Author: Maggie Condon

Loading Likes... I have read only a few Dickinson poems before, and have always loved her word choice and unique style but also have been generally baffled by her poems. Her unique use of punctuation, grammatical structure, and line breaks are essential to her poems, yet I have never been able to pinpoint how or why her unique choices contribute to her voice and writing- that is, until I read the two different versions of poem #320. The anthology included her original poem and then an edited version where many of her capitalization, punctuation and word choices were changed or erased to be published in a book about her poetry. When reading this edited version, I realized how much her odd choices construct a particular cadence to her poems that make them so distinctly hers and add to their meaning. For example, while her use of dashes seems excessive at times, the line in poem 260 “Are you – Nobody – too?” would have an entirely different meaning than “Are you nobody too?” or any other version aside from the one she wrote in her specific style. After reading the edited version, I re-read the original poem 320 and noticed an overwhelming sense that of her voice in her writing. Her use of these unconventional choices gives a rhythm and style to her writing that almost feels like she is talking to me through the page, like I can hear her speaking the lines in her particular voice.

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In reading the second third of the novel, I have found it increasingly hard to read the sections at the St Clair house. This is mostly because the devices used to construct Tom as a hero and likable character rely so much on making him a character that indulges white standards and ideals and simultaneously establishes the black race as a separate “species.” For example, his relationship with Eva is so strong because of what Stowe describes as the “soft, impressionable nature of his kindly race” that gives him a “yearning toward the simple and childlike” (152). Not only is this so obviously ignorant and offensive, it almost lends itself to justifying slavery because of the way it establishes Tom’s “kindly race” as one that is meant to be with children and occupy relationships like that of his with Eva that free white people do not. Similarly, the contrast to how Adolph, the head enslaved person in the St Clair household, is portrayed and to how Tom is shows just how much Stowe wanted to communicate that black people need to be submissive and agreeable to white standards to be worthy of sympathy and care. Adolph is described as “thoughtless and self-indulgent,” becasue he has “fallen into an absolute confusion…with regard to himself and his master’ (210), whereas every mention of Tom is accompanied by a complement to his personality and trustworthiness because of his obedience and overachieving in his serving of his masters. He goes above and beyond for St Clair, trying to get him to stop drinking, to be religious, and to generally make everyone in the household happier – the only thing that is missing is Tom’s consideration of any need or feeling he may have himself. Stowe is explicitly sending a message that this type of black person is the type of black person that the public should care about, (one that is essentially not a full human, and is rather an indulgence of white standards), and that other forms of how they may appear as full human beings are intolerable.

Loading Likes... While I loved all of the poems in this collection, poem #6 stuck out to me the most because of its imagery and the ending. I felt the message of the poem was very similar to Buddhist ideologies, both the concept that all beings are connected and that death is a central part of the cycle of life. Whitman took a blade of grass, which is something so small and easily overlooked, and brought it to life with the meaning it holds. He saw the way it connects to us all, “growing among black folks as among white” (1316, line 107) and transpiring from young men and mother’s laps, because he saw how it shares life with us like any other living being in nature. He connects each young and old man, or mother’s offspring, with a blade of grass that dies and grows again. In this metaphor, he concludes with his thoughts about death that echo Buddhist ideology like a mirror, saying, “The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life” (1317, lines 126-7). This poem felt so grounded in experience to me and also made me think back to Emerson’s “Nature” where he implores us to look into nature to find the truth about humanity. In a sense, I think that is exactly what Whitman has done here, by sitting with grass and finding meaning in it.

Loading Likes... While reading, I found Pearl to be an incredibly intriguing character that often reflected the themes and issues at play in the story. Her very existence is the origin of the conflict in the book, as she is the physical manifestation of sin that creates her mother’s public shame. In many ways, she is the embodiment of her Mother’s guilt. One passage that struck me was in chapter 19, when she doesn’t recognize her mother without her scarlet A on. Without it, Hester appears to lighten, takes her hair down, and looks beautiful and rid of the sad cloud that the A brings. However, Pearl and her reflection in the brook are not happy with her mother looking this way. In fact, she refuses to come near her mother until she replaces the A on her chest, to which Pearl says “Now thou art my mother indeed!” and kisses the scarlet letter much to her mother’s dismay.
I found this scene between the mother and daughter to be so interesting, because Pearl only has known her mother with the mark of shame on, and loves her as she is when she wears it. However, Pearl’s assertion of this also seems sinister as her mother becomes visibly less beautiful, happy, and warm as the “withering spell” of the sad letter takes over her. Pearl’s mystical quality contributes to the feeling that she has a mysterious role taking on the shame and guilt of her Mother and embodying it, like a mirror. On the other hand, she is one of the only characters that is not distressed by her mother’s shame: in fact, she loves it because it is a part of her.

