Just "A" Papers

A farewell of sorts

2011-05-26T19:59:00.000-07:00

The current phase of my education is coming to a close, and I don't think I'll have many more papers to post here for some time.

I've never made any claims to the greatness of my writing; as the title of this blog states, they're just papers that have earned A's from the teachers who graded them. I am pretty proud of them, however.

I don't intend to stop blogging, but in the absence of new papers to post, I'll be taking a different direction. If you're interested in improving your own writing, please head over to my new blog, Write Better Papers. There, I'll explain the tips and tricks that have helped me improve my own writing. See you there!

The Great Social Evil: Victorian Society's Creation of Prostitutes

2010-06-16T21:57:00.000-07:00

Scholars today widely agree that the Victorian age, from 1830-1901, was not the best time for English women. As the editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature write, "political and legal reforms in the course of the Victorian period had given citizens many rights...but women did not share in these freedoms" (990). Given few educational opportunities; lacking the right to participate in the political process, either through voting or holding political office; and unable, until the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 to 1908, even to "own or handle their own property" ("Introduction" 990), women--particularly women of the upper and middle classes--were relegated to home and hearth, and "feminine idleness was treasured as a status symbol" ("Woman Question" 1582). In an age of great social change, however, women's subservient position did not go unnoticed; many writers of the time addressed the "Woman Question." An examination of the career of Becky Sharp, one of the two women at the center of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, reveals the oppressive paradox at the heart of genteel Victorian womanhood: a woman's financial and social security depended on her use of her sexuality to attract a mate, and yet a virtuous woman could never use that sexuality knowingly to further the cause of her own survival. According to Victorian mores, only wicked women dared try to take control of their own fates. Unfortunately for many women, the unlucky accident of poverty or low social class could turn an intelligent and ambitious woman "wicked."

Thackeray seems to have recognized the unfairness of this doctrine, and to have addressed it in his treatment of Becky Sharp. The orphan of a drunken painter and a French opera-girl, Becky enters Vanity Fair, and the marriage market, a penniless governess with nothing but her own wits to help her make her way in the world. Her exploits as she rises from governess to Captain's wife, and from poverty to comparable wealth and security, do mark her as a wicked woman and eventually as a disgraced demimondaine, but they also demonstrate extraordinary intelligence and an indomitable will, as well as a certain sympathy towards her on the part of her creator. As Richard C. Stevenson writes, "the text provides us with a 'double' yet coherent way of viewing Becky: on the one hand we are given a firm basis on which to judge her severely, and on the other we are encouraged to see the limitations of that judgment and to feel a guarded admiration for the way in which she comports herself" (1). Thackeray accomplishes this by establishing Becky as a character without a single resource in the world beyond what lies within herself. Becky muses, "[I have] only herself and her own wits to trust to. Well, let us see if my wits cannot provide me with an honorable maintenance" (104), and they do. The aplomb with which she determines to rise above her circumstances in invites the reader's sympathy and admiration.

Becky's circumstances at the beginning of the novel are indeed disadvantageous, at least relating to her chances in the marriage market in which the genteel young ladies of the time met their future providers. Thackeray explains:

For though the task of husband-hunting is generally, and with becoming modesty, entrusted by young persons to their mammas, recollect that Miss Sharp had no kind parent to arrange these delicate matters for her, and that if she did not get a husband for herself, there was no one else in the wide world who would take the trouble off her hands...Our beloved but unprotected Rebecca determined to do her very best to secure the husband, who was even more necessary for her than for her friend [Amelia Sedley, the merchant's daughter]. (23-4)

The perception of necessity drives Becky. Amelia is the daughter of a well-off merchant. She will never, as far as the reader knows, have to work for her living, or suffer any indignities in order to survive. Without a husband, however, Becky must.

Becky is, in fact, already familiar with both work and indignity. At Miss Pinkerton's, the girls' school where she and Amelia became friends, Becky was "bound over as an articled pupil; her duties being to talk French [to teach the other girls],...and her privileges to live cost free, and, with a few guineas a year, to gather scraps of knowledge from the professors who attended the school" (Thackeray 13): she was more of a servant than a pupil. Her own words expose the indignities of the position:

For two years I have only had insults and outrage from [Miss Pinkerton]. I have been treated worse than any servant in the kitchen. I have never had a friend or a kind word, except from you. I have been made to tend the little girls in the lower schoolroom, and to talk French to the Misses, until I grew sick of my mother tongue. (Thackeray 11)

Her low status allows others to feel justified in treating her poorly, and she has only more of the same kind of treatment to look forward to upon leaving school, since she will be working as a governess. Is it incomprehensible, then, that she should attempt to escape this dismal future using what advantages she does have at her disposal?

Those advantages, luckily for Becky, do improve her chances in the marriage market. She has "very large, odd, and attractive [eyes]; so attractive that the Reverend Mr. Crisp, fresh from Oxford, and curate to the Vicar of Chiswick, the Reverend Mr. Flowerdew, fell in love with Miss Sharp; being shot dead by a glance of her eyes" (Thackeray 14): even at the beginning of her career, she is already capable of exploiting her physical attractiveness in order to secure her future. Such precocity isn't surprising. "She had never been a girl, she said; she had been a woman since she was eight years old" (Thackeray 14) as a result of the exigencies of poverty. As a child, she had had to talk creditors into "the granting of one meal more" (Thackeray 14), and the cunning that such early experience naturally developed helps her make the most of her advantages. What also helps her make the most of her advantages is her awareness of them. "I am a thousand times cleverer and more charming than [the rich Creole], for all her wealth," Becky reflects; "I am as well bred as the Earl's grand-daughter, for all her fine pedigree" (Thackeray 16). That awareness of her assets drives her to try to use them to her benefit. "She determined at any rate," Thackeray writes, "to get herself free from the prison in which she found herself [at Miss Pinkerton's], and now began to act for herself, and for the first time to make connected plans for the future" (16). This ability to plan and act for herself will soon set her apart from her fellow girls. Her self-reliance may run counter to the Victorian ideals of feminine "unworldliness and innocence" ("Woman Question" 1581), but without it, she would have no control over her future.

With Becky's failure to capture Jos Sedley, however, Thackeray makes clear how society's judgments limit that control. Jos, Amelia's rich buffoon of a brother, encounters Becky when she descends upon the Sedley home for a visit before the beginning of her employment as a governess, and as soon as Becky becomes aware of his wealth, she "determined in her heart upon making the conquest of this big beau" (Thackeray 23). Through a carefully executed campaign of flattery, feigned modesty, and hints of deeper regard, Becky does nearly succeed in capturing him. Her methods at this point in her career may sometimes be obvious, and, as Thackeray points out, "some ladies of indisputable correctness and gentility will condemn [her actions] as immodest" (32), but they work: by the time Becky and Jos set out on their ill-fated trip to Vauxhall, Jos is "no doubt about to" propose to her (65). What prevents Becky from succeeding is the mockery of George Osborne, Amelia's fiance. In a pivotal conversation with Jos, George stands in for societal judgment on Becky's low status, the very obstacle against which she struggles:

[George] had been revolving in his mind the marriage question pending between Jos and Rebecca, and was not over well pleased that a member of a family into which he...was going to marry, should make a mésalliance with a...little upstart governess..."Who's this little schoolgirl that is ogling and making love to him?...A governess is all very well, but I'd rather have a lady for my sister-in-law. I'm a liberal man; but I've proper pride, and know my own station: let her know hers." (69-70)

One aspects of George's argument here are particularly significant. First, Becky's status as a governess isn't what bothers him, precisely; it is, rather, her position as an upstart governess--one seemingly attempting to rise socially--that rankles. Her efforts to rise above that place--her "ogling" and "making love to" Jos--are what offend George's sense of propriety. He disapproves of Becky's desire to procure for herself a higher station in life than that into which she was born. Society, represented by George Osborne, condemns the woman who deliberately uses her desirability to improve her situation.

The next stage of Becky's career further illustrates the limitations and punishments society imposes on women like Becky. Taking with her the lessons learned from her failure with Jos Sedley, Becky goes to Queen's Crawley, where she meets the noble Crawley family and takes up the governess position from which she had hoped to escape through marriage to Jos. Undaunted by her recent failure, Becky rapidly makes a success of the job:

It became naturally Rebecca's duty to make herself, as she said, agreeable to her benefactors, and to gain their confidence to the utmost of her power...As my Lady Crawley was not one of those [influential] personages...not to be of the least consequence in her own house, Rebecca soon found that it was not at all necessary to cultivate her good will...With the young people, her method was pretty simple. She did not pester their young brains with too much learning...With Mr. Crawley Miss Sharp was respectful and obedient...The little governess rendered herself agreeable to her employer...[by finding] many different ways of being useful to him. (Thackeray 103-7).

The practice she has had in flattery and observation serve her well with the Crawleys: she quickly renders herself an indispensable part of the family. Not only does she win over the immediate household, but she also charms the Crawleys' wealthy spinster aunt, Miss Crawley. Miss Crawley tells Becky, "What is birth, my dear?...You, my love, are a little paragon...You have more brains than half the shire...you ought to have no superior, and I consider you, my love, as my equal in every respect" (Thackeray 125). The irony of Miss Crawley's flattery of Becky is that Miss Crawley does still treat Becky as an inferior, asking her to "put some coals on the fire" and "pick this dress...and alter it," and to "run of her errands, execute her millinery, and read her to sleep with French novels, every night" (125). Her kind words still encourage Becky, however, and Becky has soon achieved the most basic of her goals: she has married well, to Captain Rawdon Crawley, Miss Crawley's favorite nephew and presumed heir. But Miss Crawley's reaction when she learns of the marriage once again brings the ambitious social climber back down to earth. All her liberal proclamations forgotten in the face of the reality of her beloved and well-born nephew's marriage to a governess, Miss Crawley screams in hysterical disbelief, "Rawdon married Rebecca--governess--nobod...How dare you?" (Thackeray 195) and subsequently cuts Rawdon out of her will. Once again, not only have Becky's undeniable advantages failed to secure her the future she desires, but the very act of trying to secure that future has resulted in her rejection by established members of society.

That Becky's spirit does not falter after this failure to win over society illustrates what Stevenson describes as "her extraordinary ability to make the best of poor circumstances" (3). When Rawdon asks her what will happen if "the old lady doesn't come to," Becky confidently replies, "I'll make your fortune" (196-7). She doesn't quite do so, but in the next phase of her career, she does succeed at keeping her household afloat:

[Rawdon] vowed with a great oath that there was no woman in Europe who could talk a creditor over as [Becky] could. Almost immediately after their marriage, her practice had begun, and her husband found the immense value of such a wife. They had credit in plenty, but they had bills also in abundance, and laboured under a scarcity of ready money...[Yet] Rawdon and his wife had the very best apartments...; the landlord, as he brought in the first dish, bowed before them as to his greatest customers. (Thackeray 267)

Here, Thackeray presents the complexity of Becky's character. Her actions themselves cannot be considered honorable, consisting as they do of convincing creditors to lend her husband more money which Rawdon cannot repay, and yet the spirit with which she approaches the necessity of keeping herself and her husband fed and housed is admirable.

At this stage, however, Becky begins to overstep the boundaries of necessity, to reach for too much rather than what she deserves, leading to her ultimate fall. This shift begins in Brighton, when Becky and Rawdon meet up with the newlywed George and Amelia Osborne. The Osbornes' situation resembles the Crawleys': Amelia's father has become a disgraced bankrupt, and George's insistence on marrying her anyway has resulted in his disinheritance. George, therefore, has little wealth to tempt Becky, who is, in any case, already married and no longer free to make a marital conquest of him. Despite this lack of practical motivation, however, and despite the fact that he is married to her close friend, Becky deliberately sets out to charm George, and succeeds:

As Emmy did not say much or plague [George] with her jealousy, but merely became unhappy and pined over it miserably in secret, he chose to fancy that she was not suspicious of what all his acquaintance were perfectly aware--namely, that he was carrying on a desperate flirtation with Mrs. Crawley...flattering himself that [she] was dying of love for him. (Thackeray 355)

Beyond the small sums Rawdon wins from George during this flirtation, no reason exists for Becky to use her wiles on her friend's husband. She is, therefore, overreaching herself, and this marks her transition from spirited fighter to wicked woman. Her tendency to lean on wealthier and more influential protectors than her husband--first General Tufto, under whom Rawdon serves as aide-de-camp, and later on the cruel and corrupt Lord Steyne--likewise indicates a significant change. No longer just a social climber, Becky is now on the way to becoming a prostitute.

It is after Rawdon's discovery of her alone with Lord Steyne, and his discovery of the jewels and money she has hidden from her husband even when they could have kept him out of prison, drives him to leave her that she is exiled from respectable society and enters the world of the demimonde, from which she can never fully escape. After a long absence, Becky resurfaces, masked and gambling, at a Baden-Baden casino. Thackeray's description of the previous part of her life skillfully suggests the worst without having to state it explicitly:

We must pass over a part of Mrs. Rebecca Crawley's biography with that lightness and delicacy which the world demands--the moral world, that has, perhaps, no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name...In describing this Siren [Becky], singing and smiling, coaxing and cajoling, the author, with modest pride, asks his readers all round, has he once forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the monster's hideous tail above water? No!...And so, when Becky is out of the way, be sure that she is not particularly well employed, and that the less that is said about her doings is in fact the better. If we were to give a full account of her proceedings during a couple of years...there might be some reason for people to say this book was improper. (819-20)

It seems clear that the "hideous tail" of this siren here represents the sexual compromises the siren Becky has had to make beneath the surface of her public existence. Those compromises, after her separation from her husband, become more and more overt, as shown by the way the men who once treated her with respect now "laughed in her face with a familiarity that was not pleasant," "nodded to her without moving his hat," and "tried to walk into her sitting-room [uninvited]" (Thackeray 824). Becky's attempts to use her attractions to maintain her position have backfired. Despite her efforts to hold her head high and maintain the character of a respectable woman, Becky is eventually given "a notice to quit from the landlord, who had been told by some one that she was quite an unfit person to have at his hotel...she was forced to fly" (Thackeray 825). From these disgraces, and an episode as Jos Sedley's mistress, Becky can never recover her reputation. By the end of the novel she is alone: her son "has declined to see his mother," and Amelia, once her most steadfast friend, scurries off at the sight of her (Thackeray 888).

In Becky's story, one sees the cruelty of the Victorian moral system: in life as well as in fiction, gender inequities often meant that necessity or ambition drove clever, good-looking girls unfortunate enough to have been born into poverty into prostitution, which then shut them irrevocably out from "respectable" society. It is not unnatural, after all, that poor girls should sometimes feel, as Becky did, that they merited just as much comfort and amusement as others received, and not unnatural that some of those girls should attempt to acquire what they had not been given. The anonymous Victorian author of "The Great Social Evil" writes:

Frequently...some young lady who had quitted the paternal restraints, or perhaps, been started off, none knew whither or how, to seek her fortune, would reappear among us with a profusion of ribands, fine clothes, and lots of cash. (Anonymous 1593).

Examples like these showed the author the advantages of prostitution, and she followed those examples early on. Born into poverty and low social class, she would not be able to acquire the rewards earned through the sale of her body in any legitimate fashion anyway. Those rewards are not enough to blind her to her place in society, however:

We [prostitutes] come from the dregs of society, as our so-called betters term it. What business has society to have dregs--such dregs as we? You railers of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, you the pious, the moral, the respectable, as you call yourselves, who stand on your smooth and pleasant side of the great gulf you have dug and keep between yourself and the dregs, why don't you bridge it over, or fill it up, and by some humane and generous process absorb us into your leavened mass, until we become interpenetrated with goodness like yourselves? Why stand on your eminence shouting that we should be ashamed of ourselves? What have we to be ashamed of, we who do not know what shame is--the shame you mean?...Will you make us responsible for what we never knew? (1595)

This anonymous author, whose passionate eloquence and intelligence must have shocked some readers considering her profession, makes a powerful case against Victorian sexual mores. The very qualities that define ideal Victorian womanhood make rising from poverty impossible for women not born into affluence, and poor women, born outside Victorian definitions of respectability, have no reason to adhere to those sexual mores.

Virtue and the lack thereof in Victorian society, therefore, depended as much on social class as on innate moral qualities, creating an unjust system set up to punish women with the courage and will to attempt to overcome their circumstances. Thackeray, despite his ultimate condemnation of Becky Sharp as a creature of vice, demonstrated this injustice in his illustration of her career. Becky famously says, "I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year" (535). It is the getting of that five thousand a year that poses a problem, since for someone who starts out in the circumstances in which Becky does, there is little chance of acquiring any adequate income without turning to the behaviors forbidden to "good" women. The anonymous prostitute behind "The Great Social Evil" illustrates that with her own story: how would a girl born into poverty be able to afford both the security and the luxuries she and her ilk can, if not for prostitution? And why should she and her ilk care for polite society's condemnation of them, when polite society was never going to accept or acknowledge them in the first place? The very qualities that enabled certain women to rise above their births also ensured their ostracism from "respectabe society." Ultimately, Victorian sexual mores set active, ambitious, and aggressive women up for condemnation and failure.

Works Cited

Anonymous. "The Great Social Evil." Reidhead 1592-6. Print.

Reidhead, Julia, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th ed. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Print.

Stevenson, Richard C. "The Problem of Judging Becky Sharp: Scene and Narrative Commentary in Vanity Fair." Victorians Institute Journal .6 (1977): 1-8. Web. 1 May 2010.

Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair. New York: Bantam Classic, 1997. Print.

"The Victorian Age 1830-1901." Reidhead 979-999. Print.

"The 'Woman Question': The Victorian Debate About Gender." Reidhead 1581-3. Print.

