Portrait of the Artist

I hope everyone had a great spring break...didn't seem long enough! Anyways, I thought this reading this week was funny, I enjoyed the whole "moocow" phrase, as that's what my younger brother used to call cattle. It was an interesting read nonetheless and I enjoyed it.

What I think is most interesting in this novel is that there are the existing themes of religion, the role of an artist, and individuality, but there is also a theme of the human finding themselves throughout the turmoil of life despite the consequences of their actions, expectations of others, and obstacles they face. This is seen throughout this entire novel; the reader sort of goes on a timeline adventure of Stephen Dedalus's life, and more so James Joyce's life, since this IS a semi-autobiographical novel. I found through some research that this story was based off of a novel called Stephen Hero, but completely rewritten. Joyce was writing that novel when he became frustrated at what his wife, Nora had said it would never be published. I like how this novel is based off of Joyce's life, because I like when authors are brave enough to write about their life--from their success and failures to their dreams and most intimate of thoughts...basically I like autobiographies that are somewhat stories as well.

I found that this novel was highly relatable, even for someone living in the 21st century. The scene where Stephen goes for a walk on the beach and sees the beautiful young girl which triggers an epiphany is very relatable. The beginning of the epiphany starts with this passage..

“A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.”

He uses such delicate language when describing her, which hints what is coming to the reader. He continues with:

“She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.

-- Heavenly God! cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy.”

This one line is the climax of the entire story. Joyce does an excellent job with imagery too—I can picture the whole thing in my head. It’s such a powerful passage, it makes the reader happy for him and gives a wave of relief (at least for me) that he realizes this. I became so attatched to the character of Stephen I guess simply because I could relate to the hardship of coming into one’s own and finding themselves. Continuing with the epiphany:

“He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him… To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!”

He realizes that love is natural to want, and that beauty shouldn't be a shame to desire, like how the church reinforces. He feels as though there should be no boundaries and doesn't want to conform or abide to any religion or other set of rules. That is why he chooses to live his life as the most liberating thing he can be--an artist. I personally can relate to a society where there are certain expectations you as a young adult have to live up to in order to be formally 'accepted' by society. Even if people don't admit or act that way, it's still in the subconscious. To further explain what I mean, look at homosexuality in today's world. Although it is becoming more widely accepted, most people still find it 'wrong' or they don't accept it, due to their religion or even just their personal beliefs. This can parallel to Portrait of the Artist in a way that is different but works. I have more things to say about this piece, but I’ll save it for next week. :)

Also, now I know who that picture is of on our teacher's homepage!

The Gay Artist as a Tragic Hero

Reading this week’s homework was less enjoyable than the story (which is expected) but it was also very interesting to gain Alley’s insight on Oscar Wilde’s story. I thought that Henry M. Alley did a good job thoroughly depicting Oscar Wilde’s story about Dorian Gray. Even the title was nicely and accurately thought out—I could definitely agree with Alley and say that Basil is the gay artist but more so the tragic hero in this story. I particularly liked this passage,

“…The Picture of Dorian Gray is an impassioned affirmation of homoerotic love and its

healthy potential, since such love comprises the interior theatre for a compelling tragic drama, giving

new meaning to Wilde's statement, "Hallward is what I think I am" (Wilde qtd. in Hart-Davis 116). In

The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment, Alan Sinfield writes that

"Hallward comes closest to same-sex passion and is an artist, so we have one correlate in the Wildean

queer image" (101)….”

When Alley writes this, he gives a broad statement. He says that The Picture of Dorian Gray has a definite meaning/theme, which is homoerotic love as he calls it, and that makes it a good and interesting story for readers to become intrigued with because it is so filled with compelling drama that is almost scandalous. Now as for the meaning of “homoerotic love,” I found a few things. Wikipedia (I hope this is an alright source to use…) claims that:

“Homoeroticism refers to the erotic attraction between members of the same sex, either male-male (male homosexuality) or female-female (lesbianism),^[2] most especially as it is depicted or manifested in the visual arts and literature. It can also be found in performative forms; from theatre to the theatricality of uniformed movements (e.g., the Wandervogel and Gemeinschaft der Eigenen). According to Oxford English Dictionary, it's "pertaining to or characterised by a tendency for erotic emotions to be centred on a person of the same sex; or pertaining to a homo-erotic person.” (Wikipedia) So that relates to the novel in the sense that Basil had become “infatuated,” so to speak, with Dorian and his striking good looks. He even mentions that Dorian is “necessary to him.” This “homoerotic” relationship can also be seen between Dorian and Lord Henry. Although there are other women introduced in the novel, like Sybil and Lord Henry’s wife Victoria, they do not keep the mind off of the possible “homosexual undertones” of the story. Both women appear to be very unimportant and are kind of dismissed as being naïve. It’s almost like Wilde wanted to provide an ulterior view of the story, so that people reading it can view it as having homoerotic circumstances in the story and also the view of misunderstanding of the bond between Lord Henry, Basil and Dorian. Although, if you knew about Oscar Wilde, you would probably lean towards the view of noticing the homoerotic undertones.

Other than that, I liked Alley’s interpretation of the meaning behind the story and I think he dissected it well, though it got kind of confusing to read at times I think I understood most of it.

Btw I hope this green font is easy to read, I thought I'd get in the spirit of St. Patrick's day, since this IS Irish Literature! :)

I Love Oscar Wilde

This week’s reading was pretty enjoyable for me; I love a good story with a moral and a twist, and I love Oscar Wilde. Starting out, it seemed as though this story was going to take a while to read but I found myself flipping through the pages (via mouse clicks) quite quickly. Oscar Wilde was one of my favorite writers to study in high school; I loved The Importance of Being Earnest. Having read these this play and now this story, I have concluded that Wilde is very good at writing novels with very clever endings.

