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all questions. All questions carry equal marks.
Q1. Discuss the material conditions and
circumstances which made The American Enlightenment possible.
The American Enlightenment was a
period of intellectual and philosophical fervor in the thirteen American
colonies in the 18th to 19th century, which led to the American Revolution and
the creation of the United States. The American Enlightenment was influenced by
the 17th- and 18th-century Age of Enlightenment in Europe and native American
philosophy. According to James MacGregor Burns, the spirit of the American
Enlightenment was to give Enlightenment ideals a practical, useful form in the
life of the nation and its people
A non-denominational moral philosophy replaced
theology in many college curricula. Some colleges reformed their curricula to
include natural philosophy (science), modern astronomy, and mathematics, and
"new-model" American-style colleges were founded. Politically, the
age is distinguished by an emphasis upon equality under the law, economic
liberty, republicanism and religious tolerance, as clearly expressed in the
United States Declaration of Independence.
Among the foremost representatives of
the American Enlightenment were presidents of colleges, including Puritan
religious leaders Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Clap, and Ezra Stiles, Presbyterian
minister and college president John Witherspoon, and Anglican moral
philosophers Samuel Johnson and William Smith. Leading political thinkers were
John Adams, James Madison, Thomas Paine, George Mason, James Wilson, Ethan
Allen, and Alexander Hamilton, and polymaths Benjamin Franklin and Thomas
Jefferson. The term "American Enlightenment" was coined in the
post-World War II era and was not used in the 18th century when English
speakers commonly referred to a process of becoming "enlightened."
Various dates for the American
Enlightenment have been proposed, including 1750–1820, 1765–1815, and 1688–1815.[6]
One more precise start date proposed is 1714, when a collection of
Enlightenment books by Jeremiah Dummer were donated to the library of the
college of Yale University in Connecticut. They were received by a
post-graduate student Samuel Johnson, who studied them. He found that they
contradicted his Puritan learning.
He wrote that, "All this was like a flood
of day to his low state of mind"and that he found himself as if
"emerging out of the glimmer of twilight into the full sunshine of open
day". Two years later in 1716 as a tutor, Johnson introduced a new
curriculum into Yale using Dummer's donated Enlightenment books. Johnson
offered what he called "The New Learning",
which included the works and ideas of
Francis Bacon, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Copernicus, and literary
works by Shakespeare, John Milton, and Joseph Addison. Enlightenment ideas were
introduced to the colonists and diffused through Dissenter educational and religious
networks in America.
Enlightened Founding Fathers, especially
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Washington,
fought for and eventually attained religious freedom for minority
denominations. According to the Founding Fathers, the United States should be a
country where peoples of all faiths could live in peace and mutual benefit.
Madison summed up this ideal in 1792 saying, "Conscience is the most
sacred of all property."
A switch away from established
religion to religious tolerance was one of the distinguishing features of the
era from 1775 to 1818. The ratification of the Connecticut Constitution in 1818
has been proposed as a date for the triumph if not the end of the American
Enlightenment.
That new constitution overturned the
180-year-old "Standing Order" and The Connecticut Charter of 1662,
whose provisions dated back to the founding of the state in 1638 and the
Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. The new constitution guaranteed freedom of
religion and disestablished the Congregational church. The American
Enlightenment on the one hand grew from works of European political thinkers
such as Locke, Michel de Montaigne, and Jean Jacques Rousseau, who derived
ideas about democracy from admiring accounts of American Indian governmental
structures brought back from European travelers to the New World in the 16th
century. Concepts of freedom and modern democratic ideals were born in
"Native American wigwams” and found permanence in Voltaire's Huron.
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While between 1714 and 1818, an intellectual
change took place that seemed to change the British Colonies of America from a
distant backwater into a leader in various fields—moral philosophy, educational
reform, religious revival, industrial technology, science, and, most notably,
political philosophy, the roots of this change were home grown.America saw a
consensus on a "pursuit of happiness" based political structure based
in large part on Native sources, however misunderstood. Attempts to reconcile
science and religion sometimes resulted in a rejection of prophecy, miracle,
and revealed religion, resulting in an inclination toward deism among some
major political leaders of the age.[citation needed] A non-denominational moral
philosophy replaced theology in many college curricula. Yale College and the
College of William & Mary were reformed. The Presbyterian College of New
Jersey (now Princeton University) and Puritan Harvard University reformed their
curricula to include natural philosophy (science), modern astronomy, and
mathematics. Additionally, "new-model" American-style colleges were
founded, such as King's College New York (now Columbia University), and the
College of Philadelphia (now University of Pennsylvania).
