Term
| "The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower" |
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Definition
Author: D Thomas Genre: Poem-Surrealist Imagery. From the beginning, he was a controversial poet. Not part of the conventional literary establishment, unconnected with any particular poetic movement, his work was difficult to categorize. Although Thomas's poems received critical acclaim for the force and vitality of their language and imagery, he was also criticized for obscurity. Because of this, he was often identified with the Surrealist movement, where images and language violated the rules of logic, frequently imitating the landscape of dreams, or even nightmares. On the surface, Thomas seems to have much in common with Surrealism; however, he vehemently denied the relationship, insisting that his poetry was carefully planned and controlled. Thomas fully intended his images to be understood. Unfortunately for the reader, the intensely personal nature of many of his metaphors makes this difficult.
Summary: Line 1: "The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower" is a complicated poem. On the first reading, it may seem almost too difficult for a beginning reader to understand. However, careful analysis will make much of the imagery clearer. As a survey of critics reveals, there is no one right explanation for the more complicated ideas in the poem. Even critics interpret lines in different and often contradictory ways. Since the poem is about contrast, change, and paradox, this may prove part of the poem's meaning.
The first stanza in the poem is the easiest to understand. It is important to be aware of the pattern that Thomas develops in this stanza, in order to look for variations that appear later. The first three lines contrast the creative and destructive forces that surround man. Thomas's imagery emphasizes the explosive nature of this power. The green fuse is obviously the flower's stem, yet the word "fuse" gives the connotation of explosive growth, rather than gentle development. In this line, Thomas introduces the creative force in nature.
The rhyme scheme in this stanza is ababa.
Line 2: In the first four words of this line, the power that causes growth in nature is revealed as the same force that causes the speaker to grow. Like the flower, the speaker is still in the process of growing. Green age implies youth, since the word green has connotations of spring and renewal. Although green is often used in poetry to convey youth, this phrase also contains a sense of opposites; green conveys youth, while age often speaks of being old. Throughout the poem, Thomas will combine many seemingly opposite words.
After the caesura—the pause or break in the rhythm at the semicolon—the destructive power is unleashed. Grammatically, the phrase refers back to the force in the first line. However, now it is a destructive power, obliterating trees by their very roots. Thomas makes it clear that the fuse which blasted the flower into existence is also the blast which destroys it.
Line 3: Like nature, the speaker is also subject to the same fate. The change in length helps to emphasize the line's power. With three words, the speaker describes his ultimate fate.
Line 4: The fourth line in each stanza begins with the same four words indicating that the speaker is unable to convey his insight. Dumb has several meanings which could be applicable. While the speaker may be unable to "tell" for physical reasons, it is more likely for emotional ones, a sense of inadequacy to express the idea.
Once again, Thomas combines words with opposite connotations. The rose is a symbol of beauty, of the growth described in the first line; using the adjective crooked to describe it changes our impression of the flower. Like much of Thomas's imagery, this phrase is not precise. It relies on the reader's feeling or impressions. The entire stanza leaves the reader with the impression that the crooked rose is blighted.
Line 5: The speaker shares the same fate as the flower. The verb bent furthers the connection between the speaker and the rose, as the reader understands that the vigorous youth will become stooped and crooked with age, like the rose. In wintry fever Thomas includes still another paradox as the cold of winter is blended with a fever's heat. Line 6: The pattern in this stanza is the same as the first, both grammatically and in the organization of ideas. However, the focus now changes from relationship between man and the biological world to man and the geological world. The force that was introduced in the first stanza pushes the water from under the earth's surface through the rocks to give birth to the mountain stream.
Line 7: Once again, Thomas compares the speaker to nature in the first four words; the line opens with "drives" just as line 2 did, emphasizing the similarity. Blood is pushed through man's veins just as the water coursed through the rocks. Thomas frequently uses color in his poems; the red blood in this line is a counterpart to green age in the previous stanza. The contrasting element following the caesura describes these same streams dying. The alliterative half-rhyme of drives and dries reinforces this contrast.
Thomas is noted for his ability to combine words to create arresting images, such as mouthing streams, which are open to a variety of interpretations. A stream's mouth is the place where it enters another body of water. Rather than being destroyed at the source like the trees in line 2, the stream dries before it reaches its destination; it is thwarted from completing its route. The word mouth will appear in two different contexts later in the stanza.
Line 8: Mine in this line refers to the speaker's blood. It is turned to wax by the embalmer; it will flow no longer to sustain life but will become as solid as wax.
Line 9: In the previous stanza, the speaker was unable to communicate with the rose. In this line, his inability to express his feelings is even more poignant, since he cannot communicate with his own body. The word mouth again is used, and while to "mouth" in this line literally means to speak, the phrase takes on extra significance because of the repetition and variation in the use of this word.
Line 10: Again the speaker shares nature's fate. Mouth in this line takes on an almost vampirish quality, as it sucks away life, the water from the stream, the blood from the speaker's veins. Line 11: The first two stanzas were extremely similar. The rhyme pattern was the same. Each image in the first found a parallel in the second. The third stanza, however, varies the pattern in several ways. The rhyme scheme will shift to ababc, leaving the last line unconnected to this stanza and to the previous ones.
Force is replaced by hand. Force, as an abstract and general term, is easier to understand as a controller of human destiny than the very specific word hand. In the previous stanzas, the contrasts were clear. The first line in both previous stanzas described growth and creation; the images Thomas uses here are not as clear. Water may be life-giving, but as the hand whirls it in the pool, the words join to convey a sense of danger, of the whirlpool.
Line 12: The first four words of the second line in previous stanzas connected the speaker's growth with nature's. In this line, the pronoun is left out. Instead, the hand stirs quicksand. Like the whirlpool, it is a destructive force. Both however, are limited in their ability to damage. All flowers will die; few individuals are caught in quicksand or a whirlpool. As the first half of the comparison is longer clear in its constructive nature, the destructive element is also less obvious. To rope the wind only implies control over nature.
Line 13: Thomas includes the personal pronoun again, in the second half of the comparison. The destructive nature of the phrase is clear; the shroud means death. Indeed, the phrase conjures up visions of a type of Viking funeral as the corpse is sent to sea. Interestingly, a secondary meaning of shroud is a rope used to take pressure off a mast; this use ties the line to the ones before and after it.
Lines 14-15: In each previous refrain, the speaker failed to communicate: to the rose, to his veins. Neither of those were new images; they followed from the first part of the stanza. The hanging man is introduced for the first time in this refrain. His connection with the details in the previous lines is vague, unless the image of a rope can be counted. Even the words hanging man are imprecise. The obvious conclusion is that he is the man who has been hung, but that is not specifically stated. He could be the hangman himself. Perhaps it even refers to both. In the previous stanzas, the speaker looked ahead to his ultimate fate. Line 15 looks back from a future when the speaker is already clay, part of the lime-filled pit where the hangman disposes of his victims. The unattached rhyme in this line looks ahead to time in line 16.
Line 16: This is the most difficult of the stanzas. The punctuation is different; the semicolon isolates this line so that the first four syllables of the next line are no longer directly connected. Time is the creative and destructive force that has been operating in the previous stanzas, and now time itself becomes the focus of the poem, as time joins with the fountainhead or source. There are obvious sexual connotations in this line; the lips represent the vagina, while the fountainhead is a phallic image. The use of leech as a verb here connects this line to the sucking mouth of stanza two.
The rhyme scheme joins the first two lines, head and blood; the third and fifth lines are also connected. The fourth line refers back to line 12 in the previous stanza.
Lines 17-18: Thomas again combines positive and negative images in these lines, which are open to varied interpretations. The fallen blood may have sexual or birth connotations; it can be connected with Christ's blood and salvation, as well, in its calming power. These lines also foreshadow the final couplet, connecting love and death.
Lines 19-20: Thomas has moved from a single flower to the cosmos. The speaker cannot tell the wind about the nature of time or of the heavens. The image of speaking to the wind is a powerful one. Much of this stanza is more easily felt than defined.
Lines 21-22: The final couplet restates Thomas's theme of creativity aligned with destruction. Lover's tomb is an almost perfect symbol for love and death. The speaker, too, shares the same fate as the lovers. The last line may be interpreted in two different ways. The sheet may be viewed as a shroud, and the worm that which feeds on the corpse. The worm may also be seen as a phallic symbol and the sheet a bed sheet. Both images are integral parts of Thomas's theme. The crooked worm also returns the poem to the first stanza and the crooked rose. The poem, itself, becomes a cycle, combining conception, birth, growth, and death, all part of the same process.
Themes: Cycle of Life ("process poems"), balance, Microcosm, Macrocosm, Human Isolation. |
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Definition
Author: D Thomas Genre: Poem, lyric 1945
Summary: The speaking voice belongs to a male adult recalling his childhood and its inevitable end. “Fern Hill” re-creates and communicates the experience of a child who (for the first part of the poem) has not yet grown into historical awareness and who consequently lives in an eternal present in the Garden of Eden (“it was Adam and maiden” and “the sun grew round that very day,” lines 30 and 32).
The boy’s life is composed of repetitions of the cycles of nature, so to him there seems to be no passage of time; from his adult vantage point, however, he realizes that time was toying with him (“time let me,” he says in lines 4 and 13) until, inevitably, it exiled him from the privileged land of childhood.
In a casual, conversational tone, the poem begins by introducing the innocent boy in the context of a “middle landscape” composed of nature, the cultivation of domesticated plants and animals, and the art of song (the “lilting house”) in a small Welsh valley with wooded sides (a “dingle”). Because he still lives in the innocent world of the fairy tale (“once below a time”), he has the power of a lord to command the trees and leaves, to have them do his will. This time of life, as the poet idealizes it, is a windfall—an undeserved and unexpected boon, like a ripe apple that has blown off a tree on a stranger’s property and that the hungry passerby has a right to take and eat.
The second stanza reinforces the picture of the first with different images. The boy lives in happy unison with the domesticated calves and the wild foxes; time passes musically, like the eternal Sabbath, as the instrument the boy plays consorts in a single hymn with the voices of the singing animals.
Stanza 3 presents a capsule summary of the days in the boy’s life and of his experience of falling asleep every night. The owls and nightjars, two sorts of nocturnal birds, seem to carry the farm off (the “ricks” are well-built haystacks), and the horses seem to escape from him.
The next stanza, appropriately, presents the experience of awakening. The farm returns, with the crowing rooster on “his” shoulder, like a sailor coming home with a parrot he has trained to talk. This new day is, as always, the first day in a brand-new world in which God has created the animals afresh.
The next stanza begins the breakdown of the illusory world of the eternal present. The boy’s “heedless ways” have kept him ignorant of a central fact of human life—that because time is like the Pied Piper, childhood innocence is ephemeral, and the experience of graceless adulthood is inevitable. The final stanza offers a brief account of the end of childhood, a sort of rising in space or falling asleep in which the child dies to his childhood and the farm departs forever; yet both survive in the form of poetry.
Forms and Devices
The poem is composed of six nine-line stanzas that rhyme (mostly with slant rhymes) abcddabcd. The lines have a very flexible accentual rhythm. Lines 1, 2, 6, and 7 have six accents each; lines 3, 4, 8, and 9 have three accents; and line 5 usually has four accents.
Dylan Thomas ties the poem together effectively with strong verbal formulas. The “I” is described as “young and easy,” “green and carefree,” “green and golden,” and finally “green and dying.” Furthermore, he is “happy as the grass was green,” “singing as the farm was home,” and “happy as the heart was long”; he is “honoured among wagons,” “famous among the barns,” “blessed among stables,” and “honoured among foxes and pheasants.” His adversary, time, is also accorded verbal formulas: “Time let me hail and climb/ Golden in the heydays of his eyes”; “Time let me play and be/ Golden in the mercy of his means”; “time allows/…so few and such morning songs.” There are other formulaic systems to charm the ear, such as the conversational “Now as I was,” “And as I was,” and “Oh as I was”; the spatial “About the lilting house” and “About the happy yard”; and the temporal “All the sun long” and “All the moon long.”
The color scheme is pervasive and insistent. Implied or explicit, it portrays the Edenic color scheme of nature and its growing things: green, golden, yellow, white, and blue. Even fire is “green as grass.” Green is the most pervasive color, with gold second, as is appropriate for a poem about childhood ripening into adulthood.
There are delightful images, such as the half-concealed list of the four elements in lines 20-22 (“fields,” “air,” “watery,” and “fire”). The eternal day of creation (Genesis 1:3-4, 16-18) is elegantly described as a time and place in the passage “So it must have been after the birth of the first simple light/ In the first spinning place.” God sets the sun spinning in a place called “day”; God the Creator spins the cosmos out of chaos as a woman spins a strong, even thread from a random mass of raw cotton or wool or flax, then to weave it into the fabric of the material world.
Themes and Meanings
The “I” of the poem begins in innocence, the young Adam of the new world. As he experiences it, his correlative is as innocent as he, whether that be the farm or the princess, who is “maiden” rather than “Eve” because (as Genesis 3:20 states) the latter name means “giver of life” or “mother of all the living.” Saint Augustine of Hippo said that history began only after the Original Sin, so the child’s world seems timeless, a new world freshly created at each dawn.
As in many Renaissance poems (William Shakespeare’s Sonnets 18, 55, 65, and 116, for example), time is the enemy, but for the Renaissance reader, Father Time was Cronos (Saturn), who in Greek myth devoured all of his own children. In Thomas’s poem, time is a temporarily benevolent despot, “allowing” and “permitting” the child a time of perfect happiness before he sacrifices his own progeny to the demands of his cannibalistic nature.
At the beginning of the final stanza, Thomas uses a very private and obscure symbol: The lamblike child ascends to the loft of the barn at moonrise and sleeps to awaken no longer innocent, no longer childlike, alienated from the farm and from nature—expelled from Eden. Thus far, the reader may choose to understand this as a symbol of sexual experience of some sort. The episode involves bird symbols as well, however, and these the reader may well interpret as symbols of poetry—swallows, the implied owls and nightjars from the earlier episode of literal sleep (lines 23-27), and the moon herself as mistress of the creative imagination (like the fairy queen, Titania, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, c. 1595-1596). A child does not compose the songs of childhood. Only an adult can do so, for only the adult is thematically possessed of his own past history. Under the influence of the moon of imagination, the sea rises and falls; although a repressive king-figure (Father Time, the god Cronos, the Persian despot Xerxes, or the Danish King Canute of Britain) can attempt to chain the sea, he will not succeed. Hence, the perennial human symbol of expulsion from the limited Eden of newly created innocence also symbolizes the initiation into the more fully human and creative world of mature experience.
When the sea “sing[s] in its chains,” therefore, it does not sing only the green, white, and golden world of Fern Hill, it also sings the green and dying world of the mortal adult. Like a ritual incantation, the poem “Fern Hill” re-creates for the reader the Eden of boyhood, its loss, and its retrieval. Whenever the poem is read and for as long as it takes to read it, the paradise of Fern Hill exists again, is lost again, and is regained. |
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Term
| "The Rooms of Other Women Poets" |
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Definition
Author: E. Boland Genre: Poem
Poem: The Rooms of Other Women
I wonder about you: whether the blue abrasions
of daylight, falling as dusk across your page,
make you reach for the lamp. I sometimes think
I see that gesture in the way you use language.
And whether you think, as I do, that wild flowers
dried and fired on the ironstone rim of
the saucer underneath your cup, are a sign of
a savage, old calligraphy: you will not have it.
The chair you use, for instance, may be cane
soaked and curled in spirals, painted white
and eloquent, or iron mesh and the table
a horizon of its own on plain, deal trestles,
bearing up unmarked, steel-cut foolscap,
a whole quire of it; when you leave I know
you look at them and you love their air of
unaggressive silence as you close the door.
The early summer, its covenant, its grace,
is everywhere: even shadows have leaves.
Somewhere you are writing or have written in
a room you came to as I come to this
room with honeyed corners, the interior sunless,
the windows shut but clear so I can see
the bay windbreak, the laburnum hang fire, feel
the ache of things ending in the jasmine darkening early.
The poem questions the role of women poets in the past and how that role affects the identity of women poets in the present. It seems that Boland uses this poem to create a sort of bond between the women poets of the past and the speaker. The attempt to create rooms for these women – and the fact that a male poet would not have a room like this – forces them into existence; if she can imagine them, then they must have existed. Everything in the room has a voice. The chair "painted white and eloquent" or the table bearing writing implements and paper all have an "air of unaggressive silence" and almost welcome the writer into the room. By inventing a room for these supposed other women poets, the speaker makes the poets concrete and, therefore, a source of strength for her to draw on. Do they, like her find the dried wildflowers on the cup a symbol of the traditional view of poetry and the male poets who usually wrote it? Are they as touched and comforted by the "honeyed corners" and the clear windows? The questions in this case have no choice but to be rhetorical as the speaker cannot identify these poets but, in the end, it does not matter as she has accomplished what she needs to do by creating them in her mind – she has found companionship and encouragement from the past. |
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Definition
Author: E. Boland Genre: poem
If Boland’s intention is to show women in a more positive light, then maybe she herself shouldn’t fall back on stereotypcial images of women as domestic. In this poem, the women discuss “the textures of synthetics as compared/ with the touch of strong cloth” (6-7). In “The Women” she is doing laundry, the women in “An Irish Childhood in England: 1951″ are menial ticket collectors, and in “Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening” she is watching the children from the garden. Honestly, this is nothing new; she is not showing anything that would lead me to advocate for the rewriting of textbooks. These women are outside history in the same way that majority of men leading everyday lives were not included in history. The verbs associated with the women are weak: they were “watching” (16), “wondering” (19), but most importantly “missing” (20). Because these were not women of action, they literally missed the train to a life worth living. Watching will not get you anywhere. Don’t lament that women are outside history if you are going to offer women of inaction as examples. Boland couldn’t even argue that it was naturalism (circumstances beyond human control) that left these women on the platform, because the quote she uses in stanza two, in its entirity means that while we don’t get to choose the fabric we have at our disposal, we can choose what to make with that fabric. These women had a choice to make and they chose the “unlived life” (23). If these women chose the unlived life, they should not complain. In case you can’t tell, I have issues with Boland’s poems about women. The one Boland woman worthy of honor is the woman from “Mise Erie,” “holding her half-dead baby to her” (32). She is a woman of strength and determination, unlike the women of “The Unlived Life.” |
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Author: E. Boland Genre: Poem
Poem:
Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.
Yes I am torching
ber curves and paps and wiles.
They scorch in my self denials.
How she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers
till I renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.
I vomited
her hungers.
Now the bitch is burning.
I am starved and curveless.
I am skin and bone.
She has learned her lesson.
Thin as a rib
I turn in sleep.
My dreams probe
a claustrophobia
a sensuous enclosure.
How warm it was and wide
once by a warm drum,
once by the song of his breath
and in his sleeping side.
Only a little more,
only a few more days
sinless, foodless,
I will slip
back into him again
as if I had never been away.
Caged so
I will grow
angular and holy
past pain,
keeping his heart
such company
as will make me forget
in a small space
the fall
into forked dark,
into python needs
heaving to hips and breasts
and lips and heat
and sweat and fat and greed.
