Happy Valentine's Day (Every day the 14th)

It's two weeks from Valentine's Day, a holiday created by chocolate companies and card companies and antidepressant manufacturers. It is appropriate that the past two weeks in Literature class, two stories about relationships have been assigned.

Both Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" and Theodore Dreiser's "Free" are anti-love stories in their own way. Really, other than Chopin's mastery of brevity, (Get to the point Dreiser!) and the differing gender of the protagonists, the two stories have much in common. They both involve married individuals, that when faced with the death of their spouses, privately revel in the freedom that this will allow.

At first this seems quite cynical, and, well, it is, but is that really all that bad? This fairy tale belief our culture has about two souls united as one is, in my experience, largely bullshit. It also leads to unrealistic expectations. This perfect image of a romanticized spouse is built in our imaginations, and we become sorely disappointed at these mere humans we meet that don't fulfill all of these ideals.

Mr. Haymaker in "Free" suffers for decades with the knowledge that Mrs. Haymaker is not his ideal mate. He can't leave her because of social and religious pressures. Chopin's Mrs. Mallard is even worse off, living in a time where a middle-class woman had no autonomy. But in a time when most marriages end in divorce, maybe we should see something noble in Mr. Haymaker's commitment no matter what. I think maybe marriage is the problem, and our society is moving beyond it.

Now, anybody reading this might think that I'm a cynic, and, well, you would absolutely be correct, but I'm not a love-hater...hater of love. I simply think that it can be fleeting, and we should accept that and not see it as a failure. I very much love my partner, and we might not be together forever, but if it ends I won't be bitter. I will appreciate the time we spent together and know that this was a valuable part of my life. I will recognize that the two of us grew apart and that this is natural and okay.

Actually, I will probably cry while watching stupid movies that we watched together, but still...I will definitely look back fondly instead of dismally.

This ideal that was encouraged in the time period of these two stories was incredibly harmful to people. Poor Mrs. Haymaker, who knows how much happier she could have been if she could have been with somebody that truly and passionately loved her. Who knows what wonderful experiences Mrs. Mallard could have had if she had been able to be independent.

Creepy Crape

The best horror stories have no supernatural monsters in them. Jason could never scare me more than Silence of the Lamb's Buffalo Bill. The Creature From The Black Lagoon could never send shivers down my spine like Black Swan. This is why The Yellow Wallpaper is such a great piece of horror fiction. And speaking of Black Swan, The Yellow Wallpaper is a commentary on how society's strict gender roles frequently shatter the sanity of women.

In Black Swan the insanity came out of the Jungian Madonna/whore duality that Nina is pushed into by the (both figurative and literal) roles she must play. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator isn't given the same exact pressures, but she is given directions that drive her insane all the same. The narrator, suffering from postpartum depression is relegated to the bedroom for rest by her physician husband. Isolated, she loses her mind and starts seeing herself trapped in the wallpaper in the room. While this certainly seems like an insane woman's ramblings, there's almost a weird rationale to it. Wallpaper is merely decorative, and the narrator, being disallowed from working, is merely decorative as well.

It's funny that this patronizing effect still lives on today. In 2005, Tom Cruise expressed his disappointment in an interview about the fact that Brooke Shields used antidepressants to treat her postpartum depression. He suggested she use vitamins. I say, if it worked for Brooke Shields, then Tom Cruise should probably shut the hell up and keep making crappy action movies.

We should also, as a society, examine how our expectations create mental illness in women. Going back to The Black Swan, that pressure we put women on to simultaneously be virginal and sexy is schizophrenic in and of itself. The background of this blog is a portrait of W.E.B. DuBois, because his famous quote of "One ever knows their twoness" resonates with me and I see it being applicable to so much more than the african-american context in which he meant it originally. Women also know this twoness, this pull from two opposite directions at once by one society. And it drives them fucking crazy, so maybe we should stop?