Q2. Discuss the use of human as a tool of
social criticism in Huckleberry Finn.
Mark Twain's classic The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is told from the point of view of
Huck Finn, a barely literate teen who fakes his own death to escape his
abusive, drunken father. He encounters a runaway slave named Jim, and the two embark
on a raft journey down the Mississippi River. Through satire, Twain skewers the
somewhat unusual definitions of “right” and “wrong” in the antebellum
(pre–Civil War) South, noting among other things that the “right” thing to do
when a slave runs away is to turn him in, not help him escape. Twain also
paints a rich portrait of the slave Jim, a character unequaled in American
literature: he is guileless, rebellious, genuine, superstitious, warmhearted,
ignorant, and astute all at the same time.
The book is a sequel to another of
the author's successful adventure novels, The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer, originally published in 1876. Although The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer is very much a “boys' novel”—humorous, suspenseful, and intended
purely as entertainment—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn also addresses
weighty issues such as slavery, prejudice, hypocrisy, and morality.
After Twain finished writing the
first half of the novel, he expressed doubts about the book's potential
success. In a letter to his friend William Dean Howells in 1877 (quoted by
biographer Ron Powers in Mark Twain: A Life), Twain confessed: “I like it
only tolerably well, as far as I have got, & may possibly pigeonhole or
burn the MS [manuscript] when it is done.” Fortunately, Twain did not burn the
manuscript; when it was published in England in 1884 (U.S. publication 1885),
it quickly became the most successful book Twain had yet written.
Soon after it was published, the
public library in Concord, Massachusetts, refused to carry The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn because of its perceived crudeness. This ban turned
into a publicity coup for Twain and his book. In a letter published in
the Hartford Courant, the author responds gratefully, noting that
“one book in a public library prevents the sale of a sure ten and a possible
hundred of its mates.” Twain also notes that the library's newsworthy action
will cause the purchasers of the book
to read it, out of curiosity, instead of merely intending to do so ... and then
they will discover, to my great advantage and their own indignant
disappointment, that there is nothing objectionable in the book after all.
Despite Twain's assurances, the book
continues to spark controversy over its subject matter even today. Some modern
critics argue that the book is inherently racist in its depiction of Jim and
its frequent use of the term “n-----.” Other critics, speaking in support of
the book, point out that the terms used in the book are authentic to the
story's setting; they also point out that Jim is by far the most heroic
character in the novel, and is the only major character to demonstrate kindness
and self-sacrifice without hesitation. The book has generated so much critical
material that a special edition containing both the novel and several important
essays was published by Bedford Books in 1995 under the title Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy, edited by
Gerald Graff and James Phelan.
Despite the controversy surrounding
the book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is widely recognized as
Twain's masterpiece, and is often identified as “the Great American Novel.”
Respected writers such as William Faulkner and T. S. Eliot have written of the
book's importance to American literature. And although critics have been
divided on the book's merits since its first publication, Pulitzer and Nobel
Prize–winning author Ernest Hemingway, in Green Hills of Africa,
offers The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn its most well-known and
enduring compliment:
All modern American literature comes
from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.... All American writing
comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good
since.
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
which takes place along the Mississippi River sometime in the 1830s or 1840s,
begins with two brief statements to the reader that appear before Chapter 1;
both of these display Twain's trademark sense of humor. In the first, under the
heading “Notice,” Twain warns readers against attempting to find any sort of
deep meaning in the book. He lists different punishments for readers who seek
motive, moral, or plot within the narrative. The second, called “Explanatory,”
assures readers that the dialects used by different characters in the book are
based on real regional dialects, and have been researched thoroughly. As Twain
notes, “I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers
would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not
succeeding.”
The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn is written as a first-person narrative from the point of view of the
title character, Huckleberry (or Huck) Finn. Huck addresses the reader directly
throughout the work, and occasionally refers to events that occurred in one of
Twain's previous works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in which Huck
was a supporting character. Of the previous book, Huck notes, “That book was
made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.”
