Author: Anh Truong

At the time of writing this, I’m currently on Chapter IV. This post is to record my reactions to certain details and to name my prediction before I learn what the “beast” is in “The Beast in the Jungle”.

(And also, I must admit, to feed my ego if the prediction turns out to be right)

He would thoroughly establish the heads under which her affairs, her requirements, her peculiarities—he went so far as to give them the latitude of that name—would come into their intercourse.

(Chapter II, Project Gutenberg)

What are May’s “affairs”? Never once does he talk about her story or her “affairs”, as much as he says here that he tries to give them just as much attention as his own big event.

“What if she should have to die before knowing, before seeing—?”  It would have been brutal, in the early stages of her trouble, to put that question to her; but it had immediately sounded for him to his own concern, and the possibility was what most made him sorry for her.

(Chapter III, Project Gutenberg)

As much as Marcher tries to tell himself he’s at least a “decent” or “unselfish” person, his thought process here indicates pretty much the opposite:

• First, it struck him how old May had become over the years, which is hilarious that he didn’t even pay attention to her appearance all that time.
• The fact that his worry is about her dying before witnessing this big event is a greater testament to his selfishness. He is not concerned for her well-being or sad that her health is failing.

Also, Marcher and May? I can’t believe it took me this long to catch this.

“Too ill to tell me?” it sprang up sharp to him, and almost to his lips, the fear she might die without giving him light. He checked himself in time from so expressing his question, but she answered as if she had heard the words.

“Don’t you know—now?”

(Chapter IV, Project Gutenberg

Again, she is obviously in pain as they are having this conversation, and all he focuses on is himself. Even worse, he leaves right after she is carried into bed, without giving a single thought to stay to make sure she’s okay.

This leads me to think that the ‘beast’ is the fact that he’s unknowingly become this selfish person, an absolutely terrible friend despite all his efforts in making sure that he isn’t. He’s contradicted himself. He’s broken the image of his moral superiority that he’s worked so hard to maintain. He’s tried to be a ‘good friend’ by reciprocating May’s relationship with all these materialistic things like opera nights and luxrious stuff, but he fails to give her the mindfulness and care of a true friend.

Chesnutt completely subverts the reader’s expectations at the end of “The Passing of Grandison” with the revelation of Grandison’s grand escape. There are some details in the story that lead me to think that Chesnutt had Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the back of his mind as he was writing it:

1. Tom: the enslaved man whom Dick originally planned to go North with.
2. Grandison the “loyal slave”: the fidelity of Grandison throughout certainly reminds me of Stowe’s Uncle Tom.
3. The title: “Passing” suggests that Grandison dies, as Uncle Tom does in Stowe’s novel. However, by the end, it is revealed that “passing” refers to Grandison’s grand successful crossing of Lake Erie to Canada, thus flipping the script.

Throughout the story, we get glimpses of racially prejudiced views from the characters, and these are guised in a manner that a person who’s racist/supported slavery couldn’t tell that Chesnutt is actually being satirical.

He did not even scold Grandison; how could he, indeed, find fault with one who so sensibly recognized his true place in the economy of civilization, and kept it with such touching fidelity?

(Chesnutt, “The Passing of Grandison” Chapter III)

The story masks itself as a pro-slavery text to anyone who isn’t familiar with Chesnutt and his other works, which makes the twist at the end even more fun. I like to imagine Chesnutt just giggling to himself as he was writing these stories at the thought of some old former slaveholder in 1899 (who was, of course, no longer able to own people, but still held on to their racist views) reading and agreeing with these thoughts and then being completely flabbergasted at the end.

Also, I thought this detail was interesting:

Mr. Johnson, the shoemaker’s brother, welcomed uncle Wellington to Groveland, and listened with eager delight to the news of the old town, from which he himself had run away many years before, and followed the North Star to Groveland.

(Chesnutt, “The Passing of Grandison”, Chapter II)

The North Star, which was the symbol of freedom among enslaved people (also Douglass’ The North Star newspaper), leads to Groveland, the land of slaveholders in the south.

Out of the short stories, I personally spent the most time on “Dave’s Neckliss” – the dialect is much more pronounced than any narratives of enslaved people we’ve read so far, so it was challenging for me to follow. I had to really slow down and approached the text almost as if I was reading a new language.

The process led me to think about the conditions in which these dialects are form – from forced migration of earlier generations of Africans to America, and how they were socially and culturally isolated, being denied basic educational rights as simple as reading and writing American English, thus propelling African-Americans to over time develop a sort of creole language, the blending between American English and native African languages that fostered communication among themselves and with white people and slaveowners.

