ENL 133: “Scandalously Aesthetic: The Flaws of Modernism in Wilde’s ‘An Ideal Husband’”

Jolene Patricia Brown

Dr. K. Frederickson

ENL 133

3 June 2010

Scandalously Aesthetic:

The Flaws of Modernism in Wilde’s An Ideal Husband

In his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde writes “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. / Books are well-written, or badly written. That is all” (3). Though The Picture of Dorian Gray was written almost three years before his publication of An Ideal Husband, his philosophy of keeping morality separate from his art continues to shine through. The idea of an impending scandal permeates the construction of the drama but the reader must realize that it is not the scandal that is important to the understanding of the novel. It is the balance of the individual within society and the beauty of the “modern” individual: his portrait of a scandal is a way of representing the aesthetic of relationships between people, for even the worst of relationships represents the best of what it is to be human. In showing his characters in the worst situations he is testing their morality it is true, but it is not the morality that is the key to the drama itself. Wilde is not supplying the reader a parable for right/wrong or good/evil; the drama is way of viewing the beauty of society with all its flaws included, not hiding anything from the public yet still managing to find social acceptance. A society that can embrace its flaws is, according to Wilde, a truly beautiful, and thus modern, one indeed.

Scandal within the novel is a very real threat to those who would suffer to lose position—be it political or moral. The morality of a Victorian politician is deeply connected to their political clout, especially if that clout is deserved through the claim of a higher moral standing, such as that of Sir Robert Chilton. It is important to define exactly what a scandal is, especially in terms of Victorian politics. In the essay “A Theory of Scandal: Victorians, Homosexuality, and the Fall of Oscar Wilde,” Art Adut defines scandal as “the disruptive publicity of transgression…The norm audience is a public united by some level of identification with the norm that has apparently been violated, and it is in some capacity attentive and negatively responsive to the publicized transgression” (219-220). Adut also attributes the emergence of scandals to an “underreinforced” rule that broken in private is acceptable, but once broken in public it becomes unacceptable because it is against a social norm (214). Part of living a modern Victorian high-lifestyle is walking the line between private controversy and public morality. Sir Robert Chiltern understands that the norm of the society in which he lives revolves around the wealth that people have; to gain power, especially at a young age he must be wealthy enough to purchase it: “Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The god of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth” (Ideal II.66-69). Wilde challenges modern morality by placing Sir Robert in a position that the reader should recognize as an ethical dilemma involving the sacrifice of individual morality in order to do a greater good for society: Sir Robert married and overly-moral woman after his moral sacrifice, and does his best to do only the best for his people, and yet his one flaw returns to haunt him despite his current good-doings. It does not matter that he is a good person now, and only matters that his past returns to harm him—his past sin endangers his current endeavor for good, and indeed he sacrifices himself for the sake of morality, even at the risk of losing his wife in the process.

In the drama An Ideal Husband, Mrs. Cheveley is representative of all that is corrupt in politics but even she realizes the importance of perceived virtue to the public-at-large:

In old days nobody pretended to be a bit better than his neighbours. In fact, to be a bit better than one’s neighbour was considered excessively vulgar and middle-class. Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, everyone has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues… (Ideal I.543-547)

Her observation in this passage is a paradox of what she calls the “modern mania for morality,” as it seems her implication is that those who “pose” to have the most incorruptibility have the most virtue—but “virtue” in her sense takes on a different context. Virtue for Mrs. Cheveley is more like a coat one puts on at certain times to look a certain way for the sake of public opinion. Further, modern morality is different from “old” times in that the public now appreciates those who are “better” morally: to be better than one’s neighbor is to have a kind of moral authority that is otherwise absent among equals. Class is an important distinction is Victorian England, and for one to not only have a class distinction, but also a moral distinction only serves to put more distance between the modern aristocracy and the public it is supposed to serve.

One critic, Gregory Mackie, argues that instead of a moral basis, Wilde is arguing for an aesthetic basis for what is considered “good” (148). This argument would give more depth to Wilde’s seemingly uncaring and superficial characters. Consider Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband, who is portrayed for most of the play as an everlasting bachelor but in the course of events he is realized to be the ideal husband, for it is him who maintains and encourages “morality,” though in a way that is aesthetically pleasing to a modernist: he gives in to social-connections in order to maintain the best outcome for all those involved.

Well, the English can’t stand a man who is always saying he is in the right, but they are very fond of a man who admits that he has been in the wrong. It is one of the best things in them…in England a man who can’t talk morality twice a week to a large, popular, immoral audience is quite over and a serious politician. There would be nothing left for him as a profession except Botany or the Church. (II.186-196)

In this passage, Lord Goring’s advice is sound for he realizes that a public apology would only create more problems for the grieved Sir Robert. Goring’s avoidance of a scandal, however, is not to be read as a deception of the public, and instead should be seen much the same way that Sir Robert imagines his own fall: “I did not sell myself for money. I bought success at a great price” (II.85-86). It is the spin that the characters use that the reader can imagine an over-sensitive public using to turn against Sir Robert. It does not matter what he has done since his rise to power, for that power was built on a foundation of lies and corruption.

It is however, significant that precisely what gets Sir Robert into trouble—namely hiding his past transgressions from the public—is exactly what will get him out of trouble. This is the paradox of modern culture, according to Wilde. To reiterate the point made by Mackie, Wilde’s interest in morality has nothing to do with what is good or what is bad, and instead depends on how it is perceived in accordance to the laws of aesthetics. Scandal, though it might jeopardize an individual’s reputation has a way of bringing together the public, and making them notice things about themselves and their culture that might otherwise escape their view. Scandal becomes an opportunity for scrutiny; an individual in a spotlight becomes one of two things to the general public: they are either someone to admire and emulate regardless of their transgressions, or someone to scorn. Either way, what counts is the reaction; reaction is always dependent on the perspective of the viewer—beauty is thus thrust into the forefront of public opinion: even scandal has elements of the aesthetic. It is, then, the job of the artist to present that beauty to be seen and appreciated.

“The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist,” Wilde goes on to say in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, “but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything” (3). The controversial lifestyle of Wilde might have been subject to speculation, but he fought strenuously to keep that same speculation out of his art. Scandal, as it is presented in An Ideal Husband, is a way for Wilde to explore what is beautiful about even the most precarious of social situations. The aesthetic quality is such that it is what the viewer does not see that is actually beautiful: the viewer instead turns the scandal inward, asking themselves if their own past might not represent their current state. Wilde’s drama might be a small world of people who have little in common with the common reader, but their fears are the same. It is the aesthetic in Wilde’s work that allows the reader to find the way to embrace society’s flaws—having nothing to do with the “moral or immoral”—the beauty instead being found, as Wilde claims of his books, in how well-written and well-presented those flaws are.

Works Cited

Adut, Art. “A Theory of Scandal: Victorians, Homosexuality, and the Fall of Oscar Wilde.” American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 111, No 1. JSTOR, (July 2005). Web. 25 May 2010.

Mackie, Gregory. “The Function of Decorum at the Present Time: Manners, Moral Language, and Modernity in ‘an Oscar Wilde Play’”. Modern Drama. Vol. 52, No. 2. Project Muse. Summer 2009, pp. 145-167. Article. 25 May 2010.

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. J.W. Edwards, Inc.: Ann Arbor, MI. 2006. Print.

--. The Importance of Being Earnest and other Plays. Oxford University Press: Oxford. 2008. Print.

ENL 10C: “A Metafictional History: New Historical Context through Metafictional Narratives”

Jolene Patricia Brown

Dr. M. Stratton

ENL 10C

27 May 2010

A Metafictional History:

New Historical Context through Metafictional Narratives

History is made up of perspectives; an event recorded in history becomes entirely reliant upon the perspectives of those who witness it, and then record their memories of the event for future generations. As historical events become more global it is harder for art and literature to represent the scale of perspective necessary to give the impact of an event, and make a reader understand the magnitude of an event on a massive scale. Literature until the twentieth century was (generally) limited to one perspective which can portray only one memory of an event. To more accurately portray an event like the bombing of Dresden with more depth and accuracy an author would need to explore a different way of giving perspective to it in order to more fully represent what the author feels is the true event. Since one cannot incorporate thousands of perspectives into a single narrative, the author can instead explore the event by using metafiction and temporal distortions. These literary tactics serve to disorient the reader, thereby giving an emotional reaction necessary to make the reader more aware of the disorientation of the event being narrated. The novel Slaughterhouse-Five distorts the reality of the reader and the novel precisely because the author wants to make the history of Dresden more real: by establishing a chronology that cannot be represented in reality, Slaughterhouse-Five challenges the reader to piece together not only the events of the novel, but also the events of history itself; a process that gives the reader more insight into the challenges of representing history as more than a single story from a single perspective. “In postmodern fiction, thematic and plot devices are designed specifically to question linear history and temporality,” (179) writes literary critic Catherine Burgass; history is more than one timeline of events from one perspective, and should be represented as such. The use of metafiction and plot disruptions in the form of temporal “time-travelling” allows a reader to imagine history as multi-dimensional—as large-scale, global events should be represented—instead of flat and singular-perspective.

Then novel starts out by making the reader question the truth within it: “All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true” (1). It turns out that the “novel” itself has not really begun, and will not begin for the fictional author until page 29 in the second chapter. Vonnegut makes use of metafiction in order to disrupt what the reader knows of the book itself. He puts us in the hands of an unreliable narrator who tells the reader from the beginning that his story is only “pretty much true” and that it all happened “more or less” without telling us what exactly the true parts are. It is significant this line occurs at the beginning of the novel, as explained by Burgass:

…beginnings and endings have a special function in postmodern metafiction, marking the entrance and exit of the fictional world and its parallel time. There is a structural circularity in these novels which confounds linear time…the narrator of Slaughterhouse-Five is particularly taken with those songs whose last line repeats the first line…” (183)

The first claim of Slaughterhouse-Five cycles through the rest of the novel endlessly as the reader questions the reality and the fiction of each scenario as presented by the speaker. From a historical perspective, the history within the novel repeats itself endlessly the reader questioning the author who, in turn, questions the novel he is writing which is a novel that questions the nature of reality itself. In many ways the Vonnegut is feeding us that old line “history repeats itself” but doing so in a way that utilizes literary devices, rather than words, to show us the cliché.

