1
e une
School One’s Journal Of Ideas
Volume 12: June 7, 2013
Contributors:
Amanda Crausman
Cormac Hopkins
Camilla Medhaoui
Demetri Metaharakis
Adam Price-Schaeffer
Chelsea Riordan
Joey Santoro
Morgan Sullivan
Ryan Summers
Emily Thuotte
Michael White
Kira Wilson
Cover Art: Morgan Sullivan
Welcome to our twelfth issue of e une, School One’s Journal Of Ideas. This is an opportunity for our
writing and reasoning intensive school to publish some of its students’ best work. The brave
authors volunteered these pieces to enlighten you. The topics in this issue largely cover the
literature (mostly nineteenth century), history, philosophy and a little science. The works run in
roughly chronological order by topic. The journal concludes with a special section of short stories
in the style of James Joyce’s Dubliners but about Rhode Island instead of Dublin.
Find a comfortable chair, and open your mind. E une plurimus!
2
Contents
Religion and Gnosis
Page 4
Cormac Hopkins introduces us to Gnosticism, and Amanda Crausman follows up with a touch of
evil.
Victorian Aberrations
Page 21
Adam Price-Schaeffer compares two characters in Wuthering Heights, Morgan Sullivan and Amanda
consider our favorite lesbian vampire, Emily Thuotte assesses the poetry of Mary Elizabeth
Coleridge in the light of other Victorian poetry and Chelsea Riordan and Michael White consider
gender in Victorian poetry and society.
Modernism Arrives
Page 38
Chelsea compares causation and justice in two proto-Modernist works, King Lear and Thomas
Hardy’s Hap, while Amanda, Chelsea and Michael go to town on Dubliners.
Mid-Century
Page 59
Joey Santoro reviews Harold and Maude, and Demetri Metaharakis discusses civil rights.
Adventures in Biology
Page 61
Joey reports on a planerian lab and provides a presentation about the brain.
Rhode Islanders
Page 69
In this special supplement, Ryan Summers, Emily Thuotte, Chelsea Riordan, Kira Wilson, Amanda
Crausman, Camilla Medhaoui and Michael White share stories about Rhode Island in the style of
James Joyce’s Dubliners.
3
RELIGION AND GNOSIS
Gnosticism and Christianity
Cormac Hopkins
Gnosticism first began in the ancient Hellenistic societies located around the Mediterranean. Gnosticism
as a religion began as a part of the new Cult of Christ, or Christianity as it is known today.
Gnostics separated themselves from normal Christians by claiming that they, in addition to believing in
Christ, had experienced a special revelation and acquired new knowledge. They claimed that this
knowledge, or gnosis, set them apart from the ordinary man or Christian (http://gnosticschristians.com/).
The early days of the Christian religion were much more confusing and diverse then present times. There
were hundreds of variations on the core Christian beliefs; Gnosticism was just one of the many. However,
this wouldn't always be the case. There is direct evidence that Gnosticism had its time in the limelight and
played an important part in influencing the modern Christian faith. Gnosticism and Christianity are both
alike and different. They share many common origins, themes, and teachings, but they also have many
differences (http://gnosis.org/naghamm/nhlintro.html).
Around the start of the 4th century, the Roman Church reached the zenith of its power when the Roman
emperor Theodosius I declared Christianity the official state religion. Prior to this event, many Christian
sects read and followed many different gospels and teachings, such as the Gospel of Thomas and the
Gospel of Phillip. Once the Church had formal authority, it canonized the New Testament exclusively,
meaning that all other Gospels were declared heretical and untrue (gnostictimeline.com).
In 100 C.E., one of Gnosticism’s most influential and well-known teachers, the scholar Valentinus, was
thought to have been in the running for Pope. Valentinus was deeply involved in the Christian faith from a
early age. He quickly rose to power in the Christian community of his home city of Alexandria. After
finding success in Alexandria, Valentinus moved to Rome, the budding Christian capital. Once he was
situated in Rome, he played an active role in the public affairs of the Church. Tragically, as the Church's
power grew and its opinions evolved, Valentinus was forced from the public eye and branded a heretic in
the later years of his life (gnostictimeline.com). After the fall of Valentinus, no new Gnostics came close
to his success. By 170 A.D. the tide of history, along with Church leaders, was beginning to turn against
Gnosticism. It was around this time that Irenaeus, a bishop of Lyon, began publishing his first attacks on
Gnosticism as heresy, a labor that would be continued with increasing vehemence by other church Fathers
throughout the next century. Irenaeus wrote five volumes, entitled The Destruction and Overthrow of
Falsely So-Called Knowledge, which begin with his promise to
“set
forth the views of those who are now teaching heresy . . . to show how absurd and inconsistent with
the truth are their statements . . . I do this so that . . . you may urge all those with whom you are
connected to avoid such an abyss of madness and of blasphemy against Christ”(Irenaeus, AH 3.11.9,
taken from Pagels 20).
Irenaeus's Adversus Haereses is one of history’s best sources about Gnosticism despite its clear bias. It
harshly describes several different schools of 2nd-century gnosticism while contrasting them with
Christianity to their detriment (gnostictimeline.com).
4
The Church would continue to fight against the Gnostics and other “heretics” for the next two to three
centuries until the start of the fourth century when the Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity.
This would result in an immediate, and final, blow to Gnosticism, cutting it away completely from the
body of Christianity. Gnosticism's sacred texts were deemed heretical, its teachers shunned, and its
writings banned and burned. All that remained for students seeking to understand Gnosticism in later
centuries were fragments that survived the Church’s onslaught. So it seemed until the mid-twentieth
century with the discovery of new Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi. In 1945 a red earthenware jar was
found buried near Nag Hammadi, a town in Upper Egypt. Within the jar were thirteen papyrus books
dating from 350 A.D. The writings were those of believers in Gnosticism. The discovery at Nag
Hammadi upset the modern view of early Christianity (Pagels 9).
Nag Hammadi is a city in Upper Egypt where twelve leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar
were found by a local peasant named Mohammed Ali Samman. The writings in these scrolls comprised
fifty-two mostly Gnostic scriptures, but also included parts of the corpus hermeticum and a partial
translation of Plato's republic. After some time the codices eventually found their way into the hands of a
Coptic Priest. Later that same year the Priest's brother-in-law sold one codex to the Coptic Museum in
Cairo; the remaining codices were sold by the brother-in-law to a local antiques dealer, who in turn passed
them on to the Egyptian Department of Antiquities. In 1952 the remaining texts were given to the Coptic
museum and made national property (Pagels 9). The Coptic museum was very keen to keep the Codices
in the country, but luckily for us one fragment of the first codex had been overlooked by the government.
This part of the codices would eventually make its way to the Jung Institution in Zurich. In 1952 twelve
and a half codices were in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, and most of the thirteenth in a safe-deposit box in
Zurich. It wasn't until 1972 that the codices became available to the general population in the form of a
photographic edition. Nine other volumes followed between 1972 and 1977, giving all thirteen codices
access to the public eye (Pagels 10).
The findings at Nag Hammadi showed early Christian beliefs to be much more diverse than previously
assumed. All Christians after the second century, Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox, share the same
three beliefs due to the Church's doctrines. First, they all treat the New Testament as truth: all other
Gospels are heretical; second, they all confess the apostle's creed; lastly, they all obey the institution of
the Church. Prior to the discovery at Nag Hammadi, it was assumed that Christianity was a much less
divisive religion (Pagels 8). However, these texts do more than merely show Christianity to be more
complex than before. They also show vast contradictions when compared to the Church's teachings. Many
of these texts found in Nagi Hammadi refer to the Scriptures of the Old Testament, and others to the
letters of Paul and the New Testament gospels. However the differences between the two works is striking
(Pagels 9).
Orthodox Jews and Christians insist that a chasm separates humanity from its creator: God is wholly
other. However some of the gnostics who wrote these gospels contradict that statement. The self and the
divine are one and the same. To know thy self is to know God. This a very core Gnostic belief. In fact the
word Gnosis means knowledge in Greek. The Gnostic teacher Monoimus says:
"My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body. Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate... If you
carefully investigate these matters you will find him in yourself” (Pagels 12).
However, this a very “unchristian” belief. Gnostics believe that if one attains true enlightenment, or
knowledge, one would be equal to even Jesus. The Jesus of the Nag Hammadi texts speaks of illusion and
enlightenment, not of sin and repentance. Instead of coming to save us from sin, this Jesus comes as a
guide to spiritual understanding and “enlightenment.” This idea is against the very fundamentals of
5
modern Christian belief (Pagels 22). Christians think that Jesus is “above” his fellow man. He is not a
mortal.
It's easy to see why Church would go about banning Gnostic texts. Many elements of Gnostic mythology
are very different to the modern Christian tales. For example, in the Bible the Snake in the Garden of
Eden is depicted as a negative. The snake ruins humanity's sweet deal with God by giving them forbidden
knowledge, or in other words, original sin. In the Gnostic version of this tale, located in the scrolls found
in Nag Hammadi and titled the Testimony of Truth, the snake is the “good” guy.
“Here
the serpent, long known to appear in gnostic literature as the principle of divine wisdom, convinces
Adam and Eve to partake of knowledge while "the Lord" threatens them with death, trying jealously to
prevent them from attaining knowledge, and expelling them from Paradise when they achieve it” (Pagels
19).
In Gnostic beliefs the snake is a symbol of wisdom and enlightenment. This entire tale is the direct
opposite of its Christian counterpart; it's as if someone took the “original” story and reversed the villains
and heroes. God is now a malevolent force of evil and oppression, while the snake, traditionally shown to
be wicked and deceitful, is a force of good. The Testimony of Truth was completely opposed to the New
Testament’s Garden of Eden (http://www.mcs.ca/vitalspark/2020_schools/308gnos01.html).
Furthermore, in the Gnostic version of Genesis, the Spirit of God is referred to as the Wisdom of God, or
Sophia, who is also a feminine creative force. The Gnostics preached that she wished to give birth to a
creature like herself. She did this without the permission of God, the Father. The result was something
imperfect and different from her in appearance. She, being ashamed of it, threw it outside of the heaven.
According to the Gnostics, this horrible child became the one they called the Demiurge. Unbeknownst to
him his mother gave him some of her power, which contained the Spirit. The Demiurge thought the power
that his mother gave him was his own, and with it he started creating the physical world. In doing this the
Gnostics believed the Demiurge entrapped the Spirit in matter, creating the world in an inherently flawed
manner.
The
Gnostic
origin
story
is
very
different
from
its
Christian
counterpart(http://gnostica.tripod.com/).
Gnosticism is heavily influenced by the Hellenistic understanding that the material world is evil and the
spiritual world is good. Gnostics thought that the world was flawed because it was created in a flawed
manner. As we can see, this tale differs quite strongly from the Christianity origin story. In Genesis, God
creates a perfect world free from sin and evil. It's Adam and Eve, the first humans, who introduce
wickedness to the world. It is assumed that if they had never disobeyed God the world would still be a
paradise. In the Gnostic view, there is a true, ultimate and transcendent God, who is beyond all created
universes and who never created anything in the sense in which the word “create” is ordinarily
understood. Rather, the Gnostic God brought forth all substances in this world from himself. Everything
that exists is a part of him. It could even be said that everything “is” God (http://gnostica.tripod.com/).
It makes perfect sense that the Church would have to get rid of stories like this if it wanted to rule. It
would be hard for an organization of its magnitude to claim legitimization with such contradictory tales
drifting around. There is direct evidence of Church leaders actively protesting stories like the above even
before their organization had true “legitimacy,” in other words, before Christianity was made the official
state religion by the Holy Roman Empire. The Church's campaign against alternate forms of Christianity
was so successful, that until the discovery at Nag Hammadi, not much specific information about other
forms of Christianity existed.
6
One of the most important documents of Gnosticism is The Gospel of Thomas (found at Nag
Hammadi). The Gospel is thus named because of its opening line: “These are the secret words which the
living Jesus spoke, and which Didymus Judas Thomas wrote down.” The Gospel is, unlike the synoptic
gospels, not a story, for it has no narrative. It is rather, a collection of Jesus's sayings, totaling up to about
114. Most scholars agree that the Gospel of Thomas dates to the very beginnings of the Christian era and
may well have been used as the base for any of the four “true” gospels
(http://gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl_thomas.htm).
Both the Gospel of John and the Gospel Thomas view Jesus as more than a mere mortal, unlike in the
synoptic texts. Elaine Pagels says:
“They
both speak about Jesus as the divine light of the world that comes into the world, and the divine
energy of God manifested in human form. But the message of the Gospel of John is that Jesus alone is that
divine presence among us. Thomas' gospel suggests that Jesus taught something quite different, which is
that everyone, in fact all being, came from that divine source [and that we can access that divinity on our
own” (http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/2003/06/Matthew-Mark-Luke-And-Thomas.aspx).
However, unlike John, Paul sees everyone as having the potential to become divine, to transcend
humanity. This thought is very akin to the Eastern. idea of “enlightenment.” This idea of everyone having
the potential to transcend his/her humanity is very much against John's ideals. In John's eyes, no one is
above the Christ (http://gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl_thomas.htm). Thomas is saying that while no one is
equal to Christ right now, everyone has the potential to be. As I mentioned above, the concept of anyone
being better than Jesus, even the thought of it, is fundamentally opposite to modern Christian beliefs. This
is
one
of
the
core
differences
between
Gnosticism
and
Christianity
(http://gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl_thomas.htm.)
Gnostics also believe that all humans have a “divine spark.” This spark is thought to be a fragment of the
divine essence that makes up everything(http://gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl_thomas.htm). Every human
possesses this spark, but only a few are aware of it. Most of humanity is kept ignorant of this inner
divinity by the influence of the false creator and his Archons(the “evil” God's version of Angels), who
together are intent upon keeping men and women away from their true nature and destiny. Anything that
causes one to remain attached to earthly things serves to keep one in enslavement to the lower cosmic
rulers(the false creator, or Dimurige). Death releases the divine spark from its prison, but if there has not
been a substantial work of Gnosis undertaken by the soul prior to death, it becomes likely that the divine
spark
will
be
hurled
back
into
the
pangs
and
bondage
of
the
physical
world(http://gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl_thomas.htm).
In this passage we can highlight a concept shared by both the Gnostic and the Christian. It is the thought
that the mortal body is merely a cage for the spirit. This idea can also be easily seen in the Gospels of
Mathew, Luke, Mark, and John. Jesus often talks about the importance of the spirit over the physical body
in all the Gospels:
“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves
break through and steal:But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth
corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your
heart be also” (Matthew6:19-21).
7
From this passage, it is clear that Jesus valued the spirit more than worldly possessions. It's one of the
main tenants of the Christian faith. Again, the Gnostics, much like the Christians, think that the only way
one can achieve salvation is through spiritual fulfillment. Mortal goods carry no weight in heaven: only
faith and, for the Gnostics, wisdom. John’s gospel in particular focuses on faith. However, while the
Gnostics and Christians may have similar ideas about the value of the spirit over the body, they have very
different thoughts about salvation (http://gnosis.org/gnintro.htm).
The Gnostics think that evolutionary forces alone are insufficient to bring about spiritual freedom.
Humans are caught in a predicament consisting of physical existence combined with lack of knowledge of
their true origins, their essential nature and their ultimate destiny. To be liberated from this cage of
ignorance, human beings require help, although they must also contribute their own efforts. This help
comes in the form of Messengers of the Light (http://gnosis.org/gnintro.htm).
Throughout all of human history there have only been but a few of these Messengers. Among them stand
Seth (the third Son of Adam), Jesus, and the Prophet Mani. However the majority of Gnostics always
looked to Jesus as the principal savior figure (the Soter). Again, unlike Christianity, Gnostics do not look
for salvation through removal of sin, but rather, ignorance of sin. As we can see, knowledge, or lack
thereof, is a very, very, important part of Gnostic theology. In fact the word Gnosis comes from the Greek
work for knowledge (http://gnosis.org/gnintro.htm). Jesus came into the world to liberate the people from
their ignorance. He saves them not through His death but through His life and teachings.
Gnostics say that the potential for Gnosis, or salvation, is present in every man and woman, and that
salvation is not vicarious but individual. At the same time, they also acknowledge that Gnosis and
salvation can be, indeed must be, stimulated and facilitated in order to effectively arise within
consciousness. This stimulation is supplied by Messengers of Light who, in addition to their teachings,
establish salvific mysteries, (sacraments) which can be administered by apostles of the Messengers and
their successors. The inner spark of divine spirituality must be awakened from its slumber by the saving
knowledge that comes “from without,” Hence the need for a Messenger of Light. Like most things having
to do with Gnosticism, this concept is both Christian and not. It shares with Christianity the idea of a
divine savior, but unlike Christianity, which only has the one(Jesus), Gnosticism has a few of these men
and woman(http://www.mcs.ca/vitalspark/2020_schools/308gnos01.html).
Furthermore, the Gnostic and Christian idea of original sin in relation to salvation are very
different. Gnostics think that salvation comes from the removal of ignorance by way of a The Messenger
of Light or some other outside source and the gaining of enlightenment. Only through knowledge can one
transcend mortal flesh and become divine. Christians think that the only way to achieve salvation is to be
“saved” via the removal of the “original” sin that is naturally inherent in every man and woman. Once this
is gone, all one has to do is have faith in the teachings of Christ to make it into Heaven. Gnostics think
that one can't merely sit back and enjoy the ride: you have to go about educating yourself through selfknowledge to achieve “spiritual paradise” (http://gnostica.tripod.com/). Christians firmly believe that the
only way to get into heaven is faith in Jesus and repentence.
To the Gnostic, commandments and rules are not necessary for salvation. Rules of conduct may serve
numerous ends, including the structuring of an ordered, and peaceful, society and the maintenance of
harmonious relations within social groups. Rules, however, are not relevant to salvation or enlightenment;
that is brought about only by Gnosis. Morality therefore needs to be viewed primarily in temporal and
secular terms; it is ever subject to changes and modifications in accordance with the spiritual development
of the self; it leaves the moral conduct to the intuition and wisdom of every individual. This can be seen
8
as Jesus's message of “putting the spirit over the flesh” one step further. To Gnostics, enlightenment, or
the gaining of enlightenment, is everything. The petty shackles of the mortal world pale in comparison to
acquirement of Gnosis. Not only do Gnostics think of the body as irrelevant in relation to their spiritual
awaking; they apply the same thought to the rules of society. Only Gnosis can bring about salvation,
nothing else. An ignorant saint would not make it to “heaven” in Gnostic theology. Indeed, to the Gnostic,
there is nothing worse than ignorance. To be ignorant is to suffer. This can be easily seen in their
teachings, such as the Gnostic “Garden of Eden” story mentioned above.
To conclude, Gnosticism and Christianity are hopelessly tied together. They share as many things as they
don't and disagree about as many things as those upon which they disagree. In a different world, one
could easily see Gnosticism triumphing and Christianity vanishing. Sadly, the Church’s need for one
“true” faith would cause Gnosticism’s tragic removal from the spotlight. In a way, that was what led to
the Church's continued dominance over the centuries. The only way it could survive was by removing all
opposition and conflicting viewpoints. Nietzsche once said, “There was only one Christian, and he died
on the cross.” He was right in a sense. Gnosticism, Christianity, and every flavor in between all come
from the common source of Jesus's teachings. In a way, there is no “true” Christianity anymore. Jesus's
ideas and philosophy has been hopelessly twisted and distorted over the years by countless men like the
Apostle Paul, looking to use it to their own ends.
Bibliography
Web-sites: http://gnosis.org/naghamm/nhlintro.html
http://gnosticschristians.com/
http://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/onsite/gnostics.html
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/gnostics.html
ttp://www.mcs.ca/vitalspark/2020_schools/308gnos01.html
http://gnostica.tripod.com/
http://gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl_thomas.htm
http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/2003/06/Matthew-Mark-Luke-And-Thomas.aspx
http://gnosis.org/gnintro.htm
http://www.mcs.ca/vitalspark/2020_schools/308gnos01.html
Books: Pagels, Elaine H. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House, 1979. Print.
The New Testament in four versions: King James, Revised standard, Phillips modern English, New
English Bible. Washington: Christianity today, 1963. Print.
The Gospel of Thomas
9
A History of Evil and Exorcisms
Amanda Rose
And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but
people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil.
For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not
come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed.
But whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works
may be clearly seen as done in God.