The form of Eavan Boland's poem "Anorexic" is suitable for its subject matter. In the poem, a speaker describes the effect that anorexia has had on both her physical and emotional health. The speaker is violent and angry towards her body, which she views as a betrayer. She is also strangely spiritual about her growing thinness, which she equates with goodness, or in her words, "sinless, foodless."
The poem itself is long and thin on the page. The longest line is only seven words, and most are no more than three. In addition, almost all of the fifteen stanzas are only three lines long. This causes the poem to stretch down the page and act as a visual representation of anorexia.
Through her manipulation of the poem's form, Boland has also lent it an incantatory quality suitable for both the spiritual side of the subject matter, as well as the act of witch-burning she uses as a metaphor for her body's betrayal. There are many instances of alliteration, repetition, and rhyme (i.e. "starved and curveless...skin and bone," "How warm it was and wide//once by a warm drum," "Caged so/I will grow"), all of which are seen in both spells and prayer. |
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Definition
Author: E. Boland Genre: Awesomeness
Summary: The poem follows a figure who is emerging onto a street during a spring month. The weather is described as "washed-out yellows of narcissi / resisted dusk. And crocuses and snowdrops." The narrator says she felt melancholy because she is growing older, but the landscape around her is reflecting new life, and is a season of fragrance and refrain where everything will come to flower and be renewed, but she would not. She is distracted by a car splashing through a puddle, and Peat smoke that stayed "windless" and then notices another presence. It is a shepherdess in the distance, "her smile cracked, / her arm injured from the mantelpieces/ and pastorals where she posed with her crook." Then the speaker looks at the constellations in the sky and sees Cassiopeia "trapped" and "stabbed where / her thigh met her groin and her hand / her glittering wrist, with the pin-point of a star." Then she looks down the road where water gathers underneath cherry trees and blossoms "swam on their images" and sees a mermaid with "invested tresses,/ her breasts printed with the salf of it and all / the desolation of the North Sea in her face." She walks closer as dusk continues to fade into night and hears a voice saying:
This is what language did to us. Here
is the wound, the silence, the wretchedness
of tides and hillsides and stars where
we languish in a grammar of sighs,
in the high-minded search for euphony,
in the midnight rhetoric of poesie.
We cannot sweat here. Our skin is icy.
We cannot breed here. Our wombs are empty.
Help us to escape youth and beauty.
Write us out of the poem. Make us human
in cadences of change and mortal pain
and words we can grow old and die in. |
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Definition
Author: WH Auden; Genre: Poem
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
The basic premise of the poem is response to tragedy, or as the song goes "Obla Di, Obla Da, Life Goes On." The title refers to the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels. Auden visited the museum in 1938 and viewed the painting by Brueghel, which the poem is basically about. Generalizing at first, and then going into specifics the poem theme is the apathy with which humans view individual suffering.
Auden wrote that "In so far as poetry, or any of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate."
The poem juxtaposes ordinary events and exraordinary ones, although extraordinary events seem to deflate to everyday ones with his descriptions. Life goes on while a "miraculous birth occurs", but also while "the disaster" of Icarus's death happens.
'"Musée des Beaux Arts" (French for "Museum of Fine Arts") is the title of a poem by W. H. Auden from 1938. The poem's title derives from the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels which contains the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, thought until recently to be by Pieter Brueghel the Elder,[1] though still believed to be based on a lost original of his.[2]
"Brueghel's" painting portrays several men and a ship peacefully performing daily activities in a charming landscape. While this occurs, Icarus is visible in the bottom right hand corner of the picture, his legs splayed at absurd angles, drowning in the water.
The allusions in the first part of the poem to a "miraculous birth" and a "dreadful martyrdom" refer obliquely to Christianity, the subject of other paintings by Breughel in the museum that the poem evokes (e.g. "The Census at Bethlehem"[3] and "The Massacre of the Innocents"). The "forsaken cry" of Icarus alludes to Christ crying out on the cross, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
The poem also seems to opine the anability of art to effect any real change on society's path. Icarus is a story of hubris and self-destruction. For all of art's warnings, and their meditations on human suffering, humans continue to suffer. The ship still merrily explores the horizon, and life goes on, as does death.
Some years after Auden wrote this poem, William Carlos Williams wrote a poem titled "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" about the same painting. |
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Term
| “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” |
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Definition
Author: WH Auden; Genre: Poem in three parts
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
III
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
The First stanza reflects on the events of Yeats' (the Irish poet) death. Fittingly, it is in winter, the season of death. And as his life leaves his body, he comes less himself and his poems and the poet become more of a public object :
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
Still, the voice of the poet seems drowned out by the noise of modern life:
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
On the anniversary of the poet's death, only a handful of people will look back on it as a day in which something slightly unusual happened.
The second part of the poem addresses how the poet sees the poem function in the modern world:
Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
As with "Musee des Beaux Arts," art does nothing to heal the world of its woes, for enliven the cultural mind of its inhabitants, or change the course of history. Mad Ireland, which inspired the poet to write, is still mad. Poetry survives ("A way of happening, a mouth"). It is also a way of communicating with the past, speaking with the dead, so to speak (as Auden is doing here). It is a way to examine our lives, and the history of human misery, and the intertextuality in our own lives with what came before. |
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Author: Seamus Heaney; Genre: Poem (Northern Ireland) -- Contemporary
He is highly influenced by Irish history (especially pastoral history), politics, and the Anglo-Saxon history of the United Kingdom (he translated Beowulf).
The first poem in which Heaney says he felt his own voice as a poet; and, indeed, the poem is about the act of writing and the aim of writing for Heaney -- he will dig (compare to Rich's "Diving into the Wreck."
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.
Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.
My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
He is writing a poem about ordinary things: digging in the dirt, and watching his father and grandfather digging in the dirt as farmers. There is an intense connection that the family has had with the land, specifically with digging potatoes out the ground. The pride is evident in the poem. Writing, at first allows him to access theses memory's -- he is going back and uncovering his own past, memories. The poem starts with a short stanza about writing before shifting to his childhood memories about this father and grandfather: Between my finger and my thumb
"The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun."
Heaney's profession as a poet continues the legacy of his father and grandfather, but instead of digging in the dirt, he is digging with his words:
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
Is there a difference between mental labor and physical labor? Is one more noble than the other, |
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Author: Seamus Heaney; Genre: Poem (Northern Ireland) -- Contemporary
Poem:
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.
"Death of a Naturalist," the collection's second poem, details the exploits of a young boy collecting frogspawn from a flax-dam. The narrator remembers everything he saw and felt at those times. He then remembers his teacher telling him all about frogs in a section that speaks volumes about childhood innocence. Finally, we hear about a trip to the flax-dam that went wrong. He feels threatened by the frogs and flees. His interest in nature has gone - this is the death of a "naturalist" suggested in the poem's title. The poem makes extensive use of onomatopoeia and a simile that compares the behaviour of the amphibians to warfare ("Some sat poised like mud grenades") amongst other techniques.
Themes: Childhood memories; pastoral Ireland; connection to nature; man vs. nature; post-colonial subtext (the revolutionary frogs kick invading man out of their turf). |
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Author: Seamus Heaney; Genre: Poem (Northern Ireland) -- Contemporary
Seamus Heaney is fascinated with the Irish bogs. Early in his career, he encountered archaeologist P.V. Glob’s The Bog People – a study of European Iron Age culture, which has been preserved in the form of bodies (many of them ritually sacrificed). Most of Glob’s bog people were exhumed from Danish bogs, but others have been found since in Ireland. Glob’s work made a deep impression on the poet, and when Heaney combined its imagery with the national iconography of Ireland, the resulting ferment produced the poet’s rich mythology of a nurturing-and-devouring Earth Mother goddess. The poem depicts the long rest of a mummified female corpse whose clothing and jewelry seem to indicate high status, her rude discovery by a turfcutter, and her potentially vengeful resurrection. Though superficially the poem might be situated within the genre of gothic horror, Heaney encodes multiple layers of meaning in the poem by associating the Bog Queen with the body of the earth itself. In the context of his other bog poems, “Bog Queen” also reflects Ireland’s exploitation by England, and warns that the revolutionary spirit of Mother Ireland will rise to avenge wrongs perpetrated upon her. Heaney chooses to write in the voice of the dead queen. Although the other bog poems display a certain dialectical structure in which Heaney brings Ireland’s past and his present into conversation, showing how the archetypes of ancient Ireland are given disturbing new life in the Troubles of the twentieth century, in “Bog Queen” there is no distance between poet and subject. The fact that Heaney – a living, male poet – strives to identify with a dead, female queen sets this poem apart.
he first line of the poem suggests that the Bog Queen will rise, both by the choice of the first-person voice, implying her continuing consciousness, and the predatory words “I lay waiting” – though waiting for what, we do not yet know. The following stanzas describe the complex, organic process of her body’s decay and preservation in the bog, a process that brings her into communion with the earth’s natural processes. “My body was braille / for the creeping influences;” she says, suggesting that her body was a kind of text read by touch, understood and partially consumed by the sun and the “seeps of winter.” To the activity of winter she applies the term “digested,” a word that invokes both the process of decay and that of summarizing a text, as in literary “digests.” The roots that push into her body, however, are “illiterate,” and “ponder and die” in its hollows – unable to read her meaning. She follows this image with one of her brain “fermenting underground / dreams of Baltic amber” – once again combining images of an organic process with those of a mental one. Her brain may literally be transforming (“fermenting”) into a fossilized material (“amber”), but this image also suggests something less tangible, the slow production of dreams from a complex and organic “ferment” of the mind.
Heaney identifies the Bog Queen more explicitly with the earth itself in the following three stanzas, in which the gemstones of her crown are compared to “the bearings of history,” her sash to “a black glacier,” and her fine clothing to sediment dropped by glaciers on the hills of her breasts. The cold is “like the nuzzle of fjords / at my thighs—” as if her legs were the land. The turfcutter’s inadvertent violation, his spade cutting through her hair and uncovering her body, takes on an additional resonance – it is the earth, or perhaps Ireland herself that he has disturbed. Although the turfcutter then shows proper respect, “veil[ing] me again” and repacking her body in its resting place with barley stems, he betrays her when a nobleman’s wife bribes him to steal the Bog Queen’s severed hair. Cut and removed from the body, the plait serves the function of a severed umbilical cord for a hideous and terrifying rebirth: “. . . I rose from the dark, / hacked bone, skull-ware, / frayed stitches, tufts, / small gleams on the bank.”
The mummified queen is both the sleeping earth and the spirit of Ireland, and the poem serves as a warning to those who would violate her – thus the poem carries both an environmental and a political message. Heaney’s description leaves the reader in no doubt of this vengeful feminine spirit’s ancient power. Though laid to rest in the earth, she lies waiting and is not consumed; the processes of nature, rather than destroying her, preserve and augment her with the power of history.
Heaney’s Bog Queen is an example of the magna mater, or Great Mother archetype discussed in Jung’s psychoanalysis – the giver of life and death, closely associated with the body of the earth, the turning of the seasons, the unconscious, intuition, and the emotions.
Heaney’s choice to write “Bog Queen” from a first-person perspective similarly gives the reader direct access to the powerful, organic, feminine consciousness that Heaney has previously approached as a beloved and feared Other. Rather than merely being in relationship with Mother Earth, we are asked to fully participate in the turning of the seasons and the process of decay and rebirth; rather than speaking of wounded Ireland’s wrath, we are instead invited to experience it. In “Feeling into Words,” Heaney describes the Troubles as “a struggle between the cults and devotees of a god and a goddess,” with the male cult being the imperial English power and the female cult the “indigenous territorial numen” of Ireland whose power has been “temporarily usurped” (Anderson, 148). In “Bog Queen,” is it not enough for the poet to be a mere devotee of this goddess; instead, he seeks to put on her power, to channel into his poetry the experience and desires of the primal force he sees as animating Ireland’s national spirit. |
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| Author: Seamus Heaney; Genre: Poem (Northern Ireland) -- Contemporary |
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Author: Samuel Beckett; Genre: absurdist drama
Act I
Waiting for Godot follows two days in the lives of a pair of men who divert themselves while they wait expectantly and in vain for someone named Godot to arrive. They claim him as an acquaintance but in fact hardly know him, admitting that they would not recognise him were they to see him. To occupy themselves, they eat, sleep, converse, argue, sing, play games, exercise, swap hats, and contemplate suicide – anything "to hold the terrible silence at bay".
The play opens with the character Estragon struggling to remove his boot from his foot. Estragon eventually gives up, muttering, "Nothing to be done." His friend Vladimir takes up the thought and muses on it, the implication being that nothing is a thing that has to be done and this pair is going to have to spend the rest of the play doing it.[5] When Estragon finally succeeds in removing his boot, he looks and feels inside but finds nothing. Just prior to this, Vladimir peers into his hat. The motif recurs throughout the play.
The pair discuss repentance, particularly in relation to the two thieves crucified alongside Jesus, and that only one of the Four Evangelists mentions that one of them was saved. This is the first of numerous Biblical references in the play, which may be linked to its putative central theme of the search for and reconciliation with God, as well as salvation: "We're saved!" they cry on more than one occasion when they feel that Godot may be near.
Presently, Vladimir expresses his frustration with Estragon's limited conversational skills: "Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can't you, once in a while?" Estragon struggles in this regard throughout the play, and Vladimir generally takes the lead in their dialogue and encounters with others. Vladimir is at times hostile towards his companion, but in general they are close, frequently embracing and supporting one another.
Estragon peers out into the audience and comments on the bleakness of his surroundings. He wants to depart but is told that they cannot because they must wait for Godot. The pair cannot agree, however, on whether or not they are in the right place or that this is the arranged day for their meeting with Godot; indeed, they are not even sure what day it is. Throughout the play, experienced time is attenuated, fractured or eerily non-existent.[6] The only thing that they are fairly sure about is that they are to meet at a tree: there is one nearby.
Estragon dozes off, but Vladimir is not interested in hearing about his dream after rousing him. Estragon wants to hear an old joke about a brothel, which Vladimir starts but cannot finish, as he is suddenly compelled to rush off and urinate. He does not finish the story when he returns, asking Estragon instead what else they might do to pass the time. Estragon suggests that they hang themselves, but they quickly abandon the idea when it seems that they might not both die: this would leave one of them alone, an intolerable notion. They decide to do nothing: "It's safer," explains Estragon,[7] before asking what Godot is going to do for them when he arrives. For once it is Vladimir who struggles to remember: "Oh ... nothing very definite," is the best that he can manage.[7]
When Estragon declares that he is hungry, Vladimir provides a carrot, most of which, and without much relish, the former eats. The diversion ends as it began, Estragon announcing that they still have nothing to do. Their waiting is interrupted by the passing through of Pozzo and his heavily-laden slave Lucky. "A terrible cry"[8] from the wings heralds the initial entrance of Lucky, who has a rope tied around his neck. He crosses half the stage before his master appears holding the other end. Pozzo barks orders at his slave and frequently calls him a "pig", but is civil towards the other two. They mistake him at first for Godot and clearly do not recognise him for the self-proclaimed personage he is. This irks him, but, while maintaining that the land that they are on is his, he acknowledges that "the road is free to all".[9]
Deciding to rest for a while, Pozzo enjoys a pre-packed meal of chicken and wine. Finished, he casts the bones aside, and Estragon jumps at the chance to ask for them, much to Vladimir's embarrassment, but is told that they belong to the carrier. He must first, therefore, ask Lucky if he wants them. Estragon tries, but Lucky only hangs his head, refusing to answer. Taking this as a "no", Estragon claims the bones.
Vladimir takes Pozzo to task regarding his mistreatment of his slave, but his protestations are ignored. When the original pairing tries to find out why Lucky does not put down his load (at least not unless his master is prevailing on him to do something else), Pozzo explains that Lucky is attempting to mollify him to prevent him from selling him. At this, Lucky begins to cry. Pozzo provides a handkerchief, but, when Estragon tries to wipe his tears away, Lucky kicks him in the shins.
Before he leaves, Pozzo asks if he can do anything for the pair in exchange for the company they have provided him during his rest. Estragon tries to ask for some money, but Vladimir cuts him short, explaining that they are not beggars. They nevertheless accept an offer to have Lucky dance and think.
The dance is clumsy and shuffling, and everyone is disappointed. Lucky's "think", induced by Vladimir's putting his hat on his head, is a lengthy and disjointed verbal stream of consciousness.[10] The soliloquy begins relatively coherently but quickly dissolves into logorrhoea and only ends when Vladimir rips off Lucky's hat.
Once Lucky has been revived, Pozzo has him pack up his things and, together, they leave. At the end of the act (and its successor), a boy arrives, purporting to be a messenger sent from Godot, to advise the pair that he will not be coming that "evening but surely tomorrow."[11] During Vladimir's interrogation of the boy, he asks if he came the day before, making it apparent that the two men have been waiting for an indefinite period and will likely continue to wait ad infinitum. After the boy departs, they decide to leave but make no attempt to do so, an action repeated in Act II, as the curtain is drawn.
Act II
Act II opens with Vladimir singing a recursive round about a dog which serves to illustrate the cyclical nature of the play's universe, and also points toward the play's debt to the carnivalesque, music hall traditions, and vaudeville comedy (this is only one of a number of canine references and allusions in the play). There is a bit of realisation on Vladimir's part that the world they are trapped in evinces convoluted progression (or lack thereof) of time. He begins to see that although there is notional evidence of linear progression, basically he is living the same day over and over. Eugene Webb writes of Vladimir's song that[12] "Time in the song is not a linear sequence, but an endlessly reiterated moment, the content of which is only one eternal event: death."[13]
Once again Estragon maintains he spent the night in a ditch and was beaten – by "ten of them"[14] this time – though once again he shows no sign of injury. Vladimir tries to talk to him about what appears to be a seasonal change in the tree and the proceedings of the day before, but he has only a vague recollection. Vladimir tries to get Estragon to remember Pozzo and Lucky but all he can call to mind are the bones and getting kicked. Vladimir realises here an opportunity to produce tangible evidence of the previous day's events. With some difficulty he gets Estragon to show him his leg. There is a wound which is beginning to fester. Only then Vladimir notices that Estragon is not wearing any boots.
He discovers the pair of boots, which Estragon insists are not his but nevertheless fit when he tries them on. With no carrots left, Vladimir offers Estragon the choice between a turnip and a radish. He opts for the radish but it is black and he hands it back. He decides to try and sleep again and adopts the same fetal position as the previous day. Vladimir sings him a lullaby.
Vladimir notices Lucky's hat, and he decides to try it on. This leads to a frenetic hat swapping scene. They play at imitating Pozzo and Lucky, but Estragon can barely remember having met them and simply does what Vladimir asks. They fire insults at each other and then make up. After that, they attempt some physical jerks which do not work out well, and even attempt a single yoga position, which fails miserably.
Pozzo and Lucky arrive, with Pozzo now blind and insisting that Lucky is dumb. The rope is now much shorter, and Lucky – who has acquired a new hat – leads Pozzo, rather than being driven by him. Pozzo has lost all notion of time, and assures them he cannot remember meeting them the day before, and does not expect to remember the current day's events when they are over.