Historical perspective is really not singular, and instead should be considered plural. It is not the memories of one person that make up what is known as “history;” it is the combined memories of many people—indeed thousands of people—to create what we know as a “historical record.” As populations grow and technologies make it possible for more people to witness singular events, representing the “truth” about an event becomes more complicated. With an event as large and globally-impactful as World War II, and the bombing of Dresden, Germany, even history would have a hard time encompassing all the sides in a way that reflects the horror of war. Literature would have a hard time with this as well, since literature does not deal directly with the perspectives of reality and instead turns to fiction to represent reality:

“Did that really happen?” said Maggie White…

“Of course it happened,” Trout told her. “If I wrote something that hadn’t really happened, and I tried to sell it, I could go to jail. That’s fraud.”[…]

[Maggie:] “It’s like advertising. You have to tell the truth in advertising, or you get in trouble.”

[Trout:] “Exactly. The same body of law applies.” (Vonnegut 218)

This conversation between Maggie White and the elusive author Kilgore Trout at Billy Pilgrims eighteenth wedding anniversary party calls into question the original author’s claim of semi-truth. An author is instead compared to an advertiser out to market his own version of the truth and though this conversation seems to single out only one author and one truth that is not necessarily the case. This author, Kilgore Trout, is a fictional character in a novel written by yet another fictional novelist written by Kurt Vonnegut. The separation between the reality of the reader and the fiction of Kilgore Trout lends itself to a symbolic interpretation: Trout is all authors represented in a novel that explores reality as fiction. Indeed, Vonnegut’s claim is here rendered futile in the fact he wrote this book itself; the reader is forced to question why an author would write an anti-war novel about a man who learns that war itself is unstoppable, and cannot be prevented, and that same novel says that fictional books are truth. Instead of history, Vonnegut gives us fiction; instead of anti-war he strips us of our free will—or does he?

The reader’s ability to distinguish between the reality and the fiction presented by a metafictional text is something discussed in Burgass’ article, and she argues that metafiction itself, though it intends to disorient or disturb the reader, is rendered powerless by “average” readers:

‘Real’ readers can often quickly neutralize metafictional devices so that their ontological (and chronological categories) remain intact…The fact that readers temporarily suspend disbelief and imaginatively enter the alternative fictional world with its alternative temporality, renders them immune to metafiction. (184)

It might seem counter-intuitive to present a chronological event, such as a bombing in a war during specific period of time, in such a way as to take the emphasis off of the chronology itself by using a technique like metafictional narrative. What the literary device does, however, is force the reader to piece the events together for himself and instead of confusing or disorienting the reader, the reader is instead put in a position to become a witness to history being remade within the fictional text. In being a witness, suddenly the reader is allowed to become part of that same history—the distance between the historical event in reality and the historical event in literature is thus minimized. Instead of being “neutralized,” metafiction allows the reader a neutral stance; to take in the events presented, and incorporate the multiple perspectives presented within the metafictional text, with an invitation to provide the reader’s own (new) perspective.

The use of literary devices that are often seen as isolating to the reader, such a metafiction, are used in Slaughterhouse-Five to the opposite effect. Vonnegut represents history in a single-perspective, yet through the use of metafictional narrative allows it to be interpreted in a multi-perspective and multi-dimensional way. The generation gap that occurs between the time the novel is set, the several authors within the novel, the author Vonnegut, and the reader are collapsed into a new history, giving the reader first-hand experience of a fictional history and allowing for new perspective into history.

Works Cited

Burgass, Catherine. “A Brief Story of Postmodern Plot.” The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 30, Time and Narrative (2000): pp. 177-186. Web. 18 May 2010.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. The Dial Press: New York, NY. 2005. Print.

PHI 162: “Aristotle’s Solution to the Science of Being qua Being”

Jolene Patricia Brown

Dr. M. Wedin

PHI 162: Aristotle

25 May 2010

Aristotle’s Solution to the Science of Being qua Being

In contrast to his claim in the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle makes a case for a science of “being qua being,” stipulating that is a science to investigate the forms of all other sciences, and the forms of those forms (1003b.20-23). This claim is counter that made in the Posterior Analytics where he makes an argument against the idea that a science would be able to capture all genus as a form of study: to simultaneously study what “is” in all forms of matter would be impossible, and instead there are specific sciences that break down all the genus of things into categories; it is those categories taken together that make the whole of being. For example, there is “a man” and a man is made up of all different qualities and quantities that come together to make up the whole of the form of a man; a man has two arms, two legs, a head, a brain, a capacity to reason; he has certain qualities that differentiate him from other mammals and other qualities that differentiate him from other men. A man is a sum of all the qualities he has, and each of those qualities, Aristotle argues in the Posterior Analytics, is part of a separate genus, or science. A man himself is only a culmination of different forms and materials that come together as “a man.”

In the Metaphysics however, he seems to reverse his claim, and instead chooses to argue for a science that encompasses what he calls “being qua being” that encompasses all other sciences as well as forms and matter. The problem of a science of being, as Aristotle describes it, is that it is completely counter to what he describes in his Posterior Analytics; the idea that there is one universal that covers all other universals would only serve to inflate the problem of infinite regress of cause. He begins Posterior Analytics with the claim that “All teaching an all intellectual learning come from already existing knowledge” (71a.1). This claim, and others he makes about the existence of knowledge, led to a problem of infinite regress that is not altogether explained: if all knowledge is based on already existing knowledge, then one must continue going back to find the causes of all knowledge thereby becoming circular or impossible. By claiming that there is a science of being he asserts that by studying being qua being one can understand these causes without succumbing to the infinite regress that he postulates in the Posterior Analytics.

There are two solutions to the Aristotle’s problem of the science of being. First, he distinguishes between what it is to be a substance and what it is to be a non-substance. He postulates this at 1003b.16-20: “In every case the fundamental concern of a discipline is with its primary object…So if this thing is substance, the philosopher will need to have the principles and causes of substances.” It is the philosopher who studies substances, in relation to substances being the primary object of being, since it is substances that encompass the categories which make up being. What Aristotle puts forth as evidence of this is in regards to affirmations and negations of things: namely oppositions in the form of contrarieties.

Practically everyone agrees that the things-that-are, and substance, are composed out of contraries: at any rate, everyone describes the origins of things as contraries… It is therefore obvious from this too that it falls to one discipline to study that which is qua thing-that-is. For all things either are or are made up of contraries, and contraries originate in the one and plurality. (1004b.29-1005a.5)

To make a claim about an object is, simultaneously, to make a claim about what it is not. Take, for example, to say a man is sitting: by claiming that the man is sitting you are also claiming that he is not standing, since one cannot both stand and sit at the same time. The same can be said of qualities since to claim that all men are mortal is to simultaneously claim that there is not a man who is immortal: the claims are simultaneous of one another but contrary in that they supply information about a substance.

Furthermore, substances have the capacity to change, which is unique among the disciplines. A man who is sitting has the ability (at least under normal conditions as long as he does not suffer from bodily injury that prohibits him otherwise) to stand; a horse that is white might have offspring that are all black, and indeed there are horses who are of many colors and yet despite the color differences they are still considered “horses.” This ability to change is different from other disciplines, such as mathematics, in which stay constant and reliable regardless of the situation. An example of this would be an arithmetical example such as 2 + 2 = 4; this equality is true in any sense, and does not change. The numbers themselves are not substances and cannot, therefore, have qualities like substances such as “white,” or “sitting,” or “in such and such scenario.” Those qualities would be irrelevant for mathematics otherwise 2 + 2 would equal different things under different “qualities” but it is clear that numbers and arithmetic are not subject to claims of quality.

His second solution to the science of being he equates the science of being with the study of the origins of things:

…we shall find other things called what they are in ways similar to these: just so that which is may also be so called in several ways, but all with reference to on origin…For it falls to one discipline to study not only things called what they are by virtue of one thing, but also things called what they are with reference to one nature… Plainly, therefore, it also falls to one discipline to study the things that are qua things-that-are. (1003b.5-7 and 1003b.11-17)

To study being qua being is to study the origins of all that is such that substances are those things that encompass the categories that Aristotle is so interested in. Much like in Posterior Analytics when he says that “All teaching and all intellectual learning come from already existing knowledge” (71a.1) he begins the Metaphysics by explaining that experiences make up the “memories of the same thing [producing]…the capacity for a single experience” (980a.25). It is then, Aristotle argues, through experiences that man can know something, and the combination of experiences combine—much like the qualities that make up substances—to create memories and, ultimately, more knowledge. Substances work the same way, for the combination of qualities make up substances, such as man, horse, table and those things we know to be substances are known through experience. Those experiences are combined to form memories and humans in particular have the capacity to reason with those memories, which is yet another quality that distinguishes the substance “man” from other substances, like “animal.”

ENL 133: The Search for Love: The Poor Victorian Citizen’s Struggle as Represented by Oliver Twist

Jolene Patricia Brown

Dr. K. Frederickson

ENL 133

5 May 2010

The Search for Love: The Poor Victorian Citizen’s

Struggle as Represented by Oliver Twist

The novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens is an exploration of roots and family that takes place in a culture that values those things to the highest degree. The tragedy of Oliver is not that he is without a family, for indeed many children in the novel are without a family, but instead that he is a child deserving of a family who must find a family deserving of him. Oliver’s travels from the moment he loses his mother to the time he is adopted by Mr. Brownlow is a search for a family, and the reader is sympathizing with Oliver because he manages always to fall into the wrong circumstances, namely the wrong kind of families. The combination of his naïve innocence, his constant illnesses in times of stress, his aversion to crime, and his appreciation of positive attention render Oliver a sympathetic character to the reader; we want him to find a home and a family to care for him and nurture his innate good qualities. The idea of a family becomes a metaphor for the state of Victorian government and its lack of sympathy for poor citizens. As children were turning to crime in order to survive—and thus punished by the state—the root of their corruption was not poor upbringing, or a flaw in the poorer classes. The state was driving the criminals to a choice between punishment (by toiling in the workhouses) and crime (which ends in punishment). What the poor of England are looking for is the love of their state: sympathy from the government instead of constant punishment. With a little help from their rulers, then, in the words of Nancy to the kind Rose: “If there was more like you, there would be fewer like me, —there would—there would!” (Dickens 333).