Mad Plunges Against Fate: Marriage and Divorce in the Fiction of Edith Wharton

2010-06-16T21:49:00.000-07:00

"The great argument," Edith Wharton declared in The Writing of Fiction, "requires space" (76). She was writing of the importance of fitting one's theme to its appropriate fictional form, whether short story or novel. If one considers her argument in relation to her fiction, it becomes easy to pick out some of her particular "great arguments." Marriage and divorce play significant roles in her body of work, from The House of Mirth to The Age of Innocence. This thematic concern becomes understandable in light of Wharton's history: according to the editors of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, she was married for twenty-eight unhappy years before seeking a divorce "on grounds of her husband's adultery" (829). Also understandable in light of her history is her particular treatment of marriage and divorce. Consistently throughout her novels, Wharton presents marriage as oppression, and divorce as liberation.

In treating marriage negatively and divorce positively, Wharton was, from her first novel, setting herself against popular gender ideology. As Kelly Mayhew writes in "The Discourse of Motherhood: Maternity in Wharton, Woolf, Morrison and Shelley," "there was a social movement to remind women of their 'proper place' in society as contented wives and mothers" (37). Mayhew argues that "the goal of this movement was to divert women's attention away from examining their own political subordination" (37); an unfortunate consequence of the movement was the stunting of women's personal and intellectual growth, thus facilitating their continued subordination. Lily Bart, the tragic protagonist of The House of Mirth, provides a perfect illustration of the consequences of the marriage-centered training of women. Perfectly aware, as Lawrence Selden puts it, that marriage is her "vocation" and what "[women like her] are brought up for" (House 9), she is "so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate" (House 7). That fate is to either find a husband on whom she can depend, or to perish in the attempt. Unfortunately for Lily, her inability to survive without some male protector is accompanied by enough sensitivity to make her resist the oppressions of marriage. "She might have married more than once--the conventional rich marriage which she had been taught to consider the sole end of existence--but when the opportunity came she had always shrunk from it" (House 156). In the end, Lily dies, alone and poverty-stricken as a result of her inability to marry. This, and her failure to unite with Lawrence Selden, seem tragic until one considers the examples of marriage Wharton presents. In light of those examples, Lily may, in fact, be better off dead.

In The House of Mirth, the uneasy marriage of the Dorsets provides the example of the oppressiveness of marriage and the desirability of divorce. George and Bertha Dorset exist in an uneasy union maintained by deception on her side and ignorance on his: the cruel, unfaithful Bertha "delights in making people miserable, and especially poor George," but "doesn't dare lose her hold on him on account of the money, and so when he isn't jealous she pretends to be" (House 44). The marriage, useful as it is for Bertha, requires constant subterfuge. For George, it is a misery from which he eventually becomes desperate to escape, and to which he must be reconciled by his wife with yet more deception (House 201-9). Marriage in The House of Mirth, therefore, is a mercenary institution, and one that requires scheming and deception to maintain.

The Dorsets' example is an extreme one, lacking as it is in anything approaching genuine affection or attachment, but no less oppressive is the love-match marriage of Newland Archer and May Welland in The Age of Innocence. The Archers' story, in fact, may be more alarming in its way, since it suggests that even the best of intentions and most respectful and affectionate of beginnings cannot redeem marriage from its oppressiveness. No mercenary considerations or actual infidelity mar this union, and yet one imagines that even without the specter of Ellen Olenska between them, Newland and May’s marriage is doomed to oppress them, not enhance their lives. How could it not, when "in future many problems would thus [through his wife's ignorant disapproval] be negatively solved for [Newland]” and “May's pressure was...bearing on the very angles he most wanted to keep" (Age 204), wearing down the very aspects of his personality that Newland considers most essential to his sense of self?

The Age of Innocence, an elegy to the "old New York" in which Wharton grew up, takes place in a society in which divorce was strongly discouraged, preventing Newland from regaining his freedom through divorce, as the unconventional Ellen Olenska attempts to do. Her desire for divorce is presented clearly as a desire for her freedom. It is clear that in leaving her European husband and returning to New York, Ellen has freed herself in the practical sense. A divorce will gain her nothing more than what she has already gotten from her husband: "'She's here--he's there; the Atlantic's between them. She'll never get back a dollar more of her money than what he's voluntarily returned to her" (Age 97-8). Neither does Ellen intend to remarry. What she wants, as she tells Newland, is "to cast off all my old life...I want to be free" (Age 107-8). Wharton thus argues for divorce not only on practical grounds, but on philosophical ones as well. The oppressiveness of marriage goes beyond the physical and practical constraints it imposes. Ellen Olenska is willing to "[wound] herself in her mad plunges against fate" (Age 95) to escape her marriage: the fact of being married, even without any practical consequences, is an intolerable prison.

Even where a Whartonian marriage is not a torment, as it is for George Dorset, Newland Archer, and Ellen Olenska, it can be an obstacle to realizing one's ambitions, and divorce therefore a means of advancement, as Wharton demonstrates in The Custom of the Country. Crude as the ambitions of that novel's heroine, Undine Spragg, are--the materialistic, greedy, selfish, social-climbing Undine lives primarily for the adulation of the crowds, for "the image of her own charm mirrored in the general admiration" (Custom 96)--they are ambitions, and she marries and divorces three different husbands in order to ensure her ascent. In her Midwestern youth, she married Elmer Moffatt for his "sense of being able to succeed" (Custom 340). Her divorce from him enables her to go with her parents to New York, where marriage to Ralph Marvell gives her an “in” to Eastern society. She quickly learns, however, that "she had given herself to the exclusive and the dowdy when the future belonged to the showy and promiscuous" (Custom 117), and subsequently divorces Ralph for what she perceives as greener pastures. Had Peter Van Degen, the representative of that showy and promiscuous world which Undine longs to dominate, gotten his own divorce, she would have married him. Since he eventually chooses not to, she contrives to marry French nobleman Raymond de Chelles instead. Her marriage to him eventually sours as well; Undine ends it when she realizes that she will not be able to get what she wants out of it materially. That last divorce brings her around full circle to Elmer Moffatt, who has reached a point in his own ascent where he can offer wealth and influence to Undine as none of her previous husbands can. Even at the end of the novel, however, Wharton makes clear that this marriage, too, will eventually prove not enough for Undine: "She could never be an Ambassador's wife, and...she said to herself that it was the one part she was really made for" (Custom 364).

Yet more examples of oppressive marriages and attempts to escape from them abound in Wharton's body of work. Discussing Kate Clephane, the main character in A Mother's Recompense, Mayhew writes, "we realize that she escaped New York not out of a mad lust for a man, but because she could not stand her marriage" (48). Ethan Frome, in the novel of the same title, is so miserable in his marriage to the embittered Zeena that he attempts suicide. The widow Anna Leath's unhappy first marriage in The Reef serves only to remind her of "the old vicious distinction between romance and reality" (Reef 92), since her husband's intellectual liberation and attractively unconventional stances were only pretensions laid over an oppressively conventional approach to life. Even her engagement to George Darrow quickly turns into "unendurable anguish" (Reef 284) once she realizes that he, with his past liaison with Sophy Viner, cannot match her ideal.

This examination of Wharton's work shows that to her, marriage, with its ties to social conventions and restrictions, represented oppression and imprisonment, while divorce, although socially condemned, served as a means of liberation. Marriage oppresses for any number of reasons, such as actual cruelty, simple incompatibility, or failure to live up to an ideal. Divorce liberates by working as a complete and final break not only from the other spouse, but also from the social conventions and restrictions which oppose it. In thus promoting divorce as a solution to marital problems, Wharton revealed a radical side to her "old New York" persona, and in making marriage and divorce central themes in so many of her works, she revealed their importance as some of the "great arguments" of her art.

Works Cited

"Edith Wharton." The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. C. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 2007. 829-30. Print.

Mayhew, Kelly. "The Discourse of Motherhood: Maternity in Wharton, Woolf, Morrison and Shelley." Diss. San Diego State University, 1993. Print.

Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. New York: Collier Books, 1986. Print.

---. The Custom of the Country. New York: Penguin Classics, 2005. Print.

---. The House of Mirth. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Print.

---. The Reef. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Print.

---. The Writing of Fiction. New York: Touchstone, 1997. Print.

"You Care What People Think of You": Personal and Racial Identity in Tripmaster Monkey

2010-06-16T21:42:00.000-07:00

Postmodern American fiction is often characterized by its focus on the issues of personal and ethnic identity in a heterogenous nation. "Trippers and Askers," the first chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston's 1989 novel Tripmaster Monkey, explores these issues in a day in the life of Wittman Ah Sing, a second-generation Chinese-American poet. Relentlessly self-centered, self-consciously determined to both distinguish himself from others and claim a place within a group, and often shallow and cruel in his judgments of others, Wittman makes a sometimes unsympathetic character, but a perfect representative of complex humanity in search of a simple answer. Through him, we see that the search for identity is often an ugly affair: we judge, reject, and hurt others in our efforts at self-definition, all while mistaking others' perceptions of ourselves for our true identities.

The cruelty towards others that often accompanies a search for one's identity makes itself apparent early on in the chapter. Out for a walk one fall day, Wittman decides to open himself up to his environment and fellow human beings, to "let it all come in" (2875), perhaps in an effort to connect with his surroundings and community. As positive as his intentions may be, however, the observations he makes are uniformly negative. The "old white woman...sitting on a bench selling trivets" (2875) is a grotesque: "Not eyelids exactly but like skin flaps or membranes covered her eye sockets and quivered from the empty air in the holes or with efforts to see" (2875). To Wittman, "her thick feet chapped and dirty" (2875) suggest mental illness, for "their sorry feet is how you can tell crazy people who have no place to go and walk everywhere" (2875). Looking around his world, Wittman sees only ugliness, and reacts by rejecting it, by "[looking] away so that he would not himself get nauseated" (2876). Rejection is, after all, a method of self-definition, a way of drawing the line between oneself and the Other.

Wittman's use of judgmental rejection as self-definition reveals his conflicted attitude towards his own ethnicity when he turns his gaze upon the pedestrians who next cross his path. He, despite being Chinese-American, views other Chinese as if he were an outsider: "Heading toward him from the other end comes a Chinese dude from China, hands clasped behind, bow-legged, loose-seated, out on a stroll--that walk they do in kung fu movies" (2876). That reference to kung fu movies reads as stereotyping. One might expect a non-Chinese American to associate the Chinese man with a Western cinematic trope, but to hear it from the perspective of a Chinese-American reveals how distanced Wittman feels from his own ethnic identity. This distance becomes even clearer with his appraisal of the Chinese family that next crosses his path:

Immigrants. Fresh Off the Boats out in public. Didn't know how to walk together. Spitting seeds. So uncool. You wouldn't mislike them on sight if their pants weren't so highwater, gym socks white and noticeable. F. O. B. fashions--highwaters or puddlecuffs. Can't get it right. Uncool. Uncool. (2876)

Additionally, the specific details upon which Wittman fixates expose the shallowness of his standards, and whose opinion matters to him. What bother him about the F. O. B. family are the way they walk and the clothes they wear, and those things bother him because they are "uncool"--because they look ridiculous to others.

Despite rejecting those fellow Chinese he deems as "uncool," however, Wittman sees no conflict in turning to his Chineseness to define himself when doing so can place him above another. On a date with Nanci Lee, the beautiful Chinese-American girl with whom he has been infatuated since their college days, Wittman deliberately works to make her feel excluded from the community: "'You must not have been in on the Chinese gossip,' he said, counting on what would hurt her, that at school she had been left out by the main Chinese...He rubbed it in, how much she did not know about her own" (2882-3). Now, instead of ridiculing members of the community, he identifies himself with the community, and uses that identification to hurt Nanci by showing how she is left out. He feels the need to prove himself above her precisely because he feels himself below her in the social hierarchy. As he sees it, "she was no China Man the way he was China Man. A good-looking chick like her floats above it all. He [is] out of it" (2882). Asserting an ethnic identity, Kingston seems to suggest, can sometimes be as negative an act as rejecting one's ethnic identity, depending on the motivation for it.

Wittman's sense of self, after all, is based almost entirely on how he thinks others perceive him. Nanci recognizes this, and recognizes the reason for his attraction to her. "'You want to know how you were seen [at college]. What your reputation was. What people thought of you. You care what people think of you. You're interested in my telling you'" (2887). In other words, he wants her to tell him who he was at college. His own sense of who he was--"He had been wild...He read aloud on afternoons on the Terrace and at the Mediterraneum...There had been no other playwright. Of whatever color. He was the only one" (2887)--is not enough; being misread infuriates him.

It is being misread, in fact, that triggers his rage at the end of the chapter. After having read some of his poetry to Nanci, an act designed to impress her with the most intense expression of who he really is, Wittman asks her what she thinks. Her reply? "'You sound black,' she said. 'I mean like a Black poet. Jive. Slang. Like LeRoi Jones. Like...like Black'" (2898). Wittman tries to show Nanci who he is, and she tells him that he sounds like someone he knows he most definitely is not. In response to that misreading of his personal and ethnic identity, Wittman launches into a tirade in which he first imitates a monkey, then reads aloud in pidgin Chinese, and then claims himself to be not just a monkey, but the King of the Monkeys (2898). Nanci's misinterpretation of his identity causes him to go over the top in an attempt to reclaim his sense of self.

What becomes clear from Wittman's contortions of identity throughout "Trippers and Askers" is not only the mutability of the postmodern American's ethnic and personal identity, but also the ugliness the quest for it often inspires. Wittman cannot see himself clearly, or feel confident in himself, without someone else to whom he can feel superior, whether that someone else be a street person of a different ethnicity, recent immigrants of his own ethnicity, or an old flame whose very superiority to him makes finding a way to feel superior to her even more vital. This need to feel superior comes from the conflation of identity with others' perceptions, a conflation common in the postmodern world, in which the very heterogeneity of society makes finding one's place even more urgent and difficult than it had been in previous eras. Ultimately, Kingston seems to suggest, one cannot truly find one's place or self until one moves beyond needing to appear a certain way to others.

Edition cited: Kingston, Maxine Hong. "Trippers and Askers." The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. E. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 2007. 2874-2900. Print.

Waves and Radiation: The Pervasiveness of Media Culture in White Noise

2010-06-16T21:38:00.000-07:00

Even before the Internet and social media made media saturation in American life a cause for constant discussion and concern, the mass media had provided fertile ground for literary exploration. In 1938, John Dos Passos's U. S. A. called attention to the popular media through the use, as the editors of the Norton Anthology of American Literature write, of "newspaper excerpts and headlines, snippets from popular songs, and quotations from speeches and documents...in an imitation of the weekly feature one saw at the movie house" (1854). Nearly fifty years later, Don DeLillo presents the mass media as a ubiquitous presence in everyday life, and explores the consequences of that ubiquity. The mass media, DeLillo suggests in his novel White Noise, replaces human intellect and experience with unthinking consumerism, and addresses the human need for meaning by creating new mythologies based on the outlandish fictions of trashy supermarket tabloids.

Throughout White Noise, the children of the main character, Jack Gladney, and his wife Babette, particularly their daughters, act as receptors and transmitters of media messages, revealing how much the media can penetrate the consciousness. Watching his children sleep, Jack muses:

In those soft warm faces was a quality of trust so absolute and pure that I did not want to think it might be misplaced. There must be something, somewhere, large and grand and redoubtable enough to justify this shining reliance and implicit belief...Steffie turned slightly, then muttered something in her sleep. It seemed important that I know what it was...She uttered two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive at the same time, words that seemed to have a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant. Toyota Celica. (155)

The joke is that to the characters who inhabit White Noise, the make and model of a popular automobile do impart ritual meaning. The Gladneys are not religious. Neither do they adhere to the "traditional" model of family that may have once imparted a sense of continuity and meaning to the average human being. They are a nontraditional family, the children products of a variety of Jack's and Babette’s previous marriages. They get their sense of community from visits to their local supermarket, from the ritual of purchasing, and the sound of the television pervades their home life.

This pervasiveness has an extraordinary power, as demonstrated by the girls' reactions when the airborne toxic event occurs. Years of passively absorbing media messages have left them extremely suggestible; they do not manifest symptoms of exposure until those symptoms have been listed on the radio, and those symptoms change as their knowledge of what the radio says the symptoms are changes. The fact that the girls' symptoms are always out of sync with the latest news shows their illusory nature. The first reports warned listeners of sweaty palms, but by the time the girls began "complaining of sweaty palms,” there had "been a correction" that changed the symptoms to "nausea, vomiting, [and] shortness of breath" (111-2). Later on, the symptoms are again amended, this time to include the sense of deja vu, which Steffie then manifests. This seeming suggestibility strikes Jack: "It could mean she was in a position to be tricked by her own apparatus of suggestibility...Was she so open to suggestion that she would develop every symptom as it was announced?" (126). Steffie is, of course, the same child who murmurs the makes and models of family automobiles in her sleep, so that seems likely.

Children aren't the only ones susceptible to media influence, of course, and as the evacuees settle into their situation, even the adults begin to show a desperate need for media-created meaning. A scene in which Babette reads tabloids to a group of listeners takes on absurd significance:

There were four blind people, a nurse and three sighted people arranged in a semicircle facing the reader...Babette employed her storytelling voice, the same sincere and lilting tone she used when she read fairy tales to [the youngest child] Wilder...No one seemed amazed by [the fantastic tabloid story]...There was no interest shown in discussion. The story occupied some recess of passive belief. There it was, familiar and comforting in its own strange way...I wanted to believe at least this part of the tale. (142-5)

The reference to fairy tales, the absence of questioning or discussion, and the "passive belief" DeLillo mentions all resemble religious ritual. But for the specific text Babette reads, she could be reading to her audience from the Bible. The stories themselves, in fact, serve the same purpose as religious gospel. Babette reads about proof of life after death, which is, of course, a main tenet and comfort of religious thought. Clearly, in the absence of religion, supermarket tabloids provide hope and meaning to humanity.