They fall in a heap at one point. Estragon sees an opportunity to extort more food or to exact revenge on Lucky for kicking him. The issue is debated at length. Pozzo offers them money but Vladimir sees more worth in their entertainment value since they are compelled to wait to see if Godot arrives anyway. Eventually though, they all find their way onto their feet.
Whereas the Pozzo in Act I is a windbag, he now (as a blind man) appears to have gained some insight. His parting words – which Vladimir expands upon later – eloquently encapsulate the brevity of human existence: "They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more."[15]
Lucky and Pozzo depart. The same boy returns to inform them not to expect Godot today, but promises he will arrive the next day. The two again consider suicide but their rope, Estragon's belt, breaks in two when they tug on it. Estragon's trousers fall down, but he does not notice until Vladimir tells him to pull them up. They resolve to bring a more suitable piece and hang themselves the next day, if Godot fails to arrive.
Again, they agree to leave but neither of them makes any move to go.
Analysis
"Because the play is so stripped down, so elemental, it invites all kinds of social and political and religious interpretation," wrote Normand Berlin in a tribute to the play in Autumn 1999, "with Beckett himself placed in different schools of thought, different movements and 'ism's. The attempts to pin him down have not been successful, but the desire to do so is natural when we encounter a writer whose minimalist art reaches for bedrock reality. 'Less' forces us to look for 'more,' and the need to talk about Godot and about Beckett has resulted in a steady outpouring of books and articles."[56][57]
Throughout Waiting for Godot, the reader or viewer may encounter religious, philosophical, classical, psychoanalytical and biographical – especially wartime – references. There are ritualistic aspects and elements taken directly from vaudeville[58] and there is a danger in making more of these than what they are: that is, merely structural conveniences, avatars into which the writer places his fictional characters. The play "exploits several archetypal forms and situations, all of which lend themselves to both comedy and pathos."[59] Beckett makes this point emphatically clear in the opening notes to Film: "No truth value attaches to the above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience."[60] He made another important remark to Laurence Harvey, saying that his "work does not depend on experience – [it is] not a record of experience. Of course you use it."[61]
Beckett tired quickly of "the endless misunderstanding". As far back as 1955, he remarked, "Why people have to complicate a thing so simple I can't make out."[62] He was not forthcoming with anything more than cryptic clues, however: "Peter Woodthrope [who played Estragon] remembered asking him one day in a taxi what the play was really about: 'It's all symbiosis, Peter; it's symbiosis,' answered Beckett."[63]
Beckett directed the play for the Schiller-Theatre in 1975. Although he had overseen many productions, this was the first time that he had taken complete control. Walter Asmus was his conscientious young assistant director. The production was not naturalistic. Beckett explained,
It is a game, everything is a game. When all four of them are lying on the ground, that cannot be handled naturalistically. That has got to be done artificially, balletically. Otherwise everything becomes an imitation, an imitation of reality [...]. It should become clear and transparent, not dry. It is a game in order to survive."[64]
Over the years, Beckett clearly realised that the greater part of Godot's success came down to the fact that it was open to a variety of readings and that this was not necessarily a bad thing. Beckett himself sanctioned "one of the most famous mixed-race productions of Godot, performed at the Baxter Theatre in the University of Cape Town, directed by Donald Howarth, with [...] two black actors, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, playing Didi and Gogo; Pozzo, dressed in checked shirt and gumboots reminiscent of an Afrikaner landlord, and Lucky ('a shanty town piece of white trash'[65]) were played by two white actors, Bill Flynn and Peter Piccolo [...]. The Baxter production has often been portrayed as if it were an explicitly political production, when in fact it received very little emphasis.[citation needed] What such a reaction showed, however, was that, although the play can in no way be taken as a political allegory, there are elements that are relevant to any local situation in which one man is being exploited or oppressed by another."[66]
[edit]Political
"It was seen as an allegory of the cold war"[67] or of French resistance to the Germans. Graham Hassell writes, "[T]he intrusion of Pozzo and Lucky [...] seems like nothing more than a metaphor for Ireland's view of mainland Britain, where society has ever been blighted by a greedy ruling élite keeping the working classes passive and ignorant by whatever means."[68]
The pair is often played with Irish accents, as in the Beckett on Film project. This, some feel, is an inevitable consequence of Beckett's rhythms and phraseology, but it is not stipulated in the text. At any rate, they are not of English stock: at one point early in the play, Estragon mocks the English pronunciation of "calm" and has fun with "the story of the Englishman in the brothel".[69]
[edit]Psychological
[edit]Freudian
"Bernard Dukore develops a triadic theory in Didi, Gogo and the absent Godot, based on Sigmund Freud's trinitarian description of the psyche in The Ego and the Id (1923) and the usage of onomastic techniques. Dukore defines the characters by what they lack: the rational Go-go embodies the incomplete ego, the missing pleasure principle: (e)go-(e)go. Di-di (id-id) – who is more instinctual and irrational – is seen as the backward id or subversion of the rational principle. Godot fulfils the function of the superego or moral standards. Pozzo and Lucky are just re-iterations of the main protagonists. Dukore finally sees Beckett's play as a metaphor for the futility of man's existence when salvation is expected from an external entity, and the self is denied introspection."[70]
[edit]Jungian (Carl Jung, personality studies/behaviorist)
"The four archetypal personalities or the four aspects of the soul are grouped in two pairs: the ego and the shadow, the persona and the soul's image (animus or anima). The shadow is the container of all our despised emotions repressed by the ego. Lucky, the shadow serves as the polar opposite of the egocentric Pozzo, prototype of prosperous mediocrity, who incessantly controls and persecutes his subordinate, thus symbolising the oppression of the unconscious shadow by the despotic ego. Lucky's monologue in Act I appears as a manifestation of a stream of repressed unconsciousness, as he is allowed to "think" for his master. Estragon's name has another connotation, besides that of the aromatic herb, tarragon: "estragon" is a cognate of oestrogen, the female hormone (Carter, 130). This prompts us to identify him with the anima, the feminine image of Vladimir's soul. It explains Estragon's propensity for poetry, his sensitivity and dreams, his irrational moods. Vladimir appears as the complementary masculine principle, or perhaps the rational persona of the contemplative type."[71]
[edit]Philosophical
[edit]Existential
Broadly speaking, existentialists hold that there are certain fundamental questions that every human being must come to terms with if they are to take their subjective existences seriously and with intrinsic value. Questions such as death, the meaning of human existence and the place of (or lack of) God in that existence are among them. By and large, the theories of existentialism assert that conscious reality is very complex and without an "objective" or universally known value: the individual must create value by affirming it and living it, not by simply talking about it or philosophising it in the mind. The play may be seen to touch on all of these issues.
Much of Beckett's work – including Godot – is often considered by philosophical and literary scholars to be part of the movement of the Theatre of the Absurd, a form of theatre which stemmed from the Absurdist philosophy of Albert Camus. Absurdism itself is a branch off of the traditional assertions of existentialism, pioneered by Søren Kierkegaard, and posits that, while inherent meaning might very well exist in the universe, human beings are incapable of finding it due to some form of mental or philosophical limitation. Thus humanity is doomed to be faced with the Absurd, or the absolute absurdity of existence in lack of intrinsic purpose.
[edit]Ethical
Just after Didi and Gogo have been particularly selfish and callous, the boy comes to say that Godot is not coming. The boy (or pair of boys) may be seen to represent meekness and hope before compassion is consciously excluded by an evolving personality and character, and in which case may be the youthful Pozzo and Lucky. Thus Godot is compassion and fails to arrive every day, as he says he will. No-one is concerned that a boy is beaten.[72] In this interpretation, there is the irony that only by changing their hearts to be compassionate can the characters fixed to the tree move on and cease to have to wait for Godot.
[edit]Christian
Much can be read into Beckett's inclusion of the story of the two thieves from Luke 23:39–43 and the ensuing discussion of repentance. It is easy to see the solitary tree as representative of the Christian cross or, indeed, the tree of life. Similarly, because The Boy describes God as having a white beard, and Godot, if the boy's testimony is to be believed, also has a white beard, many see God and Godot as one and the same. Vladimir's "Christ have mercy upon us!"[73] could be taken as evidence that that is at least what he believes.
This reading is given further weight early in the first act when Estragon asks Vladimir what it is that he has requested from Godot:
VLADIMIR: Oh ... nothing very definite.
ESTRAGON: A kind of prayer.
VLADIMIR: Precisely.
ESTRAGON: A vague supplication.
VLADIMIR: Exactly.[74]
Much of the play, steeped as it is in scriptural allusion, deals with the subject of religion. The entire play takes place atop a hill, which some may interpret as being closer to heaven, giving the play a purpose as religious parable.
According to Anthony Cronin, "[Beckett] always possessed a Bible, at the end more than one edition, and Bible concordances were always among the reference books on his shelves."[75] Beckett himself was quite open on the issue: "Christianity is a mythology with which I am perfectly familiar so I naturally use it."[76] As Cronin (one of his biographers) points out, his biblical references "may be ironic or even sarcastic".[77]
"In answer to a defence counsel question in 1937 (during a libel action brought by his uncle) as to whether he was a Christian, Jew or atheist, Beckett replied, 'None of the three'".[78] Looking at Beckett's entire œuvre, Mary Bryden observed that "the hypothesised God who emerges from Beckett's texts is one who is both cursed for his perverse absence and cursed for his surveillant presence. He is by turns dismissed, satirised, or ignored, but he, and his tortured son, are never definitively discarded."[79]
At a symbolical level, we can visualise the two characters Estragon and Vladimir as the two thieves mentioned in the drama. Estragon is punished for some reasons unknown which could mean that he is the thief who has been damned for abusing Christ. On the other hand, Vladimir could be the thief who has escaped from damnation even if it is only physical. This retribution shows the arbitrary God depicted by Beckett.[citation needed]
[edit]Autobiographical
Waiting for Godot has been described as a "metaphor for the long walk into Roussillon, when Beckett and Suzanne slept in haystacks [...] during the day and walked by night [... or] of the relationship of Beckett to Joyce." The earliest drafts contain significant personal references, but these were later excised.
Homoerotic
That the play calls on only male actors, with scarcely a reference to women, has caused some to look upon Vladimir and Estragon's relationship as quasi-marital: "they bicker, they embrace each other, they depend upon each other [.... T]hey might be thought of as a married couple." In Act One, Estragon speaks gently to his friend, approaching him slowly and laying a hand on his shoulder. After asking for his hand in turn and telling him not to be stubborn, he suddenly embraces him but backs off just as quickly, complaining, "You stink of garlic!"
When Estragon reminisces about his occasional glances at the Bible and remembers how prettily coloured were the maps of the Dead Sea, he remarks, "That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon. We'll swim. We'll be happy." Furthermore, the temptation to achieve post-mortem erections arises in the context of a world without females. Estragon in particular is "[h]ighly excited", in contrast with Vladimir, who chooses this moment to talk about shrieking mandrakes. His apparent indifference to his friend's arousal may be viewed as a sort of playful teasing.
Another possible instance of homoeroticism has been discerned in the segment in which Estragon "sucks the end of it [his carrot]", although Beckett describes this as a meditative action. |
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Definition
Author: John Obsorne; Genre: drama; post-modern; 1956
about a love triangle involving an intelligent but disaffected young man (Jimmy Porter), his upper-middle-class, impassive wife (Alison), and her haughty best friend (Helena Charles). Cliff, an amiable Welsh lodger, attempts to keep the peace. The play was a success on the London stage, and spawned the term "angry young men" to describe Osborne and those of his generation who employed harshness and realism in the theatre in contrast to the more escapist fare previously seen.
Act 1 opens on a dismal Sunday afternoon in Jimmy and Alison's cramped attic in the English Midlands. Jimmy and Cliff are attempting to read the Sunday papers, plus the radical weekly, "price ninepence, obtainable at any bookstall" as Jimmy snaps, claiming it from Cliff. This is a reference to the New Statesman, and in the context of the period would have instantly signalled the pair's political preference to the audience. Alison is attempting to do the week's ironing and is only half listening as Jimmy and Cliff engage in the expository dialogue.
We learn that there's a huge social gulf between Jimmy and Alison. Her family is upper-middle class military, perhaps verging on upper, while Jimmy is decidedly working-class. He had to campaign hard against her family's disapproval to win her. "Alison's mummy and I took one look at each other, and from then on the age of chivalry was dead", he explains. We also learn that the sole family income is derived from a sweet stall in the local market — an enterprise that is surely well beneath Jimmy's education, let alone Alison's "station in life".
As Act 1 progresses, Jimmy becomes more and more vituperative, transferring his contempt for Alison's family onto her personally, calling her "pusillanimous" and generally belittling her to Cliff. It's possible to play this scene as though Jimmy thinks it's all a joke, but most actors opt for playing it as though he really is excoriating her.[citation needed] The tirade ends with some physical horseplay, resulting in the ironing board overturning and Alison's arm getting a burn. Jimmy exits to play his trumpet off stage.
Alison and Cliff play a tender scene, during which she confides that she's accidentally pregnant and can't quite bring herself to tell Jimmy. Cliff urges her to tell him. When Jimmy returns, Alison announces that her actress friend Helena Charles is coming to stay, and it's entirely obvious that Jimmy despises Helena even more than Alison. He flies into a total rage, and conflict is inevitable.
Act 2 opens on another Sunday afternoon, with Helena and Alison making lunch. In a two-handed scene, Alison gives a clue as to why she decided to take Jimmy on—her own minor rebellion against her upbringing plus her admiration of Jimmy's campaigns against the dereliction of English post-war, post-atom-bomb life. She describes Jimmy to Helena as a "knight in shining armour". Helena says, firmly, "You've got to fight him".
Jimmy enters, and the tirade continues. If his Act 1 material could be played as a joke, there's no doubt about the intentional viciousness of his attacks on Helena. When the women put on hats and declare that they're going to church, Jimmy's sense of betrayal peaks. When he leaves to take an urgent phone call, Helena announces that she's forced the issue. She's sent a telegram to Alison's parents asking them to come and "rescue" her. Alison is stunned but agrees that she will go.
After a scene break, we see Alison's father, Colonel Redfern, who has come to collect her to take her back to her family home. The playwright allows the Colonel to come across as quite a sympathetic character, albeit totally out of touch with the modern world (as he himself admits). "You're hurt because everything's changed", Alison tells him, "and Jimmy's hurt because everything's stayed the same".
Helena arrives to say goodbye, intending to leave very soon herself. Alison is surprised that Helena is staying on for another day, but she leaves, giving Cliff a note for Jimmy. Cliff in turn hands it to Helena and leaves, saying "I hope he rams it up your nostrils". Almost immediately, Jimmy bursts in. His contempt at finding a "goodbye" note makes him turn on Helena again, warning her to keep out of his way until she leaves. Helena tells him that Alison is expecting a baby, and Jimmy admits grudgingly that he's taken aback. However, his tirade continues. They first come to physical blows, and then as the Act 2 curtain falls, Jimmy and Helena are kissing passionately and falling on the bed.
The final act opens as a deliberate replay of Act 1, but this time with Helena at the ironing-board wearing Jimmy's Act 1 red shirt. Months have passed. Jimmy is notably more pleasant to Helena than he was to Alison in Act 1. She actually laughs at his jokes, and the three of them (Jimmy, Cliff and Helena) get into a music hall comedy routine that obviously isn't improvised. Cliff announces that he's decided to strike out on his own. As Jimmy leaves the room to get ready for a final night out for the three of them, he opens the door to find Alison, looking like death. Instead of caring for her he snaps over his shoulder "Friend of yours to see you" and abruptly leaves.
After a scene break, Alison explains to Helena that she lost the baby—one of Jimmy's cruellest speeches in Act 1 expressed the wish that Alison would conceive a child and lose it—the two women reconcile but Helena realises that what she's done is immoral and she in turn decides to leave. She summons Jimmy to hear her decision and he lets her go with a sarcastic farewell.
The play ends with a sentimental reconciliation between Jimmy and Alison. They revive an old game they used to play, pretending to be bears and squirrels, and seem to be in a state of truce. |
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Definition
Author: George Orwell; Genre: dystopian novel; political fiction
Summary:
W inston Smith is a low-ranking member of the ruling Party in London, in the nation of Oceania. Everywhere Winston goes, even his own home, the Party watches him through telescreens; everywhere he looks he sees the face of the Party’s seemingly omniscient leader, a figure known only as Big Brother. The Party controls everything in Oceania, even the people’s history and language. Currently, the Party is forcing the implementation of an invented language called Newspeak, which attempts to prevent political rebellion by eliminating all words related to it. Even thinking rebellious thoughts is illegal. Such thoughtcrime is, in fact, the worst of all crimes.
As the novel opens, Winston feels frustrated by the oppression and rigid control of the Party, which prohibits free thought, sex, and any expression of individuality. Winston dislikes the party and has illegally purchased a diary in which to write his criminal thoughts. He has also become fixated on a powerful Party member named O’Brien, whom Winston believes is a secret member of the Brotherhood—the mysterious, legendary group that works to overthrow the Party.
Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, where he alters historical records to fit the needs of the Party. He notices a coworker, a beautiful dark-haired girl, staring at him, and worries that she is an informant who will turn him in for his thoughtcrime. He is troubled by the Party’s control of history: the Party claims that Oceania has always been allied with Eastasia in a war against Eurasia, but Winston seems to recall a time when this was not true. The Party also claims that Emmanuel Goldstein, the alleged leader of the Brotherhood, is the most dangerous man alive, but this does not seem plausible to Winston. Winston spends his evenings wandering through the poorest neighborhoods in London, where the proletarians, or proles, live squalid lives, relatively free of Party monitoring.
One day, Winston receives a note from the dark-haired girl that reads “I love you.” She tells him her name, Julia, and they begin a covert affair, always on the lookout for signs of Party monitoring. Eventually they rent a room above the secondhand store in the prole district where Winston bought the diary. This relationship lasts for some time. Winston is sure that they will be caught and punished sooner or later (the fatalistic Winston knows that he has been doomed since he wrote his first diary entry), while Julia is more pragmatic and optimistic. As Winston’s affair with Julia progresses, his hatred for the Party grows more and more intense. At last, he receives the message that he has been waiting for: O’Brien wants to see him.
Winston and Julia travel to O’Brien’s luxurious apartment. As a member of the powerful Inner Party (Winston belongs to the Outer Party), O’Brien leads a life of luxury that Winston can only imagine. O’Brien confirms to Winston and Julia that, like them, he hates the Party, and says that he works against it as a member of the Brotherhood. He indoctrinates Winston and Julia into the Brotherhood, and gives Winston a copy of Emmanuel Goldstein’s book, the manifesto of the Brotherhood. Winston reads the book—an amalgam of several forms of class-based twentieth-century social theory—to Julia in the room above the store. Suddenly, soldiers barge in and seize them. Mr. Charrington, the proprietor of the store, is revealed as having been a member of the Thought Police all along.
