Journal Entry on "Explosive Inheritence"

Stephen Greene

English 48B

March 16, 2011

Journal #28, Christopher Benefy

"But why the sickbed rather than the marriage bed? This is the occasion for Gordon’s boldest stroke. She has combed Dickinson’s poems for an “explosive ­image-cluster: ....  But Gordon thinks there were eruptions in Dickinson’s brain as well, accounting for the poet’s reclusiveness and even, perhaps, for her white dress, adopted for “sanitary” reasons. “What’s clear,” the author concludes, “is that she coped inventively with gunshots from the brain into her body."  But if she was an invalid confined to her house, what should we make of those baffling “Master letters”? Gordon suspects that the letters were little more than “a stirring fantasy,” mere “exercises in composition.” She argues, plausibly, that Dickinson’s imaginative fantasies about her Master “spilt into an actual relationship,” her romantic epistolary give-and-take with the newspaper editor Samuel Bowles"("Explosive Inheritance", http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/books/review/Benfey-t.html?_r=4&src=me).

 

 "Rich and other feminist critics have worked so successfully to dispel the idea of Dickinson as a hyper-feminine poetess that we now tend to overlook other salient features of her works. This focus upon the powerful images in Dickinson's poetry has provided a necessary corrective to the "belle of Amherst" myth, but we should not allow it to blind us to a whole range of other images. Rather than ignore or suppress Dickinson's diminutive figures and personae, we can return to them now, armed with feminist interpretive practices and prepared to read them anew. In our new approaches to reading the conventionally weak or powerless figures in Dickinson's poetry, we discover that she uses these figures in unconventional and complex ways. For instance, Margaret Homans provides a rereading of the daisy in Dickinson's poetry and letters, demonstrating how the poet, in her use of the daisy, consciously reworks that image. Homans argues that Dickinson employs the daisy as a forceful figure: the daisy inverts the power relationship with other figures such as the "sun" and the "Master," thus affirming its own strength. Homans firmly places the daisy beside the volcano, the loaded gun, and the bomb as representative of Dickinsonian power, not restraint (201-206). Joanne Feit Diehl, Jane Donahue Eberwein, Suzanne Juhasz, Mary Loeffelholz, Cristanne Miller, Barbara Antonia Clarke Mossberg, and Vivian Pollak also"("The Emily Dickinson Journal", Project Muse, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/edj/summary/v002/2.1.anderson.html).

 I think that Gordon's analysis of who Emily Dickinson was is very revealing and cuts rather deep.  The idea of her being stuck in her bed because of some ailment like epilepsy is striking enough as it is, and something surprising to me.  This thought did not even cross my mind when reading her poetry or information on her, but it seems to make perfect sense.  The lack of factual information on her seems to be the most interesting part as there is plenty of room to speculate.  However, reading some of her poetry again through the lens that Gordon makes clear, the words seem to take on whole new meanings.  I can clearly see them as the works of a young woman, stuck in her bed from some sort of ailment, and shut in her room by her own choice to avoid some of the explosive feuding taking place in her family.  She found an escape in her poetry and in a sense hid in her room from the imaginable screaming and yelling and disruptive arguments that probably took place in the household as a result of some of the feuds and craziness.  The sexual and marital nature of these feuds would have undoubtedly given her some subject matter for her poetry, yet she seems to almost rise above it, perhaps seeing it all as superficial and silly ti fight about.  This would lead her to her sick-bed rather than marriage-bed.  She did not want to have the responsibilities of married life, saw the difficulties that it could create, and had more pressing issues on her mind: her poetry.  She rather, confined herself or almost hid from the noise of everyone else, inside her room and was able to find refuge there, delving into herself, unsatisfied with the depth of the world that surrounded her.

