Challenging “Universal” White Standards of Beauty
in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
Nicole Adams
This essay explores the damaging effects these standards have on one young black girl, Pecola, and the people who surround her. Both she and her mother desire to be beautiful and the only beauty they have seen is the image of white women. However, their desire to be beautiful based on an ideal that they cannot relate to causes great pain and detrimental outcomes for both Pecola and her mother. This essay argues that the accepted universal standards of beauty are not universal at all, but damaging to those who do not accurately fit into the mold created by white culture.
Works Cited
Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1980.
Dickerson, Vanessa D. “Summoning Somebody: The Flesh Made Word in Toni Morrison’s Fiction.” Recovering the Black Female Body. Ed. Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
Klotman, Phyllis R. “Dick-and-Jane and the Shirley Temple Sensibility in The Bluest
Eye.” Black American Literature Forum: 13.4 (1979): 123-25.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Penguin, 1994.
Walther, Malin LaVon. “Out of Sight: Toni Morrison’s Revision of Beauty.” Black
American Literature Forum 24.4 (1990) : 775-89.
Waxman, Barbara Frey. “Girls into Women: Culture, Nature, and Self-Loathing in Toni
Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” Women in Literature: Reading through the Lens of Gender. Ed. Jerilyn Fisher and Ellen S. Silber. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. 47-49.
“Only connect . . .”:
Connecting Masculinity and Femininity in Howards End
Jenny Brigham
Illness’s presence in E. M. Forster’s Howards End suggests an imbalance within the individuals and within society. One source of this imbalance may be traced back to the conflict between masculinity and femininity. The novel is concerned with the dialectic opposition between male and female and asks its readers with its epigraph, “Only connect . . .” to connect masculinity with femininity. The difficulty is being able to connect masculinity with femininity without blurring the attributes of each. There is evidence in the novel that characters can find strength and metaphorical health through gender connection.
Works Cited
Beauman, Nicola. E. M. Forster: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Born, Daniel. “Private Gardens, Public Swamps: Howards End and the Revaluation of Liberal Guilt.” The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel: Charles Dickens to H. G. Wells. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. 120-139.
Duckworth, Alistair M. Howards End: E. M. Forster’s House of Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992.
Finkelstein, Bonnie Blumenthal. Forster’s Women: Eternal Differences. New York: Columbia UP, 1975.
Forster, E. M. Howards End. 1910. Ed. Alistair M. Duckworth. Boston: Bedford, 1997.
Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Toward a Recognition of Androgyny. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.
Langland, Elizabeth. “Gesturing Toward an Open Space: Gender, Form, and Language in Howards End.” Howards End. Ed. Alistair M. Duckworth. Boston: Bedford, 1997. 400-415. 78-111.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.
Stubbs, Patricia. Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel (1880-1920). York: Barnes and Noble, 1979.
Summers, Claude J. “’The Flesh Educating the Spirit’: E. M. Forster’s Gay Fictions.” Gay Fictions: Wilde to Stonewall: Studies in a Male Homosexual Literary Tradition. New York: Continuum, 1990.
Trilling, Lionel. E. M. Forster. Norfolk: New Directions Books, 1943.
Vrettos, Athena. Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
“At His Own Peril”:
The Fate of Critic, Artist, and Art
in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
Bill Childers
Oscar Wilde, often championed as the preeminent writer of the aesthetic movement, was intrigued by the relationship between art and criticism. In the poetic collection of verses that compose the preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde explicitly connects the artist and critic in a kind of co-creation of “beautiful things.” This linkage, also pursued in Wilde’s essay “The Critic as Artist,” is generated in the association of Lord Henry (critic) and Basil (artist). This presentation seeks to confront the apparent contradiction between the optimistic preface and the closing demise of Dorian Gray.
Works Cited
Gillespie, Michael Patrick. The Picture of Dorian Gray: “What the World Thinks of Me.” New York: Twayne Publishers. 1995.
Lloyd, Tom. Crises of Realism: Representing Experience in the British Novel 1816-1910. Lewisburg: Bucknell University. 1997.
Symons, Arthur. A Study of Oscar Wilde. London: Grafton House.
Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist.” Selected Works. Ed Richard Arlington. London: William Heinemann. 1946. 63-129.
---. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oxford: Oxford University. 1998.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles: An Idle Social Ladder
Jomi Clawson
In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, many critics theorize Hardy’s subtitle, “A Pure Woman,” as a story about Tess and her physical intactness, or virginity. I would like to challenge the many facets of this interpretation on Tess Durbyfield’s “purity” by exploring her self-denial of social mobility amidst situations that tarnish her image in society’s eyes. Unlike other characters of Victorian literature—such as Hetty Sorrel of Adam Bede, or the infamous Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair—Tess refuses to improve her social standings despite birthing a child conceived from rape.
Works Cited
“An Interview With Thomas Hardy.” Tess of the d’Urbervilles. New York: Norton, 1991.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Interpretations: Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Philadelphia: The Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.
Calder, Jenni. Women and Marriages in Victorian Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Daleski, H. M. Thomas Hardy and Paradoxes of Love. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997.
Hardy Thomas. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. New York: Norton, 1991.