(John 3:19-21)
At the heart of every good story lies the eternal conflict between good and evil—the light and
the dark. This fundamental struggle lay at the forefront of the early Qumran and Christian
communities and was central to the development of faith practices. As Elaine Pagels discusses in
her groundbreaking text The Gnostic Gospels, the orthodox Christian understanding of evil’s origin
was integral in differentiating the group as a unique and distinct entity:
If gnostics insisted that humanity’s original experience of evil
involved internal emotional distress, the orthodox dissented.
Recalling the story of Adam and Eve, they explained that
humanity discovered evil in human violation of the natural
order, itself essentially “good.”
(Gnostic 146)
Because man was created in God’s divine image, Christian tradition affirms the intrinsic godliness
and “goodness” of humanity: “God created man in his image: in the divine image he created him;
male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). Thus, the Christian perception of evil and sin as
innately foreign to mankind is rooted in the myth of the Fall of Man:
But the serpent said to the woman: “You certainly will not die!
No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes
will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is
good and what is bad.” The woman saw that the tree was good
for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining
wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also
gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized
that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and
made loincloths for themselves.
(Genesis 3:4-7)
Man’s inability to resist the temptation of invisible sources of evil forever burdened humanity with
the stain of Original Sin. In the intertestamental age, evil spirits and demons were regarded as the
source of all spiritual and bodily malevolence:
10
In the Greek Book of Tobit in the Aprocrypha, Aramaic and Hebrew
fragments of which survive at Qumran, we learn how the healing
angel Raphael saved the life of the young Tobit from the evil demon
Asmodeus. This devil, in love with Sarah, young Tobit’s bride, and
determined to keep her for himself, had managed to kill seven of
her previous bridegrooms on her wedding nights before any of
them could sleep with Sarah. On angelic advice, Tobit brought live
ashes of incense into the bridal chamber and burned on them the
heart of liver of a fish, producing such a foul odor that Asmodeus,
who like demons in general was sensitive to smell, fled from Media,
where the wedding took place, to the remotest parts of Egypt.
There Raphael bound him with chains.
(Vermes 249)
The exorcising of evil spirits comprised a significant portion of Jesus’s ministry: “Seven specific
accounts in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) show him casting out of their human
victims” (Stafford 13). The similarities and differences in the accounts will be analyzed and
examined. In each Synoptic account, the banishment of evil spirits is seen as a battle between the
force of Satan and the power of God. The history of evil and humankind’s desire to eradicate the
spirits of darkness from our communities has fostered rich theological, cultural, experiential, and
psychological events that prove fascinating to investigate. In a thorough examination of humanity’s
collective demons and how they have been eradicated through the ages, I hope to shed light on the
historical experience of evil, possession and darkness.
The continuity of light and dark symbolism that runs throughout the Bible provides scholars with
clues to understanding the experience of good and evil in early faith communities. Genesis begins
with the iconic imagery that would later shape Johannine teaching, and by extension, the foundation
of the Church:
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the
earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss,
while a mighty wind swept over the waters. Then God said, “Let
there be light,” and there was light. God saw how good the light was.
God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” Thus,
evening came, and morning followed—the first day. (Genesis 1:1-5)
The passage establishes that God was an entity before the creation of the Earth; He has always
existed and always will exist. In the Old Testament, God sends Moses to deliver the Israelites to the
truth of His eternal presence:
“But,” said Moses to God, “when I go to the Israelites and say to them,
‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ if they ask me, ‘What is
his name?’ what am I to tell them?” God replied, “I am who am.” Then
he added, “This is what you shall tell the Israelites: I AM sent me to
you.”
God spoke further to Moses, “Thus shall you say to the Israelites: The
LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,
the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.
11
“This is my name forever;
this is my title for all generations:
(Exodus 13-15)
Despite God’s endless state of being at the beginning of time, the world was blanketed in “formless
wasteland, and darkness” not unlike what man was condemned to suffer in his heart and soul after
the Fall of Man. Then, God casts out the darkness with the word: light. He said, “Let there be light,”
and the barren nothingness was illuminated. Because God recognizes the light of day as “good,” it
can only be surmised that the darkness of night is “bad,” or at the very least “not good.” The creation
of light and dark, both good and bad, underscores the reality that the brilliance of day cannot be
embraced without the bareness of night. Therefore, the presence of heavenly forces in the New
Testament necessitates the inclusion of certain demonic beings.
The gospel of John utilizes figurative language and repetition of theological motifs regarding light
and darkness—good and evil—to impart the heart of Christianity: the idea of the Incarnation. This
dogmatic teaching states that God took human form in the person of Jesus in order to save the
world from sin. Deviating from the largely apocalyptic message of the Synoptic gospels, John directs
attention to the origins of the universe:
In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came to be through him,
and without him nothing came to be.
What came to be through him was life,
and this life was the light of the human race;
the light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it.
(John 1-5)
The “Word” of God that rested with God and was God Himself first references the act of Divine
creation, “Let there be light” in Genesis. Thus, light becomes a symbol not only of goodness, truth,
and illumination but also the human person of Christ within God:
And the Word became flesh
and made his dwelling among us,
and we saw his glory,
the glory as of the Father’s only Son
full of grace and truth
(John 14)
Thus, followers of Christ will be filled with the goodness of light established in the Old Testament.
However, the presence of darkness that exists alongside Christ is irrefutable:
12
The divine light did not penetrate the deep darkness into which
the world has plunged. Though [John] agrees that, since the
beginning of time, the divine light “shines in the darkness,” he
also declares that “the darkness has not grasped it”…Morever, he
says that, although the divine light has come into the world, “and
the world was made through it, the world did not recognize
it…Thus, because that divine light was not available to those “in
the world,” finally “the word became flesh and dwelt among us in
the form of Jesus of Nazareth, so that some people now may
declare triumphantly, as John does, “we saw his glory [the Greek
word translates kabod, which means “shining,” or “radiance”], the
glory as of the only begotten son of the Father.
(Pagels Belief 66-67)
John condenses the complex Christological ideas Pagels addresses above in two simple sentences:
“Jesus spoke to them again, saying, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in
darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).
Upon first examination evil appears to be an easily definable and quantifiable entity; in reality,
however, the relative moralities and belief systems of surrounding cultures are largely responsible
for a people’s perception and interpretation of what it truly means to be bad. Theologians,
philosophers, and great minds alike have discussed the origin and nature of evil for centuries. In his
De Praescriptione Haereticorum (Prescription against Heretics), the Church Father Tertullian cites
such questions as those “that make people heretics” (Gnostic 143):
The same subject-matter is discussed over and over again by
the heretics and the philosophers; the same arguments are
involved. Whence comes evil? Why is it permitted? What is the
origin of man? And in what way does he come?
(Tertullian Chapter 7)
While Tertullian believed such spiritual truths were available within the teachings of the Catholic
Church (before his separation from Catholicism), the gnostic Christians sought answers through
internal investigation of “humanity’s place and destiny in the universe” (Gnostics 144):
For when gnostic Christians inquired about the origin of evil
they did not interpret the term, as we do, primarily in terms
of moral evil. The Greek term kakía like the English term “illness”) originally meant “what is bad” –what one desires to
avoid, such as physical pain, sickness, suffering, misfortune,
every kind of harm. What followers of Valentinus asked about
the source of kakia, they referred especially to emotional
harm—fear, confusion, grief.
(Gnostic 143-144)
The “intensely private and interior journey” (Gnostic 144) that characterized the gnostic faith
community existed in sharp contrast with that of the orthodox Christians; the former group
distrusted bodily and universal experiences in favor of an intellectual internal quest for truth,
whereas the latter group placed emphasis on interpersonal relationships:
13
The orthodox interpreted evil (kakía) primarily in terms of
violence against others (thus giving the moral connotation of
the term). They revised the Mosaic code, which prohibits
physical violation of others—murder, stealing, adultery—in
terms of Jesus’ prohibition against even mental and emotional
violence—anger, lust, hatred.
(Gnostic 146)
Just as acts and thoughts committed in opposition to the Commandments were considered evil by
orthodox Christians, so too were the invisible demonic beings that blanketed the universe in
darkness:
Among certain first-century Jewish groups, prominently
including the Essenes (who saw themselves as allied with
angels) and the followers of Jesus, the figure variously called
Satan, Beelzebub, or Belial also began to take on central
importance…Such visions have been incorporated into
Christian tradition and have served, among other things, to
confirm for Christians their own identification with God and to
demonize their opponents—first other Jews, then pagans, and
later dissident Christians called heretics.
(Satan xvi-xvii)
In the aforementioned examination of such heretical Christians, Tertullian examines “spiritual
wickednesses” and the role of Satan in acts of blasphemy:
The question will arise, By whom is to be interpreted the sense
of the passages which make for heresies? By the devil, of
course, to whom pertain those wiles which pervert the truth,
and who, by the mystic rites of his idols, vies even with
the essential portions of the sacraments of God. He, too,
baptizes some— that is, his own believers and faithful
followers; he promises the putting away of sins by a laver (of
his own)…
…For this reason, then, no one ought to doubt, either that
spiritual wickednesses, from which also heresies come, have
been introduced by the devil, or that there is any real difference
between heresies and idolatry, seeing that they appertain both
to the same author and the same work that idolatry does. They
either pretend that there is another god in opposition to
the Creator, or, even if they acknowledge that the Creator is the
one only God, they treat of Him as a different being from what
He is in truth. The consequence is, that every lie which they
speak of God is in a certain sense a sort of idolatry.
(Tertullian Chapter 40)
14
As Shakespeare attests in Macbeth, the devil is able to tempt and persuade good men to forgo the
righteous path by distorting God’s reality: “oftentimes, to win us to our harm/ The instruments of
darkness tell us truths/Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s/ In deepest consequence”
(Shakespeare 1.3.123-126). Prior to his role as exorcist of evil and sin, even Jesus was called to
withstand the forces of the devil and darkness.
The Synoptic accounts of Jesus’s temptation in the desert underscore the strong
intertestamental beliefs in the supernatural forces of good and evil (i.e.: angels and demons) and
add credence to his role in the early faith community:
Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted
by the devil. He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and
afterwards he was hungry. The tempter approached and said
the him, “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones
become loaves of bread.” He said in reply, “It is written:
‘One does not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes forth
from the mouth of God.’”
Then the devil took him to the holy city, and made him stand on
the parapet of the temple, and said to him, “If you are the Son of
God, throw yourself down. For it is written:
‘He will command his angels concerning you’
and “with their hands they will support you,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.’”
Jesus answered him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the
Lord, your God, to the test.’” Then the devil took him up to a
very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the
world in their magnificence, and he said to him, “All these I
shall give to you, if you will prostrate yourself and worship me.”
At this, Jesus said to him, “Get away, Satan! It is written:
‘The Lord, your God, shall you worship
and him alone shall you serve.’”
Then the devil left him and, behold, angels came and ministered
to him.
(Matthew 4:1-11)
Although historically improbable, the pericope demonstrates Jesus’s ability to remain spiritually
strong and faithful in the face of the devil’s power. However, the fundamental subtext of the passage
lies in the fact that Jesus was a target for the devil in the first place: It would have been critical for
early Christians to witness the strength of Jesus’s divinity alongside the inherent humanness of
temptation. From the perspective of early faith communities, the mere fact that Jesus was a target
for the devil roots him firmly within humanity. The sparse parallel account in the gospel of Mark
corroborates the centrality of unseen forces of good and evil:
At once the Spirit drove him out into the desert, and he remained
in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan. He was among
wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him. (Mark 1:12-13)
15
The inclusion of the devil at the opening of Mark’s gospel contrasts with longstanding Jewish
tradition and suggests the tides of change sweeping across faith consciousness of first century
Palestine:
Mark deviates from mainstream Jewish tradition by introducing
“the devil” into the crucial opening scene of the gospel and goes
on the characterize Jesus’ ministry as involving continual
struggle between Gods spirit and the demons who belong,
apparently, to Satan’s ‘kingdom’.
(Pagels Satan xvii)
Thus, descriptions of Jesus’s initial triumph over evil in the desert foreshadows the message of
Jesus’s ministry as delineated in the New Testament: in the Kingdom of God, light will prevail over
darkness.
Although opponents of early Christianity questioned Jesus’s role as exorcist, such testimonials of
small miracles against Satan and sin proved integral to gathering a community of faithful followers
who would believe in the Christological power of Jesus’s crucifixion. According to The Vatican’s
Exorcists, an exorcism is defined as “a ritual in which prayer is used to banish the devil, demons, or
satanic spirits from a person or place” (Wilkinson 1). Jesus’s detractors in the Markan account of
the “Blasphemy of the Scribes” question the source of his power as an exorcist for they believe he
acts as an agent of evil:
He came home. Again [the] crowed gathered making it
impossible for them even to eat. When his relatives heard of this
they set out to seize him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.”
The scribes who had come from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed
by Beelzebul,” and “By the prince of demons he drives out
demons.”
Summoning them, he began to speak to them in parables, “How
can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself,
that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against
itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen
(Mark
20-30)
up
against
himself and is divided, he cannot stand; that is the end
of him. But no one can enter a strong man’s house to plunder his
property unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can
plunder his house. Amen, I say to you, all sins and all blasphemies
that people utter will be forgiven them. But whoever blasphemes
against the holy Spirit will never have forgiveness, but is guilty of
an everlasting sin.” For they had said, “He has an unclean spirit.”
(Mark 3: 20-30)
This Enlightenment-esque reasoning founded in Greek philosophy was likely directed toward
voices of opposition
during the early phases of Christianity. His critics during the post-New
(Mark 20-30)
Testament period labeled his actions as little more than cheap sorcery; however, other
contemporaries believed in accounts of exorcism as marks of connection to God: “The famous
Raban Yohanan ben Zakkai (late first century A.D.) compared the levitical ritual of purification to
exorcism, and believed the efficacy of both derived not from the ceremonial acts themselves but
from God” (Vermes 251). Therefore, accounts of Jesus driving out evil spirits in the New Testament
16
were critical in asserting his role as agent of God rather than Satan. Additionally, the New
Testament accounts of Jesus’s exorcisms are some of the most exciting stories of his public ministry.
Notably, he rebukes and casts out the unclean spirit of a man in Capernaum (Mark 1-28, Luke 4:3137), exorcises a boy possessed by a demon (Matthew 17:14-21) and makes allusions to the
exorcism of Mary Magdalene:
When he had risen, early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary
Magdalene out of whom he had driven seven demons.
(Mark 16:9)
Afterward he journeyed from one town and village to another, preaching and
proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. Accompanying him were the
Twelve and some women who had been cured of evil spirits, and infirmities,
Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out. (Luke 8:1-2)
The afflicted persons in these accounts are usually deemed cured when obvious signs of discomfort
or possession cease: “Jesus rebuked him and the demon came out of him, and from that hour the
boy was cured” (Matthew 17: 18). In some demonic accounts, Gospel writers indulge the societal
belief that explicit proof of success was necessary in a completed exorcism: “The professional
exorcist was keen to supply a more spectacular proof of his competence…The evangelists allude to
an even more sensational proof of efficient exorcism in the transfer of demons into a herd of swine
in Gergesa” (Vermes 251):
They came to the other side of the sea, to the territory of the Gerasenes. When he
got out of the boat, at once a man from the tombs who had an unclean spirit met
him. The man had been dwelling among the tombs, and no one could restrain him
any longer, even with a chain. In fact, he had frequently been bound with shackles
and chains, but the chains had been pulled apart by him and shackles smashed, and
no one was strong enough to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on
the hillsides he was always crying out and bruising himself with stones. Catching
sight of Jesus from a distance, he ran up and prostrated himself before him, crying
out in a loud voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most high God?
I adjure you by God, do not torment me!” (He had been saying to him, “Unclean
spirit, come out of the man!” He asked him, “What is your name?” He replied,
“Legion is my name. There are many of us.” And he pleaded earnestly with him not
to drive them away from that territory. Now a large herd of swine was feeding
there on the hillside. And they pleaded with him, “Send us into the swine. Let us
enter them.” And he let them, and the unclean spirits came out and entered the
swine. The herd of about two thousand rushed down a steep bank into the sea,
where they drowned. The swineherds ran away and reported the incident in the
town and throughout the countryside. People came out to see what had happened.
As they approached Jesus, they caught sight of the man who had been possessed by
Legion, sitting there clothed and in his right mind. And they were seized with fear.
Those who witnessed the incident explained to them what had happened to the
possessed man and to the swine. Then they began to beg him to leave their district.
As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed pleaded to
remain with him. But he would not permit him but told him instead, “Go home to
your family and announce to them all that the Lord in his pity has done for you.”
Then the man went off and began to proclaim in the Decapolis what Jesus had done
for him; and all were amazed.
(Mark 5:1-20)
17
This account not only proves Jesus’s success as an exorcist, but it also provides an exciting action
packed scene to entice early believers starved for television and summer blockbusters. Additionally,
the demon in the story affirms Jesus’s importance. Although it appears counterintuitive, Legion’s
admission that Jesus is “son of the Most high God” would have corroborated claims of his
supernatural importance. Christ’s decision to appease Legion and allow the evil spirits to be sent
into the swine may also be interpreted as a warning to the nonbelieving “others” surrounding the
early faith community:
Those who shut their eyes to Jesus’ character will find it hard to account
for Jesus calling the gravely sick daughter of the Syro-Phoenician woman a
“dog.” This was no more a term of endearment in the language of the time
and place than Jesus’ other designation of non-Jews as “swine.”
(Vermes 267-68)
While it is true that Jesus has been characterized as the light of the world, the historical Jesus may
likely have been more of a…“round character” (or to borrow from the vernacular: “badass”). The
suggestion that the inclusion of the demonic swine may be a double entendre is supported by the
thesis of Pagels’s The Origin of Satan:
I invite you to consider Satan as a reflection of how we perceive ourselves
and those we call “others.” Satan has, after all, made a kind of profession
out of being the “other”; and so Satan defines negatively what we think of
as human. The social and cultural practice of defining certain people as
“others” in relation to one’s own group may be, of course as old as
humanity itself.
(Pagels Satan xviii)
Each of the gospels in its own way invokes this apocalyptic scenario to
characterize conflicts between Jesus’ [sic] followers and the various
groups each author perceived as opponents. We have seen, too, that as the
movement became increasingly Gentile, converts turned this sectarian
vocabulary against other enemies—against pagan magistrates engaged in
bitter struggle with the growing Christian movement, and against various
groups of dissident Christians, called heretics—or in Paul’s words,
“servants of Satan.”
(Pagels Satan 179)
It is difficult to separate accounts of the historical Jesus from the political and Christological
descriptions included in the New Testament. As a notable prophet mentioned for his “wonderful
works” in Josephus’s Antiquities, it likely that Jesus performed some type of exorcism during his
public ministry: “Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man;
for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure”
(Josephus 18.3.3). The portrayal of Jesus as an exorcist in the Gospels strengthens his role as the
source of light against the darkness of evil and allowed evangelists to address the nature of such
sinful malevolence in their respective communities.
Although this paper originally began as a study of exorcisms, I soon realized that before I
could explain how to drive out evil, I first had to define the nature of evil within the context of early
Christianity. This complex concept is inextricably linked with the historical perceptions, moralities,
and beliefs of the Jesus movement and first-century faith community. The continuity of light and
dark symbolism that runs throughout the Bible and Dead Sea Scrolls underscores the centrality of
the conflict between good and evil and the importance of elevating one’s spirit through the
righteous path to God. It was through the use of such imagery that John was able to establish and
explore the central Christian teaching of the Incarnation: “John the mystic was responsible for the
18
delineation of the divine Logos, the Word of God incarnate” (Vermes 63). The theological base of
John’s gospel presents Jesus as the divine light of the world. In other words, Jesus was the person of
God sent to earth to exorcise demons and darkness. He is shown resisting satanic temptation and
then revealed as a powerful exorcist. Jesus’s strength as a prophet in the early Christian community
rests on his ability to transcend such corporeal sin and evil and to suggest to his followers that they
too can overcome such temptation. The New Testament representation of such evil is largely
founded on historical context and enemies of the movement during the formulation of the gospels.