Journal Entry on Emily Dickinson, part 2

Stephen Greene

English 48B

March 15, 2011

Journal #27, Emily Dickinson

 "I died for Beauty - but was scarce / Adjusted in the Tomb / When One who died for Truth, was lain /In an adjoining Room - / He questioned softly "Why I failed"? / "For Beauty", I replied - /"And I - for Truth - Themself are One - / We Bretheren, are", He said - /And so, as insmen, met a Night - / We talked between the Rooms - / Until the Moss had reached our lips - / And covered up - Our names -"(448, p.86)

"That Emily Dickinson published almost no poems while she was alive yet became enormously popular when her first book appeared four years after her death is a well known fact.¹  The 1890 volume went through eleven printings and led to a Second Series in 1891 and a Third Series  in 1896; an edition of her letters appeared in 1894 (Sewall 707, n.1).  Today she and Walt Whitman are generally regarded as the two greatest American poets of the nineteenth century.  In Jungian terms, she is a "visionary" artist who compensates for collective psychic imbalance through an archetypal vision of another possibility (see Snider 6-7).  What Jung says of visionary literature clearly applies to the best of Dickinson’s work:          " [. . .] it can be a revelation whose heights and depths are beyond our fathoming, or a vision of beauty which we can never put into words. [. . .] the primordial experiences   rend from top to bottom the curtain upon which is painted the picture of an ordered world, and allow a    glimpse into the  unfathomable abyss of the unborn and    of things yet to be" ("Psychology and Literature" 90)."(Emily Dickinson and Shamanism, http://www.csulb.edu/~csnider/dickinson.shamanism.html).

 This poem I found to be particularly interesting, although somewhat dark.  I first read this poem and heard a negative social commentary.  From the very first lines, "I died for Beauty, but was scarce".  Beauty was scarce in the world, disappearing, dieing, and being died for.  Then one who died for truth, as all the precious and supposedly innate human rights and core values are threatened, believer's dieing for their cause.  She paints a bleak world, but this is not where the two subjects of the poem reside, they have departed that world and speak to each other from adjoining tombs.  One does not recognize it at first, but the other announces that they are the same thing, beauty and truth.  They are brothers, they are sure friends, as they have died for the same cause.  Perhaps this is a hint at saying that there was a lack of unity and acceptance between people, leading to less than successful, full lives, and to divided failure.  He asked why she has failed, as if dieing, the only entirely inescapable universal theme, was a mark of failure.  Perhaps, they have both failed, and he asks the question as much of himself.  But soon they spoke between the walls, until slowly a moss began to grow.  This may be some comment on how beauty and truth were seen to the people of her contemporary time.  Not only has the struggle to maintain beauty and truth died, but the very names, definitions, and idea of them has faded and been covered by natural growth and time, leaving the new generation with nothing to even compare the current society to.

Journal Entry on Emily Dickenson, part 1

Stephen Greene

English 48B

March 15, 2011

Journal #27, Emily Dickinson

 

"340  I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, / And Mourners to and fro / Kept treading- treading- till it seemed / That Sense was breaking through- / And when they all were seated, / A Service, like a Drum- / Kept beating- beating- till I thought / My mind was going numb- / And then I heard them lift a Bok / And creak across my Soul / With those same Boots of Lead, again, / Then Space-began to toll, / As all the Heavens were a Bell, / And Being, but an Ear, / And I, and Silence, some strange Race / Wrecked, solitary, here- / And then a Plank in Reason, broke, / And I dropped down, and down- / And hit a World, at every plunge, / And Finished knowing- then-"(Emily Dickinson, 84)

"Dickinson attended primary school in a two-story building on Pleasant Street.^[12] Her education was "ambitiously classical for a Victorian girl".^[13] Her father wanted his children well-educated and he followed their progress even while away on business. When Emily was seven, he wrote home, reminding his children to "keep school, and learn, so as to tell me, when I come home, how many new things you have learned".^[14] While Emily consistently described her father in a warm manner, her correspondence suggests that her mother was regularly cold and aloof. In a letter to a confidante, Emily wrote she "always ran Home to Awe [Austin] when a child, if anything befell me. He was an awful Mother, but I liked him better than none"("Emily Dickinson, Wikipedia).