Torn away from Julia and taken to a place called the Ministry of Love, Winston finds that O’Brien, too, is a Party spy who simply pretended to be a member of the Brotherhood in order to trap Winston into committing an open act of rebellion against the Party. O’Brien spends months torturing and brainwashing Winston, who struggles to resist. At last, O’Brien sends him to the dreaded Room 101, the final destination for anyone who opposes the Party. Here, O’Brien tells Winston that he will be forced to confront his worst fear. Throughout the novel, Winston has had recurring nightmares about rats; O’Brien now straps a cage full of rats onto Winston’s head and prepares to allow the rats to eat his face. Winston snaps, pleading with O’Brien to do it to Julia, not to him.
Giving up Julia is what O’Brien wanted from Winston all along. His spirit broken, Winston is released to the outside world. He meets Julia but no longer feels anything for her. He has accepted the Party entirely and has learned to love Big Brother.
Character List
Winston Smith - A minor member of the ruling Party in near-future London, Winston Smith is a thin, frail, contemplative, intellectual, and fatalistic thirty-nine-year-old. Winston hates the totalitarian control and enforced repression that are characteristic of his government. He harbors revolutionary dreams.
ulia - Winston’s lover, a beautiful dark-haired girl working in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. Julia enjoys sex, and claims to have had affairs with many Party members. Julia is pragmatic and optimistic. Her rebellion against the Party is small and personal, for her own enjoyment, in contrast to Winston’s ideological motivation.
’Brien - A mysterious, powerful, and sophisticated member of the Inner Party whom Winston believes is also a member of the Brotherhood, the legendary group of anti-Party rebels.
Big Brother - Though he never appears in the novel, and though he may not actually exist, Big Brother, the perceived ruler of Oceania, is an extremely important figure. Everywhere Winston looks he sees posters of Big Brother’s face bearing the message “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” Big Brother’s image is stamped on coins and broadcast on the unavoidable telescreens; it haunts Winston’s life and fills him with hatred and fascination.
Mr. Charrington - An old man who runs a secondhand store in the prole district. Kindly and encouraging, Mr. Charrington seems to share Winston’s interest in the past. He also seems to support Winston’s rebellion against the Party and his relationship with Julia, since he rents Winston a room without a telescreen in which to carry out his affair. But Mr. Charrington is not as he seems. He is a member of the Thought Police.
Syme - An intelligent, outgoing man who works with Winston at the Ministry of Truth. Syme specializes in language. As the novel opens, he is working on a new edition of the Newspeak dictionary. Winston believes Syme is too intelligent to stay in the Party’s favor.
Themes, Motifs & Symbols
The Dangers of Totalitarianism
1984 is a political novel written with the purpose of warning readers in the West of the dangers of totalitarian government. Having witnessed firsthand the horrific lengths to which totalitarian governments in Spain and Russia would go in order to sustain and increase their power, Orwell designed 1984 to sound the alarm in Western nations still unsure about how to approach the rise of communism. In 1949, the Cold War had not yet escalated, many American intellectuals supported communism, and the state of diplomacy between democratic and communist nations was highly ambiguous. In the American press, the Soviet Union was often portrayed as a great moral experiment. Orwell, however, was deeply disturbed by the widespread cruelties and oppressions he observed in communist countries, and seems to have been particularly concerned by the role of technology in enabling oppressive governments to monitor and control their citizens.
In 1984, Orwell portrays the perfect totalitarian society, the most extreme realization imaginable of a modern-day government with absolute power. The title of the novel was meant to indicate to its readers in 1949 that the story represented a real possibility for the near future: if totalitarianism were not opposed, the title suggested, some variation of the world described in the novel could become a reality in only thirty-five years. Orwell portrays a state in which government monitors and controls every aspect of human life to the extent that even having a disloyal thought is against the law. As the novel progresses, the timidly rebellious Winston Smith sets out to challenge the limits of the Party’s power, only to discover that its ability to control and enslave its subjects dwarfs even his most paranoid conceptions of its reach. As the reader comes to understand through Winston’s eyes, The Party uses a number of techniques to control its citizens, each of which is an important theme of its own in the novel. These include:
Psychological Manipulation
The Party barrages its subjects with psychological stimuli designed to overwhelm the mind’s capacity for independent thought. The giant telescreen in every citizen’s room blasts a constant stream of propaganda designed to make the failures and shortcomings of the Party appear to be triumphant successes. The telescreens also monitor behavior—everywhere they go, citizens are continuously reminded, especially by means of the omnipresent signs reading “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU,” that the authorities are scrutinizing them. The Party undermines family structure by inducting children into an organization called the Junior Spies, which brainwashes and encourages them to spy on their parents and report any instance of disloyalty to the Party. The Party also forces individuals to suppress their sexual desires, treating sex as merely a procreative duty whose end is the creation of new Party members. The Party then channels people’s pent-up frustration and emotion into intense, ferocious displays of hatred against the Party’s political enemies. Many of these enemies have been invented by the Party expressly for this purpose.
Physical Control
In addition to manipulating their minds, the Party also controls the bodies of its subjects. The Party constantly watches for any sign of disloyalty, to the point that, as Winston observes, even a tiny facial twitch could lead to an arrest. A person’s own nervous system becomes his greatest enemy. The Party forces its members to undergo mass morning exercises called the Physical Jerks, and then to work long, grueling days at government agencies, keeping people in a general state of exhaustion. Anyone who does manage to defy the Party is punished and “reeducated” through systematic and brutal torture. After being subjected to weeks of this intense treatment, Winston himself comes to the conclusion that nothing is more powerful than physical pain—no emotional loyalty or moral conviction can overcome it. By conditioning the minds of their victims with physical torture, the Party is able to control reality, convincing its subjects that 2 + 2 = 5.
Control of Information and History
The Party controls every source of information, managing and rewriting the content of all newspapers and histories for its own ends. The Party does not allow individuals to keep records of their past, such as photographs or documents. As a result, memories become fuzzy and unreliable, and citizens become perfectly willing to believe whatever the Party tells them. By controlling the present, the Party is able to manipulate the past. And in controlling the past, the Party can justify all of its actions in the present.
Technology
By means of telescreens and hidden microphones across the city, the Party is able to monitor its members almost all of the time. Additionally, the Party employs complicated mechanisms (1984 was written in the era before computers) to exert large-scale control on economic production and sources of information, and fearsome machinery to inflict torture upon those it deems enemies. 1984 reveals that technology, which is generally perceived as working toward moral good, can also facilitate the most diabolical evil.
Language as Mind Control
One of Orwell’s most important messages in 1984 is that language is of central importance to human thought because it structures and limits the ideas that individuals are capable of formulating and expressing. If control of language were centralized in a political agency, Orwell proposes, such an agency could possibly alter the very structure of language to make it impossible to even conceive of disobedient or rebellious thoughts, because there would be no words with which to think them. This idea manifests itself in the language of Newspeak, which the Party has introduced to replace English. The Party is constantly refining and perfecting Newspeak, with the ultimate goal that no one will be capable of conceptualizing anything that might question the Party’s absolute power.
Interestingly, many of Orwell’s ideas about language as a controlling force have been modified by writers and critics seeking to deal with the legacy of colonialism. During colonial times, foreign powers took political and military control of distant regions and, as a part of their occupation, instituted their own language as the language of government and business. Postcolonial writers often analyze or redress the damage done to local populations by the loss of language and the attendant loss of culture and historical connection.
Doublethink
The idea of “doublethink” emerges as an important consequence of the Party’s massive campaign of large-scale psychological manipulation. Simply put, doublethink is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s mind at the same time. As the Party’s mind-control techniques break down an individual’s capacity for independent thought, it becomes possible for that individual to believe anything that the Party tells them, even while possessing information that runs counter to what they are being told. At the Hate Week rally, for instance, the Party shifts its diplomatic allegiance, so the nation it has been at war with suddenly becomes its ally, and its former ally becomes its new enemy. When the Party speaker suddenly changes the nation he refers to as an enemy in the middle of his speech, the crowd accepts his words immediately, and is ashamed to find that it has made the wrong signs for the event. In the same way, people are able to accept the Party ministries’ names, though they contradict their functions: the Ministry of Plenty oversees economic shortages, the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth conducts propaganda and historical revisionism, and the Ministry of Love is the center of the Party’s operations of torture and punishment.
Urban Decay
Urban decay proves a pervasive motif in 1984. The London that Winston Smith calls home is a dilapidated, rundown city in which buildings are crumbling, conveniences such as elevators never work, and necessities such as electricity and plumbing are extremely unreliable. Though Orwell never discusses the theme openly, it is clear that the shoddy disintegration of London, just like the widespread hunger and poverty of its inhabitants, is due to the Party’s mismanagement and incompetence. One of the themes of 1984, inspired by the history of twentieth-century communism, is that totalitarian regimes are viciously effective at enhancing their own power and miserably incompetent at providing for their citizens. The grimy urban decay in London is an important visual reminder of this idea, and offers insight into the Party’s priorities through its contrast to the immense technology the Party develops to spy on its citizens.
Big Brother
Throughout London, Winston sees posters showing a man gazing down over the words “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” everywhere he goes. Big Brother is the face of the Party. The citizens are told that he is the leader of the nation and the head of the Party, but Winston can never determine whether or not he actually exists. In any case, the face of Big Brother symbolizes the Party in its public manifestation; he is a reassurance to most people (the warmth of his name suggests his ability to protect), but he is also an open threat (one cannot escape his gaze). Big Brother also symbolizes the vagueness with which the higher ranks of the Party present themselves—it is impossible to know who really rules Oceania, what life is like for the rulers, or why they act as they do. Winston thinks he remembers that Big Brother emerged around 1960, but the Party’s official records date Big Brother’s existence back to 1930, before Winston was even born.
The Glass Paperweight and St. Clement’s Church
By deliberately weakening people’s memories and flooding their minds with propaganda, the Party is able to replace individuals’ memories with its own version of the truth. It becomes nearly impossible for people to question the Party’s power in the present when they accept what the Party tells them about the past—that the Party arose to protect them from bloated, oppressive capitalists, and that the world was far uglier and harsher before the Party came to power. Winston vaguely understands this principle. He struggles to recover his own memories and formulate a larger picture of what has happened to the world. Winston buys a paperweight in an antique store in the prole district that comes to symbolize his attempt to reconnect with the past. Symbolically, when the Thought Police arrest Winston at last, the paperweight shatters on the floor.
The old picture of St. Clement’s Church in the room that Winston rents above Mr. Charrington’s shop is another representation of the lost past. Winston associates a song with the picture that ends with the words “Here comes the chopper to chop off your head!” This is an important foreshadow, as it is the telescreen hidden behind the picture that ultimately leads the Thought Police to Winston, symbolizing the Party’s corrupt control of the past.
The Place Where There Is No Darkness
Throughout the novel Winston imagines meeting O’Brien in “the place where there is no darkness.” The words first come to him in a dream, and he ponders them for the rest of the novel. Eventually, Winston does meet O’Brien in the place where there is no darkness; instead of being the paradise Winston imagined, it is merely a prison cell in which the light is never turned off. The idea of “the place where there is no darkness” symbolizes Winston’s approach to the future: possibly because of his intense fatalism (he believes that he is doomed no matter what he does), he unwisely allows himself to trust O’Brien, even though inwardly he senses that O’Brien might be a Party operative.
The Telescreens
The omnipresent telescreens are the book’s most visible symbol of the Party’s constant monitoring of its subjects. In their dual capability to blare constant propaganda and observe citizens, the telescreens also symbolize how totalitarian government abuses technology for its own ends instead of exploiting its knowledge to improve civilization.
The Red-Armed Prole Woman
The red-armed prole woman whom Winston hears singing through the window represents Winston’s one legitimate hope for the long-term future: the possibility that the proles will eventually come to recognize their plight and rebel against the Party. Winston sees the prole woman as a prime example of reproductive virility; he often imagines her giving birth to the future generations that will finally challenge the Party’s authority. |
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Term
| Animal Farm: A Fairy Story |
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Definition
author · George Orwell; genre · Dystopian animal fable; satire; allegory; political roman à clef (French for “novel with a key”—a thinly veiled exposé of factual persons or events); novella
Character List
Napoleon - The pig who emerges as the leader of Animal Farm after the Rebellion. Based on Joseph Stalin, Napoleon uses military force (his nine loyal attack dogs) to intimidate the other animals and consolidate his power. In his supreme craftiness, Napoleon proves more treacherous than his counterpart, Snowball.
Snowball - The pig who challenges Napoleon for control of Animal Farm after the Rebellion. Based on Leon Trotsky, Snowball is intelligent, passionate, eloquent, and less subtle and devious than his counterpart, Napoleon. Snowball seems to win the loyalty of the other animals and cement his power.
Boxer - The cart-horse whose incredible strength, dedication, and loyalty play a key role in the early prosperity of Animal Farm and the later completion of the windmill. Quick to help but rather slow-witted, Boxer shows much devotion to Animal Farm’s ideals but little ability to think about them independently. He naïvely trusts the pigs to make all his decisions for him. His two mottoes are “I will work harder” and “Napoleon is always right.”
Squealer - The pig who spreads Napoleon’s propaganda among the other animals. Squealer justifies the pigs’ monopolization of resources and spreads false statistics pointing to the farm’s success. Orwell uses Squealer to explore the ways in which those in power often use rhetoric and language to twist the truth and gain and maintain social and political control.
Old Major - The prize-winning boar whose vision of a socialist utopia serves as the inspiration for the Rebellion. Three days after describing the vision and teaching the animals the song “Beasts of England,” Major dies, leaving Snowball and Napoleon to struggle for control of his legacy. Orwell based Major on both the German political economist Karl Marx and the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Ilych Lenin.
Clover - A good-hearted female cart-horse and Boxer’s close friend. Clover often suspects the pigs of violating one or another of the Seven Commandments, but she repeatedly blames herself for misremembering the commandments.
Moses - The tame raven who spreads stories of Sugarcandy Mountain, the paradise to which animals supposedly go when they die. Moses plays only a small role in Animal Farm, but Orwell uses him to explore how communism exploits religion as something with which to pacify the oppressed.
Mollie - The vain, flighty mare who pulls Mr. Jones’s carriage. Mollie craves the attention of human beings and loves being groomed and pampered. She has a difficult time with her new life on Animal Farm, as she misses wearing ribbons in her mane and eating sugar cubes. She represents the petit bourgeoisie that fled from Russia a few years after the Russian Revolution.
Benjamin - The long-lived donkey who refuses to feel inspired by the Rebellion. Benjamin firmly believes that life will remain unpleasant no matter who is in charge. Of all of the animals on the farm, he alone comprehends the changes that take place, but he seems either unwilling or unable to oppose the pigs.
Muriel - The white goat who reads the Seven Commandments to Clover whenever Clover suspects the pigs of violating their prohibitions.
Mr. Jones - The often drunk farmer who runs the Manor Farm before the animals stage their Rebellion and establish Animal Farm. Mr. Jones is an unkind master who indulges himself while his animals lack food; he thus represents Tsar Nicholas II, whom the Russian Revolution ousted.
Mr. Frederick - The tough, shrewd operator of Pinchfield, a neighboring farm. Based on Adolf Hitler, the ruler of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, Mr. Frederick proves an untrustworthy neighbor.
Mr. Pilkington - The easygoing gentleman farmer who runs Foxwood, a neighboring farm. Mr. Frederick’s bitter enemy, Mr. Pilkington represents the capitalist governments of England and the United States.
Mr. Whymper - The human solicitor whom Napoleon hires to represent Animal Farm in human society. Mr. Whymper’s entry into the Animal Farm community initiates contact between Animal Farm and human society, alarming the common animals.
Jessie and Bluebell - Two dogs, each of whom gives birth early in the novel. Napoleon takes the puppies in order to “educate” them.
Minimus - The poet pig who writes verse about Napoleon and pens the banal patriotic song “Animal Farm, Animal Farm” to replace the earlier idealistic hymn “Beasts of England,” which Old Major passes on to the others.
O ld Major, a prize-winning boar, gathers the animals of the Manor Farm for a meeting in the big barn. He tells them of a dream he has had in which all animals live together with no human beings to oppress or control them. He tells the animals that they must work toward such a paradise and teaches them a song called “Beasts of England,” in which his dream vision is lyrically described. The animals greet Major’s vision with great enthusiasm. When he dies only three nights after the meeting, three younger pigs—Snowball, Napoleon, and Squealer—formulate his main principles into a philosophy called Animalism. Late one night, the animals manage to defeat the farmer Mr. Jones in a battle, running him off the land. They rename the property Animal Farm and dedicate themselves to achieving Major’s dream. The cart-horse Boxer devotes himself to the cause with particular zeal, committing his great strength to the prosperity of the farm and adopting as a personal maxim the affirmation “I will work harder.”
At first, Animal Farm prospers. Snowball works at teaching the animals to read, and Napoleon takes a group of young puppies to educate them in the principles of Animalism. When Mr. Jones reappears to take back his farm, the animals defeat him again, in what comes to be known as the Battle of the Cowshed, and take the farmer’s abandoned gun as a token of their victory. As time passes, however, Napoleon and Snowball increasingly quibble over the future of the farm, and they begin to struggle with each other for power and influence among the other animals. Snowball concocts a scheme to build an electricity-generating windmill, but Napoleon solidly opposes the plan. At the meeting to vote on whether to take up the project, Snowball gives a passionate speech. Although Napoleon gives only a brief retort, he then makes a strange noise, and nine attack dogs—the puppies that Napoleon had confiscated in order to “educate”—burst into the barn and chase Snowball from the farm. Napoleon assumes leadership of Animal Farm and declares that there will be no more meetings. From that point on, he asserts, the pigs alone will make all of the decisions—for the good of every animal.
Napoleon now quickly changes his mind about the windmill, and the animals, especially Boxer, devote their efforts to completing it. One day, after a storm, the animals find the windmill toppled. The human farmers in the area declare smugly that the animals made the walls too thin, but Napoleon claims that Snowball returned to the farm to sabotage the windmill. He stages a great purge, during which various animals who have allegedly participated in Snowball’s great conspiracy—meaning any animal who opposes Napoleon’s uncontested leadership—meet instant death at the teeth of the attack dogs. With his leadership unquestioned (Boxer has taken up a second maxim, “Napoleon is always right”), Napoleon begins expanding his powers, rewriting history to make Snowball a villain. Napoleon also begins to act more and more like a human being—sleeping in a bed, drinking whisky, and engaging in trade with neighboring farmers. The original Animalist principles strictly forbade such activities, but Squealer, Napoleon’s propagandist, justifies every action to the other animals, convincing them that Napoleon is a great leader and is making things better for everyone—despite the fact that the common animals are cold, hungry, and overworked.
Mr. Frederick, a neighboring farmer, cheats Napoleon in the purchase of some timber and then attacks the farm and dynamites the windmill, which had been rebuilt at great expense. After the demolition of the windmill, a pitched battle ensues, during which Boxer receives major wounds. The animals rout the farmers, but Boxer’s injuries weaken him. When he later falls while working on the windmill, he senses that his time has nearly come. One day, Boxer is nowhere to be found. According to Squealer, Boxer has died in peace after having been taken to the hospital, praising the Rebellion with his last breath. In actuality, Napoleon has sold his most loyal and long-suffering worker to a glue maker in order to get money for whisky.
