Copy of 2480: Big Themes

2480: Big Themes

Surveillance

Preview: Gender, Sexuality and Hauntings

I'm putting this one (and several others) in italics because they end up touching on so many other big issues--they're almost umbrella themes that hauntings/haunted houses use as a shorthand to a host of other issues.

o What words/ideas/images keep coming up? List the specifics.

Preview: Colonies and Hauntings

"The business of the day requires a great deal of thought. Chancery justice is so ve-ry difficult to follow." (Ch 5) "The little old lady's hearing was remarkably quick. She answered for herself directly." (ch 5) "She became so fantastically and pressingly earnest in her entreaties that we would walk up and see her apartment for an instant" (ch 5)

"I can't allow them to sing much," said the little old lady, "for (you'll think this curious) I find my mind confused by the idea that they are singing while I am following the arguments in court. And my mind requires to be so very clear, you know!

I don't mind confessing to the wards in Jarndyce (in strict confidence) that I sometimes find it difficult to keep up a genteel appearance (Ch 5)

I noticed the scantiest necessaries in the way of furniture(Ch 5) "There was a more affecting meaning in her pinched appearance, I thought as I looked round, than I had understood before." (Ch 5) Esther as narrative--reading household situations/ poverty/ wealth

We've seen that the traditional gothic frequently features an imperiled female who is watched/ controlled in various ways. That watching and controlling seems to both be through her sexuality (as represented by all the locked doors and mountains and valleys) and also to be a way to control her sexuality. But these controllings are seen to have long reaching effects, as in Manfred's choosing Isabella to be his bride to strengthen his "line," which is reinforced by the fact that gothic novels are almost always "historicized" so that the struggles portrayed can be read as shaping of modernity.

Byatt plays with these tropes--the male is the watched figure, and watched by both a woman and her lost child. He also translate (or justifies?) sexuality into something demanded by the future _of_ the male. Also, this tale seems to require a female listener, who serves as a watcher/controller of the text in some ways. And indeed, even in earlier gothic tales, women have to be smart observers to escape their situations, so they turn surveillance to their own purposes.

This suggests that we want to think about the roles of gender and sexuality throughout the 19th and 20th centuries more generally, both to think about how it shapes the gothic and how the gothic might have contributed to it. What particular encounters might we have as we go into this unit on gender and sexuality?

How does the literary text, explicitly or allegorically, represent various aspects of colonial oppression?

Gender/Class/ Ethnicity: Who watches who? What sort of power is gained/lost in these transactions?

Science/Technology: What technologies allow/aid surveillance? Who uses them and in what ways?

Sexuality: How does surveillance control/shape/ encourage certain forms of sexuality? What are those forms?

History: How did such forms of surveillance come into being? Are they meant to solidify the past, or change it? In what ways?

For, on a low bed opposite the fire, a confusion of dirty patchwork, lean-ribbed ticking, and coarse sacking, the lawyer, hesitating just within the doorway, sees a man. He lies there, dressed in shirt and trousers, with bare feet. He has a yellow look in the spectral darkness of a candle that has guttered down until the whole length of its wick (still burning) has doubled over and left a tower of winding-sheet above it. His hair is ragged, mingling with his whiskers and his beard—the latter, ragged too, and grown, like the scum and mist around him, in neglect. Foul and filthy as the room is, foul and filthy as the air is, it is not easy to perceive what fumes those are which most oppress the senses in it; but through the general sickliness and faintness, and the odour of stale tobacco, there comes into the lawyer's mouth the bitter, vapid taste of opium. (Ch 11)

Young men like Mr. Allan Woodcourt who take it from a strong interest in all that it can do will find some reward in it through a great deal of work for a very little money and through years of considerable endurance and disappointment....

We had a visitor next day. Mr. Allan Woodcourt came. He came to take leave of us; he had settled to do so beforehand. He was going to China and to India as a surgeon on board ship. He was to be away a long, long time.

I believe—at least I know—that he was not rich. All his widowed mother could spare had been spent in qualifying him for his profession. It was not lucrative to a young practitioner, with very little influence in London; and although he was, night and day, at the service of numbers of poor people and did wonders of gentleness and skill for them, he gained very little by it in money. He was seven years older than I. Not that I need mention it, for it hardly seems to belong to anything.

