My plan for the exam
Dec. 13th, 2011 07:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethAt least: Three texts, two genres, two blocks of the course.
Pick a topic: Gender, Women, Sisters
Block One:
Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Women of England, their Social duties, and Domestic Habits (1839)
Christina Rosetti, Goblin Market (1862)
and a bit of useful comparison to Rosetti's In An Artist's Studio (1856)
Block Two:
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860)
all I've got for Block Three is that there's not many women in Heart of Darkness because, the Marlow character says, basically, they're better off out of it. They have a happy happy world and telling them true things would just be mean. Or something. But I don't need any from Block Three.
Okay:
Ellis represented mainstream opinion on the proper role of women at the time. She thought a general academic education for women was useless. The important quality of women was 'disinterested kindness' and they should be cultivating 'freedom from selfishness' and hence achieving 'moral greatness'. They should be given examples of 'meritorious instances of self-denial for the benefit of others'. For women it is 'the business of every day to give place to others, to think of their happiness, and to make sacrifices of her own to promote it'. To that end they should all be educated as nurses, not in competition with physicians, oh no, just so they know how to take care of loved ones when they're ill. Ellis was very disapproving of the idea of hiring in a nurse. Instead all women should be able to look after their own, should be taught common illnesses and how to treat them, and most especially should be taught how to cook for the ill. A really clever woman cooks, 'converting diet into medicine of the most agreeable description', and this is 'the most delicious and most effectual means of proving the strength of their affection', to choose to do what they might have hired someone to do. The annoying woman reckons that every woman should be taught 'to be on the watch for every opportunity of doing good to others; making it the first and the last inquiry of every day, "What can I do to make my parents, my brothers, or my sisters, more happy?"' In that order. To be fair she reckons this because she sees it as the standard every woman will be judged by in adult life anyway, so teaching them Latin and French and in general to think isn't going to help them be highly esteemed later. In this she had a point, but she took an existing situation for a moral obligation, that any woman should be seeking her own happiness only in the happiness of others.
I'm going to have to leave out the comments about how deeply irritating she is in the exam. She was very well read and widely approved of. Basically, anyway, there's more subtleties in my class notes that I haven't got open at the minute. Like, if everyone thinks this anyway, why so many books recommending it? But still, I can't call her a brainless twerp and expect to get anything other than yet another comment on use of inappropriate register.
But! Ellis connects usefully to Goblin Market and The Woman in White. The emphasis on nursing and self sacrifice is clear, and makes what Lizzie in the poem and Laura Fairlie and Marian in the book do for their sisters a socially approved feminine act, looking after them while they're sick. It also has that food-is-love connection that seems pretty persistent in human thought. Always reminds me of birds in the nest with their beaks wide open, but there you go, I do it anyway. Lizzie pretty much making herself the food - 'Eat me drink me' - is taking it to the logical conclusion really. Food and self sacrifice.
Goblin Market has two sisters and a lot of goblin men. They're not always called goblins but they're always called men. (double check that.) Laura eats the goblin fruit and then the goblins won't talk to her any more, and she can't have any more fruit, and gets sick, and would die. Lizzie saves her by going and getting goblin fruit, but while the goblins are plenty interested in her, they want to make her eat it, they don't want to sell it to her. So they mash fruit all over her and try and get some in her mouth. Also tear her clothes in a scene widely described as sexual assault. The versions for children often leave bits out. Like they leave out the bit about Jeannie who 'for joys brides hope to have' got sick and died. Of goblin. Connecting goblin fruit with stuff brides do makes it pretty clearly sexual, unless we're talking especially fruity wedding cake. Lizzie all covered in juice runs home and Laura is sad because she thinks Lizzie will suffer just like she did now but Lizzie gets Laura to suck her juices and Laura kisses her a lot and then they feel much better.
There are interpretations of this that aren't about lesbian incest, but they all seem to have to deal with the lesbian incest reading first.
So, it might be an erotic poem about sisters who kiss a lot. One gets in trouble from men making her ill and then not wanting her any more, and the other makes her feel better by not sucking goblin men fruit and bringing the juice home so her sister can suck her. For there is no friend like a sister.