Throughout White Noise, DeLillo avoids overt condemnation of modern media culture, but the absurdity of the world he depicts makes clear his anxiety over the pervasiveness of the mass media. It cannot be a positive development for advertisements to penetrate so deeply into a child's consciousness that that child says the names of cars in her sleep. Nor can it be positive for children to be so susceptible to the media that the mere mention of symptoms can cause the children to believe they manifest those symptoms. Children, of course, are not the only ones affected by media culture: it has become so ubiquitous that it provides not only suggestions about what to watch and what to buy, but also provides spiritual meaning and hope in eternal life. And as insightful as White Noise was in the decade of its publication, it is even more relevant today, in the age of cell phones that stream television shows and Google advertisements targeted to individual Web surfers, twenty years later.

Works Cited

DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books,1988. Print.

"John Dos Passos." The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. D. Ed. Julia Reidhead. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2007. 1853-4. Print.

Reality and Superstition in Silas Marner

2010-06-16T21:26:00.000-07:00

Despite the scientific advancements that have made the twenty-first century's technological marvels and unprecedented understanding of natural forces commonplace, debates still rage between empirical reason and unprovable faith or superstition. Debates such as these are not new. Nearly two hundred years ago, new theories about geological time and the evolution of all species challenged long-established religious beliefs. The ensuing debate broke free of the rarefied confines of theological discourse and made its way into larger society, appearing in the literature of the times. In the novel Silas Marner, Victorian intellectual and novelist George Eliot explores empirical reason and irrational faith, ultimately bringing them together in a philosophy with room for aspects of both. With the title character's tale, Eliot argues that while there may indeed be supernatural or divine forces at work in the world, those forces can achieve no good without human reason and choice.

Silas Marner's background illustrates the dangers of faith at the expense of reason. The youthful Silas belongs to "a narrow religious sect" that places a strong emphasis on the spiritual and visionary and rejects humanistic, rational explanation of events or phenomena, such as Silas's catalepsy (Eliot 9-10). The Lantern Yard community's prioritizing of divine intervention over empirical reason becomes clear when Silas is wrongly accused of theft. As Eliot writes, "Any resort to legal measures for ascertaining the culprit was contrary to the principles of the church in Lantern Yard...The members...resolved on praying and drawing lots [to solve the mystery]...The lots declared that Silas Marner was guilty" (13). As a result of this conclusion, formed wholly on faith in supernatural intervention, Silas Marner is excommunicated and exiled from the only community he has known. Eliot thus shows that faith alone cannot be relied upon to ensure justice on earth.

Despite this early and painful proof of the unreliability of divine intervention, however, Silas continues to display superstitious tendencies, and receives an unexpected reward for doing so. After the loss of his long-hoarded money--a theft perpetrated by Dunstan Cass, not by any supernatural agency, as some Raveloe villagers suspect (Eliot 57)--Silas takes to "the habit of opening his door and looking out from time to time, as if he thought that his money...[or] some trace, some news of it, might be mysteriously on the road" (Eliot 109). To a rational mind, this behavior makes little sense: waiting for something lost to return is no more likely to cause that return than doing nothing at all. Equally irrational is his acting on his neighbors' suggestion that on New Year's Eve, "he must sit up and hear the old year rung out and the new rung in, because that was good luck, and might bring his money back again" (Eliot 110). Neither opening his door to look for the return of his gold nor sitting up to listen to the ringing in of the new year bring Silas back his gold. If not, however, for his excitement at the possibility of his gold returning, which leads him to look out of his cottage more often than usual, and a sudden attack of his catalepsy at just the right moment, Silas's door would be closed to the infant Eppie, lost in the cold and snow that have already claimed her mother's life. Silas feels convinced of a supernatural connection between the loss of his gold and the discovery of the child, since "my money's gone, I don't know where--and this [child] is come from I don't know where" (118). Eliot neither confirms nor refutes this. Instead, she reconciles the two seemingly opposing possibilities and puts each in its place. It may be true that divine intervention brought Eppie to Silas's door, but the practical reasons for, and consequences of, her arrival are what matter: her origin in the secret marriage of Godfrey Cass, and her needs as a child. Therefore, while Silas clings to the superstitious faith that the child came to him as compensation for the loss of his gold, what he must act upon is the earthly reality of her existence. Silas's actions in response to Eppie's practical needs are what cement his bond to her.

He does continue to believe that she was sent to him by divine forces in compensation for his gold and as a path to redemption, however, a faith tested by the Casses' belief that those same divine forces intend Eppie to return to her natural father, Godfrey Cass. The discovery of Dunstan Cass's body in the Stone-pit, more than a decade after his death, convinces Godfrey that "when God Almighty wills it, our secrets are found out" (Eliot 162). This leads him to confess his previous marriage and fatherhood to his wife, Nancy. Here, again, a possible supernatural cause has produced a direct, earthly action. The Casses decide that their adoption of Eppie is a divinely ordained duty, in direct opposition to Silas's belief that Eppie was sent to him by divine action. Silas's and the Casses' superstitious claims on Eppie clash when the Casses arrive at the Marner cottage to adopt Eppie. Here, crucially, Eppie turns down the prosperous Casses' offer of elevated status in favor of life with Silas not because of his belief that she was sent to him to compensate for his stolen gold, but rather because of the earthly reality of the life they have shared. As Silas says, he and Eppie "eat o' the same bit, and drink o' the same cup" (Eliot 170). Eppie agrees: "He's took care of me and loved me from the first, and I'll cleave to him as long as he lives" (Eliot 172). Human decision, human action, and human choice decide the matter, not abstract questions of unprovable faith.

Eliot thus reconciles faith in the unseen with reason based on experience, allowing each to coexist but putting each in its proper place. Without denigrating faith in itself, however silly or irrational its expressions may sometimes be, she shows that faith alone does not decide destiny or create justice. The forces deciding the courses of earthly lives, and the power to change those lives, lie with human beings themselves. Human decisions and human actions, whether based on faith or on reason, affect the lives of all in tangible if not always comprehensible ways. Eliot shows that the wisest and kindest course of action is to seek truth and guidance not in abstract doctrine, religious principle, or superstitious belief in the unseen and unprovable, but in the solid reality of human experience, human community, and human action. Ultimately, truth and goodness lie in actions done, not doctrines held.

Edition cited: Eliot, George. Silas Marner. Ed. David Carroll. London, England: Penguin Group, 1996. Print.

The Emptiness of J. Alfred Prufrock

2010-06-16T21:22:00.000-07:00

The early twentieth century marked a significant change in American life, forcing upon the American people an urbanized, industrialized modernity, which not everyone embraced. The intellectuals of the day devoted their creativity to responding to the rapid changes in their society, producing a body of work now known as "American literary modernism" ("Introduction" 1178). Foremost among the Modernists was the conservative poet T. S. Eliot. His 1918 poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," makes clear with every line his discontent with what he perceived as the emptiness and meaningless of modern life, especially as compared to the richness and beauty of the past.

From its first stanzas, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" evokes a world whose tawdriness Eliot seems to deplore. The evening sky resembles "a patient etherised upon a table" (1577), suggesting an artificially induced helplessness and apathy, an anesthesia perhaps necessary to endure the ugly pointlessness of the city:

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, / The muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: / Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent (Eliot 1577)

The imagery is that of shabbiness, vague danger, and a deadening aimlessness, reinforced by the stream-of-consciousness pileup of images in the absence of orienting context or exposition. The succession of sleazy locales resembles a purposeless ramble on an unoccupied evening. This ramble seemingly leads nowhere, like the "tedious argument" of which Eliot speaks. That aimlessness is borne out in the next line, "To lead you to an overwhelming question..." (Eliot 1577). That question is never asked. Such is the deadened quality of Prufrock's soul, and of his world. Then an additional layer of grime descends upon the anesthetized twilight:

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, / The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, / Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, / Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, / Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys (Eliot 1577)

This filth covers the scene. It seems clear by now that Eliot's conception of urban life was not that of glittering purpose, prosperity, and amusement, but rather one of dirtiness and indifference.

That impression of dirtiness and indifference has its antithesis in Eliot's first classical reference in the body of the poem, his reference to Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" at the beginning of the fifth stanza: "And indeed there will be time" (Eliot 1577). This line echoes Marvell's "Had we but world enough, and time" (Marvell 1703). In Marvell's world, it seems, the richness of life imparted a sense of urgency to everything, even mere matters of the heart. In Eliot's time, one has all the time in the world, but nothing of particular importance lays claim to that time. Prufrock goes from a meander through dingy streets to an insignificant gathering for tea and toast: such is his evening, and his life.

The tea-party itself is as aimless and lacking in result as everything else in his existence. His concerns are petty, and reflected by the petty details described by the poem. His fears of what others may think of the "bald spot in the middle of [his] his hair" are enough to tempt him to turn back: he lacks confidence and purpose. Neither does he show any sense of urgency. Wavering, indecisive, he tells himself that "In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse" (Eliot 1578). The implication of decisions which can be reversed in a minute, of course, is that those decisions were never important in the first place.

The following stanzas provide another stream-of-consciousness recital of details calculated to evoke a life of meaningless monotony. What Prufrock knows of his life, "the evenings, mornings, afternoons," is "measured out...in coffee spoons" (Eliot 1578). Even the promise of an epic, Shakespearean love, indicated by the line "I know the voices dying with a dying fall" (Eliot 1578), an echo of Twelfth Night's Orsino saying, "If music be the food of love, play on, / ...That strain again, it had a dying fall" (Shakespeare 1080), fails to provoke Prufrock to action. He is the quintessential modern man, "politic, cautious, and meticulous" (Eliot 1580), and cannot break free of his lassitude. What, then, is the reason for his reticence? Only this question, and these small impediments: "Would it have been worth it, after all, / After the cups, the marmalade, and the tea, / Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me" (Eliot 1579). In this portrait of a potential love affair played out among trifles and stymied by the hero’s impotence, Eliot paints a tragic picture of a society hampered by triviality and weakness.

The greatest tragedy of all lies in Prufrock’s own awareness of the opportunities he has known and lost:

I have heard the mermaids singing... / I do not think that they will sing to me. /...We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown (Eliot 1580)

Prufrock, and by extension modern society, is aware of what greatness and beauty lie beyond the soot and fog of the modern world. It is his, and society's, weakness that now prevent him from reaching that greatness and beauty. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T. S. Eliot paints us a picture of a world doomed by triviality, never again to achieve the greatness of the past.

Works Cited

Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 7th ed. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Print.

Eliot, T. S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Baym 1577-80. Print.

Greenblatt, Stephen and M. H. Abrams, eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th ed. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Print.

"Introduction." Baym 1177-92. Print.

Marvell, Andrew. "To His Coy Mistress." Greenblatt and Abrams 1703-4. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. Greenblatt and Abrams 1079-1139. Print.

Class, Money, and Women in The Great Gatsby

2010-06-16T21:11:00.000-07:00

In the decades leading up to F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age, American social mores underwent momentous changes. A new ruling class emerged, one whose status and power derived not from respectable ancestry, but from enormous wealth and its display. Conspicuous consumption, the accumulation of goods to flaunt the fortunes of the purchasers, was born. So was a new American dream, which promised that anyone, from any background, could achieve status and wealth, either through industry or marriage. By Fitzgerald's time, this new American dream had produced Astors, Carnegies, Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and a host of pampered, bejeweled wives and mistresses. The new American dream, however, had a brutal dark side. Fitzgerald explores that dark side in his 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, in which he exposes the ugly truth beneath the gilded surface of society: the desire for money and social status has the power to destroy personal authenticity, particularly the personal authenticity of women.

In Daisy Buchanan, the woman for whose love the novel’s title character attains his vast wealth, one sees the new American dream's power to deform the values of women. Daisy and her ilk value wealth and social superiority in men, above any other qualities. In fact, to Daisy, wealth and social superiority excuse a host of sins, such as her husband Tom's infidelity. As The Great Gatsby begins, we learn that "Tom's got some woman in New York" (19). His infidelities, in fact, date to soon after his and Daisy's marriage: taking a nighttime drive shortly after his honeymoon, he "ran into a wagon...and ripped a front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got into the papers" (71). Daisy's private humiliation thus became public. Despite this, however, she still chooses Tom over Jay Gatsby, who has completely reinvented himself for her, and whom she may still love. With Tom, after all, Daisy can continue to enjoy wealth, privilege, and the status conferred by his wealth and their marriage. In fact, after Gatsby's murder, she disappears without even "a message or a flower" (154) for the funeral.

The attractions of Tom's wealth and status have an even more destructive effect on Myrtle, his mistress. Unlike Daisy, who was born to money and social status herself, Myrtle is the vulgar wife of Tom's mechanic. Her efforts to ape the dress and mannerisms of her lover's social class transform her natural life-force and sensuality into a grotesque caricature. "The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in [her natural environment] was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment" (31), until at last she ostentatiously bemoans "the shiftlessness of the lower orders" (32), as if having forgotten that, when not with Tom, she belongs to those lower orders herself. Nothing seems to matter to her as much as him. Even after he breaks her nose for presuming to speak the name of his wife--for daring to place herself on Daisy's level--she clings to him, with ultimately fatal results. Her death by a luxury automobile driven by her high-class rival is a telling, and tragic, image.

As different as their fates are, Daisy and Myrtle share some important similarities. Significantly, both women have flower names, perhaps indicating their primarily decorative roles both in society and Tom's life. Daisy’s and Myrtle’s lives are dominated by society's demands on women to be ornamental according to the money-mad, class-conscious standards of the time: Daisy spends most of her time entertaining her and Tom's friends, while Myrtle goes to great lengths in Tom's presence to transform herself into a hostess equally as impressive. Finally, both are willing to endure shame and abuse in order to remain with Tom.

Tom Buchanan himself offers nothing but wealth and status. Towards Daisy, he is not only unfaithful, but also dismissive, as, for instance, when he declares all his guests Nordics but only "after an infinitesimal hesitation...included Daisy with a slight nod" (17). Later on, even after learning of Daisy and Gatsby's old love and Gatsby's demand that Daisy leave Tom, Tom only says, "She gets foolish ideas in her head and doesn't know what she's doing" (118). Knowing his power, he can take her loyalty for granted. All he bothers to offer her--and all it ultimately takes to keep her--is the promise that he will "take better care of [her] from now on" (118), a phrase which suggests a fresh outpouring of gifts and luxury. Myrtle, meanwhile, endures Tom's contempt and violence for the occasional illusion of being his flaunted property. It is, tragically, her obsession with continuing to be Tom's property that drives her out onto the street on the dark night of her death. Thus, the desire to enjoy Tom's wealth and status destroys both women. It compels Daisy to sacrifice the prospect of a loving relationship with an adoring man for a life of neglect, humiliation, and infidelity, and it drives Myrtle to an untimely death.

In the fates of Daisy Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson, therefore, Fitzgerald illustrates the crushing power of the craving for wealth and social status. Tom Buchanan's hold over both women derives specifically and solely from his aura of wealth and power. In our own times, when the media laud conspicuous consumption and modern celebrities’ rags-to-riches tales of fame and fortune, the lessons of The Great Gatsby still hold true. It would be worthwhile for all of us to remember the sacrifices Daisy and Myrtle made to be close to money and power; we must all remember that all that glitters is not gold.

Edition cited: Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953.

From Beowulf to Chaucer: The Struggle to Impose Order on the British World

2009-12-30T19:46:00.000-08:00

Since the emergence of the human race, people have struggled to impose order on their world. Homo sapiens is spectacularly unfit for life in the wild: physically slower and weaker, with more limited senses and less innate protection against the elements, than many other species. Only mankind's creative intelligence, which gives us the ability to impose order on our world according to our needs, allows us to survive in an otherwise hostile and dangerous world. It is not surprising, therefore, to find an obsession with order in the recorded thought and literature of any civilization. Perhaps due to unique geographical and political conditions, however, this obsession with order is particularly prominent in British literature. A constant preoccupation with the definition and imposition of order-in times of war and uncertainty, upon the outside world, and, once the culture had achieved adequate levels of stability and sophistication, upon society and the self-unifies early British literature and ties its development inextricably to the early history of the British Isles.

Civilization of the British Isles appears to have begun auspiciously. By the Stone Age, as historian Simon Schama explains in his BBC documentary series A History of Britain, natives on the British Isles had already built villages and come together in numbers for safety ("Beginnings"). The recently unearthed Neolithic village at Skara Brae, on the island of Orkney, testifies to early British natives' ingenuity in creating a secure world:

These dwellings are not huts, but true houses, built from the sandstone slabs that lie all around the island, and which gave stout protection to the villagers here at Skara Brae from the biting Orcadian winds...Once [the villagers had] settled in their sandstone houses, they could harvest red bream and the mussels and oysters that were abundant in the shallows. ("Beginnings")

Over the following millennia, Schama asserts, inhabitants of the British Isles continued to tame the wilderness, replacing wild forests with "a patchwork of well-tilled fields" ("Beginnings") and building, with what must have been well-organized communal labor, the vast circles of standing stones that still dot the British countryside. Those years may have been exceptionally peaceful ones for the native populace, since the ocean itself surrounded the land and protected it from outside conquest.

