The Healing Power of My Childhood Motor Stimulations

The Healing Power of My Childhood Motor Stimulations

 

        I had the most wonderful childhood in every aspect.  My parents were always busy and hardly home, but they made sure their children were well taken care of, and had plenty of friends to play with.  Our house was on a hillside, surrounded by the mountains. 

As a child, I remember that “playing” meant “doing things outside.” Everyday, it was given that some child friend of mine, often much older and stronger than I, would holler me and my brother to come outside and join them for some new adventure up in the mountain.  As a child, though I did not know at the time, was exploring the nature by using my “gross motor skills—walking, running, and climbing.  

In the mountains, there are plenty of fun things to do that require “fine motor skills” as well.  For one, I remember that few girls and I would go find red bits of rocks, grind them to powder, then sprinkle it to our painstakingly chopped and marinated “kimchee,” which we had prepared from only the most natural ingredients—the fresh weeds, flowers, and wild berries.  While the boys were practicing their “flying skills” like the “Six Million Dollar Man” (the TV hero of that time), using both their gross and fine motor skills (their legs for power and fingers for steering), we girls were busy making sure that the dinner would be ready for them—these hard working boys who came home exhausted and famished.  “Hmm, this is very good…really delicious,” they would comment as they ate when they came back to our make-believe home.  The more noise the boys made in their pseudo-chewing, swallowing, and commenting on how sweet, salty, or sour the food was, we, the girls, felt a greater sense of accomplishment and pride.  Though I don’t remember exactly how old I was then, I do remember that it was many, many days, perhaps, years of playing like this in the mountains before I was put into a kindergarten.

One day, when I was much older, my mom with tears in her eyes confessed to me that I did not talk until I was five years old, because I was born with speech impairment and weak muscle tones due to my mother’s drug overdose, when I was only a two-month-old fetus in her uterus (the real reason why she was overly obsessive with me).  Thus, she said that as soon as she saw that I was beginning to talk at the age of five, though it was a real stretch in her budget, she elatedly put me into the most expensive kindergarten in Korea at the time for my further cognitive development. 

I don’t exactly know how this transformation happened, really—from being almost mute to verbal speech and weak muscles to walking and running.  My mom thinks it is because I lived and played in a mountain area where air was fresh, and had fresh spring water and goat milk to drink on a daily basis.  She may have a point there.  In addition to my mother’s hypothesis, as a student of Child psychology, I think there was perhaps one more factor to this supposition—my early years of both gross and fine motor stimulations on a daily basis in the mountains.  If my speculation is true, then my family’s then shoddy demographics was a blessing in disguise, in that we had to live in the most impoverished mountain district where children had no toys or TVs in their house, so had to adventure out to the mountains for entertainments.

My Mother’s Psychosocial Influence on Her Two Daughters

My Mother’s Psychosocial Influence on Her Two Daughters

My mother: I either adore or abhor her, but never free from her.  I have often envied orphans.  How free they must be!  Nothing about my mother is normal.  She is eccentric, neurotic, possessive, manipulative, manic-depressive, superstitious, religious, greedy, and magnanimous.  She has been an entertainer all her life.  She dances, sings, acts, and does everything else to prove that she is the queen of stars!  She is too much!  Oh, how I have prayed for freedom from her!  Her obsessiveness made my life unbearable to a point of running away from her as a teenager.  She is the reason for everything that had gone wrong in my life. 

As I got older, however, I started to perceive her from a different angle.  Not only has she torn me down, but also has built me up.  Some quiet nights, I weep as I softly play the piano for I know that I owe her for the talents I now enjoy.  Her obsession of me—the person whom she loves the most, in her words—has given me an unbeatable confidence in strange ways.  Though I knew that there were people better, smarter, and prettier than me, I always knew that I was the best thing for my mom.  She loved me in powerful ways!  The power that cannot be bought with money, the power that helps me to move forward against all odds, the power that orphans can never fathom nor enjoy has become mine.  I hate to admit that she has molded the very essence of my being.  

Now that you know what kind of psychosocial power my mother had on me, you might guess that my sister has turned out to be as self-confident as I am—not exactly.  As I have mentioned in my first essay, my sister, who was once known as the genius of my family, has always suffered from severe psychological insecurity which, she says, stems from lack of maternal love as a child.  Interestingly enough, my sister, in an attempt to psycho-analyze herself after many years of receiving psycho-therapy, went back to school at night for a second M.A. degree in Psychology.  As a student of psychology, what she enviously told me back then about the powerful influence my mother had on my indomitable self-confidence makes sense to me now, as her psychological concepts coincide with what I study in this class—that mother’s emotional, physical, and mental interaction with her child has life-long effects.  In other words, my mother’s almost exclusive, overtly expressive love for me has killed my sister’s young fragile spirit as a child growing up under my shade, and according to her analysis, has caused her to become a chronically insecure person.

From the course textbook, I was bemused to learn that not only do “rats become smarter if they are frequently held [loved] when they are young,” but more significantly, “mother’s licking and grooming of her pup . . . leads to decreased release of stress hormones, which [in turn] leads to increased tolerance of potentially stressful conditions . . . in adulthood” (53).  This theory applied to humans means that, just as the rats in this study, there is an undeniable causality between mother’s loving care of her infant and her child’s psychosocial development, which, in turn, validates my sister’s quasi-argument of “my mother’s insufficient love” being the culprit of her lack of self-confidence and insecurity as an adult. 

Further, this same theory also helps me and my mother understand why she was so determined to outdo me in every realm of her life—e.g., going to college at sixteen or becoming an auditor of L.A. County at nineteen.  What is so extremely sad and ironic about this is that while I was trying to free myself from my mother’s obsession of me, my sister was emotionally and physically killing herself to gain more of my mother’s love by proving that she is better than me in every aspect.  Indeed, my mother is a powerful figure whose love built up one daughter’s self-confidence, while the lack of it demolished another.

Crying Toddler

Crying Toddler

        The last trip I made to Taipei was purely enjoyable.  Everything was great until the last day.  However, as soon as I saw a young couple with a toddler in front of my assigned seat in the return flight back to LAX, my jubilant mood was compelled to shift gear to a contemplative mode, since I had to speculate whether this was a good baby or a fussy, crying one.

        Just as I suspected, as soon as the plane started to move, this infant of probably no more than a year old, started to cry.  I told myself that this baby is probably startled by the plane’s sudden movement, and crying is his only way to communicate his fear with his parents.  The father held the baby and tried to cuddle him, but he won’t stop crying, until his mother gave him a bottle of juice.  Appreciating the mother’s expertise in handling her son, I told myself that the baby must have been thirsty for him to cry like that. 

But as the plane started to fly high with a sudden increase of pressure, the boy now started to shriek.  He cried and cried, stopping only once in a while to suck the bottle intermittently.   No one or nothing can stop him from crying now—his father and mother’s alternating hugs, massaging his back, stroking his hair, standing up and walking around while holding the baby.  None of this worked.  Many passengers who were near enough to hear this baby shriek started to fumble about with their bodies and made nasty faces.  I was one of them.  I kept making ugly faces for the next thirteen hours, until the plane landed at LAX. 

In retrospect, I guess for this toddler, “flying” was a traumatic experience.  This toddler, who looked about a year old must have been cognitively developed enough to know that his environment has drastically changed.  And since at this stage, he can only babble or vocalize few simple words, such as “mama” or “baba,” he had to resort to “crying” as his only means of communicating his infantile sense of “life threatening situation.”  Though this crying baby was responsible for miserably ending my festive mood, I must say that from the Child Development point of view, this baby is lucky to have patient loving parents, who don’t neglect his “cries” as one of many meaningless temper tantrums.