... Playboy did an illustrated version and was quite clear on what it was all about.
The trouble with that reading is, why does Lizzie need to go get juicy in the first place? I mean, if it was her loving her sister that cures her, why does she have to go try and buy things from goblin men? And if it's a lesbian thing (with sisters, eeew), then why does the kissing scorch and make her loathe the feast?
Then there's the drug addiction reading. Goblin men as drug pushers, Laura wasting away for lack of drugs. Lizzie goes to buy more drugs. She brings them home and... they make Laura better? I can see an angle where that works though, since her reaction to Lizzie's offer is one of horror, scared that her sister will suffer the same as she has. And, wormwood, loathing, bitterness, now the fruit seems like bad poison. So the thought of her sister being miserable makes Laura not like the drugs. That can work. And then she gets all better.
There's also the religious reading, which has a lot of essays getting very technical about theology to back it up. Laura tastes of the fruits of the world and has a fall and is all miserable and going to die. Lizzie goes out and suffers and gets beat up and comes home offering food and drink from her own body. She's doing the bread and wine thing, first with the suffering and then rejecting temptation and that transforms her and she brings back redemptive sacrifice juice. And then it... burns? And then Laura falls, and 'is it death or is it life? Life out of death' and when she gets up again she's all young and innocent again. Which sounds a bit like it's death and the good place, but then she has children, so no. And then she warns her children that the fruit is poison and tells them to hold on to each other because there's no friend like a sister.
That puts a woman in the redemptive Jesus juice role.
And it's... weird. I mean, I think the theological ones have to really reach to make the juice that is both poison and cure make sense, because it doesn't make much sense.
It's only meant to be a fairy tale. It doesn't quite hold together as an allegory.
But it does have women being tempted and falling, because of evil goblin men and sucking their juicy fruits.
And then it has a woman doing the self sacrifice + food thing.
And then she saves her sister and together they're innocent and happy again.
And then there's girl children to teach this very valuable lesson, hold on to your sisters.
The most feminist part is at no point is there the remotest possibility of a man coming along and saving them. There's an ongoing shortage of men in general. There's implied existence of men at some point because children, but mostly, there's only goblin men, fruit merchant men, the evil sorts described in terms of a lot of distasteful and frequently foreign animals. Men, it seems, are mean evil fruit pushers who want you to suck their stuff. Even more than they want your money. They'll take gold of a woman's body, Laura's hair, but not ordinary earned coins. And as merchants they're really fail, since they won't sell to a customer who wants a second taste, nor will they sell to Lizzie when she won't suck. So men just want women to suck, and when women don't they get ill and beat up, and then they can only save each other. It's depressing, but it's women saving women. So.
Then there's
The Woman in White, which isn't so much with the poetic allegory, or indeed with men wanting women for their bodies. This time it's all about their gold. And killing them to take their gold. Sister tries to save sister, but they get sick and fail instead. All they're particularly successful at is nursing each other back to health. For all the rest they need a man to fix it for them.
I say 'then', but actually it was published a bit before Goblin Market. Perhaps I could write about it first? Then I start with the annoying failure to save and move on to the actually saving.
Laura Fairlie and Marian Halcolmbe are both annoying in different ways. Laura is so utterly wet. Or in Ellis terms, feminine. She's not big with the thinking, but she does the nursing parts, so that's okay. And then when she gets ill it's Marian's turn to look after her. Except there's an essay around here somewhere pointing out there's no proof that the ill woman is an ill Laura Fairlie, except for all these documents Walter presents as part of proving his son is heir to a lot of money. He and Marian end up rather well set up, which would not have happened should the woman in white have remained identified as Anne Catherick. The book doesn't want us to question Walter's veracity, but the book failed at the 'actually makes sense' test on first publishing, so there was some problem left in the believing it.
Those three sisters, Anne Catherick, Laura Fairlie and Marian Halcolmbe, they're always trying to save each other and failing. Anne has too much nerves and dies of her heart getting too excited. Laura breaks in the brain parts when her husband sends her to an asylum. Marian climbs over rooftops in the rain, which is by far the most exciting thing to happen until Sir Percival burns to death, but while she gains useful information she doesn't get to use it. She gets sick instead. Always the women are too fragile to be looking after themselves, let alone saving each other.