Huck picks up his story where it left
off in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: he and Tom, two boys who live on the
Mississippi River in the Missouri town of St. Petersburg, found a large amount
of gold left by robbers in a cave. The money—amounting to six thousand dollars
each—has been put in the care of Judge Thatcher, who gives the boys interest earnings
in the amount of one dollar each day. Huck has been unofficially adopted by the
Widow Douglas (to the apparent dismay of her sister Miss Watson), who hopes to
transform the rough-edged boy into a forthright young man. For Huck, such a
life is too restrictive; as he puts it, “All I wanted was to go somewheres; all
I wanted was a change.”
One night Tom Sawyer shows up to take
Huck to a secret meeting with some other boys; as they sneak away from the
house, one of Miss Watson's slaves—Jim—hears the boys, who carefully evade him.
Tom takes the group of boys to a cave along the river. He plans to start a gang
of highway robbers to terrorize the local roadways, killing and ransoming the
men travelers and kidnapping the women—who, according to the plan, would
eventually fall in love with them. The group discusses the logistics of such an
operation, including what a “ransom” is and what happens when the robbers' cave
becomes overfilled with kidnapped women and men waiting to be ransomed. Soon
enough, Huck realizes that Tom's gang of robbers is only meant to engage in
pretend robberies; this disappoints him, though he still plays along. Tom also
tells Huck how to summon a genie from a tin lamp; Huck later tries this without
success, and decides “all that stuff was only just one of Tom Sawyer's lies.”
Over the next several months, Huck
becomes accustomed to his life with Widow Douglas and Miss Watson. He even
starts growing fond of school. One morning, Huck finds tracks in the snow
outside the widow's house; he is certain they belong to his father, called Pap,
an abusive drunk whom Huck has not seen for over a year. Huck immediately
visits Judge Thatcher and gives up his fortune to keep his father from getting
hold of it, selling it to the judge for a single dollar.
Huck returns to his room one night to
find Pap waiting for him. Pap threatens to beat Huck if he continues going to
school. Pap tells him, “You've put on considerable many frills since I been
away. I'll take you down a peg before I get done with you.” Then Pap takes
Huck's only dollar to buy whisky.
Pap visits Judge Thatcher in an
attempt to get at Huck's money. Thatcher and Widow Douglas try to secure legal
guardianship of Huck, but the judge who hears the case is not willing to
“interfere” and officially break up Huck's “family.” Later, the same judge
takes Pap into his home in an attempt to help him straighten his life out. Pap
promises to reform, but he continues to drink and gets kicked out of the
judge's house.
Pap persists in his legal fight for
Huck's money, and occasionally beats his son for continuing to attend school.
As Huck states, “I didn't want to go to school much, before, but I reckoned I'd
go now to spite pap.” Eventually, Pap snatches Huck and takes him to a secluded
log cabin on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, where he keeps the boy
against his will. Kept away from the widow, Huck soon returns to his
comfortable old ways, wearing rags for clothes, smoking, and swearing. Pap
beats him regularly, however, and Huck waits for a chance to escape.
One morning, while checking some
fishing lines, Huck spots an empty canoe drifting down the river. He hides the
canoe to help when he makes his escape. Later that day, Pap leaves for town,
and Huck sees his chance. He stages the cabin so it appears that someone has
broken in and killed him, and that his body is somewhere in the river. This, he
believes, will keep Pap and Widow Douglas from trying to track him down. He
takes the canoe, stocked with some food and tools, to a heavily wooded island
in the middle of the river called Jackson's Island.
The next morning, Huck wakes to the
sound of cannon fire; he sees smoke near the ferryboat upriver, and figures out
what is happening. “You see, they was firing cannon over the water, trying to
make my carcass come to the top.” The ferry draws closer to the island, and
Huck sees many people he knows aboard it, including Pap, Judge Thatcher, and
Tom Sawyer. Once the ferry departs, Huck knows they will not return.
After a few days of camping and
fishing, Huck finds evidence of others nearby. He leaves for a different part
of the island, and is surprised when he sees Miss Watson's slave Jim camped
alone in the woods. Huck approaches, but Jim—thinking Huck has died—is
terrified by what he assumes to be Huck's ghost. Huck explains how he escaped
from Pap's cabin, and asks why Jim is out in the woods. Jim tells Huck that he
ran off when he heard Miss Watson was planning to sell him to a slave trader
from New Orleans. Huck promises not to tell Jim's secret to anybody.