That initial stability ended with the arrival of the Roman legions, but Roman conquest brought the isles something they may have lacked before: the beginning of unification. In the first century A.D., the isles gained a name-Brittania-and an identity, as a province of the Roman Empire ("Beginnings"). The Romans brought their own language, culture, architecture, and, eventually, religion with them. Four hundred years of Roman rule passed before "the withdrawal of the Roman legions during the fifth century, in a vain attempt to protect Rome itself from the threat of Germanic conquest, left the island vulnerable to seafaring Germanic invaders" ("Middle Ages" 4). The ensuing conquest of the native Britons "extended over decades of fighting" ("Middle Ages" 4), and the Anglo-Saxons' eventual victory wrought dramatic changes not only to the governance of the British Isles, but also to its language. "The Anglo-Saxon invaders," the editors of the first volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature write, brought with them not just their Germanic language, which heavily influenced the Old English of the early Middle Ages, but also "a tradition of oral poetry" ("Middle Ages" 5) discernible in the surviving literature of the British Isles.

Of that literature, the epic poem Beowulf serves as a clear expression of early Britons' need to impose order on the world. "The oldest of the great long poems written in English" ("Beowulf" 29), Beowulf is commonly thought to have been written sometime between the first half of the eighth century and the tenth century. It tells the tale of the pagan Danish king Beowulf and his triumphs over three monsters, and can be read in part as an elegy for the stern practicality of an earlier age, when kings unrestrained by the Christian doctrines of humility and forgiveness imposed order on their world with brute strength.

The idea of "order" depicted in Beowulf is a simple one, appropriate for a still-young society whose people had recently endured centuries of conquest and war. "Order," in the world of Beowulf, means safety from the unknown. Among the men of Beowulf, safety springs in large part from knowledge of other men and their places in society. The warriors of Beowulf follow a code of honor which demands elaborate rituals of courtesy and detailed proclamations of kinship and alliance, seemingly evolved to separate ally from enemy. Upon his arrival on the shores of Hrothgar's kingdom, for instance, the warrior Beowulf announces first his lineage and inherited allegiance before stating his purpose. That lineage and allegiance, much more than his boastful claims of martial valor, win him audience with the king: "My lord, the conquering king of the Danes," Hrothgar's attendant tells Beowulf, "bids me announce that he knows your ancestry" (Beowulf 42) and welcomes him into Hrothgar's mead-hall.

The mead-hall itself leads to the symbolic imposition of order apparent in Beowulf's structure. In the world of Beowulf, where monsters menace the wilderness outside the walls men build, the mead-hall seems to stand for order, safety, and sustenance. Grendel, the first monster Beowulf faces, can be read as an embodiment of fear of the wilderness. He lurks unseen on the moors at night, his attacks on Hrothgar's men symbolically as well as actually violating the safety and sanctity of the mead-hall. Beowulf's defeat of Grendel is thus also a victory won by man over the wilderness. This defeat leads into Beowulf's battle with Grendel's mother. Known by no other name, she makes her lair at the bottom of a swamp, from which Beowulf's men retrieve Grendel's body, "a strange lake-birth" (Beowulf 65), and may represent the fear of uncontrolled female emotion and power. Upon Grendel's death, this monstrous mother "had sallied forth on a savage journey,/grief-racked and ravenous, desperate for revenge" (Beowulf 62). Her vengeance for her son leads to the slaughter of more of Hrothgar's men. Beowulf's triumph over her, then, stands for the triumph of the rational male over the irrational female. Mankind's ability to overpower the forces of nature has its limitations, however. No man has yet managed to triumph over death. In Beowulf, death, this last and unconquerable unknown, appears as "a dragon on the prowl/from the steep vaults of a stone-roofed barrow" (Beowulf 80). Ever the mighty warrior, even in old age, Beowulf does at last defeat the dragon, but this final battle costs him his life. He goes to his grave celebrated for "his heroic nature and exploits" (Beowulf 100), but he goes to his grave nevertheless.

Beowulf provides a glance into a savage past already gone by the time of its writing. By the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, attitudes towards martial valor and the harsh rule of pagan heroes had changed. The author of William the Conqueror's obituary in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for instance, pays some lip service to the effectiveness of William's harshness towards his enemies: "No one dared do anything against his will...Any man of property could travel safely throughout the kingdom...No man dared to kill another...And if a man raped a woman, he immediately lost those parts with which he took pleasure" (116). He also, however, points out that "Truly in [William's] time men suffered much hardship and very many injuries" (116), attributes William's final illness to punishment for the wretchedness of making war on King Philip of France, which led to the burning of Mantes and its churches and the deaths of two churchmen by fire (115), and finishes the obituary with a poem vilifying William's greed, severity, and arrogance (116-117). The British Isles no longer needed the kind of king who sought to avenge blood with blood. England now needed a more sophisticated form of order, one created by the pen, rather than the sword.

During the Anglo-Norman era, increased literacy allowed rulers to begin keeping detailed records of the kingdom. "[William the Conqueror]," his obituary in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles states, "ruled over England and because of his management contrived that there was not a hide of land in England that he did not know who owned it and what it was work; and he set it down in his record" (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 116), the Domesday Book, "a census and survey of land ordered by William" (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 116). Literacy, even the limited literacy of the Middle Ages, served as a powerful tool for the imposition of order on the population. As D. R. Woolf writes, “[historian] Michael Clanchy makes [the argument that oral discourse was increasingly structured by and around texts in] England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, concentrating on the proliferation of documents in government, church and daily life” (Woolf 162).

Under Norman rule, English literacy and English language received a valuable boost. The language received a wealth of new loan words from the Old French language of the Norman conquerors, while more lay members of the ruling class began to read and write. Scholar Edward J. Kealey writes:

[During the reign of Henry I, from 1100-1135,] Benedictine monasteries trained their own oblates, but sometimes took in lay students. Austin priories attracted young scholars, like Thomas Becket at Merton, who never contemplated becoming canons. Others wishing to rise in the world might become clerks and attend classes run by masters attached to cathedral chapters. (347)

This increase in literacy began the process of the diversification of voices and ideas within British literature. Additionally, "the English Crown's French territories were enormously increased in 1154 when Henry II [married Eleanor of Aquitaine and] acquired vast provinces" ("Middle Ages" 7). With this acquisition, as well as the Crusades taking place in the same century, England, once an object of conquest, began to emerge as a conqueror. The world and minds of the English people were expanding, and with them, the English concept of order.

That concept of order now extended beyond the basic concerns for physical survival and spiritual salvation. During the Anglo-Norman period, the French rulers of England gave English audiences a new genre of literature, known as romance. Romance was "the principal narrative genre for late medieval readers...It developed ways of representing psychological interiority with great subtlety" ("Middle Ages" 8). The romances, which primarily narrated the adventures of legendary kings, knights, and their ladies, such as King Arthur, Sir Lancelot, and Guinevere, provided not only entertainment, but guidelines for an increasingly sophisticated code of conduct: chivalry. Thinkers and artists of the Anglo-Norman period turned their talents to imposing order on men's behavior with an eye to making society pleasant and harmonious. Thus, the chivalric code demands not only courage and loyalty, traits traditionally encouraged to ensure the safety of society and individuals, but also faithfulness, courtesy, compassion, and reverent treatment of ladies, behaviors which made society more pleasant.

As a model of chivalric ideals, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight excels. This narrative poem by an unknown author begins in King Arthur's legendary court, Camelot, where "with feasting and fellowship and carefree mirth./There true men contended in tournaments many,/...In peerless pleasure passed they their days,/The most noble knights known under Christ,/And the loveliest ladies that lived on earth ever" (Gawain 163). Into this revelry enters the mysterious Green Knight, with a strange challenge: someone in the court must attempt to chop his head off with his axe, and should the Green Knight survive, come to seek him in one year, so that the Green Knight can do the same to his challenger. Arthur himself nearly accepts the challenge for honor's sake, but, displaying the courage and the loyalty to one's king that are two of the central tenets of chivalry, Gawain volunteers himself.

Over the course of his ensuing adventure, Gawain finds opportunities to demonstrate the entire catalog of chivalrous qualities: "Ever faithful.../Was Gawain in good works.../To his word most true/And in speech most courteous knight" (Gawain 175), who possessed "beneficence boundless and brotherly love/And pure mind and manners, that none might impeach/And compassion most precious" (Gawain 176). Promoted by this and similar poems, which employed stories of love drawn from the Arthurian legend with which the Continent was enamored, the chivalric code evolved into the elaborate manners of the court and aristocracy. Those courtly manners endured for centuries. Judith M. Richards describes their prevalence in the Tudor court of Elizabeth I, hundreds of years later:

By 1559 [the first year of Elizabeth I's reign] there was nothing particularly distinctive...about invoking the language of love to describe the bonds between Tudor monarch and Tudor subject. The language of political love had evolved gradually beside the much older language of the duties and obligations of true and natural subjects, bound to their rightful monarch by natural and therefore divinely ordered ties. (135)

A code of behavior borrowed from the French literary tradition of the romance became a constant feature of the English court.

While the chivalric code refined the manners of the aristocracy, English politics and culture were beginning to distinguish themselves from that of other nations not only by geographical specifics, but by language. In 1362, English was first used in the law courts and Parliament ("Middle Ages" 23), supplanting French and Latin as England's national language. Other changes were taking place as well, drastically altering the order of English society. "By the late fourteenth century...[the three 'estates' of nobility, church, and commoners] were layered into complex, interrelated, and unstable social strata among which birth, wealth, profession, and personal ability all played a part in determining one's status in a world that was rapidly changing economically, politically, and socially" ("Geoffrey Chaucer" 213-14). These changes "profoundly influenced" ("Geoffrey Chaucer" 214) the work of English author Geoffrey Chaucer.

Born into the mercantile middle class, Chaucer rose to a successful career in civil and diplomatic service for the court. His work, including the Canterbury Tales, which depicts narrators of diverse social classes rather than a socially homogenous succession of aristocrats, reflected the shifting and blurring of social classes in his era. The Canterbury Tales did more than that, however. By writing in English, Chaucer helped to "greatly enhance the prestige of English as a vehicle for literature of high ambition" ("Middle Ages" 2). This further reinforcement of the English language, and thus the English national identity, at last completed the work begun by the Romans in the first century A.D. The islands once known as Brittania, first colonized, then conquered, then Normanized, had truly become Britain, and the British people, who had once had to exert themselves to impose order over the most basic physical aspects of their existence, had now, with the emergence of their own language as the national language, achieved control over their own expression and intellectual lives.

The fruits of this development of the British national identity and love of order become apparent upon examination of the later riches of Britain's literary output. In many of Shakespeare's masterpieces, such as King Lear, disorder and efforts to repair it produce unforgettable dramatic incident and exploration of character. John Donne's poems illuminate his quest to bring order to the tumult of conflicting physical and religious passions on a personal level even as religious and secular interests clashed in the British public sphere. Thinkers like Sir Thomas More and Francis Bacon presented new methods of creating order through their vastly different descriptions of utopia, while Thomas Hobbes proposed absolute monarchy as an attempt to curb what he saw as the naturally disordered state of mankind. Finally, nearly a thousand years after the composition of Beowulf, the ideological disorder of the Restoration inspired writers to tackle the momentous issues of liberty, slavery, and women's rights in vehicles as diverse as Locke's Two Treatises of Government, James Thomson's Ode: Rule, Brittania, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, and the writings of women as different from one another as gardener's daughter Mary Leapor and court lady-in-waiting Frances Burney. While the British thinkers and writers never did achieve perfect order, their attempts to do so have given the world a wealth of literary and intellectual genius. And in the process, they have truly made their world their own.

Works Cited

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, The. David and Simpson 115-117. Print.

"Beginnings." A History of Britain. Writ. Simon Schama. Narr. Simon Schama. BBC, 2000. DVD.

"Beowulf." David and Simpson 29-34. Print.

Beowulf. David and Simpson 34-100. Print.

David, Alfred and James Simpson, eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume A, 8th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Print.

"Geoffrey Chaucer." David and Simpson 213-216. Print.

Kealey, Edward J. “Anglo-Norman Policy and the Public Welfare.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Winter, 1978), 341-351. Web. 9 December 2009.

"Middle Ages to ca. 1485, The." David and Simpson 1-23. Print.

Richards, Judith M. “Love and a Female Monarch: The Case of Elizabeth Tudor.” The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Apr., 1999), pp. 133-160. Web. 14 December 2009.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. David and Simpson 162-213. Print.

Woolf, D. R. “Speech, Text, and Time: The Sense of Hearing and the Sense of the Past in Renaissance England.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), 159-193. Web. 13 December 2009.

America's Role in the Struggle for Control of Taiwan

2009-12-17T19:34:00.000-08:00

In the decades since the 1949 establishment of the Republic of China on the island of Taiwan, ROC leadership and the communist government of the People's Republic of China on the mainland have engaged in a struggle for the future of Taiwan. This struggle has often involved the United States. Although Taiwan's democratic, capitalist society aligns more closely with American ideology than the PRC's single-party, communist autocracy, United States economic and strategic interests complicate the question of which side to support. The question of Taiwanese independence, and the United States's role in helping to secure or hinder it, has become more urgent in the wake of the 2008 Taiwanese presidential elections. In 2008, the pro-independence Democratic People's Party leadership lost to the historically more pro-China Nationalist Party, or KMT. The KMT, Winberg Chai writes in “Taiwan’s 2008 Elections and Their Impact on U.S.-China-Taiwan Relations,” “is expected to retreat from the DPP’s 'Taiwanese identity' policy in favor of an eventual reunification with the Chinese mainland” (83-84). If this happens, China, already “the second-largest economy in the world after the US” (“China”), will gain an additional twenty-three million citizens and an additional $4 billion GDP (“Taiwan”). Meanwhile, Asia will lose a vibrant democracy economy with, according to the U.S. State Department, a human rights record especially commendable for its ban on compulsory and child labor and its absence of political prisoners (“China (Taiwan Only)”). On November 16, 2009, President Barack Obama declared continuing United States support for China's one-China policy (“Obama”), tipping the scales even further in favor of reunification. It is now critical that the United States reexamine its commitment to the balance of power in Asia, and decide whether its strategic and economic interests merit the annexation of a free and democratic nation by a communist state.

To understand the current tensions between China and Taiwan, one must first understand the divergence in their histories. In “Japan-Taiwan Relations: Between Affinity and Reality,” Peng-Er Lam explains that “Imperial Japan seized Taiwan...after the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) and ruled Taiwan until its defeat in World War II in 1945” (2). Shortly afterwards, civil war broke out on the mainland between the Communist Party of China and the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT). As Robert Sutter writes in Chinese Foreign Relations: Power and Policy Since the Cold War, “the United States government sided with [KMT leader] Chiang Kai-shek against the Chinese communists...ending with the communist victory on the Chinese mainland in 1949 and Chiang Kai-shek's retreat to Taiwan” (Sutter 64). Mainland China came under communist control and became the People's Republic of China or PRC, while “2 million Nationalists fled to Taiwan and established a government” (“Taiwan”) over what would become known as the Republic of China, or ROC. Since then, Taiwan has functioned as a separate political entity from China. China, however, refuses to acknowledge Taiwan's sovereignty. The PRC's one-China policy, in fact, claims Taiwan as a Chinese territory, rejects Taiwan's independence, and insists that other nations and organizations within the global community follow suit. Today, China continues “to give high priority to competing with Taiwan for international recognition, even in remote third world areas...Much of China's effort in the third world seemed designed to compete diplomatically with Taiwan for recognition” (Sutter 45-46).

Thus far, China has restrained itself primarily to diplomatic tactics in its conflict with Taiwan, rather than military aggression, in large part due to its ambitions in the global community. Sutter describes the PRC's ambitions:

Beijing wished to be seen as the leading power in Asia and not as lower in prestige or regional influence than its neighbors...China's leaders [also] desired status and prestige among the community of nations. They intended China to be a major player in the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the WTO, and other key international institutions. (38)

To do so required China to gain the support of other world powers, most notably the United States. Perhaps to protect American economic interests in both China and Taiwan, however, Washington has, according to Philip C. Saunders, “tried to avoid taking sides in the dispute over Taiwan’s status” (19), although “as the military balance has shifted in China’s favor, the United States has become more directly involved in protecting Taiwan’s security. China now assumes that the United States would intervene if a conflict broke out” (Saunders 19), an outcome the PRC hopes to avoid.

That does not mean, however, that the PRC has entirely avoided military aggression against Taiwan. In 1995, incensed by the Clinton administration's decision to allow Lee Teng-hui, at the time the president of Taiwan, to visit the United States, the Chinese government instigated “nine months of military tensions in the Taiwan Straits” (Sutter 138). Chinese military activities during those months included “frequent live-fire military exercises [and] ballistic missile tests near Taiwan's ports” (Sutter 138). Sutter describes the outcome of the tensions:

The military actions cowed Taiwan for a few months, until the United States eventually sent two carrier battle groups to observe PRC exercises--a sign that boosted Taiwan's morale and underlined for Beijing the potentially dangerous consequences of provocative military action against Taiwan. (Sutter 191)

Washington's intervention served as a reminder to the PRC of the possible repercussions of direct action against Taiwan. Since then, the PRC has “not repeated threatening actions such as firing ballistic missiles toward Taiwan. This reflects Beijing’s awareness of the high costs of using or threatening to use force [against Taiwan]” (Saunders 8). The PRC continues, however, to pursue diplomatic methods of pressuring Taiwan towards reunification.

