Final Prompt

Note: My blog posts are delayed or something. When I was finished last time, it wouldn't publish, until this morning.

My favorite story of the semester was "Rip Van Winkle" by Washington Irving. I liked this story especially because it has to do with experiencing your future right away. It is the equivalent to getting cryogenically frozen or put into a time machine. Yes, he was very old when he woke up, but it was quite the experience for him walking into town 20 years later. He missed out on an entire war. He missed the end of British rule.

This story is very similar to the movie "Planet of the Apes" which is one of my favorite films of all time. Charleton Heston is Rip of course, and the war that took place is like the nuclear holocaust that took place on earth that wiped out the humans and allowed the uprise of apes. In Rip Van Winkle those apes could be the new American way, as opposed to the old British way. I don't think you can pair them together because it was a huge dilemma for Heston who was taken prisoner in the movie. Rip Van Winkle was envied by all the men who had to work.

Gilman

The fact that husbands believed hysteria to be some kind of psychosis just proves how little married couples bonded together. The thought process that went behind putting a mentally healthy woman in a locked room for months is extremely cruel, even though her husband John did not show any ill-will towards her. He honestly thought he was doing the best thing possible for his wife, but man, was he terribly wrong.

Butttt... while some claimed she went insane at the very end, it can be interpreted as her vindication of freedom in her oppressing marriage. It was oppressive because she wasn't allowed to make any decisions regarding her mental health. She was locked away by her husband in a room meant for rehabilitation but became disturbed by the ugly yellow wallpaper and the faces that showed up in it.

I think Gilman does a good job showing that men and women cannot understand each other fully and to attempt to do so is foolish. Even if it is from of the bottom of your heart, it's best that men just sit on the sidelines and let the woman take care of their own issues because they are the ones most familiar with them.  The fact that the narrator wife steps over her husband as she makes laps around her wall at the end of the story symbolizes her conquering of marital freedom.

Freeman

I really liked how the story "A New England Nun" ended. It was a good break from all the stories we read with dismal endings that had to do with imprisonment or death of some sort. I liked the message behind the story. You should break off promises and engagements if there seems to be issues at hand. Louisa promised Joe Daggett 15 years ago, that she would marry him. That seemed highly implausible, and upon his return it seems even more dubious to Louisa and Joe to go through with the marriage when both had changed drastically over the last fifteen years.

This line of thinking would help stunt the increasing divorce rate in this country. When you see problems at hand, it's best to just call it off. I've seen many examples of this gone wrong throughout my life. I've seen so many couples have arguments with each other and constantly nitpick, but breaking off their engagement is out of the question for them. That, makes no sense to me at all. If you are fighting now or not living up to their standards now, how is that blow going to be lessened after the quarreling bride and groom tie the knot? The answer is, it won't be, and matters start to get significantly worse until the day the when the married couple decide to part. It wouldn't be such a big deal if it was just that, but at this point in the marriage, you have kids getting dragged through it, and it's troubling to have to sacrifice one parent in the middle of your childhood.

Chopin

In the end of the story it is revealed through a letter from Armand's mother to his father that Armand is actually the one who is half black, and his mother "belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery". I like to call this justified irony, because he thought he was ridding himself of this shame that no men should ever be ashamed for, but he really just lost his wife, lost his kid, and destroyed his self-image. In essence, he destroyed his own life when he thought he was saving it. Basically, Chopin's outlook on marriage is a dark one... one fueled by conditional love, and man's impossible search for perfection.

She does the same thing with the women in her stories "At the 'Cadian Ball" and "The Storm". Infidelity runs rampant in the story, and neither Clarisse or Calixta appear to show any regret just as we don't see Armand's regret after reading the letter from his mother. Chopin seems to portray her characters as materially superficial, with questionable morales... which had never been a form of writing that rose to popularity before. This could arguably be the precursor to books or even television shows that center around scandal or scandalous behavior.

Twain & Harte

Mark Twain and Bret Harte often focused on smaller regional communities, or in this case with Twain's "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" or Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp", they followed the pioneers to lands that much of the country out east has never experienced yet.

Twain concentrates a lot on the different dialects present in the frontier west. A good quote that exemplifies regionalism is when Simon Wheeler says about Jim Smiley, "He was always ready and laying for a chance; there could be no solittry thing mentioned but that feller'd offer to bet on it...". Another example of this western dialect that can be a phonological nightmare is this following quote: "He ketched  a frog one day, and took him home, and said he cal'klated to edercate him; and so he never done nothin for three months but set in his backyard and learn that frog to jump."

Another thing you can take from the dialect and the story that Wheeler tells the narrator, is that all of these pioneers seem almost callow. Even in "The Luck of Roaring Camp", the superstitions that everyone at the mining camp possess, is highly reminiscent of child-like behavior. Is it that the pioneers who are free to establish their own law and live off each other, resort back to their childhood ways, waiting for someone to spoon-feed them their duties? It could be why everyone has lost hope at Roaring Camp, then gain hope with foolish superstition, then lose it again just because a baby dies in a flash flood. The baby wasn't working to bring prosperity to the mining camp. It happened because everyone at Roaring Camp changed their ways when "The Luck" was born. They stopped drinking and fighting, to raise the kid properly, akin to giving up their childish ways to take responsibility like an adult.

Davis

Rebecca Harding Davis promotes change within industrial capitalism. The harsh imagery she depicts using realism of her native hometown Wheeling, VA, is ostensibly worse for the lower working class than it is for the wealthy industrialists. She creates a notable division between the impoverished and the powerful through the interaction at the iron mill. The difference between the mill workers and Dr. May, Clarke, Kirby, and Mitchell was even evident to Hugh Wolfe who is one of the downtrodden characters suffering from Tuberculosis. 

Davis alludes to industrialism and greedy capitalists destroying the environment and the people's spirit. She even generalizes that most of these soulless upper-class individuals are passive christians who believe in and find solace with God, but aren't charitable nor benevolent because they don't think that pity is the proper way to reach the poor working class. These passive christians are metaphorically portrayed later on in the story before Hugh goes to prison, when he is in the upper-class church. The preacher fails to reach Hugh using language meant for cultured and well-educated church members.

All-in-all, Davis speaks out against the ignorant nature of greedy capitalists who fail to see all the damage they have done to the environment and the people who live in it because of their passive coexistence with the lower class, and failure to understand the needs, desires, and aspirations of the lower working class.

Douglass

In the Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, Douglass himself exposes the grim life of an average slave. Their typical experiences were pretty dire and as time went on you would think things would get better and more respect would be shown for some of these older slaves, but that wasn't the case. It is stated in the narrative that Douglass was shipped from property to property multiple times to work on several different plantations and none of them were the least bit pleasant.

He was without a mother from a very young age and didn't even know about his birthdate. Douglass even likened his status in the household to the livestock. One of his masters even took away his privilege to read the Bible, because if he had done so he wouldn't be fit to be a slave. This is where I believe (and many others it seems) where Douglass developed the determination to learn all that he could and become a smart man.

A crossover I noticed between one of the facts in the movie we watched, and this narrative, was that Douglass described the singing of slaves as sorrowful, which is contradictory to the way blacks were depicted in popular culture during the early 20th century (singing with daffy glee).