R's blog

I've been meaning to post a notice here forever saying that I no longer use this blog for anything except commenting on other people's blogger blogs, and archiving some writing. But, y'know, I'm absentminded... So I'm only just getting around to it!

Anyway! Yes, this is a mostly-dead blog. You can find my more blogly activities at my LiveJournal these days, and I've also got a website (RobynFleming.com) that you can check out. Hope to see you at one of those places soon!

For those working on Jude the Obscure, here are the summaries I wrote for the articles I... summarized. I thought it might be helpful if we post them, so that we can get an idea of what's out there that we might not have read because the title didn't convey it. If you want to use any of the articles I've written on, talk to me/email me and we can do some photocopying stuff one way or another.

Doheny, John R. “Characterization in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: The Function of
Arabella.” Reading Thomas Hardy. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. 57-82

Doheny begins with the idea that “by its very nature, the novel is too large and contains too much life, to function effectively as polemic.” He proposes that Hardy “is so thoroughly engaged with his characters as representations of people, [that] his characters overcome his engagement, and…take on a life of their own” in Jude the Obscure. In the rest of his essay, he discusses specifically the characterization of Arabella in the novel, and how she functions to illuminate the attitudes of both Jude and Hardy. Interestingly, he convincingly portrays Arabella as something of a wronged possible protagonist, claiming that Jude is “a desperate snob who insists that Arabella is beneath him in sensitivity, intelligence, and sophistication”. He seems at many points to feel that the character of Jude himself is unworthy of attention, and that the novel ought to have focused on the more practical and worldly Arabella.
But though I expected Doheny to try to establish a complex characterization for Arabella, based on his grandiose opening ideas about the nature of novels, he never does so in this article. Instead, he eventually admits that “Arabella is a developed but comparatively uncomplicated character”. I think that this essay can be very useful in my paper because of the issues of development and complication of characterization that it raises, especially since, though Doheny would clearly very much like to, he is unable to actually propose Arabella as a fully realized female character.

Dutta, Shanta. “Sue’s “Obscure” Sisters”. Thomas Hardy Journal 12 (1996) 60-71.

In this essay, Shanta Dutta compares Hardy to Olive Schreiner, who wrote The Story of an African Farm, and George Egerton (penname of Mary Chavelita Clairmonte), with whom Hardy apparently had direct correspondence as he was finishing Jude. Dutta discusses the ways in which all three authors wrote about the “New Woman”, focusing particularly on the similarities of the heroine’s feelings about love, sex and the institution of marriage. The article never makes a strong argument, but rather makes observations and shows that Hardy may have been influenced by the two female authors, since he owned a book by the one and corresponded through letters with the other.
Of greatest interest to me was a short comparison in which Dutta observes that “[o]ne image common to [all three authors] is that of the captive/caged bird which represents woman’s sense of entrapment within the narrow role assigned to her by patriarchal society.” It is suggested that this image evokes “claustrophobia, a passionate yearning for liberty, a frustrated chafing against the oppressive rigidity of the iron bars.” In light of the images of Sue as a bird that I observed in my own earlier paper, I feel that this section of the article has particular relevance.

Larson, Jil. “Sexual Ethics in Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman Writers.”
Rereading Victorian Fiction. Houndmills, England: Palgrave, 2002. 159-72.

This article discusses Hardy’s commonalities with women writers, specifically Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand. Larson established early in her text that “[i]n contrast to earlier Victorian novelists, these writers critique a sexual ideology that punishes women for acting on their emotions and desires.” She claims that they do this by associating “emotion with women but no longer diminish women’s power by doing so” and that they “arm” their female characters with “intellect and education” instead of causing them to rely on “emotions and desires that lead them to indirect forms of influence and manipulation.” Her main argument is that Hardy is, in fact, one of these “New Woman” writers, and that he “shares both the feminist concerns” and the “ethically complex treatment of emotion, reason and gender.” She attempts to establish this by showing the similarities between Sue’s behavior and that of the characters of Schreiner and Grand. After a long section of such comparison, she sums up by noting “[a]ll three of the women in these novels evade commitment and seek to gain emotional satisfaction from their relationships with men in daring, unpredictable, intellectually self-conscious ways.”
Larson then discusses how the characterization of these women and what happens to them in the novels is affected by external influences. She claims that the depressing endings reveal “not the author’s beliefs about what the New Woman’s fate should be, but his or her recognition of what it most often was.” She wraps up her essay with the assertion that all three authors “delineate a subtle, complex and ethically promising relationship between emotion and reason in the lives of these early feminists.”

Renner, Stanley. “Mary Teller and Sue Bridehead: Birds of a Feather in “The White
Quail” and Jude the Obscure.” Steinbeck Quarterly 18 (1985) 35-45.