Huck and Jim find a large cavern in
the center of the island, and decide it would make a suitable camp protected
from the elements. One night, they see a frame house drifting down along the
river; they row the canoe out to it and climb inside, where they find a dead
man who has been shot in the back. Jim covers the dead man's face and tells
Huck not to look at it. The two also find some supplies in the house, including
some knives, candles, and a hatchet, which they gather up and take with them.
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Q3. Comment on the theme of Wallace Steven’s
poem ‘The Emperor of Ice-cream’.
The Emperor of Ice-Cream" is one
of the most well-known poems by American Modernist poet Wallace Stevens. The
poem appears in Stevens's widely influential debut collection, Harmonium,
which was published in 1923. The meaning of the poem is notoriously ambiguous,
but its two equal-length stanzas present clear enough scenarios. An old woman
has died, and in the first stanza the speaker issues instructions to others for
the funeral or wake. In the second stanza, the speaker appears to be in a
quieter room with the woman's cold, dead body. Here, the speaker seems to issue
a mysterious plea for reality to be stripped of illusory appearances. Readers
have often interpreted the poem as showing the ultimate triumph of life over
the silence of death. This isn't necessarily some heroic victory, but rather a
wider point about the nature of experience.
Bring in the big strong man who makes
cigars, and tell him to get to work making ice cream from lusty curds of
milk. Tell the women they can wear whatever they normally wear, and tell
the boys to bring flowers wrapped up in old newspaper. Let reality triumph
over illusion. There's only one real emperor: the emperor of ice cream.
Inside a drawer of the pine dresser
(which is missing three of its glass knobs) you'll find a bedsheet belonging to
the dead woman, one which she herself stitched with elaborate
patterns. Lay it over her body and make sure her face is covered. If
her feet (with their bunions and toes like horns) stick out at the bottom, it's
just to remind us that she's cold and dead. Fix the lamplight on her in
full glare. There's only one real emperor—the emperor of ice cream.
The Emperor of Ice Cream” is one of
Wallace Stevens’s most famous and most notoriously ambiguous poems.
It’s hard to pin down the poem’s themes precisely—indeed, that’s probably
deliberate on Stevens’s part—but the poem definitely presents
a juxtaposition between the way things appear to be and the
way things actually are. The mysterious speaker of the poem seems to
construct an argument in favor of acknowledging reality—including the finality
of death—over being deceived by illusory appearances.
The poem takes place at a wake or
funeral, with preparations taking place in what appears to be someone's home.
The first stanza is about making these ritualistic preparations for the
ceremony, while the second stanza discusses how to handle the dead body
(revealed to be that of an old woman). In both sections, the speaker fixates on
the contrast between “being” and “seeming”—between reality and appearances.
For example, the speaker tells the
“wenches” to put on the “dress […] they are used to wear.” The word “wenches”
might refer female servants, prostitutes, or simply girls; in any case, these
are implied to be working-class women whose typical “dress” wouldn't be fancy.
Flowers, meanwhile, should be brought wrapped in “last month’s newspapers.”
These two instructions perhaps
reflect the speaker’s wish to strip any illusory appearances from reality. That
is, the women shouldn’t dress in a way that is somehow different, and the
flowers similarly don’t require fancy ribbons or wrapping paper. In fact, the
flowers’ covering might even be thought of as actually capturing reality, as the
newspapers report actual events. The poem suggests that there’s no real benefit
to dressing things up to seem better than they are—especially in
the face of death (again, this all takes place at a wake or funeral of some
sort).
This idea is strengthened by the last
two lines of the first stanza: “Let be be finale of seem. / The only emperor is
the emperor of ice cream.” The first of these two lines addresses this theme
head on: let “be” (how things actually are) “be" the "finale” (the
ending) of “seem” (false appearances). In other words, let reality dispel the
magic of illusions. Perhaps this relates to death, with the speaker expressing
the way that death, as life’s only real certainty, strips away any world of
appearances that people might construct for themselves during their earthly
lives.