Years pass on Animal Farm, and the pigs become more and more like human beings—walking upright, carrying whips, and wearing clothes. Eventually, the seven principles of Animalism, known as the Seven Commandments and inscribed on the side of the barn, become reduced to a single principle reading “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Napoleon entertains a human farmer named Mr. Pilkington at a dinner and declares his intent to ally himself with the human farmers against the laboring classes of both the human and animal communities. He also changes the name of Animal Farm back to the Manor Farm, claiming that this title is the “correct” one. Looking in at the party of elites through the farmhouse window, the common animals can no longer tell which are the pigs and which are the human beings.
The Corruption of Socialist Ideals in the Soviet Union
Animal Farm is most famous in the West as a stinging critique of the history and rhetoric of the Russian Revolution. Retelling the story of the emergence and development of Soviet communism in the form of an animal fable, Animal Farm allegorizes the rise to power of the dictator Joseph Stalin. In the novella, the overthrow of the human oppressor Mr. Jones by a democratic coalition of animals quickly gives way to the consolidation of power among the pigs. Much like the Soviet intelligentsia, the pigs establish themselves as the ruling class in the new society.
The struggle for preeminence between Leon Trotsky and Stalin emerges in the rivalry between the pigs Snowball and Napoleon. In both the historical and fictional cases, the idealistic but politically less powerful figure (Trotsky and Snowball) is expelled from the revolutionary state by the malicious and violent usurper of power (Stalin and Napoleon). The purges and show trials with which Stalin eliminated his enemies and solidified his political base find expression in Animal Farm as the false confessions and executions of animals whom Napoleon distrusts following the collapse of the windmill. Stalin’s tyrannical rule and eventual abandonment of the founding principles of the Russian Revolution are represented by the pigs’ turn to violent government and the adoption of human traits and behaviors, the trappings of their original oppressors.
Although Orwell believed strongly in socialist ideals, he felt that the Soviet Union realized these ideals in a terribly perverse form. His novella creates its most powerful ironies in the moments in which Orwell depicts the corruption of Animalist ideals by those in power. For Animal Farm serves not so much to condemn tyranny or despotism as to indict the horrifying hypocrisy of tyrannies that base themselves on, and owe their initial power to, ideologies of liberation and equality. The gradual disintegration and perversion of the Seven Commandments illustrates this hypocrisy with vivid force, as do Squealer’s elaborate philosophical justifications for the pigs’ blatantly unprincipled actions. Thus, the novella critiques the violence of the Stalinist regime against the human beings it ruled, and also points to Soviet communism’s violence against human logic, language, and ideals.
The Societal Tendency Toward Class Stratification
Animal Farm offers commentary on the development of class tyranny and the human tendency to maintain and reestablish class structures even in societies that allegedly stand for total equality. The novella illustrates how classes that are initially unified in the face of a common enemy, as the animals are against the humans, may become internally divided when that enemy is eliminated. The expulsion of Mr. Jones creates a power vacuum, and it is only so long before the next oppressor assumes totalitarian control. The natural division between intellectual and physical labor quickly comes to express itself as a new set of class divisions, with the “brainworkers” (as the pigs claim to be) using their superior intelligence to manipulate society to their own benefit. Orwell never clarifies in Animal Farm whether this negative state of affairs constitutes an inherent aspect of society or merely an outcome contingent on the integrity of a society’s intelligentsia. In either case, the novella points to the force of this tendency toward class stratification in many communities and the threat that it poses to democracy and freedom.
The Danger of a Naïve Working Class
One of the novella’s most impressive accomplishments is its portrayal not just of the figures in power but also of the oppressed people themselves. Animal Farm is not told from the perspective of any particular character, though occasionally it does slip into Clover’s consciousness. Rather, the story is told from the perspective of the common animals as a whole. Gullible, loyal, and hardworking, these animals give Orwell a chance to sketch how situations of oppression arise not only from the motives and tactics of the oppressors but also from the naïveté of the oppressed, who are not necessarily in a position to be better educated or informed. When presented with a dilemma, Boxer prefers not to puzzle out the implications of various possible actions but instead to repeat to himself, “Napoleon is always right.” Animal Farm demonstrates how the inability or unwillingness to question authority condemns the working class to suffer the full extent of the ruling class’s oppression.
The Abuse of Language as Instrumental to the Abuse of Power
One of Orwell’s central concerns, both in Animal Farm and in 1984, is the way in which language can be manipulated as an instrument of control. In Animal Farm, the pigs gradually twist and distort a rhetoric of socialist revolution to justify their behavior and to keep the other animals in the dark. The animals heartily embrace Major’s visionary ideal of socialism, but after Major dies, the pigs gradually twist the meaning of his words. As a result, the other animals seem unable to oppose the pigs without also opposing the ideals of the Rebellion. By the end of the novella, after Squealer’s repeated reconfigurations of the Seven Commandments in order to decriminalize the pigs’ treacheries, the main principle of the farm can be openly stated as “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” This outrageous abuse of the word “equal” and of the ideal of equality in general typifies the pigs’ method, which becomes increasingly audacious as the novel progresses. Orwell’s sophisticated exposure of this abuse of language remains one of the most compelling and enduring features of Animal Farm, worthy of close study even after we have decoded its allegorical characters and events.
Songs
Animal Farm is filled with songs, poems, and slogans, including Major’s stirring “Beasts of England,” Minimus’s ode to Napoleon, the sheep’s chants, and Minimus’s revised anthem, “Animal Farm, Animal Farm.” All of these songs serve as propaganda, one of the major conduits of social control. By making the working-class animals speak the same words at the same time, the pigs evoke an atmosphere of grandeur and nobility associated with the recited text’s subject matter. The songs also erode the animals’ sense of individuality and keep them focused on the tasks by which they will purportedly achieve freedom.
State Ritual
As Animal Farm shifts gears from its early revolutionary fervor to a phase of consolidation of power in the hands of the few, national rituals become an ever more common part of the farm’s social life. Military awards, large parades, and new songs all proliferate as the state attempts to reinforce the loyalty of the animals. The increasing frequency of the rituals bespeaks the extent to which the working class in the novella becomes ever more reliant on the ruling class to define their group identity and values.
Animal Farm
Animal Farm, known at the beginning and the end of the novel as the Manor Farm, symbolizes Russia and the Soviet Union under Communist Party rule. But more generally, Animal Farm stands for any human society, be it capitalist, socialist, fascist, or communist. It possesses the internal structure of a nation, with a government (the pigs), a police force or army (the dogs), a working class (the other animals), and state holidays and rituals. Its location amid a number of hostile neighboring farms supports its symbolism as a political entity with diplomatic concerns.
The Barn
The barn at Animal Farm, on whose outside walls the pigs paint the Seven Commandments and, later, their revisions, represents the collective memory of a modern nation. The many scenes in which the ruling-class pigs alter the principles of Animalism and in which the working-class animals puzzle over but accept these changes represent the way an institution in power can revise a community’s concept of history to bolster its control. If the working class believes history to lie on the side of their oppressors, they are less likely to question oppressive practices. Moreover, the oppressors, by revising their nation’s conception of its origins and development, gain control of the nation’s very identity, and the oppressed soon come to depend upon the authorities for their communal sense of self.
The Windmill
The great windmill symbolizes the pigs’ manipulation of the other animals for their own gain. Despite the immediacy of the need for food and warmth, the pigs exploit Boxer and the other common animals by making them undertake backbreaking labor to build the windmill, which will ultimately earn the pigs more money and thus increase their power. The pigs’ declaration that Snowball is responsible for the windmill’s first collapse constitutes psychological manipulation, as it prevents the common animals from doubting the pigs’ abilities and unites them against a supposed enemy. The ultimate conversion of the windmill to commercial use is one more sign of the pigs’ betrayal of their fellow animals. From an allegorical point of view, the windmill represents the enormous modernization projects undertaken in Soviet Russia after the Russian Revolution. |
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Definition
author · Jean Rhys
type of work · Novel
genre · Postcolonial novel; reinterpretation; prequel
Published 1964
Antoinette's story begins when she is a young girl in early nineteenth- century Jamaica. The white daughter of ex-slave owners, she lives on a run-down plantation called Coulibri Estate. Five years have passed since her father, Mr. Cosway, reportedly drunk himself to death, his finances in ruins after the passage of the Emancipation Act of 1833, which freed black slaves and led to the demise of many white slave owners. Throughout Antoinette's childhood, hostility flares between the crumbling white aristocracy and the impoverished servants they employ.
As a young girl, Antoinette lives at Coulibri Estate with her widowed mother, Annette, her sickly younger brother, Pierre, and gossiping servants who seem particularly attuned to their employers' misfortune and social disrepute. Antoinette spends her days in isolation. Her mother, a beautiful young woman who is ostracized by the Jamaican elite, spends little time with her, choosing to pace listlessly on the house's glacis (the covered balcony) instead of nurturing her child. Antoinette's only companion, Tia, the daughter of a servant, turns against her unexpectedly.
One day, Antoinette is surprised to find a group of elegant visitors calling on her mother from Spanish Town, the island's version of a sophisticated metropolis. Among them is an English man named Mr. Mason who, after a short courtship, asks for Annette's hand in marriage. When Mr. Mason and Annette honeymoon in Trinidad, Antoinette and Pierre stay with their Aunt Cora in Spanish Town.
In the interim, Mr. Mason has had the estate repaired and restored to it to its former grandeur, and has bought new servants. Discontent, however, is rising among the freed blacks, who protest one night outside the house. Bearing torches, they accidentally set the house on fire, and Pierre is badly hurt. As the family flees the house, Antoinette runs desperately towards Tia and her mother. Tia throws a jagged rock at Antoinette, cutting her forehead and drawing blood.
The events of the night leave Antoinette dangerously ill for six weeks. She wakes to find herself in Aunt Cora's care. Pierre has died. Annette's madness, which has revealed itself gradually over the years, has fully surfaced after the trauma of the fire. When Antoinette visits her mother, who has been placed in the care of a black couple, she hardly recognizes the ghostlike figure she encounters. When Antoinette approaches, Annette violently flings her away.
Antoinette then enrolls in convent school along with other young Creole girls. For several years, she lives at the school with the nuns, learning everything from proper ladylike deportment to the tortured histories of female saints. Antoinette's family has all but deserted her: Aunt Cora has moved to England for a year, while Mr. Mason travels for months away from Jamaica, visiting only occasionally.
When Antoinette is seventeen, Mr. Mason announces on his visit that friends from England will be coming the following winter. He means to present Antoinette into society as a cultivated woman, fit for marriage. At this point, the end of Part One, Antoinette's narration becomes increasingly muddled, jumping from present- tense descriptions of her life in the convent to muddled recollections of past events.
Antoinette's husband, an Englishman who remains nameless, narrates Part Two. After a wedding ceremony in Spanish Town, he and Antoinette honeymoon on one of the Windward Islands, at an estate that once belonged to Antoinette's mother. He begins to have misgivings about the marriage as they approach a town ominously called Massacre. He knows little of his new wife, having agreed to marry her days before, when Mr. Mason's son, Richard Mason, offered him £30,000 if he proposed. Desperate for money, he agreed to the marriage.
When the couple arrives at Granbois, Antoinette's inherited estate, the man feels increasingly uncomfortable around the servants and his strange young wife. Hostility grows between the man and Christophine, Antoinette's surrogate mother and a servant who wields great power in the house. The man soon receives a menacing letter from Daniel Cosway, one of old Cosway's illegitimate children. Venomous in tone, letter warns of Antoinette's depravity, saying that she comes from a family of derelicts and has madness in her blood. After reading this letter, the man begins to detect signs of Antoinette's insanity.
Antoinette, sensing that her husband hates her, asks Christophine for a magic love potion. Christophine grudgingly agrees. That night, when the man confronts Antoinette about her past, they argue passionately. He awakes the next morning believing he has been poisoned, and he later sleeps with the servant girl, Amelie, who helps him recover. Sitting in the next room, Antoinette hears everything.
The next morning, Antoinette leaves for Christophine's. When she returns, she seems to be totally mad. Drunk and raving, she pleads with the man to stop calling her "Bertha," a name he has given her without explanation. Antoinette then bites her husband's arm, drawing blood. After she collapses and falls in bed, Christophine rails at him for his cruelty. That night, he decides to leave Jamaica with Antoinette.
Antoinette narrates Part Three from England, where she is locked away in a garret room in her husband's house, under the watch of a servant, Grace Poole. A hidden captive, Antoinette has no sense of time or place; she does not even believe she is in England when Grace tells her so. Violent and frenzied, Antoinette draws a knife on her stepbrother, Richard Mason, when he visits her. Later she has no memory of the incident. Antoinette has a recurring dream about taking Grace's keys and exploring the house's downstairs quarters. In this dream, she lights candles and sets the house ablaze. One night, she wakes from this dream and feels she must act on it. The novel ends with Antoinette holding a candle and walking down from her upstairs prison.
Themes
The Oppression of Slavery and Entrapment
The specter of slavery and entrapment pervades Wide Sargasso Sea. The ex-slaves who worked on the sugar plantations of wealthy Creoles figure prominently in Part One of the novel, which is set in the West Indies in the early nineteenth century. Although the Emancipation Act has freed the slaves by the time of Antoinette’s childhood, compensation has not been granted to the island’s black population, breeding hostility and resentment between servants and their white employers. Annette, Antoinette’s mother, is particularly attuned to the animosity that colors many employer-employee interactions.
Enslavement shapes many of the relationships in Rhys’s novel—not just those between blacks and whites. Annette feels helplessly imprisoned at Coulibri Estate after the death of her husband, repeating the word “marooned” over and over again. Likewise, Antoinette is doomed to a form of enslavement in her love for and dependency upon her husband. Women’s childlike dependence on fathers and husbands represents a figurative slavery that is made literal in Antoinette’s ultimate physical captivity.
The Complexity of Racial Identity
Subtleties of race and the intricacies of Jamaica’s social hierarchy play an important role in the development of the novel’s main themes. Whites born in England are distinguished from the white Creoles, descendants of Europeans who have lived in the West Indies for one or more generations. Further complicating the social structure is the population of black ex-slaves who maintain their own kinds of stratification. Christophine, for instance, stands apart from the Jamaican servants because she is originally from the French Caribbean island of Martinique. Furthermore, there is a large mixed-race population, as white slave owners throughout the Caribbean and the Americas were notorious for raping and impregnating female slaves. Sandi and Daniel Cosway, two of Alexander Cosway’s illegitimate children, both occupy this middle ground between black and white society.
Interaction between these racial groups is often antagonistic. Antoinette and her mother, however, do not share the purely racist views of other whites on the island. Both women recognize their dependence on the black servants who care for them, feeling a respect that often borders on fear and resentment. In this manner, power structures based on race always appear to be on the brink of reversal.
The Link Between Womanhood, Enslavement, and Madness
Womanhood intertwines with issues of enslavement and madness in Rhys’s novel. Ideals of proper feminine deportment are presented to Antoinette when she is a girl at the convent school. Two of the other Creole girls, Miss Germaine and Helene de Plana, embody the feminine virtues that Antoinette is to learn and emulate: namely, beauty, chastity and mild, even-tempered manners. Mother St. Justine’s praises of the “poised” and “imperturbable” sisters suggest an ideal of womanhood that is at odds with Antoinette’s own hot and fiery nature. Indeed, it is Antoinette’s passion that contributes to her melancholy and implied madness.
Rhys also explores her female characters’ legal and financial dependence on the men around them. After the death of her first husband, Antoinette’s mother sees her second marriage as an opportunity to escape from her life at Coulibri and regain status among her peers. For the men in the novel, marriage increases their wealth by granting them access to their wives’ inheritance. In both cases, womanhood is synonymous with a kind of childlike dependence on the nearest man. Indeed, it is this dependence that precipitates the demise of both Antoinette and Annette. Both women marry white Englishmen in the hopes of assuaging their fears as vulnerable outsiders, but the men betray and abandon them.
Motifs
Madness
Madness in Wide Sargasso Sea is intricately linked with images of heat, fire, and female sexuality. Madness is Antoinette’s inheritance: her father was mad, according to his bastard son Daniel, as was her mother, Annette. Antoinette’s upbringing and environment exacerbate her inherited condition, as she feels rejected and displaced, with no one to love her. She becomes paranoid and solitary, prone to vivid dreams and violent outbursts. It is significant that women like Antoinette and her mother are the most susceptible to madness, pushed as they are into childlike servitude and feminine docility. Their madness consigns them to live invisible, shameful lives. The predominance of insanity in the novel forces us to question whose recollections are trustworthy. The fragmented memory of a madwoman like Antoinette opens up the possibility for alternate stories and imagined realities.
Disease and Decline
In the Caribbean portrayed in the novel, an atmosphere of sickness reflects the perverse and unnatural subjugation of blacks by whites and of women by men. Repression explodes into fevers, fits, and madness, so that the body says what the mouth cannot. Both Antoinette and Rochester suffer near-fatal fevers, as if to mark their feelings of persecution and fear of the outside world.
Images of disease, rot, and illness also suggest the moral and financial decline of Antoinette’s family. Disease works as a kind of moral retribution, in that the Cosway family, after generations of abuse, inherits a legacy of alcoholism, madness, and deformity (the young boy Pierre is degenerate). Antoinette naïvely believes her family’s cure lies abroad, in England. On the night of the fire, she leans over the crib of her sleeping brother to assure him that, once Mr. Mason takes them to England, he will “be cured, made like other people.” However, England offers no cure, as Antoinette herself further deteriorates when she is there.
Death
Death seemingly hovers over Antoinette’s every moment. One of the first memories she recounts from her childhood is that of her mother’s poisoned horse, lying dead in the heat and swarming with flies. This image creates a mood of sinister anticipation and points to an evil undercurrent haunting Coulibri. The death of the horse also foreshadows the deaths of Pierre, Antoinette’s mother, Aunt Cora, and Mr. Mason, all of which leave Antoinette without a family. So attuned to death’s presence in her childhood tale, Antoinette foreshadows her own violent end.
At Coulibri, allusions to zombies and ghosts further contribute to the eerie mood. Christophine’s supernatural tales, drawn from voodoo legends, share Antoinette’s fascination with death. Antoinette incorporates these superstitions, using a stick as a protective talisman and believing that her mother has become a zombie—a body without a soul. It is Antoinette’s faith in an invisible world that accounts for her peculiar preoccupation with death.
Magic and Incantation
In his decision to take Antoinette away from Jamaica, Rochester bitterly thinks to himself, “No more false heavens. No more damned magic.” The Windward Islands, where Granbois is located, are home to the magical, syncretic religions of their black inhabitants. Christophine’s unique powers, which command respect from her peers, derive from her expertise in obeah practices and her knowledge in casting spells. Antoinette incorporates Christophine’s superstitious beliefs, leading her to read signs and symbols in the natural world. On the night of the fire, for instance, Antoinette shrinks in horror when she sees her mother’s parrot burn alive, believing it is bad luck to kill a parrot or watch one die. This knowledge of magic is Antoinette’s one source of power and independence.