Ingham, Patricia. The Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Langland, Elizabeth. “Nobody’s Angels: Domestic Ideology and Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Novel.” PMLA 107 (1992): 290-304.
LaValley, Albert J., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969.
Lipshitz, Susan. Tearing the Veil: Essays on Femininity. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.
Cross-dressing: Empowering Rosalind and Viola
Sarah Cleaveland
The endings of As You Like It and Twelfth Night disappoint many modern day audiences. Many critics argue that by giving up their male identities and freedom for marriage Rosalind and Viola become weak and submissive characters. However, I argue that the endings are not flawed; these women remain strong throughout the entirety of their plays through the use of cross-dressing and manipulating their female power. In fact, comedic endings in Shakespeare’s day were often designed to appeal to female audiences, subtly empowering women within the context of a patriarchal society.
Works Cited
Berggren, Paula S. “Female Sexuality as Power in Shakespeare’s Plays.” The Woman’s Part. Ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely. Chicago: University of Illinois, 1983. 17-34.
Davies, W. Robertson. Shakespeare’s Boy Actors. New York: Russell & Russell Inc, 1964.
Novy, Marianne. “Shakespeare’s Female Characters as Actors and Audience.” The Woman’s Part. Ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely. Chicago: University of Illinois, 1983. 256-270.
Park, Clara Claiborne. “How a Girl Can Be Smart and Still Popular.” The Woman’s Part. Ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely. Chicago: University of Illinois, 1983. 100-116.
Rose, Mary Beth. The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama. Ithaca: Cornell University, 1988.
Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ed. David Bevington. 5th ed. New York: Pearson, Education, Inc, 2004.
---. Twelfth Night. Dir. Trevor Nunn. Perf. Helena Bonham Carter, Richard E. Grant, Nigel Hawthorne, Ben Kingsley, Mel Smith, Imelda Stauton, Toby Stephens, Imogen Stubbs. MMV Image Entertainment, Inc, 1996.
Poisoning the Patriarch:
Antony and Cleopatra and the Performance of Gender
Deva Connett
In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare compares Cleopatra and Queen Elizabeth I to the masculine world in which they reside, thus setting up the dichotomy between masculine and feminine roles. Cleopatra, however, utilizes the entire gender role spectrum in being both a powerful ruler and a sexual being. Unlike other Shakespearean characters whose innerness is displayed in soliloquies, Cleopatra’s identity is formulated by messengers’ reports. One of the only actions Shakespeare allows the audience to see is her suicide, leaving ambiguity to her motivations. I argue that Cleopatra defends her position as queen, within a male dominated world, by taking her life; one of the only choices she has left. In this sense, gender is a performance that Cleopatra controls.
Works Cited
Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. New York: Routledge, 1992. 174-92.
Bushman, Mary Ann. “Representing Cleopatra.” In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama. Ed. Dorthea Kehler and Susan Baker. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1991. 36-49.
Charnes, Linda. Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.
Eggert, Katherine. “The Late Queen of Famous Memory: Nostalgic Form in Antony and
Cleopatra and the Winter’s Tale.” Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 2000. 131-68.
Levin, Carole. The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1994.
Shakespeare, William. “Antony and Cleopatra.” The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 5th ed. Ed. David Bevington. New York: Pearson, 2004. 1335-1383.
Re-thinking Voluntary Poverty:
Radical Relinquishment as a Form of Self-Recovery in Walden
Alison Tyner Davis
This section of my honors thesis re-evaluates our understanding of “voluntary poverty” in the context of Thoreau’s Walden experiment. Rather than an attempt to starve down and control the material effects of his life on the pond, Thoreau’s experience can be understood as a life that willingly abandons itself to the process and care of Nature. In seeking an alternative to capitalist labor, he finds provision in the care of a pure and natural economy, and as I argue, it is in this life of simple dependence that Thoreau is able to recover a whole sense of self, untainted by the distractions of trade economy.
Works Cited
Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Cavell, Stanley. The Senses of Walden. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.
Richardson, Robert D. Jr. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Ed. Brooks Atkinson. New York: Random House, 1965.
“The Words Won’t Come”:
The Absence of Language in Whitman and Dickinson’s Gay Writing
Ann Elizabeth Delaney
During the 1850s, the legal term for homosexuality was “inter Christianos non nominandum,” which means, “that thing which cannot be named among Christians.” In his poetry, Walt Whitman struggles to find language to represent this love unspoken to the world around him. Emily Dickinson also struggles with this. Dickinson’s poetry and extensive correspondence to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert show that she also aches to find a voice for a sexuality that did not publicly exist. I will argue that Whitman and Dickinson share an overwhelming absence of language in their writings and turn to cryptic codes in order to represent a clandestine love in Victorian America.
Works Cited
Dickinson, Emily. “Wild Nights—Wild Nights.” Final Harvest. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1961.
---. Letters of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Mabel Loomis Todd. London: Harper, 1931.
Erkkila, Betsy. The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Schmidgall, Gary. Walt Whitman: A Gay Life. New York: Dutton, 1997.