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The repeated line about the “emperor
of ice cream” also seems to strengthen this reading. An “emperor of ice-cream”
is a kind of oxymoron: emperors are supposed to be mighty, powerful
figures, meaning that being an emperor of ice-cream sounds like a
kind of joke title. This might be similar to the fable of the emperor’s new
clothes, suggesting that power is itself a kind of illusion (and therefore
an appearance that needs to be replaced by reality).
The speaker’s instructions for the
handling of the dead body also contribute to this implicit argument against
illusory appearances. Though the speaker wants the body to be covered with
“embroidered fantails” (a decorative sheet) as a kind of tribute to the woman,
it doesn’t matter whether it fully covers her. If her feet poke out, then so be
it; they are simply a reflection of the stark reality that this woman is
“cold,” dead, and “dumb.”
Accordingly, the “lamp” should “affix
its beam”—it should cast an unflinching light on reality for all to see. And as
if to underscore this point, the poem then repeats its key line: “The only
emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.” People shouldn’t put so much emphasis on
appearances, the poem suggests, and should instead embrace the reality of life,
death, and who they are.
Though it’s not spelled out
explicitly, “The Emperor of Ice Cream” appears to suggest that life is fleeting
and, because of that, precious. The poem often focuses on life's sensuality—the
experience and pleasure of the world as known through the senses, such as
taste. It opposes that sensuality to the “cold” and numbness of death. In doing
so, it gently nudges its readers to contemplate this opposition. That is, the
poem seems to argue for the importance of living life to its fullest, because
death is inevitable. Savoring joy and pleasure—eating that delicious
“ice-cream”—is thus all that really matters.
The poem takes place at a wake (an
obvious representation of death) but everything about the speaker’s
instructions for the wake celebrates the sensuous pleasures of being
alive. In particular, the poem’s focus on ice cream foregrounds the importance
of sensory enjoyment. Indeed, the first instruction issued by the speaker is to
fetch a strong cigar-maker—“the muscular one.” The mention of the man's muscles
has sexual undertones, which is likewise supported by the presence of
“wenches,” a sexually loaded and archaic term for women. In this way, then, the
kitchen scene of the poem is subtly governed by the presence of sensual and
sexual pleasure.
Yet this pleasure won't last forever.
After all, cigars burn out, ice cream melts. Like sex, these suggest a
fleeting, precious kind of enjoyment. Ironically, the dead body in the
poem does the opposite of ice cream, easily becoming cold. Ice cream, then, is
a complicated symbol. On one hand, it speaks to life's sensual pleasure.
On the other hand, in linking with the "cold" dead body, it
represents the knowledge of inevitable death, which creates the need to embrace
sensuality in the first place.
The speaker’s other instructions also
link sensuality with the vividness of life. The image of “flowers in last
month’s newspapers” contrasts symbols of life's briefness and
beauty—flowers—with the discarded waste of the past: newspapers. Again, this
can be read as a subtle argument in favor of valuing life through the enjoyment
of the senses. In other words, it’s worth stopping to smell the flowers, since
time inevitably marches forward and everything will eventually become old news.
This idea also applies to the use of
the specific bedsheet for covering the body. The dead woman, when she was
alive, once engaged in a kind of sensory pleasure: the embroidery of beautiful
patterning (“fantails”). This embroidery was an aesthetic pursuit not necessary
to the cloth itself. Mentioning the embroidery acknowledges the worth of this
kind of human activity, which is motivated by beauty rather than just survival.
Additionally, one of the most
engaging aspects of the poem is its beautiful use of sound patterning
through consonance, assonance, and alliteration. This is
established right from the beginning, as the mysterious speaker begins the
instructions for the servants. The /l/ consonance in the first line, the /i/
assonance in lines 2-3, and many other examples throughout the poem are in
themselves sensuous events, pleasing to the reader’s ear. These sounds
help build a vivid picture of a scene alive with sensuality.
In this reading, then, the
"emperor" of the poem’s title doesn't necessarily have anything to do
with power and authority in the usual sense. This isn't a real emperor,
perhaps, but a personification of the love of sensuous beauty and
pleasure, of celebrating life in all its fleeting glory. The speaker states
emphatically that all other emperors pale in comparison to the "emperor of
ice cream." No amount of power, the poem suggests, can c
"The Emperor of Ice Cream"
opens by immediately establishing its imperative voice—the speaker's
instructions using present-tense verbs like "Call," "bid,"
"Let," and so on. This gives the poem a ceremonial atmosphere right
from the start, the speaker taking on the role of organizer for some kind of
ritual (which gradually reveals itself to be a funeral or wake). The first
instruction, then, is issued in lines 1-3. Here, the speaker summons the
"roller of big cigars" (a "muscular" man). He then says
that the man should be instructed ("bid him") to start making ice
cream ("concupiscent curds") for the funeral/wake.