:-p
There's an essay about how sisters are subversive, because the whole Victorian value system was founded on the idea of family, and of men being in charge of it. But sisters were family that didn't have men involved. If they looked after each other successfully it would be all okay according to the value system that says women should be self sacrificing and helpful and kind and all of that, and yet, there would be no men anywhere. Can't be having with that. Sensation novels were often about women and identity, losing their identity, having to prove they really were nice upstanding middle class ladies of character rather than, for instance, nobodies from an asylum. The later sensation novels got a lot complained about, but this one didn't. The later sensation novels were mostly about women deciding on the new identities, controlling their own identity. This one is about men renaming women all the way through.
And while it's about sisters caring for each other, by the end of the book it reconfigures around Walter, who spends the book growing into the kind of decisive insightful rational bureaucratic manly man that can rule these irrational fragile women. Sort of. There was a lot in essays about how nervous was a feminine quality, and Walter got infected with nervous when The Woman in White touched him in the middle of the night and made all his blood stand still. Then he went to central america and everyone he was with died and he came back all brave and bold... and still having a shock when he sees another woman in white in a graveyard. Gender is right complicated from all these nervous men around.
Gender is also complicated by Marian constantly referring to herself as manly and being introduced as having a moustache. So she gets to be the active one. But it wears off. As do references to her masculine ugliness. After she's spent a volume just looking after her sister they stop mentioning her masculine ugly.
It's all very annoying.
I need to re-read my notes and have a more coherent opinion. With quotes. And close reading.
So it took me like an hour to write up that summary bit. on the plus side, I'll be able to fill a three hour exam. On the minus side, I'm fairly sure all that all wouldn't get me very good grades.
Study is hard.
Also, at least this semester, both annoying and boring.
I know there's a ton of texts being weird about women. Look at the poor fragile women, aw look at them being all caring and doing nurse stuff and also things to do with food, there they are in their nice neat place. Yuck.
I want to go back to watching Doctor Who or, I don't know, martial arts movies. They're weird about women but there's more kicking arse mixed in.
I'm so going to fail this semester.
Pick a topic: Gender, Women, Sisters
Block One:
Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Women of England, their Social duties, and Domestic Habits (1839)
Christina Rosetti, Goblin Market (1862)
and a bit of useful comparison to Rosetti's In An Artist's Studio (1856)
Block Two:
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860)
all I've got for Block Three is that there's not many women in Heart of Darkness because, the Marlow character says, basically, they're better off out of it. They have a happy happy world and telling them true things would just be mean. Or something. But I don't need any from Block Three.
Okay:
Ellis represented mainstream opinion on the proper role of women at the time. She thought a general academic education for women was useless. The important quality of women was 'disinterested kindness' and they should be cultivating 'freedom from selfishness' and hence achieving 'moral greatness'. They should be given examples of 'meritorious instances of self-denial for the benefit of others'. For women it is 'the business of every day to give place to others, to think of their happiness, and to make sacrifices of her own to promote it'. To that end they should all be educated as nurses, not in competition with physicians, oh no, just so they know how to take care of loved ones when they're ill. Ellis was very disapproving of the idea of hiring in a nurse. Instead all women should be able to look after their own, should be taught common illnesses and how to treat them, and most especially should be taught how to cook for the ill. A really clever woman cooks, 'converting diet into medicine of the most agreeable description', and this is 'the most delicious and most effectual means of proving the strength of their affection', to choose to do what they might have hired someone to do. The annoying woman reckons that every woman should be taught 'to be on the watch for every opportunity of doing good to others; making it the first and the last inquiry of every day, "What can I do to make my parents, my brothers, or my sisters, more happy?"' In that order. To be fair she reckons this because she sees it as the standard every woman will be judged by in adult life anyway, so teaching them Latin and French and in general to think isn't going to help them be highly esteemed later. In this she had a point, but she took an existing situation for a moral obligation, that any woman should be seeking her own happiness only in the happiness of others.