I think—I mean, he told us—that he had been in practice three or four years and that if he could have hoped to contend through three or four more, he would not have made the voyage on which he was bound. But he had no fortune or private means, and so he was going away. He had been to see us several times altogether. We thought it a pity he should go away. Because he was distinguished in his art among those who knew it best, and some of the greatest men belonging to it had a high opinion of him.

When he came to bid us good-bye, he brought his mother with him for the first time. She was a pretty old lady, with bright black eyes, but she seemed proud. She came from Wales and had had, a long time ago, an eminent person for an ancestor, of the name of Morgan ap-Kerrig—of some place that sounded like Gimlet—who was the most illustrious person that ever was known and all of whose relations were a sort of royal family. He appeared to have passed his life in always getting up into mountains and fighting somebody; and a bard whose name sounded like Crumlinwallinwer had sung his praises in a piece which was called, as nearly as I could catch it, Mewlinnwillinwodd.

Mrs. Woodcourt, after expatiating to us on the fame of her great kinsman, said that no doubt wherever her son Allan went he would remember his pedigree and would on no account form an alliance below it. She told him that there were many handsome English ladies in India who went out on speculation, and that there were some to be picked up with property, but that neither charms nor wealth would suffice for the descendant from such a line without birth, which must ever be the first consideration. She talked so much about birth that for a moment I half fancied, and with pain—But what an idle fancy to suppose that she could think or care what MINE was!

-Ch 17

Through illuminating readings of the fiction of Dickens, Conan Doyle, and Wilde, Chang's third chapter shows how the opium den came to serve as "a persistent spatial shorthand denoting corrupting iniquity" (110). For Chang, the smoke-filled den, often littered with drugged bodies, represents a "gothic parallel" to the official exhibitions of Chinese wares and culture at the Great Exhibition and elsewhere during the mid-century period between the two Opium Wars. While China's ostentatious place within the integrated High Victorian global marketplace belied the colonialist rendering of China as backward and remote, the image of the opium den reinforced it by depicting China's population as enfeebled and effeminized by addiction. In an iconic episode such as the opening to Dickens' Edwin Drood, the opium den is "a fundamentally misrepresented and misrepresenting space." (140)

Colonies then:

[Review of] Elizabeth Chang's Britain's Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain

How do gender, race, and class function in colonial and postcolonial discourse? Are new forms of imperialism replacing colonization and how?

serve as/take the space of earlier gothic spaces-they are both historically behind and other, and a space for the English subject to "find" himself

carry threat/possibility--of poverty/riches, of sexuality/freedom

Post/Colonialism

3 Hauntings

__The emphasis on the ways that colonial concerns cause Mr Jellyby's bodily needs to be forgotten--as with his breakfast-- or dissapear--as when he is "merged" with his wife--__ is surprisingly different than __the maternal qualities on Mrs. Jellyby, such as her many children, emphasis on families, and "nest[ing]"_ in terms of _choose 1 from box below____.

Shape

Size

Placement/Timing (either in terms of plot or in terms of the actual text)

Make-up/components/ function within a group

Use/Purpose

Outcome

Definitions

Reasoning

Causes

By this, I mean _____term from the box above__ is ____description of how it fulfills the term in the box__ in ____Specific Detail 1___ while there is a striking difference in ___Specific Detail 2___ in terms of ____description of how it fulfills the term in the box__. Noticing this pattern of ____a more precise definition of term from the box above¬___ suggests that ____Specific Detail 3 that was not in original dump____ is also a part of this collation because it _____ description of how it matches one specific detail, but not the other__.

o What words/ideas/images keep coming up? List the specifics.

Mrs. Jellyby: "devotes herself entirely to the public" "passed several more children on the way up" "We hope by this time next year to have from a hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy families cultivating coffee and educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger." "sitting in quite a nest of waste paper"

portrayed as mother to all /maternal/almost animalistic

"until something else attracts her" "received so many letters that Richard, who sat by her, saw four envelopes in the gravy at once" "Everything was just as we had left it last night and was evidently intended to remain so. Below-stairs the dinner-cloth had not been taken away, but had been left ready for breakfast. Crumbs, dust, and waste-paper were all over the house. Some pewter pots and a milk-can hung on the area railings; the door stood open"

domestic space is neglected for imperial space

Mr. Jellyby: " merged—merged—in the more shining qualities of his wife" "passively to submit himself to Borrioboola-Gha but not to be actively interested in that settlement" "As to Pa, he gets what he can and goes to the office. He never has what you would call a regular breakfast. Priscilla leaves him out the loaf and some milk, when there is any, overnight"