A child without a family, raised in an environment depriving him of not only physical care but also emotional care, would be hard-pressed to care for himself. In being taken to the workhouse Oliver experiences loneliness for the first time (11), despite the terrible treatment of where he was raised. It is only a short time later, when he is in the juvenile workhouse, that Oliver finds himself in a scenario that signifies his search for familial love:

Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger and reckless with misery. He rose from the table, and advancing, basin and spoon in hand, to the master, said, somewhat alarmed at his own temerity –

‘Please, sir, I want some more.’

…The assistants were paralysed with wonder, and the boys with fear…

‘Please, sir,’ replied Oliver, ‘I want some more.’ (15)

Even though it is food that Oliver is requesting, the metaphor is clear: what he longs for and what he desires is really the love of a family. It is no coincidence that Oliver is taken from the one family he knows, as “Wretched as were the little companions in misery he was leaving behind” (11), then speaks up for more food when he reaches the uncaring environment at the workhouse. Being forced to leave what little love he has with his friends, and brought to a place for children considered “offenders” of the law of poverty (6) is a jarring change. Instead of finding a place of camaraderie among the boys of the workhouse, he finds a place of misery and competition that is devoid of any nurturing that his nature requires.

In the article by Larry Wolff, he cites sources that compare the camaraderie of juvenile criminals a kind of sibling relation:

…in an older tradition of writing about juvenile crime, for already in the 1750’s the magistrate John Fielding…proposed a sibling relation between the two criminal cases: “These deserted Boys were Thieves from Necessity, their Sisters are Whores from the same cause.” (231)

The environment that Oliver finds among the thieves is a welcome one precisely because it offers a kind of comfort and protection that he desires and has not found in his short life. He sees Fagin as a “merry old gentleman” why plays games with a group of young boys: the game brings Oliver to tears with laughter; probably one of the first moments of joy in Oliver’s life (Dickens 70). The game is performed in such a “funny and natural manner” (71) on the part of Fagin that Oliver sees it as a ritual of belonging, and on the very next page participates in the game himself. Through this game Oliver is brought into a family structure of criminals, and though he does not realize they are criminals he is nonetheless impressed with the brotherhood enough to want to join it. It is not until he realizes the nature of their family that he decides he does not want to belong: it is not the criminality that attracts him; it is the opportunity to belong to a family.

It is through intervention by Rose that Oliver is first allowed the luxury of a family. Rose shares with Oliver the status of being an orphan, so she understands what it is that he seeks. She comes to his rescue when he is most vulnerable, and cannot defend himself because he is near-mortally injured, and in their care:

‘…think that he may never have known a mother’s love, or even the comfort of a home, and that…may have driven him to herd with the men who have forced him to guilt…I have never felt the want of parents in [Mrs. Maylie’s] goodness and affection, but that I might have done so, and might have been equally helpless and unprotected with this poor child, have pity upon him before it is too late’ (239)

Rose recognizes Oliver’s search for love and familial companionship as one she would have had to do if it were not for the care and love of the Maylie family. Indeed, she was also rescued from a family who “began to sicken…of their fine humanity,” (437) by Mrs. Maylie, who treated her as her own daughter. Rose realizes how fortunate she was to find a family who would treat her as a daughter, a friend, and—in the case of Henry Maylie—future wife, and because she has not forgotten her luck, wishes to show that same pity to Oliver. Oliver only too happily accepts, and though he is not immediately reunited with Mr. Brownlow, he has found a family who cares about him and, more importantly, has faith in him enough to believe that there are evil men out to do him harm, and this family protects him.

The Victorian audience would appreciate Oliver’s longing for familial love, and recognize their own struggle within the country, especially those people of the lower and middle classes. Much of this novel is a protestation against the over-punishment of crime in England. Even the smallest crimes run the risk of death by the state. The struggle is between the choices made to commit a crime—a child is forced to a criminal lifestyle when there are no other options for survival, but the punishment for a child in that struggle outweighs the crime itself. The argument is then one of pity: it is wrong for the state to punish a child for maintaining their survival; Oliver struggles for survival and does not need to turn to crime to do so because he finds a family. The state must take in those poor criminals who struggle to survive and help them, like Oliver’s new family helps him; otherwise the criminal continues to wander and run the risk of getting into—or causing—more trouble.

Poverty was a crime at the time of publication, yet the wealth remained in the hands of a select few, while the vast majority of the population struggled with everyday living. What Oliver wanted more than anything was the love of a family to nurture his natural inclination to do what is right for himself and for society. The poor-houses of England were full of people who wanted nothing more than to survive, but had no way to do support themselves. Wolff cites this behavior as well in the story of a boy and a gentleman, as first related by another author Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor:

“…[the boy] went up to an old gentleman, walking slowly in Hyde-park, and said to him, ‘Sir, I’ve lived three weeks by begging, and I’m hungering now; give me a sixpence, or I’ll go and steal.’ The gentleman stopped and looked at the boy…in whose face was no doubt starvation, for without uttering a word he gave the young applicant a shilling” (241)

Instead of turning to crime, the good poor citizens turned to the state: the government-run work houses. Instead of a gentleman to give them more than they asked, like the young man in the passage above, they found themselves punished unjustly and disproportionately for their “crime” of poverty. The metaphor runs deep between the love of a family and the love of the state; the illusion is one is born with both a family and a country to care for them, but in reality neither love is a guarantee.

Works Cited

Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. London: Penguin Publishing, 2002. Print.

Wolff, Larry. “The Boys are Pickpockets and the Girl is a Prostitute: Gender and Juvenile Criminality in Oliver Twist.” New Literary History 27.2 (1996) 227-249.

ENL 10C: Manliness and Repetition in “The Blue Hotel”

Jolene Patricia Brown

Dr. M. Stratton

ENL 10C

30 April 2010

Manliness and Repetition in “The Blue Hotel”

In Stephen Crane’s short story “The Blue Hotel” there is a depiction of the relationships between men that calls into the question the sincerity of connections between men in times of stress. The story itself is simple: a man running a hotel brings three patrons from the train station to spend the night during an intense snow storm, and the consequences of their brief interaction. The outcome is far from simple and, in fact, illustrates an inherent mistrust between men who struggle for control, which is amplified when placed in unfamiliar surroundings. The story is a criticism of modern hospitality between men represented by the show of the hotel owner for the sake of reputation, and the misunderstandings that occur when communication is avoided for the sake of manliness. By using repetition, Crane makes a statement of the circularity, and futility, of over-exerted manliness in situations where survival is the most important goal: much like the repetition of certain phrases in the story, the society of men repeats their own follies of misguided assertions of power and control thereby bringing tragedy on themselves, and others, that otherwise could have been avoided.

The Palace Hotel is an actor on the stage of Fort Romper, Nebraska. The hotel “then, was always screaming an howling in a way that made the dazzling winter landscape…seem only a gray swampish hush” (376) which prompted the passengers, as a chance audience, to be “overcome at the sight” to which they “expressed shame, pity, [and] horror, in a laugh” (377). The owner of the hotel, Pat Scully has painted the hotel precisely for this reason: to attract the attention of the passengers who will spend their time, and their money, in his hotel. Scully himself is putting on a show for his guests, creating an environment that is hospitable in order to promote continued growth of his business. It is clear from the beginning of the story that Scully’s hospitality is an act put on for the benefit of business: “It was notable that throughout this series of small ceremonies the three travelers were made to feel that Scully was very benevolent. He was conferring great favors upon them. He handed the towel from one to another with an air of philanthropic impulse” (377). The passage states that the travels “were made to feel” and that Scully had “an air” is suspicious because it is not claimed by the speaker directly that Scully is either benevolent or a philanthropist. Instead, these qualities of the host are presented as an act; Scully, like his hotel, are putting on a show for the passengers who have sought refuge from the overwhelming storm outside.

The significance of “acting” in this story is far-reaching, as all the characters are putting on an act, though some are more convincing than others. The Swede is also putting on an act, like the host of the hotel, as described by the speaker: “His eyes continued to rove from man to man…he said that some of these Western communities were very dangerous…It was plain that the demonstration had no meaning to the others” (378). The Swede in this passage is sizing up the men around him, evaluating the dangers he believes to exist in “Western communities” and presents a “demonstration”—an outward show of manliness with his “wink and laugh” (378). The Swede winks again on the following page, initiating a repetition of both gestures and phrases that continue throughout the story, creating a cyclical pattern of behavior that only escalates the show of the men inside the hotel as they continually struggle for control of the situation. The character of the Swede suffers greatly for his over-confidence by cutting himself off from the companionship of the other men in the hotel.

The repetition of gestures and phrases creates a loose camaraderie between the cowboy, the Easterner, Scully and his son, Johnnie, but serves only to isolate the Swede who continues to assert his own manliness as a defense against the men he believes want to kill him. A turning point in the story occurs on page 385; in this passage Scully becomes a metaphor for all men, as even his speech takes on an almost universal quality becoming a “combination of Irish brogue and idiom, Western twang and idiom, and scraps of curiously formal diction taken from story-books and newspapers” (384). His speech at this moment asserts his control over his hotel through repetition:

“What do I keep? What do I keep? What do I keep?” he demanded, in a voice of thunder… “I keep a hotel,” he shouted. “A hotel, do you mind? A guest under my roof has sacred privileges. He is to be intimidated by none...” He wheeled suddenly upon the cowboy and the Easterner. “Am I right?”

“Yes, Mr. Scully,” said the cowboy, “I think you’re right.”