Robin Cohen and Homi Bahba’s Analysis: Postmodern Diasporas as Transnationalists

Robin Cohen and Homi Bahba’s Analysis: Postmodern Diasporas as Transnationalists

In our postmodern world, the complex global economic interdependence and cultural interpenetration complicate the notion of national identity/subjectivity for those who geopolitically/culturally straddle more than one nation-state, hence the postmodern revival of diasporas.  Characteristically, according to Cohen in Global Diasporas, diasporas emotionally/physically inter-traverse between two cultures: their homeland and adopted land.  Cohen says that diasporas “are positioned somewhere between nation-states and ‘traveling cultures’ in that they involve dwelling in a nation-state in a physical sense, but traveling in an astral or spiritual sense that falls outside the nation-state’s space/time zone” (135).  The increased awareness of the postmodern diasporas who have bi-cultural locality, then, necessitates a re-conceptualization of “nation-state” as not a homogenous cultural site, but an amorphous instrumental location of plural subjectivities.  Whereas, Cohen in Global Diasporas brings the definition of “diasporas” up to date to reflect their postmodern transnational reality, Homi K. Bhabha in “Locations of Culture” locates the cultural production site of the contemporary diasporas.  Bhabha’s examination of contemporary diasporas reveal that their subjectivities are formed in an interstitial cultural space called “the space of beyond,” where one’s past and present conjoin in a pluralistic sense.  Though Cohen and Bahba’s approach may vary, both of their cultural analysis of diasporas acknowledge the complex transnational subjectivity of the postmodern diasporas, and believe that cultural cosmopolitanism, not homogenous nationalism, is the inevitable course in our international world.

As an anthropologist, Cohen sees diasporas as the “dispersed” people, but he also acknowledges the postmodern reality of diasporas as being builders of transnational community. In the past, the term has carried apocalyptic connotations.  It designated those who are victimized by being forcefully/traumatically uprooted from their homeland to another, and was commonly associated with the dispersion/extermination of the Jews, Armenians, or Africans, to name a few.  Historically, diasporas in their adopted land, literally and psychologically struggle between their old and the new cultures.  If in the past the term has had race-specific regional ramifications, Cohen says now the word “diaspora” extends to transnational scope.  It now includes all races of modern day’s “traveling cultures”—the cultures that has lost their territorial moorings due to today’s affordable and efficient means of communications and transportations (128).  Cohen states that contemporary diasporas “bridge the gap between the individual and society, between the local and the global,” syncretizing the diverse cultures in a complex ways (196).  Thus, “traveling diasporas” of the post-modernity, with the help of today’s high-tech culture, have unshackled themselves from their historically subdued/servile status to being today’s builders of transnational communities.

If postmodern diasporas, at best, are perceived as builders of transnational communities, at worst, their transnational intercrossing of cultures can be seen as a menace to national solidarity.  Cohen articulates that postmodern cultural diasporas have dubious political allegiances.  By not fully assimilating to their host countries and maintaining sociopolitical ties with their homeland, diasporas, according to Cohen, live in the “no-group lands” (189) of liminality, syncretism and ambiguity, where they both “accommodate to, but also resist, the norms and claims of nationalist” (135).  For postmodern diasporas, “the nation-state is not only (or at all) an oppressive form of social organization, but also one that protects free expression, [and] political diversity” (196).  Diasporas are thus neither assimilators nor separatists but are those with multiple cultural attachments whose subjectivity cannot be contained in one national location.  Their political and cultural ambiguity, however, can work against them: Their existence can “represent a threat to the nation-state and the liberal-democratic order” (192).  More bluntly, they can be seen as a force of dismantling nationalism.  Ultimately, the transnational nature of diasporas does aid, in varying degrees, in de-territorialization of nation-states and de-authentication of established social identities, thus rendering the nation-state “impossible to realize the nineteenth-century dream of a place for each ‘race’” (196).  

While Cohen seems bemused by and merely accepts the fact that postmodern diasporas influence and re-map national and transnational landscape, Homi K. Bhabha in “Locations of Culture” insists on legitimization of the transnational subjectivity of diasporas in contemporary cultural production.  Bhabha believes that regional/racial identification and division of people can no longer be substantiated in our cosmopolitan era. He thus proposes a “radical revision in the concept of human community itself” (1335). While it is true that capitalism on a global scale has brought different cultures geopolitically in closer proximity, Bhabha insists that unless we drastically abandon our provincial mentality, “the great connective narratives of capitalism… do not, in themselves, provide a foundational frame for those modes of cultural identification and political affect” (1335).  Instead of trying to divide and contain sundry identities into different national/cultural types, Bhabha argues that what is most critical in our contemporary cultural production is not a mere recognition but a legitimization of  complex subjects who fall out from the mainstream—the diasporas.  By legitimizing diasporas’s extra-territorial cultural location, Bhabha demystifies diasporas’s sociopolitical ambiguity, and by extension, the myth of the supposed national homogeneity.

Bhabha’s call for legitimization of the diasporas’s cultural bi-locality, then, in essence, reveals their anti-nationalistic existence.  In terms of diasporas’s cultural location, Bhabha sees that their cultural subjectivities are formed “in the…interstices—the overlap and displacement of” their past and present cultures (1332).  In other words, diasporas’s borderline subjectivities are formed “in-between” national and cultural boundaries.  Here, diasporas’s “intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated” (1332).  Diasporas’s interstitial nature of their subjectivity keeps them from being fixed to any one location.  Rather, they serve as the “connective tissue…between [the] fixed identifications.” (1333). Diaporas as a connective tissue modulate the constant flux and mutability caused by bipolar national forces (1333).  In the process of their juggling act of two (or more) nation-states, they become the “cultural hybridity” that obviates national territories and “entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (1333).  Thus, Bahbha’s observation of diasporas confirms Cohen’s sociological concerns that diasporas are not situated in the core of one fixed geopolitical position, but in the “liminal” space where they pledge to neither of the nation-states completely, and thus becomes a potential danger to nationalism.

Both Cohen and Bhabha recognize that today’s high-tech culture and the force of cosmopolitan market contribute to cultural hybridization.  If in the past, nation-state has sought racial homogeneity, diasporas of the postmodern world challenge such pure nationalism. As Bhabha remarks, now “the very idea of a pure ‘ethnically cleansed’ national identity can only be achieved through…death” (1334).  If in one sense, contemporary diasporas’s cultural bi-locality is seen positively as builders of transnational communities, on another sense, their politically dubious subjectivity can be seen as a threat to pure nationalism.  Nonetheless, in our cyberspace age, nationalistic intolerance of cultural hybridity must be replaced by cosmopolitan pluralism.

Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi K. “Locations of Culture.” The Critical Tradition.  Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998. 1331-1344.

Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas. Seattle, WA: University of Wshington Press.

Modernist and Postmodernist’s Appropriation of Traumatic Memory for Spiritual Liberation in Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” and Angela Carter’s “Nights at the Circus”

Modernist and Postmodernist’s Appropriation of Traumatic Memory for Spiritual Liberation in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus

Both modernist and postmodernist writers recognize the “human memory” as a crucial, cognitive phenomena in shaping one’s character and life.  Because the human mind traverses time and history by means of memory – connecting past, present, and future into a sequential continuity – one’s dysfunctional/distorted memory can disrupt one’s historicity and psychological soundness.  Both Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (the modern text) and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (the postmodern text) explore characters whose memories become dysfunctional due to traumatic past experiences.  For instance, in Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus’s uncontrollable mental replay of his horrid war experience leads to his ultimate corporeal demise.  On the other hand, in Nights at the Circus, Mignon’s atypical, refractive short-term memory due to severe traumatic experience acts as a buffer that enables her to reconstruct her previously debased identity into an honorable one.  Thus, due to debilitating war memory, if Septimus chooses suicide to liberate his spirit from the oppressive modern world, Mignon from the postmodern world gains her spiritual redemption by not only defying the very source of her painful memory (the patriarchal abuse and exploitation of her sexuality), but also by overtly espousing lesbianism.

Woolf depicts Septimus as a victim of modern-warfare indoctrinations.  Lamont, in her essay “Moving Tropes: New Modernist travels with Virginia Woolf,” informs that “Mrs. Dalloway is set in London, in 1923, a time of incredible flux and change for the city, brought about largely by the newly ended First World War” (Lamont 165).  Lamont’s turbulent depiction of postwar London, in part, can be microcosmically represented by one man of this city, Septimus, who suffers posttraumatic war syndrome.  Before the war, Septimus was an aspiring poet with an astute mental faculty.  He was also patriotic and “was one of the first to volunteer” as a soldier to fight for his country (Woolf 86).  However, he returns home disillusioned and labeled as a lunatic.  Still, irrespective of how society defines him, Septimus is not exactly insane.  He is what Woolf would diagnose as a victim of modernist’s misleading, militant ideology – a soldier who had witnessed human evil firsthand on the battlefield, and thus become disoriented and mistrustful of the human world. 