Fire
Fires recur throughout the novel, representing destruction, damnation, and smoldering passions. In Part One, Antoinette describes the fire that burned down Coulibri Estate and triggered her mother’s collapse into madness. In Part Two, Rochester describes the use of candles at night, paying particular attention to the moths that burn themselves in the flames. These descriptions not only recall the grotesque death of Annette’s bird, but they also mirror Antoinette’s perverse fascination with fire and foreshadow her own tragic end.
Symbols
Birds
Coco, Annette’s pet parrot, enacts Antoinette’s own doom. With his wings clipped by Mr. Mason—notably, an Englishman—the bird is shackled and maimed, mirroring Antoinette’s own flightless dependency. As Antoinette recalls, “[Coco] made an effort to fly down but his clipped wings failed him and he fell screeching. He was all on fire.” This passage presages the apocalyptic dream that ends the novel, including Antoinette’s fiery fall from the attic. As omens and warnings, birds invite Antoinette to invest meaning and significance in the natural world. When she sees a cock crowing alongside Christophine’s house, Antoinette thinks, “That is for betrayal, but who is the traitor?” As with the parrot, the appearance of the cock portends danger.
Forests and Trees
Antoinette’s recurring forest dream introduces a cool, dark, unknown landscape that contrasts sharply with Jamaica’s colorful brightness. A nightmare that is also a premonition, the dream takes place among “tall dark trees” that lead to an enclosed stone garden. Following a sinister and faceless man, Antoinette finds herself in a foreign place that portends her future captivity in England. Another forest omen resides in the name of the honeymoon estate, Granbois, which translates into “great forest.” Like Antoinette’s dream, this name foretells her move to the cold forests of England. It is here at Granbois that her husband loses himself in the woods, stumbling upon the haunting ruins of a stone house. Rochester’s eerie experience in the forest echoes his wife’s dream; in fact, it provides the second half of her nightmarish prediction. In the forest, he seems to be gazing upon the consequences of his own actions: a ruined house in the woods, a clear image of his English estate that will be burned and abandoned.
The Garden
Antoinette compares the garden at Coulibri Estate to the biblical Garden of Eden, with its luxurious excess and lost innocence. In her own words, the garden has “gone wild,” assaulting the senses with its brilliant colors, pungent odors, and tangling overgrowth. The flowers look vaguely sinister; Antoinette describes one orchid as being “snaky looking,” recalling the biblical fall and man’s decline into greed and sensuality. The decadent Creole lifestyle as portrayed in the novel—predicated upon exploitation, wealth, and ease—finds its natural counterpart in the fallen garden. |
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| “The Moment before the Gun Went Off” |
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Definition
Author: Nadine Gordimer; Genre: Short Story
In “The Moment Before the Gun Went Off,” Nadine Gordimer presents readers with a poignant vignette of South African apartheid. Gordimer is not out to blame, an instinctive tendency that would only widen the already gaping black-white schism. In “The Moment,” Gordimer means to link the two races as victims of the injustices of apartheid, and possibly to contribute to the eradication of a segregationist mindset and to the reconciliation of blacks and whites. Her vehicle is Marais Van der Vyver’s “twenty-year old farmhand,” Lucas. In the story, Van der Vyver has taken particular interest in this “black boy,” teaching him tractor maintenance and taking him hunting. As usual, Lucas rode in the bed of the pickup, scouring the African grasses for game, while Van der Vyver drove. Vand de Vyber's gun discharges and renders Lucas a victim of freak accident, negligence, and ultimately apartheid. In Gordimer’s South Africa, apartheid has become more than legislation; it has become a mentality that segregates and prejudges. Lucas and Van der Vyver were separated by more than the rear window of the truck. The narrator is an unmistakable apartheid-sympathizer. He drops stereotypes carelessly, always commenting on how blacks raise their children, on how blacks waste their money on funerals, and on “their” perceived short-comings and idiosyncrasies in general. Lucas is not a boy; he is a “black boy.” The narrator, wide-eyed with disbelief, remarks that “blacks can sit and drink in white hotels” and that “blacks can sleep with whites."
These are unthinkable liberties in the mind of the white apartheid-advocate. By speaking from the perspective of an apartheid supporter, Gordimer manages to storm the apartheid fortress from within, and in the process, seizes a brilliant sense of irony and seemingly unquestionable credibility for herself. Gordimer sounds her loudest peal of irony in the last sentence: Lucas is Van der Vyver’s son, and therefore, both white and black. Just as Van de Vyver has failed to acknowledge his son, the white community has refused to acknowledge the culture of discrimination and oppression they have been supporting. However, “the young black callously shot through the negligence of the white man” is not only the farmer’s son; he is a symbol. Lucas, as the son of Van der Vyver and one of his farm workers, is the intersection of the black and white divisions. Apartheid has extinguished Lucas’ life, along with black dignity and white moral integrity. Gordimer has slid her keystone into place and has constructed a South Africa divided, confused, and victimized by apartheid. |
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Author: Angela Carver; Genre: short story; based on Bluebeard
A teenage girl marries an older, wealthy French Marquis, whom she does not love. When he takes her to his castle, she learns that he enjoys sadistic pornography and takes pleasure in her embarrassment. She is a talented pianist, and a young man, a blind piano tuner, hears her music and falls in love with her. The woman's husband tells her that he must leave on a business trip and forbids her to enter one particular room while he is away. She enters the room in his absence and realizes the full extent of his perverse and murderous tendencies when she discovers the bodies of his previous wives. When the Marquis returns home he discovers that she has entered the room and proceeds to try and add her to his collection of corpses. The brave piano tuner is willing to stay with her even though he knows he will not be able to save her. She is saved at the last moment at the end of the story by her mother, who arrives and shoots the Marquis just as he is about to murder the girl.
Angela Carter's short stories challenge the way women are represented in fairy tales, yet retain an air of tradition and convention through her voluptuously descriptive prose. For example, in the opening tale "The Bloody Chamber" which is a retelling of Bluebeard, Carter plays with the conventions of canonical fairy tales; instead of the heroine being rescued by the stereotypical male hero, she is rescued by her mother.
The stories deal with themes of women's roles in relationships and marriage, their sexuality, coming of age and corruption. Stories such as "The Bloody Chamber" and "The Company of Wolves" explicitly deal with the horrific or corrupting aspects of marriage and/or sex and the balance of power within such relationships. Themes of female identity are explored in the "Beauty and the Beast" stories such as "The Tiger's Bride". In one instance, Beauty: the story's heroine, is described as removing the petals from a white rose as her father gambles her away, a seeming representation of the stripping away of the false layers of her personality to find her true identity; an image that finds a mirror in the story's fantastical conclusion.
The stories are updated to more modern settings. The exact time periods remains vague, but they are clearly anchored intentionally. For example, in "The Bloody Chamber" the existence of transatlantic telephone implies a date 1930 or later. On the other hand, the mention of painters such as Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, and of fashion designer Paul Poiret (who designs one of the heroine's gowns) all suggest a date before 1945. "The Lady of the House of Love" is clearly set on the eve of the First World War, and the young man's bicycle on which he arrives at the tradition-bound vampire's house is a symbol of the encroaching modernity which fundamentally altered European society after 1914. |
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| "That the Science of Cartography is Limited" |
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Definition
Author: E. Boland Genre: Poem
Summary: The poem begins with stating that the science of cartography is limited not by "the fact that this shading of / forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam," but "the gloom of cypresses / is what I wish to prove." The speaker remembers when "you and I were first in love" and they drove to the boarders of Connacht. The narrator relates the story of the lover when he remembers that there used to be a road where they stood in the wood, called "famine road." The lover remembers in 1847 when the crop had failed twice that Relief Committees gave the starving Irish roads to build. When the Irish died, the road ended. The lover says "When I take down / the map of this island, it is never so / I can say here is / the masterful, the apt rendering of the spherical as flat, nor an ingenious design which persuades a curve / into a plane," Instead the lover tells themselves that:
the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon
-will not be there |
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Definition
Author: T. Hughes Genre: Poem, Lyric 1957
Summary: “The Thought-Fox” is a poem of twenty-four lines divided into six stanzas. The title tells the reader that the poet is drawing an analogy between a thought—specifically, in this case, a poetic composition—and a fox.
The poet speaks in the first person and in his own persona. He begins by evoking the silence and mystery of a forest at midnight. An atmosphere of suspense is created as one becomes aware of “something else” that is alive in the imaginary forest outside. The world of the forest is set against the world of the room where the poet is working, characterized only by the presence of a clock and the poet’s as yet blank paper.
The second stanza intensifies the suspense. The poet shifts his perspective, taking the reader’s awareness outside the room as he looks through the window into the black, starless night. The “something” is approaching, beginning to solidify out of the darkness. The third stanza gives the first tangible sense of the creature in the form of the fox’s cold nose investigating the surrounding twigs and leaves.
The poet introduces the fox into the reader’s sensory field in parts: a nose, then two eyes, as the fox stealthily moves between the trees of the silent, snowbound forest, then the whole body as it flashes across clearings. The fox in its literal sense as a fox is fully realized by the fifth stanza; it is “Brilliantly, concentratedly,/ Coming about its own business.”
The final stanza is a sudden and shocking transition back to the fox as a metaphor for thought. “With a sudden sharp hot stink of fox/ It enters the dark hole of the head.” The reader is reminded that, although the poet has presented a vivid picture of a fox, he was all the time comparing it with the creative process. Like the fox in the darkness of the forest, a thought begins in the subconscious mind as a vague sense or movement. As it rises to the conscious level of the mind, it becomes increasingly concrete and definite, until it finally “enters the dark hole of the head” as a conscious, coherent thought.
The reader is brought back to the poet’s room with a reference to the window, “starless still.” One senses the unbounded, uncreated reality that underlies individualized creation, unchanged and undiminished by the ever-changing manifestations that emerge from it. The ticking of the clock brings one back from the timeless world of the imagination to the world of time and space. “The page is printed” states that the thought has taken its final form—as the very poem that is before the reader. The poet has witnessed the act of his own poetic creation. Thus the poem is reflexive; it is a poem about its own composition.
Forms and Devices
Ted Hughes extends his central metaphor of fox-as-thought with great skill. Although the fox is symbolic of poetic creation, the reader is able to maintain a strong sense of it as a “real” fox. Even when Hughes is conveying abstract ideas, he uses precise detail and concrete sensory images from the natural world.
Hughes often uses strong contrasts to convey his notion of nature as interacting opposites: life and death, light and dark, predator and prey. The main contrast in this poem is between the intense vitality of the imagination (the world of the fox) and the impersonal vacancy of the poet’s self and environment. The unidentified “something else” in the forest seems more real, more alive than anything in the room, including the poet. More human feeling is accorded to the clock in its “loneliness” than to the poet. He is defined in negatives, in absent terms. There is a disembodied quality to the image of the blank notepaper “where my fingers move,” as if the fingers had a life of their own and were acting independently.
The abstract phenomenon of the creative process is made into a living creature of independent will. “Something more near” than the starless night, yet “deeper within darkness,” solidifies out of the blackness. This apparent contradiction, of something being real yet elusive, is descriptive of an idea at its genesis. One is aware of the idea’s existence, yet it has not yet gained sufficient definition for one to grasp it. The atmosphere of suspense relaxes into the first concrete sensory images of the fox—the cold touch of its nose, then “two eyes”—as the fox edges cautiously into vision. In the beats of “now,/ And again now, and now,” and the three consecutive strong stresses of “sets neat prints,” one hears the rhythm of the fox’s tentative steps.
Hughes often uses alliteration (repetition of consonants) and assonance (repetition of vowel sounds within words) to add an incantatory quality to his verse and to bring images to life. In the alliteration of “touches twig, leaf,” one feels the delicacy of the fox’s nose investigating its environment. The strong sounds of “Of a body that is bold to come/ Across clearings,” together with the positioning of “Across clearings” at the start of a new stanza, give a sense of sudden energy as the fox emerges into the open.
The most memorable image forms the poem’s climax: “With a sudden sharp hot stink of fox/ It enters the dark hole of the head.” The fox has realized its symbolic status as metaphor for thought. The thought fills the expectant vacancy that has been the poet’s consciousness until now. The image is intensely violent, evoking speed, flavor, temperature, and smell.
Two images introduced at the poem’s beginning and repeated at the end reflect its circular journey: from the everyday world, into the imaginative world, then back into the everyday world enriched by the gift of the imagination, the poetic composition. The image of the still-ticking clock, echoing the third line of the poem, recalls one to the world of time and space into which creation manifests. “The window is starless still,” also a repeated image, brings one back full circle to the unchanging eternity that preceded the coming of the thought-fox and continues undiminished after the event. “The page is printed”—referring to the page one has read—resolves the central metaphor. The thought-fox has found its fulfillment in the completed poem.
Themes and Meanings
In his essay “Capturing Animals” (Poetry Is, 1967), Ted Hughes recalls his boyhood hunting expeditions with his brother. Hughes’s job was to retrieve the many different creatures that his brother shot. When he was fifteen, however, his attitude to animals changed. He gave up hunting around the same time that he began to write poems.
It was several years before he realized that “my writing poems might be partly a continuation of my earlier pursuit. Now I have no doubt. The special kind of excitement, the slightly mesmerized and quite involuntary concentration with which you make out the stirrings of a new poem in your mind, then the outline, the mass and color and clear final form of it, the unique living reality of it in the midst of the general lifelessness, all that is too familiar to mistake.” It is hunting, he wrote, and the poem is a new type of creature. “The Thought-Fox” was the first of Hughes’s many animal poems. He says, “It is about a fox, obviously enough, but a fox that is both a fox and not a fox.…It is both a fox and a spirit.” The poem is a clear expression of his notion that writing poetry is a kind of hunting, an attempt to capture the unique essence of an experience or an object.
According to Hughes, a poem, like the fox, comes of its own volition. Also like the fox, it comes shyly, “warily,” and step by step. The implication is that it could easily be frightened away at any stage. In fact, in his essay “Learning to Think” (also in Poetry Is), Hughes describes how his experience of angling taught him to write poetry. His technique to catch fish was to keep perfectly still and allow his mind to settle on the float, which would attract the fish. Similarly, the would-be poet must first learn to still his mind on an object in order to catch the myriad thoughts that gradually attach themselves to it.
“The Thought-Fox” embodies Hughes’s vision of poetic creation—that a poem, before it takes on a manifest form on the page, has a life of its own, independent of the individualized self of the poet. The poet’s role is impersonal. He only has to stay quiet and alert, to be receptive to the poem. Then he can capture it as it emerges from the depths of uncreated reality and delicately makes its way into conscious awareness.
Hughes shares his vision of the creative process with the English Romantics, who commonly viewed poets as channels through whom inspiration flowed from a transcendent source. Hughes’s unique contribution to this tradition is his ability to clothe profound metaphysical truths in simple, precise language and concrete images from nature. |
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Author: T. Hughes Genre: Poem
Poem:
Crow's First Lesson
God tried to teach Crow how to talk.
'Love,' said God. 'Say, Love.'
Crow gaped, and the white shark crashed into the sea
And went rolling downwards, discovering its own depth.
'No, no,' said God. 'Say Love. Now try it. LOVE.'
Crow gaped, and a bluefly, a tsetse, a mosquito
Zoomed out and down
To their sundry flesh-pots.
'A final try,' said God. 'Now, LOVE.'
Crow convulsed, gaped, retched and
Man's bodiless prodigious head
Bulbed out onto the earth, with swivelling eyes,
Jabbering protest--
And Crow retched again, before God could stop him.
And woman's vulva dropped over man's neck and tightened.
The two struggled together on the grass.
God struggled to part them, cursed, wept--
Crow flew guiltily off. |
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| Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead |
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Definition
Author: T. Stoppard Genre: Drama 1966
Characters: Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, THe player, Tragedians, Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes.
Summary: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wander through a featureless wilderness, flipping coins, which keep coming up heads. Each time a coin lands on heads, Rosencrantz wins it. While Guildenstern worries about the improbability of a coin landing on heads so many times in a row, Rosencrantz happily continues flipping. Guildenstern wonders if they have entered a world where the laws of chance and time are absent. The pair struggles to recall why they are traveling and remember only that a messenger called them.
They encounter a troupe of actors, known as the Tragedians. The leader of the group, called the Player, indicates that the Tragedians specialize in sexual performances and gives Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the chance to participate for a fee. Guildenstern turns the improbable coin-flipping episode to their advantage by offering the Player a bet. The Player loses but claims he cannot pay. Guildenstern asks for a play instead. Guildenstern starts to leave as the Tragedians prepare, and Rosencrantz reveals that the most recently flipped coin landed tails-up.
The scene changes suddenly. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are now inside Elsinore, the royal castle of Denmark, watching as Hamlet and Ophelia burst onstage and leave in opposite directions. Mistaking Rosencrantz for Guildenstern, Claudius explains that he sent for the pair so that they could ascertain what is bothering Hamlet, their childhood friend.
Bewildered, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern discuss how they might probe Hamlet for the cause of his supposed madness. They play a game of question-and-answer, further confusing themselves about their purpose and even their identities. Guildenstern suggests that he pretend to be Hamlet while Rosencrantz questions him. They realize that Hamlet’s disturbed state is due to the fact that his father, the former king of Denmark, has recently died, and the throne has been usurped by Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, who also has married Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern overhear Hamlet speaking riddles to Polonius.
Hamlet confuses Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with an enigmatic speech. Polonius comes in to tell Hamlet that the Tragedians have arrived. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern despair about how little they learned of Hamlet’s feelings. They cannot decide whether he is insane.
Polonius, Hamlet, and the Tragedians enter, and Hamlet announces that there will be a play the next day. Hamlet leaves, and Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and the Player discuss the possible causes of Hamlet’s strange behavior. The Player departs while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern discuss what happens after death.
As Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, and Ophelia enter, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern explain that Hamlet wants them all to attend the play. The group leaves, but Hamlet enters. Not noticing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet wonders whether he should commit suicide. Ophelia enters, praying. After a short conversation, she and Hamlet exit.
Alfred, one of the Tragedians, arrives dressed as Gertrude. The other Tragedians enter to rehearse their play, which parallels Claudius’s rise to power and marriage to Gertrude. Ophelia enters, crying, followed by an angry Hamlet, who tells her to become a nun, then quickly departs. Claudius and Polonius enter and leave with Ophelia. The Player explains the tragic aspects of the Tragedians’ play, which metaphorically retells the recent events at Elsinore and foreshadows the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They discuss whether death can be adequately represented on stage. The scene goes black.
In darkness, voices indicate that the play has disturbed Claudius. The next day, Claudius and Gertrude ask Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to find Hamlet, who has killed Polonius. Alone again, the pair concocts a plan to trap Hamlet with their belts, but they fail as Hamlet enters from an unexpected direction and immediately leaves, carrying the dead Polonius. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern call Hamlet back, but he refuses to say what he has done with Polonius’s body. Hamlet accuses Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of being Claudius’s tools. Hamlet escapes as Claudius enters, only to be brought back onstage under guard. The scene shifts outdoors, where Guildenstern tells Rosencrantz that they have to escort Hamlet to England. Hamlet arrives in conversation with a soldier. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern reluctantly depart.