Wilde was (appropriately) an Irish writer, and I researched him and found that The Picture of Dorian Gray is his only novel. I also found that Wilde’s family had experienced quite a bit of tragedy during Wilde’s early years. Perhaps this lead to Wilde’s homosexuality, which was discovered by the public when he was arrested for gross indecency, or sexual acts with a man. It’s interesting to me how in Carmilla’s story, homosexuality seemed to not be such a big deal to write about, but then in Oscar Wilde’s case, it was a very serious “criminal act.” Although, Carmilla is a fiction story. But I still wonder if maybe Carmilla is a subliminal message and small petition, if you’d call it, for gay rights? However, I took the story of Carmilla a lot differently than I noticed other classmates did, so who knows. Everyone’s views are different.

But back to the story for this week. I enjoyed it a lot. I could go on and on and explain what I thought every chapter of the story meant but for space & time's sake I'll just stick to this end chunk. Oscar Wilde writes enjoyable pieces with clever morals. I just want to say that the scene when Dorian stabs the painting and ends up getting the knife in his heart, was really where all of my anticipation led up to. “He looked round and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward.
He had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it.
It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter,
so it would kill the painter's work, and all that that meant.
It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.
It would kill this monstrous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings,
he would be at peace. He seized the thing, and stabbed the picture
with it…”

I have to say it was quite predictable what would happen, but I have read hundreds of books and have seen hundreds of movies so still I thought it was quite clever. The line where he says, “It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free,” is most interesting to me. The knife did indeed kill the past—the past that was living within him. But yet it restored the past to the painting. Not the effects of the past, which is what I believe the aging was, but since it restored Dorian to his full youth, I believe it preserved himself in the past, long before his past was ever a bad thing. So, in a way, it got rid of the past like he said, but just the part of his past that was regretful.

I also liked the quote, “Youth had spoiled him.” I believe this is a very powerful quote from the novel, because it is the sum of what the whole story is about. If Dorian hadn’t spent all of his focus on staying young, he would had never had the problems he went through---the aging. He still aged from trying to stay young, and it showed in the picture of him. His mind still aged, and further endorses the quote “Beauty is only skin deep.”

Carmilla Continued.....

Hey guys…Sorry if I skip around a lot in this blog, I just got very excited about incorporating psychology into this week’s reading, so bear with me!

(<-----Freud)

When I saw the name Freud pop up in this reading, I knew there would be a whole lot of nonsense going on and I would be rolling my eyes. I have taken many psychology classes in high school and now one in college and I find myself not being a big fan of Freud and his ‘philosophies.’ Though I don’t like Freud, I was open to the argument posed in this reading and I read it with an open mind. After reading it, I could draw connections between Freud’s theories, thoughts, and views on subliminal ‘messages’ the human brain unconsciously thinks and the story of Carmilla. Freud wrote a book (as you read in the reading) called The Interpretation of Dreams, which became very well known for its interesting and unconventional take on what dreams really mean and what the human mind is really unconsciously thinking. I had to read this part of this book and reviews of this book for my high school psychology course and quickly figured out that Freud was extremely, EXTREMELY strange. But, for the sake of writing an unbiased blog, like I said before I kept an open mind about the connections between his theories and Carmilla.

So, back to the reading…From the beginning I liked how Michael Davis stated, “Dreams are often enigmatic and enigma, as we know, also lies at the heart of the Gothic.” I like how this was said, because I think it is very true. I haven’t done much Gothic reading myself, but I have read some Edgar Allan Poe (The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart) and have found his stories to be extremely mysterious but in the most fascinating way—very enigmatic. So connecting dreams with the Gothic through enigma is very perfect, I’ll say, because both are so full of wonder, perhaps muddled darkness, and, as certain psychologists deem, full of meaning. In Carmilla, the story starts out with a dream which is just the beginning of all the puzzling mystery yet to come but the coolest thing, to me at least, is that it’s a dream in a gothic story—sort of like a double dose of enigma, which is what I think the quote I mentioned up above is stating.

Back to Freud…in the reading they mention “latent content” of dreams and “manifest content” of dreams. Latent content is basically the “disguised” meaning of dreams hidden by more obvious subjects, and manifest content is basically the story line of dreams. In the reading, Michael Davis writes, “…the manifest content ‘is given as it were in the form of hieroglyphics whose signs are to be translated one by one into the language of the dream thoughts’.4 Only by deciphering the picture puzzle that is the manifest content can the psychoanalyst reach the latent dream thoughts or those forbidden and thus repressed wishes and desires disguised by the dream

work.” Then he says, “Like a rebus, Gothic encodes its meanings; its signifiers form a puzzle that demands to be translated.”

So you can see, there is an obvious relation between dreams and the Gothic. See, with Sigmund Freud, I’m not much of a believer when it comes to his thoughts on certain things. I was apprehensive about what Michael Davis was saying in this piece because I know that Freud had some really messed up theories about dreams (at least they were messed up in my mind) like dreaming of flying translating into wanting to have sexual intercourse and dreaming of a baseball bat translating into dreaming about the male reproductive system. However, though I don't agree with Freud on those things (I’m no psychologist but hey, everyone has their own thoughts & opinions) I do think that the connection made using Freud’s latent content and manifest content in relation to the Gothic was done very well. Does that make sense?

Have a great week everyone!