Tayson, Richard. “The Casualties of Walt Whitman.” Virginia Quarterly Review 81:2 (Spring 2005): 79-95.
Whitman, Walt. The Portable Walt Whitman. Ed. Michael Warner. London: Penguin, 2004.
William Wordsworth: Nature as a Vehicle for Political Discussion
Stephanie Di Palma
I will discuss William Wordsworth’s The Prelude of 1799, and his ability to use nature to discuss the effects the French Revolution had on his personal experiences. I am especially interested in the Shepherd’s boat scene. British Romanticism was fascinated with the topics considered taboo. This is where the poets began to use other topics as metaphors for what they were really trying to say; Wordsworth was one of the best at accomplishing this. I conclude that it is this ability to use nature as a metaphor for society that proves Wordsworth embodies the qualities of a Transcendentalist.
Works Cited
Brooks, Colin. “England 1782-1832: The Historical Context.” The Context of English Literature: The Romantics. Ed. Stephen Prickett. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1981. 15-76.
Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. London: Routledge, 1991.
Censer, Jack and Hunt, Lynn. “Imaging the French Revolution: Depictions of the French Revolutionary Crowd.” American Historical Review (2005): 38-45.
Cooke, Michael G. Acts of Inclusion: Studies Bearing on an Elementary Theory of
Romanticism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Fulford, Tim. Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincy, and Hazlitt. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.
Kreis, Steven. “The Romantic Era.” The History Guide: Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History 13 May 2004. 17 Mar 2005. http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture16a/html.
Kroeber, Karl. Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Lucas, Colin. “The Crowd and Politics Between ‘Ancien Régime’ and Revolution in France.” The Journal of Modern History 60 (1988): 421-457.
Lerner, L. “Wordsworth’s Refusal of Politics.” Studies in English Literature 31 (1991): 673-691.
Liu, Yu. “Crisis and Recovery: The Wordsworthian Poetics and Politics.” Papers on Language and Literature 36 (2000): 19-41.
McGann, Jerome J. “Poetry” An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832. Ed. Iain McCalman et. al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 270-279.
Mortensen, Peter. “Taking Animals Seriously: William Wordsworth and the Claims of Ecological Romanticism.” Orbis Litterarum 55 (2000): 296-311.
Prickett, Stephen. “Romantic Literature.” The Context of English Literature: The Romantics. Ed. Stephen Prickett. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1981. 202-261.
“Romanticism.” Wikipedia. 11 Mar 2005 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism.
Shelley, Percy. “A Defence of Poetry.” British Literature 1780-1830. eds. Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 1996. 1167-1178.
Wordsworth, William. “The Two-Part Prelude of 1799.” British Literature 1780-1830. Ed. Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 1996. 624-635.
Wüscher, Hermann J. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity in Wordsworth 1791-1800. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1980.
A She-Whale?:
Finding Female Redemption in Melville's Moby Dick
Anna Finkelstein
In Herman Melville's Moby Dick, masculinity is an overtly dominant theme. Meanwhile, the importance of the feminine presence in the novel—specifically the way in which this female influence serves as a redemptive presence in the story—is frequently overlooked. By examining the way in which Ishmael is able to embrace femininity more closely than the other male characters in the novel, particularly Ahab, the reader is able to gain a deeper understanding into why Ishmael survives the shipwreck at the end of the story while no one else on board does.
Works Cited
Edinger, Edward F. Melville's Moby Dick: A Jungian Commentary. New York: New Directions, 1978.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: The New American Library, 1961.
Olsen, Charles “Ahab and His Fool.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of Moby Dick. Ed.Michael T. Gilmore. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1977.
Percival, M.O. A Reading of Moby-Dick. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950.
Simpson, David. “Herman Melville: Chasing the Whale.” Modern Critical Interpretations Moby-Dick. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
Slotkin, Richard. “Moby Dick: The American National Epic.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of Moby Dick. Ed.Michael T. Gilmore. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1977.
Solomon, Pearl Chesler. Dickens and Melville in Their Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975.
Blessed Forgetfulness:
Time and Memory in Waiting for Godot
David D. Fleck
In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, time and memory take a powerful role in dictating the lives of the characters contained within the play. Though critics have been quick to discount the role of time, linking it to Beckett’s ties to “the theatre of the absurd” and, thus, making it ineffectual and meaningless in the great scheme of things, I will show textual evidence and historical fact that indicate that time and the memory of events passed as well as hope in things future play a key role in the “lives” of the plays characters and provide insight into Beckett’s work.
Works Cited
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land: a Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts. Ed. Valerie Eliot. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1971.
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove Press, 1954.
Cronin, Anthony. The Last Modernist: Samuel Beckett. 1st ed. New York: Harper Collins, 1997.
Gontarski, S.E., ed. On Beckett: Essays and Criticism. New York: Grove Press, 1986.
Kenner, Hugh. A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett. 1st ed. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1973.
Kenner, Hugh. The Stoic Comedians: Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962.
Postlewait, Thomas. "Self-Performing Voices: Mind, Memory, and Time in Beckett's Drama." Twentieth Century Literature 24 (1978): 473-491.