“Yes, Mr. Scully,” said the Easterner, “I think you’re right.” (385)

What is significant about this passage is that Scully claims to provide a haven that is free of intimidation, yet he intimidates his guests into agreeing with him. He asserts himself at this moment as the man in control of the situation, but instead comes across as just as intimidating and irrational as the Swede; the cycle of intimidation and the struggle for power escalates into the fight between Johnnie and the Swede, and ultimately the death of the Swede. Scully repeats the word “keep” four times, which signals to the audience (the reader as well as the men in the hotel) that he intends to recover his claim to authority that has been called into question by the men who seek to throw one of this guests out of the hotel. Though it seems strictly a business decision, the outburst is more than that as it is a reassertion of his manliness—his power and control as the owner and host—threatened by his son and his guests.

It is not until the final scene that we are presented with the definition of manliness, realizing that their manliness was only an act and that there were no “men” in the hotel that night. The Easterner explains to the cowboy: “Johnnie was cheating. I saw him. I know. I saw him. And I refused to stand up and be a man…Usually there are from a dozen to forty women really involved in every murder, but in this case it seems to be only five men…” (396). Here the idea of masculinity is made clear as the Easterner not only denies himself the role of a man, but he also compares the four men in the hotel that night to a large group of women who, he claims, are “usually…involved in every murder.” To be a man, by this definition, is not to commit murder, for that is the role of a woman, and a man instead would have stood up for the Swede; would have pointed out that Johnnie was cheating; would not have encouraged the fighting that ended in the death of a man. True manliness is not power or control over a situation: instead is the power and control of oneself with regards to a situation, and making the right decision based on what is right and not what is dictated by others. This is significant about the repetition in the story: the men fall into the trap of repeating the mistakes of one another instead of making their own decisions.

The combination of “putting on a show” of manliness and the constant repetition in this story proves deadly. None of the men shows true character, instead choosing to look to each other for guidance for behavior, continuing the escalation of the power struggle throughout the story. If even one man had walked away from the fight things might have turned out differently. The hotel itself, a painted actor on the stage of Fort Romper, Nebraska, will continue its show as the men inside will continue theirs. Manliness becomes a form of crowd assimilation instead of individuality, which is precisely the problem being addressed in the story.

PHI 162: “The Problem of Scientific Knowledge through Demonstration” (according to Aristotle)

Jolene Patricia Brown

Dr. M.V. Wedin

PHI 162: Aristotle

27 April 2010

The Problem of Scientific Knowledge through Demonstration

Aristotle claims that scientific knowledge can only arise in the situation that one can demonstrate what they know by presenting the knowledge in a coherent form with specific rules. In this way, his definition of scientific knowledge can be compared to a syllogism: it takes two true premises, argued together, to be able to claim new true information in the conclusion of the argument in the form of the syllogism. Like a syllogism, scientific knowledge consists of true claims that one must understand, and have seen demonstrated, taken together in an argument to be a conclusion that consists of scientific knowledge. He writes:

…it is necessary for demonstrative understanding in particular to depend on things which are true and primitive and immediate and more familiar than and prior to and explanatory of the conclusion… (71b.20)

In the above quote he states four dependencies that must be necessary for understanding of scientific knowledge to occur: a premise must be true, primitive and immediate, more familiar and prior and explanatory. These dependences are important because without them a conclusion would suffer from inconsistency, false claims, and a lack of demonstration that would be necessary for knowledge to be obtained.

Each of the four dependencies represents some form of demonstration in and of itself. The truth dependency, the first one on his list, is that which claims that the premises must be true in order for the conclusion to be true: truth in the premises demonstrates the relationship of truth in the premises to the truth contained in the conclusion, rendering the information in the conclusions as true. The second dependency, primitive and intermediate, refers to the relation of the premises to the conclusion for the information in the premises must precede the information in the conclusion or otherwise entail the conclusion. It would not be possible for a premise that that contains information that is, for instance, chronologically later than the information contained in the conclusion. This dependency demonstrates the relationship of the information in the premises to the information contained in the conclusion and the importance of entailment and logical following as going from premise to conclusion in the course of the argument. The third dependency is more familiar and prior which refers to the relationship between the information and the individual who knows it. One must be familiar with the information contained in the premises in order to use it to make a claim about that information in a new way, such as in a conclusion. “Being prior and more familiar” is that which is “nearer to perception”—something that can been demonstrated to the individual in such a way as to produce knowledge, which can in turn be used as premises to form even more knowledge in the conclusion (72a.1-5). The last dependency is that the premises must be explanatory, meaning that the information contained in the premises must explain the information contained within the conclusion, thereby demonstrating the connection between the relevance of the information in the argument.

The problem with Aristotle’s claim of demonstration as a means of obtaining scientific knowledge is that there is a regress of circularity that occurs in the rigorousness of providing demonstration for all knowledge beginning with the premises that precede the conclusion and extending back to the “first premises.” If Aristotle is correct, there will be no “first claims” that would be found underlying all other claims leading to a conclusion: if there were it would create a problem because either those first claims would not meet the criteria of the dependencies, or one would have to continue their demonstration in a circular argument that would quickly become non-demonstrable. Aristotle makes an argument against the circularity of knowledge by stating that “if demonstration must depend on what is prior and more familiar…it is impossible for the same things at the same time to be prior and posterior to the same things” (72b.25-30). We must remember that being “prior and more familiar” demonstrates the relationship of the information to the individual, and in this way Aristotle is correct: for an argument to be circular, then the individual would both have to know and not know the premises simultaneously in order for the argument to complete itself in a reciprocal fashion. Since the ability to simultaneously know and not know is impossible, the idea that all arguments are circular is not an option.

Instead of pressing for more justification of demonstration as the only means of scientific knowledge, Aristotle then explores the idea that the immediate, or that the dependency between the premises and the conclusion, is not necessarily demonstrable and that instead knowledge at a certain point can be obtained through familiarity by definition (72b.20-25). Aristotle earlier defines “definition” as a “posit…but not a supposition” (72a.20), meaning that unlike a supposition that “assumes either of the parts of a contradiction”—like an assumption—a definition gives information that one must assume but that does not nullify either part of a contradiction. Instead, a definition outlines the meaning of a premise in such a way that it maintains truth, and allows the formation of new information in the conclusion thereby creating new premises for argument: the first “first claims” needed to source scientific knowledge. In claiming that it is possible for some premises, namely those that are immediate, to originate from definitions, Aristotle almost convinces the reader of the definition as a solution to the problem of infinite regress, but even that falls short. The problem with the idea of definition is thus stated:

Since one should both be convinced of and know the object by having a deduction of the sort we call a demonstration, and since this is the case when these things on which the deduction depends are the case, it is necessary not only to be already aware of the primitives…but actually be better aware of them. (72a.25)

By this explanation it is not sufficient that a definition might allow a premise to exist as a primitive, since it is necessary for an individual to be already aware of the premises, but “better aware” of them than the conclusion itself. Since it would be hard to take the definition of a very abstract idea and construct an argument such that the conclusion would not only include information from both definitions, but also create a new idea that is concrete seems impossible. A definition would need to be so well-known by the individual that it would become another premise that would need another demonstration in order to prove all the points of the definition in such a way as to create a conclusion, leading back to the original circular pattern of demonstration needed for scientific knowledge.

Unhappy with the options he presents about the source of knowledge Aristotle instead rejects all accounts, and claims there must be another way for one to achieve knowledge. His options as they stand are to concede to circular reasoning, resort skepticism, or have an infinite explanation that no one would ever be able to conceive. None of these options present a case for scientific knowledge as he would like to accept—in demonstration—so instead of claiming one over the others, he rejects all of them as false, and by doing so implies the option of something unknown even to him: “…hence, since there are few such things in demonstrations, it is evident that it is both empty and impossible to say that demonstration is reciprocal and that because of this there can be demonstration of everything” (73a.15-20). By rejecting all those things he denies are the sources of truth he does not explicitly state what it is that is the source of truth, and instead makes an oblique claim that there is something else that is unknown at this point that is the source. Scientific knowledge, therefore, can be had, but we reach a point in demonstrating the truth of it that knowledge itself remains source less.

ENL 10C: The Use of Metaphor in Pound’s “In the Station of the Metro”"

Jolene Patricia Brown

Dr. M. Stratton

ENL 10C

9 April 2010

The Use of Metaphor in Pound’s “In the Station of the Metro”

Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro” uses metaphor to assist description in the poem that might otherwise be limited by the imagist ideal of “strict verbal economy” (Mikics 152). By using an extended metaphor, Pound is able to give the maximum amount of images to the reader with the minimum number words. The content of the poem consists of two major metaphors: the first being between the station of the metro and the “wet, black bough”; the second being the comparison of the faces of the crowd and the petals on the bough. The metaphor conveys maximum imagery with minimal words, and it extends from the title and continues through each line in a continuous flow of linked ideas. Each line changes the image in the mind of the reader to form a more complete idea of what exactly the speaker is seeing: a description of what the speaker sees with his eyes in an urban metro station and turns it to what his mind interprets that vision.

Metaphors play an important role in the form of the poem by allowing the speaker to give a maximum number of images while using the least number of words necessary to convey what the speaker sees. In the first metaphor the metro is indirectly compared to a “wet, black bough” and one can imagine the station and the metro consisting of a long, well-lit tunnel with shining tracks, and people peering from windows that reflect the light. The wetness is the light of the station; the black the shadows created by that same light. The urban, man-made metro station is thus transformed into an object of nature. This same transition is what happens in the second metaphor as well: the crowd of human faces on the metro is transformed into a row of petals with only the use of a trope and a semi-colon.

The semi-colon at the end of the first line of the poem offers the reader the comparison between the contents of the title and the first line, and the final line of the poem, to be juxtaposed side-by-side as equal images in the mind of the reader. As a continued sentence, instead of one broken up by a period, the metaphor is given more weight; the last line of the poem is offered as a parting thought to send the reader away with the final image birthed by the vision of the metro. In using metaphor, Pound gives “two ideas for the price of one…offer[ing] the reader a bonus of meaning” (Mikics 181) all while realizing his goal of using only the most necessary words. The metaphors he uses show the reader what he sees, yet maintains a sense of reader imagination: the reader is allowed imaginary freedom without the extra description, while the speaker maintains the control of what is being described. Both freedoms lie in the use of metaphor, which turns an otherwise ordinary metro station into a wet, petal-laden bough.

