Heroic Behavior

"Sometimes I am tempted to think that Mrs. Pontellier is capricious" a housewife that swims against the current.

I always think that when one criticizes someone it is because you feel either jealous  or superior in some way. In the case of Madame Lebrun, she perhaps thinks of Mrs. Pontellier as a changing being because her way of acting differs from the conventional personalities she is accustomed to . A bizarre change in the typical behavior of a house wife.

Who would dare to swim in the "vast expanse of water, meeting and melting in the moonlit sky"(62)?  Edna Pontellier did it. And because of it she was simply considered different. As if it were a crime to simply walk away to rejoice triumph alone. When one stands out, simply breaks what society expects one is criticized.

Edna's behavior was seen as heroic, but the way she coped with it was seen was different, weird, moody. Society wants to be a part of everything a controlling freak that when one little thing escapes the judgmental moster inside it comes out to display its prejudice.

Waiting in Vain

I know we are suppose to be writing on feminism or simply close reading. But I simply do not feel like it. Why?  No reason, I simply do not want to.

Just some hours ago my friend was a bit down because he felt that life was changing. When he described his feeling I pictured, "the figure of a man standing beside a desolate rock on the seashore" (55). A bit emo, I know, but it was an illustrative manner to portray my relation to his feeling.

We feel alone, desolate and misunderstood when we are facing change, when we feel that our friends are not there for us, that fade away in the distance once we receive our high school diploma. But that is life.

Why when we feel like that we "wait for the material pictures which we think would gather"(56)?
Pictures of solitude, and despairing feelings.

It is because we expect change to be painful. And it is. It hurts. Life is ephemeral, a cycle of never ending changes that transforms us and others as we go along. And simply because, it is painful to leave those moments of pleasure, of enjoyment, what makes us reach that so called happiness. As if picturing pain would surpass that feeling of loosing something or even someone, making us feel victims of our own conscious feeling.

We feel deceived by life itself when our greatest moments become memories, and wait for them to come again. But, "we wait in vain"(56).

There are, "no pictures of solitude, of hope, of longing, or despair. But the very passions themselves" (56). The passion of enjoying what we have, without picturing it as a future pain because we lost it.

The passion of embracing what we know will not last long.

The Female Parrot

It is the universally understood that a locked up bird symbolizes imprisonment, the lack of liberty. In The Awakening, a locked up parrot seems to interrupt randomly the events in the novella. As if it were suppose to make a statement.

First time the little parrot comes up:

"A green yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over: "Allez-Vou-en! Alle vous-en! Sapristi! That's all right! He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood, unless it was a mocking beard that hung on the other side of the door, whistling his fluty notes out upon the breeze with maddening persistence" (1). 

Second time the little parrot comes up: "Allez vous-en! Sapristi" shrieked the parrot outside the door. He was the only being present who possessed sufficient candor to admit that he was listening to these gracious performances for the first time that summer" (53).

What does it all mean? Birds out there that wake me up every morning, please enlighten me. 

It seems as if Chopin relates the bird with Mrs. Pontellier, or to be more precise with women, at least those who sought to break the conventional, or even so women that are seeking to break the conventional. A bird just wants to sing, to fly. A cage locks all of its abilities, it avoids it to experiment its liberty. The parrot speaking another language reflects how society tends to misunderstand women, how they simply assume something from them, in the case of the parrot, the fact of it being a pet, neglecting  that there is more to them. Their voice unheard, misunderstood. A constant struggle to make a statement, always ignored. And when they do, people "insist upon having the bird removed and consigned to regions of darkness" (52). Silenced forever, destined to obey the objections of others, acting as expected. Jut like women do. 

Cupid

I woke up today trying to interpret feminism in the 21st century. One can assume that our society has opened itself to equalizing the roles of the male and female genders. But has it really?

I want to start this blog with a simple comment. Girls have a better chance to get into the college they want. 

Does that ring a bell?

But lets understand the concept in a closer case scenario.

Patty goes out to a party and meets Ron, a charming handsome guy who has a penetrating glare. As soon as Patty sees him, Cupid struck her.

Ron seeks for the girl of that will make his night but as a first impression, she has to be  "some sensuous Madonna, with the day of the fading day enriching her splendid color" (31). Patty was no girl of some sort, "she was rather handsome than beautiful". Nevertheless, Cupid struck him as well.

