Assignment #5: Close Reading of the last chapter of Maggie

The last chapter of Maggie is very strange. After denouncing her for leaving her shit situation for a man who appeared to love her and then condemning her when she returns because he utterly abandoned her, Mary the mother weeps and wails for her daughter's supposed death, and in doing so has the sympathy of the tenement community. Is Maggie really dead though? Chapter seventeen suggests that she has moved on to another life and is doing well for herself, although her name is never used (she is named "girl") it can be assumed that this is Maggie. Maggie had nowhere to go and thusly became a girl of the streets, she is at home wandering the city looking for patrons. The girl of chapter seventeen is described as wearing a "handsome cloak" and her feet are described as "well-shod". This girl is doing well for herself, no longer wearing worn out rags and going barefoot. She seems to be happy and at ease, even when the strange man at the end followed her. the suggested imagery is that something unpleasant had happened to Maggie on behalf of this strange man, however no conclusions are made.
Jimmies' declaration that "Mag is dead" is met with denial and then sadness by the mother, who in her hysteria kept repeating that she put her daughter in shoes that were as big as a thumb. Mary screams at Jimmie to "Go git yer sister and' we'l put deh boots on her feets!" and Jimmie goes to do just that. Is putting shoes on the dad a kind of cultural practice or is Mag not really "dead", but dead in memory only? Was this the moment that Jimmie found out that his sister finally went to the streets and rather than torment his mother by saying that's where Maggie was, he just said that she was dead?
Mary is also urged by fellow mourners to forgive Maggie, and Mary screams that she will forgive her at the very end of the story. Shouldn't it be Maggie who forgives her mother and her community? A community that is soiled in every debauchery except "loose women" and they have a break down when their girl goes out and has a good time?

Assignment #4: Stephen Crane and Maggie

For this week's blog assignment we were tasked with picking out one passage in the story that we find interesting and examining it in light of what we have learned about 19th century America, realism and impressionism. For me, the most disturbing scenes of the first seven chapters occur in the beginning of the story. The audience gets a snapshot of life for these young children and it is not sugar-coated one bit. After Jimmie is escorted home from the fight with the Devil's Row boy by his father, Maggie his sister, appears for the first time. She drags along her younger brother Tommie with little attention to the fact that he is just a babe. He "roars with indignation" in a way that only a small child can do. When Jimmie meets with his sister, she starts to cry because she sees that he has been fighting again and this annoys Jimmie who does the only thing he's been raised to know how to do, hit her. We then enter the tenement and the way it is described is very intriguing, almost as if they are entering the belly of the beast per se, with the hallways and stairwells being described as gruesome, cold and gloomy.

In the next few lines we meet Mrs. Mary Johnson, who, as scary as we might have thought Mr. Johnson was, is a monster taken human form. She gets roaring drunk, screams obscenities directed at the father and beats him mercilessly and he retaliates in kind. Mary isn't immune to hitting her children as we witnessed when Maggie dropped a plate after dinner. Jimmie is so terrified he runs off to a neighbor who offers to let him sleep on the floor if he ran an errand for her, when Jimmie tries fate and his drunken father prevent him from fulfilling the request. His father steals the beer out of the bucket and smacks Jimmie with the empty bucket. Jimmie runs off into the streets in a rage and returns only late at night to see the limp for of his father and the slobbery mess of his mother. He and Maggie hold each other in their arms until morning.

The first three chapters are devastating in their effectiveness of bringing to scope the lives of the tenement poor of NYC, so devastating that Stephen Crane published his novel with a pseudonym. This story is all about impressionism, as impressionism is more interested in painting a realistic picture of the world than of copying reality exactly. As authors and illustrators they were acting with a belief in civic duty to their fellow man. America was rebirthed in fire and flames after the Civil War and these people represent the iron and steel ore that is heated, pounded and shaped into the beams that support NYC.

Paper 1 Free Write

Free write. There is a lot of ambiguity in what Free Write means. Am I to list ideas? Am I to ramble on a topic? Very 19th century, that.
Well, if I was to choose which topic interested me that most I would have to say that topic "b)", or the question of authority, interests me the most. The question of what authority and, by design, authorship really mean has always fascinated me. You know the saying "The ones who write the history are the ones who won the war"? Eh, well it goes something like that. Anyway the point is that that statement is very true and has contributed to shaping the modern world. Imagine what the consequences would have been if the French had won the French and Indian War? Can anyone say Parlez vous francais? Or if we never had slavery in America, imagine what society would be like today if you even can fathom it. The culture of what it means to be black in the United States would be totally different, we might not have ever had the chance to bathe our ears in the sweet sounds of Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, and more contemporary, Kendrick Lamar.