Even just in the space of three
lines, the poem introduces a number of its key features, in addition to the
imperative voice. One of the poem's major themes is finding a kind of aesthetic
pleasure in everyday experience, and the poem's language is tuned precisely to
make the poem itself, in its way, delicious. So the first line goes straight in
with prominent consonance and a little assonance, while lines 2
and 3 add alliteration and much more consonance and assonance too.
This involves /l/, /g/, /r/, /k/, /p/, /n/, /s/, and short /i/ sounds
Call the
roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Stevens's poetry often delights in
the sound of language, and the poem is just as concerned with this kind of
pursuit as it is with any literal meaning. This amounts to
a performance of sensuality—after all, even a funeral is a kind of
show.
"[C]oncupiscent curds" is
Stevens's deliberately gaudy way of saying ice cream, which is one of the
poem's main symbols. The word "concupiscent" relates to sexual
desire, which also ties in with the innuendo of "big cigars" (hinting
at male genitalia). And "curds" are coagulated bits of milk used in
cheesemaking. Here, they're meant to poetically suggest the thick sensuousness
of ice cream. Additionally, while ice cream is cold to the touch—like the dead
woman's body—it also symbolizes a kind of revelry in the senses, with its sweet
and thrillingly cold taste. It also—like life—doesn't tend to last that long!
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Q4. Discuss on the appropriateness of the title
Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye.
The Bluest Eye provides an
extended depiction of the ways in which internalized white beauty standards
deform the lives of Black girls and women. Implicit messages that whiteness is
superior are everywhere, including the white baby doll given to Claudia, the
idealization of Shirley Temple, the consensus that light-skinned Maureen is
cuter than the other Black girls, the idealization of white beauty in the
movies, and Pauline Breedlove’s preference for the little white girl she works
for over her daughter. Adult women, having learned to hate the Blackness of
their own bodies, take this hatred out on their children—Mrs. Breedlove shares
the conviction that Pecola is ugly, and lighter-skinned Geraldine curses
Pecola’s Blackness. Claudia remains free from this worship of whiteness,
imagining Pecola’s unborn baby as beautiful in its Blackness. But it is hinted
that once Claudia reaches adolescence, she too will learn to hate herself, as
if racial self-loathing were a necessary part of maturation.
The person who suffers most from
white beauty standards is, of course, Pecola. She connects beauty with being
loved and believes that if she possesses blue eyes, the cruelty in her life
will be replaced by affection and respect. This hopeless desire leads
ultimately to madness, suggesting that the fulfillment of the wish for white
beauty may be even more tragic than the wish impulse itself.
Seeing
versus Being Seen
Pecola’s desire for blue eyes, while
highly unrealistic, is based on one correct insight into her world: she
believes that the cruelty she witnesses and experiences is connected to how she
is seen. If she had beautiful blue eyes, Pecola imagines, people would not want
to do ugly things in front of her or to her. The accuracy of this insight is
affirmed by her experience of being teased by the boys—when Maureen comes to
her rescue, it seems that they no longer want to behave badly under Maureen’s
attractive gaze. In a more basic sense, Pecola and her family are mistreated in
part because they happen to have black skin. By wishing for blue eyes rather
than lighter skin, Pecola indicates that she wishes to see things differently
as much as she wishes to be seen differently. She can only receive this wish,
in effect, by blinding herself. Pecola is then able to see herself as
beautiful, but only at the cost of her ability to see accurately both herself
and the world around her. The connection between how one is seen and what one
sees has a uniquely tragic outcome for her.
The Power of
Stories
The Bluest Eye is not one story,
but multiple, sometimes contradictory, interlocking stories. Characters tell
stories to make sense of their lives, and these stories have tremendous power
for both good and evil. Claudia’s stories, in particular, stand out for their
affirmative power. First and foremost, she tells Pecola’s story, and though she
questions the accuracy and meaning of her version, to some degree her attention
and care redeem the ugliness of Pecola’s life. Furthermore, when the adults
describe Pecola’s pregnancy and hope that the baby dies, Claudia and Frieda
attempt to rewrite this story as a hopeful one, casting themselves as saviors.