Works Cited

Mikics, David. A New Handbook of Literary Terms. London: Yale University Press, 2007. Print.

PHI 178: "Response to ‘Discuss Frege’s conception of logicism. What is a number and how are they defined?’”

Jolene Patricia Brown
Dr. R. May
PHI 178: Frege
17 March 2010

Response to ‘Discuss Frege’s conception of logicism. What is a number and how are they defined?’

Frege’s conception of logicism is beautiful in its simplicity. He set out to prove a link between logic and arithmetic; arithmetic meaning the branch of mathematics that is concerned with counting. More specifically he wanted to capture the Peano postulates of arithmetic in logic, prove that all arithmetical functions can be shown true in purely logical proofs. Frege’s concerns at the beginning of the project included several frustrations about the seemingly superficial way in which many of his contemporaries were exploring mathematical proofs in general. In his search for logicism, Frege managed to give definitions to mathematical concepts that, until he defined them, were ambiguous at best—at least in definition.

Both as a professional mathematician and as a philosopher Frege considered it scandalous that the foundations of ‘the most exact of all the sciences,’ mathematics, should be treated in the cursory and superficial manner…He embarked, therefore, upon a programme of investigation which was designed to fulfill two basic theoretical needs: to explain the concepts, and to secure the truths of arithmetic and analysis. (Bell 141)

Despite such huge mathematical leaps being made during Frege’s life there were still many mysteries surrounding the “elementary” mathematics of arithmetic. In setting out to find a link between logic and arithmetic that Frege was certain existed, the managed to give more depth to the definitions, and led to a revolution in the way mathematicians and philosophers alike approached math, science, and language.

One of the fundamental questions that had not been under scrutiny before Frege was the question ‘What is a number?’ Arithmetic is taught to school children every day with the emphasis that counting and arithmetical functions are easy to understand, with little to no explanation beyond what those functions do to manipulate numbers. Beginning with the premise that arithmetic reduces to logic, Frege took the first step in showing that every step in logic, or mathematics, must follow the highest standard of logical precision and proof. If something “follows logically” from (a) premise(s) then it is being held to the highest certainty in order to be called “knowledge.” This is the same standard that science adheres to in its theoretical postulates. Mathematics, until this time, had not this standard of logical certainty, and instead allowed themselves the flexibility of semi-ambiguous inference and even unscientific “intuition” to permeate its claims:

Since it is arbitrary what reference one wants to give to a sign, it follows that the content of the sign will have these or those properties, depending on the particular choice made…Mathematicians…are very peculiar people; instead of investigating the properties a thing really has, they don’t care about them on iota, but using so-called definitions, ascribe all sort of properties to a thing that have absolutely no connection with the thing itself, and then investigate these properties. (Frege “Formal Theories” 115-116)

In being critical of his colleagues’ intuitive claims about the definition of number, Frege realized that the numbers have a seemingly arbitrary quality: for example an army could be called “one” army, “ten” regiments, or “five-thousand” men, depending on the “concept” that is in question. His realization allowed him to make a distinction between the name of the number and the number itself. He outlines this in Sinn and Bedeutung when he makes the distinction between the morning star and the evening star. Since the term “morning star” and the term “evening star” each refer to the same point in the sky, they both represent the planet Venus, there is something significant that is to be learned from which term is thus used. The claim “the morning star is the morning star,” however, seems trivial; Frege then asks the question: what about the statement “the morning star is the evening star” gives information when the the statement “the morning star i the morning star” is deemed trivial? The answer lies in the what the sign is referencing: the signified. In logic this is represented through the use of identity; a = a is trivial because it is obvious (under normal conditions) that a thing is equivalent to itself. The claim a = b, however, gives information beyond the trivial: it signals to the thinker that there are two objects that are identical, and that those objects have a sign that is not the same—the significance in the difference of the sign is what makes the information important instead of trivial.

Numbers work the same way: the name “two” refers to a number, but that number has no meaning unless it refers to a concept that can be linked to the number itself. Numbers, then, are concepts—not objects with properties—and those concepts have different levels that signal the thinker to the meaning of the concept. An example is given in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “The concept being an author of Principia Mathematica falls under the concept being a concept under which two objects fall” (Malpas). This claim involves the concept two, much like the statement “There are two authors of Principia Mathematica” but the emphasis in the first claim distinguishes the conceptual nature of “two.” “Two” is not an object with properties that can be pointed out in space. Instead, “two” acts like a column on a table whereby claims such as “being an author of Principia Mathematica” might be filed under as being true when placed under “two.” Concepts themselves have properties, but, to quote Frege,

By properties that are asserted of a concept I do not, of course, mean the marks that make up the concept. These are properties of the things that fall under concept, not of the concept…In this respect existence is similar to number. Affirmation of existence is indeed nothing other than denial of the number zero. (Frege “Foundations” 103)

The properties of numbers are such that they are attributed to the objects within the concept. To know a number is not just a case of pointing to it: you would have to know something about it. For example five is the sum of two and three it is the second prime number. Each of these examples tells what “five” is, but each one is also a relation to other numbers. In other words, numbers are only “known” through their relation to other numbers, such as the successor function which orders numbers according to the number that comes before it.

When Frege conceived of logicism as a way to link logic and arithmetic, but his idea, despite its flaws, was so well-formulated that it affected philosophy of mathematics and language in ways he never intended.

Frege’s…’logicism’ essentially involves establishing (i) that the primitive concepts of arithmetic and analysis are logical concepts, i.e. that numbers, arithmetical functions, and operations can be reduced to, or defined exclusively in terms of, purely logical notions; and (ii) that the truths of arithmetic are logical truths, analytical statements which can be known a priori. (Bell).

In looking at the very foundations of “simple” arithmetic with such a scrutinizing eye, Frege helped to define things that, until he attempted it, did not have definition. Part of what Frege discovered in his exploration of logicism is that language is inherently flawed in describing his “most exact of all sciences” and that in order to accurately portray logicism, arithmetic, or logic he would have to build his own system in order to give the kind of accuracy he demanded. His attention to detail and high standards for proof led to a revolution in the way philosophers and mathematicians considered language, be it natural, unnatural, or mathematical. Despite his failure to prove a link between arithmetic and logic, the standards to which he held himself managed to reshape modern though: his short-term failure to prove logicism was a long-term success in that this rigorous standards paved the way for a higher mathematical standard that raised the bar for philosophy of mathematics, as well as creating new philosophical movements such as analytical philosophy and the philosophy of language. The fact that his seemingly narrow goal has shaped so much modern though has become more evident over time.

Works Cited

Bell, Davis. “Appendix: Frege’s Philosophy of Arithmetic” from Frege’s Theory of Judgment. From PHI 178 course website. Winter 2010.

Frege, Gottlob.

“On Formal Theories of Arithmetic.” From PHI 178 course website. Winter 2010.

“The Foundations of Arithmetic.” The Frege Reader. Ed. Michael Beaney. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1997.

Malpas, J., “Donald Davidson.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2003 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2003/entries/davidson/

ENL 10B: "A Close Reading of "Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville"

Jolene Patricia Brown

Dr. T. Morton

ENL 10B

15 March 2010

A Close Reading of “Bartleby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville

            In reading “Bartleby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville, the first thing one notices is the repetition of certain words and themes that permeates the work throughout.  This repetition occurs right at the beginning of the story with the narrator:

I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact that I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor, a name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion. (4)

It is the sound f the word that the narrator enjoys, but one must remember that the opening of the story takes place after the other events in the story.  The narrator is looking back and writing from the memory the events of Bartleby as he remembers it and by the end of the story it is suspicious that the narrator has this fondness for word or name repetition.

            The most obvious example of this is Bartleby himself who has little more to say than “I would prefer not to.”  Bartleby’s insistence upon only using these words to turn down his boss’ requests becomes almost a mechanical response, devoid of emotion or any humanistic quality.  Indeed, everything that Bartleby does lacks human qualities as the narrator does not see him eat, has no idea what he does with his free time, and his work style is unquestionably different from that of other scrivener:

At first, Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing.  AS if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents.  There was no pause for digestion.  He ran a day and night line, copying by sunlight and by candlelight.  I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious.  But he wrote on silently, paley, mechanically. (11)

The narrator is not bothered by the amount of work that Bartleby is performing, he is bothered by the way in which he does it.  “Silently, paley, mechanically” are not words used to describe a living being: they imply a robot, an automaton without any human characteristics, who works on without regard for his surroundings and regardless of who witnesses.  Bartleby, unlike Turkey or Nippers, is not putting on a show for anyone else; he only continues his work for his own purpose which seems to be no purpose at all.

            Turkey and Nippers both adhere to cycles that are predictable but emphasize their faults as people.  These cycles are outlined early on in the story by the narrator, who describes in detail the cycle between the two scriveners in great detail, even going so far as to describe them and their habits over the course of 5 pages (page 5 to halfway through page 10) .  This duration and attention to detail on the part of the author signals the reader that the predictable natures of Turkey and Nippers cycles are integral to understanding how Bartleby does not fit into this predictability.  This creates a sense of irony: Bartleby is predictable, but not in the way that Turkey and Nippers are predictable.  Turkey and Nippers are predictable in humanistic ways because they allow their imperfections to control their cycles by alternating when each one does his best work, even though they do not necessarily consciously control their cycles.  Bartleby, however, has no humanistic cycles of imperfections.  Instead, he is predictable in his unwillingness to do those things that are requested of him.  The only predictable thing about him is his use of the word “prefer” which becomes so predictable that it becomes inhuman: he becomes a machine that continually repeats “I would prefer not to” with such reliable predictability that it becomes mechanistic.  It is unpredictable precisely because it is so predictable, losing all familiarity to the more imperfect beings around him.

            Repetition is an important part of this whole story from beginning to end.  The author uses repetition to make a point about Bartleby himself, and how Bartleby affects his surroundings.  Bartleby’s use of the word “prefer,” for instance, begins to affect those in the office, including the narrator and the other two scriveners.

