Take me home tonight
American lit final. Part 2
Part two: The Fantastic Voyage or, Conversely, What the Bleep Do We Know?
One of the defining characteristics of Modernist writing is a sort of abstinence from expressing the personal. There is an attempt to walk the line between the interior landscape and the exterior; they try to find a balance between the interior and the exterior. There is a representation of the external universe. Visually, it is the narrowest point on the hourglass: the upper reservoir is the outside world, and the lower reservoir is the inside world.
Three of the authors examined this semester walk that line in profoundly different places: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ezra Pound and Robert Frost all explore the ranges of this paradigm.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” chronicles a young wife and mother’s descent into madness via post-partum depression, at the time, a condition that was classified by the medical profession as “hysteria” or a work of pure fiction conjured out of the ether by these “silly women”. The narrative is first person, set up as a group of journal entries from the point of view of a nameless young woman married to a doctor whose treatment for her so-called hysteria is confinement to her bedroom. Needless to say, the narrator has a little too much time to think on her hands and begins obsessing over the wallpaper. She says that the wallpaper looks “as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!” She sees eyes throughout the pattern and gets “positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breaths didn't match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.” She also becomes fixated with the idea of a woman creeping around the room, only for the reader to discover it was the narrator all along. Because it is told from these first person journal entries, the reader has a sense of empathy for her. The reader does not recognize that she has flown over the cuckoo’s nest, as it were, until the very end where she tries to catch the woman in the wallpaper with a rope secured to the light fixture. The story is semi-autobiographical; Gilman suffered from post partum depression herself, and was given a similar treatment to Wallpaper’s narrator. It has been said that writing this story kept her from going off the deep end completely.
In his works, Ezra Pound tended to stay away from one thing: the profoundly personal. When personal pronouns did encroach on his work, usually they were at the very least persona poems, if not dramatic monologues. The interior landscape that was charted either belonged to someone else or was one hundred percent implication. In one of his most notorious poems “In a Station of the Metro”, Pound delivers three scant lines (including the title): “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; /Petals on a wet, black bough.” It would seem that Pound only gives the reader the framework, and it is up to the reader to color in what he means by the framework. Like a coloring book. There are no personal pronouns, there are no verbs. There is no time either, just a place. Pound’s sense of self has more to do with context rather than expressly saying “this is who I am. This is what I think, and this is how I feel.”
Robert Frost’s sense of self, from a literary standpoint, walks the line between Gilman and Pound: he uses personal pronouns to talk about himself, but explores the expansive natural landscape and melds the two worlds. If explored literally, Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” is about a walk in the woods and considering which path to take. In actuality, the roads “diverged in a wood” represent life choices. Generally there are ways to have one’s cake and consume it too, but there are those things in life that are either black or white. Either one does or does not, there is no middle ground in this Venn diagram. Both choices have their advantages and disadvantages, and one is no more or less appealing than the other. But Frost chooses “the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” His decision to deviate from the beaten path has made or unmade where he is at this particular point in his life. He thought he could “kept the first for another day!/ Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/ [he] doubted if [he] should ever come back.” Sometimes it works out in favor of doubling back, but in most cases, it does not. Sometimes choices leave people stuck, and other times it leads to a world of never ending possibility. Some situations call for being bound and others call for freedom. Neither is perfect all of the time, but it is adapting to the times where the path does not work that builds character and makes the difference.
Part two: The Fantastic Voyage or, Conversely, What the Bleep Do We Know?
One of the defining characteristics of Modernist writing is a sort of abstinence from expressing the personal. There is an attempt to walk the line between the interior landscape and the exterior; they try to find a balance between the interior and the exterior. There is a representation of the external universe. Visually, it is the narrowest point on the hourglass: the upper reservoir is the outside world, and the lower reservoir is the inside world.
Three of the authors examined this semester walk that line in profoundly different places: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ezra Pound and Robert Frost all explore the ranges of this paradigm.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” chronicles a young wife and mother’s descent into madness via post-partum depression, at the time, a condition that was classified by the medical profession as “hysteria” or a work of pure fiction conjured out of the ether by these “silly women”. The narrative is first person, set up as a group of journal entries from the point of view of a nameless young woman married to a doctor whose treatment for her so-called hysteria is confinement to her bedroom. Needless to say, the narrator has a little too much time to think on her hands and begins obsessing over the wallpaper. She says that the wallpaper looks “as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!” She sees eyes throughout the pattern and gets “positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breaths didn't match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.” She also becomes fixated with the idea of a woman creeping around the room, only for the reader to discover it was the narrator all along. Because it is told from these first person journal entries, the reader has a sense of empathy for her. The reader does not recognize that she has flown over the cuckoo’s nest, as it were, until the very end where she tries to catch the woman in the wallpaper with a rope secured to the light fixture. The story is semi-autobiographical; Gilman suffered from post partum depression herself, and was given a similar treatment to Wallpaper’s narrator. It has been said that writing this story kept her from going off the deep end completely.
In his works, Ezra Pound tended to stay away from one thing: the profoundly personal. When personal pronouns did encroach on his work, usually they were at the very least persona poems, if not dramatic monologues. The interior landscape that was charted either belonged to someone else or was one hundred percent implication. In one of his most notorious poems “In a Station of the Metro”, Pound delivers three scant lines (including the title): “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; /Petals on a wet, black bough.” It would seem that Pound only gives the reader the framework, and it is up to the reader to color in what he means by the framework. Like a coloring book. There are no personal pronouns, there are no verbs. There is no time either, just a place. Pound’s sense of self has more to do with context rather than expressly saying “this is who I am. This is what I think, and this is how I feel.”
Robert Frost’s sense of self, from a literary standpoint, walks the line between Gilman and Pound: he uses personal pronouns to talk about himself, but explores the expansive natural landscape and melds the two worlds. If explored literally, Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” is about a walk in the woods and considering which path to take. In actuality, the roads “diverged in a wood” represent life choices. Generally there are ways to have one’s cake and consume it too, but there are those things in life that are either black or white. Either one does or does not, there is no middle ground in this Venn diagram. Both choices have their advantages and disadvantages, and one is no more or less appealing than the other. But Frost chooses “the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” His decision to deviate from the beaten path has made or unmade where he is at this particular point in his life. He thought he could “kept the first for another day!/ Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/ [he] doubted if [he] should ever come back.” Sometimes it works out in favor of doubling back, but in most cases, it does not. Sometimes choices leave people stuck, and other times it leads to a world of never ending possibility. Some situations call for being bound and others call for freedom. Neither is perfect all of the time, but it is adapting to the times where the path does not work that builds character and makes the difference.