The idea of sculpting evil from the clay of fear and prejudice and then refining its form with
dressings of relative morality and perception is apparent in the exegetical examples of Jesus’s
exorcisms. The concept of evil is a construct to protect us from what is foreign and threatening. In
the case of the New Testament evangelist Matthew, the figure of Satan is used as a tool in fighting
opponents of the Jesus movement:
Matthew borrows sayings from the Q source and shows Satan appearing three
times to “test” Jesus, as Pharisees and other opponents test him. Here the Q
source turns Satan into a caricature of a scribe, a debater skilled in verbal
challenge and adept in quoting the Scriptures for diabolic purposes, who
repeatedly questions Jesus’ [sic] diving authority (“If you are not the son of
God…”)…Thus Matthew, following Mark’s lead, implies that political success
and power (such as the Pharisees enjoy under Roman patronage) may evince a
pact with the devil—and not, as many of Matthew’s contemporaries would
have assumed, marks of divine favor.
(Pagels Satan 81)
Therefore, Christianity teaches that Jesus is the ultimate model of the “goodness” in God’s creation
upon which to gauge evil; tradition proposes that through the person of God we are able to
recognize our human faults and follow Jesus’s example of resisting temptation and exorcising such
darkness. If Jesus is the source of such goodness and light, then evil resides in the shadowy
unknown of all that is threatening and foreign in this world.
The realization that humans delineated the dogmatic teachings and moralities of Christianity (as
well as other religions and belief systems) carries with it the shocking implication that two
thousand year old prejudices continuously influence modern history. Suddenly, the obvious answer
that “bad is bad” and “good is good” can’t measure up to such age-old questions about the source of
evil. Upon further examination even the apparent simplicity of the Eden mythology crumbles in on
itself:
It reveals truth only when one reads it in reverse, recognizing that God is actually
the villain, and the serpent the holy one! This teacher points out, for example, that
in Genesis 2:17, God commands Adam not to eat from the fruit of the tree in the
midst of Paradise, warning that “on the day that you shall eat of it, you shall die.”
But the serpent tells Eve the opposite: “You will not die, for God knows that when
you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good
and evil” (3:4-5). Who, asks the Testimony, told the truth? When Adam and Eve
obeyed the serpent, “then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they
were naked” (3:7). They did not die “on that day,” as God had warned; instead,
their eyes were opened to knowledge, as the serpent had promised. But when God
realized what had happened, “he cursed the serpent, and called him ‘devil’ (Gen.
3:14-15).
(Pagels Satan 159)
19
Christianity teaches that the serpent is a symbol of the darkness blanketing mankind, and it is this
darkness that can only be penetrated by the saving light of the human God. However, gnostic
Christians likely would have been hesitant to regard any type of knowledge as anathema; rather, it
is possible that some would have identified the truth gained from disobeying God as the real light.
The clearly balanced roles of good and evil shift just as the veil of illusion slipped for both Adam and
Eve and young Pagels devotees. Furthermore, Jesus’s exorcisms of evil spirits can then be viewed as
the volitional reinstitution of ignorance. He returns the afflicted to a state of blissful happiness and
leaves them unburdened by the knowledge that mankind is inherently trapped and naked.
Unsurprisingly, this is not the perspective of the Catholic Church, and such statements would have
easily branded me as a heretic by Tertullian criteria. In the process of researching this paper, I have
come to realize that the devil is not typically quick to assert itself as “Legion,” move into swine and
then hop into the nearest body of water. It is not even as easy to identify as a serpent beneath the
innocent flower because everything changes when examined from a new perspective. It is far easier
to characterize the Pharisees and the Phoenicians as villains and subordinates than it is to mend
such prejudices. Painting certain groups as “bad” and others as “good” is generally a means of
convincing others (and often oneself) that your way is the right way. Both the modern and early
Christian worlds share a sense of uncertainty about the nature of good, evil, light, darkness, and
fundamentally ourselves. Although such questions may never be answered definitively, it is critical
that we never stop searching for answers:
What is the light? And what is the darkness? And who is the one who created
the world? And who is God? And who are the angels?...And what is the
governance (of the world)? And why are some lame, and some blind, and
some rich, and some poor?
(Pagels Satan 159 from Testimony of Truth)
Whether one finds it amidst cast-off apple cores strewn about the Garden of Eden or in the
reverberations of “Catlick”-school hymns on the walls of memory, “the truth is out there.”
Bibliography
Betty, Stafford. "The Growing Evidence for Demonic Possession: What Should Psychiatry’s
Response Be?" Journal of Religion and Health 44.1 (2005): 13-30. JSTOR: Journal of Religion.
Web. 26 Mar. 2013.
Holy Bible: The New American Bible. Wichita, KS: Fireside Bible, 2000. Print.
Josephus, Flavusius. "Josephus and Jesus Christ." Theistic Evolution. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Apr. 2013.
Pagels, Elaine H. "Gospels in Conflict: John and Thomas." Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas.
New York: Random House, 2003. 30-73. Print. (Belief)
Pagels, Elaine H. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House, 1979. Print. (Gnostic)
Pagels, Elaine H. The Origin of Satan. New York: Random House, 1995. Print. (Satan)
"Prescription against Heretics." Church Fathers: The Prescription Against Heretics (Tertullian). N.p.,
n.d. Web. 23 Apr. 2013.
Shakespeare, William. Macbeth (Arden). London: n.p., 1917. Print.
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Vermès, Géza. The Changing Faces of Jesus. New York: Viking Compass, 2001. Print.
Wilkinson, Tracy. "The Vatican's Exorcists: Driving Out the Devil in the 21st Century
[Hardcover]." The Vatican's Exorcists: Driving Out the Devil in the 21st Century: Tracy
Wilkinson. Wagner Books, n.d. Web. 26 Mar. 2013.
VICTORIAN ABERRATIONS
Emily Bronte’s Catherine and Nelly: Compared and Contrasted
Adam L. Price-Schaeffer
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is universally recognized as being a rather strange book, both in
the context of the Victorian era and in general. One of its greatest strangenesses within its cultural
context is that its narrator is someone involved in the story. This is not terribly strange in and of
itself, but it becomes strange when one considers the narrator's part in the story. Nelly, as said
narrator is called, is a servant of Catherine’s who serves as the protagonist for a good portion of the
book. The implications of this are greater than they may seem, and they certainly have the potential
to affect her storytelling by making her much less sympathetic towards any actions of which she
does not approve.
In order to properly assess Nelly, one must have a point of comparison. Catherine serves excellently
in this capacity as she is nearly always in close proximity to Nelly. The first thing that comes to mind
when describing Catherine is that she is rather brash, headstrong and strong in general, as was
reflected by her running amok outdoors as a child and generally doing whatever others didn’t want
her to do (Bronte 30). The next thing that is worth noting about Catherine is that she isn’t terribly
shy about subtly (or somewhat less subtly) manipulating Edgar Linton, both when he is her suitor
in youth and when he is her husband in young adulthood. This gets her into trouble when she says
to Nelly, “And, Nelly, say to Edgar, if you see him again to-night, that I'm in danger of being seriously
ill. I wish it may prove true. He has startled and distressed me shockingly! I want to frighten him.
Besides, he might come and begin a string of abuse or complainings; I'm certain I should
recriminate, and God knows where we should end!” (Bronte 86). Of course, it is Nelly’s refusal to
carry out orders she sees as manipulative that causes Catherine to fall severely ill unnoticed, so one
could say that Nelly’s manipulations (which I will go into in more depth later in this essay) have as
much to do with the unfortunate result as Catherine’s do. The final thing that I think is worth noting
about Catherine’s personality is that, though she may seem somewhat selfish at times, she is almost
ultimately selfless in several instances involving Heathcliff, a friend of hers from childhood with
whom she is in love. I think that the best example of this comes when Catherine is explaining to
Nelly her reasons for marrying Edgar Linton; “Nelly, I see now you think me a selfish wretch; but
did it never strike you that if Heathcliff and I married, we should be beggars? whereas, if I marry
Linton I can aid Heathcliff to rise, and place him out of my brother's power” (Bronte 59). Thus, she
is willing to forgo marrying the man she truly loves so that she may help said man as best she can. It
can then be summarized, I think, that Catherine is a very headstrong girl who does somewhat
selfish things for very selfless reasons.
With the assessment of Catherine finished, I must turn now to Nelly, who is at once a very similar
and a very different character from Catherine. The first thing to note about Nelly is that, despite her
being a servant, she is nearly as strong-willed as Catherine. This is shown when she maintains an
almost witty discourse with Catherine’s brother Hindley as he is threatening to kill her (Bronte 53).
21
Another similarity between herself and Catherine is that Nelly also has the tendency to manipulate
others, as she does quite well when Catherine is explaining to her her reasons for marrying Edgar
Linton. Nelly noticed that Heathcliff, who had been a seemingly accidental eavesdropper on the
conversation, “had listened till he heard Catherine say it would degrade her to marry him, and then
he stayed to hear no further” (Bronte 59). After Catherine says this, however, she explains that she
truly loves him and would not be ashamed to marry him but would rather be marrying into poverty.
Had Nelly chosen to bid Heathcliff return and listen to the rest of what Catherine had said, he would
have known the truth, would likely not have left the area for the length of time that he did and
would hence have avoided some severe nastiness resulting from his return later. Instead, she
actually bids Catherine to be quiet so that Heathcliff might not hear her, believing that only good
things could result from dissuading a suitor whom she feels is unworthy of Catherine and does not
approve of in the least. The final thing to note about Nelly is that, despite her faults, she always
believes that she is doing what is best, and occasionally even is, as with her caretaking of Hareton
(Bronte 53-55). In summary, Nelly is a strong-willed girl who is always well-meaning but frequently
causes situations that are pleasant for no one.
As I said previously, Nelly and Catherine are both similar and different characters. They are similar
in that they are very strong-willed and share a penchant for (varyingly) subtle manipulation, albeit
one at which Catherine is much the superior. They are different, primarily, in their opinions.
Specifically, the proper manner in which a young lady should behave is frequently a point of
contention between them. The major issue with comparing the main character and the narrator is,
of course, how the narration could differ from the events as told by said main character. While I
don’t think that Nelly’s differences of opinion with Catherine would cause the tale to be terribly
different in a factual sense, it is certain that things such as the motivations and reasoning behind
certain actions or ideas would be portrayed incorrectly, if at all. Over all, then, I would say that
Nelly’s narration is to be taken with a grain of salt but certainly not dismissed.
Carmilla
Morgan Sullivan
The culture behind horror stories goes back hundreds of years. Before we had scary movies, we had books
and poems, and before that people would gather around to listen to the whispers of an old man using his
words to spook children. Among these tales is one very famous monster: the Vampire. Carmilla is among
the first written Vampire novels. This story written by J. Sheridan LeFanu has one major theme that sets it
apart from all the rest, and that is homosexuality. The tale of a vampire usually contains very prominent
elements of sexuality and romance, but not until recently have many gone so far as to make it clear that
one is a lesbian like Carmilla. The story was written during a time where it was very unsafe to come out
as a homosexual. The topic was controversial. Homosexuality was looked upon with even more disgust
than it is now. This novel explores themes of sexuality and romance that were so foreign to the
imaginations of the people reading it when it came out (no pun intended). I’m sure it raised many
questions and peaked a few curiosities as well. The tale of Carmilla starts with a crash. Out of a capsized
carriage spills a woman and her beautiful daughter, passed out from shock. A young woman named Laura
and her father run to their aid and end up taking the young lady into their care after the mother insists she
must hurry on her journey. When the girl wakes up in Laura’s home, she reveals her name to be Carmilla.
As the girls grow closer, the line between friendship and romance seems to blur. A series of events occur,
and as the girls seem to fall in love, Laura seems to have strange symptoms no doctor can explain. The
story unfolds with the question of whether or not the beautiful Carmilla and this illness are related.
Carmilla tells a tale of homosexual romance without making it seem disturbing. The book doesn’t shame
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the girls for their feelings, but perhaps the story behind the young Carmilla herself is a method of
discouraging those who considered homosexuality.
Carmilla’s first words to Laura were about her face: how she had seen it a long time ago in a dream and
that it had haunted her ever since. Even with these first words, you can sense a homoerotic subtext that
could easily go overlooked. It’s the way she lights up when she sees her for the first time and how she
describes her beauty in detail upon first speaking to her. It’s easily assumed Carmilla is smitten. When the
girls’ first conversation ends and they have to say their goodbyes, Carmilla instantly refers to her new
acquaintance as a dear friend. Laura reflects on this by saying to herself, “Young people like, and even
love, on impulse. I was flattered by the evident, though as yet undeserved, fondness she showed me. I
liked the confidence with she at once received me. She was determined that we should be dear friends”
(LaFanu 289). It is clear in this passage that Laura, at this point in time, isn’t aware of Carmilla’s
romantic interests. Even so, she is very pleased to get to know her as a friend and is perhaps having
underlying feelings for her that she is unaware of. The more time the two spend with each other, the more
open they become. Their relationship evolves into spilled secrets and cheek kisses. Carmilla seems to
express genuine feelings and thoughts to Laura, which she returns. She says little things to Laura like,
“You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever” (LaFanu 292). After a long time of
getting to know each other, Carmilla actually bluntly confesses her feelings: “I have been in love with no
one, and never shall, unless it should be you” (LaFanu 300). It’s hard to tell if these are all genuine
feelings of Carmilla’s or just a way to lure Laura in. Because the story is told from Laura’s point of few,
her image of Carmilla could be clouded with love. However, considering the way Laura describes her
movements and the fashion in which Carmilla speaks to her, I would say their feelings for each other are
honest. Carmilla’s approaches to love and sexuality are very flirtatious and obvious, though fairly
innocent for a murderous vampire who preys upon young women. She seems to show Laura a very raw
affection, or maybe she’s just very good with words.
Victorians seem to have had a special place in their hearts for tragedy. So many Victorian stories reflect
this. The stereotypical story is of two lovers forbidden to be with each other ending in a morbid death
usually causing the demise of one or both of the lovers. The same theme is carried through Carmilla. Her
lovey-dovey attitudes towards her lover seem almost too corny to be accurate. Laura often returns her
feelings, but she’s sometimes a bit agitated by Carmilla’s growing affections. The story also holds that
element of tragedy by separating the lovers. Not only are they forbidden due to their gender, but Carmilla
is also secretly a vampire who is known to prey upon pretty young ladies such as Laura. Though
Carmilla’s feelings could just be a hoax used to suck on Laura’s breast for blood, they could also be
genuine. This gives the story a whole new dimension to it because of the differing perspectives. Even the
way they speak to each other shows a deeper hint of death in their flirtations. “I live in you; and you
would die for me, I love you so” (LaFanu 300). Isn’t that a common romantic cliché? The idea of
someone offering his or her life to you seems to be a ideal fantasy that dates back to even before the
Victorian era. It’s originally a Romantic idea, but the Victorians adopted it. It became a trend. Even as
they get closer and feel more for each other, there is of course going to be something that tears them apart.
Carmilla had been secretly sucking the blood from Laura’s body nightly, causing her to fall ill. When
Laura’s father’s friend, the General, comes to visit after losing his poor niece suddenly, the pieces start to
fit together. The General tells a story of the monster who killed his poor child. In his story he recalls a
woman leaving a beautiful young girl in his care without knowing him, similar to the way Carmilla was
left in their care. When the General started to describe his niece’s symptoms as very similar to her own,
Laura grew suspicious. Eventually, he described the monster just like Carmilla, and when Carmilla
arrived at the scene, the General’s fit of rage gave her away. With a simple movement, Carmilla dodged
his attacks and disappeared, and it was revealed that she was the murderous monster. Carmilla never came
back to the schloss, and coincidentally enough Laura’s symptoms went away. I think Laura was in shock
at the situation. Her closest friend and companion was revealed as a vampire, and everyone she knew was
hunting down the girl she loved. The last time Laura sees Carmilla she is slaughtered in her own century23
old coffin. Her last words about her deceased lover in the story were uttered long after the tragedy: “To
this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alterations—sometimes the playful,
languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I
have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door” (LaFanu 339). The
Victorian culture adopted romance as a tragic thing, and Carmilla certainly ends in tragedy. The story
leaves the reader with the sense that Laura’s love doesn’t die with Carmilla, and she continues to live with
those feelings for a long time.
Regardless of the story revolving around two homosexual characters, the book describes their relationship
as natural and romantic rather than with distain for their lifestyles. I believe LaFanu did the homosexuals
hidden within themselves during his time justice. He must have been a very open-minded person for his
time. I think he used a vampire as a reason to end the story tragically or perhaps to show a character less
innocent than her lover. Because of the stereotypical woman in a romance being innocent and beautiful,
LaFanu could have used Carmilla to contrast that belief with a darker female love interest. He may have
done it just to contrast Laura herself. Their physical appearances were also drastically different. He was
probably just trying to make the characters seem as different as possible while still maintaining their
connection. LaFanu had accomplished creating a love story featuring two females without showing
disgust for them. Instead he showed that two women can share the same love as a heterosexual couple,
and he even preserved those Victorian romance clichés.
Carmilla
Amanda Crausman
J. Sheridan Lefanu’s “Carmilla” tells the simultaneously sweet and sinister tale of a beautiful
vampire and her young, innocent victim. The story is laced with elements of overt and subversive
sexuality, not the least of which is Carmilla herself. Carmilla courts and entrances Laura as one
would woo and seduce a lover. Carmilla moves languidly through her days and evaporates silently
into the darkness of night. Therefore, it is often difficult for readers to view the breathtaking guest
as the prototypical creature of vampire folklore. Published in the late nineteenth century, Lefanu’s
story highlights the sexual beliefs and insecurities of the era. It is likely that the guise of a vampire
story allowed the author to explore the concept of lesbianism more freely than he otherwise could
have within the constraints of the period. The contrast between Carmilla’s languid femininity and
the grotesque reality of her nature represents the conflicting Victorian attitudes toward sexuality.
From the moment of Carmilla’s first encounter with Laura through the utterance of her final
“piercing shriek,” the vampire evokes strong images of sexuality, intimacy, love, and danger (Lefanu
337). The frightful childhood encounter between Laura and Carmilla contrasts the speaker’s
virginal innocence with the vampire’s predatory experience:
I saw a solemn, but very pretty face looking at me from the side of my bed.
It was that of a young lady who was kneeling, with her hands under the
coverlet. I looked at her with a kind of pleased wonder, and ceased
whimpering. She caressed me with her hands and lay down beside me on
the bed, and drew me towards her, smiling; I immediately felt delightfully
soothed, and fell asleep again. I was wakened by a sensation as if two
needles ran into my breast very deep at the same moment, and I cried
loudly. The lady started back, with her eyes fixed on me, and then slipped
down upon the floor, and, as I thought, hid herself under the bed. (227)
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Carmilla defiles the almost sacred boundaries of the childhood nursery, substituting her sexual
bloodlust in place of maternal care. Carmilla’s desire for Laura is experienced almost as Humbert
Humbert’s desire for Dolores in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: an overwhelming, yet not
unsympathetic, sense of wrongfulness. As evidenced by “the accounts of the progress of the
mysterious disease that has invaded [the] neighborhood” (302), Carmilla routinely drains the blood
of the surrounding townsfolk. Nevertheless, she pursues Laura with a desire and persistence
resembling that of courtship. Carmilla “exercise[s] inexhaustible patience and stratagem…never
desist[ing] until [she] has satiated [her] passion, and drained the very life of [her] coveted victim”
(337). Thus, the nighttime dalliances between prey and predator function as veritable sex scenes.
The phallic nature of Carmilla’s fangs, as well as the necessity of “breaking the skin” with each
draining, is equated with a loss of innocence. Upon her later admittance into the schloss, Carmilla
flirts with Laura and suggests something more than friendly interest: I have made your
acquaintance twelve years ago, and have already a right to your intimacy” (289). Whilst the
romance seems initially one-sided, Laura expresses her complex feelings toward Carmilla: “Her hair
was quite wonderful, I never saw hair so magnificently thick and long when it was down about her
shoulders; I have often placed my hands under it, and laughed with wonder at its weight” (290).
Similarly, Lefanu illustrates the complexity of love and lust through Carmilla’s heartfelt admission
to Laura: “If your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours in the rapture of my
enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die—die, sweetly die—into mine”
(291). Laura attests to the capricious attitudes of Carmilla:
Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion
would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again
and again; blushing softy, gazing in my face with languid and burning
eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the
tumultuous respiration. It as like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed
me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she
drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and
she would whisper almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, and
you and I are one forever.” Then she has thrown herself back in the
chair, with her small hands over her eyes, leaving me trembling. (293)
Lefanu portrays Carmilla as both an emotional lover and the animalistic monster that is her true
nature. However, Carmilla’s notion of love is consummated by the slow murder of those “[she] is
prone to be fascinated with” and treats with “an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of
love” (337).