“That’s the word, Turkey,” said I--”that’s it.”

“Oh, prefer? oh yes--queer word.  I never use it myself.  But, sir, as I was saying, if he would but prefer--”

“Turkey,” interrupted I, “you will please withdraw.”

“Oh certainly, sir, if you prefer that I should.” (26)

In this passage Turkey calls the word prefer “queer,” and claims he never uses it, but he then, immediately uses it not once but twice: the second time in such a way to be exactly contrasted to the sense in which Bartleby uses it.  This opposition between Turkey and Bartleby is important, as even the narrator himself realizes the affect on his office: “I must get rid of a demented man, who already has in some degree turned the tongues, if not the heads, of myself and clerks” (26)  The repetition of Bartleby is more than just a significance of preference and it quickly becomes contagious in nature.  Bartleby himself embodies repetition, not just in his words, but in his life as well, as he goes from working in the dead letter office to become himself a “dead letter”: his dying at the end of the story is also repetition.

            The speech in the story is mostly tagged direct speech, with the exception of Bartleby, who has untagged direct speech for most of his responses.  The differentiation between tagged being the more human characters in contrast to Bartleby’s untagged speech is significant for the subject position: by not supplying tags for Bartleby’s speech the reader is isolated from Bartleby, and Bartleby becomes an outsider, much like his relationship to those in the law office.  When the speech is tagged, the effect is unnerving, and usually emphasizes some of emotion that is not normally attributed to Bartleby, since his character is such that he rarely exhibits “emotion” in a way that is familiar to the reader.  His emotions, furthermore, are usually those of indifference, such as on page 26:

The next day I noticed that Bartleby did nothing but stand at his window in his dead-wall reverie.  Upon asking him why he did not write, he said that he had decided upon doing no more writing.  “Why, how now? what next? exclaimed I, “do no more writing?”

“No more.”

“And what is the reason?”

“Do you not see the reason for yourself?” he indifferently replied.

The emotions expressed by Bartleby and by the narrator are not evenly matched, as the narrator describes his reaction as an exclamation--usually showing a shock or dismay--whereas Bartleby does no more than to show indifference to his statement.  This tagged and untagged distinction only helps to emphasize the disconnect that Bartleby has with his humanity, and gives the reader that much more reason to be disturbed by the narrator’s portrayal of Bartleby, even though the narrator goes out of his way to familiarize the reader with the good qualities that Bartleby may have.

ENL 159: “Married or Single: Marriage as a Means of Instigating Environmental Change”

Jolene Patricia Brown

Word Count: 3092

Dr. J. Marx

ENL 159: Global City Fiction

12 March 2010

Married or Single:

Marriage as a Means of Instigating Environmental Change

In Zakes Mda’s novel Ways of Dying there is a constant emphasis on the relationships between people, men and women in particular, as being integral to the state of their surroundings. “I believe the salvation of the settlement lies in the hands of women” says Toloki on page 176. This observation is striking because one realizes the disjoint in the balance between the sexes that must be remedied in order to fix the social problems the characters endure. The roles of the sexes are changing dramatically in African cultures and people struggle to care for themselves and their families in an increasing competitive world with less access to ever fewer resources. Since traditional gender roles can no longer supply families with what is needed for survival, a new unification and understanding must occur at a cultural level which can, in turn, affect the whole of society. Personal relationships are an important tool to use in order to bring change to large-scale social networks and by involving oneself in society a person can do more in instigating change than if they were to take a more independent, self-involved approach. This change, however, must begin at the individual level as people must take it upon themselves to become actively involved in their communities and change their own role, setting an example for those around them, much like Noria and Toloki in Ways of Dying.

Toloki begins the novel as an outsider. Though he is well-known in his neighborhood and within funerary circles, he still isolates himself from others because he "decided to follow a new path that involved sacrifice, self-denial and spiritual flagellation" (Mda 119). When he is reunited with Noria, however, he quickly reintegrates himself into society by integrating himself into Noria’s settlement. Toloki was not born in the city, he came into it later after he left his village to escape his father and the ill-treatment of other young people in his village. At first in the city he manages to get a place in a settlement, much like what Noria has, but he ends up leaving it to live in the waiting room at the train station when his house is burned down. Toloki elects at first to deprive himself of interpersonal connections by leaving his village, then by doing the same thing in the city, choosing instead a life of solitude in the name of the “holy” profession of mourning. Life in the settlement is hard, and he leaves because a perceived lack of unity:

It is strange how things don’t change in these shanty towns or squatter camps or informal settlements or whatever you choose to call them...The situation is even more complicated these days...But today people are strongly united. None of these groups are ever able to gain any lasting foothold in the settlements and in the townships. People fight back. (147)

The difference in the current settlement is that people overcome the oppressors, so Toloki no longer needed to “eschew forever the company of men. And of women” (147).

In meeting up with Noria, Toloki slowly reintegrates himself back into society. At the outset of the novel Toloki has no personal connections but by the end of the novel he manages to become, along with Noria, a central figure within the settlement. The example of companionship that Toloki and Noria show to the settlement impacts dramatically the face of the settlement. This is an important move for Toloki and for the settlement itself because by choosing to be a part of Noria’s home, Toloki chooses to belong to the settlement. In the article “Spatial Stories: Photographic Practices and Urban Belonging” by Carol Magee, she describes what she calls “elective belonging”:

…one may be born into that community, or one may move to it, but in either case, when one chooses to stay, one elects to belong. This belonging does not depend on formalized recognition by the community, even if it engages with the community…elective belonging does not depend upon one’s acceptance by one’s elected community: instead…one uses the visual to assert and represent belonging. (110)

Though Toloki still imagines himself an outsider he still moves his material possessions into Noria’s shack and into the settlement. Immediately afterwards people see this as a link between Noria and Toloki, assuming of course they are lovers. This move and recognition, however, is more than nosiness: it is symbolic of the link that is being forged between Toloki and the community. The transition from outsider to member of the community can be slow process unless one becomes active within the community. Toloki is not active at first, and it is only through Noria that he is able to assert himself and contribute to the community.

His role as a “professional mourner” seems to give Toloki a sexless status at the beginning of the novel. He represses his sexuality for the sake of his profession because he intends to emulate a holy man but this isolation and repression allows him access to a perspective that is unique: “[Toloki] attributes his keen sense of observation to the fact that he has not lived with other human beings for many years. He therefore sees things with a fresh eye” (176). The perspective he gains in this practice is important later in the novel when Toloki watches the men and women of the village, especially when he goes with Noria to inform the community about the strike. Toloki notices the “women are never still...always on the move...always on the go” (175), in sharp contrast to the men who “sit all day and dispense wide-ranging philosophies on how things should be...then at night they demand to be given food” (175). The division of work between the men and women is notably unfair as women are expect to cook, clean, and care for the children while the men seem to not have jobs and do not do their share of the housework. The roles at home mirror the roles in community action: it is the women who go out into the communities and rally for change while the men only philosophize their “empty theories” (176). The division in these gender roles within the community is in contrast to the relationship between Toloki and Noria who have a balanced relationship, and who support one another equally. It is not beneath Toloki to meet Noria’s women friends, or to assist the women with cooking or setting up for the community meeting (171).

The roles of men and women in Africa are important to the establishment of local government. Marriage itself is a tool people can, and do, use to establish themselves within the community and to gain access to material or money. For example, there was a custom in the 1920s- 1960s called “The Hats” where young women and young men would enter themselves into a marriage “lottery”:

While the women waited outside, the men were instructed to remove their hats, and leave the room. The hats were lined up on a table, and the women filed in. Each [woman] selected a hat, and was married, there and then, to its owner...This...entitled the newlyweds, together with their dependants, to occupy a township ‘family house’...the official permission to inhabit this cramped and inhospitable space offered a stake in the life of the city which many were desperate to seize. (Posel 57)

As the quote suggests, the people who chose to participate in this seemingly absurd marriage ritual were desperate to participate in the life of the city even at the cost of marrying someone they know nothing about. The article calls this the “logic of partnership” where the emphasis is not on marriage for the sake of love but instead to gain access to life within the city, reserved only for people who were married (58). By participating in marriage people were granted access to a luxury not everyone could have: the links created in marriage became an incentive to participate even at the cost of marrying someone who is entirely a mystery and may not be the best match. This participation in the social structure of marriage that is important for the evolution of communities because marriage, whether done for love or other reasons, is a form of participation in social structures that enables people to become more aware of their own social conditions. By marrying, people choose to participate in their communities thereby linking themselves to it in an intimate way and building ties that allow them more access to material and personal freedoms. The decision to marry under the custom of “The Hats” is then not so absurd and instead takes on a more important role as a form of social participation: sacrificing individuality for the sake of social connectivity, with the promise of easier access to urban luxuries.

The status of single women, and the children who are often with them, is one of poverty in Africa. Building a society that includes women who are not married, especially those who have children, has proven challenging. Cities come bundled with a variety of social problems that are not as easily solved in reality as they are on paper. Cities themselves are almost a paradox of wealth and poverty, as they seem to harbor both equally but also as degrees that mirror one another:

While cities are centers of wealth, they are also the focus of intense poverty...there are high concentrations of poverty within particular cities, making poor urban areas...the highest concentrations of poverty in the country. Moreover, the generally accepted notion that women and children are more vulnerable to poverty holds equally well for urban areas...in fact African women and children make up the bulk of the total urban populations. (Parnell 26)

It is a telling statistic that women and children are the “bulk of the urban populations” and not families or, specifically, male-headed households. Cities are centers of wealth, which is part of the lure to people who are on the other side of the spectrum, the poorest of the people. To be close to those people who have money and to attempt to claim some of that wealth for themselves. Women, however, do not have the same opportunities as men do in the work force: there is an obvious disadvantage for women who are unmarried especially if they have children because they cannot find jobs that pay enough for them to care for themselves and their children. Women are thereby encouraged to marry in order to find security for themselves and their (future) children and men become a woman’s only way to find security within communities.