Whereas Septimus suffers from cognitive breakdown due to his convoluted war memories, Mignon, on the other hand, in her Carter-created postmodern world, is protected by her deflective short-term memory, minimizing the effects of patriarchal abuse in her life.  Like Septimus, who is deserted by the society as a lunatic, Mignon, an orphan in a patriarchal society, is marginalized and victimized because of her sex and class. She, for example, encounters numerous and potentially debilitating experiences, all instigated by the men in her life: The murder of her mother by her father and her father’s accidental death while trying to cover up his crime; her ensuing orphaned, homeless life as a street thief; an unanticipated separation with her younger sister who “she never s[ees]…again” (131); habitual beatings from her husband who had once thrown her out “half-naked on to the Russian winter streets” (127); and the physical and mental exploitations by her spiritualist employer and the male customers at the bar she worked, to bring up a few.  However, Mignon’s memory is a “peculiar and selective organ,” which represses traumatic events (144).  In other words, her memory of the tragic past, unlike Septimus, does not involuntarily replay the horror on its own.  In fact, it is so well kept that her “smile contain[s] her entire history and [is] scarcely to be borne” (144, emphasis added).  Mignon’s memory actively constricts her past tragedy into “an exceedingly short memory, which alone save[s] her from desolation” (141).   

If Mignon is physically pounded by the men in her life, Septimus is mentally enthralled by his participation in the patriarchal warfare.  As a war veteran, Septimus’s memory, unlike Mignon’s, involuntarily perpetuates in the past.  His mind revisits and lingers in a time of war, where he hears and sees Evans (his inseparable companion) and himself still in combat.  In Septimus’s delusional mind, “The word ‘time’ split its husk” and becomes “an immortal ode to Time!  He s[ings].  Evans answer[s] from behind the tree…There they wait…till the War [i]s over, and now the dead, now Evans himself…A man in grey [i]s actually walking towards [hi]m.  It [i]s Evans”(70).  His memory is indiscriminate to time and space, transfixed in one moment of his friend’s death for which he blames himself.  His future thus becomes forever eclipsed by his mental inability to completely return from the past (from the war) to the present. 

While Septimus’s unresolved memory that is transfixed in the past is both anachronistic and disruptive to his present existence, Mignon’s co-mingling of the past and present through theatrical staging as the dead for the spiritualist employer positively reconstructs the site of the past tragic memory.  For instance, when Mignon is “impersonat[ing] the dead” for the spiritualist and his clients, she is forced to reckon the photograph of herself in the act as a resembling image of her dead mother (138).  Upon seeing the photograph, Mignon’s usually repressed subconscious memory surfaces; “she [is] troubled.  For the face that sw[ims] out of the acid emerge[s] to her out of her memory in the same way. ‘Mother…’” (138, emphasis added).  Nonetheless, unlike Septimus, Mignon refuses to dwell in the past.  She laughs it off, as if it is a game, “How she giggle[s]!  It ha[s] never been anything more than a game to her” (139).  Because Mignon’s refractive mind refuses to introspect and analyze deeply like Septimus’s, each repetitive death-scene she plays – where her mind must re-associate the death of her mother (the past) – conversely produces a positive, psychological effect; it shatters her conscious/unconscious memory, thereby enabling an implantation of a new positive reality.  For example, to Mignon’s deflective mental faculty, “acting,” which is a “pretense of reality,” histrionically and psychologically re-presents and replaces the horrific reality of the past as a “pretense” – a mere mental fabrication.  Thus, symbolically and literally, Mignon’s dramaturgical revisitations of the past not only blur the very origin of her traumatic past, but more significantly, mitigate and reconstruct the very source of the harmful past memory.       

Unlike Mignon, who actively mitigates her past hurtful memories through creative means, Septimus internalizes the patriarchal tyranny imposed by his erroneous, un-empathetic doctors; he chooses suicide to sever himself from the modern world.  Septimus is confounded by Dr. Homes and Bradshaw’s scientific arrogance and misdiagnosis of his postwar symptoms.  Septimus disrespectfully epithets the doctors as “Like that sort of thing” (149), because, to him, they are the epitome of evil in “human nature” (140).  They represent the modern world that misappropriates divine omnipotence through science, eviscerating the mortal vitality of someone like Septimus.  “Holmes is on us,” Septimus would say, for “Dr. Holmes…stands for something horrible to him. ‘Human nature,’ he call[s] him” (140).  Septimus also has mental visions; he sees that “he [is] drowned” by forces unknown (140).  Septimus decides to materialize this vision of drowning (his suicide), because he believes that death is better than surrendering his soul to the modern cold-hearted scientists, who plot to lock him up in a mental institute.  When Dr. Holmes arrives, Septimus quickly weighs the two options of life or death for the last time, “He d[oes] not want to die.  Life [i]s good.  The sun hot…[but] what d[o] they [patriarchal authorities] want?…Holmes [i]s at the door. ‘I’ll give it you!’…and fl[ings] himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs. Filmer’s area railings” (149).  Unlike Mignon, Septimus’s dysfunctional recollective faculty fails to reconfigure negative cognitive perceptions – the ills of modernity represented by the doctors.

While Septimus chooses death to liberate his spirit from the oppressive modern world, Mignon joins with the princess in love, creating a new social order for the women of postmodernism.  If Septimus is an insane, marginalized modern man, Mignon is an orphan forsaken by her postmodern society.  Mignon’s men in the past have exploited her female sexuality without genuine love.  However, in this Cartersonian world, she is able to invert the patriarchal tradition of female sexual-objectification.  By joining the princess in love, she revalorizes her commoditized value as a sexual object into an eminent human being, loved unconditionally by the princess.  Fevvers comments on her transformation, “Can this truly be the same ragged child who came to me for charity those few short weeks ago? …‘Love, true love has utterly transformed her’” (276).  Thus, unlike the stoic Septimus who pursues his vision of death rather than choosing the love of his wife, Mignon envisions love and claims life over death.  Quintessentially, however, it is “the redaction of her life-drama” stored in her memory that frees her mind from the horrors of the past, enabling her to ultimately transcend into a respected and beloved womanhood with the princess.

While Virgina Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway glorifies and sympathizes Septimus’s stoic decision to die in order to escape from the harsh modern world, Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, by showcasing Mignon’s resilience against patriarchal abuse, intuits the post-modernist’s fight against societal oppression by choosing life, not death.  As a modernist, Septimus is engrossed in incessant introspections over Evans’s death and his doubts about the power figures in the modern world, his fragmented mind forever in abeyance in utter isolation without panacea.  In contrast, Mignon’s postmodernist mentality goes further than introspection or questioning authority.  Her selective and reconstructive cognizance not only extrapolates the poisonous episodes from her history, but also, by overtly espousing lesbianism, creates a new feminist order in patriarchal society.    

Works Cited

Carter, Angela. Nights at the Circus. New York: Penguin, 1984.

Lamont, Elizabeth Clea. “Moving Tropes: New Modernist travels with Virginia Woolf.”   Journal of Comparative poetics (2001): 161- 184.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: A Harvest Book, 1981.

Modern Men’s Narcissistic Syndrome in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and James Joyce’s “The Dead”

Modern Men’s Narcissistic Syndrome in

Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and James Joyce’s “The Dead”

Modernism puts its foremost trust and emphasis in men, potentiating narcissism.  With Nietzche’s proclamation that “God is dead,” the modernists live for the acquisition/preservation of earthly glory, as opposed to entrance into heaven.  In place of old, familiar belief systems, modernists are inundated by contradictory, provocative, and complex new ideas.  In fact, Nietzsche, in Will to Power, lays out a formula for an ideal modern-man which conflicts with the age-old, Christian belief, overtly advocating egocentric, primordial instincts: “the love of power is the demon of men.  Let them have everything and they [will be]…happy – as happy as men and demons can be” (Nietzsche 397).  However, modern men’s new intense emphasis on self-gratification, that defies old morals, subjects their minds to perpetual restlessness, disorientation, and fragmentation.  In fact, Nietzsche, in Will to Power, admits that “disintegration characterizes this time.”  In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and James Joyce’s “The Dead,” the two modern protagonists, Kurtz and Gabriel respectively, struggle for worldly excellence and glory.  However, by completely subscribing to dubious modern ideologies, namely colonialism and universalism, their minds disintegrate and their spirits paralyze, crippling their ability to feel love except for themselves. 