I'm getting away from the point. The point is that by the 19th century americans were beginning to question authority because the pastoral bliss of the Revolutionary America of the 18th century was long gone and gone with it (or soon leaving, anyway) was the puritanical and religious notion of total submission to authority.

When looking at authority through the lens of our class, I am most drawn to "In Search of Local Color" by Brander Matthews and "Chickamauga" by Ambrose Bierce. I choose these two stories because they have two radically different main characters who embody the authority in the story. In "Color" De Ruyter is the literal  authority as he is an author in search of something to write about. In "Chickamauga" the authority in the story, or who we view the story though, is that of a little boy that the narrator continues to tell us to distrust because of his age.

I have my direction and purpose in the paper now, but it is early days yet.

Assignment #3: Local Color and Impressionism/Realism

"In Search of Local Color" by Brander Matthews appears to be a story grounded in realism, impressionism and the human condition. Curiously, our main character Rupert De Ruyter, is in search "fresh impressions" when he asks his friend John Suydam to take him to the poorest of the poor for a taste of local color. This story leads the author down a road where we examine the human condition in its worst state, at its basest. De Ruyter is interested in the permanence of the tenement people when he describes the Chinese quarter as nothing more than "a mere accidental excrescence" and the tenement people as "people [that] have come to stay". What would be his interest in their permanence? The Chinese and their "barbarous" and  "exotic"  ways are flaky and material, they won't last any longer than the thread of their colorful clothing and decorations. The tenement people will always be there, in their dank filth and crowded homes. They last simply because that is what they do best, survive. Suydam, when asked about how the poor Italians live in that dank basement, replies "They don't live,". That is a perfect way to describe how the poor live day to day, they survive by being the most resilient.

This whole trip is an event generated by Mr. De Ruyter as a way to see some of the local color and get some "fresh impressions" to help with his story that he is writing for the magazine. Yet strangely, he doesn't seem too surprised or even concerned with the condition of the people there. in fact, De Ruyter seems to believe that the existence of the poor people in Mulberry Bend are a microcosm for existence itself and he is "interested" by it. He "felt as though he was receiving an impression of life itself" found it, "unfailingly interesting", and by bearing a cold observation of the human condition as nothing but "interesting", he denies his own humanity. He makes that statement as though he is an observer from another planet, or maybe even the author of existence himself. Near the end of the story when the police are out looking for Pietro and it is revealed that Pietro killed his wife, De Ruyter does not react with surprise, but of an author putting together the final pieces of the story.In fact he says that he can get a "good mot de la fin", or last word. For me,D Ruyter is like a kid with an ant colony, watching and analyzing but not caring.

I suppose that I find De Ruyter's character and his intentions problematic, but Matthews could have used him as a foil to the poor people who live as honestly as they can. De Ruyter is cold and unattached from the human condition, he uses it for his entertainment and ignores the reality of the situation. The poor people live that life on an everyday basis, and because they do they are closer to being what it means to be human than anyone else in the story.

Assignment #2: Bierce and Irony

Both "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and "Chickamauga" by Ambrose Bierce represent what readers today might refer to as classic realist literature from the post Civil War Era.The Civil War was brutal, and who could depict the futility and brutality of war better than Bierce, an author who suffered through it as a young man in the Union army? Something characteristic of these post-war authors was a new appreciation for irony, no doubt stemming from the wartime experience of being told what to do by commanding officers, but not being told why they were doing it, or when, or how and then experiencing a dramatic turn of events from seemingly out of nowhere, due to the withholding of information. In much the same way, Bierce withholds information from the reader in an attempt to turn the plot on it's head and shock the reader into a realization about war and it's consequences.

In "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", the entire part of the story stemming from Peyton falling into the river and reaching home is a fabrication, as it is revealed that he actually died hanging from the railroad tracks. As a realist, Bierce detested the romantics of the previous age as liars, because for him they did not tell the story of life as it actually was. In utilizing irony in Peyton Farquhar's story, he attempts to shock the public back to reality, and away from their romantic dreams. The way in which he ends the story is a stark contrast to the proceeding paragraphs. As he was approaching his wife at the gates of their home, after he improbably escaped from the jaws of death at multiple moments, Bierce strikes his readers with a simple sentence, "Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck. swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek Bridge". He ends his tale with brusqueness and efficiency of the soldiers who ended Peyton's. 