The emphasis of the novel, however, is not that only one sex embodies the desirable characteristics that enable a community to thrive. Instead the argument is for cooperation and cohesion of the sexes to create a more unified community through the strengths of women and men working together, beginning with individual people, to families, to large-scale community projects. This political identity that is built by the unity of the sexes can be seen as an “effect of belonging” which Aimee Rowe discusses as an aspect of the politics of relation:

A politics of relation is...to tip the concept of “subjectivity” away from “individuality”...rather something called “subjectivity” may be thought as an effect of belonging--of the affective, passionate, and political ties that bind us to others. (18)

As Rowe says, there should be a distinction between the idea of “individuality” and “subjectivity,” and this distinction can be seen in Ways of Dying. At the beginning of the novel Toloki was a single individual who had little impact on his environment and he preferred to keep it that way:

...[Toloki’s] role had been to mourn, and only to mourn. He must keep his priorities straight... The work of the Professional Mourner was to mourn, and not to intervene in any of the proceedings of the funeral. It would lower the dignity of the profession to be involved in human quarrels. (Mda 24-25)

Toloki in the beginning is an individual: he does not concern himself with the living community in any way and is more concerned about the dead. In fact, he is so far outside the social realm he does not consider himself “human.” He is not selfish, and in fact seems quite generous, but his material generosity is countered by a political individuality. Politics for him are an inconvenience, only for humans, and should not interfere with Toloki’s “inspired mourning” (24).

Toloki gains “subjectivity” later when he begins to see the impact that Noria has on her community through personal interaction and outreach. Toloki is still maintains his individuality but through Noria he begins to build interpersonal relationships throughout the community, based on those Noria already has. Their relationship itself begins to shape each of them in different ways, as Noria and Toloki both realize. On page 151 Noria tells Toloki that she wants him to teach her how to live and forgive; later Toloki comes to the conclusion that is it Noria who knows how to live (169). Noria and Toloki share a mutual respect that is not seen among others of their peers, and each one learns from the other ways of living that would not have been apparent without the other. Noria does know how to live just as Toloki knows how to die. This dynamic between them seems odd, however, because Noria has experienced death first hand--such as the tragedy of her two sons--while Toloki seems to draw in all people living with his charisma, despite his awful smell. The importance is not is not what Noria and Toloki have experienced as much as it is the connection between them that brings forth the “effect of belonging” (Rowe)--the connection they form as homeboy and homegirl, and then cohabitating creates a dynamic of respect between men and women that permeates the community in subtle ways. The effects on the neighborhood become evident in the novel when Shadrack acknowledges the partnership between Toloki and Noria:

[Shadrack] had heard from Noria’s homeboys and homegirls of the power she used to have back in the village, and he had never believed the stories. But what he has seen with his own eyes this afternoon has left him dumbfounded. He has never had to much good feeling swelling in his chest before.

‘I cannot spoil things between you two. Yours is a creative partnership.’ (200)

The relationship between Toloki and Noria is more than friendship: it is a connection of artistic inspiration that manages to bring together the community at the end of the novel. The women and children gather around the two of them to marvel at Noria’s singing and Toloki’s pictures.

This community gathering at the end of the novel coincides with the new year’s celebration giving an element of rebirth to the characters and to the community. This rebirth consists of the cohabitation of Noria and Toloki, which links them to the community around them, but also the shared artistic link between them that allows Toloki to draw faces--something he could not do before. In the article “Writing the World from an African Metropolis,” Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nutall discuss the problem with presenting Africa in written form:

To write...is the same thing as to form. To a large extent, to write is to bring to the surface something that is not yet there or that is there only as latent, as potential...the ongoing negotiation...between what is and what could be. (348)

Mda’s novel is a perfect example of this negotiation of potentialities because he creates a world that is fiction, of course, but also manages to capture the struggles of a people who teeter between life and death. The art of Toloki and Noria also captures this negotiation as it manages to “bring to the surface” the question of existence within their urban unit--their art is as much a form as the writing of the novel itself. Even the figurines of Jwara capture the joy of the neighborhood, especially that of the children:

Everyone is absorbed in the figurines. The children are falling into such paroxysms of laughter that they roll around on the ground. Toloki is amazed to see that the figurines give pleasure to the children in the same way that Noria gave pleasure to the whole community back in the village. (210)

Existence, in the case of Noria’s neighborhood, is one that consists of walking that line between “between what is and what could be” (Mbembe 348) precisely because these are a people who live on the outside of the city life, and who are working their way into it. By giving pleasure to these people Toloki and Noria allow them access to a luxury: the ability laugh despite their condition, and the opportunity to laugh whenever one feels like it, which is why it is significant that Toloki and Noria choose to keep the figurines at the end of the novel. In setting up a place where the “children could come and laugh whenever they felt like it” (211) Noria and Toloki bring luxury into the settlement--a luxury made possible only by the unification of Noria and Toloki.

To conclude, personal relationships might seem self-serving as they tend to give people more reasons to care about themselves, but they do serve the communities. When people unite with others they create for themselves networks within the community that communities can use to combat oppression and bring forth large scale change. The unity between people can be a powerful tool in petitioning for change: governments find it easy to ignore small-scale movements but it is hard to ignore larger-scale movements that can often begin with small family units banding together. Individuals have little power without support from others, and that support often arises from the immediate networks people have, beginning with families and moving outward through ever-expanding familial groups. Basically, families provide easy access to large-scale mobilization and this is most easily accessible through establishment of still more families with marriage. Toloki and Noria are successful in their community precisely because they unite--man with woman--forming a family structure that links them to each other and to their community. As individuals they were helpless, but with each other their power to create change increases dramatically. Singularly a person is at the mercy of their environment, but with even one link to a person that changes and suddenly people have more control over everything around them.

Works Cited

Magee, Carol. “Spatial Stories: Photographic Practices and Urban Belonging.” Africa Today, Vol. 54, No. 2 (Winter 2007), pps 109-129. Project Muse. Web. 25 February 2010.

Mbembe, Achille and Sarah Nuttall. “Writing the World from an African Metropolis.” Public Culture, Vol. 16, No. 3, pps 347-372. Project Muse. Web. 28 February 2010.

Mda, Zakes. Ways of Dying. South Africa: Oxford University Press, 1995. Print.

Posel, Deborah. “Marriage at the Drop of a Hat: Housing and Partnership in South Africa’s Urban African Townships, 1920s-1960s.” History Workshop Journal, 61 (2006), pps 57-76. Oxford University Press. Web. 25 February 2010.

Parnell, Susan. “Constructing a developmental nation--the challenge of including the poor in the post-apartheid city.” Transformation, Vol. 58 (2005), pps 20-44. Project Muse. Web. 25 February 2010.

Rowe, Aimee Carrillo. “Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation.” NWSA Journal, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer), pps 15-46. Project Muse. Web. 28 February 2010.

ENL 177: “Relationships: the Ties that Bind in A Mercy and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison”

Jolene Patricia Brown
Dr. J. Rose
ENL 177: T. Morrison
9 March 2010

Relationships: The Ties that Bind in
A Mercy and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Now I am thinking of another thing. Another animal that shapes choice.  Sir bathes every May.  We pour buckets of hot water into the washtub and gather wintergreen to sprinkle in.  He sits awhile.  His knees poke up, his hair is flat and wet over the edge.  Soon Mistress is there with first a rock of soap, then a short broom.  After he is rosy with scrubbing he stands.  She wraps a cloth around to dry him.  Later she steps in and splashes herself.  He does not scrub her.  He is in the house to dress himself.  A moose moves through the trees at the edge of the clearing.  We all, Mistress, Lina and me, see him.  He stands alone looking.  Mistress crosses her wrists over her breasts.  Her eyes are big and stare.  Her face loses its blood.  Lina shouts and throws a stone.  The moose turns slowly and walks away.  Like a chieftain. (Morrison, A Mercy 82-83)

“When we were little girls, before you were born, he took us to the ice-house once.  Drove us there in his Hudson.  We were all dressed up and we stood there in front of those sweating black men, sucking ice out of our handkerchiefs, leaning forward a little so as not to drip water on our dresses.  There were other children there.  Barefoot, naked to the waist, dirty.  But we stood apart, near the car, in white stockings, ribbons, gloves.  And when he talked to the men, he kept glancing at us, us and the car.  The car and us.  You see, he took us there so they could see us, envy us, envy him…First he displayed us, then he splayed us.  All our lives were like that: he would parade us like virgins through Babylon, then humiliate us like whores in Babylon.” (Morrison, Song of Solomon 216)

    Relationships are an important theme in Song of Solomon and A Mercy by Toni Morrison.  They give a foundation to the events in the novel and allow Morrison more avenues with which to fully explore the dilemmas she presents the reader.  In building relationships between people, time periods, and places the reader begins to understand the dynamics of the novel more clearly: by emphasizing relationships, or a lack thereof, Morrison reinforces the disconnect that her African characters often endure in the course of the novel. In depriving her characters of familiar places, times, and people Morrison recreates slavery in an emotional arena, forcing them to construct connections without a cultural context and enter into relationships based on what they see around them, instead of what is taught by close relations.  These connections are much like those forced upon slaves who are uprooted from their homes, fighting to survive in an institution that views them as little more than cattle, and forming relationships with people that would not have formed without the institution of slavery in the United States.