Rabinovitz, Rubin. Innovation in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
Sohn, Dong-Ho. “The Concept of Time and Space in Beckett's Drama: Happy Days and Waiting for Godot.” Journal of English Language and Literature 44 (1998): 807-830.
A Taste of Her Own Medicine:
Assimilation and Preservation in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine
Amy Grau
In her novel, Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich explores the dilemma of Native Americans who fight to maintain a traditional identity in the face of massive social pressures created by Western expansion and assimilation. The tension between tradition and assimilation in Love Medicine produces two different forms of narrative with two different outcomes. In this essay, I argue that survival for Erdrich’s characters depends on their ability to resist the allure of Western culture and adhere to the practices and rituals of Native American tradition.
Works Cited
Bear, Luther Standing. “Indian Education Should Not Destroy Indian Culture.” Native Americans: Opposing Viewpoints. Ed. William Dubley. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, ,1998. 191-201.
Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. “American Indian Intellectualism and the New Indian Story.” American Indian Quarterly 20 (1996): 57-76.
Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.
Falk, Gerhard. Stigma. New York: Prometheus Books, 2001.
Gray, James A. “Mediating Narratives of American Indian Identity Contemporary Literature.” Contemporary Literature 39: 1 (1998): 146-154.
Sanders, Karla. “A Healthy Balance: Religion, Identity, and Community in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” MELUS 23: 2 (1998): 129-156.
“Back! You! Naomi!”:
Decomposing the Deceased Mother in Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish”
Kate Lampe
Faced with the death of his schizophrenic mother in New England while he was residing in California, Allen Ginsberg needed to find a way to mourn his mother on his own terms. I argue that, due to Naomi Ginsberg’s repeated absence, Allen Ginsberg did not know her very well as a typical son might have—and that to mourn her properly, he must break her down into the varying personae she evinced during her lifetime, continually rejecting clinging to one or another as the “real” Naomi. Having done so, Ginsberg can reconstruct his mother and put her memory to rest.
Works Cited
Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel. Vol. 1. Translated & Ed. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Breslin, James E. B. “Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl.’” From Modern To Contemporary: American Poetry 1945-1965. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. 77-109.
Ginsberg, Allen. Howl. Collected Poems: 1947-1980. New York: Harper Perennial, 126-133.
---. “Kaddish.” Collected Poems: 1947-1980. New York: Harper Perennial, 1984. 209-227.
Millen, Rochelle. Personal Interview. 2 February 2006.
Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy From Hardy to Heaney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Trigilio, Tony. “’Strange Prophecies Anew’: Rethinking the Politics of Matter and Spirit in Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish.’” American Literature 71: 4 (December 1999): 773-795.
Escaping the Nightmare:
Spatial Symbolism in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening
Heather Milner
In studying Kate Chopin’s The Awakening we see how Edna Pontellier is trapped within her own nightmare. Edna’s nightmare has many levels which she tries to navigate, layers made evident by Edna’s physical surroundings. Edna is trapped in a nightmare in which she is struggling to define herself and her role in society. Edna’s emotional state is personified through the houses in which she lives. This symbolism is better understood by using Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In understanding this symbolism, it becomes clear how Edna’s attempts to define her true self are mirrored in her spatial surroundings.
Works Cited
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. Ed. Margo Culley. New York: Norton, 1994.
Culley, Margo. “Edna Pontellier: ‘A Solitary Soul’” The Awakening. New York: Norton, 1994. 247-251.
Edwards, Lee R. “Sexuality, Maternity, and Selfhood.” The Awakening. New York: Norton, 1994. 282-284.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. “Progression and Regression in Edna Pontellier.” The Awakening. New York: Norton, 1994. 257-262.
Franklin, Rosemary F. “The Awakening and the Failure of Psyche.” American Literature 56.4 (1984): 510 – 526.
Parvulescu, Anca. “To Die Laughing and to Laugh at Dying: Revisiting The Awakening.” New Literary History 36.3 (2005): 477-495.
Ringe, Donald A. “Romantic Imagery in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.” American Literature 43.4 (1972): 580 – 588.
Toth, Emily. “Kate Chopin on Divine Love and Suicide: Two Rediscovered Articles.” American Literature 63.1 (1991): 115-121.
Walker, Nancy. “Feminist of Naturalist?” The Awakening. New York: Norton, 1994. 252-256.
Wolkenfield, Susan. “Edna’s Suicide: The Problem of the One and the Many.” The Awakening. New York: Norton, 1994. 241- 246.
A Place in this World:
Recovering Identity through the Slave Spirituals
Elizabeth Narcho
While slavery is viewed today as a shameful piece of history, the unique identity of the people that suffered is often still overlooked. The slave spirituals that were composed and practiced by captive slaves have tremendous literary value. These songs speak loudly of the experience of recovering a personal identity when one’s environment works towards keeping the sense of self non-existent. Even when every effort was made to strip the slaves of their past identity, their former selves refused to die. Through the distinct art of the spirituals, slaves gained a satisfactory identity that melded their African heritage with new influences into a unique consciousness.
Works Cited
Allen, William Francis. Slave Songs of the United States. New York: Peter Smith, 1867.