The contradictory nature of a vampire who loves its prey emphasizes the conflicting nature of love
and sexuality in the Victorian time period. Readers note the sexually charged imagery in the
portrayal of Carmilla’s feeding:
…I was equally conscious of being in my room, and lying in bed, precisely as
I actually was…I saw something moving round the foot of the bed…but I
soon saw that it was a sooty-black animal that resembled a monstrous
cat….and it continued to-ing and fro-ing with the lithe sinister restlessness
of a beat in a cage. I could not cry out, although as you may suppose, I was
terrified. Its pace was growing faster, and the room rapidly darker and
darker, and at length so dark that I could not longer see anything of it but its
eyes…The two broad eyes approached my face, and suddenly I felt a stinging
pain as if two large needles darted, an inch or two apart, deep into my
breast.
(304)
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Hence, Lefanu represents sex itself as an animalistic act. The terror and fear palpable in the passage
attests to the Victorian disdain of virginal corruption. Likewise, Laura’s noncompliance in the act
pervades the scene with a sense of molestation. Although it is not her fault, the young victim must
nevertheless suffer the spirit-draining consequences of her participation in the feeding: “I felt
myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy I would not have
interrupted” (307). Despite the view of explicit sex as dangerous, Lefanu alternately portrays the
beautiful nature of romance and unconsummated love: “Her soft cheek was glowing against mine.
‘Darling, darling,’ she murmered, ‘I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so’” (300). The
contrast between sex and love illustrates the taboo inherent in sexuality, especially of the
homosexual variety. Lefanu tiptoes dangerously close to scenes of overt lesbian sex and then seems
to restrain himself in fear of Victorian denunciation of the piece as smut. Such Victorian era
restraint can either be viewed as fostering the tension that propels the narrative or leaving
something to be desired. Additionally, the vampiric corruption of such innocents as Laura and
Bertha Spielsdorf emphasizes the importance of virginity in the Victorian era. The psychological
desire to corrupt the virginal, despite the fact that their value lies in said innocence, strengthens the
power of Carmilla’s sexually charged feeding “nightmares” (304). Regardless of the social
constraints characteristic of the period in which Carmilla was written, Lefanu’s provocative story
succeeds in drawing parallels between the creatures of the night and humanity’s innate and
animalistic sexual desires.
The sexually provocative nature of Lefanu’s “Carmilla” contributes to the overall success of the
piece as an exposé of the dark nature of humankind. The sexual nature of the feeding scenes
emphasizes the repression of natural desires whilst highlighting the terrifying nature of corruption.
Carmilla’s penetrating fangs threaten the lives of innocents throughout the countryside and within
the schloss. The beautiful vampire thrives off the benefits of monstrous and despicable desire whilst
contradictorily applying admirable tenets of Victorian courtship. The loving and caring energy
between Carmilla and Laura offers testament to the fact that even the most abhorrent creatures are
capable of basic human kindness. The contradictory image of Carmilla as a seemingly sweet young
Countess and her true nature as an immortal and evil vampire contributes to Lefanu’s conscious
commentary on man and the subconscious reflection of the Victorian era.
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
Emily Thuotte
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge was a poet who published a few things in her lifetime, and two such
published pieces were her poems The Witch and The Other Side of a Mirror. The poem The Witch is
about a young maiden who has been cast out into the snow and has walked many miles and found
what seems to be a door, and she is begging to be let inside and out of the cold. The young girl in the
poem seems to represent the frailty and helplessness and lack of control women in the Victorian
times had, and this makes the poem appear to be about the injustice caused to women by their
oppression in Victorian times. The Other Side of a Mirror has a similar topic to the first poem,
although it is about something completely different. In The Other Side of a Mirror, the narrator looks
into a mirror and instead of seeing her happy appearance as she usually does, she sees a wild and
desperate face looking back at her from the mirror. The face reflected in the mirror appears to
represent the trapped inner self of the narrator, and this poem clearly reflects the plight of women
in the Victorian times. The poem is about the woman inside the narrator who is desperate for the
ability to make her own decisions and feels lost and in anguish because she is oppressed and
controlled and jealous of men and their ability to be freer in Victorian society. Mary Elizabeth
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Coleridge seems to share the view that women in the Victorian times were oppressed, and since she
thought that, she most likely also believed women deserved equality, although that is not shown in
the poems. While the majority of Victorians would have disagreed with Coleridge, there are a few
other poets and writers who would have agreed with her. One such writer was John Stuart Mill, who
wrote an essay called The Subjection of Women on the oppression of women in the Victorian times
and spoke for equality of the sexes. There are also two poets who appear to agree with Coleridge
and Mill’s ideas, Christina G. Rossetti and Lord Tennyson. Christina G. Rossetti wrote one poem
called From the Antique, and while it does not express a desire for women’s rights, it does say that
women are basically useless in the Victorian society and that they may as well not exist at all, which
clearly shows that Rossetti felt women were oppressed in Victorian society. Lord Tennyson wrote a
poem The Woman’s Cause Is Man’s, which hints at the idea that women are equal to men, saying
that as women and men grow older they must be more like each other and also hints at the idea of
women being oppressed in Victorian society. Therefore, all of the works listed address the issue of
oppression of women in the Victorian society, and Rossetti, Mill, Coleridge and Tennyson all seem to
agree that women are oppressed in the Victorian society, and that it is not right.
The first poem written by Coleridge that seems to reflect oppression of women in the Victorian
society is the poem The Witch. The Witch is about a young girl who has been cast out into the snow
to wander alone and begins with the lines “I have walked a great while over the snow, And I am not
tall nor strong” (Witch 1-2). These lines are fairly straightforward, letting us know that whoever is
narrating has traveled a long distance in the cold and snow, probably on foot, and that the narrator
is weak and frail and therefore helpless. The next lines read, “My clothes are wet, and my teeth are
set, And the way was hard and long” (Witch 3-4). This part is also very straightforward, informing
us that the narrator is cold and wet and has been walking for a very long while and that wherever
she is now, it was difficult to get there. Next come the lines, “I have wandered over the fruitful earth,
But I never came here before. Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!” (Witch 5-7).
Here the narrator states she has walked across the earth before but has never seen this door before
and has never been inside the house, and she begs to be let into the house out of the cold. The next
lines return to the narrator’s situation outside of the house: “The cutting wind is a cruel foe. I dare
not stand in the blast. My hands are stone, and my voice a groan, And the worst of death is past”
(Witch 9-12). The narrator tells us she is cold and frozen to the bone and that she cannot withstand
the wind much longer and perhaps is already halfway dead. The next lines finally reveal that our
narrator is a young girl, saying, “I am but a little maiden still, My little white feet are sore. Oh, lift me
over the threshold, and let me in at the door!” (Witch 13-15). The narrator tells us she is but a young
girl who cannot stand the cold and being outside much longer and begs again to be let into the
house. The next lines include a shift of narrator, saying, “Her voice was the voice that women have,
Who please for their heart’s desire” (Witch 16-17). Here the narrator shifts to the person inside the
house, who observes that the voice of the narrator was the voice women have when pleading for the
one thing they want most in the world. The next lines state, “She came--she came--and the quivering
flame Sunk and died in the fire” (Witch 18-19). The narrator says the little girl came inside, and
something died once she was in there. It may have been the girl who died, or the fire may have
represented the fire of hope, which died after she was brought inside. The final lines of the poem
read, “It never was lit again on my hearth Since I hurried across the floor To lift her over the
threshold, and let her in at the door” (Witch 20-22). The final lines state that the flame, whatever it
was, was never lit again on the narrator’s hearth since the moment the narrator let the little girl into
the house. The poem is clearly about a young girl who has been cast out and is begging to be let into
a house she has found, and the poem seems to represent the oppression of women in the Victorian
age. The line “I have walked a great while over the snow, And I am not tall nor strong” (Witch 1-2)
reinforces the typical Victorian idea that women were frail and not equipped to do things like have
jobs that men held. The lines, “I have wandered over the fruitful earth, But I never came here before”
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(Witch 5-6) seem to represent something the narrator has not considered yet. The wind and the
cold could be the oppression of society combating the narrator’s refusal to accept this oppression,
and the house is the narrator’s acceptance of the oppression of the Victorian society. Given what
occurs and is said later in the poem, this seems likely. The lines where oppression seems to be
winning are, “My hands are stone, and my voice a groan, And the worst of death is past” (Witch 1011). If the wind and cold in the poem represent oppression, then here oppression has half won the
battle, forcing the narrator to at least somewhat accept it. The lines “Her voice was the voice that
women have, Who plead for their heart’s desire” (Witch 15-16) almost seem to represent the
narrator’s desire to have equality for women but at the same time her inability to have this due to
the oppression of Victorian society. The final lines, “She came--she came--and the quivering flame
Sunk and die in the fire. It never was lit again on my heart Since I hurried across the floor, To lift her
over the threshold, and let her in at the door” (Witch 17-22), reinforce the idea that the house is the
acceptance of oppression in Victorian society. The fire seems to be hope for equality and the will to
keep fighting for it, and once the girl is let into the house and therefore begrudgingly accepts
oppression, the fire goes out and is never lit again. This poem clearly represents the oppression of
women in the Victorian society, and Coleridge’s seems to be the opinion that this oppression is
terrible but cannot be fought.
The next poem, The Other Side of a Mirror, is narrated by a woman who states she was looking into
her mirror, and instead of seeing her happy face reflected back, saw a wild and desperate looking
woman reflected in the mirror. The poem begins with the lines, “I sat before my glass one day, And
conjured up a vision bare, Unlike the aspects glad and gay, That erst were found reflected there The vision of a woman, wild With more than womanly despair. Her hair stood back on either side A
face bereft of loveliness” (Mirror 1-8). The woman reflected in the mirror is not like the happy
reflection the narrator usually sees but instead is a vision of a woman whose face is completely
lacking in beauty and shows nothing but pure and utter despair beyond the type women were
usually allowed to have. The next lines say, “It had no envy now to hide What once no man on earth
could guess. It formed the thorny aureole Of hard, unsanctified distress” (Mirror 9-12). The
woman’s face no longer can hide her despair and anguish where once no one on earth would have
been able to see the distress. The lines that follow say, “Her lips were open - not a sound Came
through the parted lines of red, Whate’er it was, the hideous wound In silence and secret bled. No
sigh relieved her speechless woe, She had no voice to speak her dread” (Mirror 13-18). The
woman’s distress is so great that it cannot be expressed through sound, and no sound emerges from
her to help ease her distress. The distress is also silent because it is still a secret despair, since this
despair is something that the narrator possesses but keeps hidden from the world. The next lines
say, “And in her lurid eyes there shone The dying flame of life’s desire, Made mad because its hope
was gone, And kindled at the leaping fire Of jealousy and fierce revenge, And strength that could not
change nor tire” (Mirror 19-24). The woman’s eyes reflect the dying flames of a desire to live, lost
because her hope is gone and nothing but jealousy and anger remain. The final lines say, “Shade of a
shadow in the glass, O set the crystal surface free! Pass - as the fair visions pass - Nor ever more
return, to be The ghost of a distracted hour, That heard me whisper: - ‘I am she!’” (Mirror 25-30).
The narrator recognizes the woman in the mirror to be the side of her that the narrator hides from
the world and begs the vision to leave as the fairer visions do. This poem clearly represents the
oppression of women in the Victorian society. First of all, the lines that say, “The vision of a woman,
wild With more than womanly despair... A face bereft of loveliness. It had no envy now to hide What
once no man on earth could guess” (Mirror 5-10) reflect the despair of the narrator and every
woman oppressed by the Victorian society. The despair is so great that the narrator can hide it from
herself no longer, although it remains unseen by the world. This unseen quality is proven by the line
“Whate’er is was, the hideous wound In silence and secret bled” (Mirror 15-16). The despair of
being oppressed, despite being so great, is lamented in silence and secret, unseen by the rest of the
28
world. The next lines prove that narrator has long since given up on equality for women: “...in her
lurid eyes there shone The dying flame of life’s desire, Made mad because its hope was gone”
(Mirror 19-21). The woman in the mirror, who represents the narrator’s hidden side, has given up
hope and therefore finds life no longer worth living. This seems to represent the oppression of
Victorian society finally winning over the narrator. The final line that proves that this is the other
half of the narrator who represents the narrator’s despair over being oppressed is the line: “...That
heard me whisper: - ‘I am she!’” (Mirror 30). This final line has the narrator realizing that this
woman who is so in anguish is the narrator herself, or at least the secret half of the narrator that
silently despairs of the oppression of women in the Victorian society. This poem says much the
same thing as the poem The Witch, only in a much more overt fashion.
Coleridge’s opinion that women were oppressed in the Victorian society was both true and not
widely accepted. However, there were a few other people who wrote during the time period who
agreed with her that women were oppressed, and some even went so far as to say that women and
men should have equality. While Mary seems to have given up on this idea, John Stuart Mill certainly
advocated for gender equality and definitely believed that women were unjustly oppressed in the
Victorian society. However, he was a true radical in his way of thinking and was very far ahead of his
time. There were two poets who wrote during the Victorian era who had slightly more typical ideas
about gender equality and the oppression of women, although both were still slightly ahead of their
time. These two poets were Christina Rossetti and Lord Tennyson. Of the two, Tennyson is
somewhat more conservative but still very forward-thinking. He writes the poem The Woman’s
Cause Is Man’s, in which he recognizes that women are oppressed in Victorian society but at the
same time states that men and women are different, which is completely true. Despite saying that
men and women cannot be the same or love would be destroyed, he does seem to be advocating for
equality. His poem shows his thoughts that men and women are different and should be treated as
such in the lines, “For woman is not undevelopt man, But diverse: could we make her as the man,
Sweet Love were slain” (Tennyson 259-261). Here Tennyson states that women are not like men
and are very different from men, and if men and women were the same, then love would cease to
exist. He goes on to acknowledge that women are oppressed in the Victorian society, as shown in the
lines, “Seeing either sex along Is half itself, and in true marriage lies Nor equal, nor unequal: each
fulfils Defect in each” (Tennyson 283-286). Tennyson says here that in true marriage the man and
woman are not equal or unequal but function to supplement the defect in the other. However, the
line “ ‘A dream That once was mine! what woman taught you this?’” (Tennyson 290-291) shows that
Tennyson recognizes that women do not have equality in Victorian society and he seems to believe
they should have equality. The fact that he agrees women are oppressed in Victorian society and
deserve equality is forward-thinking for his time and also in agreement with Coleridge. However,
Coleridge seems more hopeless than Tennyson about equality, and here the two differ in opinion.
The next poet, Christina Rossetti, wrote the poem From the Antique, in which she clearly
acknowledges that men and women are not the same and the women are oppressed and not treated
as equal in the Victorian society. She seems to agree that women are not treated equally but does
not advocate gender equality outright. Her poem begins with the lines, “It’s a weary life, it is, she
said:--Doubly blank in a woman’s lot: I wish and I wish I were a man: Or, better than any being, were
not:” (Rossetti 1-4). The poem begins with a woman lamenting that it is weary and difficult being a
woman, and she wishes she were a man, or better yet, nothing at all. It can be inferred that it is
weary to be a woman because women are oppressed in the Victorian society, and the woman in the
poem wishes she were a man so she could be treated equally or better yet to not exist at all since
she seems utterly useless. The feeling of uselessness Rossetti seems to think women are possessed
of due to oppression in the Victorian society is reinforced by the last lines of her poem: “None would
miss me in all the world, How much less would care or weep: I should be nothing, while all the rest
Would wake and weary and fall asleep” (Rossetti 13-16). These last lines show the woman narrator
29
saying that she is so useless that no one in the world would miss her and that everyone would go on
living his or her life because she contributes so little to society nothing would change with her
absence. This feeling of uselessness seems to have been brought on in the poem by the lack of
equality in the Victorian society, and from this one can see that Rossetti clearly thought women
were oppressed in the Victorian society. She seems to have wanted gender equality, but similar to
Coleridge, Rossetti seems to have considered gender equality impossible to achieve. Rossetti is
ahead of her time in realizing women were oppressed in the Victorian times and in wanting gender
equality, and she is similar to Coleridge in believing gender equality is impossible to achieve. The
final writer from this time is John Stuart Mill, who wrote a very radical essay called The Subjection
of Women, in which he clearly acknowledges women’s oppression in the Victorian society and
writes in support of gender equality. Mill acknowledges in his essay the oppression of women, as
can be proven here, where he says, “Think what it is to a boy, to grow up to manhood in the belief
that without any merit or any exertion of his own, though he may be the most frivolous and empty
or the most ignorant and stolid of mankind, by the mere fact of being born a male he is by right the
superior of all and every one of an entire half of the human race: including probably some whose
real superiority to himself he has daily or hourly occasion to feel; but even if in his whole conduct he
habitually follows a woman's guidance, still, if he is a fool, she thinks that of course she is not, and
cannot be, equal in ability and judgment to himself; and if he is not a fool, he does worse — he sees
that she is superior to him, and believes that, notwithstanding her superiority, he is entitled to
command and she is bound to obey” (Mill 6). Here Mill clearly states that women are oppressed
from the day they are born, and it is drilled into their heads and the heads of men that women are
inferior, thus oppressing women. He continues on to say women are not inferior and have proven
this many times over, as shown in this quote: “When we consider how sedulously they are all
trained away from, instead of being trained towards, any of the occupations or objects reserved for
men, it is evident that I am taking a very humble ground for them, when I rest their case on what
they have actually achieved” (Mill 5). Mill states that based on what women have achieved despite
being trained they are inferior from the day they are born, it is clear that women are not inferior.
Clearly, Mill saw that women were very much oppressed in the Victorian society. However, he goes
on to speak out for gender equality, something none of the previous writers discussed did. Since
gender inequality was often based on the idea that women were mentally inferior to men, Mill
states, “Let us first make entire abstraction of all psychological considerations tending to show, that
any of the mental differences supposed to exist between women and men are but the natural effect
of the differences in their education and circumstances, and indicate no radical difference, far less
radical inferiority, of nature” (Mill 5). Mill states here that no natural difference has been shown in
the minds of men and women, and any difference found in their abilities is purely due to lack of
access to education to which men have access. He clearly thinks that women should be afforded the
same opportunities as men and states that if women had the same opportunities and education as
men, women and men could function as equals with no problem. He also states, “Were it not for that,
I think that almost everyone, in the existing state of opinion in politics and political economy, would
admit the injustice of excluding half the human race from the greater number of lucrative
occupations, and from almost all high social functions; ordaining from their birth either that they
are not, and cannot by any possibility become, fit for employments which are legally open to the
stupidest and basest of the other sex, or else that however fit they may be, those employments shall
be interdicted to them, in order to be preserved for the exclusive benefit of males” (Mill 4). Mill
clearly says here that it is ridiculous to restrict women from occupations open to even the stupidest
of males, and this is a clear plea for gender equality. Mill is obviously the most radical of all the
writers: not only seeing clearly the oppression of women in the Victorian society but also
advocating for gender equality. Coleridge and Rossetti seem to agree on everything, from the fact
that women were oppressed to the idea that gender equality is not achievable, while Tennyson
agrees that there should be gender equality but does not seem to have given up on the idea.
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In conclusion, Coleridge is somewhat radical for the Victorian society, but she is not the most radical
writer of the four writers discussed here. While Coleridge writes two poems in which she clearly
acknowledges the oppression of women in Victorian times, she also seems believe in the poems that
gender equality is impossible and seems to have given up on the idea. Her recognition of the
oppression of women is ahead of her time, but her acceptance of this oppression is similar to most
other people in her time period. Rossetti holds similar views to Coleridge’s, clearly seeing that
women are oppressed by the Victorian society but believing that gender equality is impossible.
These two writers, while somewhat radical for the Victorian era, also share some views of the
Victorians. Tennyson is also similar in his views to Rossetti and Coleridge, as he acknowledges that
women are somewhat oppressed and advocates for gender equality. The final writer, Mill, is the
most radical of all, since he not only sees that women are very much oppressed in Victorian society
but also believes strongly in gender equality and its possibility. Therefore, Coleridge is somewhat in
the middle of radical and typical, accepting the oppression of women in the Victorian era as
unchangeable but acknowledging that women are oppressed in the Victorian society, something not
many other people did.