Both Kurtz and Gabriel are archetypal, exceptional men of the modern world with extraordinary intelligence and eloquence.  For instance, Kurtz, according to those who know him is so eloquent that people “who ha[s] heard him speak once” (74) becomes “his friend” (74).  The Russian sailor tells Marlowe that he will “never, never meet such a man again” (63).  He continues: “You ought to have heard him recite poetry – his own too it was, he told me. Poetry!… Oh, he enlarged my mind!” (63). In fact, because Kurtz can linguistically “take care” (67) of the evil motives into a “right motives” (67), he attains an honorable job: The International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs “entrust[s] him with the making of a report for its future guidance” (50).  This suggests that Kurtz’s words, spoken or written, have power.

However, if Kurtz’s gift of tongue helps him advance in his career, the same talent also weakens his intimacy with his fiancé.  His Intended (his fiancé) tells Marlowe that although “others knew” (75) of Kurtz’s “vast plans” (75), she “could not…understand” (75) his abstract ideas.  Obviously, to Kurtz, it is not important that his Intended understands his “vast plans” (75), otherwise he would have made it plain to her.  While he shows no interest in augmenting his intimacy by having his partner’s mind in union with him, he shows excessive anxiety over his “pamphlet” (51) that is bound to help him advance in his career.  Even in his dying moments, Kurtz asks Marlowe to “take good care of ‘[his] pamphlet’…as it was sure to have in the future a good influence upon his career” (51).  Furthermore, Kurtz’s litany of “elevated sentiments” (67) – “My Ivory, my Intended, my station, my career, [and] my ideas” (49) – shows his primeval, human greed and egocentrism.  Interestingly, his second sentiment, the epithet “My Intended” (49), not only linguistically suspends his fiancé in the air, but also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when his “intentions” to marry her never materialize.  Moreover, the fact that his first sentiment is “ivory,” not “his Intended,” symbolically parallels his priority, that to him, human intimacy is an excess and that an object “ivory” is the foremost passion.

Like Kurtz, the fact that Gabriel is a writer evinces in his linguistic mastery.  Gabriel, like Kurtz, is obsessed with his literary career: “he love[s] to feel the covers and turn over the pages of [his] newly printed books” (128).  As a man of accomplishment and “superior education” (122), he is asked to give a speech at the party.  In his intellectual arrogance, he fusses over “the lines from Robert Browning, for he fear[s] they would be above the heads of his hearers” (121).  Indeed, his speech is not understood by all.  Just as Kurtz’s Intended is not able to decipher what Kurtz’s “vast plans” (75) are, Gabriel’s high-sounding words, to his aunts, are nothing but emotion-fillers that puts a “large smile on Aunt Julia’s face and…tears…[in] Aunt Kate’s eyes” (139).  Though his Aunt Julia, “d[oes] not understand” (139) his speech, out of courtesy, “she look[s] up, smiling, at Gabriel, who continue[s] in the same vein” (139).  Furthermore, the fact that he uses the possessive “I” fourteen times in his brief speech shows that he, like Kurtz, is an egotist, who is more interested in gratifying himself with the speech than his audience.  Indeed, he does not worry that the meaning of the theatrical oration he delivers is not understood by “two ignorant old women” (his Aunts) (130).  Just as Kurtz’s ideological rhetoric alienates him from his Intended, Gabriel’s abstract words, printed or spoken, distances him from his people. 

Moreover, Gabriel’s words, like Kurtz, are foreboding.  Just as Kurtz’s epithet, “My Intented” (67), encapsulates the unrequital nature of their intimacy, Gabriel’s act of naming his wife’s elegiac moment of her dead lover, Michael Furry, as a “Distant Music” epitomizes the distant and dissonant nature of his marriage.  While Gretta listens to the singing, Gabriel studies her and wonders – “[w]hat is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of ?” (143) – then in his mind, he mutely names it “Distant Music” (143), because that is what “he would call the picture if he were a painter” (143).  Henceforth, he discovers that it is Michael Furry, not him, who is alive in Gretta’s heart.  He is thus symbolically reduced to death in her mind, spiritually distanced from her.  His wife has not loved him, but Michael, who died for her many distant years ago.  He mournfully realizes that his marriage has been a life of spiritual paralysis, because it lacks the spiritual union based on a deep love and passion, which he is incapable of.  

Although Gabriel can care less about his Aunts’ senile minds, Miss Ivors’s critical view of him “unnerve[s] him” (130).  Miss Ivors is “ashamed” (127) of Gabriel, for in her opinion, his commentary in The Daily Express is treacherous, shamefully exposing his “West Brinton[ness]” (127), when he is, in fact, an Irish.  When Miss Ivors demands an explanation of his unpatriotic commentary, as intelligent and eloquent as he is, he “d[oes] not know how to meet her charge” (128); instead, blurts out some ridiculous, childish disclaimers like “Irish is not [his] language” (129) or that “[he] is sick of [his] own country” (129).  Worst yet, contradictory to his usual composure and years of linguistic training, he “glance[s] right and left nervously and…under the ordeal…mak[es] a blush invade his forehead” (129).  This shows the addled state of his mind that is characteristic of a modern man – a man torn between conflicting identities and loyalties.  He is angry because Miss Ivors’s patriotic condemnation of him undermines his self-assurance and pleasure of being “a universal man,” his self-constructed identity.  Albeit unable to argue intelligibly the meaning of such a title to Miss Ivors, he feels that she has “no right to call him a West Briton before people” (129), not only because he is “sick of [his] own country” (129), but because he believes petty nationalism blocks progress.  

Soon after Miss Ivors (Gabriel’s worst nightmare) leaves the party, Gabriel overtly expresses his anti-nationalism.  He vows that “[he] will not linger in the past” (139), namely, in the memory of his country, Ireland.  Indeed, his speech attempts to indoctrinate progressive ideas.  Sounding much like Nietzche, he exhorts the audience that “[they] have…living duties and…rightly claims [to their] strenuous endeavors” (139).  His speech intimates that human beings have divine power to dominate and control all elements of this world.  Also, Gabriel’s Nietzche-like observation that this new generation is “a thought-tormented age” (138) is a fitting self-image, since he is in a perpetual restlessness with divided royalty between two nations, Ireland versus Britain.  Just as modernistic ideals that denounce mediocrity sends Kurtz alone to Congo to prove his superiority, Gabriel’s fear of localism, namely, Irish regionalism, socially displaces him from his ethnic familiarities – Irish language and culture.  Thus, exceptional modern men, like Kurtz and Gabriel, are often exceptional eccentrics, psychologically and literally living in the “X-dimensional space” – their space of mental and literal exile. 

 If Miss Ivors is Gabriel’s nightmarish critic whose rebuke undermines the very core of Gabriel’s belief system, “ivory” is Kurtz’s worst “nightmare” (64) that leads to his spiritual and physical obliteration.  If Gabriel is an internationalist, traveling to and embracing the cultures of France, Belgium, and Germany, Kurtz, on the other hand, is a colonialist in Congo, uprooting the native’s culture and devastating its natural resources.  Before Congo, Kurtz, like Michael Fury, was a romantic “musician” (71).  In Congo, however, obsessed with ivory that renders him money, status, and power, the “original” (50), romantic Kurtz transforms into a mercenary, evil madman, who “take[s] a high seat amongst the devils of the land” (49).  While Gretta genuinely grieves for Michael Fury (for he truly loved her), Kurtz’s Intended erroneously grieves for Kurtz’s death, not knowing that he had a more prominent, new lover in Congo, “Ivory.”  In fact, when Kurtz’s Ivory enterprise is endangered, his pleading to his mistress shows that ivory has become his overriding purpose in life: “Save me – save the ivory…Don’t tell me! Save me!” (61).  Thus, Kurtz’s pursuit of ivory “alone in the wilderness” (65) gradually eclipses his original identity, until “he…go[es] mad” (65) and becomes unsalvageable.

While Gabriel aspires to be a universal man, Kurtz has already earned the title, “universal genius” (71), from those who know him.  Unlike Gabriel, however, Kurtz’s “inten[tions] to accomplish great things” (67) shows “no restraint…and no fear” (66).  Instead of limiting his material desires to an ideal amount, he, like the zealous modernists who denounce moderation, pushes for excess, lacking all restraints in hoarding wealth, fame, and distinction.  In his over-confidence, Kurtz even instructs Marlowe how to gain fame and wealth: “You show them you have in you something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability” (67, emphasis added).  Kurtz even aspires “to have kings meet him at railway stations on his return” (67) to England.  Marlowe says that Kurtz has “nothing either above or below him” (65).  Indeed, he “ha[s] kicked himself loose of the earth” (65), impersonating God to those around him and to himself. 

