book, when she is mad, she refers to Rochester as “the man who hated me” (189), which shows a frightening spectrum of the depth of her self-blame and her lack of feeling loved by anyone, even to the end.
Rochester, on the other hand, is able to place blame on his father, his family, and on the fact that he was born the younger brother.  Since he was not alone in this feeling (he almost without doubt shared them with other younger brothers his age), placing the blame on others became part of his nature.  Thus, even when he is going to Jamaica to achieve monetary success as a younger brother, he is quick to remove the blame from himself when the situation does not work out.  He is quick to blame his family as soon as Cosway writes him.  Later, he also blames Christophine.  Interestingly, he also blames Antoinette, but not as harshly because he does not understand her situation fully.
Thus, when Antoinette calls him a wide variety of names, it is really injurious, because she is essentially calling him inferior.  This is as close as she comes to placing the blame on him; and it seems to be a last-straw moment for Rochester.  Yet Rochester still cares about Antoinette’s well-being and is mad at Christophine for making her a drunk even after their whole fight.  He tries to stamp out the flame of love from their relationship but at this point he still wants to stay friends, in a sense.  He visualizes them living in the same house.
So why does Antoinette end up by herself in an attic, saying that Rochester never came back?