 This poem particularly fascinates me.  I first read it as from an auto-biographical voice of someone being driven slowly to insanity through too much knowledge and too much social stimulation.  The last lines lead me to believe that it has something to do with a surplus of knowledge, although perhaps sarcastically.  The last line, 'And Finished knowing- then' seems to imply this idea of the culmination of the pursuit if knowing and the arrival at the end of the path to insanity as occurring simultaneously.  I almost read it as a sarcastic, fictional, and vaguely darkly humorous plotting of her own path.  She knows that she is not going crazy, but perhaps feels it momentarily from intruding visitors in her room, from some of society's formalities, and from solitude.  I can see Dickinson thinking up this almost silly idea of herself pursuing endless knowledge, but constantly being disrupted, distracted, etc.  Then, this path leads her fictional self down a path to insanity just as she reaches the end of knowledge and has finished.  She writes a poem that tells this story, but it does more.  It is written in a way that shows the reader rather than tells.  She does not talk directly of the person's actions or even of reality.  She does not describe the subject of her poem in third person, nor give any hint to what they look like from an external point of view.  She instead, speaks first person, limits details in order to make it almost universally applicable to the individual, and speaks only of the person's perceived reality and how these things slowly make them crazy.

Journal Entry "Walt Whitman's America"

Stephen Greene

English 48B

March 10, 2011

Journal #26, David S. Reynolds

 

 "Whitman fastened to the word 'kosmos'.  ...[I]t pictured nature not in chaos or conflict but as a source of calmness, always in equilibrium, with humans as the acme of creation.  ...The infinite diversity but ultimate order suggested by the notion of cosmos is what made the word meaningful to Whitman.  ...For Whitman as for Humboldt, 'cosmos' signified both the order of nature and the centrality of human beings.  Humboldt said he wished to present nature not only in its 'external manifestations' but 'its image, reflected in the mind of man'"(245).

"Humboldt viewed nature holistically. He tried to explain natural phenomena without the appeal to religious dogma. Humboldt used extensive observation to get the truth from the natural world. He had a vast array of the most sophisticated scientific instruments ever before assembled. ... Essentially everything would be measured with the finest and most modern instruments and sophisticated techniques available, for all the collected data was the basis of all scientific understanding. This quantitative methodology would become known as "Humboldtian science." Humboldt wrote "Nature herself is sublimely eloquent. The stars as they sparkle in firmament fill us with delight and ecstasy, and yet they all move in orbit marked out with mathematical precision"(Alexander von Humboldt, Wikipedia).

Humboldt and his idea of cosmos are identified by David Reynolds as extremely significant and influential to Walt Whitman and his writings.  He begins with a description of Whitman's religious and deistic influences from his father as he was growing up.  His faith in religion was not extinguished, but his faith in the institution of the church was disrupted.  He witnessed, as other great minds of time did, that capitalism and materialism had infiltrated the establishment and hijacked their purposes.  He no longer saw churches that were centered on religion, faith, or spirituality, but rather on money.  Whitman read many of the science books of his time including "Kosmos" by Alexander von Humboldt.  He found great comfort, reason, and meaning in the ideas within it and direct correlations can be seen throughout his poetry.

Whitman clearly believes in this idea of the people, the plants, the animals, the earth, the stars, every single thing within the entire universe as being part of a whole.  This seems to have brought him comfort and some sort of an answer to his persistent questions about death.  This meant that death was not the end; birth was not the beginning.  There is simply a changing of roles as one leaves their body, playing another part of the whole, the cosmos.  This can be seen in many passages from "Song Of Myself" where he speaks of grass growing from the chests of men, of corpses fertilizing the plants, of the continuation of matter and life, despite any individual's actions.  Whitman's poetry is not only the image of nature reflected in the mind of man, that Humboldt speaks of, but also the depiction of how it is mirrored.  Humboldt used literary descriptions of nature to show what he meant by this reflection.  Whitman not only describes and reflects nature,  but illustrates his part in the whole.