There are several implications of this dialect, one being it is a dialect formed from racial oppression, and yet there is also a sense of power and identity in its resilience. Countless orations of tales, stories, songs were created through the dialect, and now a fraction of those can be experienced through Chesnutt’s attempt at transcribing this vernacular onto the page. However, a thought lingers on regarding narratives written first-hand by enslaved people such as Frederick Douglass and how the dialect isn’t very pronounced in their writings as much, likely because they didn’t have the social standings and the privilege of someone like Chesnutt to experiment more freely with language to their audience. They had to conform to a more “perfect” American English to represent themselves in the fight against slavery. It feels… paradoxical.

Publication – is the Auction
Of the Mind of Man –
Poverty – be justifying
For so foul a thing

Possibly – but We – would rather
From Our Garret go
White – unto the White Creator –
Than invest – Our Snow –

Thought belong to Him who gave it –
Then – to Him Who bear
It’s Corporeal illustration – sell
The Royal Air –

In the Parcel – Be the Merchant
Of the Heavenly Grace –
But reduce no Human Spirit
To Disgrace of Price –

(Dickinson 1686)

We get a sense of Emily Dickinson’s view on priorities in writing: writing to sell versus writing to be in touch with the soul and for artistic purposes. She thinks writing for the mass market is “foul”, which is pretty consistent with the fact that she tent to keep most of her poems to herself, having a sense of reverence for her privacy so that she could be as authentic as possible. However, she also acknowledges that not everyone is in a position to not write for a living – as far as I know, her family was fairly well off so I don’t think she struggled financially, which gave her the privilege of being a writer unburdened by the thought of how well her texts would sell.

It seems here she describes herself being in a white gown and living in the attic:

“From Our Garret go
White – unto the White Creator -“

…which is interesting because in class on Tuesday we did talk about this image of her that some people held, which we were cautioned to interpret with “a huge grain of salt” (Prof. Oerlemans). Could this piece be the source of that speculation?

Prejudice

Eliza and George happens happens to be the most daring among slaves – George is depicted as an intelligent man right at the start with a straight-up invention of a machine, and has classy manners, James Bond style which makes his master jealous, gives a powerful speech (“not my country”) to Wilson, gives a badass speech before gunning down Loker. Eliza has bold and successful journey while carrying Harry, making a daring jump across the Ohio river.

There are two ways of looking at this:

1. By making Eliza and George more white than black, Stowe is trying to make a point that the couple succeeded only because they look white, which makes blending in and receiving empathy from others easier, that it is a privilege to be white.
2. Stowe is ultimately biased in her perception of race, which is why Eliza and George, being of white ancestry, seem to be more active and make aggressive/bold moves in their resistance. Stowe could be implying that those of Anglo-Saxon blood are more capable, which is outrageous but would not be unthinkable at the time. Comparing Eliza and George to other slaves who are black, particularly Uncle Tom, we see there is a great gap between Stowe’s portrayal of the white slave couple and other slave characters. Eliza and George seems to be much more mature and realistic, and we get more accounts of their inner thought processes, while for Uncle Tom, his resistance is passive, and his mind is as pious as the bible itself.  That instance where he freaks out over St. Claire’s drinking problem was just hilariously comical to me, like it came out of a ancient Greek or Roman novel. Her portrayal of several black characters just feels a bit two-dimensional to me.

Possible Influences

Speaking of Greek & Roman novels, Stowe’s portrayal of characters’ actions and emotions feel very inspired by early ancient Greek & Roman literature. If you’re familiar with some of those novels or stories, you’d find that they tend to have very dramatic displays of emotions – characters fainting from love, joy, heartbreaks; characters falling on their knees and literally tearing their clothes and crying, pulling their hair from emotional distress, or refusing to eat or to even live just because they have a crush on some unearthly attractive person, etc. I can’t help but see some of these qualities in Stowe’s portrayal of emotions. To give a few examples: Sam with his speech  about deceiving Haley to help Eliza escape, Eliza fainting from joy when she learns that George was coming, and of course, Uncle Tom kneeling, crying and begging St. Claire to give up drinking.

Once Paumanok,

When the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month grass was growing…

from Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking (pg. 1369)

The footnote details ‘Paumanok’ as Long Island. The name was given to the place by Native Americans who originally inhabited it, translated to “The Island That Pays Tribute”, according to Wikipedia.

Walt Whitman was born in May.

At this point I realized he’s writing about his younger self. Out of all of his poems we’ve read so far, I think this one may be the one with the most fantastical elements, which is quite fitting for a Walt Whitman origin story.

It’s interesting, the way he reminisces on his memories and tells a story out of it, like a grown adult’s mind peering through the eyes of a child. I think as he was writing this, he still remembered how it felt to be a kid, and so mingled aspects of childlike innocence, particularly the imagination of the bird’s aria, with darker thoughts (death) that come with maturity and the process of thinking as a poet.