I'm going to have to leave out the comments about how deeply irritating she is in the exam. She was very well read and widely approved of. Basically, anyway, there's more subtleties in my class notes that I haven't got open at the minute. Like, if everyone thinks this anyway, why so many books recommending it? But still, I can't call her a brainless twerp and expect to get anything other than yet another comment on use of inappropriate register.
But! Ellis connects usefully to Goblin Market and The Woman in White. The emphasis on nursing and self sacrifice is clear, and makes what Lizzie in the poem and Laura Fairlie and Marian in the book do for their sisters a socially approved feminine act, looking after them while they're sick. It also has that food-is-love connection that seems pretty persistent in human thought. Always reminds me of birds in the nest with their beaks wide open, but there you go, I do it anyway. Lizzie pretty much making herself the food - 'Eat me drink me' - is taking it to the logical conclusion really. Food and self sacrifice.
Goblin Market has two sisters and a lot of goblin men. They're not always called goblins but they're always called men. (double check that.) Laura eats the goblin fruit and then the goblins won't talk to her any more, and she can't have any more fruit, and gets sick, and would die. Lizzie saves her by going and getting goblin fruit, but while the goblins are plenty interested in her, they want to make her eat it, they don't want to sell it to her. So they mash fruit all over her and try and get some in her mouth. Also tear her clothes in a scene widely described as sexual assault. The versions for children often leave bits out. Like they leave out the bit about Jeannie who 'for joys brides hope to have' got sick and died. Of goblin. Connecting goblin fruit with stuff brides do makes it pretty clearly sexual, unless we're talking especially fruity wedding cake. Lizzie all covered in juice runs home and Laura is sad because she thinks Lizzie will suffer just like she did now but Lizzie gets Laura to suck her juices and Laura kisses her a lot and then they feel much better.
There are interpretations of this that aren't about lesbian incest, but they all seem to have to deal with the lesbian incest reading first.
So, it might be an erotic poem about sisters who kiss a lot. One gets in trouble from men making her ill and then not wanting her any more, and the other makes her feel better by not sucking goblin men fruit and bringing the juice home so her sister can suck her. For there is no friend like a sister.
... Playboy did an illustrated version and was quite clear on what it was all about.
The trouble with that reading is, why does Lizzie need to go get juicy in the first place? I mean, if it was her loving her sister that cures her, why does she have to go try and buy things from goblin men? And if it's a lesbian thing (with sisters, eeew), then why does the kissing scorch and make her loathe the feast?
Then there's the drug addiction reading. Goblin men as drug pushers, Laura wasting away for lack of drugs. Lizzie goes to buy more drugs. She brings them home and... they make Laura better? I can see an angle where that works though, since her reaction to Lizzie's offer is one of horror, scared that her sister will suffer the same as she has. And, wormwood, loathing, bitterness, now the fruit seems like bad poison. So the thought of her sister being miserable makes Laura not like the drugs. That can work. And then she gets all better.
There's also the religious reading, which has a lot of essays getting very technical about theology to back it up. Laura tastes of the fruits of the world and has a fall and is all miserable and going to die. Lizzie goes out and suffers and gets beat up and comes home offering food and drink from her own body. She's doing the bread and wine thing, first with the suffering and then rejecting temptation and that transforms her and she brings back redemptive sacrifice juice. And then it... burns? And then Laura falls, and 'is it death or is it life? Life out of death' and when she gets up again she's all young and innocent again. Which sounds a bit like it's death and the good place, but then she has children, so no. And then she warns her children that the fruit is poison and tells them to hold on to each other because there's no friend like a sister.
That puts a woman in the redemptive Jesus juice role.
And it's... weird. I mean, I think the theological ones have to really reach to make the juice that is both poison and cure make sense, because it doesn't make much sense.
It's only meant to be a fairy tale. It doesn't quite hold together as an allegory.
But it does have women being tempted and falling, because of evil goblin men and sucking their juicy fruits.
And then it has a woman doing the self sacrifice + food thing.
And then she saves her sister and together they're innocent and happy again.
And then there's girl children to teach this very valuable lesson, hold on to your sisters.