The diplomatic pressures China exerted against Taiwanese independence revolved around preventing Taiwan from gaining international recognition as a sovereign entity. By the mid-1990s, “reducing Taiwan's diplomatic stature was the most important issue of immediate concern to Chinese foreign policy makers” (Sutter 191). The PRC “relied heavily on its position as a permanent member of the UN Security Council to insure that its interests were protected” (Sutter 117), using its influence and veto power to “[block] Taiwan from gaining entry into the United Nations or UN-affiliated organizations” (Sutter 118) and isolate Taiwan from the international community. Sutter lists some of the PRC's diplomatic tactics against Taiwan:

Beijing in January 1997 used its veto power...to block approval for UN peacekeepers in Guatemala until Guatemala agreed to reduce its support for Taiwan's efforts to gain UN entry. In 1999, China [blocked] the continuation of UN peacekeeping operations in Macedonia, which had recently established diplomatic relations with Taiwan. (Sutter 120)

Essentially, Beijing hoped to isolate Taiwan “to whittle away Taiwan's shrinking band of diplomatic allies. Thus, China in 1999 used its veto power to bar UN peacekeepers from Haiti until the government there modified its traditionally strong support for Taiwan” (Sutter 191-192). It seems clear that the threat of American disapproval failed to deter China from its commitment to reunification with Taiwan, even at the expense of the welfare of other nations.

In its efforts to isolate Taiwan, the PRC refrained only from the use of economic pressure. Despite political antagonism, economic ties between China and Taiwan benefited both nations: Taiwanese investment in China accounted for nearly $40 million of China's direct foreign investment in 2004, making Taiwan the third-largest investor in China (Sutter 95), and Taiwan also counted as one of the top three sources of imports to China (Sutter 96). Additionally, “efforts to pressure Taiwan’s economy would affect companies and countries around the world, producing international pressure against the Chinese government” (Saunders 16). Saunders writes:

China is also vulnerable to economic pressure as it becomes more dependent on exports to the U.S. market. China enjoyed a $162 billion dollar trade surplus with the United States in 2004. China may be willing to bear high costs to prevent Taiwan independence, but the evidence to date suggests that leaders in Beijing will be reluctant to use economic coercion or force against Taiwan. … Chinese leaders are reluctant to start a war that might derail their country’s economic modernization. (Saunders 16)

Ultimately, China's economic pragmatism protects Taiwan from attacks on what may be its greatest strategic asset: its economy.

Taiwan, however, has more to offer the global community than mere prosperity. Since the emergence of political liberalization following the lifting of martial law in 1987, Taiwan has developed into a multiparty democracy. That democratization has “led a rapidly expanding number of Taiwanese non-profit and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to take part in transnational activities,” as Chen Jie writes in “Civil Society, Grassroots Aspirations and Diplomatic Isolation” (Friedman 110). Through these NGOs, Taiwan can participate meaningfully in global efforts to combat “environmental, human rights, gender and development issues” (Friedman 111) despite exclusion from international governing bodies. Taiwan can also “tackle concerns it shares with other countries (from child prostitution and climate change to human trafficking and humanitarian relief)” (Friedman 112), some of which China has so far failed to meaningfully address (“China”). Taiwanese NGOs also improve conditions within Taiwan's own borders, as women's NGOs did when their campaigning led to the passage of a Gender Equality Labour Law in 2001 (Friedman 116). Unfortunately, “Taiwanese NGOs are challenged by the international community's continuing non-recognition of the Taiwanese state” (Friedman 116) due to the PRC, which “systematically obstructs Taiwanese NGOs” (Chen 117) through political exclusion, just as it obstructs ROC recognition in global governing bodies. The PRC's use of such tactics deprive the international community of the assistance Taiwan could provide against environmental and humanitarian problems affecting the world. This shows Beijing's willingness to neglect or even jeopardize solutions to urgent global issues in its pursuit of reunification.

Despite PRC pressures, however, “opinion polls consistently indicate that a majority of Taiwan voters favor maintaining the status quo rather than...moving toward reunification” (Saunders 4). Additionally, in post-democratization years, there has been a “shift toward increasing consciousness of a Taiwan national identity separate from China” (Saunders 5). Saunders elaborates:

Many nationalists have made a conscious effort to define “Taiwan identity” in opposition to “Chinese identity,” rather than as a supplemental identity (such as the way local Guangdong or Jiangsu provincial identities coexist with Chinese identity in the PRC). Taiwan nationalists have consciously sought to reshape school curricula to emphasize Taiwan history, language, and culture. … [There exists a] perceived fusion between a Taiwan national identity and support for independence. (Saunders 6)

Of course, as the Taiwanese national identity develops and becomes further removed from previous perceptions of Chinese identity, “the prospect of China persuading Taiwan to accept reunification becomes remote” (Saunders 6).

With the solidification of Taiwan's national identity comes the solidification of Taiwan's separation from the PRC's attitudes towards other world powers, such as towards the United States. While the PRC and the United States enjoy strong economic ties and an overtly friendly diplomatic relationship, “at the start of the twenty-first century, the list of Chinese charges and grievances against [perceived] U.S. hegemonism was long and involved many issues of direct concern to China and nearby Asia” (Sutter 69). Sutter notes:

Specialists from the United States and other countries...note the Chinese desire to work against and protect China from many perceived negative aspects of U.S. policy and behavior towards China. ... Many of the Chinese specialists who dealt with U.S. affairs had a strong prejudice toward the United States as a hegemonic power driven by the desire for world domination. (Sutter 65)

This prejudice makes the PRC resistant to cooperation with the United States and its allies on issues such as Chinese human rights violations and arms distribution, illustrating “the limits of China's accommodation to international norms. China continued to transfer sensitive military technology...to Pakistan, Iran, North Korea, and other potential flash points, despite criticism from Western countries” (Sutter 22). In fact, “Chinese nationalism [pushed] Chinese policy in directions that resisted U.S. international leadership...the power of the United States, and U.S. allies in East Asia, notably Japan, and Taiwan” (Sutter 30). This attitude bodes poorly for China's continued and productive participation in U.S. and international efforts to improve humanitarian conditions and promote human rights and freedoms, and calls into question the United States's commitment to those rights and freedoms, given Washington's reluctance to give up its conciliatory stance towards the PRC.

That conciliatory stance, the corruption scandals that disgraced former Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian and led to his pro-independence Democratic People's Party's loss in the 2008 Taiwanese presidential elections, and the restoration to power of the traditionally more PRC-friendly KMT all indicate that the time is ripe for another move towards reunification. On the 16th of November, 2009, the Xinhua news agency reported that “China's top political adviser Jia Qinglin on Monday urged a visiting Hong Kong delegation to make more contribution to the reunification of China...and resolutely oppose any form of separatist activities for 'Taiwan independence'” (“China's Jia Qinglin”). For a high-level official to publicly discuss reunification seems to indicate Chinese confidence that it will happen, despite Taiwanese resistance. This supports the widespread perception “that Chinese leadership confidence in foreign affairs had grown with the increase in Chinese wealth and prominence and with growing Chinese international success in Asian and world affairs” (Sutter 13). As China continues its economic dominance of the world economy, that confidence will continue to grow. It is not impossible that eventually “Chinese leaders may decide...to use force to stop [Taiwanese] independence” (Saunders 8). If that happens, will the United States support China, a major trading partner guilty of human rights abuses the U.S. and other developed nations claim to oppose, or Taiwan, the democracy whose ideology much more closely matches the rest of the developed world's?

An examination of Congressional support for Taiwan is encouraging. In “Economics, Lobbying, and U.S. Congressional Support for Taiwan,” Joshua Su-Ya Wu writes:

In the U.S. political landscape, Congress is arguably Taiwan’s greatest proponent and most reliable supporter. … From the 1950s to the 1980s...the China lobby actively sought to shape and influence U.S. policy in the Far East... [and] worked fervently to ... stabilize and codify continued U.S. support for Taiwan. In the 1980s and 1990s, the China lobby ... was replaced by a Taiwan lobby. … The Taiwan lobby has also consolidated more formalized support in Congress. In 2002, the Congressional Taiwan Caucus was launched, followed by the Senate Taiwan Caucus in 2003. … There is bipartisan support for Taiwan, including by co-chairs from both the Republican and Democratic parties. (381-382)

In fact, “the U.S. Congress has emerged as one of the island’s most loyal and influential supporters. … Contemporary supporters praise Taiwan’s democratic development, economic vitality, and cultural richness (Wu 385). Wu goes on to detail Congress's legislative support of Taiwan:

In the past decade, members of Congress have also advocated full Taiwanese independence, condemned the PRC for its cross-strait aggression, and argued the merits of normalizing relations with Taiwan. Furthermore, Congress has passed resolutions urging U.S. support for Taiwanese membership in the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations. In 2000, the House passed the controversial Taiwan Security Enhancement Act, which...made more explicit how the U.S. should...help Taiwan defend itself and secure weaponry. The bill never made it to the Senate floor, so it remains a House resolution. (388)

Unfortunately, President Obama's recent declaration of support for the PRC's one-China policy indicates that Congressional efforts on behalf of Taiwanese independence are inadequate to secure the administration's full support for Taiwan. Despite its environmental and humanitarian shortcomings, the PRC remains too dominant an economic power to fully oppose. Weakening that economic dominance requires a concerted, collective effort to avoid purchasing goods or making investments that will benefit the PRC. The only way to persuade enough consumers to do so is to convince them of what is truly at stake: the freedom, independence, and sovereignty of a democratic nation. Those members of Congress who work for Taiwanese recognition and sovereignty, as well as all the people aware of the situation and the consequences for Taiwan should reunification become a reality--consequences such as the loss of basic personal and intellectual freedoms and the imposition of autocratic, communist rule in Taiwan--must educate American consumers on the cost to Taiwanese freedom of saving a few dollars by buying products from China. Consumers need compelling reasons to support Taiwanese independence in the face of PRC reunification plans. Only when given those reasons will they consider acting to weaken the PRC's trade dominance, and only by weakening the PRC's trade dominance can the global community weaken the PRC's ability to isolate and eventually annex Taiwan. Meanwhile, Taiwanese NGOs and supporters of independence within the Taiwanese government must increase efforts to participate in the resolution of global humanitarian crises and maintain positive relationships with international allies to further prove the value of the ROC within the global community. International recognition of Taiwan will strike a strong blow at the arrogance of the PRC, and may eventually lead to greater freedoms within China's borders, as well as without. Not only for the future of Taiwan, but also for the future of democracy in Asia, the United States as a nation must take a stand against the PRC's insistence on reunification with Taiwan.

Works Cited

“China.” The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency, 28 October 2009. Web. 5 November 2009.

"China's Jia Qinglin calls for reunification efforts with Taiwan." BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific 16 November 2009. ProQuest Newsstand, ProQuest. Web. 25 Nov. 2009.

“China (Taiwan Only).” Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. U.S. Department of State, 25 February 2005. Web. 30 November 2009.

Chai, Winberg. "Taiwan's 2008 Elections and Their Impact on U.S.-China-Taiwan Relations.” Asian Affairs, an American Review 35.2 (2008): 83-92. International Module, ProQuest. Web. 2 Dec. 2009.

Chen, Jie. “Civil society, grassroots aspirations and diplomatic isolation.” Friedman 110-129. Print.

Friedman, Edward, ed. China's Rise, Taiwan's Dilemmas, and International Peace. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Lam, Peng-Er. "Japan-Taiwan Relations: Between Affinity and Reality." Asian Affairs, an American Review 30.4 (2004): 249-267. Ethnic NewsWatch (ENW), ProQuest. Web. 17 Nov. 2009.

“Obama Reiterates One-China Policy, Pleased to See Improving Cross-Strait Ties.” Xinhua News Agency, 16 Nov. 2009. CountryWatch. Web. 1 December 2009.

Saunders, Philip C. "Long-term Trends in China-Taiwan Relations: Implications for U.S. Taiwan Policy." Asian Survey 45.6 (2005): 970. Ethnic NewsWatch (ENW), ProQuest. Web. 17 Nov. 2009.

Sutter, Robert G. Chinese Foreign Relations: Power and Policy Since the Cold War. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. Print.

“Taiwan.” The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency, 28 October 2009. Web. 30 November 2009.

Wu, Joshua Su-Ya. "Economics, Lobbying, and U.S. Congressional Support for Taiwan: Buying American Support, 2002-2006." Asian Survey 49.2 (2009): 380-402. Ethnic NewsWatch (ENW), ProQuest. Web. 17 Nov. 2009.

More Fun with Basic French

2009-12-17T19:21:00.000-08:00

Answer to an essay question on our French 101 final exam. We were given a picture of four people sitting at a café, and asked to describe it.

Ils sont au café. Ils sont quatre: deux filles et deux hommes. Ils sont jeunes. Aujourd'hui, il fait beau. Ces étudiants parlent et dejeunent ensemble. Ces deux filles ont l'intention de faire du shopping après. Un jeune homme a besoin de préparer ses cours. L'autre homme va faire les courses pour sa mère après. Ce soir, ils vont sortir. Ils ont l'intention de dîner au restaurant.

Final Exam: Globalism's True Impact

2009-12-17T19:15:00.000-08:00

Written in class as a final exam. Last few paragraphs are less developed because I was running out of time.

The privileges and products of economic globalization saturate everyday American life. From automobiles to underwear, bananas to backpacks, nearly everything most Americans purchase, use, or consume owes at least a part of its production to foreign labor or other international manufacturing processes. This pervasiveness can make it easy to take globalism for granted as a benign or at least neutral process with a relatively positive outcome. As authors Corey Mattson, Meredith Throop, and Barbara Ehrenreich show, however, globalization often enriches the few--businesspeople and transnational corporations--at the expense of many disadvantaged or disenfranchised workers and innocent bystanders in nations exploited by globalism. Only by addressing the inequities exposed or exacerbated by globalism can citizens of the world help to create a more just and less harmful global economic paradigm.

When considering the injustices and inequities often produced by globalism, one often thinks of sweatshops, which Corey Mattson quotes Sweatshop Watch as defined as "a subcontracting system in which the middleman earned profits from the margin between the amount they received for a contract and the amount they paid to the workers" (481). That margin, Sweatshop Watch explains, is said to be "'sweated' from the workers because they received minimal wages for excessive hours worked under unsanitary conditions" (Mattson 481). Mattson discusses one nation's sweatshops in particular: the maquilas of Guatemala. Thanks to the cheap labor U.S. foreign assistance and the Guatemalan government allow workers to provide, in large part to U.S. and Asian apparel manufacturers, "the maquila has been the birth of a new working class in Guatemala" (Mattson 484). The employment of "tens of thousands of workers" (Mattson 484) would appear to be beneficial. When one considers that the minimum wage in Guatemala as of August 2004 was "U.S. $4.95 per day" (Mattson 484), however, paid mostly to impoverished women--according to Mattson, "approximately 80% of maquila workers are women" (484), this employment becomes less clearly beneficial. Mattson's description of maquila working conditions, moreover, paints an alarming picture:

Unventilated workrooms, unsafe workshops, verbal abuse, sexual harassment and abuse, firings for pregnancy, arbitrary dismissals and forced overtime are just some of the issues workers face in Guatemalan maquilas...Bathroom access is restricted causing kidney infections...Respiratory problems are common due to poor ventilation...It is not uncommon to work 70 to 80 hour weeks in the maquila. This increases the number of industrial accidents and causes repetitive motion injuries. (Mattson 484-85)

Maquila conditions, and the extremely low compensation paid to workers enduring those conditions, fail to fulfill the dream of prosperity that proponents of globalization promise.

Globalization, however, doesn't only affect workers. A continent away from Guatemala, in South Africa, black South African women unconnected to sweatshops or transnational manufacturers suffer another consequence of economic globalization. In South Africa, the International Monetary Fund and the Workd Bank, according to Meredith Throop, have "aggressively pursued the privatization of water" (511) as part of a "capitalist, free-market economic model" (510) in which citizens are forced to pay for formerly publicly provided necessities such as water. As Throop explains, "women have, through their traditional roles...been disproportionately impacted" (510). Throop elaborates:

Every day women and girls walk long distances to fetch water for their families, often at the expense of education, income-generating activities, cultural and political involvement, and rest and recreation...As accessibility to water deteriorates, poor women's livelihoods and thus the livelihoods of entire families become increasingly vulnerable. (Throop 510)

The price hikes on water often force South African women to supply their families' water from "polluted rivers, streams, and open pits [leading to the spread of] cholera" (Throop 512), whose incidence quintupled in some regions after the privatization of water (Throop 513). In addition, "inadequate water and sanitation service exacerbates the condition of people suffering from immune deficiencies such as HIV/AIDS" (Throop 513). South Africa's example clearly illustrates the failure of globalization's capitalist ideology to provide for the well-being of large numbers of people.

Finally, beyond the physical costs, globalization can exact an emotional and psychological toll. In "Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy," Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell tell the story of Josephine, a Sri Lankan woman who left her own children behind to care for another family's child in Greece. Josephine's work has brought her family a measure of prosperity, but her two youngest children "have shown signs of real distress" (Ehrenreich 531), with one "attempting suicide three times" (Ehrenreich 531). "Increasingly often," Ehrenreich writes, "as affluent and middle-class families in the First World come to depend on migrants from poorer regions to provide child care [and] homemaking, a global relationship arises that in some ways mirrors the traditional relationship between the sexes" (538). In that relationship, "poor countries take on a role like that of the traditional woman...patient, nurturing, and self-denying" (Ehrenreich 538), often at the cost of her own family's emotional and psychological stability.

An examination of these examples makes clear the fact that globalization's effects extend much further than the merely economic. Capitalism and the search for cheap labor have created and exacerbated startling and often devastating inequities all over the world. As consumers, we should feel obligated to keep these inequities in mind, and make our purchasing and consumption decisions based not only on price and convenience, but also on what practices our purchases may encourage in the world. We must also be aware of the global effects of our national ideologies, and know that our votes and politics also affect others around the world. Only by being aware of the impact we make can we act as truly responsible global citizens.

*All quotes are from Beyond Borders: Thinking Critically About Global Issues, edited by Paula S. Rothenberg.