Gender In Victorian Society
Chelsea Riordan
Women living in the Victorian era faced oppression from the opposite sex just as they did in the
centuries past and as they would for years to come. While the majority of men believed that
womankind’s natural role in both society and in marriage was a submissive one, John Stuart Mill
and a number of other Victorian thinkers challenged this position. Trained in the arts of debate and
analysis, Mill’s mind was highly attuned to sound logic, and as such, he picked out the various flaws
in western male reasoning. Nearly a century later, authoress Phyllis Rose published Parallel Lives, a
tome recounting a collection of Victorian romances and marriages, including John Stuart Mill’s.
Comparing Mill’s feminist essay The Subjection of Women to Rose’s study both strengthened the
former’s arguments and shed some light on the sort of treatment Victorian women received. The
oppression of women was a rampant problem within nineteenth century marriages and a problem
that Mill and a select few defied.
In his essay, Mill described not just the subjection women faced but also his theories regarding the
cause of this oppression. After bringing up and debunking a number of allegations pointing towards
female inferiority, he addressed the true root of the issue: male comfort levels. “On the... point
which is involved in the just equality of women, their admissibility to all the functions and
occupations hitherto retained as the monopoly of the stronger sex... I believe that [women’s]
disabilities elsewhere are only clung to in order to maintain their subordination in domestic life;
because the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal” (Mill 3).
Mill argued that men, happy in their general “superiority” to females, made women second class
citizens for their own good, but because they were unwilling to share their political and social sway.
“Is not this enough, and much more than enough, to make it a tyranny to them, and a detriment to
society, that they should not be allowed to compete with men for the exercise of these functions? Is
it not a mere truism to say, that such functions are often filled by men far less fit for them than
numbers of women, and who would be beaten by women in any fair field of competition?” (Mill 4).
He went on to state plainly that supporters of the Patriarchy clearly did not have faith in their own
opinions, because if women were so collectively inferior to men, they wouldn’t need to be
suppressed in the extreme way that they were. “In the last two centuries, when (which was seldom
the case) any reason beyond the mere existence of the fact was thought to be required to justify the
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disabilities of women, people seldom assigned as a reason their inferior mental capacity; which, in
times when there was a real trial of personal faculties (from which all women were not excluded) in
the struggles of public life, no one really believed in. The reason given in those days was not
women's unfitness, but the interest of society, by which was meant the interest of men...” (Mill 4).
“The interest of men” referred to anything and everything that men could gain from sectioning
women off into “seen and not heard” lifestyles. This could have been anything from the
psychological conditioning that women were subject to from birth to the fact that sexual abuse of
the woman within any marriage was totally legal. It was the latter in particular that instilled a
bitterness in Mrs. Harriet Taylor that would never totally leave her. After marrying her first
husband, the generally good natured John Taylor, Harriet found that “bumping uglies” was one of
her least favorite things to do. “Since she never really felt like making love with him, his desire to
make love to her came to seem like a demand. She complied at first resignedly, but then with more
and more resentment. The very fact that he kept imposing himself on her in this way, which seemed
so aggressive and brutal-- the Victorian word was “inconsiderate”-- strengthened her distaste for
him” (Rose 102). Taylor, though a generally agreeable man, was absolutely guilty of perpetuating
the subjugation of women as a group by subjugating an individual woman sexually. On the less
glaring side of things, John Cross also played his part in this vicious cycle with his wife, Marian
Evans. However, in this case it wasn’t born out of his actions but rather his mindset. “He had the
pleasure of feeling himself in the control of a woman in some ways more powerful than himself,
who, nonetheless, depended on him in other ways” (Rose 231). Because he took such glee in
emotionally dominating his wife (whether this domination was real or imagined is up for debate),
Johnny Cross was also part of the subjection machine. If his wife was to be superior to him in some
ways, he made a point to overpower her in other areas, reinforcing his supremacy as the majority of
his men continued to do. As a final example, John Ruskin’s treatment of his wife Effie Gray was
consistently poor. From their wedding night onwards, the Ruskins’ relationship was rocky. John
found his wife to be sexually repulsive, irascible, and hard-headed, while Effie found her husband
and inlaws alike to be stiflingly controlling and cruel. Their unhappy union lasted for several years
before an annulment was finally arranged on the grounds that the marriage had not been
consummated. In a letter to his beloved parents, John retrospectively examined their relationship.
“Had she treated me as a kind and devoted wife would have done, I should soon have longed to
possess her, body and heart. But every day that we lived together, there was less sympathy between
us... It is of no use to trace the progress of alienation. Perhaps the principal cause of it-- next to her
resolute effort to detach me from my parents-- was her always thinking that I ought to to attend her,
instead of herself attending me” (Ruskin 88). Much like his conservative father, John Ruskin
believed that women ought to be subservient to their spouses rather than respond to disputes with
the willfulness and vitriol that his former wife did. The Ruskins’ collective opinions surrounding
women’s roles in society and in the home were pervasively shared by the majority of the western
world, which was, of course, nothing but harmful to Mill’s feminist cause, and much like many
women of their day, Taylor, Gray, and Evans faced subjection on individual and societal scales.
Mill, of course, saw the poor treatment of women for what it was. It was oppression, nigh slavery,
and he found it to be highly unethical. He thought that women were just as capable and able-bodied
as men were, and even if the average woman was inferior, as his opposition would argue, why
would it be necessary to keep them in legal shackles? “...any woman, who succeeds in an open
profession, proves by that very fact that she is qualified for it. And in the case of public offices, if the
political system of the country is such as to exclude unfit men, it will equally exclude unfit women:
while if it is not, there is no additional evil in the fact that the unfit persons whom it admits may be
either women or men. As long therefore as it is acknowledged that even a few women may be fit for
these duties, the laws which shut the door on those exceptions cannot be justified by any opinion
which can be held respecting the capacities of women in general” (Mill 5). If women were, in fact, the
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lesser sex, there would be no need to hold them back from typically male-dominated professions, as
their own invalidity would be restrictive enough. Mill then goes further, naming a number of great
women in history, thus debunking the inferiority argument, at least to an extent. “When we
consider how sedulously [women] are all trained away from, instead of being trained towards, any
of the occupations or objects reserved for men, it is evident that I am taking a very humble ground
for them, when I rest their case on what they have actually achieved. For, in this case, negative
evidence is worth little, — while any positive evidence is conclusive. It cannot be inferred to be
impossible that a woman should be a Homer, or an Aristotle, or a Michael Angelo, or a Beethoven,
because no woman has yet actually produced works comparable to theirs in any of those lines of
excellence. This negative fact at most leaves the question uncertain, and open to psychological
discussion. But it is quite certain that a woman can be a Queen Elizabeth, or a Deborah, or a Joan of
Arc, since this is not inference, but fact” (Mill 5). Those women alone should have been enough
proof that women at least deserved a shot at competing in the professional world. If the knowledge
that men on the whole had established and were forever preserving an injustice was not enough to
sway opinions, Mill also pointed out that forcing one half of Britain’s population to remain inert was
detrimental not just to the oppressed but also to the oppressors. “To ordain that any kind of
persons shall not be physicians, or shall not be advocates, or shall not be Members of Parliament, is
to injure not them only, but all who employ physicians or advocates, or elect Members of
Parliament, and who are deprived of the stimulating effect of greater competition on the exertions
of the competitors, as well as restricted to a narrower range of individual choice” (Mill 4). Put
simply, having fewer people in the working world meant that less got done, and the western world
therefore enjoyed less progress than it would have with more doctors or politicians on hand.
Freeing women would not just be beneficial to women themselves but also to their fathers,
husbands, and brothers. Though he was a feminist before becoming acquainted with Mrs. Taylor,
her history with her husband affected Mill’s perspective greatly. “Harriet Taylor was an intellectual.
When she realized, after four years of marriage, that her husband was distasteful to her, she went to
consult her minister. She told him that her husband was not her intellectual equal. She said she was
bored” (Rose 103). Harriet was living proof of Mill’s theories, and Mill had all of the desirable
qualities that John Taylor lacked. The pair became inseparable very soon after they’d met, and Mill
fell completely head over heels. “Mill now felt as though another world were being opened up to
him. This was what he’d been missing in all those arid years: beauty, emotion, passionate response.
Harriet seemed to care about everything, approaching ideas with passion and not the calm logic he
had been trained to exercise” (Rose 107). Harriet’s appreciation for aesthetics and intelligence were
highly attractive to him, and he felt as though his “platonic lover” completed him and helped him to
expand his worldview. Beyond that, she was also a noteworthy thinker in her own right; at the very
least she was Mill’s equal, and she was certainly more emotionally independent than he. In return
for all he felt Harriet had done for him, Mill proposed to her a few years after her husband’s death.
Keeping in mind their shared criticisms of marriage, he wrote up a special marital document
specifically for the occasion. “Being about, if I am so happy as to obtain her consent, to enter into the
marriage relation with the only woman I have ever known, with whom I would have entered into
that state; and the whole character of the marriage relation as constituted by law being such as both
she and I entirely and conscientiously disapprove, for this amongst other reasons, that it confers
upon one of the parties to the contract, legal power and control over the person, property, and
freedom of action of the other party, independent of her own wishes and will; I, having no means of
legally divesting myself of these odious powers (as I most assuredly would do if an engagement to
that effect could be made legally binding on me), feel it my duty to put on record a formal protest
against the existing law of marriage, in so far as conferring such powers; and a solemn promise
never in any case or under any circumstances to use them. And in the event of marriage between
Mrs. Taylor and me I declare it to be my will and intention, and the condition of the engagement
between us, that she retains in all respects whatever the same absolute freedom of action, and
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freedom of disposal of herself and of all that does or may at any time belong to her, as if no such
marriage had taken place, and I absolutely disclaim and repudiate all pretension to have acquired
any rights whatever by virtue of such marriage” (Mill 118). Under these terms, Harriet agreed. Mill’s
eager and ardent respect for not just his wife but for all women made Harriet’s second marriage
much stronger than her first. Even after her death, Mill remained faithful to her, fervently praising
her in his writings and visiting her grave daily. A second happy relationship recorded by Rose was
that of George Lewes and Marian Evans. Though they were never officially married, they may as
well have been, and their informal union came as a blessing to both. While Evans had previously
resigned herself to spinsterhood, Lewes’s marriage was falling apart. His wife’s three youngest
children were fathered by someone other than himself. Though he legally remained attached to his
wife, George Lewes preferred to share secluded quarters with his lover. Evans and Lewes were
openly intertwined, which led to scandal and gossip from all ends of the country. Despite this, the
two lived blissfully. Together they wrote various books and articles. In fact, it was Lewes who
encouraged Marian to switch over to writing novels, despite his uncertainty about her abilities.
However, their shared concerns were dispelled after Evans produced a sample chapter. “When
Lewes returned and read aloud what she had written, both of them were moved to tears. He went
over to her, kissed her, and said, “I think your pathos is even better than your fun” (Rose 209).
Henceforth, Evans began to publish her books under a male pseudonym, becoming George Eliot
after removing her proverbial Clark Kent glasses. Throughout the twenty-four years Lewes and
“Eliot” spent together, they brought each other great happiness. Because of her partner’s liberal
viewpoints, Marian was free to explore the option of becoming a novelist, and as a result, she would
go down in history as an important writer and thinker. The relationship shared between Lewes and
Evans, as well as that between Mill and Taylor, boded well for the latter man’s arguments against
male rule over women.
This assortment of Victorian relationships illustrated the sliding scale of the treatment married
women received. However, the lives of the more liberated women were more the exception and not
the rule. For every outspoken Harriet Taylor, there were hundreds of repressed women living
under their husbands’ heels. Even the willful Effie Gray was trapped in her own personal Ruskinthemed Hell for several years. Feminist writers and thinkers of that day aimed to free unhappy wives
from their domestic prisons, and from the information Rose delivered, their goals were justified.
Mill’s urgings for social and legal equality between the two sexes only proves that point further, as
shackling women was just as much a hindrance to their oppressors as it was to the oppressed
themselves. The sentiments held by him and his like-minded contemporaries made a strong basis
for each of the positive relationships described in Parallel Lives.
Subjection of Women in Victorian Society
Mike White
Victorian society was a different world than the one we live in now. This is true in many cases,
however it was possibly the most true in the case of the subjection of women. Women, as a whole,
were seen as being on a lower level than men. This was partially due to their physical stature by
comparison and the inherent expectations put on them by the world they occupied. However, they
were also held to a higher moral standard, but this idea of “pure” and perfection was also
restrictive. With very few exceptions, they were caretakers and wives for people of importance,
rather than being people of importance themselves. As pointed out by John Stuart Mill in his 1869
essay on the subjection of women, “Nothing so much astonishes the people of distant parts of the
world, when they first learn anything about England, as to be told that it is under a queen; the thing
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seems to them so unnatural as to be almost incredible. To Englishmen this does not seem in the
least degree unnatural… They do feel it unnatural that women should be soldiers or Members of
Parliament” (Mill 1-2). The position of Queen of England wasn’t strange only because the culture
had been that way for a very long time. However, when a woman wanted to run for a position of
power in Parliament, no one would have it. They would let a woman more or less rule their country
but would not let her fight as a soldier to protect it. On top of this, virginity, femininity and
complete obedience were demanded qualifications for marriage while men in this time needed far
fewer qualifications. It is no wonder that increasing need for social reform coincided with an
increasing number of published female writers. In this time frame, many were divided by the
prominent issue of women’s rights and the details of occupation and status. Mill was a man who
was very much in favor of women’s rights, but many, such as Thomas Carlyle, believed that women
should remain in their place. Mill, Carlyle, John Ruskin and George Lewes all have differing views
from each other, but these views shed light of the opinions of the people of their time. Each of the
marriages I will discuss also shed light on the different outcomes of women subjected to the needs
of society and their husbands and the women who were more highly independent. This was a tough
time for women, and few of these intellectuals’ marriages gave the women the support and freedom
they deserved.
Two marriages that could have gone considerably better were those of Thomas Carlyle and Jane
Welsh and between John Ruskin and Effie Gray. However, the former was not realized until
relatively far into the marriage. Carlyle started off as a great teacher to Jane Welsh. They sent letters
back and forth to each other talking of everything from German literature to prompts for poems
they would both write. From a young age, Jane Welsh only worked to please her father. His
happiness was really a driving force in her work habits. “At age thirteen she wrote a novel. At
fourteen she wrote a five-act tragedy which Dr. Welsh admired so much that he sent it on to a
friend. Words, clever words, written and spoken, were Jane’s way of winning her father’s approval,
an approval she came to depend on” (Rose 25). This really shows the amount of emotional stock she
put in her father’s approval. This made it all the more crushing when he died when Jane was 18.
Jane Welsh spent a long time looking for something else to drive her, primarily another male who
she could please with her work and intellect. She found this in Thomas Carlyle. She asked him in
letters if she could over-study everyday because she enjoyed doing the work and pleasing him so
much. However, after their wedding, things took a darker turn. This is after he also took her from a
comfortable, wealthier life. I think this quote taken from a letter from Carlyle to Welsh is very
telling of his view on marriage and women, “Do you think, that when you on one side of our
household shall have faithfully gone thro your housewife duties, and I on the other shall have
written my allotted pages, we shall meet over out frugal meal with far happier and prouder hearts
than thousands that are not blessed with any duties, and whose agony is the bitterest of all, ‘the
agony of a too easy bed?’… I predict that we shall be the finest little pair imaginable! A true-hearted
dainty lady-wife; and sick and sulky, but diligent, and not false-hearted or fundamentally unkind
Goodman: and these two fronting the hardships of a life in faithful and eternal union” (Rose 42-43).
He has directly assigned the gender roles in this house. He has given himself right to be “sick and
sulky” and not “fundamentally unkind.” This is not a man who sees women on an equal level with
him. This is a man who believes that he has authority over his wife in an ideal situation. I think this
is a very telling letter because it really describes a lot of the view of women through the Victorian
era as far as marriage goes. Another marriage where the wife was put on a lower level than her
husband was between John Ruskin and Effie Grey. After a few years of living together without any
sort of sexual contact, issues arose in the marriage. There was a certain connection lacking. On top
of this, Effie Grey believed that she had a right to have as much authority as John Ruskin. This
outraged him and led him to a hatred of her. Ruskin once said, to his lawyer, on the subject of Effie,
“I married her thinking her so young and affectionate that I might influence her as I chose, and
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make of her just such a wife as I wanted. It appeared that she married me thinking she could make
of me just the husband she wanted. I was grieved and disappointed at finding I could not change her,
and she was humiliated and irritated at finding she could not change me” (Rose 61). He believed
that he was perfectly justified in trying to change her. She was his wife after all. Why wouldn’t he
have the right to completely alter everything about this woman? He was completely caught off
guard when she supposedly wouldn’t budge. This says a lot about the idea that the wife is the
property of the husband, as Carlyle might agree. Later, he even showed that he believed her want to
be on the same level of authority as he was “petty” and “childish.” An analysis quoted in Phyllis
Rose’s Parallel Lives sheds light on this, “The absence of petty jealousies which so beset young
married women in their struggles for a childish authority would have certainly increased his
Respect for his Wife’s character” (Rose 68). He was not at all the only one with these beliefs, and
that was what made this time frame so detrimental for women. The same book talked about “
woman’s place” that came out in the 1830s and ‘40s that “suggested… that some people were
beginning to forget what woman’s place was” (Rose 68). These books said, “it was a woman’s duty
to ‘raise herself, by every means, in the esteem of her husband.’” That was an obvious display of the
men in the Victorian era, and possibly even some of the women, actively trying to keep women “in
their place.” That is pointing to the subjection of women in that time. As if to degrade her further,
Ruskin also told her that he respected her more because she won the affections of someone so
talented as an Austrian officer named Paulizza. He did not respect her, however, for her own talents
and knowledge. She was not only subjected to his daily expectations of her as a wife, but she was
also an object or a prize when it came to his appreciation. John Stuart Mill sums this up by saying, of
the dependence of women on their husbands, “This great means of influence over the minds of
women having been acquired, an instinct of selfishness made men avail themselves of it to the
utmost as a means of holing women in subjection, by representing to them meekness,
submissiveness, and resignation of all individual will into the hands of a man, as an essential part of
sexual attractiveness” (Mill 3). This was and still is, a powerful quote. Mill nailed the exact form of
subjection that was involved in many, if not most, Victorian marriages. A woman was expected to be
meek and submissive if she wanted to be an attractive woman in that time.
However, not all men had this view at the time. John Stuart Mill and George Henry Lewes had a very
different view of woman than the two earlier husbands. One reason for the successfulness of
Harriet Taylor’s marriage with Mill was that he saw her as his equal. In Mill’s essay The Subjection of
Women, he wrote, “I believe that their disabilities elsewhere are only clung to in order to maintain
their subordination in domestic life; because the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the
idea of living with an equal” (Mill 3). He was one of few males at the time who saw that females
were one hundred percent equal with males. Males at the time could not deal with the idea of
having met their match regardless of the level of talent and wit that the woman possessed. Women,
subsequently, were repressed by males to “keep them in check” at home. When it came to jobs, Mill
said, “Such functions are often filled by men far less fit for them than numbers of women” (Mill 4).
Many women had the qualifications or could be trained in the skills in which a male was trained.
However, many refused to acknowledge this fact. To the contrary, many believed that there were
differences between men and women from the moment they were born! Things like this, which
were so commonplace, shocked Mill. England was ruled by a queen, but it refused a woman a
position in Parliament. The blatant sexism of day-to-day life was everywhere, but many failed to see
it merely because that was how they were raised. Mill set out to dissolve the pre-conceived skill
level and position of Victorian women. “Any of the mental differences supposed to exist between
women and men,” he wrote, “are but the natural effect of the differences in their education and
circumstances, and indicate no radical difference, far less radical inferiority, of nature. Let us
consider women only as they already are, or as they are known to have been; and the capacities
which they have already practically shown” (Mill 5). None of this was to say women are above men
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across the board. Women, like men, were to be judged individually by what they have shown they
have the ability to do. A man could be below a woman and vice versa. Harriet Taylor and her
husband, John Stuart Mill, ended up not being very interested in the idea of sex because they
believed that “it gave men pleasure at the women’s expense” (Rose 124). This was the view of many
feminists in the 1800s. Birth control was actually frowned upon by women because “it would
remove one of women’s few defenses against sex –the fear of pregnancy- and would make them
vulnerable to male sexuality more of the time” (Rose 124). This alone showed that it was more an
act of power over women and further subjection than a mutual exchange. The fact that this was the
primary reason for sex, along with offspring, makes it no wonder that it was seen as a negative by
feminists of the time. This is how deeply engrained in the society male dominance, and
subsequently, female subjection, was. Many didn’t even notice that they were degrading women and
keeping them down. Mill wrote, “And men of the cultivated classes are often not aware how deeply
it sinks into the immense majority of male minds” (Mill 6). This is in no way taking the blame off of
the men. This is simply blaming society as a whole. Another couple with a different view of
marriage was George Henry Lewes and Marian Evans (George Eliot). Eliot’s need to use a male
name to publish her work in the first example of suppression of females. Regardless, her work
became a success, and she and Lewes were happily married. Lewes was married to Agnes Jervis
when he met George Eliot. Jervis had been cheating on him with another man and so, due to his
rationalist ideology, Lewes was still living with her but simply believed that they were no longer
married. He still provided for her children with the other man and for his own as well. Lewes was a
man who believed that her rights to being with who she wanted to be with were as legitimate as his
own, so he “refused to be outraged” by her lack of fidelity. At the time “it was understood that a man
had the right to exclusive enjoyment, sexually speaking, of his wife” (Rose 205). Lewes’s ideology,
although it must have been tough for him at times, was evolved compared to contemporary English
law. When he began seeing Eliot, he was still a married man, but Eliot stayed with him nonetheless.