Purity, Patriarchy, and Plumage

In Sarah Orne Jewett's "A White Heron", a young girl named Sylvia is minding her business when a brutish man comes along (after shooting a bunch of birds that were also minding their business) and asks her if he can crash at her place for the night. At first she's kind of creeped out by the guy, but she relents because she's a polite young lady and a bit of a pushover. But that's what society expects little girls to be. Quiet, reserved, capitulating to the demands of men.

The Ornithologist is a total patriarchal asshole who is in search of a rare white heron, so he can shoot it, stuff it, and put it on a mantle to drunkenly tell uninterested guests the story of his heroic capture of a bird that stood little chance against a freaking rifle. He wants poor Sylvia, who hangs out in the woods a lot, like many emo girls do, to help him find this white heron. The Ornithologist is this throwback to the enlightenment era, when technology was going to save the world and help man control and dominate nature and make nature its little bitch. If this mentality sounds familiar, it's because everybody in contemporary times is tweeting these very same thoughts into their iPhones. While obviously The Ornithologist exists well after the enlightenment era, many of the ideas seem to have remained with people for a long time. And, as we see in the case of our current messianic worship of technology, these ideas have a way of cropping back up.

After a while, this lonely little girl warms up to the Ornithologist, gets a little schoolgirl crush on him, but still wonders why he kills the things that he searches for. Seems a little counterintuitive, doesn't it? If you love birds so much that you fancy yourself an ornithologist, maybe you shouldn't kill every feathered animal that you see to the point that your game-bag can be described as "lumpy." So Sylvia decides she's going to climb this enormous old pine tree, so she can see the entire forest and locate the heron's nest. The reason that this pine is so tall is because it is so old, and the reason it is so old is because an "arborist" didn't come by and chop it down. I don't know if Jewett meant for this tree to serve as an example of what happens when we don't destroy nature, but it serves that purpose all the same. Funny what conservation does!

So Sylvia stays up all night, filled with excitement by her adventurous plan. Early in the morning, before any of the lame older people wake up, she sneaks off to climb this old pine tree. It is arduous and dangerous, but she succeeds, and sees the white heron crying out for its mate. Then something happens: Sylvia realizes that the stupid ornithologist should go screw himself. She, Sylvia, is lonely like this heron, and finds this heron as a compatriot, and doesn't want it to be killed. So she climbs down, and doesn't tell the asshole ornithologist.

So there you have it, an antisocial girl finds that she relates more with a bird than with a hunter. But that isn't it! I believe that not only does The Hunter (Ornithologist? Please.) symbolize manifest destiny, but also this story is a virginity tale. Sylvia is an innocent girl of nine years, and the white heron symbolizes her purity/virginity. The thing is white after all, which is a common color to symbolize purity and chastity. So along comes this strong dominating man, and she becomes a little enamored with him. He asks her to give up the white heron, and she contemplates doing just this at first because in patriarchal society, women are taught to just do as men tell them to do. She even takes on this difficult task of climbing this tree, which could be seen as symbolizing the lengths some women will go to impress a man. But in the climb, in the difficult task, she realizes that she is strong, and has no need to give up her white heron to a man.

This virginity symbolism actually fits nicely with The Hunter's desire to dominate nature. Nature is frequently associated with the feminine. In Pagan traditions, the earth is typically a Goddess, while the ethereal God of the cosmos/heavens is given male attributes and pronouns.

In so many coming of age stories, something is sacrificed to show that the person "puts childish things away" like the biblical passage says. In A White Heron, something is preserved. This makes sense in light of Jewett herself never getting married. She never had to give anything up to a man to feel complete, she was whole on her own.

Does a Marginalized Character by Any Other Name Still Smell as Discreet?

In my Literature class on Thursday, we discussed the removal of the n-word from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and its replacement with the word "slave." I was sharply in the minority for not having a problem with this singular printing of the book.

Four main reasons were given:

1. It is inaccurate as not all of the african-american characters in the book were slaves.

2. It is wrong to change a book, especially a canonical great work of literature like Huck Finn.

3. It amounts to censorship.

4. The book, with the n-word in place, serves as an opportunity for classrooms to discuss race. The alteration lessens the impact of these discussions.