According to Marlowe, Kurtz, as a deified figure in his ultimate “moment of complete knowledge” (68), “ha[s] summed up – he ha[s] judged” (69) the Eurocentric colonialist sentiment in one word: “The horror!” (69).  Likewise, Gabriel’s ultimate epiphany, “that such a feeling must be love” (152), upon realizing that a seventeen-year-old Michael’s love for his wife had been more triumphant and pure than his, forces him to see the hollowness of his intellectual achievements.  Thus, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and James Joyce’s Dubliners both explore the effects of modernism which create narcissistic milieu for Kurtz and Gabriel where their body and spirit disintegrate.  They are both incapable of love because they are infatuated with themselves.  To them, intimacy is an excess they can not afford.  Instead of trying to extract a meaningful purpose in life from human relationships, they retreat to the self’s interior – to private experience and excellence – as the source of their ultimate happiness.  However, the fact that they are ultimately miserable, and not happy, exposes the ideological fallacy of Eurocentric propagandas of the day, namely, colonialism and universalism.

Works Cited

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Norton & Company, 1988.

Joyce, James. “The Dead.” Dubliners. New York: Dover Publications, 1991.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Will to Power.” Western Civilization. Perry, Chase, et al., eds. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co, 2000.

Women’s Spatial Mobility under Patriarchy In Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” and Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea”

 

Women’s Spatial Mobility under Patriarchy

In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

        Virginia Woolf, in “A Room of One’s Own,” speculates that “if a woman in Shakespeare’s day had…Shakespeare’s genius” (39), but not given an artistic arena to channel out her creative energy, then, she would have died on some winter’s night, and found “buried at some crossroads where the omnibuses…stop” (39). In other words, Woolf is claiming that women’s “room of their own,” and more abstractly, “a space of their own,” is directly reflective of how they fare psychologically, intellectually, and even physically.  Succinctly, she is implying, figuratively and literally, that if a woman is not allowed a space to intellectually grow and physically move about, she will wither and die.  In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, “a space of women’s own” – which, from here-on-after, for the purpose of this essay, will be called “spatial mobility” – reflects the level of freedom and independence the female protagonists are allowed under patriarchy.  In Jane Eyre, the fact that the protagonist, Jane, is an orphan works to her advantage because she has no patriarchal allegiances that restrict her from maneuvering her various spaces, different dwellings, to enhance her self-preservation and independence.  On the other hand, in Wide Sargasso Sea, the fact that the protagonist, Antoinette, has numerous patriarchal authorities (Mr. Cosway, Mr. Mason, Richard Mason, Daniel Cosway, Sandi Cosway, and Rochester) who, in one way or another, restrict, malign, and stifle her spatial mobility, forestalls her self-preservation and independence.  Thus, while absence or escape from patriarchal authority allows spatial mobility that preserves Jane, too much of its presence – too many controlling men – confines Antoinette into a fixed space that kills her.

        For Jane, albeit, moving from one home to another causes tremendous amount of anxiety and insecurity, each spatial movement, nevertheless, leads her to a higher level of independence.  Her first spatial movement to Mr./Mrs. Reed’s home provides her the basic shelter, food, and protection from the harsh world.  Her second movement to Lowood Institution not only satiates her yearnings to be literate, but more importantly, equips her with employable skills that enable her to be self-sufficient.  Her third relocation to Thornfield as a governess had required a permission from a guardian, which she gains effortlessly due to the absence of paternal authority in her life; in place of her deceased uncle, her aunt, Mrs. Reed, permits “that ‘[Jane] might do as [she] pleased, [for] she had long relinquished all interference in [Jane’s] affairs’” (76).  Her fourth movement, a flight to St. John’s abode proves to be quintessential in her life; it not only frees her from Rochester – a potentially threatening, patriarchal authority – but more significantly, links her to a loving and admirable extended family, which one of whom (her uncle) makes her a wealthy woman, a turning point in her life that cements her self-preservation and independence.  In fact, her final movement, a return to Rochester in Ferdean, is, in effect, a cardinal moment in her life where she makes an important pronouncement of her independence.  This final movement is profound, not only because it frees her from St. John – another potentially abusive, patriarchal authority – but because it is a choice that she deliberately makes, as Jane informs Rochester as “an independent woman” (370).  Bewildered by her new aura and claims to independence, Rochester asks for explanation: “‘Independent! What do you mean, Jane?’” (370)  Jane gives him a stunning answer that not only informs him that she now has money of her own, but her subtle word play also implicates that she intends to keep and manage her own money: “‘Quite rich, sir…If you won’t let me live with you, I can build a house of my own close up to your door, and you may come and sit in my parlour when you want company of an evening’” (370, emphasis added).  Indeed, for Jane, each “spatial movement” dramatically enhances and fortifies her self-preservation and independence. 

Although, Jane, an orphan, out of necessity moves from one shelter to another, “moving” or “going away” is imperceptible for Antoinette, whose family is deeply-rooted in her home town with a lineage of patriarchs, from her birth father to step-father, her half-brothers to a step-brother.  In terms of spatial mobility, Antoinette exhibits timid and stagnant mentality when she comments about her mother’s importunate pleadings to Mr. Mason to move away from their town: “I [also] knew that we were hated – but to go away … for once I agreed with my stepfather.  That was not possible” (19).  Antoinette seems to have been inculcated by patriarchal dogmas of the day about how woman should be – helplessness and immobile, always needing to stay within her boundaries.  The fact that her family estate is so deeply-rooted in her home town doesn’t help either; it seems to make it inconceivable and imprudent for her to even think about relocating herself to a different home or a town – the privilege of “not being an orphan,” a daughter of a prominent man in town. Her birth father, Mr. Cosway, therefore, is Antoinette’s first patriarch that indirectly restricts her spatial mobility.  Mr. Cosway, furthermore, by leaving a legacy as a slave owner, exacerbates Antoinette’s spatial stasis in her home town because his such legacy makes her become the target of malignant assaults from townspeople.  Worse yet, Antoinette’s step-father, Mr. Mason, and his son, Richard Mason, continue the role of a patriarch by engineering Antoinette into a marriage.  This commodification of Antoinette into a marriage with Rochester completely forestalls her independence, let alone any spatial mobility.  Moreover, Antoinette’s half-brothers, as an extended representatives of patriarchy, compounds this situation; both Daniel’s slander and Sandi’s tenderness toward Antoinette fuel up the tension between her and her husband, Rochester.  In fact, these issues become the very reasons that Rochester use to justify his imprisonment of Antoinette in England.  Thus, for Antoinette, each line of patriarchs and its successors in her family, collectively and individually, restrict, malign, and imprison her into a life of hell with no spatial freedom nor mobility.

Among all the patriarchs in Antoinette’s life, the one who holds the ultimate keys to her status, happiness, and freedom, her husband Rochester, cruelly eracinates all human dignity out of her; he treats her with the utmost disrespect, uproots her from her social and cultural familiarities, and imprisons her in his domain – Thornfied, a cell that slowly kills her.  Alarmed by such a plan to uproot Antoinette from her hometown, Antoinette’s surrogate mother, Christophine, exhorts Antoinette to leave him: “Ask him pretty for some of your own money…When you get away, stay away…Better not stay in that old house.  Go from that house, I tell you” (66).  Antoinette, however, is overwhelmed by the patriarchal forces that are seemingly omnipotent and omnipresent in her life, self-rendering her escape to freedom unfathomable; she gives in all too easily and feebly:

He would never give me any money to go away and he would be furious if I asked him…Even if I got away (and how?) he would force me back.  So would Richard.  So would everybody else.  Running away from him, from this island, is the lie.  What reason could I give for going and who would believe [or support] me? (68)

When Christophine pleads Rochester for money, so that she and Antoinette can go away to Martinique and “[t]hen to other places” (95), Rochester, not only denies Antoinette any spatial mobility by not returning a portion of her money, he also psychologically eliminates “the only space of her own” – her home – by having an affair with her servant: “Do you know what you’ve done to me?  It’s not the girl, not the girl.  But I loved this place and you have made it into a place I hate.  I used to think that if everything else went out of my life I would still have this, and now you have spoilt it” (88).  In fact, Rochester is so obsessed with the idea of controlling Antoinette that he exclaims in silence: “She said she loved this place.  This is the last she’ll see of it…I’ll take her in my arms, my lunatic.  She’s mad but mine, mine. What will I care for gods or devils or for Fate itself.  If she smiles or weeps or both.  For me” (99).  Thus, Rochester, Antoinette’s husband, who bears the highest moral obligation to love and protect her, betrays her most utterly, and becomes the ultimate culprit to her gradual death, psychologically and physically. Engineered, thwarted, and crumpled by various patriarchal figures in her life, most repulsively yet decisively, by her husband Rochester, Antoinette, unlike Jane, each “spatial movement” she undertakes pulls her downhill, undermining her self-preservation and independence.  