In A Mercy, Florens learns much of what she knows from those people she encounters around her.  The passage on pages 82-83 gives the reader a glimpse into what Florens sees as choice:  Florens is desperate for social context, and sees “choice” as dictated by objects, like an animal, which is the case in this passage.  The images in this passage are mixed in origin, creating a crossroads of culture in what Florens witnesses.  First is the bathing ritual that occurs once a year for Jacob and Rebekka. This is symbolic of the white culture during this period, consisting of a people who are working hard to establish their own customs in a land that is foreign to them.  In bathing, Jacob first has his wife scrub him, washing from him a year’s worth of dirt, but also a symbol of baptism or rebirth.  The dynamic between Jacob and Rebekka is unequal as he does not reciprocate the scrubbing, instead going indoors to dress leaving Rebekka alone with only slaves and nature.  It is not, however, the slaves that bother Rebekka, it is nature. A moose, a symbol of nature, wanders from the woods and watches as Rebekka “crosses her wrists over her breasts” (83) protecting herself from the view of the animal: Florens recognizes the indifference of the animal towards Rebekka, but Rebekka only sees the animal as a threat.  The moose also represents the Native Americans during this time, who wanted nothing more than to be left alone and live in peace.  Whites were always encroaching on tribal lands to make more space for farming and agriculture, but at the fringe of those settlements were the Native lands.
In this passage Florens relates the interaction between several people who have influenced her life: Lina, Mistress, Sir, and nature, represented by the moose.  The un-reciprocated washing of Sir sends a message of uneven duty and respect, since Jacob is not obligated to wash Rebekka in return.  The moose witnesses Mistress’ own washing of herself, but seeming voyeurism attributed to this act by Rebekka is meaningless to Florens because she does not comprehend the importance of physical privacy, something that slaves were not accustomed to.  Instead of seeing the moose as a threat, Florens compares the moose to a “chieftain,” no doubt a word she learned from Lina who, as a Native American, would have used that vocabulary in front of Florens naturally, since a “chieftain” is a head of a native tribe (OED).

This memory is an intersection of cultures, between the white cultures represented by Jacob and Rebekka; the Native American culture represented by Lina and the moose; the culture of women and that of men; the older generation and the new.  It is Florens who is watching this scene, a young black woman who is looking back on this memory as she interprets her first ideas of love.  “Another animal that shapes choice” (82) is significant to the opening of this memory: the moose “shapes choice,” as she describes in the passage.  The ability to choose, to a slave, is a luxury because slaves were not allowed choice in their lives. A choice is “That which is specially chose or to be chosen on account of...excellence” and “care in choosing, circumspection, judgment, discrimination” (OED).  Rebekka chooses to run to her husband at the end of the passage instead of choosing to continue cleaning herself: the choice is one of comfort, not available to slaves regardless of how well-treated they are in slavery.  Rebekka can choose; Florens cannot because she is a slave and her life is without choice whether that choice is for place, comfort, even where she can go or what she can do.

In the close of the passage Florens begins to disagree with her original memory and interpretation of choice.  Lina, at end of the memory, separates the “world" from the individual, which Florens suddenly cannot understand:

We never shape the world she [Lina] says.  The world shapes us.  Sudden and silent the sparrows are gone.  I am not understanding Lina.  You are my shaper and my world as well.  It is done.  No need to choose. (83)

Florens does not need to choose because of her love for the blacksmith, which turns what she has known until this point into a fiction: the blacksmith is kind to her, reciprocates her love, and his watching her has meaning.  For Florens, the Blacksmith is her world and her shaper, and Florens feels this was not a choice on her part, or that of the world.  The truth of the Blacksmith lies in his embodying all things for Florens and becoming all those things she desires.  All of what she has seen in her youth is suddenly wrong because the context has changed, and she finds herself closer to that which she should have known all along: a connection to Africa and a person who embodies the traditions and cultures she has come to lack.
In the second passage, from Song of Solomon, Corinthians tells Milkman of a memory she had from her youth when her father took his daughters so others might envy them. Two words in this passage stand out immediately: “displayed” and “splayed.”  According to the OED, “displayed” is “unfolded, unfurled, spread open to view” and also “To disclose, reveal, or show, unintentionally or incidentally; to allow to be perceived, to betray.”  Macon I took his daughters to show them off to a crowd of men who would, according to Corinthians, “see us, envy us, envy him” (216).  By “displaying” his daughters he betrays them to those men, making them objects, like his car, that would inspire desire.  “Splayed,” in the OED, means to “spread out in an awkward manner” but also to “have the ovaries excised.”  In showing his daughters as objects Macon I deprives them of everything that makes them people, but also of their rights as women. The relationship between father and daughters is jeopardized, and also jeopardizes the relationships between these women and their future men, as neither woman later marries and has children.

Corinthians and Magdalene are placed on a pedastal by their father, but instead of making them feel good about being women it deprives them of their femininity and, by objectifying them, disconnects them.  There are several instances of physical disconnect that occur in the passage including between Macon and his daughters, Macon and the Men, the girls and the other children.  The disconnect, however, goes beyond the physical: there is a distinct disconnect between these characters socially that might not have occurred except for a need to escape the confines of the slave-mentality.  Macon intended to put on a show for those men in order to have the men envy him: his position is superior to their own, as demonstrated by his two beautiful daughters, his nice car, and his willingness to “share” the view with his neighbors.  The display is only a ruse, and as soon as the physical boundary is breached--the little boy reaching out to Corinthians’ hair--the social boundaries are then raised to compensate for the lost distance.

The example that Macon I sets for his children isolates them and, in turn, sets an example for Milkman in the way to treat women. Corinthians describes that “he [Macon] would parade us like virgins through Babylon, then humiliate us like whores in Babylon.”  Women became objects of envy and jealousy, to be displayed when one needed to show superiority over others, regardless of the need to.  Objectification of women was not uncommon during slavery:

There was a marked sexual component to the assaults: rape was common. Kinship was disregarded, particularly the paternity of children. Their status reflected the enslaved status of their mothers, no matter who their father might have been. Slave owners treated their unpaid, overworked labor forces as mere chattel. (“The Transatlantic Slave Trade”)

Milkman “pisses” on everything, according to Magdalene, not because he intends to or even wants to; his pissing is an unconscious disrespect for everything and everyone around him because he has no direct comparison to see that his behavior is unacceptable in a respectful culture (216).  Corinthians realizes his objectification and it is what Milkman’s only example is his father, without context otherwise, who teaches his only son that there is no past, and that the future is void of any real ties outside one’s own needs and desires.
In emphasizing the relationships between characters Morrison is effective in building a case for the importance of cultural history by emphasizing the loss that occurs when history is unknown.  Milkman Dead’s father, Macon Dead I, kept his son ignorant of almost every aspect of the past which forced Milkman to go in search of his past at the close of the novel.  The discoveries he makes not only gives him an insight into his family’s past, but helps him realize his shortcomings as a son, a brother and a lover:  “As Milkman watched the children, he began to feel uncomfortable.  Hating his parents, his sisters, seemed silly now” (301).  His change in attitude is a shift from an earlier scene with his sister, Magdalene, who confronts him about his need to piss on everything in their house (216).  Her accusation is not literal--with the exception of an event in their childhood--and instead is a metaphor for his need to control the people in his life, much like his own father strove to control people.

This error on Milkman’s part to continue the unfortunate legacy of his father can be blamed on the institution of slavery and its effect on black family and community structure in the United States.   In the article “Transitioning the Caregiving Role for the Next Generation: An African-Centered Womanist Perspective," Rhonda Wells-Wilbon argues that

The institution of slavery attempted to weaken African family ties and the sense of community through the purchasing of Africans from different tribes and separating of blood parents and extended kin from their children: however, enslaved Africans reinvented kinship ties as they held on to values and elements of African family life by connecting with non-kin and forming fictive kin relationships. (89)

The same could be said of Florens, who lacks the personal relations of family to give her life context.  Florens imagines herself abandoned by a mother who preferred a son, and despite an upbringing without the traditional slave-abuse attributed to most owners, she still struggles to find a way to build her identity.

What occurred with slavery is that an entire race of people were stripped not only of their familiar locations, but also of their identity within kin groups, within a culture, and within a structure that educated them in ways not available to them once they were in the mercy of slave owners.  Consider how children were raised in traditional West Africa:

Children were not considered the sole possessions of biological parents; rather, they belonged to and were accountable to the larger kin network that consisted of surrogate fathers and mothers...all whom worked collectively in building the tribal community.  These kinship arrangements provided a foundation to the care giving system as members worked as interdependent and cooperative units for childrearing, and socialization, group survival, and collective identity. (Wells-Wilbon 88)

In African society children were not considered “possessions," and would not subsequently carry that mind set of physical ownership with them into adulthood.  In being uprooted from their culture, Africans become a people without a context, suddenly left to create for themselves an understanding of the world.  They no longer have an older generation to emulate and instead must create their own ideas of kinship, building networks with those around them.  Without proper guidance, many young people can only mimic those things they immediately see around them whether or not the example is one of quality.

The networks created among these displaced Africans were not always trusted, and did not serve the same purpose as those found at home in their native culture.  In some cases the networks were nothing more than a way to participate in the discrimination imposed upon them by creating competitions in power and seniority.

The loss of context that occurs when a people are uprooted from their culture to be planted into a new one can be jarring for physical and emotional realities.  In an interview with Cecil Brown, Morrison reflects on the idea of a name:

[the name ‘Dead’ in Song of Solomon’] shows a mistake...a clerical error...the carelessness of white people...and the indifference when they...they don’t pay much attention to what the records are.  My mother doesn’t even have a birth certificate.  My aunt has a birth certificate and her name is not even on it.  It says, Negro Child, that’s all. (461).

The white culture into which they were thrust left Africans without a course of action to protect themselves from loss of identity.  Their former lives in Africa gave them a structure to fit themselves into, a context within which to operate, giving their lives a meaning that belonged to them, and no one else.  The people around them influenced them in ways that were relevant to their own culture, instructing them on the best ways to live and the best adaptations for their surroundings.

Works Cited
Brown, Cecil with Toni Morrison.  “Interview with Toni Morrison.”The Massachusetts Review, 36.3 (Autumn 1995): 455-473.  JSTOR.  UC Davis Library, Davis, CA. 28 February 20010 <http://www.jstor.org>.
Catherine Packer-Williams. "Understanding the Impact of Maternal Messages Given to Single, Educated African American Women about Relationships." Black Women, Gender & Families 3.2 (2009): 48-67. Project MUSE. UC Davis Library, Davis, CA. 24 February 2010 <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.
OED
“The Transatlantic Slave Trade.” inmotionaame.org. InMotion. March 5, 2010. Online. http://www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/topic.cfm?migration=1&topic=10
"displayed, ppl. a." The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 5 Mar. 2010.

"splayed, ppl. a." The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 5 Mar. 2010.

Morrison, Toni. A Mercy. New York: Vintage Publications, 2008. Print.

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Vintage Publications, 2004. Print.