On the boat to England, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wonder where they are and whether they might be dead. They notice Hamlet sleeping nearby, remember their mission, and consider what to do when they arrive. Guildenstern has a letter from Claudius, which reveals that Hamlet is to be executed in England. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern cannot decide what to do.
As the pair sleeps, Hamlet switches the letter they were carrying with one he has written. The next morning, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern awake and hear music coming from barrels onboard the ship. To their surprise, the Tragedians emerge from the barrels just before pirates charge the ship. Hamlet, the Player, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern jump into the barrels, and the lights go down.
When the lights come back up, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and the Player come out of the barrels. Hamlet is gone. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tell the Player about the letter and rehearse what they will say to the English king. Guildenstern discovers that the letter now states that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are to be executed. The Tragedians encircle the pair. Despairing about his fate, Guildenstern takes a knife from the Player and stabs him. The Player cries out and falls, apparently dead. The Tragedians clap as the Player jumps up. He says that his death was a mediocre performance while showing Guildenstern that the knife was actually a stage prop.
The Player describes the different deaths that his troupe can perform while the Tragedians act out those deaths onstage. Rosencrantz applauds, and the light shifts, leaving Rosencrantz and Guildenstern alone. Rosencrantz breaks down and leaves as he realizes his death is near. Guildenstern wonders how they were caught in this situation, lamenting that they failed to seize an opportunity to avert their fate. Guildenstern exits.
The light changes, revealing the dead bodies of Claudius, Gertrude, Hamlet, and Laertes. Horatio arrives and delivers the final speech of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as the music rises and lights fall.
Themes: Incomprehensibility of the world, the difficulty of making Meaningful choices, The relationship between Life and the stage. |
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Author: H. Pinter Genre: drama
Characters: Jessie, Joey, Lenny, Mac or MacGregor, Max, Ruth, Sam, Teddy.
Summary: The Homecoming is set in a large room in an old house in working-class North London. This is the home of Max, a retired butcher; Sam, his brother, who drives for a car-hire (cab) service; and two of Max's sons: Lenny, a successful pimp, and Joey, a dullard who works on a demolition crew during the day while trying to become a professional boxer.
Act I, scene 1
The play opens with Lenny reading the newspaper. Max enters looking for scissors and is ignored by Lenny. Max talks about his late wife Jessie and his late friend MacGregor. He speaks of Jessie with both fondness and shocking disapproval-' 'She wasn't such a bad woman. Even though it made me sick just to look at her rotten stinking face, she wasn't such a bad bitch." Max also talks of his special understanding of horses. Lenny tells Max to shut up and then says that Max's cooking is fit only for dogs. Sam enters and Max insults him about his driving and the fact that he is not married. Joey enters from a workout at the gym, and Max turns on him, saying that his trouble as a boxer is that he doesn't know how to attack or defend himself. Max also threatens to throw Sam out when he is too old to pay his way. Sam pointedly reminds Max that Mac and Jessie were very close friends. The scene ends in blackout.
Act I, scene 2
The next scene, a few hours later, opens with Teddy and Ruth standing at the threshold to the room. Teddy is Max's eldest son, a Ph.D. who teaches philosophy at an American university. Ruth is his wife of six years about whom the rest of the family know nothing. They have been on a tap to Europe, and Teddy has brought her to meet the family. Ruth, though at first claiming to be tired, decides to go out for a walk. After Ruth leaves, Lenny enters. The reunion between the two brothers is civil but without any sense of warmth. Teddy goes to bed and Lenny goes and gets a clock that he suspects of disturbing his sleep.
Ruth enters and after some surprising small talk, says that she is Teddy's wife Lenny pays no attention to that. He launches into a long story which ends with his beating up a whore, whom he would have killed except for the bother of getting rid of the body. He then tells another long story that ends with his beating up an old woman, whether true or not, these tales are obviously meant to intimidate Ruth. They do not. There follows a wonderfully theatrical power play with Ruth dominating Lenny by using a glass of water to taunt him with sexual favors Ruth goes to bed leaving Lenny alone. Max enters and Lenny turns on him asking about the night he was conceived. Max spits at him and says he will drown in his own blood.
Act I, scene 3
The next scene opens at six-thirty the next morning. Joey is working out. Max enters complaining that Sam is in his kitchen. He calls Sam into the room and belittles him. Teddy and Ruth enter, and Max calls Ruth a "smelly scruffer," a '"stinking pox-ridden slut." and says that there hasn't been a whore in the house since Jessie died. Ruth seems to be unfazed by this verbal abuse. Joey apologizes for Max, saying he is an old man. Max hits Joey in the stomach with all his might. Joey staggers across the room, and Max begins to collapse with the exertion; Sam tries to help Max, and Max hits him in the head with his cane. Max then asks Ruth if she is a mother, seems pleased when she says she has three boys, and asks Teddy for a cuddle. Teddy accepts.
Act II, scene 1
It is just after dinner on the same day. Ruth serves coffee, and the men smoke cigars. Max praises Ruth and tells her that Jessie was the backbone of the family, that she taught the boys "all the morality they know…every single bit of the moral code they live by." Max then berates Sam and complains that he has worked hard all his life to support his brother and his own family—"three bastard sons, a slutbitch of a wife"—and even claims to have suffered the pains of childbirth. After further abusing Sam. Max turns to Teddy and gives his marriage his blessing, saying that Ruth is a charming woman. Sam leaves.
Lenny tries to engage Teddy in philosophical speculation about a table. Teddy refuses to be drawn in. Ruth points out that when she moves her leg her underwear moves with her and that perhaps the fact that her lips move is more important than the words which come through them. After a silence Joey, Max, and Lenny leave to go to the gym. Teddy suggests to Ruth that it is time to return home to America. Ruth seems uninterested. Teddy goes to pack. Lenny enters, and he and Ruth talk about the weather. Then Ruth says that before she went to America she had been a "model for the body," and she seems to have a longing for that life again. Teddy enters.
Lenny and Ruth dance slowly and kiss. Max and Joey enter and Joey delightfully says Ruth is a tart. He grabs her and starts to make love to her on the sofa. Max makes small talk with Teddy and praises Ruth in extremely sentimental terms. Ruth suddenly pushes Joey away, stands up, and demands a drink. She further demands food, that the record be turned off, and that she be given a particular kind of glass. She then asks if the family have read Teddy's critical works. Teddy says that they wouldn't understand them.
Act II, scene 2
The following scene takes place that evening and opens with Teddy in his coat sitting dejectedly with his suitcases beside him. Sam asks if Teddy remembers MacGregor and says that Teddy was always his mother's favorite. When Lenny enters.
Sam leaves. Lenny accuses Teddy of stealing his sandwich and is outraged when Teddy admits that he did. Joey enters: he has been in his room with Ruth for two hours but he didn't get "all the way." Max and Sam enter and Max demands, "Where's the whore?'' Max commiserates with Joey and says that it might be good to have Ruth stay with them. Teddy says that she should go home to her children. The problem of supporting Ruth is discussed, and Lenny suggests that she could pay her own way by working as a whore. Max, Joey, and Lenny agree that this is a good idea.
When Ruth enters, Teddy explains what the family has in mind. Ruth says, ' 'How very nice of them." Her demands, however, are very specific: a flat with three rooms and a bath, a maid, complete wardrobe, and that the original outlay must be viewed as a capital investment. She demands a contract to be signed before witnesses. All is agreed to. Sam then bursts out with the information that MacGregor had Jessie in the back of Sam's cab as he drove them along. He collapses. No one helps him. Teddy complains that he had counted on Sam to drive him to the airport and leaves to find a cab. Ruth sits in Max's chair, Joey sits on the floor and puts his head m her lap. Max complains that he will be left out, that she thinks he is an old man, and he collapses. As Max crawls toward Ruth, asking her for a kiss, Lenny sullenly stands watching.
Alienation and Loneliness
A family lives in the same house and though they live side-by-side physically, their emotional alienation and consequent loneliness is palpable. Perhaps the most alienated of all the characters are Teddy and Ruth They seem to have chosen to remain emotionally separate from the others. Teddy very clearly states this when talking about his "critical works." He says that it is a question of how far one can operate on things and not in things. He has chosen not to be emotionally involved with anyone and apparently has chosen to specialize in a very arcane branch of philosophy in order to maintain what he calls his "intellectual equilibrium"; more likely this field allows him to work with little contact with others. Teddy says his relatives are just objects and, "You just…move about. I can observe it I can see what you do. It's the same as I do. But you're lost in it. You won't get me being. ... I won't be lost in it " Teddy displays a near complete apathy to the events that unfold during his visit. Despite losing his wife to his father and brothers (not to mention a life of prostitution), despite watching his uncle collapse in front of him, he remains passionless and isolated from an emotional tie to these events.
Ruth also chooses to treat others as "objects" to be controlled. She agrees to work as a prostitute, which by nature requires a lack of emotional involvement, and at the same time she agrees to "take on" the men of the family. She shows no hesitation or sense of loss when she chooses not to return to her three sons and her home in America. She even calls Teddy "Eddy" when telling him not to become a stranger as he leaves for America.
Anger and Hatred
Anger abounds in The Homecoming. The play opens with Max looking for scissors and Lenny ignoring him. Lenny then responds with, "Why don't you shut up, you daft prat9" Throughout the first scene, as the family of men are introduced, anger and hatred seem to be the main traits of their relationships and their preferred modes of conduct Lenny calls Max a "stupid sod," and Max responds with, "Listen! I'll chop your spine off, you talk to me like that!" Even when talking about the past, Max recalls that he and his late friend Mac (MacGregor) were two of the "worst hated men in the West End"; even something like nostalgia, which is typically happy and fond, is tainted with loathing.
None of the relationships in the play are warm and caring. When Max's brother Sam comes home from work, Max taunts him, and the seemingly gentle Sam retorts with innuendoes about Max's late wife Jessie and his friend Mac—a sore spot that has obviously been picked at many times before. In fact, the smoldering anger over the suspicion of what took place between Jessie and Mac is a weapon often used against Max by both Sam and Lenny. When Joey, Max's dullard younger son, returns home from the gym, Max turns on him and belittles his dreams of becoming a professional boxer. Joey is too slow witted to respond and simply retreats from the room The attempt to escape from this seething anger and vicious attacks was probably what drove Teddy to retreat into a narrow intellectual discipline, to marry without telling his family, and to move to America.
Appearance and Reality
Although there are flare ups of anger and even violence, most of the brutality in The Homecoming is covered with a seemingly sophisticated veneer. When the actual physical violence does erupt, it seems comic. Lenny's stories about the tart down by the harbor and the old woman that he beat up are told in an almost off-hand way. The violence is contained in the subtext, the threat of violence to Ruth or any woman for whom Lenny takes a disliking. Ruth also behaves with outward decorum which belies her inner fire and sexuality.
Act II starts out with the whole family having after-dinner coffee and cigars. They exchange pleasantries about the meal, the coffee, and family chat about how proud Jessie would be of her fine sons and how much she would like to see her grandchildren. It seems to be a warm family gathering. Seething beneath the surface, however, is a violent dominance game in which there is a constant right for control of the family. One of the rules of the family seems to be that when a blow is delivered the one who is attacked must not show his hurt. Even after Ruth has decided to stay and become a prostitute, Teddy's leave taking is comically conventional. He tells Max how good it has been to see him, there is advice on how best to get to the au-port, and Max gives him a picture of himself to show the grandchildren. This surface conventionality helps to make the emotionally violent reality stand out as even more grotesque.
Doubt and Ambiguity
Pinter's plays are filled with ambiguity. He does not spell things out clearly and the viewer must often construct the past out of small hints, which may or may not be true. Lenny's stones about beating up women may be true or he may be lying to bolster his image as a tough pimp. It isn't revealed where in America Teddy teaches or if he truly does have teaching post. It isn't clear what Ruth means when she tells Lenny she had been a “model for the body." There's further doubt regarding Sam's sexuality, Joey's boxing career, and Max's younger days (though it is revealed that he and Mac were something of a fearsome pair).
Perhaps most striking is the dichotomy in Mac's recollections of his wife, Jessie (he refers to her as both a "slutbitch" and as a warm, giving mother and wife). It is unclear which of his recollections best summarized his wife—or if they are both accurate. When Sam says that he knows that Mac and Jessie had had sexual relations, he immediately collapses with an apparent heart attack or stroke and yet no one pays any attention to what, again, may or may not be the truth. Part of what Pinter is saying is that life itself is mostly ambiguous and that people must often navigate their lives without satisfactory knowledge or guidance; the truth may set you free but good luck finding it.
Language and Meaning
Language in The Homecoming is used by the characters to attain tactical advantage. The language is seemingly a very accurate reproduction of normal speech. However, it is very carefully selected and, while still seeming "realistic," it reflects the fact that people think at different speeds, use language to evade confrontation, and think and speak in metaphors. Frequently people seem to misunderstand one another when they actually don't want to understand or to be seen to understand. Language, in Pinter's hands, is a weapon. Put into the mouths of characters like Lenny and Max, it seeks to hurt others. By belittling and verbally abusing the other characters, Lenny and Max can keep them off guard, control them. While this has been an effective tool in the past, the presence of Ruth upsets the balance. Not only can she match or better the men's verbal skills, she has nonverbal sexual skills which she uses to ultimately gain the upper hand.
Morals and Morality
One of the things that bothered some critics about The Homecoming is the complete lack of a moral framework. Although none of the characters seems to have any moral scruples at all, Pinter does not condemn any of them. That is part of the viewer's astonishment at Ruth's deciding to stay and "service" the family while also working as a prostitute. Equally astonishing is the calm with which Teddy accepts her decision. Pinter includes no hint of his personal feelings toward these characters actions. Their fates are stated objectively; it is up to the audience to decide what is moral and what is not.
Politics
At the time The Homecoming was written, many young British playwrights were writing plays with overt political messages. While Pinter addresses no political system in his play, The Homecoming does deal with politics: the psychic politics of the family and of the sexes. This play very powerfully shows these dynamics at work. By extension the audience is able to relate these politics to the wider arenas of organizations and even states. A viewer can easily extrapolate the relationship between Max and his sons to that between a politician and his constituents. Ruth's ascension to family dominance is, likewise, similar to a rebel force arriving in a capital and toppling the old regime in a coup.
Sex
The Homecoming is rife with sex, although none of it seems to have anything to do with love and little has to do with lust or pleasure. In most cases, sex in the play is another weapon used for gaining control. Jessie, the mother of Teddy, Lenny, and Joey, is viewed both as a nurturing figure and as a whore, a role that Ruth overtly takes over at the end of the play. Jessie's sexual relations with Max's friend MacGregor is a theme that is alluded to frequently throughout the play.
Ruth blatantly uses sex and Lenny's apparent fear of sex in order to dominate him in their first encounter. Later she again uses sex to dominate Lenny while they dance. Immediately after that she begins foreplay with Joey in full view of the rest of the family, including her husband. Later she spends two hours in Joey's room leading him on without "going all the way," and he is enthralled with her. She agrees to be a prostitute as a business proposition. Teddy seems to accept her sexual activity as somehow separate from her role as mother in their family of boys. Even Sara's lack of sexual interest is used as a weapon against him. When Joey and Lenny relate a story of their sexual escapade with two girls, it is really a story about having the power to frighten away the girls' escorts and then to have the girls in the rubble of a demolition site. Sex for these people is a matter of power and domination.
Sex Roles
Max has become the "mother" of the household in charge of the cooking. The men see women as objects to be dominated and to use for sexual gratification. Lenny runs a string of prostitutes; upon first meeting Ruth, Max assumes she is a prostitute; when Joey sees her dancing and brushing lips with Lenny in Act II, he exclaims, "She's a tart. Old Lenny's got a tart in here.... Just up my street!" Ruth is also the mother of three boys, as was Jessie. Part of what Pinter is dealing with, and part of what some members of the audience find astonishing and upsetting, is the fact that Ruth encompasses both of the stereotypical polar extremes assigned to women by men: Madonna and whore.
Sexism
The whole family of men assumes that women are there to be used. Teddy sees Ruth as a mother and helpmate. Max and Lenny immediately assume she is a whore. Moreover, Max attempts to lower the other men, attacking their maleness by calling them "bitches'' or other derogatory terms usually used to refer to women. Ruth, too, uses sexism to emasculate Lenny. After toying with Joey she abruptly stands and demands a drink: when Lenny asks if she wants it on the rocks, she says, "Rocks? What do you know about rocks?'' Her double entendre is not lost on Lenny. In fact, the whole play can be read as an attempt to keep women “in their place," and the victorious revolt against that effort by Ruth She takes complete control. She escapes from a dead, arid marriage, and she takes control of the business negotiations and demands a contract based on firm economic principles. She will use her body as she sees fit in order to gain what she wants and without any concern for what others, including her husband, think. As Pinter said in a conversation with Mel Gussow of the New York Times, "Ruth in The Homecoming—no one can tell her what to do. She is the nearest to a free woman that I've ever written—a free and independent mind.'' |
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Author: G. Greene Genre: novel
Characters: Maurice Bendrix, Henry Miles, Sarah Miles, Mr Parkis, Parkis's son, Richard Smythe
Summary: Books 1-2
As The End of the Affair opens, the narrator, Maurice Bendrix (called simply "Bendrix" by his friends) explains that he is a writer and thus is in control of the story he is about to tell. Although it is a true story, he determines how much of it he will tell—at what point he will begin his tale and at what point he will end it. He begins with the night he encounters Henry Miles, the husband of a woman with whom Bendrix had an affair in the recent past. Henry has no idea that Bendrix was once involved with his wife. The two men go to a bar to get out of the rain, and Henry reveals that he thinks Sarah (his wife) is seeing another man. Pretending to be a friend to Henry, Bendrix offers to secure a private investigator to find out the truth. In reality, Bendrix is jealous and wants to know for his own reasons if Sarah is seeing someone. Bendrix's affair with Sarah ended suddenly, and he is tormented by the breakup and longs to know why she ended the relationship. When Bendrix is talking to Henry, he mentions that a demon encourages him to be deceptive and false in pretending to be Henry's friend so that he can find out about Sarah. At various points throughout the novel, Bendrix mentions this demon, which represents his hate and selfishness.
Henry decides against hiring an investigator, but Bendrix does so anyway. A man named Mr. Parkis is assigned to the case. Parkis follows Sarah and reports back to Bendrix on what he sees, which is very little. When Henry finds out that Bendrix has hired a detective, he guesses that Bendrix's interest in Sarah means that they were once involved with each other. Bendrix admits this, and the two men talk calmly about it.
Parkis finds that Sarah has been visiting a man named Richard Smythe, so Bendrix creates a ruse in order to visit him. Smythe, a man with "livid spots" on the left side of his face, turns out to be a rationalist with an extensive library, and Sarah has been debating the existence and nature of God with him.