masculine power is minimal/bodies become less important

Gender, Sexuality, and Family Relationships

• How does the literary text, explicitly or allegorically, represent various aspects of colonial oppression?
• How did the experience of colonization affect those who were colonized while also influencing the colonizers? What were the forms of resistance against colonial control?
• What does the text reveal about the operations of cultural difference - the ways in which race, religion, class, gender, sexual orientation, cultural beliefs, and customs combine to form individual identity - in shaping our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the world in which we live?
• How do gender, race, and class function in colonial and postcolonial discourse? Are new forms of imperialism replacing colonization and how?
• What person(s) or groups does the work identify as "other" or stranger? How are such persons/groups described and treated? (above: https://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/)
• How does a literary text in the Western canon reinforce or undermine colonialist ideology through its representation of colonialization and/or its inappropriate silence about colonized peoples? (Tyson 378-379)

Writing and Language

o Also, look for specifics: is the sun compared to God, or are the rays of the sun compared to God’s vision? Point out the specifics of the comparison. How do they put surprising concepts together?

we could not help noticing that her dress didn't nearly meet up the back and that the open space was railed across with a lattice-work of stay-lace—like a summer-house.

Here Mrs Jellyby's attire is compared to a location--a summer house--which is not necessary but a place for the rich with leisure. This one, though, is falling apart/weakly constructed.

I'm putting this one (and several others) in italics because they end up touching on so many other big issues--they're almost umbrella themes that hauntings/haunted houses use as a shorthand to a host of other issues.

__Esther's using her doll as a motherly confidante who listens too her day while she is "leaning on the elbow of her great chair"__ is surprisingly like __Esther's having the students "confide in her" and remember her as someone who spoke kindly to them at bedtime _ in terms of __Outcome__.

By this, I mean __that the outcome__ is replaceing a mother with an inanimate object__ in __the case of the doll__ and the same holds true in __Ether serving as a confidante__ in terms of __her serving as a mother figure for all the studnets__. Noticing this pattern of __a replacement of maternal roles by people inappropiate for that role__suggests that __the man Esther meets in the carriage__ is also a part of this collation because he __tries to comfort her tears and feed her, both traditionally maternal roles__.

How are bodies described in the text? How do they interact with each other an their environments?

What symbols, settings, or actions might be understood as representative of sexuality or gender?

What does the text portray as "normal" in terms of gender roles and sexuality? Besides explicit comments, how are these roles portrayed and enforced?

Are the ways in which non-normative gender roles are allowed or accepted in the text? What sort of roles? In what situations are such moments allowable?

Who serves in "traditional" family roles (mother/father/sister/aunt...)? Are there any missing family members? Any doubling?

(also check out specific prezis)

Genre: In what genre is the writing/language occurring. Does it work with/oppose other genres? In what ways?

Gender/Class/ Ethnicity/ (Post) Colonialism: Who has access to/authority over writing or language? Is it used differently by different groups? In what ways? What system or conventions are used to make sense of the language./writing?

Family/Sexuality: Is reading or writing a form of erotic power? Is it a key to understanding family secrets? How is it used/who finds/interprets it?

History: Does writing reveal otherwsie hidden histories? What form of writing and who can find/read/interpret it?

Technology/Science: What technologies of language/writing/transcription are used? Can some use/access them in ways others can't?

__Lady Dedlock's interest and agitation at seeing the "law hand" of the legal documents__ is surprisingly like __Esther's finding "tener" and "gracious" "emotion" in the short, abbreviated letter from Kenge and Carboy about serving as a companion__ In terms of Outcome. By this, I mean __the outcome__ is __an overly emotional response to dry facts__ in __Lady Dedllok's seeing the legal papers___ and the same holds true in __Esther;s response___ in terms of __how she interptets the business letter__. Noticing this pattern of _surprising emotional response to written texts__ suggests that __the shift in narrators__ is also a part of this collation because it __shifts how the reader releates to the text, shifting teh emotional effcet__.

.

History

o What words/ideas/images keep coming up? List the specifics.