Finally, Claudia resists the premise of white superiority, writing her own
story about the beauty of Blackness. Stories by other characters are often
destructive to themselves and others. The story Pauline Breedlove tells herself
about her own ugliness reinforces her self-hatred, and the story she tells
herself about her own martyrdom reinforces her cruelty toward her family.
Soaphead Church’s personal narratives about his good intentions and his special
relationship with God are pure hypocrisy. Stories are as likely to distort the
truth as they are to reveal it. While Morrison apparently believes that stories
can be redeeming, she is no blind optimist and refuses to let us rest
comfortably in any one version of what happens.
Sexual
Initiation and Abuse
To a large degree, The Bluest
Eye is about both the pleasures and the perils of sexual initiation. Early
in the novel, Pecola has her first menstrual period, and toward the novel’s end
she has her first sexual experience, which is violent. Frieda knows about and
anticipates menstruating, and she is initiated into sexual experience when she
is fondled by Henry Washington. We are told the story of Cholly’s first sexual
experience, which ends when two white men force him to finish having sex while
they watch. The fact that all of these experiences are humiliating and hurtful
indicates that sexual coming-of-age is fraught with peril, especially in an
abusive environment.
In the novel, parents carry much of
the blame for their children’s often traumatic sexual coming-of-age. The most
blatant case is Cholly’s rape of his own daughter, Pecola, which is, in a
sense, a repetition of the sexual humiliation Cholly experienced under the gaze
of two racist whites. Frieda’s experience is less painful than Pecola’s because
her parents immediately come to her rescue, playing the appropriate protector
and underlining, by way of contrast, the extent of Cholly’s crime against his
daughter.
But Frieda is not given information
that lets her understand what has happened to her. Instead, she lives with a
vague fear of being “ruined” like the local prostitutes. The prevalence of
sexual violence in the novel suggests that racism is not the only thing that
distorts Black girlhoods. There is also a pervasive assumption that women’s
bodies are available for abuse. The refusal on the part of parents to teach
their girls about sexuality makes the girls’ transition into sexual maturity
difficult.
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Q5. Attempt a critical reading of A Clean Well
Lighted Place
Late in the early morning hours, in a
Spanish cafe, an old man drinks brandy. A young waiter is angry; he wishes that
the old man would leave so that he and an older waiter could close the cafe and
go home. He insults the deaf old man and is painfully indifferent to the older
waiter's feelings when he states that "an old man is a nasty thing."
The older waiter, however, realizes that the old man drinking brandy after
brandy is not nasty; he is only lonely. No doubt, that's the reason why the old
man tried to hang himself last week.
When the old man leaves, the waiters
close the cafe. The young waiter leaves for home, and the older waiter walks to
an all-night cafe where, thinking about the terrible emptiness of the old man's
life which he keenly identifies with, he orders a cup of nada from the waiter.
A cup of nothing. The man who takes the order thinks that the old waiter is
just another crazy old man; he brings him coffee.
Finishing the coffee, the older
waiter begins his trudge homeward. Sleep is hours away. Until then, he must try
to cope bravely with the dark nothingness of the night.
Analysis
What happens in this story? Nothing.
What do the characters stand for? Nothing. What is the plot? Nothing. In fact,
because there is no plot, Hemingway enables us to focus absolutely on the
story's meaning — that is, in a world characterized by nothingness, what
possible action could take place? Likewise, that no character has a name and
that there is no characterization emphasize the sterility of this world.
What then is the theme of this story?
Nothing, or nothingness. This is exactly what the story is about: nothingness
and the steps we take against it. When confronting a world that is meaningless,
how is someone who has rejected all of the old values, someone who is now
completely alone — how is that person supposed to face this barren world? How
is that person able to avoid the darkness of nada, or nothingness?
The setting is a clean Spanish cafe,
where two unnamed waiters — one old and one young — are discussing an old man
(also unnamed) who comes every night, sits alone, and drinks brandy until past
closing time. The young waiter mentions that the old man tried to commit
suicide last week. When the old waiter asks why the old man tried to commit
suicide, the young waiter tells him that the old man was consumed by despair.