Truth in Masquerade: Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as Storyteller's Manifesto

2009-11-11T15:18:00.000-08:00

Conceal me what I am, and be my aid
For such disguise as haply shall become
The form of my intent.
(Shakespeare 1.2:50-51)

Scholars have long recognized William Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night as a celebration of the carnivalesque in Elizabethan England. As the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature write in “Twelfth Night,” their introduction to the play of the same name, “[In Elizabethan England], Twelfth Night, the Feast of the Epiphany...marked the culminating night of the traditional Christmas revels...A rigidly hierarchical social order...temporarily gave way to raucous rituals of inversion” (1078), allowing the relief of class resentment and envy. Twelfth Night's disguises, deceptions, eventual comic revelations, and assortment of happy endings mirror the Twelfth Night festivities. The masquerades around which Twelfth Night's plot revolves, however, do more than express humanity's need for occasional communal games of dress-up and pretend. A deeper significance lies in the statement Twelfth Night's masquerades make about the power of performance itself: that some truths can only be transmitted through artifice, and that the theater serves a vital role in the transmission of those truths.

The idea that theatrical illusions could reflect life's realities did not, of course, originate with Shakespeare. Neither did the idea of the world itself as a play, which Anne Righter, in Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, suggests may first have been used by Pythagoras (65) and was popular among Elizabethan dramatists (84). Shakespeare, however, “seems to have been concerned with the play metaphor to a degree unusual even among his contemporaries” (Righter 89). Righter continues:

Gradually, the association of the world with the stage fundamental to Elizabethan drama built itself deeply into his imagination, and into the structure of his plays. … The play image also became in mature Shakespearian drama a meditation upon the nature of the theatre. (89)

Shakespeare appears to signal this thematic concern early on in Twelfth Night, when Sir Andrew remarks, “I delight in masques and revels altogether” (1.3:106). Later on, Viola suggests the deeper purposes hidden within the comedy: “This fellow is wise enough to play the fool,/and to do that well craves a kind of wit...This is a practice/As full of labor as a wise man's art” (3.1:59-65). She speaks of Feste, but her lines could easily describe the work of a playwright, laboring to draw the resonance of serious truths from comic frolics.

That Shakespeare may have consciously chosen to make the theater the subtextual vehicle of truth in Twelfth Night—using a wise man's labor to achieve a fool's seemingly artless comedy—becomes clear upon examination of the plot. Each of the play's major deceptions depends upon some theatrical device for success. To pass as Cesario, Viola dons a costume, one so effective, in fact, that it fools everyone she meets. Infatuated with the sham Cesario, Olivia uses a ring—a prop—to ensure his return to her side. Malvolio wears a costume of sorts in his quest for Olivia, and performs the part of a lordly wooer to secure her affections, and the forged-letter prank which drives him to don those yellow stockings and treat Olivia to his dramatic enactment of flirtatiousness owes its success to both the scripting and acting skills of Toby and Maria. In every case, the characters of Twelfth Night resort to tricks of the theater to achieve their ends.

In every case, too, those tricks allow the revelation of knowledge that would otherwise remain unknown, further developing the idea of theatrical artifice as a key to truth. Obsessed with Olivia, Orsino would most likely not take any notice of the orphaned, shipwrecked Viola as herself. Orsino himself proclaims his contempt for women in general and the constancy of his own love for Olivia: “There is no woman's sides/Can bide the beating of so strong a passion/as love doth give my heart” (2.4:92-94). Only by impersonating a man can Viola attract enough of his attention and respect to eventually prove her worth to him as a woman. In disguise as Cesario, Viola also inadvertently exposes the passionate nature beneath the aristocratic manner and mourning veil of the “virtuous maid” (1.2:32) Olivia, who openly pursues Cesario. And only by inflaming the passions of the priggish Malvolio with a well-forged love letter can Toby and Maria expose his hidden vanities and pretensions. Through all of these revelations, Shakespeare clearly shows that sometimes truth can only emerge through artifice and deceit, a message uniquely relevant to the theater and storytelling.

Beneath this relatively simple statement, however, lies a more complex one. Each character can be taken as author and performer of his or her own play, and the outcomes of their individual attempts make a bold artistic statement: only by using the masks and deceptions of the medium to explore and reveal genuine truths can one's performances succeed. Viola's imposture allows Orsino to appreciate her true loyalty and intelligence; she wins his love. Olivia's ring trick, though doomed to fail in capturing Cesario, reveals the integrity of her character, since it proves her capable of loving and marrying beneath her social class; in the end, she is rewarded with marriage to Sebastian. And, though mean-spirited, the forged-letter prank Toby and Maria play on Malvolio is designed to unmask his social pretensions, an admirable goal. They succeed. In contrast, Malvolio's masquerade fails, perhaps because of the essential impurity and untruthfulness of his feelings towards Olivia. Malvolio, after all, doesn't desire her for herself, but for the power and status marriage to her will bring him. Believing himself alone, he imagines life as “Count Malvolio” (2.5:32), “sitting in my state.../Calling my officers about me, in my branched/velvet gown/...And then to have the humor of state” (2.5:44-49). Theatrical masquerades, these outcomes suggest, can only succeed if they contain true feeling, and fail if used as self-serving manipulations.

Manipulation, of course, is the stock in trade of any fiction and any performance, making Shakespeare's apparent stance in Twelfth Night artistically admirable. Himself adept at wringing the resonance of truth out of a medium dependent on artifice, he reveals an uncompromising pursuit of honesty. His definition of honesty, in addition, appears distinct from conventional morality. The characters' deceptions, of course, are by their very nature dishonest, a quality considered negative and not to be rewarded by society as they are in the play. Beyond that, too, if the characters' deceptions depend on good intentions or the ultimate betterment of their victims for their success, Toby and Maria must fail miserably at tricking Malvolio. Instead, as Milton Crane writes in “Twelfth Night and Shakespearian Comedy,” “the baiting of Malvolio is unrelieved in its comic heartlessness, and is not even superficially moral in its purpose. … No one takes the slightest interest in whether all this will make a better man of Malvolio” (5). This clear separation of truth from the conventional morality rewarded by morality and mystery plays underscores the artistic integrity inherent in the message implied by Twelfth Night's plot.

This message, that masks, artifice, and performance are not only necessary for the revelation of truth, but should only be used for the revelation of truth, appears too consistent throughout the play to be accidental. Shakespeare's great plays, such as Twelfth Night, demonstrate a cohesiveness of parts leading to a powerful and consistent whole that could only happen through conscious effort on the part of the author. In The Writing of Fiction, Edith Wharton cautions, “Any theory [of storytelling] must begin by assuming the need of selection. … To choose between all this [potential dramatic incident and detail] is the first step toward coherent expression” (11). Seemingly carefully selected, each action and incident in Twelfth Night fits within, and enhances, the play's overall theme. This suggests a conscious intention on Shakespeare's part to embed his statement about storytelling and performance in the text of the play.

If this is the case, one may wonder to whom Shakespeare may have directed this message. Elizabethan audiences “were sufficiently immersed in the conventions both of theater and of social life in general to accept [theatrical artifice]” (Logan, Greenblatt, Lewalski, and Maus 1077), and probably did not need a reminder of the occasional necessity of the carnivalesque. The religious politics of Shakespeare's time, however, suggest that the Puritans, who “attacked the theater for what they saw as its links with paganism, idleness, and sexual licence” (Logan, Greenblatt, Lewalski, and Maus 1078), did need that reminder. Then, too, perhaps the message simply served as a proclamation by the playwright of his artistic intentions. We may never know. What we can know, however, is that Shakespeare's own body of work proves the message of Twelfth Night true. The truths Shakespeare revealed using the masks and lies of the theater have immortalized his name and work in the canon of Western literature and drama, while most of his contemporaries—perhaps doomed by intentions more akin to Malvolio's than Viola's—have faded into obscurity.

Works Cited

Crane, Milton. “Twelfth Night and Shakespearian Comedy.” Shakespeare Quarterly. Issue 6 (1955): 1-8. Web.

Logan, George M., Stephen Greenblatt, Barbara K. Lewalski, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume B, 8th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Print.

Righter, Anne. Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1962. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. Logan, Greenblatt, Lewalski, and Maus 1027-1139. Print.

“Twelfth Night.” Logan, Greenblatt, Lewalski, and Maus 1077-1079. Print.

Wharton, Edith. The Writing of Fiction. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1924. Print.

Midterm Essay: A Proposed Solution to the Afghan Conflict

2009-11-04T19:11:00.000-08:00

Written in class as a midterm test.

Eight years after U.S. and coalition forces invaded Afghanistan with the stated mission of ousting the Taliban fundamentalist regime, finding Osama Bin Laden and the other Al Qaeda leaders who had claimed responsibility for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and destroying the Al Qaeda terrorist organization, the outcome of foreign involvement in Afghanistan remains unclear, and the situation in Afghanistan bleak. Despite the initial retreat of the Taliban and the recent establishment of democratic elections and a democratically elected government, Afghan security still fails to meet U.S. and coalition standards for stability and self-reliance. Taliban insurgents continue to wage a bloody war with the occupying forces; corruption runs rampant in every level of government; and the life of the average Afghan remains one of poverty and insecurity. This lack of definitive improvement serves as an indictment of U.S. and coalition tactics in the region. The current military approach to democratizing and stabilizing Afghanistan is failing to achieve the desired outcomes of peace, stability, democracy, and improved human rights for Afghans; to create a more stable and secure Afghanistan, more attention and resources must be directed towards education, development, and infrastructure, thus concretely improving the lives of the Afghan people.

An examination of recent Afghan history demonstrates the importance of both properly administered foreign aid and liberalized governance to achieving a peaceful Afghanistan. According to journalist Thomas J. Billitteri, in the 1960s, late in the reign of Crown Prince Mohammed Zahir Shah, "Zahir...pressed for political freedoms that included new rights for women in voting, schooling, and employment" (681-682). Though his reforms were not universally popular, they, and the infusion of Soviet and American funds directed towards infrastructure building and improvement, produced a "rare long period of peace...recalled now with immense nostalgia" (Billitteri 682). Unfortunately for Zahir and Afghanistan, "peace was not accompanied by prosperity" (Billitteri 682), and soon after his ouster, the country collapsed into internal strife, setting the stage for the troubles that would follow.

The violence that followed Zahir's fall from power had lasting consequences. "Between 1979 and the Soviet withdrawal in 1989," Billitteri writes, "some 14,500 Soviets died" (682), and, even more significantly, "the [Soviet-Afghan] war was a bloodbath that all but destroyed the economy and educational system and uprooted much of the [Afghan] population" (Billitteri 682). Worse still, the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, instead of allowing peace to return to the region, prompted the United States to withdraw its support for Afghanistan. Thus, in the absence of foreign aid and an established, stable government, and still reeling from the violence of the war with the Soviets, Afghanistan became ripe for regional conflict and the eventual rise of the Taliban.

The rise of the Taliban illustrates the importance of establishing law and order to the Afghan people. The Taliban's rise "stemmed directly from the chaos wracking Afghanistan" (Billitteri 683) and "succeeded in establishing law and order throughout most of the country" (Billitteri 683), establishing its own legitimacy in the process. Today, although the Taliban no longer rules Afghanistan, the organization continues to attract followers willing to fight in the insurgency, against which U.S. and coalition forces now use tactics, such as air strikes which often kill innocent bystanders, that may, as journalist Chalmers Johnson points out, "turn the Afghan people and the Islamic world further against the United States" (Johnson).

The chaos, lack of infrastructure, and lawlessness of Afghanistan today all contribute to the continuing violence and volatility of the region. As history demonstrates, military attempts by foreign powers to seize control of the region, from Britain to the U.S.S.R., inevitably fail and often leave Afghanistan in worse condition than before. Therefore, rather than continuing to focus on military efforts to fight and defeat rebel forces, efforts which foster an environment of bloodshed and contribute little to the creation of a stable, long-term infrastructure, U.S. and coalition forces should divert resources and attention to creating a better Afghanistan, one with a government, infrastructure, economy, and educational system capable of maintaining law and order, which will lend itself to a long-lasting peace, out of which prosperity and advancement can grow.

The Obama administration's stated approach to Afghanistan may help move the conflict in the right direction. The administration plans to provide "aid to build up [Afghanistan's] social and political infrastructure and democratic institutions" (Billitteri 672), and to increase "the number of agricultural specialists, educators, engineers, and lawyers" (Billitteri 672) to aid in the establishment of the new Afghan government and infrastructure. This reflects a shift in U.S. priorities to the long-term well-being of Afghanistan. U.S. commitment to that long-term well-being may, in the end, prove more effective at establishing peace and at preventing the rise of another militant, fundamentalist regime, like the Taliban, than traditional military strategies would. A country which we have helped achieve peace and self-sufficiency will view the United States more favorably, after all, than a country whose infrastructure we have assisted in destroying, without leaving any improvements behind. Therefore, both to achieve peace in Afghanistan and to minimize anti-American sentiment in the region, we must focus on rebuilding the country and helping the people, rather than on destroying villages and killing our opponents. Only then can a truly successful long-term outcome be won.

Works Cited

Billitteri, Thomas J. "Afghanistan Dilemma." CQ Researcher, 7 Aug 2009: Web. 22 Oct. 2009.

Johnson, Chalmers. "Three Good Reasons to Liquidate Our Empire and Ten Steps to Take to Do So." Peace Resource Center of San Diego, 30 July 2009. Web. 22 Oct. 2009.

The Cultural Cost of Invading Afghanistan

2009-11-04T18:38:00.000-08:00

Eight years after launching Operation Enduring Freedom in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the United States finds itself mired in a struggle for the future of Afghanistan, fighting, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, for “peace and security, rule of law, good governance, human rights protection and sustainable economic and social development” (“Mandate”). In our attempts to reshape Afghanistan in its new conquerors' images, however, what cultural treasures are being lost? Even a cursory examination of Afghan history should cause observers to question the means with which American forces are currently attempting to reform the region. Afghanistan has suffered numerous foreign invasions during its long history, invasions which have cost the world not only human life, but human history: once destroyed, Afghanistan’s irreplaceable cultural artifacts take precious knowledge of our past with them.

Afghanistan's documented history dates back to the Paleolithic era. By the Bronze Age, artifacts traced to Iran, Mesopotamia, Turkmenistan, Siberia, and the Indus Valley indicate that “Afghanistan was a vital link [between those civilizations],” according to Warwick Ball in The Monuments of Afghanistan: History, Archaeology and Architecture (46). By the Iron Age, Kandahar had already developed into a major city. Kandahar's “massive ramparts” (Ball 51) and other archaeological remnants indicate “centralised rule and the need for large-scale defence...[suggesting] some form of state” (Ball 51-52). In other words, civilization existed in Kandahar several hundred years before the establishment of the Roman Republic.

For centuries, despite periodic invasions, that civilization flourished and grew. The prophet Zoroaster, founder of the “first of the great monotheistic ideas and the first religion with the concept of a hopeful hereafter” (Ball 55) may have originated in Afghanistan; during Afghanistan's Zoroastrian period, many regions received their first recorded names, including Haraiva for the region around modern-day Herat. Shortly afterwards, during the sixth century BC, Cyrus the Great incorporated Afghanistan into the Persian Empire. “Subject peoples were not suppressed,” Ball writes, and, perhaps surprisingly given Afghanistan's current climate of fundamentalism and intolerance, “[diverse] religions were respected, even encouraged” (58). Later on, Alexander of Macedon's invasion in the late fourth century BC brought new influences to the region. Excavations of the city of Ai Khanum have revealed “temples, a gymnasium, a theatre, an agora and other imports from the Hellenic world” (Ball 70). A century later, Buddhist missionaries arrived in Afghanistan, where “Greek artistic forms soon fused with Indian philosophical ideas to produce Buddhism's first major artistic expression” (Ball 66).

The invasion of the Huns in the fourth century AD destroyed many of the products of that artistic expression. The Huns left utter devastation in their wake. Cities and monasteries fell, and many of Afghanistan's Buddhist centers suffered massive damages. The damage, however, was not irreversible. A later Turk ruler began a period of Buddhist revival, out of which emerged the gigantic Bamiyan Buddhas. According to Ball, “the painting and sculpture [of the Bamiyan Buddhas] combined Hellenistic, Iranian, and Indian elements that influenced subsequent Chinese and Islamic art” (87). Afghanistan, Rory Stewart writes in The Places in Between, “was where Buddhism met the art of Alexander's Greece” (257). In modern times, the Bamiyan Buddhas represent the tragic obliteration of cultural treasures by Islamic fundamentalism. They were declared idols and destroyed, with dynamite, by the Taliban in 2001.

The religion that would eventually spawn the Taliban began in the seventh century AD, when the Prophet Muhammad established a new religion in Arabia. By the turn of the first millennium, the Abbasid dynasty of eastern Iran had extended Islam into Afghanistan and revived the use of Persian as a courtly language. In fact, “Dari,” the name of the Persian language in Afghanistan, means “language of the court.” For two centuries, Afghanistan and the rest of Central Asia experienced widespread conversions to Islam, as well as an Iranian renaissance.

