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).

Jacobs

Reading in the first person made some of the facts in the book seem more realistic or as if it were happening right in front of you, but I personally thought the best reason to explain the validity of this slave-narrative, was that the author was black and lived her entire life as a slave or fleeing from slavery. It does more for the reader to just understand the background of our author Harriet Jacobs/Linda Brent, than to focus on the perspective of the narration. A few things however, jumped out at me and could have only done so in a first person account. 

One of those things had to do with Linda's brother William who was owned by Mr. Sands. Even though he was a privileged slave, he desired escape like any other. A few thoughts get raised for me here. First, I better trust the narrative whether or not Linda Brent distinctively states this quote at the beginning:

"READER, be assured this narrative is no fiction. I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true. I have not exaggerated the wrongs inflicted by Slavery; on the contrary, my descriptions fall far short of the facts."

I am a bit of a skeptic, so although through history was I able to recognize the truth of this account, I tried to read this as if I was a native of 1850's America, and that quote right there could very well be a desperate ploy to get readers to believe in all the outrageousness going on in the story, especially since pro-slavery narratives (which were frequently published at the time) said otherwise. So, back to my original thought. Although Linda Brent was trying to expose the horrors of slavery, she didn't let it cloud the truth. There were slaves out there who lived pretty good lives because they were owned by "better" people, but contrary to what many southerners will tell you today, those privileged-slaves would have been happier if they could have dropped the suffix, even if they had to sacrifice the prefix.

All that being said, it was probably still way more beneficial to have a white author write about anti-slavery than it was a black author. Having an outside party feel sympathetic usually has more of an impact than hearing it straight from the oppressed, for believability reasons in those days. Now-a-days (most) people are well-informed about the cruelty and brutality of the slave-ownership era.

Stowe

I can easily see the evidence that Stowe is purposely using emotion to move her readers to change because truth be told, I nearly cried my eyes out at the end of the story whether this was written over 150 years ago or not. As a person who was anti-slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe did a fantastic job driving her motive across in the story. You spend so much time getting close to this character Tom who has undeniably loving qualities. As the reader, I feel it's easiest to relate to the character George Selby who was the son of Uncle Tom's original slave owner Arthur Shelby. He looked at Tom as a friend and mentor, and as I was reading I viewed Tom's character in the same light if I was magically inserted into this story.

I think any kind of critical analysis of this story that matches up with second paragraph of Ms. Irvin's Stowe prompt is spot on, because it does all those things for the readers of the story, and back when this was published in 1853, those readers were entrenched in this world and were living out the settings. The story was relatable to many, and so as a best-seller, many were moved by the story and sympathized with african americans for the first time. Many believe that this story was the reason for the American Civil War. I would say that they are probably right to an extent. I'm sure it got the people stirred up and got them talking.

I think many readers started thinking along the same lines of this quote in the story:

"Indeed, ma'am, you can know nothing of them, if you say so," answered the first lady warmly. "I was born and brought up among them. I know they do feel, just as keenly, -even more so, perhaps,- as we do."

Poe

Edgar Allen Poe turned the normal into abnormal in the story "The Black Cat" by depicting some sudden unusual behavior of the narrator's pet cat, as well as the narrator. We can already deduct that the narrator has a few screws loose and is quite mad. Just because his cat attempts to attack him, the narrator gruesomely gouges out the cat's eyes. Following this incident, the cat is terrified of it's master and runs every time it sees him. This comes to make the narrator feel bad for it (guilt) but then he gets irritated at it for it's behavior (more rage). He then hangs the cat from a tree because he is so enraged with it.

The cat dies and that night the narrator's house burns down with a silhouette of the cat hanging inexplicably on one of the walls, which frightens the narrator and brings upon more abnormalities to the story. After a while, the narrator comes across a black cat of the same size with a missing eye! He decides to take this cat home to replace his old one. However, the cat's one difference is its white blotch on its chest which takes the shape of gallows more and more each day.

One day at their new house, the cat tries to trip him and the narrator tries to kill it with an axe. He is stopped by his wife, so he kills her instead because of his abnormal rage. He buries her behind the wall, and the cat is gone. The police come over to investigate, but find nothing at first. On the last day they go into the basement and here a high pitch screech from behind the wall in which the narrator's wife was buried. They break down the wall to find the screeching cat atop the dead wife's head, which can be interpreted as the narrator's guilt wallowing and barking to be found out. All-in-all, reading this story or any of Poe's stories is a very abnormal experience.

Hawthorne

In the story "The Minister's Black Veil", the author Nathaniel Hawthorne toys with the idea of secrecy and sinful desires that may not even be apparent to the ones you call your closest. I like the symbolism he uses in the story such as the underlying reason why Reverend Hooper is wearing the black veil even though it goes unstated. We can gather from the text that he starts wearing the veil at the funeral of an unnamed young lady, and doesn't take it off ever again. He says that the black veil represents secret sin, and that everyone of the townspeople are like him in that they all have some kind of secret sin that goes unnoticed. The symbols we can gather from this instance is that Reverend Hooper could have possibly had an affair with the young maiden who died, and his guilt made him wear the veil from then until death.