Loading Likes... One thing that struck me while reading Narrative of the Life was the extreme attention to detail that Douglass had to afford to every single story he put forth in his autobiography. When you consider the context of his audience at the time of publishing, it’s surprising that he went into so much detail about matters that would actually be very familiar to a white and black American audience. The experiences he talks about, and their extension to larger societal structures at play at the time, were widely known and accepted social conventions. For example, the assertion that if he had been murdered with only black people as witnesses, “their testimony combined would have been insufficient to have arrested one of the murderers” (1215) was not a surprising or unique statement at the time; black people were regarded as sub-human, and not capable of intelligence or authority by white society in this time. However, by painting the vivid picture of this experience he had, and stating this horrible inequality in plain terms, he commands authority and attention to these horrible facts, which is incredibly brave to do in a society that aims to erase and placate them.

Loading Likes... I find the narrative voices in all of these short stories to be very interesting. Poe makes it a point in each piece to have an aura of mystery and authority in each of his narrators, who seem to be coming to the reader as if to share a long-awaited and famed story. For example, in William Wilson, the narrator makes a point many times to tell us that William Wilson is not his real name, and that he is using a fake one. We don’t know why, and it’s very interesting to consider why Poe would take this character to another level of fiction that seems unnecessary to the story. However, it does add to the gothic mood he creates and fills the story and the character with even more mystique. He does a number of similar things with all of his narrators, which I found peculiar (for example, when the husband in Ligeia can’t remember his wife’s last name) but they all seem to fit the story well and add to the uniquely thrilling tone he constructs. I also loved his use of magical realism in Ligeia, The tell-tale heart, and Usher. He makes his narrators unreliable, making them opium addicts, alcoholics, or just plain crazy to blur the line between what is actually happening or what is made up in their minds.

Loading Likes... I found myself very moved by Emerson’s chapter on Beauty. I really enjoy the idea that one would spend their intellectual effort and time to write about something so simple and inherent in human life, simply because it is loved so much. I found that his message was not a novel or unique idea to me, but it was quite the opposite; I found his writing so compelling because what he is saying felt so true. He writes about the human connection to beauty as something as intrinsic as our need to breathe or for food. Of the delight of beauty, he writes that a working man, or someone who is disconnected from nature, “sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself” (186). I found this to be so poignant because I have found myself that way, too, and never can quite express why a warm summer day or a walk in a snowstorm can feel like waking up, and bring you back to yourself.
I also appreciated his passage about beauty being all-encompassing, year round. Nature experiencing itself through growth and decay is beauty that is always there when we want to look for it. He ties this to divinity and implies that beauty from nature is the higher power of the universe, which teaches and fills us as humans. Though I definitely did not appreciate his depiction of colonization, I took his writing to mean that beauty is what guides us and is, in a way, it’s own divine power. I think of spirituality in terms of Buddhist thought, which teaches that the higher power that exists is the inherent connection between all living things, which I see echoed here in his exploration of beauty.

Loading Likes... I find Alice and Cora’s identities and relationship fascinating in this book. Cooper seems to be both satisfying the sexist romance stereotypes of the time while also breaking them with these characters. In chapter 25, after Hawkeye tells Heyward where to find Alice, the romantic vignette Cooper writes of their interaction plays into conventional feminine stereotypes to almost a comical degree. Alice is described as “sought, pale, anxious, and terrified,” but of course, always “lovely,” while Heyward comes to her rescue and dotes on her trembling, weak existence. This convention of relationships having a strong, brave man and a weak and beautiful woman who relies on him entirely is disappointing, if not incredibly predictable. However, Cooper doesn’t just leave it there, because we have her sister, Cora, and her romantic escapades as a starkly contrasting situation. Cora is the opposite of being girlish and weak, and in fact she comes across as one of the most dependable and strong people in the novel. Her character seems to exist to defy the conventions that Cooper so blatantly conforms to in other places. This all is fascinating in reference to the ending, where Cora and Uncas die (somewhat heroically) together, seemingly immortalizing their unique relationship and leaving a lot to think about in terms of the race and gender themes in the book.