Both in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, the protagonists’ free movements from space to space, or even having such a constant space that she can call “a space of her own,” is directly linked to whether or not a patriarch is present or absent in her life.  For Jane, in Jane Eyre, absence or escape from patriarchal authority enables her to use spatial mobility as one of her means to enhance and fortify her self-preservation and independence.  For Antoinette, in Wide Sargasso Sea, however, too much patriarchal presence – too many controlling men – ultimately kills her. 

Works Cited

Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Norton & company, Inc: New York, 2001.

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Norton & Company, Inc: New York, 1999.

Woolf, Virginia. “A Room of One’s Own.” The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature. (2001): 16-72.

The Tragic History of Hamlet Prince of Denmark: 3.3.85-96

To take him in the purging of his soul,                   85

When he is fit and seasoned for his passage?

No.

Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent.

When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,

Or in th’ incestuous pleasure of his bed,                 90

At game a-swearing, or about some act

That has no relish of salvation in’t –

Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,

And that his soul may be as damned and black

As hell, whereto it goes. My mother stays.                     95

This physic but prolongs thy sickly days.

This soliloquy, spoken by Hamlet upon hearing Claudius’s penitent prayer in Act 3, Scene 3, Lines 85-96, in The Tragical History of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, illuminates his sinister logic that delays the murder of Claudius.  Hamlet’s postponement of the murder does not stem from his emotional remorse or pity for Claudius.  Rather, his hesitation springs from his perverse theological analysis of Claudius’s spiritual state as a sinner.  Hamlet knows that according to Christian theology, a repentant murderer like Claudius can be saved by grace.  Hamlet fears this possibility of Claudius’s redemptive state in afterlife, not only because he believes in retribution, but more threateningly, because Claudius’s redemption could mean that his free soul may join up with his mother again in the spiritual world.  In other words, if Hamlet kills Claudius at his redemptive moment, then he must accept one ominous possibility: Claudius’s physical obliteration might not warrant the two lover’s spiritual separation.  Claudius’s death, in other words, would merely mark the two lover’s mortal separation, while their spiritual, eternal reunion (when queen dies) is unguarded.  What Hamlet plots to intercept is this portentous possibility of the two lover’s “incestuous” (90) perpetuation in the next life.  However theologically perverse, Hamlet believes that only by killing Claudius at his most sinful, irredeemable state, the two lover’s both physical and spiritual alienation can be achieved.   

Lines 85-88 convey Hamlet’s preliminary response to and analysis of Claudius’s remorseful prayer.  Upon hearing Claudius’s self-accusatory confession, instead of rushing to kill Claudius, Hamlet pauses and collects himself.  The regularity of iambic pentameter in these lines parallels Hamlet’s controlled reasoning.  He begins to suspect that Claudius’s soul may be redeemed: “To take him in the purging of his soul, / When he is fit and seasoned for his passage?” (85-86).  The otherwise flowing rhythm of iambic pentameter suddenly halts to one syllable in line 87: Hamlet emphatically utters “No” to killing Claudius at such a salvable state.  Hamlet concludes that this is not the right moment to kill Claudius because he dreads the potential, divine impunity of Claudius’s sin.  No longer certain that Claudius’s death will effectuate his eternal damnation, Hamlet utters “No” (87). 

Hamlet, in line 88, rearranges his murder plot against Claudius to a later date.  The opening spondee – that is distinctly separated by two commas – creates much turbulence in the meter scheme to encapsulate Hamlet’s delayed, yet more determined resolution to stab Claudius.  The personified spondee – with a physically provoking “Up,” (88) and a combative object, “sword,” (88) – indicates Hamlet’s present inaction of killing Claudius cannot be interpreted as a passive resignation.  Rather, the personification of the two militant words, “Up, sword,” (88) prefigures the immediacy of the imminent slaughter of Claudius.  The rest of the lines, “and know thou a more horrid hent” (88), also stray from predictable iambic cadence to accentuate Hamlet’s self-suppressed, calculated motive.  The uncontrolled, ferocious burst of “Up, sword,” (88) is quickly repressed by Hamlet’s chilling reasoning.  He decides to delay the murder until “a more horrid hent” (88) can be framed for Claudius.

Throughout the soliloquy, the harsh consonants, “S” and “H,” reinforce Hamlet’s injurious plot against Claudius as both “sinister” and “hellish,” respectively.  For instance, the following “s” phrases are all indicative of Hamlet’s “sinistrous” accusations against Claudius: “his soul” (85), “seasoned for his passage” (86), “drunk asleep” (89), “At game a-swearing” (91), “some act” (91), “salvation in’t” (92), and most pungently, “th’ incestuous pleasure of his bed” (90) and  “This physic but prolongs thy sickly days” (96, emphasis added in all phrases).  Likewise, the “h” phrases denote the “hellishness” of Hamlet’s plot against Claudius.  For example, the alliterative phrase, “a more horrid hent” (88); the synecdochic expression, “his heels may kick at heaven” (93); and finally, the simile “that his soul may be as damned and black/As hell” (95) all depict “hellish” quality to the plot.  Thus, both “s” and “h” phrases, subliminally planted throughout the passage, underscore Hamlet’s maliferous plot against Claudius. 

In contrast to the subliminal undertones scattered throughout the passage, in lines 89-92, Hamlet explicitly points to the optimal moments to entrap Claudius.  In line 89, for example, Hamlet schemes two antithetical moments to kill Claudius: either in his “drunk asleep, or in his rage” (89).  These two bipolar activities also implicate that, in Hamlet’s perception, Claudius’s character is basically two dimensional: slothful and wrathful, both of which constitute two of the “seven deadly sins.”  Claudius’s two dimensional demeanor rapidly descends to an adulterous and blasphemous state: “incestuous pleasure” (90) and “game a-swearing” (91), both of which are also condemned under the “seven deadly sins.”  Thus, Hamlet’s numerous charges against Claudius’s character show that he is morally decayed and thus unfit to be a king.  It is fitting, then, that Claudius’s soul will “[have] no relish of salvation” (92) in the next life.  Notably, the sound effects of the words/phrases that deviate from their iambic structure seem to pound on Claudius’s incorrigibleness: “incestuous” (90), “about some act” (91), and “salvation in’t –” (92).  Among these three, one particularly stands out: “incestuous pleasure[s],” which Hamlet deplores the most, and thus which he (perhaps) considers to be the most optimal moment to kill Claudius. 

In line 92-94, black imagery and an inconclusive dash accentuate Hamlet’s relentless condemnation of Claudius.  In line 92, Hamlet wishes that Claudius’s “soul may be as damned and black” (94) with “no relish of salvation in’t –”.  The only dash in the passage after “salvation in’t –” heightens the infinite nature of eternal punishment that Hamlet schemes for Claudius.  Thus, the black imagery, a symbol of death, combined with the perpetual dash, signals a kind of hell suited for Claudius.   

In lines 95, Hamlet concludes that it is “hell, whereto it [Claudius] goes,” but his “mother stays” (95) with him.  Notably, Hamlet refers to Claudius’s soul as “it” (not even human) that goes to “hell.”  What is most crucial and conspicuous in line 95 is the distance established by the double syntax.  The period after the first sentence, “As hell, whereto it goes” (95) before the new sentence “My mother stays” (95) creates a deliberate space that enforces a separation between the two “incestuous” (90) lovers.  Also, this spatial construction hints at Hamlet’s possessiveness of his mother.  By capitalizing “M” in “My mother,” Hamlet seems show his strong attachment to his mother and a determination to preserve her by his side.