Cone, James H. The Spirituals and the Blues. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1991.
Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self Reliance.” Self-Reliance and Other Essays. New York: Dover, 1993. 19-38.
Haskins, James. Black Music in America: A History through Its People. New York: Harper Collins, 1987.
Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. Online. www.Dictionary.com. Internet. 20 April 2005.
“Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel?” Class handout: English 311: Spring 2005
“Go Down Moses.” Class handout: English 311: Spring 2005
“I'm A-Rollin’.” Class handout: English 311: Spring 2005
“Oh, Freedom!” Class handout: English 311: Spring 2005
“Steal Away to Jesus.” Class handout: English 311: Spring 2005
“Walk Together Children.” Class handout: English 311: Spring 2005
“Intemperate and Unchaste”:
The Destruction of Female Sexuality in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea
Elizabeth Powers
Many critics have argued that the character of Antoinette, otherwise known as Bertha, in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea acts as a double and a warning to Jane Eyre, showing what happens to a woman who gives in to sexual temptation and desire. However, the only “temptation” Antoinette seems to submit to is that of seeking a sexual relationship with her legal husband. I argue that rather than being a warning against desire, Antoinette represents a warning against the male’s need for dominance and the consequent destruction of female sexuality as shown through the character of Mr. Rochester.
Works Cited
Baer, Elizabeth R. “The Sisterhood of Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway.” The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. Ed. Elizabeth Able, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1983. 131-148.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Ed. Richard J. Dunn. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 2001.
Emery, Mary Lou. “The Politics of Form: Jean Rhys’s Social Vision in Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea.” Twentieth Century Literature 28.4 (1982): 418-30.
Fayad, Mona. “Unquiet Ghosts: The Struggle for Representation in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” Wide Sargasso Sea. Ed. Judith L, Raiskin. New York: Norton, 1999. 225-240.
Kromm, Jane E. “The Feminization of Madness in Visual Representation (Part 1 of 2).” Feminist Studies 20.3 (1994): 507.
Mitchell, Marea, and Dianne Osland. Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Ed. Judith L, Raiskin. New York: Norton, 1999.
Starks, Lisa S. “Altars to Attics: The Madwoman’s Point of View.” The Aching Hearth: Family Violence in Life and Literature. Ed. Sarah Munson Deats and Lagretta Tallent Lenker. New York: Plenum Press, 1991. 105-117
Moveable Feasts:
The Significance of Place in Hemingway’s Narratives
David Pratt
Ernest Hemingway focuses primarily on location in his narrative description. This descriptive choice is worth examining because readers and critics typically notice Hemingway’s extensive omissions and the sparse nature of his descriptions rather than the implications of what the author actually includes. In this essay, I will argue that Hemingway does not omit description of characters and events so much as replace it with description of places that hold symbolic meaning within the world of his texts, like the mountain settings and the city of Paris in both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and A Moveable Feast.
Works Cited
Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner, 1992.
---. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Ed. Finca Vigia. New York: Collier, 1987. 39-56.
Johnston, Kenneth G. “’The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge.” Studies in Short
Fiction 21.3 (1984): 223-227.
Stoltzfus, Ben. “Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway’s African Stories.” Comparative
Literature Studies 42.3 (2005): 205-228.
Tanner, Stephen L. “Hemingway’s Trout Fishing in Paris: A Metaphor for the Uses of
Writing.” Hemingway Review 19.1 (1999): 79-91.
Ward, David. “Lighting Out for the Territories: American Expatriates, Paris, and
Modernism.” Sewanee Review 105.3 (1997): 423-427.
“You In Deep Water, Girl”:
Water Imagery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Allison Reese
Just before Sethe crosses the Ohio River to freedom, she sips water to quench her thirst, but ends up wanting more. Scenes in which characters have physical and psychological connections to water occur often in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Water means many things: birth, freedom, death, and even despair. Water becomes a mysterious force that is an integral part of every character’s life from slavery to freedom. In this essay, I argue that water encompasses both life and death as a way for the characters to transcend their brutal past in order to accept the future.
Works Cited
Edwards, Thomas R. “Ghost Story.” Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Ed. Barbara H. Solomon. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1998.
Epstein, Grace A. “Out of Blue Water: Dream Flight and Narrative Construction in the Novels of Toni Morrison.” State of the Fantastic: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Fantastic Literature and Film: Selected Essays from the Eleventh International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, 1990. Ed. Nicholas Ruddick. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992.
Greenbaum, Vicky. “Teaching Beloved: Images of Transcendence.” English Journal 91.6 (July 2002): 83-86.
May, Samuel J. “Margaret Garner and Seven Others.” Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Casebook. Ed. William L. Andrews and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 25-36.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage International, 1987.