Stanley Renner compares similarities between the main female characters in Jude and a short story by Steinbeck. He discusses in detail their physical similarities (both women are invariably described as “pretty”) and their similarities in attitudes towards marriage, love and sex. After concretely establishing that the authors are writing about similar themes through extremely similar female characters, he goes on to propose that both authors are establishing “the incompatibility between the spiritualization of love and the natural sexual instincts of the male”, telling “a larger story of the trouble in marriage caused by the spiritualization of love.”
Of particular interest to me in this article is the way in which Renner discusses the physical attributes of the two heroines. It is interesting that he shows the similarities between them exhaustively, comparing their prettiness (the “insistent epithet”), showing that both women are described at some point as somehow fey, and so on. However, though he describes how Mary Teller is equated with the symbol of the white quail, he apparently has not picked up on the imagery of Sue as a bird in Jude, and leaves that parallel unremarked. He does, however, discuss in detail what the symbolism of the bird in “The White Quail” might be, and I think that this will be helpful in my own paper. Though it was published in the Steinbeck Quarterly, I really found this article to be the most helpful of those I’ve had a chance to review extensively so far.

Simpson, Anne B. “Sue Bridehead Revisited.” Victorian Literature and Culture 19
(1991) 55-66

Anne Simpson opens with a brief gesture towards traditional interpretations of Sue Bridehead’s role within Jude the Obscure, summing up with “Sue has been positioned by generations of critics at varying intervals along a continuum of liberation.” She discusses some of these positions, and the essential (and often conflicting) characteristics that Sue has often been reduced to. She states that “[e]vident in most of the criticism is the wish to establish Sue as a signifying element which on scrutiny will yield a comprehensible signified”, and then continues in the rest of her article to show that this is not possible. Simpson argues that Sue seems “undefinable” because she actually is, at least within the world of the novel, and of masculine discourse. Sue “occupies a liminal space that cannot be articulated even by herself in standardized conceptions and words as they have been formulated by men.” She argues that Sue, therefore, is an exhortation to readers to “think beyond the confines” of the text, rather than an intellectual problem that can actually be solved. She concludes by saying that “[r]evisiting Sue Bridehead affords an opportunity for the creative investigation of strategies of knowing.”

I’m sure I’m not the only person who was deterred by the dry “legalese” language of the No Child Left Behind excerpts we were to read for this week. I definitely did some skimming, and had to backtrack and reread things a few times to be sure that I was actually making sense of the words, rather than just letting my eyes run over them. It was because I was doing this, thinking hard about the sense of each statement, that I became interested in the particular words that are being used in this document to describe the objectives of the act. Mainly, I found myself intrigued by statements like the one indicating that the act will provide “an enriched and accelerated educational program” while at the same time, it will ensure that all children will “reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging State academic achievement standards and state academic assessments.”

My attention was also caught by the constant references to how local schools needed to somehow be made accountable (as though they are not now…?) for the education of their students, and the sort of implication throughout the document that teachers aren’t any good at what they do, and all need to be retrained, or possibly replaced with members of the armed forces. But mainly, it was that stuff right in the beginning that got me going. Reaching “proficiency on challenging State academic achievement standards and…assessments” sure sounds like teaching to a test, to me. And I believe that that is incompatible with any kind of “enriched” educational program. Honestly, I can not say enough bad things about the AIMS test. A brief overview of my loathing for that “academic assessment” would include a mention of how I myself failed the math portion twice before passing, and barely slipped by on the language sections, though I generally am a very good test-taker, and have done extremely well on other standardized tests in the past. I’d have to note that the valedictorian for my graduating class, a truly brilliant young woman who has the intelligence and drive and mental stamina to be pursuing an architecture degree right now, never did finish passing all the sections of AIMS. I’d have to go on at length about how the results of AIMS and other standardized tests are almost as good at showing ethnicity and class differences between schools as actual demographic surveys, since minorities and underprivileged students tend to do very poorly on such “academic achievement standards and...assessments.” How is that going to stack up with the goal of “closing the achievement gap…especially…between minority and nonminority students, and between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers”?

Maybe if we pound trivial, taught-to-the-test information into their brains enough, we –can- close that gap between students who do poorly on standardized tests as a result of their backgrounds rather than through any deficiency in intelligence or desire to learn… But then what will we have? On the one hand, it’d be great if everyone could pass those damn assessments, because then we could stop pretending that there are real mental differences between different groups of people… and I’m sure that having that nicely stamped high school diploma would help a bunch of kids get better jobs, or into better training programs. But I don’t think that that would be an education. Certainly, it wouldn’t be an “enriched” one.