In "Chickamauga", Bierce once again utilizes irony to strike out at a public who he believed shared an unrealistic perception of war, as does the boy of the story. While the story is set in small southern plantation/forest, it is clear to me that the story is a metaphor for the public and war. The public is the young boy, happily gallivanting through the forest of both trees and copy machines. The public has the same perception of war as the young boy, it is an exercise, it's an event; It's something to get excited over, as the boy get's excited by striking at imaginary foes with his wooden sword. The dead soldiers represent misfortune and death, but the misfortune and death of people who do not directly affect you. If the boy is the general public, Bierce could be saying that the public mourns their side's dead only superficially. He shows this by the boys next actions. The boy takes on the role of a general, leading the crawling mass towards the red glow in the distance, he adores the red glow and the fire it represents, he even feeds it with his wooden sword which stands as a symbol for the disgust of war and also of the public's incessant need to fuel the flames of war. Only when the boy realizes when it is his own home and his own dead does the gravity of the situation strike him. It is only when we are confronted with the horrors of war do we truly understand the weight of war.

Irony is important for Bierce and authors like him because it gives them an avenue to express their bitterness and disgust, without directly accusing the public and allowing for a story to take place and flow.  

Assignment # 1 "20/20" and "Story of an Hour"

The first assignment we have been given was to read three short stories, choose two of them, and put them into some kind of conversation with one another. I chose to focus on gender issues even though the only thing these two stories really have in common with each are gender issues, and the vivid visuals that accompany and "illustrate" some of the symbolism. 

Both "20/20" and "Story of an Hour" center around gender issues, yet they are from different periods of American history and thus focus on different aspects of gender oppression and equality. Kate Chopin wrote "Story of an Hour" in 1894, from a time before women even had the right to vote in the United States. The issues Chopin felt strongly about involved voting equality, the right for a woman to choose her partner freely, to not be bound by her choice (divorce rights) and just generally to become an equal partner in both society and marriage. If Chopin were to read "20/20" by Linda Brewer and then take from that some understanding of the advances that society has taken towards equality, she would be disappointed. Sure, women can now vote and have equal protection under the law, but they have not achieved true equality in the eyes of their male peers. Why? That's a difficult question to answer, but when looking at "20/20" one can perhaps attain a clearer understanding. 

"20/20" by Linda Brewer is a revealing story, not due to it's length (it's only about five paragraphs long), but due to what Linda is trying to say in those five paragraphs. "20/20" is a snapshot of everyday male/female relations in the United States. It is assumed by science that men, in general, think more logically than women who think more emotionally than men. Bill and Ruthie are on a drive across and the country and when the story begins, Bill comes to the conclusion that Ruthie is "incapable of theoretical debate" as "she refused to argue" and "stuck to simple observation, like 'Look, cows.'".Right away you can tell that Bill is annoyed with her and continues to be annoyed with her throughout the story. Ruthie takes over the driving duties and continues to make observations, one such observation "Indian paintbrush. A golden eagle." causes Bill to frown, as he believed that there were no indian paintbrush near Chicago. This can be interpreted to mean that he thought she didn't know much about the world, being a girl from rural Ohio after all. She continued to make observations and the last one was a comment on a handsome man that looked like Bill, and he "let it ride". 

For me this story this story is both about the perceived ignorance and ambivalence of women (due to...their perceived emotional state?), and how we struggle everyday to communicate with one another effectively. The man in this story is solely focused on logical thought, and as such misses the excitement that a trip across the country can bring to someone who maybe doesn't travel very often. To be fair Bill does touch upon that as a possibility, however he asks to drive after she "mistakes" a tree stump for a bigfoot. It is obvious to the reader that the woman is imagining these things to add to her sense of adventure yet the man mistakes her for being silly and tired. The sentence "Her eyes were big, blue, and capable of seeing wonderful sights." hits the nail on the head and convinces me that I'm right, or at least on the right path. Also, the fact that bill doesn't "get" Ruthie despite their three days on the road together further highlights the breakdown in communication between the sexes. 

I apologize if this seems rambling, but as I was writing more and more ideas came to me.