Muckley, Peter A. “To Garner Stories: A Note on Margaret and Sethe In and Out of History, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Anniina’s Toni Morrison Page. 19 Sept. 2002. 22 Apr. 2003. <http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/ tonimorrison/muckley.html>
Plasa, Carl, ed. Columbia Critical Guides: Toni Morrison’s Beloved. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
The Need for Memoir in the Modern Day Presidency:
An In-depth Look at Jimmy Carter’s Literary and Political Pursuits
Elise M. Renz
During the past fifty years, the U.S. President’s power and the amount of confessional memoir writing have increased significantly. This paper explores the parallel, explaining why a memoir fits what a modern day president needs and what the public desires. Since the conclusion of his presidency in 1981, Jimmy Carter has become a prolific author in a variety of genres. While each of his books shows a different side of Carter’s personality, it is in his memoir, Keeping the Faith, where he explains his decisions and allows the public to see all of his faults and strengths simultaneously.
Works Cited
Carter, Jimmy. Always a Reckoning and Other Poems. New York: Times Books, 1995.
---. Keeping Faith: Memoirs of A President. New York: Bantam Books,
1982.
---. “President in Search of a Publisher.” The Writing Life. Ed. Marie Arana.
New York: Public Affairs, 2003. 322-329.
Eakin, Paul John. The Ethics of Life Writing. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.
Gould, Lewis L. The Modern American Presidency. Lawrence, KS: The University Press of Kansas, 2003.
Morris, Kenneth E. Jimmy Carter, American Moralist. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1996.
Shultz, George P. “The Political Memoir: Taking Note of History.” The Writing Life.
Ed. Marie Arana. New York: Public Affairs, 2003. 312-321.
Thomas, Norman C. “The Carter Administration Memoirs: A Review Essay.” The
Western Political Quarterly 39.2 (1986): 348-360.
Zinsser, William. Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.
Ishmael and the “Active Soul”:
The Quest for Freedom and Liberation in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
Nathan William Sears
Many critics relegate Ishmael’s role and story to the parameters of Moby-Dick’s main action, reducing him to a mere witness—his narrative a mere frame through which Ahab’s fall and destruction is realized. Ishmael’s story, however, is a perpetual search and journey for freedom and liberation to which Ahab serves as a violent adversary. To understand this interpretation fully, it is best to examine Melville’s novel through the lens of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s idea of the “active soul.” In this way, it is possible to see the central importance Ishmael’s journey of freedom has in Moby-Dick.
Works Cited
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol. 1. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904.
Feidelson, Charles Jr. Critics on Melville. Ed. Thomas Rountree. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1972.
Millhauser, Milton. Critics on Melville. Ed. Thomas Rountree. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1972.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick or, The Whale. New York: Penguin, 2003.
Olson, Charles. Call Me Ishmael. London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Isolation as a Gateway to Madness:
Mental Illness and Oppression in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Fiction
Stefani Shelley
Writing was a catharsis for Charlotte Perkins Gilman. However, when she was told by her husband and her doctor, S. Weir Mitchell, that she should no longer write to aid in the cure of her diagnosed neurasthenia, she nearly went mad. By referencing her works, The Yellow Wallpaper and “If I Were a Man,” I demonstrate that Gilman writes to unveil the injustices she suffered and to become a role model for her female readers.
Works Cited
Chesler, Phyllis. Women and Madness. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997.
Fleenor, Juliann Evens. “The Gothic Prism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Gothic Stories and Her Autobiography.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work. Ed. Sheryl L. Meyering. Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Research Press, 1989.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “If I Were a Man.” The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader: “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Other Fiction. Ed. Ann J. Lane. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.
---. The Yellow Wallpaper. New York: The Feminist Press, 1996.
---. “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.” Ed. Catherine J. Golden. New York: The Feminist Press, 1992.
Golden, Catherine J. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers. Ed. Denise D. Knight and Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997.
Haney-Peritz, Janice. “Monumental Feminism and Literature’s Ancestral House: Another Look at ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition. Ed. Catherine J. Golden. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Hedges, Elaine R. “Afterward,” The Yellow Wallpaper. New York: The Feminist Press, 1973.
Hubert, Susan J. Questions of Power: The Politics of Woman’s Madness Narratives. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002.
Kessler, Carol Farley. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia with Selected Writings. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995.
Sutton-Ramspeck, Beth. Raising the Dust: Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004.
Wiesenthal, Chris. Figuring Madness in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
Eschatology and the Will to Power:
Byron, Nietzsche, and the Apocalypse
Eric Shonkwiler
In “Darkness,” Lord Byron reveals to us a terrifying vision of the end of the world. In “Manfred,” he gives us the end of a fervently independent individual. Friedrich Nietzsche perused Byron and approved of his hero as a precursor to the Superman. I argue that through analysis of Byron's literature and Nietzsche's philosophy, the death of the individual is tantamount to the apocalypse in importance, and also that these final tribulations are part of the all-important struggle that make up the lives of the Byronic hero and Superman.
Works Cited
Hirst, Wolf Z., ed. Byron, The Bible, and Religion. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991.
Byron, George Gordon. Manfred: A Dramatic Poem. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton, 2006.
---. Darkness. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton, 2006.
Ingraffia, Brian D. Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology: Vanquishing God's Shadow. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Mencken, H.L. The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1967
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Antichrist. Translated by H.L. Mencken. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2003.
---. The Will to Power. Translated by W. Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.
---. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Walter Kaufman. New York: Modern Library, 1995.