I find it also chilling how Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking transitions quite well into Vigil Strange I Kept on The Field one Night, going from from a child’s first encounter with death to a man in the Civil War witnessing soldiers’ deaths. The two poems share a theme of keeping guard on one’s surroundings, with young Whitman observing the sea and the bird, and the Civil War Whitman keeping watch in the night.

I think reading From Pent-Up Aching Rivers before Crossing Brooklyn Ferry did me a disservice in my attempt to assess the latter. Sexuality has such a prominent presence in From Pent-Up Aching Rivers that I keep involuntarily associating rivers in all of Whitman’s poems to erotic ‘resistless yearning’ (pg. 1357). Perhaps that is not so far off to his relationship with river or just nature as a whole, because sexuality is one of the fundamental aspects of nature.

As some have said in class on Tuesday, although there is the egotistical pervasiveness and at times–I’m not sure how to put it–presumptuousness in the way he tries to absorb other people’s experiences as his own (e.g., the ‘hounded slave’), one could still feel some sort of intimacy with his aspiration to connect to everything, trying leave nothing out of his perception.

I too had receiv’d identity by my body,

That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my body.

from Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Section 5 (pg. 1366)

As I was reading Song of Myself, I could not decide whether the speaker’s voice is more intimately dreamy-like, or if the voice is one full of hubris and even vanity to a certain degree. The voice in my head was in constant shifts between different tones. Sometimes it would be a romantic voice like that of Romeo in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film Romeo and Juliet. For example:

“I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,

How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,

And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart

And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.”

 

(Song of Myself, Section 5)

Other times, and perhaps more frequently so, I would hear the prideful, epic  voice of Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey…

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,

Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,

No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,

No more modest than immodest.

 

(Song of Myself, Section 24)

Although the lines above suggest that he’s just a human being, no better than others, I think deep down he (and the reader) may share a feeling that this is not how he truly thinks of himself. Throughout Song of Myself, I had a feeling that he was writing to impress and to show how great he is, being a poet and being the deep observer that Emerson advocated everyone should be. He wanted to be the example, which makes this poem not only artful as poems are but also prideful in nature, to believe that he could see associations between what there is and more abstract things, more than many others could.

Maybe we’re not supposed to pick a singular voice. Maybe we can read it in our mind in both Romeo’s and Odysseus’ voices, because the poem goes through many emotions. A deep and almost Epicurean-like simplicity of love for the outer world and its relation to the soul, along with a sense of gratitude and pride in being able to play the language like an instrument to express that love — these things are for us to take delight in.

No, I do not understand Bartleby, nor am I trying to. Although, I am not left without that same sense of curiosity about the scrivener’s past. The closest I can come to bring about the shape of the scrivener’s motive is that he has none. I see certain traits of Diogenes’ cynicism in the story, not only through the way of Bartleby but also the internal struggles of the narrator as he contemplates on the most ethical or moral course of action. I think it’s one of the story’s main theme: No matter how morally solid you think you are, at some point there is going to be some outlier that will test your limits and push you to a point of hypocrisy, the same way the narrator gave up on the idea of staying and taking care of Bartleby.

Diogenes’ philosophy, which includes rejection of societal conventions, indifference to the pursuit of material wealth, only caring for the bare necessities for existence, and a sort of distrust in humanity–or more specifically, society, to practice “correct” ethics. However, the idea behind Diogenes’ philosophy is to attain some sort of enlightenment by living a virtuous life, and this is where I see it parting with Bartleby. I don’t think Bartleby has an idea of salvation in mind, and to me he seems more unintentionally self-destructive, as if he is held back by something.

The best I can describe Bartleby is that he is like a ghost of someone who had died, and that someone perhaps had a significant other that they left behind, and so he chooses to stay still in the same place that he left his lover, watching helplessly yet is unwilling or unable to leave, letting everything around him evolve and change as time passes, while he is stuck in the moment.

The Name

Regarding the name ‘Bartleby’ – I looked into the origins of the name and found almost nothing – nothing but this: it is perhaps a variant of the name Bartholomew of Aramaic origin: “bar” means “son of’ and the rest means “the furrows” or “Talmai”. I’m not well-versed in biblical stories or figures so if anyone can derive some meaning from this detail, please share… if you’d prefer to, that is.

In Chapter X, there’s a passage which I really admire:

“I have observed this in my experience of slavery,—that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans
to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one.“

I think it is very inspiring the way he refuses to be lured by any temptations of impermanent sense of satisfaction. It shows his unyielding quality, a willpower that aligns with his strong moral compass to not settle with the lesser evil that is slavery but with acceptable conditions. Evil is evil, and there should not be compromises. Happiness is not given, it is sought and pursued by a person.