Comment 1: who approached whom? Obviously Ron. Why? If a girl approaches a guy it could be misinterpreted as the girl being a slut, or really needy. 

They danced for a while until he asked her for her BB Pin. 

Comment 2: Same comment as comment 1. If a girl asks for a guy's BB Pin it implies desperation a.k.a "I need a boyfriend, add me now so we can talk" (18).

Patty was really happy she finally had a boy that was interested, that was willing to talked to her. They went out a couple of times. And liked each other. In a romantic evening Ron leaned to kiss Patty. 

Comment 3: Why didn't Patty lean to kiss Ron?

The Hamlet Radioshow

Jack Hitt writes a story about a group of prisoners at the Missouri Eastern Correctional center who are rehearsing and staging the production of Hamlet, "A man pondering a violet crime and its consequences performed by violet criminals living out those consequences".

The actors of the play relate to the characters they chose, it all comes to the generalizations that Hamlet is a metaphor of a prison. The prison that each character lives inside.

Just as the actor that played Laertes said, "Criminals are cowards". And his character, and pretty much most of Hamlet's characters are. They are insecure, they all try so hard to seem, rather than be and they are perplexed by their own thoughts.  All of Hamlet's characters are criminals, just like the ones that play them.

The prisoners have intimacy with the material, that gives a better insight of the personality of each of the characters. The relation the actors create with the character makes the play believable, and expressing what is difficult to perceive, what is in-between the lines.

Hamlet's Insecurity

I won't blog about August Wilhelm Von Schlegel's essay on Hamlet without contextualizing myself on his views. To understand what he is saying about Hamlet we should first understand what took him to such reasoning. 

If you read the Hyperlink you might understand what I am talking about. He was a leader of German Romanticism, a nineteenth century movement whose main features were the mind-dependence of reality, the dominance of thought over sensation, universalized ethics and natural theology.

After reading this it all became clear, Von Schlegel judges Hamlet as a coward, "but in the resolutions which he so often embraces and always leaves unexecuted, his weakness is too apparent". 

The ideal of dominance of thought over sensation is what Von Schlegel questions about Hamlet. Hamlet is all about thoughts, and his thoughts dominate his feelings. He over thinks too much and he is perplexed by his own thinking. This is an obstacle that Hamlet himself creates in the way he performs his actions, portraying his insecure self that is unable to put up with any task. The tragedy is surreal on its form, based on doubt and insecurity. 

Hamlet could be considered a paradox to the beliefs of Schlegel. 

Freud's Awkward Analysis

Oh! Joy! Sigmund Freud is on the packet that Mr. Tangen gave us! and somehow it was the first essay I wanted to read, coincidence?  I doubt it.

There is something about Freud that has always called my attention, his looks?  

No, definitely not. Simply the way he interprets the unconscious understanding human behavior. Something quite useful in Hamlet's case. The guy was completely out of his mind. But why? What was wrong with the dude? Freud would have won millions if he had psychoanalyzed him.

Even if 200 years had passed he actually tried, and he defines Hamlet's character through this essay. Freud discusses how Hamlet's case is very similar to Oedipus Rex's. That is, the guy had repressed desires to sexually posses his mother. Wait what?

Yeah Freud said that, and I completely agree. Hamlet wanted to avenge his father's death as a way to avenge his uncle from stealing his mother. When his father was alive, Hamlet felt that he still, in a way, possessed his mother, because she was part of their nuclear family. Once his father died, he had to completely give her up. Now his mother did not belong to his father rather to his uncle, even further away from him, making it impossible for him to posses her. 

Although both Oedipus and Hamlet suffer from the same complex, Hamlet's complex is repressed, he is never able to possess his mother, and compel his task. He is unable to fulfill his goal because he over thinks too much. This made him realized that his uncle took away his mother from him, just as his father did, representing the repressed wishes of his childhood, thus showing him that "he is no better than the sinner whom he is to punish" (Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams).

So what does this mean? Simply that Hamlet realized that it is not worth to kill his uncle, since he will never achieve what he deeply wanted. He accepts that he will never be able to possess his mother, and lets nature takes its natural course. Although not fulfilling his task he did act upon things, by expressing his anger and repressed desires, but somehow he sacrificed them by realizing it would be a worthless fight.

So Freud, even if you made it a bit awkward, I find it quite accurate.