Books 3-5
Parkis takes Sarah's diary while posing as a party guest in the Miles's home, so Bendrix can finally know why she broke off their relationship. He reads Sarah's diary, reviewing entries about their relationship and her feelings for him. Then he finds the entry about their last day together. They had been in bed when bombs started to fall. Bendrix went to see if the landlady had retreated to the bomb shelter. While he was looking, he was knocked unconscious. Seeing him in the hallway, Sarah thought he was dead or dying, so she went back to the bedroom and pleaded with God to let him live. She felt so strongly about this that she vowed she would give up her sinful ways, and Bendrix, if only he would live. When he walked in shortly thereafter, Sarah believed that her prayer had been answered. She broke off their relationship to keep her vow.
But Sarah's inner conflict did not end on the day of the air raid. She embarked on a spiritual journey of deep, painful struggle. She looked for ways to rationalize recommencing a relationship with Bendrix. She felt love and hate for God, but ultimately made peace with the situation. At the end of her struggle, she feels the power of God's love in her life, and she dedicates herself to Him. She reinterprets her relationship with Bendrix as a precursor to the deeper, purer love of God, and she asks God to give Bendrix the peace she now enjoys. From her pain comes faith in, and love for, God.
After reading Sarah's diary, Bendrix is convinced that she still loves him and that he can offer her real, tangible joy, not the kind of abstract happiness of spirituality. He calls her, but she says she does not want to see him. When he insists on seeing her, she leaves the house, running through the cold and sleet to evade him. She does not know that he is following her, but she keeps running. Finally she collapses, coughing and clutching her side. He rushes to her, and as he tells her of his plans to run away together, she insists that she does not want to go. He can see that she is exhausted and ill, so he tells her to go home and to call him when she feels better. Eight days later, Bendrix receives a call from Henry. Sarah has died of pneumonia.
Bendrix and Henry find themselves surprisingly close as they grieve the loss of Sarah. Although Sarah had expressed a desire to become Catholic, Henry and Bendrix decide against giving her a Catholic burial. In fact, when visited by a priest, Bendrix makes it clear that Sarah will be cremated, despite the Church's objections.
On the day of the funeral, Bendrix first meets with Waverly, a writer who is working on an article about him. After a brief exchange, Bendrix must leave for the funeral, and he takes Waverly's girlfriend with him. Bendrix does not like Waverly, and he feels powerful in taking his girl from him. Realizing that he does not actually want the girl along, he says a prayer to Sarah to help him out of the situation. Sarah's mother arrives, and Bendrix has an excuse to ask the girl to leave. Over dinner, Sarah's mother explains to Bendrix that Sarah was actually Catholic all her life, having been baptized as such at the age of two.
A series of miracles is attributed to Sarah in the days following her death. First, Parkis's son is cured of appendicitis after being given a book that belonged to Sarah. The spots on Smythe's face clear spontaneously. At the end, Bendrix and Henry are walking arm in arm as Henry declares how much he looks forward to their walks. Bendrix agrees. Silently, he tells God that he is tired and old, and he implores God to leave him alone.
Themes:
Love and Hate
The opposing themes of love and hate run throughout The End of the Affair as Greene sets them up to shed light on each other. Ultimately, he demonstrates that hate can be the surprising precursor to love. At the same time, he depicts the cruel realities often associated with love and hate. After all, Sarah chooses love (divine) and dies, but Bendrix chooses hate (earthly) and is still alive at the end of the novel. The choices these characters make represent the two kinds of love in the novel: divine love, which is selfless; and romantic love, which is selfish and can easily turn to hate.
Bendrix knows only romantic love, and he knows it only for Sarah. After she ends their relationship, he does not seek a new woman for his life. Instead, he alternates between love and hate for her. When they are involved, he loves her, but when she stops seeing him, he hates her. Then when he thinks he has a chance to win her back, he loves her again. When she dies, he claims to love her, but his actions tell a different story. His love is so confused by romantic selfishness that he ignores what he can infer about her burial wishes and insists that she be cremated, which according to Catholic faith, would be unpleasing to the God who took her from him.
Sarah, on the other hand, sacrifices romantic love for divine love. Although she began the affair in pursuit of romantic love, even at the cost of her morality, she is surprised to find herself giving it up to fulfill a desperate promise made to God.
Sacrificing the affair leads Sarah to the other kind of love presented in the novel, divine love. After an intense spiritual struggle to truly give up her romance with Bendrix, she finds herself at peace because she has accepted the love of God. She finds that this love renews her, whereas her love for Bendrix was sinful and unhealthy. In fact, she concludes that her love for Bendrix was merely a stop on the way to the divine love that awaited her. In her diary, she writes:
Did I ever love Maurice as much before I loved you? Or was it You I really loved all the time?... For he hated in me the things You hate. He was on Your side all the time without knowing it. You willed our separation, but he willed it too. He worked for it with his anger and his jealousy, and he worked for it with his love. For he gave so much love and I gave him so much love that soon there wasn't anything left, when we'd finished, but You.
The Divine
Whether or not they are aware of it, the divine plays a role in the characters' lives. Sarah prays to God in a panicked moment, pleading for Bendrix's life and promising to abandon her immoral ways in return. When Bendrix walks into the room, she is convinced that her prayer has saved him and she makes good on her promise. For Sarah, this incident is unquestionably a moment of divine intervention. The spiritual struggle that follows is also an example of the divine shaping her life. She realizes that she cannot attain spiritual peace alone, and she submits to the will of God and feels the change in her life.
After Sarah's death a series of miracles occurs, seemingly because of her status in heaven. In the Catholic tradition, a person is not canonized (declared a saint by the Catholic Church) unless a miracle is attributed to him or her. This implies that Sarah is a saint or is eligible for such divine status. Her ability to perform miracles after her death represents her divine influence in the lives of the people she once knew.
The presence of Bendrix's demon also alludes to the divine world. As a devout Catholic, Greene is likely familiar with the position of St. Augustine a first-century bishop and theologian whose teachings are regarded as among the most important in Catholic theology. Augustine taught that evil is present in the mere absence of God. This is relevant to Greene's novel because Bendrix makes repeated references to his demon, which seems to appear and talk him into doing and saying things that are hateful. According to Augustine, the intervention of this evil presence would be evidence of Bendrix's separation from God. |
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Definition
Author: K. Ishiguro Genre: novel
Summary: Prologue: July 1956
Readers are introduced to Stevens, an aging butler who has served Darlington Hall for about thirty years. The house has recently come under the ownership of an American man named Mr. Farraday, after belonging to Lord Darlington’s family for two centuries. While Lord Darlington was a reserved English gentleman, Mr. Farraday is a carefree man who likes to banter. Because he will be away for a while, he suggests that Stevens take his car and go on a trip. Stevens agrees, reasoning that he will go see Miss Kenton (the Hall’s ex-housekeeper), who has just written a letter to Stevens. Always focused on duty, Stevens hopes to recruit Miss Kenton back to Darlington Hall, where she is needed.
Day One
Stevens begins his trip, feeling uneasy as he leaves Darlington Hall behind him. As he drives, he considers what is to him a very important question: What is a great butler? He recalls lively conversations with past colleagues on the matter.
Stevens is humble, however, and never claims to be truly great, only to perform his duties with dignity. Stevens relates stories about his father, also a butler. These stories reflect the sort of dignity and dedication to duty that Stevens admires. He is proud of his father’s accomplishments, yet the reader notices that everything Stevens says about his father is relevant to work.
Day Two
Stevens stays the night at a country inn and wakes early. He provides some background about Miss Kenton, who left Darlington Hall in 1936 to get married. Although she is Mrs. Benn now, her letter to Stevens has indicated that her marriage may be in trouble. Stevens recalls that she was a good housekeeper with a professional demeanor. Stevens also reveals that she came to the Hall at the same time that his father came to serve as under-butler. Stevens’s father’s employer had recently died, and the old man had nowhere to go, so Stevens brought him to Darlington Hall. Although committed to doing a good job, the elder Stevens was limited by his age.
Reflecting on the past, Stevens provides more detail about Lord Darlington. He was influential and involved in politics, and he entertained frequently. Just after World War I he was sympathetic toward Germany due to the harsh demands of the Treaty of Versailles. He resolved to do something and organized an unofficial conference in 1923 where important representatives from around the world gathered to make plans for asserting their influence in their respective governments on Germany’s behalf. During the conference, Stevens’s father became seriously ill and died, but Stevens insisted on continuing with his duties.
Day Three
Stevens is still thinking about what makes a great butler when he has car trouble. Pulling into the driveway of a large house, he speaks with the chauffeur, who fixes the car. The man seems surprised to hear that Stevens worked for the Lord Darlington. This is the reader’s first sense that Lord Darlington ended his life with a shameful reputation. Stevens explains that he has seen this reaction from people before, and that he has chosen to distance himself from it, not because of shame, but because of his desire to avoid hearing his past employer disparaged.
The next morning, Stevens interacts with the locals and then sits in a cafe enjoying tea. He reflects further about Lord Darlington and the political events and influential Germans that figured prominently in his life. Although Lord Darlington told him to fire two Jewish members of the house staff (which outraged Miss Kenton), Stevens maintains that his employer was not anti-Semitic. Stevens continues on his drive to see Miss Kenton. He recalls an incident in which she came to his room and found him reading a romance novel. He explains this by saying that he was only reading it to improve his command of the English language. He follows this story by relating that he and Miss Kenton used to meet over cocoa to discuss household matters. Although they got to know each other better during these meetings, the relationship never became truly personal.
Stevens’s thoughts return to Lord Darlington, and he admits that his employer was not the man Stevens thought he was at the time. Lord Darlington became a Nazi sympathizer and was manipulated and used by people in positions of power.
Stevens realizes that Lord Darlington was misguided and foolish, but maintains that his own dedication to his employer was not blameworthy or unwise.
Day Four
Stevens’s car runs out of gas, and a kind doctor helps him. Once his car is refueled, Stevens reaches his destination, Cornwall. As he prepares to meet with Miss Kenton, he remembers when she told him she was leaving to get married. His memory also takes him back to the time when he found out that Lord Darlington had been used by Hitler to spread propaganda in England.
Day Six
Now in a seaside town, Stevens relates his meeting with Miss Kenton two days previous. They exchanged pleasantries and caught each other up on what they had been doing. Stevens asked Miss Kenton if her husband was treating her well, and she said that he was. She added that she did not love him at first, but came to love him. Now, she said, they are happy and expecting a grandchild. She also confessed that, at times, she wonders what might have been if she and Stevens had shared a life. When her words have sunk in, Stevens is saddened and a little heartbroken at realizing how close he came to having a fuller life.
Stevens shares his regrets with a stranger. He tells the man that he gave so much to Lord Darlington that he has little left for himself or anyone else. While Lord Darlington was not a bad man, he reasons, Stevens regrets not having made his own mistakes. He asks, “Really—one has to ask oneself— what dignity is there in that?” The stranger advises Stevens that it is best simply to look ahead. Stevens resolves to return to Darlington Hall and be the best butler he can be for his new employer, which means learning to banter with him.
Themes: Duty
Duty and dedication are at the heart of this novel. Stevens has lived his life in pursuit of perfect dutifulness. He has willingly made every personal sacrifice along the way, and when he realizes what he has given up in life, it is too late. He cannot reconnect with his family members because they are all dead, he cannot choose a different vocation, and he cannot marry and enjoy romantic love. As he made these sacrifices, he did so gladly, because he felt that the best way to be of service in the world was to serve a great gentleman. By convincing himself that Lord Darlington was such a man, Stevens deceived himself into believing he was living honorably. Sadly, he allowed himself to be so blinded by duty that he ignored his own judgment and needs.
Stevens’s father provides a role model for his son’s extreme devotion to duty. Stevens recalls a story about his father in which a general was coming to visit his employer. This general was responsible for the needless death of the elder Stevens’s other son, who was under the general’s command at the time. The elder Stevens understandably feels deep loathing for this man, yet when he is called on to act as his valet, he does so with emotionless dedication. The elder Stevens’s employer had offered to allow his butler to leave the house for the duration of the general’s stay, yet he refused. To him, as to his son, duty came before anything and everything else. It is little wonder, then, that Stevens chose to keep performing his duties without hesitation when his father died. In fact, Stevens comments on that evening when his father died and there was a banquet for the important international guests. He states, “For all its sad associations, whenever I recall that evening today, I find I do so with a large sense of triumph.” His triumph is that he orchestrated a well-run banquet and did not waver from his duties even when his father died. In other words, he was the picture of dignity and duty.
Related to the theme of duty is patriotism, because both come from dedication to a larger entity. Stevens is deeply patriotic and loves his native England, although he has seen very little of it. In his mind, he has seen the best of England in the great people who have visited Darlington Hall over the years. When he embarks on his trip, however, he has the opportunity to take in England’s expansive landscape. He finds it utterly breathtaking and perfectly beautiful. In a way, he projects himself into the landscape, because he finds it beautiful in its understatement and its confidence in knowing that it is beautiful. He imagines that other countries have stunning features, too, but what he admires about England’s landscape is its unwillingness to try too hard to be noticed. On day one in Salisbury, he writes, “It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.”
Hindsight
As Stevens leaves his microcosm of Darlington Hall, his mind slowly wanders from familiar matters (great butlers, dignity, and the staff plan) to less familiar, more personal, matters. This leads him to reflect on his past and to come to certain realizations in hindsight. As much as he admired Lord Darlington and as deeply dedicated as he was to serving him, he now realizes that Lord Darlington was not the great gentleman Stevens needed to believe he was. Upon reflection, Stevens understands that his employer lacked the wisdom, power, and decency Stevens once believed he possessed. This realization is very troubling to Stevens, who made profound sacrifices to serve his employer. He grapples with this realization, concluding that he is not to blame because, after all, he merely carried out his duties with the dignity appropriate to a butler. At the end of day three, he reflects:
How can one possibly be held to blame in any sense because, say, the passage of time has shown that Lord Darlington’s efforts were misguided, even foolish? Throughout the years I served him, it was he and he alone who weighed up evidence and judged it best to proceed in the way he did, while I simply confined myself, quite properly, to affairs within my own professional realm.
The irony, of course, is that at the time Stevens was not concentrating solely on his professional obligations; his need to serve a “great gentleman” led him to believe that Lord Darlington was something he was not. By the end of his trip, Stevens also realizes that he had the opportunity for love, but he let it go. Now it is too late.
The character of Stevens’s father provides foreshadowing. As he approaches death, the elder Stevens shares a rare moment of attempted tenderness with his son. He asks if he has been a good father, and supposes he has not. The elder Stevens seems to realize at the end of his life that he has wasted his years focusing on being a good butler rather than spending them being a good father or a good person. The younger Stevens fails to understand the significance of this exchange and thus loses the opportunity to learn from it. As a result, he too finds himself, late in life, regretting choices he made in the past.
ending passages:
Lord Darlington wasn’t a bad man. He wasn’t a bad man at all. And at least he had the privilege of being able to say at the end of his life that he made his own mistakes. His lordship was a courageous man. He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I trusted. I trusted his lordship’s wisdom. All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really—one has to ask oneself—what dignity is there in that?"
"Now, look, mate, I’m not sure I follow everything you’re saying. But if you ask me, your attitude’s all wrong, see? Don’t keep looking back all the time, you’re bound to get depressed. And all right, you can’t do your job as well as you used to. But it’s the same for all of us, see? We’ve all got to put our feet up at some point. Look at me. Been happy as a lark since the day I retired. All right, so neither of us are exactly in our first flush of youth, but you’ve got to keep looking forward." And I believe it was then that he said: "You’ve got to enjoy yourself. The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it. That’s how I look at it. Ask anybody, they’ll all tell you. The evening’s the best part of the day."
Summary
Stevens is on his return trip back to Darlington Hall, having failed in his mission either to bring Miss Kenton back to her position of housekeeper or to resume their relationship on a more personal level. In the midst of this failure, he stops his journey and contemplates the fruitlessness of his life. His personal life is non-existent, having been sacrificed for the sake of his career as butler, which in itself has proved to have been misspent in the services of a less than honorable man. He encounters a local gentleman who had also been in service but who is now retired. While Stevens is exchanging his experiences with the gentleman, the failures of his life overcome him, and he at last gives way to his emotions. He feels he cannot go on to be the type of butler he has always wanted to be and which he always felt he was, in his service to Mr. Farraday. He gave all his best years to Lord Darlington, and they were years thrown away. He has no heart left, having had it broken both by Miss Kenton and Lord Darlington. The local gentleman disagrees that Stevens’ life is now over. He points out that for many people, their later years, the “remains of the day,” are the best time of their lives, when all duties are behind them and they can take their ease. He encourages Stevens to do the same. |
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Definition
Author: D. Lessing Genre: Short fiction
Summary: Part 1
The story begins with a description of the history of Susan and Matthew Rawlings’s marriage, which has been a very practical union. They married in their late twenties after having known each other for some time and after having experienced other relationships. They, and their friends, consider them to be “well matched.”
Before their children came, Susan worked in an advertising firm while Matthew was a sub-editor for a London newspaper. They began their family in a house in Richmond, a suburb of London, and they eventually had four children. Their life together was happy but rather flat. They privately began to wonder about the central point of all of the work they did—Matthew outside the home and Susan inside. They did, however, love each other and were determined to have a successful marriage. As a result then, they convinced themselves that “things were under control.”
One night Matthew comes home late and admits that he has been with another woman. Both he and Susan determine that the event was not important and would not damage their relationship. Yet, they both become irritable. Susan begins to wonder about her importance to Matthew and thinks about the ten years of her fidelity. Eventually, they determine that the sensible thing to do is to forget the entire incident. Matthew continues his infidelities, however, prompting Susan to consider the emptiness of her life and her lack of freedom.
Part 2
By the time they are in their early forties, Susan begins to think about what she would do when all of her children go to school. On the day that she drops the twins, her youngest, off for their first day of school, Susan returns home and spends a restless morning, not knowing quite what to do with herself. The restlessness evolves into a state of panic until she convinces herself that her feelings are quite normal and that it would take time to discover her own needs after caring so long for others’ needs. Yet, she spends the day helping their maid take care of the house.
This pattern continues until the school holiday, when she feels resentment that she will no longer have any freedom, even though she has carefully avoided freeing herself from her domestic duties. She experiences a growing sense of restlessness and emptiness but hides her feelings from Matthew, because they are not “sensible.”
On the fourth day of the holiday, her irritation grows to the point that she snaps at her children. Matthew’s understanding and comfort help her regain control of herself, but the sense of restlessness returns when the children go back to school. In an effort to find a place where she can be alone and gain some measure of freedom, which has become increasingly important to her, Susan takes a spare room in the house for her own where she can enjoy some privacy. Matthew and the children respect her time there and determine not to take her for granted in the future.
Susan’s restlessness, however, is not abated by the time in her room. Her increased impatience and anger frighten her, especially one afternoon when she thinks she sees a man in her garden, stirring a snake coiled at his feet. As she determines that this devilish man has brought on the emotional turmoil she is caught up in, he disappears.
Part 3
One afternoon, Susan decides to rent a room in London for a day so that she can be truly alone. Yet when the hotel’s proprietress will not leave her in peace, Susan leaves, feeling defeated. At home, her maid complains that she did not like having the responsibilities of the house fall on her for the entire day while Susan was gone.
When Susan takes a holiday in Wales, she feels no relief since her husband and children call her each day wit |
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