"Innumerable children" " married into it" " little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse" "Fair wards of court " "The very solicitors' boys" "a mere bud on the forest tree of the parent suit" "the young girl—" "Begludship's pardon—boy," says Mr. Tangle prematurely. "In reference," proceeds the Chancellor with extra distinctness, "to the young girl and boy, the two young people" "the young people" (Ch 1)

There's a kind of surprisng emphasis on youth and things that lead to children (married/fair wards/mere bud/young girl and boy)

o In what tense is the narrative told? Where do you see it shifting or being surprising?

"ought to be sitting here—as here he is" "ought to be—as here they are" " ought to be—as are they not?" "Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor's court ...?" (Ch 1)

it keeps switching betqween subjunctive and present declarative. But then those become interrogative--less certainity than there may seem to be

Place and Environment

Who is allowed to tell history? Whose histories are told?

Is history seen as an explantion or origin for current conditions? In what ways?

Does one sort of history possibly stand for another? [That is, could the details of a marriage, for instance, possibly represent the unification of Scotland and England?](you'll probably want to track the minutiae of one history and then see if you can collate with a different history)

Are there hidden or alternate histories invoked? How?

Do different versions of history seem at war? in what ways? how are they oposed?

If it is a historical place, how has its significance changed? What has been lost and gained in that space?

I'm putting this one (and several others) in italics because they end up touching on so many other big issues--they're almost umbrella themes that hauntings/haunted houses use as a shorthand to a host of other issues.

Preview: History and Hauntings

In some ways this is the easiest sell of the connections I'm making: the Gothic requires some "secret history" to function--why was that giant helmet there? who was locked in that room?

But we could switch it around and ask why history shapes so many forms in the eighteenth through tweny-first centuries: not just the gothic, but the larger project of the novel, which is generally about the history of a specific person, to poems of the age which move from "emotion reflected in tranquility" to addressing and deconstructing history.

Why do you think this time period/ these time periods were so obsessed with re-writing/ restructuring history?

o What sort of comparison is being made? Object to Object? Part to Whole? Adjacent to Object? Exaggerated to Actual? Understated to Actual? In other words, do you have a symbol, personification, metaphor, simile, metonymy, synechdoche, hyperbole, litotes….? [I care less about your knowing the exact term and more about you identifying the relation set up by the symbolic language.] Identify the elements of each side of the comparison. [that is “the eye of heaven” compares a part—the eye—to a very big whole—the sun” ]

As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill (Ch 1)

the muddy streets of London are being compared to the prehistoric/post-flood world. So an actual thing is being compared to 2 imagined times: the flood, and the scientific prehistoric.

o If an object does represent something else, isolate the way that object is described and list key terms: check not just nouns, but adjectives and adverbs. What is rich/detailed about the description?

waters newly retired, would not be wonderful, Megalosaurus, forty feet long, waddling, elephantine Lizard--emphasis not just on ancientness, but otherness--animals, weird movement, "would not be"--what is not expected

• Can you get a sense of meter? Pound out the rhythm on your knee. Are there places where strong stresses take over? Where softer sounds abound? Identify the places where meter changes and what you see it as doing

• Does the poem have alliteration (the repetition of consonant sounds) or assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds)? Where? What is the subject matter of that part?

.Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex Marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper….(Ch 1)

Two phrases of five syllables each (“Fog everywhere”; “Fog up the river”) establish a powerful rhythmic expectation that is clinched in repetition (…fog down the river…. Fog on the Essex…, fog on the Kentish…. Fog creeping into…;…fog drooping on the…)This phrase pattern can be scanned ( ) and is strongly characterized by alliteration, the repetition of stressed consonantal sounds (Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs) and by assonance, the patterned repetition of vowel sounds (fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among)

These effects create a feeling of being surrounded and oppressed, exactly what Dickens is trying to create through his description.

While place/setting can be a kind of obvious foil for larger themes (it's raining, and the main character is sad), we've started thinking about the struggle to contain certain things within certain places (as the Gothic tries to do with its castles and grand houses), and the fears of how place can shape a person (as in _Heart of Darkness_). It's also worth shifting the question a bit-- how are characters defining and manipulating spaces in thes etexts? To what ends?

Gender/Class/ Ethnicity: Who can be in what space? How are spaces divided?

Science/Technology: How is the space created/manufactured? How does it/does it not work with nature?

Sexuality: Does the space replicate/ comment on sexual relations in any way? (think towers, turrets and lakes)

History: Are some spaces more "modern" or "backwards"? What makes them so?

Are there certain places that keep out/ fence in history? how?