As far as number one is concerned, there is no rebuttal. If the characters were not slaves, then "slave" is an inaccurate description. It is a completely valid point. However, it only argues that the replacement word is inaccurate, and doesn't address that the very replacement of words is wrong to do.

In regards to not touching great literature, we do it all the time. There are numerous translations of Dostoyevsky's work. Hell, there are numerous translations of Dostoevsky's name. Which one is superior? The things that Nietzsche's sister did to his work after his death, all in favor of promoting her Nazi agenda hardly get any press. If people truly feel that altering a great piece of literature is verboten, then where was the outrage at the publication of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? A remixing of Jane Austen's novel with zombies interspersed into the plot. Or its companion book, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters?

Did these people write strongly worded letters to Baz Luhrmann when he gave Romeo and Juliet an MTV quick-edit facelift, adding guns, Radiohead, and lowriders? Do they curse Leonard Bernstein's name for sullying Shakespeare's work by resetting it in New York's lower east-side, and giving it showtunes? The Bible, which even in my atheist mind is a great work of literature, has been revised numerous times itself, including giving it a hippie/anti-Vietnam style in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar. How very much more than a single word being replaced!

I'm not a fan of censorship. In my political-science class I took during the mini-term, I was the only student that supported Wikileaks, comparing it to The Pentagon Papers during Vietnam. But this is simply not censorship. The government is not taking the original Twain text out of libraries, and pulling it from shelves in the way that Stalin disappeared records of dissidents. It isn't even like Wikileaks, where politicians are calling for the assassination of Julian Assange, and criminal charges for those that reproduce the leaks. It is a single run of the book by a single publisher. The book is still available with the original text on Amazon. I can even get it on my Kindle, replete with the n-word. To compare this to censorship is to undermine actual censorship.

The most difficult of all these points is number four: dialogue about race in the classroom. This is something I think is incredibly vital, especially in the times in which we live. A bad economy makes people look for easy scapegoats, and all too often that has meant ethnic partisanship. Antisemitism was rampant during The Great Depression, and in the single year I've lived in Dayton, Ohio, I have had multiple instances of people thinking that they could talk to me about their racist beliefs. I've had people explain to me that Dayton is economically depressed because of "lazy black people", to which I respond, it was lazy black people that made all the factories shut down and leave you with rampant unemployment? Not to say that my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky didn't have its own severe racism issues, but a number of factors, including a thriving local economy, meant that it wasn't used as a scapegoat to pin the city's issues on as casually.

So, this is a conversation that this city, and every other American city is desperately in need of. But is Huck Finn the best device we have to start that conversation? I don't know, it seems a bit irrelevant to the discussion. I can see how it can be used as a tool to put things into historical context, but this book is being taught in grade schools. How many children are able to put anything into historical context? They don't understand that the socioeconomics at play since slavery, remained thanks to Jim Crow, and that many of those factors carry on to the present day as can be evidenced by the overrepresentation of African-Americans in the prison system, which is the nouveau slavery in America.

That sort of thing flies over their heads. Hell, it flies over most grown people's heads. What they do know is that "I hate niggers" is carved into the bathroom stall of the men's restroom at their school. At least I would assume it is, since I've seen it carved into a bathroom stall at Sinclair Community College. And for all a black student knows, it was carved by John Smithers, the kid that bullies them in between classes. So now John Smithers is reading Huck Finn aloud in class and ever so subtly emphasizing the n-word and stealing glances at the one black kid in this suburban classroom because grade school students are the most evil bastards on the planet other than Dick Cheney.

So no, I don't think that taking the word out will ruin race discussions in classrooms. I think if teachers want to confront racism, homophobia, classism, sexism, and ableism in their classrooms, then they should confront it as it exists in the culture today. Don't skirt around it, don't use some century old text to give kids the opportunity to say, "See, everything is better now because we don't act like that anymore!" Just talk about the damn thing.