A reading of Eliot’s behavior revealed that she was “always requiring someone to lean upon,
preferring what has hitherto been considered the stronger sex, to the other and more impressible.
She was not fitted to stand alone” (Rose 210). Regardless of whether or not she was dependant, this
reading stated that she was dependant on “what has hitherto been considered the stronger sex.” I
would assume that Lewes never considered himself such when in her company. Overall, these two
men had a very different view of marriage and the women with whom they were married. The
rights of women really mattered to these couples and to another entire population of the Victorian
era who believed in equality.
Mill was obviously passionate when it came to this topic. He not only pointed out society’s flaws
when it came to the subjection of women, but he also devised a plan for how to improve greatly. He
wrote in The Subjection of Women, “All that education and civilisation are doing to efface the
influences on character of the law of force, and replace them by those of justice, remains merely on
the surface, as long as the citadel of the enemy is not attacked. The principle of the modern
movement in morals and politics, is that conduct, and conduct alone, entitles to respect: that not
what men are, but what they do, constitutes their claim to deference; that, above all, merit, and not
birth, is the only rightful claim to power and authority” (Mill 7). Mill suggests that women should be
judged, like men, on conduct and conduct alone. No capable woman should ever lose a job to a man
less capable. Someone’s worth should not be determined at birth but rather by the actions and
choices made in the life he or she lives. “When we consider the positive evil caused to the
disqualified half of the human race by their disqualification” Mill writes, “first in the loss of the most
inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next in the weariness, disappointment,
and profound dissatisfaction with life, which are so often the substitute for it; one feels that among
all the lessons which men require for carrying on the struggle against the inevitable imperfections
of their lot on earth, there is no lesson which they more need, than not to add to the evils which
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nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one another” (Mill 7). John Stuart Mill
is saying that if we realize the damage we cause everyone by writing off half of the people in the
world, we would see that we don’t need to damage the human race more on top of the already
existing imperfections we have. With the exception of his view of sex being a driving force in female
subjection, most of Mill’s views were acted upon in time. This is not to say that now society has
reached some sort of utopian state when it comes to equality. It hasn’t. However, we’re a lot closer
than we were when John Stuart Mill was writing his essay or George Eliot was publishing under a
male name. Many of Mill’s ideas could still be valuable to parts of our culture where equality is not
as close as it is here. Only time can will tell us how long we have to fully realizing equality.
MODERNISM ARRIVES
Causation and Justice in King Lear and Hap
Chelsea Riordan
Modernism was an artistic and intellectual movement that blossomed in the late 1800s and peaked
in the 1940s. Modernists, like many Victorians, had lost their faith in God, but unlike their
predecessors, the Modernists also found it futile to try to fill the void that religion left with love or
anything else. Instead, they abandoned form, no longer finding purpose in following the rules set in
place by a defunct belief system. While this opened up the doors to hundreds of new ways for artists
to express themselves, these bold creative experiments were born from feelings of deep frustration,
anxiety, and disaffection caused by staring into the inky, meaningless void that was life. Even before
Modernism properly took off, what would come to be accepted as Modernist philosophies and ideas
existed. Thomas Hardy’s short verse Hap (1866) was several decades ahead of the game, and
William Shakespeare’s King Lear was Modernism’s senior by several centuries. Still, both contained
sentiments that were markedly Modernist. Hardy’s poem articulated his resentment towards life’s
lack of objective moral structure and the hollow frivolity of existence in general, while King Lear
toyed with the Renaissance’s concept of The Wheel of Fortune, though several changes were made
to the original rules, making the play’s representation of cosmic justice much more nuanced.
Thomas Hardy’s Hap, though published almost forty years after if was first penned, was well ahead
of its time. Not only did it portray misery that aligned with both Victorian and Modernist angst in no
uncertain terms, but it also stated flat-out that there was no God, as if this was a proven fact.
“If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”
Then I would bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller thanI
Had willed and meted the tears I shed.
But not so” (Hardy 1-9).
Even worse than the fact that he was suffering greatly, Hardy thought, was the fact that his misery’s
presence was completely devoid of any reason or rhyme. Had there been a God who knowingly
inflicted pain upon him, he would have at least been comforted to know that the pain served some
purpose, even if that purpose was to feed the malicious Creator’s perverse sadism. However, Hardy
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put no stock in God or religion, meaning that the proverbial cross he bore was just as trivial as
every other aspect of his life, and the extreme negativity that he lived with on a daily basis was
stuck to him out of sheer happenstance. This made his dolor all the worse, because to him, the only
thing worse than suffering was suffering for no reason. Acknowledging the fact that something so
powerful and restricting as his feelings of desolation was insignificant only emphasized the
insignificance of his existence, thus aggravating his already gloomy outlook. This poem was sheerly
Nihilistic in its insistence that all happenings on Earth and in the Universe were totally random and
meaningless, and that life and all of its intricacies was nothing more than some grand cosmic milk
spill of which no real sense could be made.
In King Lear, the validity of both astrology and religion proper came into question. In the first act,
Edmund challenged the notion that the circumstances of his conception determined his personality.
“My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail and my nativity was under Ursa
Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am had the
maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing” (Shakespeare 1.2.128). The truth is
that this assertion could not necessarily be proven or disproven because there’s no real way to see
what Edmund would have been like if he’d been born under different circumstances. However,
there was no further evidence within the play’s narrative that pointed to astrology being a
substantial factor in earnestly affecting anyone’s life, and on top of that, Edmund was written as one
of the most intelligent, if not the most intelligent, characters in the whole play, so despite his
malignant disposition, Shakespeare would have likely put some stock in Edmund’s personal
philosophies. Edgar’s experiences with gods and devils mirrored Edmund’s considerations of
astrology. In one scene, Edgar tricks his recently-blinded father into believing that he’d been led to a
high bluff from which he could jump to end his own life. Instead, the eyeless Gloucester was in a
perfectly flat field, and instead of falling to his death, he bellyflopped into the grass. Edgar then
convinced his father that he had indeed landed at the bottom of a bluff, but he’d been saved by the
gods and originally escorted by a demon.
“As I stood here below methought his eyes
Were two full moons. He had a thousand noses,
Horns whelked and waved like the enraged sea.
It was some fiend. Therefore, thou happy father,
Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours
Of men’s impossibilities. have preserved thee” (Shakespeare 4.6.72).
With his eyes recently extracted, Gloucester believed this story, gullible as ever. In this scene Edgar
unofficially made his atheism known to the audience. If he’d believed in such demons and gods, he
would have prayed for their help rather than take action, especially when that action involved
blatantly lying about their handiwork. Since the beginning of the play, Edgar’s character developed
greatly, and he became just as proactive and wiley as his younger sibling. In this play, no higher
powers took an active role in affecting change. Whether they existed or not was never specified, but
even if they did, they were highly passive and inattentive. All of the characters were left to their
own devices, and human intervention was the only thing that set the plot in motion.
As stated previously, Hardy’s Hap took a staunchly atheistic stance and subscribed to a Nihilistic
philosophy, because without a God pulling strings behind the scenes, cosmic justice could not exist.
There was only one thing that Hardy seemed to consider remotely analogous to true justice.
“--Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan...” (Hardy 11-12).
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Unlike the word “god” at the beginning of the poem, the first letters of both “time” and “causality”
are capitalized, making them both proper nouns within the context of the poem. This denotes that
the passing of time and chance were Hardy’s replacements for God, though of course, it was a bit of
a poor man’s substitute. Unlike God, Time and Crass Casualties were not conscious and therefore
could not make weighty ethical decisions, set a universal truth, or dole out proper punishments.
“Crass Casualty” was not cited as proper justice so much as it was one-thousand cosmic monkeys
bashing away at one-thousand cosmic typewriters. However, with Time’s passage, everyone and
everything eventually would cease to be. Death would act as a great equalizer. While that would not
be as just as the wicked receiving proper punishments and the good receiving rewards, it would
resemble justice, as everyone returns to the soil in death.
Despite its bleak resolution, the occurrences in King Lear seemed to imply more reason and rhyme
than Hap did, but of course the bar for this was set extremely low. In this play, Shakespeare built off
of the concept of The Wheel of Fortune, a Renaissance theory that explained how fate functioned.
Simply, the idea was that, much like any point on a giant spinning wheel, any and every human’s
luck would rise, peak, fall to rock bottom, and begin to rise again. For the vast majority of King
Lear’s cast, The Wheel of Fortune concept applied. A once powerful king degenerated into madness,
his two eldest daughters rose to power in his absence and later died horribly. The Duke of
Gloucester and his would-be heir were deceived and overthrown by his bastard son Edmund, who
claimed his Dukedom, only to lose it again and perish. Every major character in King Lear turned
full circle at least once (or else traveled steadily downward from their high points), building on and
later losing whatever level of luck with which they’d started. On his deathbed, Edmund even
referenced The Wheel of Fortune, stating that “The wheel is come full circle, I am here”
(Shakespeare 5.3.173). However, pinning King Lear’s plot entirely on The Wheel of Fortune would
be an overly-simplistic explanation. The Wheel concept ensured that there was order in this world
but not necessarily that there was justice. Nigh-saintly characters like Cordelia spent the majority of
the play in misery, and even the most diabolical personalities, such as Edmund, had enough
redeeming qualities to earn them some sympathy, and Edmund’s awful “punishment” was not
entirely deserved. Even his brother Edgar, one of the most morally white personalities in the play
and one of only two major characters to survive to the end, received a questionable helping of
cosmic justice. Edgar received the Horatio treatment which, on the positive side gave him total
control over Lear’s kingdom, but all of his loved ones, family, enemies, and associates all died
miserably at his feet at the same time, leaving him disillusioned and totally alone. Another
contradiction pitted towards The Wheel of Fortune was the idea that there was no real lowest point
on the wheel, and that, no matter how bad things got, they could always get worse. Edgar had to
learn this the hard way. Believing himself to have hit rock bottom, Edgar made a heartfelt speech
about his belief that there was nowhere to go but up from his low point. However, irony is no friend
to the optimist, and directly afterwards, Edgar learned that his beloved father had been attacked,
mutilated, and blinded.
“Oh gods! Who is’t can say ‘I am the worst?’
I am worse than e’er I was...
And worse I may be yet; the worst is not
So long as we can say ‘This is the worst’” (Shakespeare 4.1.28-30).
Edgar’s faith in a structured system of fate and justice was shattered in this scene, and he realized
that life and times were not nearly as simple as a turning wheel. In fiddling with the Wheel of
Fortune concept, Shakespeare gave his play a simple structure and a powerful motif. By breaking
out of the bare structure he’d established, Shakespeare posed big questions regarding fate and gave
his characters’ lives depth and complexity.
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Despite being pre-Modern, both Hap and King Lear matched the movement’s bleak messages and
harsh philosophies. There were no gods or conscious higher powers present in either work. In Hap,
this meant that every facet of life was utterly meaningless. In King Lear, The Wheel of Fortune
concept was in play up to an extent. Because of this, the storyline’s turns of events weren’t entirely
random or unregulated, but at bottom, only the characters had any real influence on their “fates.”
Both works were highly Modernist in that they tackled the harsh realities of living in a Godless
universe.
Epiphanies in “The Sisters” and “An Encounter”
Amanda Crausman
In “The Sisters” and “An Encounter,” James Joyce draws parallels between stories of transformative
childhood experiences and the culture of alienation and vulnerability perpetuated by Modernism.
Although the concept of “epiphany” generally connotes a positive illumination about the human
condition, Joyce’s protagonists are instead enlightened toward the harsh realities of the world. In
“The Sisters” an adolescent boy faces the death of a Priest with whom he had shared a close, albeit
somewhat ambiguous, relationship. Similarly, “An Encounter” details how the meeting between two
young boys and a strange older man contributes to the protagonist’s loss of faith in reality. While
the “The Sisters” is pervaded with a certain weighty seriousness throughout the text, “An
Encounter” demonstrates a more radical shift in tone and mood throughout the action of the
narrative. The strong sense of spiritual loss evident in both stories is a testament to the central
unifying characteristic of Modernist literature: the horrifying realization that there is no God and it
is up to the individual to find a reason for living.
The cloud of disorder and discord that hovers above “The Sisters” is not unlike the clash of
seemingly wrong notes in “The Rite of Spring.” The opening statement establishes the tone of the
piece: “There was no hope for him at this time” (1). The thematic lack of hope once again
emphasizes the dark heart of the period. The story begins with a critical epiphany surrounding the
narrator’s perception of life and death: “He had often said to me: ‘I am not long for this world,’ and I
had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true” (1). Upon consideration that the Priest
symbolizes God, the previous passage can be interpreted as an admission that the Victorian God
could not possibly exist within Modern precepts. Initially, the protagonist becomes transfixed by
his own fear and despair:
I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my
ears, like the world gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism.
But now is sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It
filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly
work. (1)
As the story continues, the protagonist confronts his feelings about the Priest and readers are given
clues about the peculiar relationship from Old Cotter: “ ‘No I would not say he was exactly…but
there was something queer…there was something uncanny about him. I’ll tell you my opinion…” (1).
It can be inferred from Cotter’s hesitance to name an explicit flaw and the manner in which he
dances around language that the Priest is thought be a homosexual: “‘I have my own theory about
it,’ he said. ‘I think he was one of those…peculiar cases…But it’s hard to say…’ (1). Cotter discusses
Father’s Flynn’s relationship with the narrator and stresses the importance of a childhood filled
with experience: ‘I wouldn’t like children of mine,” he said, “To have too much to say to a man like
that[…]‘What I mean is,” said old Cotter, ‘it’s bad for children. My idea is let a young lad run around
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and play with young lads of his own age and not be…Am I right, Jack?’” (2). The narrator mentally
defends the Priest during the conversation: “ ‘I crammed my mouth with stirabout for fear I might
give utterance to my anger. Tiresome old red-nosed imbecile!’” (2). As he drifts off to sleep, the
narrator “puzzle[s] to extract meaning from his unfinished sentences” (2). The image of the Priest
clearly frightens him: “In the dark of my room I imagined that I saw again the heavy grey face of the
paralytic. I drew the blankets over my head and tried to think of Christmas. But the grey face still
followed me” (2). The conversation with Cotter and this nightmare contribute to the narrator’s
epiphany regarding Father Flynn: “The reading of the guard persuaded me that he was dead and I
was disturbed to find myself at check” (3). Flynn’s death frees him from the constraints of faith: “I
felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as I had been freed from
something by his death” (3). The narrator feels guilty for his feelings because “[Flynn] had taught
[him] a great deal” (3). For a time the narrator found truth and purpose in the words of religion:
“His questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the Church
which I had always regarded as the simplest acts” (4). Later, the narrator visits Father Flynn at the
house of mourning. He notices the imperfect details of humanity alongside the corpse of someone
who once seemed perfect to him:
I pretended to pray but I could not gather my thoughts because the old
woman’s mutterings distracted me. I noted how clumsily her skirt was
hooked at the back and how the heels of her cloth boots were trodden
down all to one side. The fancy came to me that old priest was smiling
as he lay there in his coffin.
(4)
The simple passage is central to the theme of the story: Life is ugly and flawed, but it’s all that we
have. In the Priest’s final moments on Earth, he seems to understand that his life as a man of the
cloth has been in vain: “And what do you think but there he was, sitting up by himself in the dark in
his confession-box, wide-awake and laughing-like softly to himself? (7). The death-bed revelation
mirrors Kurtz’s infamous “The horror! The horror” in Heart of Darkness. The narrator intuitively
understands that he too must find his own meaning in life before it’s too late: “I knew that the old
priest was lying still in his coffin as we had seen him, solemn and truculent in death, and idle chalice
on his breast” (7). It is within this ugly world that the protagonist finds meaning in life; he finds
freedom in the death of his God and the realization that life’s meaning can only be derived from the
unvarnished experience.
“An Encounter” addresses the contrast between the Platonic World of Being that exists within the
mind of children and the imperfect World of Becoming that exists before our eyes. At the beginning
of the story, the children are distracted from reality by adventure fantasies. Joyce stresses the
preservation of childhood innocence for as long as possible: “The adventures related tin the
literature of the Wild West were remote from my nature but, at least, they opened the doors of
escape” (8). The narrator then realizes that true adventure must derive from experience rather than
books:
The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine
of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But
real adventures, I reflected to not happen to people who remain at home: they must
be sought abroad. (4)
This epiphany precedes his first dark experience of humanity. Initially, the protagonist and his
schoolmate spend a fun bunk-day shirking responsibility on the streets of Dublin: “School and home
seemed to recede from us and their influences upon us seemed to wane” (11). However, the boys
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eventually find themselves in a field with a strange elderly gentleman: “He stopped when he came
level with us and bade us good-day. We answered him and he sat down beside us on the slope
slowly and with great care” (12). They discuss books and then “totties.” The narrator then becomes
frightened by the Old Man’s monologue: “He said that my friend was a very rough boy and asked did
he get whipped often at school[…] He began to speak on the subject of chastising boys[…]He said
that when boys were that kind they ought to be whipped and well whipped” (13). The Old Man’s
speech eventually sends the narrator over the edge: “
He said that if ever he found a boy talking to girls or having a girl for a sweetheart he
would whip him and whip him; and that would teach him not to be talking to girls. And
if a boy had a girl for a sweetheart and told lies about it then he would give him such a
whipping as not boy ever got in this world. He said that there was nothing in this
world he would like so well as that. He described to me how he would love that, he
said, better than anything in this world; and his voice, as he led me monotonously
through the mystery, grew most affectionate and seemed to plead with me that I
should understand him. (14)
The narrator’s first real world experience leaves a sour taste in his mouth:
I waited till his monologue paused again. Then I stood up abruptly. Lest I should betray
my agitation I delayed a few moments pretending to fix my shoe properly and then,
saying that I was obliged to go, I bade him good-day. I went up the slope calmly but my
heart was beating quickly with fear that he would seize me by the ankles. When I
reached the top of the slope I turned round and, without looking at him, called loudly
across the field:
“Murphy!”
My voice had an accent of forced bravery in it and I was ashamed of my paltry
agitation. I had to call the name again before Mahony saw me and hallooed in answer.
How my heart beat as he came running across the field to me! He ran as if to bring me
aid. And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little. (14)
“An Encounter” reads almost as a parable of the adage “Be careful what you wish for.” The narrator
mistakenly presumes that life experiences also possess the wonder and whimsy of fantastical
adventures. In “An Encounter” the protagonist is pulled from the World of Being that exists within
the sheltered adventures of youth into the World Becoming by the ugliness of a real human
experience.
In both “The Sisters” and “An Encounter,” Joyce uses the purity of childhood and the loss of that
innocence as a metaphor for the transition from the Victorian Era to the Modern Period. The
narrator’s disillusionment surrounding Father Flynn in “The Sisters” parallels with the
protagonist’s fear of the Old Man in “An Encounter.” In both cases Joyce utilizes the figure of the
elderly man as a symbol of God and power. Thus, in “The Sisters” the loss of God is a central motif.