Finally, the couplet’s (line 95-96) rhyming assonance, “mother stays” and “sickly days,” capture the ultimate fate of Claudius.  Hamlet uses this paradoxical juxtaposition of “This physic” and “sickly days” (96) to dramatize the final anguishing moments of Claudius.  This paradoxical deployment suggests that “physic” (the medicinal intervention), ironically, can only harm Claudius by “prolong[ing his] sickly days” (96).  Claudius’s “sickly days” on earth, prolonged by his remorseful confession (the “physic”), will not help him escape his ultimate fate in hell.  In fact, to exacerbate his final damnation, his soothing companion, the queen, “stays” (96, emphasis added) with Hamlet.  The verb “stays,” in particular, uniquely cements the queen’s motion with Hamlet; it is the only static verb in the passage.  The other verbs throughout the passage, such as “take,” “drunk,” “a-swearing,” “trip,” “kick” and “goes,” all portray action.  These active verbs markedly contrast with the static immobility of the queen’s final motion: she “stays” while Claudius “goes” to “hell” (95).  These antithetical destinations of the two lovers, “hell” for Claudius and “earth” for Gertrude” forecast Claudius’s final moments, his fate. 

This soliloquy, spoken by Hamlet upon hearing Claudius’s penitent prayer in Act 3, Scene 3, Lines 85-96, in The Tragical History of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, elucidates Hamlet’s underlying sinister logic that delays the killing of Claudius.  His theological analysis that leads to this postponement is perverse yet rational and strategic.  Hamlet’s primary reason in lengthening Claudius’s “sickly days” (96) is born by his calculated reasoning.  He aims to capture Claudius at his most (optimally) abominable state that guarantees Claudius’s soul in “hell” (95).  What Hamlet ultimately plots against Claudius is not only an attempt on his part to ascertain eternal damnation of his soul, but most importantly, that he is without a companion, his mother, in the next life.  Only then, can Hamlet be assured that the two lover’s “incestuous pleasure[s]” (90) will not perpetuate eternally. 

Works Cited

Braunmuller, A.R. The Tragical History of Hamlet Prince of Denmark. New York: Penguin, 2001

The Galvanized Victim Reciprocates Abuse to the Electro-perpetrator

The Galvanized Victim Reciprocates Abuse to the Electro-perpetrator

 Death and the Maiden is a play written by Ariel Dorfman after seven years of exile from Chile when General Augusto Pinochet was still the dictator of the nation.  In this play, Dorfman explores the unstable psyche of citizens of Chile who had undergone horrific abuse by the Pinochet’s regime.  Dorfman uses his protagonist, Paulina, as an emblem that embodies the citizens of Chile who have been victimized by fascism.  In the play, Paulina is raped and abused under the high-voltage, electric currents by the secret servicemen of the Pinochet’s regime.  Paulina’s physical and psychological wounds from this abuse symbolically represent the scars of Chileans who had been victimized by fascism.  Electricity that is used by the secret serviceman is also an emblem that signifies the annihilative power of fascism.  Dorfman’s use of electricity as a metaphor warns that if the power of government is not monitored with moral conscience, it can bring devastating, irreparable outcomes, not only to its oppressed citizens, but also to the regime itself.  In Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, Dr. Roberto is the secret serviceman of fascism who rapes and galvanizes Paulina, a woman who represents the victimized citizens of Chile.  Due to Roberto’s abusive use of high-voltage electricity, Paulina, ironically, transmogrifies into a perpetrator who “reciprocates” the same level of abuse back to Roberto, resulting in a reversal of role and power between the two parties, symbolically dismantling fascism. 

In order to understand how the power of electricity signifies fascism in Dorfman’s play, first, it is helpful to examine the nature and the power of electricity.  Electricity has both regenerative and annihilative powers.  Its regenerative power is seen in all living organisms, from the photosynthesis of plants to the radiation therapy of humans (that uses X-rays or ultraviolet light to heal and lengthen human life).  In Dorfman’s play, however, the regenerative power of electricity signifies the freedom and democracy that would enhance the lives of Chileans.  Electricity’s annihilative power is just as actively sought after by humans; for example, radiation injury (ionizing radiation) that causes sickness to nuclear energy (radioactive energy from fission) that causes widespread destruction of life and the environment.  Metaphorically, electricity’s annihilative power in Dorfman’s play alludes to fascism that kills individualism and free society.  Electricity, therefore, can either electrocute (kill) or electrify (revive); for this reason, its power must be governed with ethical prudence.

Because electricity has power to kill, the danger of mishandling its power escalates in the hands of the brutal perpetrator like Roberto, who is morbidly curious and devoid of ethics.  Roberto, in Death and the Maiden, confesses his perverse curiosity in electrically-induced, human anatomy: “My curiosity was partly morbid, partly scientific.  How much can this woman take?…Does her sex dry up when you put the current through her?  Can she have an orgasm under those circumstances?” (59).  Under Fascism, the victims who fall under such inhumane Doctor, at best, are severely abused, and at worst, face possible death: “She is entirely in your power, you can carry out all your fantasies, you can do what you want with her” (59).  Thus, the brutality of Dr. Roberto reveals how electricity (the power of fascism) in the hands of the few powerful can injure its laboratory victims (its citizens).  By emblematizing electricity as a metaphor, Dorfman indirectly and artfully demonstrates the perverse and brutal power of fascism under Pinochet.

Surely, the rape and the electro-abuse that Roberto commit against Paulina are bizarre and inhumane, potentially producing psychological electrogenetic symptoms in her.  For instance, Paulina avoids light, so much so that her husband, Geraldo, constantly adds more light into their inhabitant.  In the dark of the night, Geraldo comes home to his wife, Paulina, and finds her “hidden behind the curtains.  He switches on a light” (3).  Geraldo, again, adds more light to find his dinner: “He puts on another lamp and sees the table set” (4).  Furthermore, the scene in which Roberto visits Geraldo reveals that Paulina instinctively pushes Roberto away from her presence by turning off the light: “Someone knocks…A lamp is switched on…[but] is immediately switched off” (12).  Paulina’s aberrant behavior towards “light” seems to suggest that these symptoms link to the high voltage, electro-shocks she suffered.  Symbolically, it is a post-fascist, psychological symptoms marked in the citizens of Chile.  Her symptoms allude to the mistrusting and fearful mentality of Chileans in the aftermath of Pinochet’s regime.  The citizens rather find refuge in the dark, for they fear that the electric lights, which represent the power of fascism, might rape them once more, pulverizing their individual dignity.

In addition to Paulina’s deliberate avoidance of lights, she also exhibits behaviors that seem to evince that she has been desensitized to violence by the electric stimuli.  First, the biological impact of electric stimuli on Paulina’s body can be examined to analogically link her symptoms to that of the citizens of Chile.  According to Siniaia, a neurologist, “in mammalian,…central nervous systems exhibit habituation and/or sensitization of their responses to repetitive stimuli” (Siniaia, 1).  In other words, “electric stimulation of infralimbic subregion (lower area of cerebrum) reduces conditioned…fear stimuli” (Milad 1).  These scientific studies cast light on why, perhaps, Paulina in the play exhibits no fear.  Also this impact of electric stimulations on mammalian is analogous to the fascist regime that not only repeatedly manipulates and controls the minds of its citizens, but also desensitizes the citizens to violence.  Paulina, who had undergone near-death experience with electric shocks, shows no fear of abusing or killing her perpetrator, Roberto: “When I heard his voice, I thought the only thing I want is to have him raped” (40).  She continues: “What do we lose by killing one of them?” (66)    Roberto’s electro-abuse against Paulina that symbolizes fascist brutality, in effect, has desensitized and galvanized her into a perpetrator.  Thus, the electrically desensitized Paulina symbolizes Chileans who are apathetic to the violence and death after many years of repetitive, brutal stimulations from the Pinochet’s regime.