"Why?" asks the old waiter. "Nothing," answers the young
waiter.
The young waiter reveals that there
is absolutely no reason to commit suicide if one has money — which he's heard
the old man has. For the young waiter, money solves all problems. For an old,
rich man to try to commit suicide over the despair of confronting nothingness
is beyond the young waiter's understanding. However, nothingness is the reason
that the old man comes to the cafe every night and drinks until he is drunk.
In contrast, the old waiter knows all
about despair, for he remains for some time after the lights have gone off at the
clean, earlier well-lighted cafe. The old waiter also knows fear. "It was
not fear or dread," Hemingway says of the old waiter, "it was a
nothing that he knew too well. It was a nothing and a man was nothing
too." After stopping for a drink at a cheap, all-night bar, the old waiter
knows that he will not sleep until morning, when it is light.
The story emphasizes lateness — late
not only in terms of the hour of the morning (it's almost 3 A.M.), but also in
terms of the old man's and the old waiter's lives. Most important, however, is
the emphasis on religious traditions — specifically, on the Spanish Catholic
tradition, because faith in the promises of Catholicism can no longer support
or console these old men. Thus, suicide is inviting.
The old man who drinks brandy at the
clean, well-lighted cafe is literally deaf, just as he is metaphorically deaf
to the outmoded traditions of Christianity and Christian promises: He cannot
hear them any more. He is alone, he is isolated, sitting in the shadow left by nature
in the modern, artificial world. Additionally, all of the light remaining is
artificial light — in this clean, "well-lighted" cafe.
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What is important in the story is not
only the condition of nothingness in the world but the way that the old man and
the old waiter feel and respond to this nothingness. Thus, Hemingway's real
subject matter is the feeling of man's condition of nothingness — and not the
nothingness itself. Note, though, that neither of the old men is a passive
victim. The old man has his dignity. And when the young waiter says that old
men are nasty, the old waiter does not deny the general truth of this
statement, but he does come to the defense of the old man by pointing out that
this particular old man is clean and that he likes to drink brandy in a clean,
well-lighted place. And the old man does leave with dignity. This is not much —
this aged scrap of human dignity — in the face of the human condition of
nothingness, but, Hemingway is saying, sometimes it is all that we have.
The young waiter wants the old man to
go to one of the all-night cafes, but the old waiter objects because he
believes in the importance of cleanliness and light. Here, in this well-lighted
cafe, the light is a manmade symbol of man's attempt to hold off the darkness —
not permanently, but as late as possible. The old man's essential loneliness is
less intolerable in light, where there is dignity. The danger of being alone,
in darkness, in nothingness, is suicide.
At this point, we can clearly see
differences between the old waiter and the young waiter — especially in their
antithetical attitudes toward the old man. Initially, however, the comments of
both waiters concerning a passing soldier and a young girl seem very much
alike; they both seem to be cynical. Yet when the young waiter says of the old
man, "I wouldn't want to be that old. An old man is a nasty thing,"
then we see a clear difference between the two waiters because the old waiter
defends the old man: "This old man is clean. He drinks without spilling. Even
now, drunk."
The young waiter refuses to serve the
old man another drink because he wants to get home to his wife, and, in
contrast, the old waiter is resentful of the young waiter's behavior. The old
waiter knows what it is like to have to go home in the dark; he himself will
not go home to sleep until daybreak — when he will not have to fall asleep in
the nothingness of darkness.
Thus, in a sense, the old waiter is
partially Hemingway's spokesperson because he points out that the old man
leaves the cafe walking with dignity; he affirms the cleanliness of the old
man. Unlike the young waiter, who is impetuous and has a wife to go home to,
the old waiter is unhurried because he has no one waiting for him; he has no
place to go except to his empty room. The old waiter is wiser, more tolerant,
and more sensitive than the young waiter.
What Hemingway is saying is this: In
order to hold nothingness, darkness, nada at bay, we must have light,
cleanliness, order (or discipline), and dignity. If everything else has failed,
man must have something to resort to or else the only option is suicide — and
that is the ultimate end of everything: "It is all nothing that he knew
too well. It was all nothing and a man was nothing. It was only that and light
. . . and a certain cleanness and order."
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