Journal "Song Of Myself"

Stephen Greene

English 48B

March 10, 2011

Journal #25, Walt Whitman

 "Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,

Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,

Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,

Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,

Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.  

... I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,

And you must not be abased to the other"(33).

"Whitman wrote in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." He believed there was a vital, symbiotic relationship between the poet and society.^[105] This connection was emphasized especially in "Song of Myself" by using an all-powerful first-person narration.^[106] As an American epic, it deviated from the historic use of an elevated hero and instead assumed the identity of the common people.^[107] Leaves of Grass also responded to the impact that recent urbanization in the United States had on the masses"(Walt Whitman, Wikipedia).

This quote comes after Whitman's description of his environment.  A detailed, beautiful list of what is around him in the city.  He says that he stands apart though.  He is of it, but not entirely defined by it.  He speaks of himself as an observer, watching the game that everyone plays, watching the people run around performing their roles in this society.  He is not entirely separate  either.  He is not just an observer, not just watching, but also sees himself within it.  This passage, in this way, almost seems like a description of an out-of-body experience.  He is writing from the perspective of watching all of society and the environment, including himself.  He is witnessing the entire society both from an outside perspective and that of every single person inside it.  He describes many of the different jobs that people are doing, many of the different sounds that are being made, many of the different things that make up the city, large and small.  He does this from a first person perspective to reinforce that he is all of them.  He speaks of a difference between his soul and the other I.  The soul is the artist, the observer, the one who sees all from an outside perspective.  The other is him as a man.  It is physically him within the city, literally what he does daily and the role that he plays.  He speaks from the perspective of his body, his physical being for a moment to say that he believes in his soul, speaking directly to it.  He explains that his soul cannot give in, cannot allow itself to be belittled or lowered by the other, physical identity.  He also says that this physical identity, the Walt Whitman that walks the city all day, cannot lower itself or be subservient to his soul.  As an aspiring musician, this makes a great deal of sense to me and strikes deeply.  I often feel as if there are two inside me; one is the physical self that goes to school everyday, relates with friends, goes to work, etc. and that of the soul which observes all, comments on it, feels in touch with all, transcends physical limitations, and thinks more deeply and creatively.  I feel that art, true art, needs both sides.  Whitman obviously understands this and seeks to portray it in his poems.  I try to do so in my music as well, especially in my lyrics.  The artist must be able to observe from outside and relate to each within, but also be aware of his own physical presence and capability.  It is a delicate balance and a fine line to walk.  It takes tremendous effort at times to keep both sides of oneself alive, equal, and functioning, but it can pay off in spades.  Creativity is achieved not when one bridges this gap, but when one becomes aware of the different parts within him and holds both as important, fosters the growth of both, and thinks and imagines from both, bringing the outside view of one's soul to the people in a way that they can readily relate to.

Journal Entry "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

Stephen Greene

English 48B

March 3, 2011

Journal #24, Walt Whitman

"You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers,
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us,
We use you, and do not cast you aside--we plant you permanently within
       us.
We fathom you not--we love you--there is perfection in you also,
you furnish your parts toward eternity,
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul"(25).

"A great city is that which has the greatest men and women".

"And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero".