The Muslim dynasties that ruled during that renaissance fell when Genghis Khan's ambitions turned towards Central Asia. Around 1220, the Mongol invader wrought destruction comparable, Ball asserts, to “the Nazi Holocaust or modern nuclear war...Whole cities, whole populations, whole landscapes, were simply wiped out. The great historic cities of Central Asia were...reduced to dust” (94-95). Ball continues:

Many of the cities of eastern Iran, Afghanistan and central Asia—some of the greatest intellectual and artistic centres in the world at the time—have never recovered. It is important to stress how very different the subsequent history of Central Asia might have been without [the Mongol invasions]...Afghanistan...being at the heart of the initial Mongol destruction, never saw any...rebuilding. (96)

The horrors of the Mongol conquest did, of course, have some benefits. The consolidation of a vast stretch of Asia created a diverse, cosmopolitan society in which commerce and travel flourished, due to the openness of trade routes across the Eurasian continent. One wonders, however, whether that openness would not have developed in the absence of a Mongol conquest. Historical evidence suggests that travel and trade to, from, and through Afghanistan had been established millennia ago, and without the massive destruction wrought by Genghis Khan's invasion. The question remains important today. Along with the human cost of the war to Westernize Afghanistan comes the cultural cost.

Invasions, after all, destroy more than homes and lives. While exploring the remains of the twelfth-century minaret at Jam, looted by impoverished villagers, Stewart reflects:

The village was digging through the traces of more than a single Afghan culture...[the site] contained art imported from all over twelfth-century Asia...We know very little about this period because, just as Genghis buried the Turquoise Mountain, he also obliterated the other great cities of the eastern Islamic world...The Turquoise Mountain was only the most dramatic and most recent victim of a general destruction of Afghanistan's cultural heritage. (157-158)

That obliteration continues today. Earlier in his travels, Stewart visited the twelfth-century domes at Chist and observed that while the western dome seemed largely unharmed by the war, the eastern dome had been nearly obliterated by a tank shell.

When the human cost of conquest is compounded by a potentially staggering cultural cost, it seems wise to rethink the methods of conquest and the damage conquerors are willing to incur. A people may recover from war, but, once destroyed, the remnants of ancient cultures and civilizations cannot be remade. Afghanistan, with its long history and historical role as the crossroads of empires, hides countless cultural treasures beneath its war-torn surface, and to destroy a culture's artifacts is to destroy its history and its identity. Ball writes of the need to preserve those artifacts:

All nations are products of their past...The glories and achievements of [Afghanistan's ancient] civilizations are far more a part of Afghanistan's identity than its modern agonies are, and we abroad should remember that. If the last decades of Afghanistan's history have demonstrated nothing else, it is the need for a strong, unified cultural identity and cohesiveness. The role of its cultural heritage is essential in this. (x-xi)

Should the forces currently fighting to bring peace and prosperity remember to honor Afghanistan's past, they will prove their commitment to the Afghan people and may finally win their trust and acceptance. In addition, the preservation and eventual excavation of Afghanistan's ancient artifacts may reveal secrets of our own past that would otherwise be lost forever. In protecting Afghanistan's cultural heritage, civilization has little to lose, and much to gain.

Works Cited

Ball, Warwick. The Monuments of Afghanistan: History, Archaeology and Architecture. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd., 2008. Print.

“Mandate.” United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (2009): n. page. Web. 10 Oct. 2009.

Stewart, Rory. The Places In Between. London: Picador, 2004. Print.

Just for fun

2009-10-15T20:14:00.000-07:00

From a French 101 exam.

J'ai un petit ami. Il s'appelle Brandon. Il a vingt-trois ans, et il est étudiant. C'est un bel homme, et il est trés intelligent et amusant. Il est* plutôt paresseux**, mais c'est un bon étudiant.

*I have more verbs now.
**He's not, but I wanted to use the vocabulary word.

Nature and Doom in Beowulf

2009-10-15T20:05:00.000-07:00

Answer to an essay question on an exam. Written in class, so the writing is less polished than in formal essays.

By setting the confrontations Beowulf has with the monsters first at night, then in the lake, and then in the dragon's underground lair, the author of Beowulf is at once expressing fears of those things themselves--darkness, the water, and the wilderness--and is also using those settings to externalize and express deeper psychological fears: of the unknown and unseen (Grendel, lurking in the night), uncontrolled female power (Grendel's mother), and death (the dragon's lair is a barrow, where Beowulf does indeed meet his death).

These three primal fears all belong to the category of "nature"--the fears of the unknown, the female, and death are all fears of things that are both natural and unavoidable. By using those fears, the writer of Beowulf creates a terrifying world, in which nothing and no one can be safe, even in the supposed sanctuary of the mead-hall. This makes sense, as the people of the time were striving to impose order on their world. Much of the code of honor the men of Beowulf's world adhere to, and all the attendant rituals of courtesy and careful marking of kinship and alliances, are designed to impose order on an unruly and threatening world; the monsters and all they are associated with are threats to the order men had created. Nature itself is a threat because of its separateness from the world of mankind, and its tendency to harbor the unknown and the dangerous. Thus, Beowulf's defeats of the three monsters are heroic because those defeats represent man's master of nature in its various guises. As can be seen from Beowulf's death at the end, however, the author of Beowulf suggests that despite all other victories, the one unknown force that cannot be defeated and is inevitable for all is death.

This sense of impending death gives Beowulf a feeling of doom, enhanced both by the funerals that mark the beginning and end of the story, and the frequent, sudden, and senseless deaths throughout. Beowulf was written after the time of those pagan warriors was past, by a Christian author who seems to lament the fall of their simple, hard ways, while at the same time knowing that their lack of Christian belief doomed their souls. That author's lament for the old heroes and pity for their unshriven souls gives Beowulf its elegiac quality and sense of doom.

A Question of Identity

2009-10-15T19:54:00.000-07:00

I am Taiwanese-American, and I identify myself as Taiwanese-American, not Chinese-American. To some, the distinction may seem minor; to me, that perception is exactly why the distinction matters. Like many other Taiwanese and Taiwanese-Americans, I hope for the eventual recognition of Taiwan as a sovereign nation, independent of the communist People's Republic of China, but before that can happen, the international community must recognize that Taiwan is, in fact, a separate entity from China.
My early education, unfortunately, demonstrated a discouraging lack of information on the basic political difference between Taiwan and China, or, indeed, much exposure to Asian politics at all. I grew up in Decatur, Illinois, where, according to DiversityData.Org, a Harvard University research and data analysis project, the total number of Asians and Pacific Islanders was 509 in 1990, 0.4% of the total population (DiversityData Project), and our social studies curriculum focused primarily on the United States. In “How Textbooks Around the World Portray U.S. History,” Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward perfectly summarize this educational myopia:

...many history classes in the United States are taught from an isolationist standpoint, where events in U.S. History are portrayed as if they occurred within a historical vacuum. If other nations are mentioned in American textbooks, it is often only within the context of the impact of the United States' foreign policy or from the viewpoint of U.S. interests. (46-47)

As a result of this, many of my classmates entered high school thinking that Hong Kong was in Japan and Tokyo in China, or that China, Japan, and Vietnam were all the same thing. Hardly anyone outside my small circle of friends knew that Taiwan existed at all, let alone that there existed any difference between Taiwan and China.

The failure to grasp the difference is understandable. The vast majority of Taiwan's inhabitants migrated there from China, and in custom and language, “they are similar to the Chinese and consider themselves part of the Chinese” (“Taiwanese” 581). There are, however, significant differences, which originated primarily from the sharp divergence of Chinese and Taiwanese history in 1949, when the Taiwanese government was founded in opposition to Communist mainland China. Indigenous Taiwanese peoples and traditions, as well as Taiwan’s greater openness to Japanese and Western influences as compared to China’s, also contributed to the development of a unique national and popular culture. The way Mandarin is spoken differs, with Taiwanese speakers possessing a distinct accent and vocabulary. Taiwan also uses the traditional Chinese written language, while China has adopted a simplified form.

The languages, customs, and cultures do overlap, though, encouraging the perception of Taiwan as a part of China and creating challenges to developing awareness about the existence of Taiwan as an entity distinct from China. Taiwan is often poorly represented in reference texts. For example, the 1993 edition of the Encyclopedia of the Peoples of the World devotes three text columns to the Chinese, and only half a column to the Taiwanese. CountryWatch.com, the San Diego City College library's recommended database for research on different countries, has Taiwan listed as a subsection of China's, without its own sections for such information as human rights or investment climate. And, perhaps due to Taiwan's lack of representation in or recognition by the United Nations as a sovereign state, Taiwan is not among the nations evaluated using the United Nations' Human Development Index, an omission which denies researchers a valuable tool with which to measure quality of life in Taiwan. This relative lack of information on Taiwan indicates a failure to recognize it as an independent entity.

The frequent failure to count and document Taiwan as a nation separate from China can create the impression that information about China applies to Taiwan as well. Even if that were true, however, China, a vast and populous nation with no less than “fifty-six different identifiable ethnic groups” (“Chinese” 147), defies attempts at generalization, since “sharp regional and cultural differences, including major variations in spoken Chinese, are often as great as among many European nationalities” (“Chinese” 149), and the Chinese are “dispersed over such a large and diverse country that it is impossible to expect them to share a uniform lifestyle” (“Chinese” 149). CountryWatch.com's “People” entry for China contains a warning regarding the country's income and poverty statistics:

Poverty in China...cannot be easily dichotomized into regions, nor can it be considered in binary urban versus rural terms...Urban and rural residents of China apparently increased their savings from the 1970s to the 1990s by over 71 percent. But media attention on these increases... often overshadow the marked increases in urban poverty that has been occurring in recent years. (CountryWatch.com)

The economic and political differences between China and Taiwan render the conflation of Taiwan with China misleading. Chilla Bulbeck, describing the modern understanding of the third world as “'backward,' 'poor,' or 'developing' nations” (38), suggests that this category now includes formerly second-world countries such as China, while stating that Taiwan belongs to the “no longer Newly Industrializing Countries of Asia” (39) and pointing out its “high per capita incomes” (39.) Unfortunately, scholars like Bulbeck, who distinguish Taiwan from China, appear too rare and specialized to create a common awareness of the differences between the two nations.

In the absence of a large body of research treating Taiwan as an independent state, or even basic education about Taiwan as an entity separate from China, raising awareness of the political differences and logical reasons for recognition of the two countries as separate states must begin at the individual level. As citizens of the global community, each one of us serves as a representative of our unique background, and possesses the power to promote awareness of our culture to others. When I identify myself as Taiwanese-American, rather than Chinese-American, I create an opportunity to inform others about the difference. I don’t identify myself as Taiwanese-American simply because that’s what I am. I identify myself as Taiwanese-American because it matters.

Works Cited

Bulbeck, Chilla. “Fracturing Binarisms: First and Third Worlds.” Rothenberg 37-41. Print.

“China.” CountryWatch.com. CountryWatch. Web. 14 September 2009.

“Chinese.” Encyclopedia of the Peoples of the World, The. 1st ed. 1993. Print.

DiversityData Project: Metropolitan Quality of Life Data. Harvard University School of Public Health, 2009. Web. 7 September 2009.

Gonen, Amiram, ed. Encyclopedia of the Peoples of the World, The. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1993. Print.

Lindaman, Dana and Ward, Kyle. “How Textbooks Around the World Portray U.S. History.” Rothenberg 44-57. Print.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “One-Third/Two-Thirds Worlds.” Rothenberg 41-43. Print.

Rothenberg, Paula S., ed. Beyond Borders: Thinking Critically About Global Issues. New York, NY: Worth, 2006. Print.

“Taiwanese.” Encyclopedia of the Peoples of the World, The. 1st ed. 1993. Print.

Our Construction of Reality: Kant and the Power of the Mind

2009-10-15T19:46:00.000-07:00

A rationalist in his thinking, concerned purely with reason—the intellectual processes of the mind—and dismissive of physical experience, Plato posited that the physical world is unreal, and that truth and reality lie beyond it in an immaterial world existing outside of space and time. Immanuel Kant proposed a different strategy for understanding reality. Kant's strategy shared Plato's framework of dual existences, but demystified the framework and validated earthly existence by claiming that, although there is a world of objective truth beyond human experience, it exists not in some ethereal plane beyond space and time, but rather alongside the subjective world of human experience, which, to Kant, is itself real, valid, and true. Kant then solved the problems of rationalism and empiricism by proposing a radical method of understanding the division between the objective world and the subjective one.
The subjective world within the range of human perception is real, Kant argued, and can be proven by the fact that “the world of objects exists, that objects are related in lawlike ways that science and common sense can discover.”* Were the subjective world to be ultimately unreliable, as the rationalists asserted, the natural laws which apply to material things would not bind them. The fact that interpretations of the subjective world are dependent on human perception does not invalidate them as reality. But the reality of the subjective world is subjective, and therefore separate from the objective reality, because it cannot provide complete truth merely through physical experience, contrary to the empiricists' claims. Human perception and interpretation of physical objects can be easily shown to be limited. Physical experience on its own, therefore, is an unreliable basis for understanding of ultimate reality.

Existing in a world of objective things inherently unknowable because of the limitations of our perceptions, Kant argued, human beings have actively constructed the subjective reality they can know. It is the middle ground between subjective perception and objective reality, Kant argues, which constitutes the reality in which we live, an “orderly and intelligible world” which we construct by using human reason on objective things. Those objective things, the experience of which is valued above all else by the empiricists, are not an end in themselves. What objective things provide is raw material, upon which we then use our rational, reasoning faculties to construct a world that makes sense.

We construct a world that makes sense by choosing to perceive only those things which we can arrange in orderly fashion. Kant theorized that there are twelve basic categories of understanding which every human being possesses and uses to make sense of things and events. Those categories include cause and effect, “induction, objects, space, and time,” and are universal to every human mind. Human beings construct their reality by selectively perceiving and interpreting those things that conform to the rules of the twelve categories. If an object or concept does not conform, we are unable to perceive or make sense of it, and it therefore does not exist in our reality. Our reality, according to Kant, is one which our minds actively created by the selection and processing of only those stimuli which we can understand.

It is clear that Kant's fusion of rationalism and empiricism allows one to come closer to a complete understanding of reality than either rationalism or empiricism can alone. Pure rationalism, in valuing the intellectual processes of the mind above all else and rejecting the physical stimuli of the earthly realm, is fatally limited by the absence of data or context: “Thoughts (concepts) without content (sense data) are empty,” as Kant said. And pure empiricism, in assuming that physical objects or stimuli are the sole source for universal understanding, is fatally limited by the subjectivity of human perceptions: “Intuitions (of sensations) without conceptions [are] blind.” To understand our reality, we must recognize that we use both our faculty for experience and our faculty for thought. Our world is “an integrated package in which sensory experience and the faculties of the mind” work together seamlessly to construct a reality that makes sense.

It can be argued that Kant's constructivism opens the way for a frightening conception of the world. If every person's world is different because every person's mind constructs it slightly differently, how can we ever know what is true? If one person perceives the other as standing too close to him, while the other perceives himself as standing at an acceptable distance from his companion, how then can they truly judge the distance between them? If every individual perceives and interprets things differently, how then can humanity come to a consensus about any truth?

Kant's argument of the twelve categories of understanding solves this problem. By stating that all human beings share these universal methods for deriving knowledge, he states that there are certain ways of understanding that are universal, and can be used to arrive at important consensuses, such as the existence or nonexistence of specific objects or phenomena. All human beings do share a basic reality. That there is room for individual interpretation within this basic reality does not disprove the existence of the basic, shared reality itself. We may each see our personal worlds differently from anyone else, but we do all live in the same larger, collective reality. Ultimately, Kant's constructivism provides a deeply reassuring and yet potentially exhilarating way of viewing existence: reassuring because we can be assured of the reality of our world, and exhilarating because within that framework, we do still construct our own individual worlds, and are free to do so as we will.

*Footnotes removed because Blogger doesn't support them. All quotations are taken from John Chaffee's The Philosopher's Way.

Escape from Illusion: Plato's Allegory of the Cave and the Matrix

2009-10-15T19:42:00.000-07:00

Nearly four hundred years before the birth of Christ, Greek philosopher Plato formulated a startling theory about reality. The physical realm, Plato taught, is neither real nor the source of any genuine wisdom or enlightenment. The things in this earthly world are merely illusory, impermanent reproductions of the perfect, unchanging, true essences of objects and ideas. To achieve wisdom, Plato argued, a philosopher must first awaken to the unreality of the visible world, and then undertake the arduous process of learning to contemplate the reality beyond. To illustrate this theory, Plato created the Allegory of the Cave, his tale of one man's liberation from a cave of shadow and illusion into the real world beyond. More than two thousand years later, filmmakers Larry and Andy Wachowski proved the continued relevance of the Allegory of the Cave by repackaging it as The Matrix, a blockbuster science fiction movie about sentient artificial intelligence, computer-generated virtual reality, and one man's liberation from his virtual-reality bondage.

Startling parallels between The Matrix and Plato's Allegory of the Cave abound. In The Matrix, human beings are imprisoned in a virtual-reality dream world so complete and convincing to the senses that the prisoners do not even realize they are prisoners. The sights, sounds, smells, textures, and even tastes of this virtual-reality world are only illusory reproductions of reality, much like the shadows of the “artifacts, statues of men, [and] reproductions of other animals in stone or wood fashioned in all sorts of ways”* cast before the eyes of the prisoners in Plato's cave. Both the prisoners of The Matrix and of Plato's cave know no other reality. The prisoners of The Matrix were born into unconscious bondage, while the prisoners of the cave “have been there from childhood, with their neck and legs in fetters.”

Neither the prisoners of The Matrix nor the prisoners of the cave remember any life outside of their prisons, nor any reality different from what they see. This ignorance leads them to believe that “these shadows [are] the real things.” They “believe the truth to be nothing else than the shadows of the artifacts.” Enlightenment is difficult. When Neo, the hero of The Matrix, breaks out of his computer-generated dream into reality, he awakens weak and helpless, his muscles atrophied from bondage, his eyes painfully blinded by the light, for he has never used his eyes before. Similarly, when the prisoner of Plato's cave is first liberated, “when he came into the light, with the sunlight filling his eyes, he would not be able to see a single one of the things which are now said to be true.” And the prisoner of the cave, like Neo, needs “time to get adjusted before he could see things in the world above.”