While the story does relate a sense of loss and despair surrounding the Priest’s death, the narrator’s
central epiphany regards the experience of freedom following the death of his mentor. In “An
Encounter” the narrator immediately regards his elder with respect and reverence. He is
hypnotized by the peculiarity of the meeting. As in “The Sisters” the narrator’s paralytic hypnosis
roots him in the experience and cages him between inaction and action. The inability to tear oneself
from such a conversation can be interpreted as the inability to extricate oneself from the shackles of
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religion. However, the spell does eventually break like Priest’s Chalice in “The Sisters”: “It was that
chalice he broke…That was the beginning of it. Of course, they say it was all right, that it contained
nothing. I mean. But still…They say it was the boy’s fault” (7). The symbolic destruction of religion
and God contributes to critical epiphanies in both pieces: the realization that the world is not a
pretty place. In the first story, the narrator is freed by the realization that the world is not as
beautiful as religion would lead one to believe; in the second story, the narrator is horrified to learn
that the real world is far stranger and scarier than the world of fantasy. In “The Sisters” and “An
Encounter” Joyce allegorizes the collective loss of faith in God facing the modernists through stories
of spiritual and personal epiphanies.
Faraway Places in An Encounter, Araby, and Eveline
Amanda R.
In James Joyce’s An Encounter, Araby, and Eveline, the author utilizes mysterious qualities of
faraway places to facilitate turning points in the plot. The characters seek freedom outside the
confines of routine daily life in Dublin and find solace through fantastical imaginings. While Joyce
intentionally advances the age and maturity level of the protagonist over the course of the three
stories, the epiphany in each narrative bears the same soul-shaking significance and seriousness as
the last. In An Encounter a young boy journeys to a seemingly faraway field and learns that the
whimsical world of his daydreams does not exist in real life. Araby relates the tale of a young man
who experiences the true meaning of “Modern love”: he realizes that nothing is as “real” as it exists
in one’s own mind. Eveline details a young woman’s futile attempt to escape unhappiness through
love. The three stories work wonderfully together when read as a unit: Joyce examines childhood,
the loss of innocence, the dichotomy between spirituality and reality, and the classic Platonic
conflict between the world as we imagine it to be and the harsh world that exists around us.
Similarly, the characters’ respective pilgrimages to new places—in reality and in their imaginings—
further emphasize the sense of confinement they feel both in their lives and in this life.
In Araby the conflict between the narrator’s expectation and experience of a faraway land heralds a
critical shift in his perspective. At the beginning of the narration, Joyce includes the now familiar
image of childhood fun and games:
The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the
lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played
till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play
brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the
gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark
dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odourous
stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from
the buckled harness. (15)
This passage juxtaposes the lightheartedness of innocent play with a realistic and somewhat
grotesque view of the streets. Thus, the previous excerpt parallels the structure of the analyzed
pieces: the fragile lacquer of happiness needs only a few light taps before it fractures and bleeds
black. Speaking of biting internal pain, the narrator then describes what it means to be young and in
love (infatuated):
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Or if Mangan’s sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea we
watched her from our shadow peer up and own the street. We waited to see
whether she would remain or go in and, if she remained, we left our shadow and
walked up to Managan’s steps resignedly. She was waiting for us, her figure
defined by the light from the half-opened door. Her brother always teased her
before he obeyed and I stood by the railings looking at her. Her dress swung as she
moved her body and the soft rope her hair tossed from side to side.
Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door. The blind
was pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen. When she
came out on the doorstep my heart leaped. I ran to the hall, seized my books and
followed her. I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came near
the point at which our ways diverged, I quickened my pace nad passed her. This
happened morning after morning. I had never spoken to her, except for a few
casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood. (16)
There is no denying the narrator’s powerful romantic feelings for his first crush; in many ways, he is
truly in love with her. Joyce uses the romantic fictions created in our minds as a metaphor for the
divergence between fantasy and reality—between faith and Modernism. The intensity of the young
boy’s love is further underscored by the religious ferocity of his quest:
Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday
evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We
walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid
the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the
barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you
about O’Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises
converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely
though a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and
praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not
tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I
thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if
I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a
harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires. (16)
The narrator seeks the love of the girl: the quest for her affection has taken on the mythical
proportions of the search for the Holy Grail. While it is admittedly dramatic for a pre-pubescent kid
to compare puppy love to frenzied religious devotion, Joyce imbues the text with such weighty
importance that one easily suspends disbelief and forgets the immediate circumstances of the
narration. After seeking spiritual counsel from a room endowed with the energy of the dead priest
(well, we certainly haven’t seen this before), the narrator hears the call to embark on a grand and
sweeping adventure:
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All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to
slip from them, I pressed the pals of my hands together until they trembled,
murmuring: “O love! O love!” many times.
At last she spoke to me. When she addressed the first words to me I was so
confused that I did not know what to answer. She asked me was I going to Araby. I
forgot whether I answered yes or no. It would be a splendid bazaar, she said she
would love to go.”
“And why can’t you?” I asked.
While she spoke she turned a silver bracelet round and round her wrist. She could
not go, she said, because there would be a retreat that week in her convent. Her
brother and two other boys were fighting for their caps and I was alone at the
railings. She held one of the spikes, bowing her head towards me. The light from
the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that
rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing. It fell over one side of her
dress and caught the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease.
“It’s well for you,” she said.
“If I go,” I said, “I will bring you something” (16-17).
The narrator then focuses the fire of his passion toward journeying to Araby: “What innumerable
follies laid waste my waking and sleeping thoughts after that evening! I wished to annihilate the
tedious intervening days. I chafed against the work of school.” (17). Not unlike the angsty senior
eager to begin her life outside the suffocating fabric of the ivy-league polo set (and the Polo set), the
protagonist has heard his calling and dreams of the bazaar: “I had hardly any patience with the
serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child’s play,
ugly and monotonous child’s play” (17). Although the narrator struggles to scrounge up the funds
to accommodate his travels, he eventually makes it to the fair and is disappointed by what he finds:
I could not find any sixpenny entrance and, fearing that the bazaar would be closed, I
passed in quickly through a turnstile, handing a shilling to a weary-looking man. I found
myself in a big hall girdled at half its height by a gallery. Nearly all the stalls were closed
and the greater part of the hall was in darkness. I recognized a silence like that which
pervades a church after a service. I walked into the center of the bazaar timidly. A few
people were gathered about the stalls which were still open. Before a curtain, over which
the words Café Chantant were written in coloured lamps, two men were counting money
on a salver. I listened to the fall of the coins.
Remembering with difficulty why I had come I went over to one of the stalls and
examined porcelain vases and flowered tea-sets. At the door of the stall a young lady was
talking and laughing with two young gentlemen. (19)
Regardless of his valiant efforts, the protagonist arrives far too late to fulfill his quest. Joyce’s
comparison of the empty bazaar to an abandoned church reinforces the many complex themes and
adds continuity to the story. The narrator walks through the empty aisles and listens to the
saleswoman flirt with the boys. In the context of the church simile, the woman can be interpreted as
46
an Eve character bent on corrupting young men. In a way his perceptions of her actions do just
that:
I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in her
wares seem the more real. Then I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of
the bazaar. I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket. I heard a
voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out. The upper part of the hall
was now completely dark.
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and
my eyes burned with anguish and anger. (19)
Although Joyce is a prose writer, every sentence and every word is chosen with the care and
concern of a poet. Each carefully planned phrase in the passage above and throughout the entirety
of Araby is meaningful and terribly important. The mere phrase “to make my interest in her wares
seem more real” enforces the theme that real life will always be more disappointing than the
fictions we spin. The clanking of the coins and the descent into darkness symbolizes the narrator’s
understanding that despite his powerful spiritual quest for love, he is powerless before the true
gods of money and vanity. Furthermore, his exchange with the flirtatious saleswoman forces the
narrator reevaluate his love’s desires; was their conversation merely an attempt to extract a gift
from him, or did she truly appreciate the passion of his devotion? The conclusion of the story
suggests that the narrator has had an epiphany about the nature of human interaction and how the
world works. He grasps that perhaps even his own desires were not entirely pure and spiritual but
instead driven by a more sinister vanity. As he walks through the black abyss, harsh tears of bitter
realization christen the narrator an adult. At the conclusion of Araby, the protagonist finally
recognizes that he is another one of the many unremarkable and disgusting creatures that dares to
walk the earth.
The following story, Eveline, examines a parallel loss of innocence and faith in one’s dreams from
the viewpoint of a female narrator. Like the previous story, the author opens with images of
childhood: “The children of the avenue used to play together in that field—the Devines, the Waters,
the Dunns, little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters. Ernest, however, never played;
he was too grown up” (20). This passage differs from the others in that the narrator relates her
childhood experience as a memory rather than within the immediate action of the story: “That was
a long time ago…Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her home” (20).
Eveline is a
(18-19)
hardworking girl who nevertheless yearns to leave the mundane toil of her daily life behind. She
imagines the world she will see once she shakes the dust of small town living off her work boots:
What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out that she had
run away with a fellow? Say that she was a fool, perhaps…
…But in her new home, in a distant unknown country, it would not be like
that. Then she would be married—she, Eveline. People would treat her with
respect then. She would not be treated as her mother had been. Even now,
though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her
father’s violence. She knew that it was that that had given her the
palpitations. When they were growing up he had never gone for her, like he
used to go for Harry and Ernest, because she was a girl; but latterly he had
begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for her dead
mother’s sake. And now she had nobody to protect her. (21)
47
Throughout her life Eveline feels she has been held back from happiness by poverty and her father’s
mistreatment:
She always gave her entire wages—seven shillings—and Harry always sent
up what he could but the trouble was to get any money from her father. He
said she used to squander the money, and she had no head, that he wasn’t
going to give her his hard-earned money to throw about the streets, and
much more, for he was usually fairly bad on Saturday night. (21)
The narrator’s ambiguity surrounding this “bad” behavior on Saturday nights suggests
psychological and possibly also physical and sexual abuse. Although their relationship is tense and
uncertain to the readers, it is apparent that she is also tied to her home by a strong sense of family
obligation:
She had hard work to keep the house together and to see that the two
young children who had been left to her charge went to school regularly
and got their meals regularly. It was hard work—a hard life—but now
that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.
(21)
Returning again to the metaphor of the second semester senior, the narrator has begun to feel the
sharp pang of nostalgia about the figurative “devil she knows.” While she is excited and driven by
the prospect of leaving home, the uncertainty of life outside the comfort-bubble of familiar lands
permits her to fondly remember life events that were likely not so pleasant. Nevertheless, she
daydreams about life in a faraway place with her young love:
She was about to explore another life with Frank. Frank was very kind,
manly, open-hearted. She was to go away with him by the night-boat to
be his wife and to live with him in Buenos Ayres where he had a home
waiting for her. (21)
As if it were ripped from the pages of a fairytale, Eveline has the chance to marry her handsome
prince and live happily ever after. However, the protagonist feels unable to leave Dublin because of
a promise she made to her mother:
(18-19)that it should come that very night to remind her of the promise to her
Strange
mother, her promise to keep the home together as long as she could. She
remembered the last night of her mother’s illness; she was again in the close
dark room at the other side of the hall and outside she heard a melancholy air
of Italy…
…As she mused the pitiful vision of her mother’s life laid its spell on the very
quick of her being—that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final
craziness. She trembled as she heard again her mother’s voice saying
constantly with foolish insistence:
(18-19)
“Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!” (22)
Eveline understands that the “commonplace sacrifices” of daily life contributed to her mother’s
eventual craziness. She questions if she too will experience the same pain as her beloved mother
did on her deathbed. The frantic Gaelic plea, “The end of pleasure is pain!” rings in Eveline’s ears as
she decides between a future founded in uncertainty and predicated on her own happiness and
48
(18-19)
what she believes she is obligated to do. Eveline is not capable of dealing with the implications of
this memory so she once again escapes to dreamland:
She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would
save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why
should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his
arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her. (22)
Just as the protagonist in Araby believed salvation would result from his quest for the Holy Grail of
love and bazaar trinkets, Eveline believes that the life she has concocted in her mind will deliver her
from the evil that contributed to her mother’s decline. When it finally comes time for the narrator to
travel to the faraway land with Frank, she is rendered physically and mentally immobile:
He held her hand and she knew that he was speaking to her, saying something
about the passage over and over again. The station was full of soldiers with brown
baggages. Through the wide doors of the sheds she caught a glimpse of the black
mass of the boat, lying beside the quay wall, with illumined portholes. She
answered nothing. She felt her cheek pale and cold and, out of a maze of distress,
she prayed to God to direct her, to show her what was her duty. The boat blew a
long mournful whistle into the mist. If she went, to-morrow she would be on the
sea with Frank, steaming towards Buenos Ayres. Their passage had been booked.
Could she still draw back after all he had done for her? Her distress awoke a
nausea in her body and she kept moving her lips in silent fervent prayer…
…All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them:
he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing.
“Come!”
No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas
she sent a cry of anguish!
(18-19)
“Eveline! Evvy!”
He rushed beyond the barrier and called her to follow. He was shouted at to go
on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless
animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition. (23)
Eveline is paralyzed by the contrast between reality and the distant land of her imaginings. She
used the mental picture of Buenos Ayres and her life with Frank as an escape from daily life and
likely never entertained what that reality would actually look like. She prays to God for guidance,
and she hears nothing but the cold metal tang of the boat whistle. At the end of the story, she leaves
her fiancé with no look of love or farewell or recognition because she never truly loved the real
Frank in the first place. Her paralysis is caused by the realization that real life can never compare
with fantasy and the guilt incited by the idea of leaving her family behind in order to chase an
unattainable dragon.
In An Encounter, Araby and Eveline, Joyce uses parallel themes and images to express the idea that
romantic pilgrimage and faraway lands are as fantastical and intangible as altered memories of
49
childhood innocence. The three stories all include strong examples of childhood and daydream: An
Encounter juxtaposes the narrator’s Wild West playground games with the horrifying adventure in
the field, Araby contrasts the protagonist’s perception of love with the selfishness of humanity, and
Eveline challenges a young girl’s escape fantasy by forcing her to confront her dream. The
description of innocence and the candor of youth prior to the epiphanies encourages readers to
recall their own childhoods. The bubbly nostalgia that will invariably arise about some aspect of
said innocence is as distant and faraway as Araby seems to the young narrator. Joyce emphasizes
the point that once innocence is lost, you can never go back there: no matter how hard you try, you
will never recapture what was taken from you. The theme “loss of innocence” is really a fancy way
of saying “the first time the world broke you.” Much like the Modernists in their struggle to find
purpose in life without God, this was probably the first time you really had to stare humanity in the
eyes and face the world alone. It is a frightening experience will either destroy or strengthen the
spirit depending on one’s ability to push through the initial paralysis. The characters in Joyce’s work
recognize that neither God nor money nor love nor family will bring the same bliss that existed
before it become glaringly apparent that the world is fundamentally a shitty place. If the boy in An
Encounter, the young man in Araby, and Evvy in Eveline can transcend their paralysis without the
security of false escapes, only then can they define what makes life worth living. Although
Modernism is initially horrifying and immobilizing (as our buddy Kurtz said in Heart of Darkness,
“The horror! The horror!”), learning to climb the rock face of reality without faulty ropes and
harnesses probably isn’t such a bad thing after all.
Counterparts
Chelsea Riordan
All of the stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners can be compared and contrasted with one another in a
number of ways. Because of this, it is interesting to note that one of the middlemost stories in that
collection is entitled ‘Counterparts.’ The Oxford Dictionary defines the term “counterparts” in one of
two ways: “A person or thing extremely like another” and “A natural complement or equivalent.”
Both definitions come into play throughout Joyce’s book but the latter more so than the former.
Comparing the stories centered around younger characters with those focusing on adults especially
highlights a web of parallels. Many comparisons can be drawn to connect characters and stories, but
they tend to complement and contrast with one another more often than directly coinciding.
The story Counterparts deals with the life of a perpetually frustrated office worker, Mr. Farrington.
From the very first sentence, adjectives are repeated as their equivalent adverbs within the same
sentences: furious and furiously (Joyce 55); heavy and heavily (Joyce 55); and furtive and furtively
(Joyce 56-57). It’s also noted several times that, in order to leave his work station, Farrington had to
lift up and pass by a literal counter. These devices already enforce the “counterparts” motif. Beyond
that, our pathetic main character is constantly referred to as an extremely large, powerful looking
man, while his employer, Mr. Alleyne, is described as highly fragile. “Mr. Alleyne, a little man
wearing gold-rimmed glasses on a clean-shaven face, shot his head up over a pile of documents. The
head itself was so pink and hairless it seemed like a large egg reposing on the papers” (Joyce 55).
Alleyne is compared to an egg several times throughout the story, accentuating his brittle
appearance. Despite their physical attributes, however, Farrington is forced to bite back on the
swirling torrent of anger building up inside of him while Alleyne is free to chastise and verbally
abuse his employee to his heart’s content, complete with sarcastic mimicry. “The tirade continued:
it was so bitter and violent that [Farrington] could hardly restrain his fist from descending upon the
50
head of the manakin before him: ‘I know nothing about any other two letters,’ he said stupidly. ‘You- know-- nothing. Of course you know nothing,’ said Mr. Alleyne” (Joyce 58). If Farrington and
Allayne actually were to physically spar, the latter wouldn’t have a prayer, but on a psychological
and hierarchical level, his underling is very clearly outmatched. In that way, these two men are the
counterparts cited in the title. However, there are multiple sets, as shown by Farrington’s blustery
return home. “‘Where’s your mother?’ ‘She's out at the chapel.’ ‘That's right.... Did she think of
leaving any dinner for me?’ ‘Yes, pa. I --’ ‘Light the lamp. What do you mean by having the place in
darkness? Are the other children in bed?’ The man sat down heavily on one of the chairs while the
little boy lit the lamp. He began to mimic his son's flat accent, saying half to himself: ‘At the chapel.
At the chapel, if you please!’ When the lamp was lit he banged his fist on the table and
shouted: ’What's for my dinner?’ ‘I'm going... to cook it, pa,’ said the little boy. The man jumped up
furiously and pointed to the fire. ‘On that fire! You let the fire out! By God, I'll teach you to do that
again!’ He took a step to the door and seized the walking-stick which was standing behind it. ‘I'll
teach you to let the fire out!’ he said, rolling up his sleeve in order to give his arm free play. The little
boy cried ‘O, pa!’ and ran whimpering round the table, but the man followed him and caught him by
the coat. The little boy looked about him wildly but, seeing no way of escape, fell upon his knees.
‘Now, you'll let the fire out the next time!’ said the man striking at him vigorously with the stick.
‘Take that, you little whelp!’” (Joyce 63). Here, Farrington displaces his violent feelings towards his
boss onto his young son, Tom, even going so far as to do a taunting impression of him the way
Alleyne had done earlier. This is the second set of counterparts: Tom is to Farrington as Farrington
is to Alleyne. This creates a chain of anger displacement, which can probably be traced up to Mr.
Crosbie, Alleyne’s supervisor, and beyond.
A Painful Case, the eleventh story in Dubliners, revolves around Mr. Duffy, a man who’s separated
himself from everyone else in Dublin almost completely. He only ever leaves his house to fulfill
obligations to his job, his health, and the bare minimum that societal norms dictate. On one of his
routine outings, however, he meets Mrs. Sinico, with whom he falls in love. The two strike up an
affair of sorts, although their love does not stem from a physical relationship but an intellectual
understanding. Their relationship is comparable to platonic love in that way, as they never have sex,
nor are there ever allusions to kissing or heavy petting between them. This directly counters Two
Gallants, which came five stories earlier than A Painful Case. In it, a man named Corley is in a
relationship with a woman who “pays” him for sex and companionship. Despite being perfect
opposites, both of these relationships are viewed as tawdry, because Duffy’s relationship is, of
course, an affair straight out of “Me and Mrs. Jones,” while Corley is participating in what appears to
be unofficial prostitution or at least something similar. A Painful Case can also be considered a
counterpart to Araby: both Duffy and the Araby boy deal with the disillusionment left over from
failed romances and lost interpersonal connections. While Araby is a story centered around a child
first coming to grips with romantic disappointment, Duffy’s story is that of a man who is still
grappling with that realization years down the line. By the end of the story, it becomes obvious that
he is so fervently asocial because he is “...a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others but
[is] often disappointed” (Joyce 71). He becomes so terribly used to social and romantic failures that
when he actually finds love, he pushes her away. While part of his avoidance in his relationship with
Mrs. Sinico is due to the fact that dating outside of a marriage is considered amoral, it is mainly due
to his pre-existing distrust of others, as Duffy’s moral fiber is remotely questionable, as he is noted
to have “….allowed himself to think that in certain circumstances he would rob his bank...” (Joyce
71) meaning that he was not quite so immaculately moral as one might think. He uses morality as a
guise, convincing himself that his tidy principles cause him to reject his paramour and not the deeprooted fear of emotional openness that drives him to become an anchorite. Duffy’s special brand of
denial is exhibited in other areas of his life as well, including his brief stint with the local chapter of
the Socialist party. “He told her that for some time he had assisted at the meetings of an Irish
51
Socialist Party where he had felt himself a unique figure amidst a score of sober workmen in a
garret lit by an inefficient oil-lamp. When the party had divided into three sections, each under its
own leader and in its own garret, he had discontinued his attendances. The workmen's discussions,
he said, were too timorous; the interest they took in the question of wages was inordinate” (Joyce
72). Much as he rationalizes leaving Mrs. Sinico, retentive Mr. Duffy does not admit to leaving the
Irish socialists out of the resentment and disappointment that not being acknowledged as the
superior mind he fancied himself to be caused, but rather, he turned up his nose, assuring himself
that his high standards and intellect that set him apart from his blue-collar associates. If he weren’t
so pessimistic about relationships and life in general, the likelihood is that he would have stayed
with Mrs. Sinico. Duffy is so used to being disappointed that he begins to cling to his bleak
ideologies neurotically, dismissing other people in favor of his emotional security blanket.