" After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains".        --Walt Whitman

 This passage is the last few lines of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and is a very motivating, inclusive string of words that is dripping with the ideals of democracy.  Whitman begins with challenging statements confronting the reader and accusing.  He is admonishing people for waiting, and deeming them dumb.  But, he quickly spins on his toe, from dumb to beautiful ministers.  But, in a protective move, we are encompassed by the society,  by the us.  He goes on to say that we, meaning society and its people, use you, again speaking to the reader.  But it is not a damaging use of the individual, but a rooting and securing one, protecting.  He says that "we use you, and do not cast you aside--we plant you permanently within us."  His placement of "us"on the next line, indented, alone, is done to emphasize the all-encompassing sense of community.  The society loves the individual, the reader specifically in this case, and sees perfection in him simply because of his place within it, Whitman seems to say.  Each person must furnish their part, must play their role, must not because they are forced to, but must because it is impossible for a mind not to.  This translates to some of the ideals typical of democracy.  He is trying to challenge the individual to action, then encompassing and protecting as the individual as he acts, and using him.  But through his use, he benefits by gaining acceptance and support.

Journal Entry "Unveiling Kate Chopin"

Stephen Greene

English 48B

March 3, 2011

Journal #23, Emily Toth

" --but neither one could ever expect to have a profession.  St. Louis had few women's clubs or opportunities; there were no abolitionist or suffrage activities like those that occupied women in the East; and women were not allowed to attend law or medical school or St. Louis University.  Kate and Kitty knew intellectual and well-educated and capable teachers and administrators among the Sacred Heart nuns--but those women were cloistered.  They had taken the veil, and given up the world"(17).

 

"Even today, much of the criticism of Chopin's most famous work centers on Edna Pontillier's morals-- is she a fallen woman, a bad mother, a selfish human being? Why does the character still, in an era where sexual openness is not totally condemned, point us toward a discussion of what makes a woman "bad?" What does the novel say about constrictions and constructions of the feminine role, today and during the time it was written? What does the novel say about human consciousness, and conscience?"(Kate Chopin, womenwriters.net).

This passage comes from a description of Kate Chopin's early childhood growing up in St. Louis.  Her best friend Kitty was from similar social and economic status, although her father was still alive and the harmony seemed intact within their family's structure.  The young girls have few figures of women in high positions.  There is little attention given in their community to the growing tide of feminism and the only women of any intellectual prowess or freedom that the girls seem to exposed to are nuns at Sacred Heart.
I found this quote particularly interesting because of its relation to the woman in black from "The Awakening".  There is a mysterious woman in black, never introduced or fully described to the reader, that follows from a distance or tags along in various meaningful scenes.  This woman counts her rosary beads and seems almost devoid of personality or character, but still significantly ominous as a figure in the background.  Throughout the novel, the woman in black is often also placed alongside the two, in-described and un-introduced lovers that seem to follow Edna around in a similar manner.
Their places next to each other, the woman in black and the lovers, could be seen as either to highlight their differences and point to different paths that Edna could fallow, or, perhaps more likely, to show the almost conflicting extremes of citizens in this strict society.
If the woman in black in "The Awakening" can be seen as a religious figure and a nun, not much of a stretch since she counts rosary beads, then Edna could be seen as influenced strongly by religion.  There is an undercurrent of religious themes throughout the book once read like this, and, as Kate probably discovered and felt as a child, there are points that define the figure of religion as a both a role model and something to avoid, both examples of individual freedom despite society's limitations, and as the results of someone desiring to be free, but stuck within the iron cage of society.
I feel that Kate probably took both of these messages away from observing the nuns when she was a child.  She at once saw them as something to look up to; a woman that has cast aside society's shackles and devoted themselves entirely to the quest for truth and freedom, separating themselves from both social and economic pressures and constraints.  However, this means that the free woman must be chaste.  Something that Chopin obviously did not agree with.  Her rejection of isolation from society in favor of defiance of society is clear in "The Awakening" in which Edna commits suicide as a direct result of her solitude and isolation.  The pervading sexuality of the story also speaks to Kate's own opinions of what a 'free' and 'proper' woman are supposed to be.  Religion does not play a huge role in either case, the story or her life, but a background one of both reproach and warning, and of encouragement and exampled  success, excluding sexuality to fit into a religious theme, and not meshing well in this respect with Chopin's own attitudes.