Paley, Morton D. Apocalypse and Millenium in English Romantic Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Stambaugh, Joan. Nietzsche's Thought of Eternal Return. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.
Toole, David. Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypse. Boulder: Westview Press, 1998.
“I Can’t Bear to Let Anyone Have Him But Me”:
Feminism in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Megan Smida
Referring to his title character as “A Pure Woman” outraged conservative Victorian readers, but Thomas Hardy wrote compassionately about a “ruined” woman in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Some critics relate Hardy’s novel to the emerging New Woman movement in which middle-class women questioned conventional gender roles and social institutions. Social reformers, however, believing the morality of the working class automatically suspect, stressed traditional values in their efforts with the poor. Working-class Tess longs for the stability of the traditional marriage her past denies her, and Hardy’s hesitancy to make Tess of the d’Urbervilles a decisively feminist novel reflects the paternalistic attitude of the middle class towards the working class.
Works Cited
Dowling, Linda. “The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890’s.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 33: 4. (March 1979): 434-53.
Dutta, Shanta. Ambivalence in Hardy: A Study of his Attitude to Women. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Dyhouse, Carol. Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.
Green, Laura Morgan. Educating Women: Cultural Conflict and Victorian Literature. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2001.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Norton Critical Edition. Third edition.Ed. Scott Elledge. New York: Norton, 1991.
Larson, Jil. “Sexual Ethics in Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman Writers.” Rereading Victorian Fiction. Ed. Alice Jenkins and Juliet John. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000. 159-170.
Wright, T.R. Hardy and His Readers. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2003.
Myth and Madwomen:
In Search of Patriarchal Power in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea
Lauren Smith
The Edward Rochester portrayed in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is often seen as the archetypal romantic hero, while the Edward Rochester portrayed in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea is seen as the archetypal villain. However, I argue that both Rochesters aim to maintain control and decentralize the power of the women in their lives through “mythography”—simply writing them out of reality and into stories authored and controlled by men.
Works Cited
Barnes, Fiona. “Dismantling the Master’s Houses: Jean Rhys and West Indian Identity.” International Women’s Writing: New Landscapes of Identity. Ed. Ann E. Brown and Marjanne E. Goozé. London: Greenwood Press, 1995. 150-61.
Bosco, Steve. “Maenad.” Encyclopedia Britannica Ready Reference, 2001.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Ed. Richard Dunn. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 2001.
Caputi, Jane. “On Psychic Activism: Feminist Mythmaking.” The Feminist Companion to Mythology. Ed. Carolyne Larrington. London: Pandora, 1992. 425-40.
Fayad, Mona. “Unquiet Ghosts: The Struggle for Representation in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” Wide Sargasso Sea. Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York: Norton, 225-40.
Flockemann, Miki. “Breakdown or Breakthrough? The Madness of Resistance in Wide Sargasso Sea and A Question of Power.” MaComère 2 (1999): 65-79.
Madden, Deanna. “Wild Child, Tropical Flower, Mad Wife: Female Identity in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” International Women’s Writing: New Landscapes of Identity. Ed. Ann E. Brown and Marjanne E. Goozé. London: Greenwood Press, 162-74.
Peters, John G. “Inside and Outside: Jane Eyre and Marginalization Through Labeling.” Studies in the Novel 28 (1996): 57-75.
Proulx, Patrice. “Revision and Revolution: Writing Women into Myth and History.” Women in French Studies 3 (1995): 100-111.
Purkiss, Diane. “Women’s Rewriting of Myth.” The Feminist Companion to Mythology. Ed. Carolyne Larrington. London: Pandora, 1992. 441-57.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York: Norton, 1999.
Rowe, Margaret Moan. “Beyond Equality: Ideas and Images in Jane Eyre.” Forum 21 (1980): 5-9.
Sulivan, Paula. “Fairy Tale Elements in Jane Eyre.” Journal of Popular Culture 12 (1978): 61-74.
Summers, Marcia. “Victimization, Survival and Empowerment in Wide Sargasso Sea and Daughter of Earth.” Woman’s Place: Selected Proceedings of the University of South Dakota’s First Annual Women’s Research Conference. Ed. Karen Hardy Cárdenas, Mary Schneider, and Susan Wolfe. University of South Dakota Research Conference, 1985. 79-85.
“An Apocalypse of the World Within”:
De Quincey’s Struggle with Opium, God, and a Personal Hell.
Torren Stanley
Battling opium addiction for decades, Thomas De Quincey used his “opium-dreams” as inspiration for many of his works, perhaps the most important being Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. The images and people present in De Quincey’s hallucinations illustrate something more profound than just an enthusiastic description of the pleasures, and the pains, of opium. I argue that De Quincey’s opium dreams were an attempt to connect with the happiness and the God of his childhood, but in attempting to do so, De Quincey fell into a Hell that concentrated on his original fear: absolute solitude.
Works Cited
Goldgar, Anne. “The British Museum and the Virtual Representation of Culture in the Eighteenth Century.” Albion 32:2 (Summer 2000): 195-231.
Hayter, Alethea. Opium and the Romantic Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.
Miller, J. Hillis. The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.