One of the onlookers says this quote: "I had a fancy," replied she, "that the minister and the maiden's spirit were walking hand in hand." This only further solidifies the suspicion that Reverend Hooper was unfaithful to his late fiancee Elizabeth, who left him because she couldn't handle him wearing the veil any longer. Both of these facts bring me to this specific quote in the story that caught my attention when I read it again (this was my favorite story of all three): "I don't like it," muttered an old woman, as she hobbled into the meeting-house. "He has changed himself into something awful, only by hiding his face."

There is a great deal of irony in this statement. He really hasn't changed himself into something awful at all, because what he already did before wearing the veil was awful. The veil was Hooper's way of coming to terms with his guilts. So he informs the townspeople of secret sin but doesn't reveal the significance of the veil in that, whether or not everyone was shaken up by the look of the horrifying veil upon his face. Many ask why he wears it, but when he offers no explanation, the sin stays in secrecy, and more and more people get turned off to it. His fiancee Elizabeth ends up leaving him because she can't understand why he goes on wearing it. 

Apess & Emerson

America was going through an identity crisis early on in our history. The shock of breaking away from the British hasn't fully settled, and everyone is still living like and identifying with Englanders. Emerson and Apess challenged the people of America through their speeches, to stand up and become new individuals. Emerson hinted at new ways of thought mentality, which goes a long way to say that culture comes from the mind and how you think.

Apess addressed this to the public in the way we think about the darker skinned individuals known as the Native Americans. Who would have known that a writer from the earliest days of our nation's history felt that compelled to tackle racism, and at the same time word the speech in a way that it sounds like he's pointing fingers at the white american population. Throughout history we will see people in similarly dire situations trying to uprise or go against what the popular opinion is to encourage peace and coexistence.

Examples of this comparison lie in the heart of black segregation, when motivational speakers like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X were testing what their fellow American's previously thought, and professing of a better way of coexistence that can lead to a higher standard of living for everybody. However, unlike King, Malcolm, and many others... Apess drifted into obscurity and didn't have as much respect as the aforementioned men. He drank himself into alcoholism and died at a very young age. He was also part native american, so he could have been race oppressed. I mean, like I said... racism has been around for a very long time, so even throughout history examining literature, Americans were probably hesitant/reluctant to applaud the writings of an off-white native american man.

About Me

Hi, my name is Noah Syed, and I'm about to be a senior at TCU as a writing major and math minor but my real passion is writing, composing, and engineering some raw underground hip-hop tracks free for the open public. There's too much of my love in it to keep it hidden for monetary reasons. I hail from Albany, NY which is inexplicably the capital of the state, and happens to only be half an hour from the Catskills where the fictitious Rip Van Winkle lived and slept. I am taking this course because I am game to read over the summer. A long time ago, I lost interest with books and reading, but my enjoyment is rekindling.

I came to TCU because it was always my dream to be in the state of Texas, as culturally different as it was. I applied to 7 schools here, 2 in New York, and 1 in Massacusetts. As soon as I got accepted to a school in Texas, there was nothing that was going to hold me back from going. If I was made chancellor of TCU, the tuition drops immediately, but hopefully not at the expense of our athletics which are relatively top notch for such a small institution. Aesthetically pleasing parking garages would be erected, and moving sidewalks would be the next job for construction. As you can see, although I'm very lean, walking is my enemy. :)

A good teacher engages in discussion to the point where it's driven into our skulls that contributing to the discussion is vital and very constructive to learning whether it is optional or not. A good student should be able to somewhat pull off a Lead Classroom Respondent session nearly everyday of the July-mester, even with little time for preparation.

If I could have dinner with three people living or dead, I would pick Giada Delaurentis so she can cook as well as have dinner. I would then choose Tony Parker who is my current favorite player in the NBA, and last but not least I would pick Phonte from my favorite rap group Little Brother because of his musical mentality. I wouldn't pick anyone dead, because I'm terrified of ghosts.

Three key points to know about yours truly, is that I love my Spurs and I talk about the NBA like it's my religion and pastoral obligation. I love to dress nice with a little urban flavor. I'm NOT a collar popping, top sidering, khaki donning, smock wearing frat boy. I honestly would like to know one thing about y'all. Have you ever been to New York City? If no, you should schedule a trip sometime this year or next year. You won't regret it because NYC is that amazing.

The writing I primarily do is lyrical. I love punchlines, wordplay, double entendre's, whatever. The meter and beat keeps the poetry challenging and structured. I think highly of my lyrical writing at this point, but that isn't to say that I couldn't improve. That would be very far from the truth. However, I've been writing hip-hop lyrics and hooks since I was in the 8th grade. Now I'm a senior in college, so my writing better be something to write home about (lol).

The point of this blog is to follow my mental compass and seek it's path to analytical thinking about some Major American writers and their stories. It should be fun because my mind is a trip and I can think abstractly. What can I say? I am an aspiring artist. They say artists are weird, but I just think we explore the darkest depths.