I haven’t read anyone else’s blog yet, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who was confused by the second half of Old School. I can’t seem to think of anything else to write about, so perhaps it may be useful for me to examine the things that bothered me. First was that the narrative in the first half (and for a short period thereafter) seemed to follow a roughly straight line, moving forward, with few flashbacks or digressions, in a fairly orderly progression of time. The narrator didn’t exactly show us things happening day by day, but large chunks of time were not skipped – everything took place one thing after another over the course of a school year, more or less. In the second half of the book, this is no longer true. It feels like the narrator is skipping stones across the pond of his life, where before he was wading at a smooth pace through the water. We stop briefly in his time as an enlisted member of the army, then skip on until he meets with Susan Friedman, then skip on again until the narrator is invited to speak at his old school. To me, it felt very disjointed, especially when the book closes with the story of Dean Makepeace’s accidental lie about Hemingway. I was left wondering “What happened to the –narrator-?” When I started reading this book, I had certain expectations about how it would end. I thought, as I read the first few chapters, “this book is about the narrator’s last year at this school. It will end when he graduates, or shortly before or after.” When that eventuality was precluded by him being kicked out of school, I revised my prediction. I thought “now the narrator must come to terms with his mistake, and make peace with it somehow. The story will end when he either learns to do that, or overcomes it somehow, possibly with good personal and professional success.” No doubt, his becoming a well-known enough literary figure to be invited back to his own school would have been a reasonably suitable ending for that purpose. But instead, we end with someone else’s story entirely. I don’t know what to make of it, and it’s been bugging me for over a week.

What the novel actually definitively ends with gives me less trouble. The last line ends with “His father, when he saw him coming, ran to meet him”, which seems to be very appropriate. In the part of the narrative where it actually appears, it describes Arch’s feeling of homecoming. I think it also describes in a way how the adults of that particular world of academia are in a way like children themselves their whole professional lives, even as they teach actual children. They are sheltered by the insular world of the private school, and Arch’s story certainly seems to show that they do not do well away from it. That sentiment, speaking about a father, authority figures, seeming to speak of affection and comfort and protection, also seems to describe what the narrator wants at the beginning of the book, and possibly at the end as well. He wants someone to come running to meet him, to acknowledge him and support him in that safe way that fathers do.

I sense that there is more meaning to be unpacked from this line, and wish I knew what it was from, exactly. It definitely seems to have a biblical theme or connection, but since it was offered almost as a quote, I thought it might be from somethign else, as well. As an interesting aside, I ran a quick internet search to see if I could turn it up, and got an interesting article, linked at http://www.gallerybooks.com/bkm/wob031102.html

The thing that I found most interesting about this first section of Old School is that though we know our narrator is attending a school, what he learns is never in the classroom, and always comes from personal interactions with other characters or directly from books that he reads. This learning takes many forms, and is sometimes more useful than other times. For example, he appears to learn a good deal about writing stories and poetry from reading the efforts of his classmates, but it is debatable whether what he learns is “good” actually is or not. Myself, I found the “You bitch, said Montague. You perfectly beautiful bitch” line from Bill White’s novel (11) laughably pretentious. The whole concept of these young, sheltered boys writing about a hard-bitten convict “smoking his last cigarette while pouring daringly profane contempt over the judgment of a world that punishes you for one measly murder while ignoring the murder of millions” (7) was to me quite silly. But, of course, it also struck a chord with my own experiences. I wrote my fair share of dreadful, self-absorbed, depressed and depressing poetry as an adolescent.

The other major way in which the narrator learns also hit close to home for me. I saw in his devouring of The Fountainhead the same behavior that I exhibited back when I read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged for the first time. I was as fascinated by Dagny and Reardon as he was by Dominique and Roark. I, too, was seduced by the elitist, hyper-capitalist propaganda embedded in Rand’s work. And, to my embarrassment, the flirtation that the narrator has with Rain over a provocative passage in the book is a perfect stand-in for my own high-school experience of finding out that a young man I was attracted to was reading Atlas Shrugged.

So other than being a series of moderately interesting anecdotes relating my personal life to the text, what is the point of this? The point is that I can’t help but wonder how true this stuff is for other members of our class. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who has written regrettable metaphors as a younger writer, or whose reach exceeded her grasp in writing short stories… Can the events of learning in the novel be said to be universal? How many of us have had an experience of being seduced and ultimately disillusioned by a text, like the narrator’s, if not directly that of being so affected by Ayn Rand’s work? It seems to me that though Tobias Wolff has written about a very specific institution of education, that of a private boarding school in New England at a certain point in history, the education that he has written about is far more general. It may be, in fact, the education that all young readers and writers receive, no matter what institution they are schooled in.