It also brings us back to Chapter VII, in which Douglass regards of the even of him learning how to read being a “curse” because he is no longer able to shut himself off from thoughts of what could be better and how stuck he is. It’s like the curse of being an intellectual who is ahead of their time and is left without the appropriate language or technology express their ideas, and a society that is unwilling to accept it.

Additionally, I see a little bit of Emerson’s Nature through Douglass’ narrative:
“The one thing in the world of value is the active soul,—the soul, free, sovereign, active. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth, or creates.”

This brings me back to the question brought up in class about why Emerson never addressed the issue of slavery in any of his essays, which were advocating quite passionately for the freedom of the soul and “self-reliance”. I feel like he was afraid to face the controversy head-on and so decided to stick to more abstract measures.

I did get a bit lost at the end as everything began moving so fast following Douglass’ escape. From Mr. and Mrs. Johnson to his wife Anna Murray, which I don’t think was mentioned before in any of the previous chapters. I was also surprised that Douglass let Johnson choose his name rather than his wife, because I thought Anna Murray was the one who helped him choose the name Douglass.

I’m starting see more in line with the idea Poe was not a madman as many thought he was as a result of the often disturbing nature of his writing. Aside from his discussed tactics for marketing as someone writing to earn a living, upon reading The Imp of the Perverse, I can further recognize that his work derives from ways of thinking that are certainly self-reflective and can be quite logical in their reasoning, to the point where it reveals some aspect of truth about human behavior as we know it modern day perspectives.

As Poe describes it, the “Imp” refers to the intrusive thought that comes from somewhere in the mind that pushes us to do things that brings us no benefit whatsoever – from acts of procrastination to directly negative and dangerous thoughts like self-harm, murder not with motive but simply an impulsive attraction to what shouldn’t be done. He’s basically providing a sensible explanation for intrusive thoughts.

Why do we do the things that have no real benefits for us, sometimes even compromising ourselves? Why is it when I’m walking down Martin’s way and the thought of jumping down from the bridge, for no reason whatsoever, crosses my mind? I wonder how it would it feel to fall at such a height? To feel my knees bashing against the ground? For no reason at all? Poe recognizes that there is an irrational, more instinctive component of the human mind. And even though it has been suggested that I should not take Poe’s work at face value, I think there is some truth to be derived from the words of The Imp of the Perverse.

This blog is just a collection of my impression on the essay, rather than attempting to make a point. Please excuse the seemingly fragmented manner in which I convey my thoughts below.

There is a very comprehensive lens through which Emerson attempts to have the reader contemplate on the idea of nature: to view it is not as an absolute substance, but as a “phenomenon” (Nature, Chapter VI). I am very much compelled to the more expansive idea of nature that it is not simply the physical landscape or the environment that is untouched by mankind, but rather everything that makes up the universe, the material and immaterial. From physical matter to its connection with our perception and feelings of reality, how the soul interacts with the world.

I particularly like the example of poetry, such as Shakespeare’s poem in the same chapter:

“Take those lips away
Which so sweetly were forsworn;
And those eyes,—the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn.”

Through these samples of poems Emerson brings to us the idea that nature, or the perception of it through the eyes of the soul, is a form of communication in which the attractions of the physical world reciprocates the soul’s desire to perceive beauty. As poets tend to use figurative language to associate one thing with another – in this case the eyes of a person that is associated with the image of dawn’s light. It’s a spiritual connection that brings two seemingly unrelated things in nature together.

What I find troubling is how Emerson seems to advocate for so individualistic a way to approach/perceive the natural world but he also speaks of the “permanence of nature”, that “we are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand,” (Chapter VI). He is admitting to the idea that we as humans have been so successful in ensuring our survival because we understand how the natural world works and build tools/structure to adapt to this world, and yet to me his argument is that it wouldn’t matter if things worked differently. If I interpret the text correctly, there is a lot of issues that comes with this stance.

At this point I must admit that the text has become lost on me due to the amount of content and context that I’ve consumed in such a short amount of time reading it.

Between James Fenimore Cooper’s ideals in The Last of the Mohicans and Emerson’s essay: the emphasis on learning and feeling God’s presence through observation of the natural world and the surrounding environment. It’s one of the main emphases of Transcendentalism. While one might think of it as a very Hawkeye-like mindset, it is the only common ground that Emerson finds with Cooper’s “heroic” character. Hawkeye is otherwise a person favoring the wisdom of experience and logical reasoning (in his own blatantly racist way) and is one to suppress his own feelings, which I think is conflicting with Emerson’s Transcendentalist ideals: feelings over logic.