Perry, Curtis. “Piranesi’s Prison: Thomas De Quincey and the Failure of Autobiography.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 33:4 (1993): 809-824.
Rzepka, Charles J. Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text and the Sublime in De Quincey. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
Schmitt, Cannon. Alien Nation: Nineteenth Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Battling the Feminine Ideal:
Hysterical Heroines, Catherine Earnshaw, and Emily Bronte
Michael A. J. Taylor
Many critics argue that the phenomenon of illness in women is a direct by-product of patriarchy. In particular, critics argue that Victorian society admonished women to be ill as a requirement of Victorian womanhood. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights showcases a heroine whose internal conflict with her narrowing feminine role manifests itself into external illness, therefore assuming the Victorian ideal. While it is subversive for unhealthy to be considered healthy, Catherine perversely subverts patriarchal expectations by fully embodying her illness as a way to be released from an oppressive, external world.
Works Cited
Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Ed. Linda Peterson. Boston: Bedford, 2003.
Gorsky, Susan Rubinow. “I’ll Cry Myself Sick: Illness in Wuthering Heights.”
Literature and Medicine 18.2 (1999): 173-191.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and
the Anxiety of Authorship.” The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. 45-92.
Giobbi, Giuliana. “The Anorexics of Wuthering Heights.” Readings on Wuthering Heights. Ed.Hayley R. Mitchell. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. 136-141.
Showalter, Elaine. “Nervous Women: Sex Roles and Sick Roles.” The Female Malady. New York: Penguin, 1987. 121-146.
Small, Helen. “Love’s Madness.” Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity 1800- 1865. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 1-32.
Vine, Steve. “Living in Silence: The Life of Emily Bronte.” Emily Bronte. Ed. Herbert Sussman. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998. 1-20.
Wood, Jane. “The Medicalization of Womanhood.” Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 8-58.
London in the 1590’s and the Real Knack of Knowing a Knave
Librette Tye
In the 1590’s Londoners witnessed economic growth, a swelling population and the birth of the middle class; however, when these factors intermingled with dispossessed peasants and a wasteful aristocracy, “the time/that the unjust man doth thrive” was created (Winter’s Tale, IV, iv, 763-4). As a result, the perspectives on and definitions of a “knave” were altered. Knavery became the practice and professions of kings, priests and degenerates. I will use three divergent literary perspectives of knavery in order to prove that London’s peculiar affiliation with knavery was affected by certain historical occurrences, societal changes and the Elizabethan way of life. Ultimately, I will divulge to you the real knack of knowing a knave.
Works Cited
Greene, Robert. A Notable Discovery of Coosnage 1591. The Second Part of Conny Catching 1592. London: John Lane of the Bodley Head, 1923.
Hibbard, George Richard, ed. Three Elizabethan Pamphlets. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969.
Pafford, J.H.P. ed. William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. London: Methuen & Co, 1963.
Proudfoot, G.R. ed. A Knack to Know a Knave. Oxford: University Press Oxford, 1964.
Szajnowsky, Stephanie & Librette Tye ed. A Knack to Know a Knave. 14 April 2005.
The Vital Player in Shakespeare’s Tragedy
Lindsay Weldon
Ophelia, one of William Shakespeare’s most well known tragic leading ladies from the play Hamlet, is a figure who stands as one of his best literary devices. She serves as a picture of innocence which all things in the play can be compared to and contrasted against. Shakespeare also uses this technique in his other tragedies as well, particularly Othello and King Lear. I hope to show how Ophelia’s innocence, throughout the play, only becomes stronger when compared to the other characters and their actions and in effect making the tragedy all the more potent to the reader.
Works Cited
Belsey, Catherine. The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama. New York: Methuen, 1985.
Berry, Philippa. Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings: Disfiguring Death in the Tragedies. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Jardine, Lisa. Still Harping On Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1Creation of a Personal Counter-Memory
in Walt Whitman’s “Calamus”
Elizabeth Yoke
In the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman raises the issue of the body and its relationships to society. Michel Foucault’s philosophy of caring for the self, detailed in his third volume of The History of Sexuality, can be applied to this theme in Whitman’s “Calamus.” Individuals may find freedom within the limits of social discourse, Foucault argues, by creating a “counter-memory” through which one recognizes the existence of a social regime and reevaluates these notions to create personal constructions. In the “Calamus” section of Leaves of Grass, Whitman redefines his conception of body and relationships to create a personal counter-memory.
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, Volume 3. New York: Vintage, 1988.
---. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Whitman, Walt. “Behold this Swarthy Face.” Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michael Moon. New York: Norton, 2002. 108.
---. “For You O Democracy.” Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michael Moon. New York: Norton, 2002. 100-101.
---. “I Hear It Was Charged Against Me.” Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michael Moon. New York: Norton, 2002. 110.
---. “In Paths Untrodden.” Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michael Moon. New York: Norton, 2002. 96.
---. “Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances.” Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michael Moon. New York: Norton, 2002. 103.
---. “When I Heard at the Close of the Day.” Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michael Moon. New York: Norton, 2002. 105.
---. “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand.” Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michael Moon. New York: Norton, 2002. 99-100.