Just as the studies on electric stimulations give insights into that Paulina could have been desensitized to violence, examining other characteristics of electricity provide cues to the victim’s reciprocal behaviors.  Scientifically, Paulina’s act of reciprocating abuse back to Roberto can be analyzed, hypothetically, that the victim’s “impedance” (Giaever 2) is at action, an electro-phenomenon that is defined as an overall opposition to electric currents.  In other words, human bodies, innately, either neutralize or resist electric stimuli off their bodies.  This tendency of human bodies can be analogically adapted to assume that oppressed Chileans will naturally find ways to either neutralize or fight fascism off their state.  Furthermore, electricity is not static; it is intrinsically mobile, an electro-phenomenon termed as “electromotion.”  Electricity – either negatively/positively charged – naturally travels from one place/thing to another, transmitting its energy on to that which it comes in contact with.  In order to apply this intrinsic nature of electricity to human phenomena, this mobility of electricity can be figuratively adapted as “violence begets violence.”  In other words, electricity’s inherent mobility can be reinterpreted metaphorically to explicate why Roberto’s electro-abuse would affect Paulina, and her galvanized energy, in turn, would haunt him.  Thus, from electromotive phenomena, a simile can be drawn to hypothesize human phenomena: that one person’s negative/positive motives engender another’s negative/positive motives accordingly.  Whether the interpretation is scientific or metaphoric, one, coterminous analysis can be derived from this electromotive hypothesis: humans, in general, are innately born with reciprocal impulses to, at least, oppose or resist negative energy, if not to reciprocate exactly, as ill for ill and good for good.  Thus, symbolically, the violence suffered by the Chileans under Pinochet’s fascism has natural tendencies to be reciprocated by the victims unto the perpetrators.

This metaphoric interpretation of electromotion – the galvanic mobility plus its tendency to reciprocate – can be divided into two major, insurgent movements to analyze Paulina’s act of revenge.  The first movement is Paulina’s character metamorphosis, her character transformation into that of her perpetrator, Roberto.  This character transformation prepares and enables her to reciprocate abuse.  The second movement of insurgence is the consummation of revenge, the actual act of reciprocating abuse for abuse and violence for violence, ultimately undermining the authority of Roberto. 

The first movement of insurgence – the victim’s character metamorphosis – primarily comes through “character mimesis,” meaning that Paulina transforms into a perpetrator through mimicry, ultimately mirroring Roberto’s demeanor and gender.  For instance, Paulina mimics male’s voice and demeanor: “She…discovers Roberto about to free himself…Paulina ties him up again, while her voice assumes male tones” (37).  She, in effect, is transforming herself into an assertive and preemptive fascist.  She no longer wants to be the submissive citizen anymore.  In fact, she regrets that in “All [her] life, [she’s] always been much too obedient” (58).  Paulina is no longer reactive, nor heeds to fascist authority.  The following passage shows that she is now a different citizen; she appropriates fascist authority: “I don’t need to ask him…I gave him the name Bud, Doctor…I inserted in my story to Gerardo, and you corrected most of them.  It turned out just as I planned…I’m going to kill you because you’re guilty” (64-5).  Paulina’s character transformation represents Chileans who are preparing to take actions into their own hands, transmogrifying into the very same demeanor of their fascist perpetrators.

The final movement of insurgence – the consummation of revenge – reaches its climax as Paulina not only gains full control of her perpetrator, but also dismantles his power and authority that which represents fascism.  Paulina triumphs when Roberto, after many hours of psychological and physical abuse, begs her for a pardon.  “Forgiveness” (60), Roberto cries out, and “writes down” (61) his confession while Paulina “hear [his vocal] confession on the tape” (61).  Roberto even “gets down on his knees” (65); his once-powerful, fascist authority totally dismantles.  The only thing that stops Paulina from actually killing Roberto is that her abuse from him, however brutal, does not add up to a murder: “Kill them? Kill him?  As he didn’t kill me, I think it wouldn’t be fair to –” (34). Paulina knows that because Roberto represents only an administrator of fascism, killing him would not kill the entire system.  In fact, what she really wants is for him to confess, repent and reform.  In other words, what the people of Chile want from their previous regime is that it admits its brutality and compensates for it.  In this last scene of the play, since Roberto has confessed and repented, Paulina and the people of Chile is satisfied and show that their insurgence have successfully culminated to the full cycle of reciprocity.

Paulina’s successful act of dismantling the authority and power of Roberto attests to the reversal of power between the two parties.  The fact that Dorfman has chosen a woman as a victim, and not a man, dramatizes the uneven power relations between Pinochet’s regime and Chileans.  Moreover, by emblematizing an element that is as prodigious, yet destructive, as electricity, Dorfman poignantly stresses the brutality of Pinochet’s fascism.  However, the fact that his protagonist, Paulina, does not kill Roberto at the end of the play shows that the author advocates peace between the perpetrators and the victims who have survived Pinochet’s fascism.  Thus, the prime purpose of Dorfman’s play, The Death and The Maiden, is not to provoke anger, but to provide a purging effect in the Chilean audience.  In other words, the fact that Paulina – who represents the victims of Chile – wields her power to successfully flip the power relations with that of Roberto allows the Chilean audience to vicariously channel out their decades-old, fascist toxics, and thus become relieved and free.

 

Works Cited

Dorfman, Ariel. Death and the Maiden. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Giaever, Ivar, et al., eds. “Electrical Wound-Healing Assay for Cells in Vitro.”  PNAS

101.6 (2004): 1554-1559.

Milad, M.R. et al., eds. “Electrical Stimulation of Medial Prefrontal Cortex Reduces

Conditioned Fear in a Temporally Specific Manner.” Behavioral Neuroscience

118.2 (2004): 389-394.

Siniaia M.S., et al., eds. “Habituation and desensitization of the Hering-Breuer Reflex in

        Rat.” The Journal of Physiology: 523.2 (2000): 479-91.

Literary Critique:Scott Juengel,s “Face, Figure, Physiognomics: Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and The Moving Image”

Literary Critique of:

Juengel, Scott. “Face, Figure, Physiognomics: Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and The Moving Image.” A Forum on Fiction: 33 (2000 Summer): 353-76

 

Juengel argues that physiognomic determinism is deployed in Shelley’s Frankenstein.  He believes that the governing logic of physiognomics of the day (which was heavily influenced by Lavater’s physiognomy) is implicated in Frankenstein through the “circulating, miniature portrait” of the protagonist’s mother that seems to herald the deaths of Frankenstein’s mother, brother (William), and Justin.  He further argues that the monster’s hunting gaze in the two scenes by the window also casts him as an “image of moving portraiture” since it is this horrid image that Frankenstein runs for/away from that which ultimately causes his death.  Lastly, he questions the ethics of physiognomic determinism in Frankenstein, and believes that the novel interrogates this issue itself by illuminating how the monster’s hunting visage thwarts any descent, intersubjective relationship between the creator (Victor) and his creature (monster).

Although Juengel’s essay is insightful and convincing, I take issue with his occasional, obscure use of the term “physiognomics.”  Juengel quotes Lavater’s theory of physiognomics extensively to lay out the meaning of physiognomics, however, his essay, in large, does not follow this precept in the strict sense, and thereby confuses the reader in grasping his central points.  For instance, his main points of the essay are more about the devastating effects of this “moving image of portraiture” (the picture of Victor’s mother and the monster’s gaze framed by the window), rather than about the cause and effects of physiognomic determinism (showing how the specific facial features of the monster mirror his character, or presage future events according to Lavater’s theory). 

Juengel does, however, persuasively argue that monster’s conspicuously structured body from the corpses  – “the construction of living from the dead” which Juengel defines as an act of “prosopopeia” – foreshadows iconoclastic fate of his mate’s unfinished, destroyed body.  He also does an excellent job of convincing that portraits, specifically, close-ups of human face, have “talismanic” or “fetishistic” power over the beholder because they force the gazer to confront, acknowledge, and linger over an imagined face; but more significantly, because they freeze the image of a moving, living person as static and inanimate, symbolizing death.  His final argument, the “ethics of physiognomy,” claims that the immediacy of “face-to-face tableau” – the exchange of monster’s and Frankenstein’s gaze in their encounters – accentuates and augments “fetishistic power,” and thereby, more poignantly provokes and summons Frankenstein’s paternal duty to his creature.  For Frankenstein, however, the monster’s distorted visage produces a certain impenetrability that blocks and hampers any “intersubjective intercourse” between the two.  Thus, according to Juenguel’s ethics of physiognomy, the fact that Frankenstein escapes from the monster’s proffered hand during this “face-to face” encounter holds him that much more accountable and unethical. 

I find this essay intriguing and valuable in investigating and understanding the subtle and powerful impact of the portrait imagery deployed in Frankenstein.  Moreover, Juengel’s ethics of physiognomy – the ethics of reading/misreading only what is visible and external (even among the elite scientists) – is interesting and informative because it discloses human’s irrational, biased tendencies in evaluating one’s physicality.