Author: Alex Ruffer

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One thing I noticed while reading Beast in the Jungle and as we were discussing it in class was that Henry Jame’s writing style changed significantly from Daisy Miller: a Study. However, it seems to be for the worse, or at least to be more confusing. One of the places it was the most prevalent was the beginning, which may have soured my view of the rest of the text so I might be a bit biased here. Take the second sentence for example:

“He had been conveyed by friends, an hour or two before, to the house at which she was staying; the party of visitors at the other house, of whom he was one, and thanks to whom it was his theory, as always, that he was lost in the crowd, had been invited over to luncheon.”

I feel like this sentence interrupts itself so many times that I can’t get a clear understanding of what’s happening. I also feel like this sentence could have been written in a much more concise way that emphasizes that Marcher was lost. However, it could also be that by writing in this way and confusing the reader, James conveys Marcher’s confusion. Father down the page, James also seems to describe the feeling of awe and wanting to own something you would see in a museum further down the first page. I had to read it a few times to understand what he was saying, and I feel like this could have also been written in a more concise way, as he seems to almost be writing in full circles before moving on to the next detail about what he’s describing.

Loading Likes... The ending of Daisy Miller: A Study seemed to me as if it were a punishment for defying societal norms. Over the course of the story, Daisy presents herself as careless, capricious, and forward, traits that many other high-class people in the story considered unbecoming of a young lady. She constantly flirts with other men, stays out late at night, and encourages men to fight for her affection. In these regards, she’s the epitome of “live fast, die young,” and the ending solidifies that. Ironically, she dies relatively slowly, having time to reflect on some of her past actions and even letting Winterbourne that she wasn’t engaged after all. It was as if the world rejected her very existence and gave her time to think about how she could have been more proper, how she could have lived longer only if she had followed the rules of society.

Additionally, during the funeral Giovanelli remarks that Daisy was “the most innocent young lady he ever saw.” With the way she died, I realized that calling her innocent, both here and the previous times Winterbourne makes that remark, might have less to do with her virtue and more to do with her naivety and ignorance of how the world works. The ending really showed that when you play the game of life, you always play for the highest stakes regardless of if you know it or not.

Loading Likes... One of the most interesting things I found about these short stories was goophering and how it highlights the cultural differences between African Americans and white people. In most of the stories, Chesnutt uses goophering as the great equalizer between enslaved African Americans and their white owners. When a problem arises that was impossible for the enslaved African Americans to solve by mundane means, for example getting Sandy out of having to go to a far-off plantation or getting Sis Becky back, they would turn to a wise woman who can goopher. Goophering often takes the form of transforming a person into a different creature or plant, but it can also take the form of a curse or by commanding animals to perform certain tasks. On the surface, it looks like goophering is a part of Julius’s stories as a coping mechanism, merely an element of escapism made to make those who listen feel better about their situation. This is certainly what the white narrator believes, calling Julius’s stories “ingenious fairy tales” and saying that African Americans will “never rise in the world until they throw off these childish superstitions” (58). But to Julius, goophering is very real and he believes in the power that it holds. To him it’s not escapism at all, rather it’s how the world works. African American culture is so closely tied to the land, partly because of slavery, and Chesnutt uses goophering to portray that.

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While all of Dickinson’s poems are worthwhile in their own right, 479 was particularly interesting to me for its interpretation of death and the race against it. Generally speaking, people interpret death as something to be avoided and outpaced, for the end of your story comes when death catches up to you. However, Dickinson portrays death as something more akin to a traveling companion, someone to be welcomed and respected rather than an uncaring force of nature. In the poem, the speaker describes how death “kindly stopped for [them]” and how they “slowly drove” and “knew no haste,” implying that to drive alongside death rather than trying to speed ahead of it might result in a more fulfilling life.

In a similar vein, Dickinson presents immortality and death as two sides of the same coin. Both Death and Immortality reside in the carriage that the speaker rides in, which says something about the nature of immortality. By definition, immortal means to be unable to die, yet to ride in the same carriage as both would mean that one would be simultaneously at the mercy of death and far above it. In essence, one is immortal until death decides to claim them. One cannot die until death decides it’s time, which also then brings up the question of free will and the choice to die or survive. Maybe that last part is a bit of a stretch, but I just found it interesting how many questions this poem brings up and its fairer representation of death.