After this period of adjustment, however, the prisoner of Plato's cave comes to “reckon himself happy for [his enlightenment], and pity” the other men still imprisoned in the cave of illusions. Neo grows determined to free his fellow human beings from their virtual-reality imprisonment.

Unfortunately, however, humanity does not always respond well to being told that what it believes true is, in fact, false. Were the prisoner of Plato's cave to attempt to enlighten the other prisoners, the prisoners would say “that he had returned from his upward journey with his eyesight spoiled, and...it was not worthwhile even to attempt to travel upward”: they would prefer to remain in the world of illusion with which they had grown comfortable, and, in fact, “if they could somehow lay their hands on [the man who tried to free them] and kill him, they would do so.” To avoid this very threat, Neo must act in secrecy within the virtual-reality world he hopes to destroy, for, as his mentor Morpheus tells him, all those who are not one of the enlightened must be seen as his enemies. Despite these difficulties, however, the wisdom which Neo and Plato's prisoner achieve is worth the struggle. Freed of the illusions which once imprisoned them, they can know reality, and may come, in time, to free others by turning their souls “from the world of [illusion] until [they] can endure to contemplate reality, and the brightest of realities, which we say is the Good.” This turning of others' souls towards the Good is, in Plato's theory, of great benefit to humanity.

So many years after Plato first wrote the Allegory of the Cave, however, those benefits still have yet to be fully enjoyed. Many people still live in the “shadowy world of illusion.” In our media-saturated age, we are more clearly imprisoned among illusions than ever. What is television, for instance, but the shadows, reflections, and distortions of reality, chosen and presented for our enjoyment? We even have a genre of television programming specifically designed to simulate reality: “reality TV.” We hide inside and surf the Internet in between hours of watching TV. More than ever, we live in a world of unreality.

What is encouraging, however, is that The Matrix, and by extension Plato's Allegory of the Cave, resonates so strongly with audiences. We, as a civilization, are aware of our imprisonment. We do sense that what we are shown is not real, and we do desire to break free of the unrealities we see into a truer existence. To do so, what we must do is what the prisoner in the cave and Neo in The Matrix did: reject our world of unrealities and contemplate, not just truth, but the simple fact that there is a truth beyond what we see. And once we do so, we will surely feel, as both the prisoner and Neo felt, that our enlightenment is worth the suffering.

*Footnotes removed because Blogger doesn't support them. All quotations come from John Chaffee's The Philosopher's Way.

Socrates and Nietzsche

2009-10-15T19:34:00.000-07:00

"An unexamined life is not worth living."
-Socrates

Over two thousand years after Socrates made his famous pronouncement, despair is everywhere. Gifted with health and luxuries once unimaginable, we modern humans go to therapy and take medications to cope with our despair. Our despair is not the desperation of poverty or enslavement, but a despair of the soul, which causes us, in the midst of our material comforts, to ask, "Is this life worth living?" And speaking to us from the distant past, Socrates answers, "An unexamined life is not worth living."

Note that Socrates did not say, "An unhappy life is not worth living," "An unexciting life is not worth living," or "A difficult life is not worth living." Instead, he insists that the life truly worth living is the examined one.

Though Socrates's pronouncement seems stark and uncompromising, it is also uniquely empowering. Happiness--a state of good cheer and satisfaction, free of anxiety, pain, or sorrow--is beyond our control. To find happiness in the first place is difficult, and it can vanish in an instant. One might fall ill, or lose money, a job, a loved one. Excitement is more easily attained, but anyone who has fallen under the spell of drink, drugs, sex, or gambling can attest to the unpredictable benefits and heavy price of excitement. And, as movies like American Beauty, Click, and Weatherman* show, freedom from material worry not only can't protect one from loneliness, but can cause it. The main character in American Beauty allowed the pursuit of external prosperity to numb his soul. The protagonist of Click was so consumed with external goals that he disengaged from his life, literally skipping over the moments which truly mattered. The pursuits of happiness, excitement, and ease cannot create a consistent sense of a life worth living. The contemplation and inner search for wisdom Socrates advocate, however, can.

We have absolute control over whether we work to discover who we really are and what our purpose in life is. Barring brain damage or degeneration, nothing can take away our intellect or self-awareness. Self-examination neither causes hangovers nor empties bank accounts. Wisdom gives perspective to poverty and enriches wealth. And the key to all that lies in our hands.

It is only when we make the effort to examine ourselves that we can begin to understand not just who we are and how best to behave towards others, but what our place is in the world. Only when we understand that can we direct our lives to do our true best for ourselves and our world. And only then can we satisfy both our inner need for meaning and our surface craving for accomplishment. Money and success alone cannot buy meaning. Conscious self-awareness and the sense of purpose that that self-awareness produces form the only road to true self-fulfillment.

We are a thinking species, capable not only of contemplation but of creative action. Those capabilities set us apart from every other species on the planet and give us, uniquely, the tools not only to live, as even the most primitive of animals can live, but to live with meaning. Because we are a thinking species, we long to mean something, and feel that life isn't worthwhile unless it has meaning. The only way to find our personal meaning is through self-examination. That is why an unexamined life is not worth living, and why an examined life is the only one worth living.

"What if, some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more'...Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything so divine."
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Would you be happy to live your life again and again? Or does the very idea of repeating what you have lived fill you with despair?

It is important to note that Nietzsche, like Socrates, is not interested in happiness. He makes that clear by specifying that the demon will come in your "loneliest loneliness,” implying that unhappiness is inevitable. Nietzsche is not asking whether your life has been happy enough for you to want to repeat it. If that was the case, the question would be pointless, the answer always no. Who would want to suffer the pains and sorrows of life over again?

What Nietzsche asks is, What makes a life so worth living that one is willing to repeat it to infinity, pain and sorrow included? The answer, as Socrates knew, is meaning.

Meaning makes any pain endurable and every moment worthwhile. The artist who truly loves his craft never begrudges the time, effort, frustration, and disappointment inherent in his training. The mother who adores her children considers even the worry, conflict, and pain inherent in their upbringing worthwhile. So it is with life. If a life has meaning, then even its difficult moments are not only worthwhile, but precious and good.

Nietzsche's challenge goes beyond simply finding meaning, however. He says that the demon comes "some day or night." That is to say, you will not know when the demon will come. In that vagueness lies the significance of his challenge. If you don't know when the demon will come, you must be ready at all times. Nietzsche's question is, quite simply, a challenge to live meaningfully for as much of your life as you can: to create, with every moment, the life you would be happy to relive.

*We were required to include discussion of some of the movies we had watched in class.

The Arbiters of Media Success

2009-10-15T19:28:00.000-07:00

Mass media inundate contemporary American life. TVs, the Internet, and cell phones supply information, entertainment, and communication on demand. Billboards loom over streets; magazines tempt captive audiences in every supermarket checkout line. Modern media has achieved unprecedented ubiquity and significance, which some media critics lament. The pervasiveness of mass media, those critics argue, has brainwashed audiences and consumers into mindless imitators of media images, many of which, critics say, promote sexual promiscuity, drug use, violence, and diseases such as anorexia and bulimia. For instance, in her article, “Anorexics Are Victims of Society's Obsession with Thinness," Susan Renes accuses the media of causing eating disorders in women through its portrayal of thin models as desirable in her article. Renes writes, “We are bombarded by advertising and mass media messages that say women must be as thin as the models in magazines and on television,” and, consequently, women “disregard their need for...a sufficient amount of food to adequately sustain them,” placing their health at risk to live up to a media-perpetuated standard. Although eating disorders are a serious problem, however, overweight American consumers far outnumber eating disorder victims, contradicting Renes's contention that the standard of beauty commonly promoted by the media poses a grave danger to American women. The average American's diet and lifestyle demonstrate an apparent resistance to the pursuit of thinness and fitness the media promotes. In fact, media critics' perception of a one-sided causal relationship between media and consumers assigns a disproportionate power to the media and assumes extreme passivity in consumers. A closer examination of the media/consumer relationship uncovers substantial consumer influence over the media. What the media shows does affect consumers' tastes, aspirations, and values, but the consumer market itself dictates what the media decides to show.

The reciprocal interaction between consumer and media creates what The Merchants of Cool documentary producer Douglas Rushkoff calls a “giant feedback loop.” Through interviews with advertisers, producers, and critics working in media, Rushkoff shows that entertainment and advertising corporations do not impose arbitrarily chosen marketing and entertainment messages on consumers. Instead, corporations research their target markets' interests, tastes, and aspirations to create offerings that will appeal to consumers' sensibilities. Consumer response then helps the corporations decide how to capitalize on those sensibilities for maximum profit by manipulating audiences' preexisting tastes and aspirations to create or increase demand for what the corporations hope to promote. The consumers' sensibilities come first. Therefore, before developing any programming or advertising campaign, most media corporations first invest in market research to determine consumer sensibilities to exploit, and then continue to rely on market research for consumer reactions to their attempts.

The media corporations' reliance on market research disproves the theory of an influencing media and passive consumers. If consumers were merely passive followers of media messages, corporations would not need market research. They could simply tell consumers what to want, without regard to the consumers' preexisting desires. That the corporations do study consumers disproves the theory that the power to influence rests only with the media. Market research itself exists because of the consumer's influence.

The consumer's influence over the media stems from simple economic reality. Without the cooperation of the consumer, the majority of mass media could not exist. Most broadcast media depend on advertising dollars to recoup production costs and make profits; so do mass-market periodicals. A drop in ad sales can lead to collapse. As the New York Times reported in April 2009, “In filing for bankruptcy recently, Sun-Times Media Group...disclosed in court papers that it had...[lost] 30 percent [of ad revenue].” Advertising dollars depend directly on consumers. And since, for maximum impact, advertisements must appear in the programs or publications the advertisers' target markets watch or read, advertising-dependent media must produce content as appealing to those target markets as the advertisements themselves. The consumer market therefore wields enormous influence over the mass media.

Because of the consumers' influence over the mass media, as the consumer market changes, so does the media corporations' output. Consider More to Love, an upcoming Fox reality show. Like The Bachelor and other dating competitions, More to Love follows a standard format. Twenty bachelorettes compete for the affections of one bachelor. What makes More to Love unlike other Bachelor-style shows, which generally feature slim, fit, and conventionally attractive contestants, are its stars: plus-sized bachelorettes and a 330-pound bachelor. More to Love eschews the mass media's traditional aspirational paradigm, in which consumers are presented with images of people who conform to physical, social, or economic standards unattainable, but considered desirable, by most of the public. Insead, More to Love “follows one regular guy's search for love among a group of real women determined to prove that love comes in all shapes and sizes (emphasis added),” according to More to Love's official website. “The average American woman,” a More to Love commercial declares, “is a size 14-16. The average American reality contestant is a size 2. How real is that (emphasis added)?”

More to Love may reflect a major change in American society. More than two-thirds of American adults are now overweight, according to an annual report released by health advocacy group Trust for America's Health. As obesity rates continue to rise, the conventional standard of attractiveness appears more unattainable for the general population than ever. The producers of More to Love are gambling on the idea that American consumers will respond to a program that reflects their reality.

Early interest appears to justify this gamble. As blogger “Ms. LMC” writes on the blog Luvin' My Curves, “It's about time that folks realize that people over a certain size do date, want to date and are looking for love.” More to Love's producers did realize that. They stand to profit as a result, and, if they do, to inspire a slew of similarly themed programs, just as The Bachelor spawned dozens of imitations. More to Love's success could start a new movement in entertainment media, a movement that depicts plus-sized people as being fully human and attractive to others, like their thinner counterparts.

Even if More to Love fails to capture a large audience, however, its existence still demonstrates the influence of the consumer on the media. In 2001, Susan Renes claimed that the media influenced women to damage their own health to conform to the media's standard of attractiveness. In 2009, the changing size of the consumer has caused a shift in media portrayals. Corporations cannot rely solely on giving consumers “what [the corporations] want them to have,” as media critic, NYU professor, and author Mark Crispin-Miller says in The Merchants of Cool, in which he laments the enormous and negative impact of corporate media on presumably passive teenage consumers. With More to Love, Fox gives consumers a reflection of what they already are. More to Love makes clear the fact that however much influence the media may possess over the consumer, the consumer also possesses an enormous amount of influence over the media. Ultimately, although the media does depict and promote the standards to which consumers aspire, those standards arise from consumers and society themselves, and change with consumers and society. Neither the media nor consumers wield absolute power over the other, but instead exist in a symbiotic relationship, constantly feeding off of and changing each other in, as Douglas Rushkoff described it, the endless feedback loop.

Works Cited

“About the Show.” Fox Broadcasting Company: MORE TO LOVE. 2009. 23 July 2009.

“F as in Fat 2009: How Obesity Policies Are Failing in America.” Trust for America's Health. July 2009. 23 July 2009.

Merchants of Cool, The. Frontline. Douglas Rushkoff. PBS. 27 February 2001.

More to Love. Advertisement. Fox Broadcasting Company. 23 July 2009.

“More to Love: Reality Dating Show for REAL Women.” Luvin' My Curves. 10 April 2009. 22 July 2009.

Perez-Pena, Richard. “Newspaper Ad Revenue Could Fall as Much as 30%.” New York Times Online. 14 April 2009. 23 July 2009.

Renes, Susan. "Anorexics Are Victims of Society's Obsession with Thinness." At Issue: Anorexia. Ed. Daniel A. Leone. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2001. Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Gale. San Diego City College. 21 July 2009 .

A Free Press Keeps Us Free

2009-10-15T19:19:00.000-07:00

In June of 2009, the Chinese government arrested dissident author Liu Xiaobo. As Audra Ang of the Associated Press reports in her article, “Chinese Intellectuals Call for Release of Dissident,” Liu had recently co-authored “a bold manifesto urging civil rights and political reforms [within the Chinese government].” That manifesto may cost him fifteen years in prison for the crime of “inciting to subvert state power.” The heavy penalty reflects how seriously the regime regards its control of information. Like all totalitarian governments, the Chinese government understands that to control the people, it must control the press. And, just as a state-controlled media controls the populace, so a free press keeps the people free.

The success of any democracy depends upon the freedom of the press, because only a free press can provide the information voters need to cast educated votes. Bradley Steffens, in his editorial "The News Media Must Be Free," writes, “A free press is vital in a democracy. ... To make informed choices about their government, the people need to know what their leaders are saying and doing.” This places the government’s interest in direct opposition to the populace’s at precisely the times when voters’ awareness of their leaders actions matter most: when the leaders have something to hide. “President Nixon's staff [attempted] to thwart [media] investigations into the Watergate scandal, President Reagan's staff … into the Iran-Contra affair, and President Clinton's staff … into the Democratic Party's 1996 campaign fund-raising efforts,” Steffens points out. When the nation’s leaders seek to hide their actions from the voting public, only journalists and the media can ensure that the voting public learns what its leaders wish to conceal. Journalists form the public's first line of defense against corruption in high office. As Steffens writes, “A person cannot form a bad opinion of the government if he or she does not know what the government is doing.” Every time reporters expose an abuse of power, those in power see that the public holds them accountable for their actions.

The role of journalists goes far beyond merely exposing political corruption, however. At their best, journalists can help undermine the control of single-party regimes like China’s by alerting the public to untruths in the official propaganda. In the United States and other multiparty democracies, journalists can fact-check partisan propaganda and provide necessary perspective during election years, when the voting public’s knowledge of their government and political candidates becomes crucial. Informed votes, after all, require knowledge of all sides the debate. A government- or party-controlled press can only present the side of the ruling faction. This leads to distortions and omissions of fact that inhibit the ability of citizens to make educated choices.

The power of the media to control perceptions has been used by governments since the rise of the printing press. Centuries before Communist China began jailing journalists, the Tudors of sixteenth-century England used their control over mass printing to depict the preceding century's Wars of the Roses as far bloodier and more brutal than scholars now believe they were. The people accepted Tudor rule far more willingly when convinced the Tudor dynasty had lifted the realm out of a savage dark age.

But governments aren't the only abusers of media power. Journalists abuse their own reach whenever they become the mouthpieces of a political party or corporate entity, whether for personal gain or out of a sincere belief in an ideology. The political left and right wings and the corporate world all have some media propagandists, reporters who either fail to recognize, and therefore to report, problems in their chosen party or corporation, or who deliberately distort facts and withhold inconvenient information for the furtherance of an agenda. These reporters pose nearly as great a danger to freedom of thought as a government-controlled press. Their work can preclude voters from casting truly informed votes. Freedom of the press cannot mean a complete lack of accountability. A free press can only sustain a free society by using its freedom responsibly, to report the truth about events that matter in the world and allow the public to draw its own conclusions.

Ultimately, that ability to disseminate facts to a public allowed to draw its own conclusions makes a free press vital to democracy. The power of democracy lies not in the advancement of any one agenda, but in the ability of the voting public's power to decide the future for itself. In "Censorship Threatens Freedom of the Press," Carl Jensen's lament for the decline of muckraking journalism, Jensen writes, “The press does have the power to stimulate people. ... Now let us seek a more responsible and responsive press.” With the information that that press provides, responsible and responsive voters will have the tools necessary to make decisions that can “build a more enlightened and responsive society.”

Works Cited

Ang, Audra. “China intellectuals call for release of dissident.” WTOP Online. 26 June 2009. 9 July 2009. .

Jensen, Carl. “Censorship Threatens Freedom of the Press.” Current Controversies: Free Speech 2000. Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Gale. San Diego City College 2 July 2009. .

Steffens, Bradley. “The News Media Must Be Free.” Opposing Viewpoints Digests: Censorship. 2001. Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Gale. San Diego City College 2 July 2009. .