The most feminist part is at no point is there the remotest possibility of a man coming along and saving them. There's an ongoing shortage of men in general. There's implied existence of men at some point because children, but mostly, there's only goblin men, fruit merchant men, the evil sorts described in terms of a lot of distasteful and frequently foreign animals. Men, it seems, are mean evil fruit pushers who want you to suck their stuff. Even more than they want your money. They'll take gold of a woman's body, Laura's hair, but not ordinary earned coins. And as merchants they're really fail, since they won't sell to a customer who wants a second taste, nor will they sell to Lizzie when she won't suck. So men just want women to suck, and when women don't they get ill and beat up, and then they can only save each other. It's depressing, but it's women saving women. So.
Then there's
The Woman in White, which isn't so much with the poetic allegory, or indeed with men wanting women for their bodies. This time it's all about their gold. And killing them to take their gold. Sister tries to save sister, but they get sick and fail instead. All they're particularly successful at is nursing each other back to health. For all the rest they need a man to fix it for them.
I say 'then', but actually it was published a bit before Goblin Market. Perhaps I could write about it first? Then I start with the annoying failure to save and move on to the actually saving.
Laura Fairlie and Marian Halcolmbe are both annoying in different ways. Laura is so utterly wet. Or in Ellis terms, feminine. She's not big with the thinking, but she does the nursing parts, so that's okay. And then when she gets ill it's Marian's turn to look after her. Except there's an essay around here somewhere pointing out there's no proof that the ill woman is an ill Laura Fairlie, except for all these documents Walter presents as part of proving his son is heir to a lot of money. He and Marian end up rather well set up, which would not have happened should the woman in white have remained identified as Anne Catherick. The book doesn't want us to question Walter's veracity, but the book failed at the 'actually makes sense' test on first publishing, so there was some problem left in the believing it.
Those three sisters, Anne Catherick, Laura Fairlie and Marian Halcolmbe, they're always trying to save each other and failing. Anne has too much nerves and dies of her heart getting too excited. Laura breaks in the brain parts when her husband sends her to an asylum. Marian climbs over rooftops in the rain, which is by far the most exciting thing to happen until Sir Percival burns to death, but while she gains useful information she doesn't get to use it. She gets sick instead. Always the women are too fragile to be looking after themselves, let alone saving each other.
:-p
There's an essay about how sisters are subversive, because the whole Victorian value system was founded on the idea of family, and of men being in charge of it. But sisters were family that didn't have men involved. If they looked after each other successfully it would be all okay according to the value system that says women should be self sacrificing and helpful and kind and all of that, and yet, there would be no men anywhere. Can't be having with that. Sensation novels were often about women and identity, losing their identity, having to prove they really were nice upstanding middle class ladies of character rather than, for instance, nobodies from an asylum. The later sensation novels got a lot complained about, but this one didn't. The later sensation novels were mostly about women deciding on the new identities, controlling their own identity. This one is about men renaming women all the way through.
And while it's about sisters caring for each other, by the end of the book it reconfigures around Walter, who spends the book growing into the kind of decisive insightful rational bureaucratic manly man that can rule these irrational fragile women. Sort of. There was a lot in essays about how nervous was a feminine quality, and Walter got infected with nervous when The Woman in White touched him in the middle of the night and made all his blood stand still. Then he went to central america and everyone he was with died and he came back all brave and bold... and still having a shock when he sees another woman in white in a graveyard. Gender is right complicated from all these nervous men around.
Gender is also complicated by Marian constantly referring to herself as manly and being introduced as having a moustache. So she gets to be the active one. But it wears off. As do references to her masculine ugliness. After she's spent a volume just looking after her sister they stop mentioning her masculine ugly.
It's all very annoying.
I need to re-read my notes and have a more coherent opinion. With quotes. And close reading.
So it took me like an hour to write up that summary bit. on the plus side, I'll be able to fill a three hour exam. On the minus side, I'm fairly sure all that all wouldn't get me very good grades.
Study is hard.
Also, at least this semester, both annoying and boring.
I know there's a ton of texts being weird about women. Look at the poor fragile women, aw look at them being all caring and doing nurse stuff and also things to do with food, there they are in their nice neat place. Yuck.
I want to go back to watching Doctor Who or, I don't know, martial arts movies. They're weird about women but there's more kicking arse mixed in.
I'm so going to fail this semester.