When examined alone, each of the vignettes in Dubliners gives a special perspective regarding a
specific issue, be that problem politics, love, religion, or Dublin itself. Taken as a group, however,
they express the various pitfalls of aging from childhood through adulthood. They display
reflections of childlike problems still existing in a person’s adult life and vice versa. Dots like these
are connected within the story ‘Counterparts,’ just as they can be connected to and from any
number of Joyce’s fifteen anecdotes. One could even theorize that many of the children in the earlier
stories could have well grown up to be the adults who come later. Because these stories are all
intended to be not just slices of Irish life but also epiphanies that are nearly universal to all human
beings, many of the characters, storylines, and morals are comparable to one another.
Dubliners: Final Essay
Mike White
James Joyce’s early work, Dubliners, is composed of a collection of short stories that are intricately
woven with subtle themes and tones. Many involve family and manipulation, such as The Boarding
House, which is about a single mother who runs a home for people to stay in during various travels.
However, when her daughter starts sleeping with a man staying at the house, she devises a plan to
have the man marry her daughter so he will have to support her. Another example of family greed
and manipulation is A Mother; a story of a woman and her daughter who is a talented pianist. After
the daughter is set to play a large show, the mother attempts to get more money from the
organizers, saying that they held out on her and her daughter. After The Race is about a boy who is
told by his middle-class father to spend money on stocks with his rich friends but ends up drunk
and without a penny left. This is where the stories of family tie in with elements of alcohol. Alcohol
mainly leads many of the character into bad situations in Dubliners. A man in Grace falls down a
flight of stairs in a bar, which pushes his religious friends to coax him into giving Catholicism a try,
and a father in Counterparts drinks after a long day only to come home and beat his son in a
drunken rage. Lastly, I will discuss elements of love. Most of the stories of love talk about an overall
paralysis. Eveline is about a girl who tries to leave her family and run off with a man named Frank,
however she is unable to bring herself to do so and is left alone at the ship yard. A Painful Case is
about a man’s stunted courtship of a woman and a few years later, when he hears of her death, he is
shocked and begins to feel alone. The Dead narrates a large banquet involving songs, dancing and a
speech from Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist of the story. However, when his wife hears the song a
former romantic partner had sung to her, she breaks down. These stories all have themes that
weave in and out of the entire collection of stories. Some themes are just more prevalent in some
stories than others. The point of each of these themes of greed, alcohol and love is to help Joyce give
an accurate description of Dublin and all of its many walks of life.
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Many of the stories about family have a running theme of the parents pawning off and nearly
prostituting the children. Some of the strongest examples of a dysfunctional family in Dubliners can
be found in The Boarding House. It was not a mistake that Joyce named Mrs. Mooney in The
Boarding House “the madam.” This is reference to her position as head of the boarding house being
similar to being head of a brothel. Her subsequent goal of marrying her daughter out to a man
through intimidation is also an indication of the elements of prostitution that are so prevalent in
this story. When her daughter, Polly, falls for Mr. Doran, “the madam” orchestrates many of the
events involved in getting him to marry her daughter. Mrs. Mooney seems less concerned with her
daughter than what price Mr. Doran will pay to avoid a serious hit to his reputation. She views the
issue as, “She had allowed him to live beneath her roof, assuming that he was a man of honour, and
he had simply abused her hospitality. He was thirty-four or thirty-five years of age, so that youth
could not be pleaded as his excuse; nor could ignorance be his excuse since he was a man who had
seen something of the world. He had simply taken advantage of Polly’s youth and inexperience: that
was evident. The question was: what reparation would he make?” (Joyce 40). She then intimidates
him into marrying her daughter. The last scene finishes with her telling Polly, “Come down, dear.
Mr. Doran wants to speak to you” (Joyce 43), saying that he intended on marrying her. A Mother
features another strong woman figure who also tries to prostitute her daughter but in a different
way. Mrs. Kearney sells her daughter, Kathleen, off through stage performance as a talented pianist.
Her mother works as a manager of sorts for her daughter at first. Mrs. Kearney tells the organizers
of a large event, “The artistes! Of course they are doing their best, but really they are not good”
(Joyce 93). She helps organize the show and gets a contract written up with Mr. Holohan. However,
when one show is cancelled, she starts getting rough with Mr. Holohan, who pushes all
responsibility off of himself. She eventually takes over, telling the men who booked her daughter
that she demands more money. In the end, losing her side of the case, Joyce writes, “After that Mrs.
Kearney's conduct was condemned on all hands: everyone approved of what the committee had
done. She stood at the door, haggard with rage, arguing with her husband and daughter,
gesticulating with them” (Joyce 100). She has no respect for anyone around her at this point, after a
moment shouting at her husband to get a cab. She leaves, telling Mr. Holohan that she is not done
with him. The difference between Mrs. Kearney and Mrs. Mooney is that Kearney goes and
confronts men herself. Mooney instead used her son to threaten the man who was with her
daughter. After the Race is no exception to the stories of family manipulation and the pawning off of
the children. Protagonist Jimmy Doyle has just won a large race with two rich French acquaintances
and a Hungarian friend. His father, a wealthy butcher in town, has given him money for investment
in the motor industry, which is currently on the rise when the story is taking place. However, his
father’s plan backfires more and more as the night goes on. “Cards! cards! The table was cleared.
Villona returned quietly to his piano and played voluntaries for them. The other men played game
after game, flinging themselves boldly into the adventure. They drank the health of the Queen of
Hearts and of the Queen of Diamonds. Jimmy felt obscurely the lack of an audience: the wit was
flashing. Play ran very high and paper began to pass. Jimmy did not know exactly who was winning
but he knew that he was losing” (Joyce 28). Jimmy gets drunk as the others stay sober, leaving him
open to their manipulation. He ends up losing all of his father’s money, knowing there will be hell to
pay in the morning. These stories of “family” really paint a bleak picture for the whole of Dublin.
However, many of the situations are harshly realistic, which is much more accurate than a white
picket fence story. These are the families that Joyce must have encountered and heard about in
Dublin, and they are all the basis for some of the most fascinating characters.
Alcohol works throughout the stories as a catalyst that pushes events and troubles to occur. It is
constant background imagery that gains a sinister connotation in the stories when it turns out that
alcohol only leads to very bad events. Counterparts is the story in which alcohol use is most
53
rampant among the characters, especially the main character, Mr. Farrington. Mr. Farrington starts
out his day in the office where his boss is angry at his lazy behavior in the workplace. He is told to
make extra copies of a document for one of the cases the company is handling and instead of
finishing the job, he goes out to have a couple of drinks. One man notices and says, “I know that
game. Five times in one day is a little bit… well, you better look sharp and get a copy of our
correspondence in the Delacour case for Mr. Alleyne,” (Joyce 57). This starts a downward spiral that
lasts long into the evening. He returns to work and his boss, Mr. Alleyne, is still angry at him which
leads Farrington to insult Alleyne, at which point he is made to apologize and leave the office. He
goes to the bar and continues to drink, which leads to him making unsuccessful advances on a
woman and his loss in an arm wrestling match. Before going home, we see Farrington on a street
corner. He’s described, “A very sullen-facen man stood at the corner of O’Connell Bridge waiting for
the little Sandymount tram to take him home. He was full of smoldering anger and revengefulness.
He felt humiliated and discontented; he did not even feel drunk” (Joyce 62). This just shows the
focus on alcohol in this story. He is a miserable person and that one thing can’t even lift his spirits.
Racked with the many failures of the day, he returns home to his family. In a drunken rage, he
becomes angry with his son, beating him until he begs his father to stop. Grace shows more of this
imagery of alcohol leading to bad things when the first scene opens up in a bar. “These two
gentlemen and one of the curates carried him up the stairs and laid him down again on the floor of
the bar. In two minutes he was surrounded by a ring of men. The manager of the bar asked
everyone who he was and who was with him. No one knew who he was but one of the curates said
he had served the gentleman with a small rum” (Joyce 101). This is the first mention of liquor in the
story, which only shows how it is merely a catalyst for events rather than a driving force. When his
friend, Mr. Power, drives him back to his house, Kernan’s wife exclaims, “Such a sight! O, he’ll do for
himself one day and that’s the holy alls of it. He’s been drinking since Friday,” (Joyce 104). Her
irritation with him is evident as she tells Mr. Power, “I know you’re a friend of his, not like some of
the others he does be with. They’re all right so long as he has money in his pocket to keep him out
from his wife and family. Nice friends! Who was he with to-night, I’d like to know? I’m so sorry that
I’ve nothing in the house to offer you. But if you wait a minute I’ll send round to Fogarty’s, at the
corner. We were waiting for him to come home with the money. He never seems to think he has a
home at all,” (Joyce 104). At this point, Mr. Power tells her that he and some friends from the
Catholic church intend on trying to get him back on track because they honestly believe him to be a
great man. However, even in their discussions with him, the atmosphere is set with alcohol as well.
“The light music of whisky falling into glasses mad an agreeable interlude,” Joyce writes about the
scene. However, then the men propose that Kernan join them when they tell him, “We’re all going to
make a retreat together and confess our sins- and God knows we want it badly” (Joyce 116). Mr.
Kernan agrees to the retreat, saying that he “bars the candles,” as he considers that “magic-lantern
business” absurd. The story goes through a vast transition as it begins in the bar and ends in the
retreat with all of Kernan’s Catholic friends. After The Race shows the effects alcohol much later in
the story. After winning a big race, the story’s “hero,” Jimmy Doyle, goes to party with his fellow
victors. As part of the festivities, he and his acquaintances gamble and drink. What Jimmy doesn’t
realize is that these rich “friends” of his are scamming him out of his modest sum of money. The two
rich men stay oddly sober as Jimmy gets increasingly intoxicated. Through it all, Jimmy Doyle
wastes his father’s money as he loses again and again in the games they play. “Jimmy did not know
exactly who was winning but he knew that he was losing. But it was his own fault for he frequently
mistook his cards and the other men had to calculate his I.O.U.s for him. They were devils of fellows
but he wished they would stop: it was getting late,” (Joyce 28). He knows he’ll have to face it in the
morning, but for now he doesn’t mind. Then, once he’s wasted all of the money and then some, the
gravity kicks in as a Villiona stops the party announcing, “Daybreak, Gentlemen!” (Joyce 28). In all
three of these stories, alcohol is a bad omen right from the start. From Mr. Kernan to Jimmy Doyle,
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the moment alcohol comes into play, it is an immediate cue to reader that things are not going to go
well from here on out.
Love is a huge influencing factor in these stories, but in Dubliners, love is something that is more
often lost or missed. There is very little fulfilled love in the book. In Eveline, Eveline starts out the
story loving a man named Frank who claims he will take her to Buenos Ayres. She wants to go with
him as she yearns for a way away from her family. Her abusive father makes it tough to leave it all
behind in good faith, but she knows that she has to get out at some point or another. When she gets
to the dock, she is full of love for Frank and fear of the outcome. She trusts him, though, and she
fully intends to leave with him, but just as they have to go, she stays back. She suddenly has no love
for him left. In that moment she makes a huge decision that she could not go. She is paralyzed
where she stands and cannot leave her family behind. A Painful Case talks of a similar loss of love.
Mr. Duffy just goes about his life for a long time not bothering with romance or friends. He goes to
work, goes home and goes to small concerts. At one of the concerts, he meets Mrs. Sinico. Their
friendship starts out platonically; her husband doesn’t even mind when they spent time together
when he is at sea. However, her dissatisfaction in her marriage begins to show and her advances
make Mr. Duffy uncomfortable. “The end of these discourses was that one night during which she
had shown every sign of unusual excitement, Mrs. Sinico caught up his hand passionately and
pressed it to her cheek,” (Joyce 73). Subsequently, he pushes her away, along with his only chance
for love in years. After a few years pass, he finds out that she has died. He feels that all too familiar
feeling of paralysis that comes with the loss of his love. The narration continues, “He walked
through the bleak alleys where they had walked four years before. She seemed to be near him in the
darkness. At moments he seemed to feel her voice touch his ear, her hand touch his. He stood still to
listen. Why had he withheld life from her? Why had he sentenced her to death? He felt his moral
nature falling to pieces” (Joyce 76). He feels immense guilt for her death as he walks through the
silent park and alleys. He ends the story feeling “that he was alone.” A change of pace comes when
The Dead opens with a hectic banquet scene and a young girl named Lily greeting the guests at the
door. The banquet is for Christmas, and the man the story focuses on is named Gabriel. The opening
scene is charged with a fear that Gabriel will not show up and that a man named Freddy Malins will
show up drunk. When they both arrive, Gabriel is told to see if Freddy is drunk and of course, he is.
After a short while at the banquet and a piano piece by one of the guests, Gabriel is paired up with a
strong woman named Miss Ivors when she says that she has “a crow to pick” with him. She
criticizes, “I have found out that you write for The Daily Express. Now, aren’t you ashamed of
yourself?” (Joyce 127). He reacts with a confused air, asking why he should be ashamed of himself.
She then says, “Well, I’m ashamed of you. To say you’d write for a paper like that. I didn’t think you
were a West Briton” (Joyce 127). A West Briton is an Irish person who is considered by his or her
peers as being too involved with British culture. This is a derogatory term, and the whole
interaction shakes Gabriel. He announces to her that he is “sick of [his] own country! Sick of it!”
(Joyce 129). After the strange interaction, he is invited by Freddy Malin’s mother to carve the goose,
to which he agrees. Before carving the goose, he makes a long, beautiful speech saying, “A new
generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles. It is
serious and enthusiastic for these new ideas and its enthusiasm, even when it is misdirected, is, I
believe, in the main sincere. But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thoughttormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is,
will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older
day. Listening tonight to the names of all those great singers of the past it seemed to me, I must
confess, that we were living in a less spacious age. Those days might, without exaggeration, be
called spacious days: and if they are gone beyond recall let us hope, at least, that in gatherings such
as this we shall still speak of them with pride and affection, still cherish in our hearts the memory of
those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die” He continues on
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this note, later finishing by saying, “Therefore, I will not linger on the past. I will not let any gloomy
moralising intrude upon us here to-night” (Joyce 139). This speech is talking about how there are so
many great things and people who are no longer with us. We should always look back and remind
ourselves that those are happy times and there are still happy times to come. However, he
concludes by telling everyone that the night of the banquet is a night to live in the moment, not to be
full of remorse. However, later that night, he finds his wife, Gretta, completely fixated on listening to
a song that is played. Her mood never recovers after that for the rest of the night, and Gabriel
decides to ask her what was wrong once they leave the party. She recounts how an old lover sung
her the song outside of her window. She the boy as “very delicate… Such eyes as he had: big, dark
eyes! And such an expression in them --- an expression!” (Joyce 149). She tells Gabriel that the boy
died a week after standing outside of her house in the cold rain. The thought of it chills Gabriel as he
thinks of Gretta’s story long into the night. Love in this story pushes Gretta to a paralysis that is
similar to Eveline’s. Gabriel’s jealous reaction to her love for the boy also puts their relationship in
perspective, making the reader wonder about the love between the couple. Love pushes all of these
characters into a feeling of not being able to move. From Eveline on the dock to Gretta at the
banquet to Mr. Duffy after reading of Mrs. Sinico’s death, the characters all feel the same pain that
comes with the loss of their loves.
James Joyce seems to believe that alcoholism, family and love are suffering aspects of life in Dublin
in the early 1900s. His depictions of these issues are grave, as are his depictions of other issues like
religion and politics. Ireland, in particular, is in a very rough time when this was written, so the
views portrayed in Dubliners are very much in light of Ireland’s standpoint of social and political
issues. The views are not so much universal as they are easily applicable to other scenarios.
Dubliners is full of stories that are highly relatable to many different walks of life, and the messages
tend to stand for any sort of moral dilemma one might come across. However, even with such a
great selection of short stories, I don’t think this book would inspire much change in Ireland. I think
people would see it as a shock when it comes out, and many people would relate to it, but that does
not mean that it would spark a change in alcoholism, family disputes, politics or religion.
Dubliners
Chelsea Riordan
James Joyce’s relatively short writing piece, Dubliners, portrays the suppressive Irish society in
which he grew up. The book features fifteen short stories, each one surrounding the tribulations
and affairs of its own cast of characters. With each passing tale, the main characters get older,
detailing childhood emotional landmarks all the way up to epiphanies that aging adults experience.
The vast majority of these landmarks and epiphanies are negative, leading to stories that generally
end in disillusionment and disadvantage. These characters and set-ups were selected carefully by
Joyce to bring to light the harsh truths through which most human beings spend their lives
struggling. In this collection of dreary vignettes, both external forces, such as the pressure to marry,
and internal forces, such as weak-willed materialism, work in perfect harmony to paralyze nearly
all of fictional Dublin and, theoretically, all of real-life mankind.
One of the most common causes of emotional crippling in Dubliners is the pressure that surrounds
marriage. Adolescents who feel the hot, proverbial breath of wedding bells breathing down the
backs of their necks and unhappy older couples suffer alike. Marriage in itself is a double-whammy
in that it combines the powers of religious guilt and idealized romance (and sometimes other, more
specific aspects as well) to entice and frighten young adults into partnering up to fuel the baby
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machine and continue the cycle. Marriage can also make for a handy social or political tool, and in
Dubliners, this is one of the more positive things a marriage can be. In the first tale of adolescence,
‘Eveline,’ a young woman plans to elope with her handsome boyfriend, therefore escaping her
perceived obligations to her psychologically abusive father and the tattered remains of her
immediate family. Eveline’s choice to wed Frank, had her plans actually come to fruition, is a
decision she came to not out of their mutual love (whether this love is real or not is, at best, up for
debate) but because Eveline was seeking an escape from her beastly father and her equally beastly
life. Another example of a woman who uses marriage as a stepladder is Mrs. Kearney of ‘A Mother,’
who originally became engaged to silence other women from gossiping about her singularity. Later
on in life, however, Mrs. Kearney finds that utilizing her husband as a minion makes it somewhat
easier for her navigate a man’s world like Ireland as a woman. “She respected her husband in the
same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed; and though
she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male” (Joyce 94).
Despite being involved in that really cute mail pun, Mr. Kearney himself is a much more passive
personality, and he spends most of the story standing quietly, observing things, and stroking his
beard while his no-nonsense wife puts her back into influencing a whole heard of bumbling,
ineffectual men. The irony is, of course, that no matter how competent she is and no matter how
inept the men around her are, Mrs. Kearney could never even dream of having the sort of sway that
they command, simply because she is female. Had she been a man, she would have earned the
ludicrous committee's respect and achieved her goals. While these circumstances are negative
enough, the men acting as utilities rather than as earnest partners did not actually affect them
negatively, but in ‘The Boarding House,’ not only does the manipulation destroy the manipulatee’s
life, but the manipulator’s ends are actually met this time. While Eveline and Kearney arranged for
marriages out of absolute necessity, Mrs. Mooney pushes for her daughter to wed Mr. Doran to
maintain control over both of them primarily, but she uses the social scandal and religious qualms
that their unmarried sex (and debateable pregnancy) would stir up to guilt Doran into doing what
she wanted him to do. “It is all very well for the man: he can go his ways as if nothing had happened,
having had his moment of pleasure, but the girl has to bear the brunt. Some mothers would be
content to patch up such an affair for a sum of money; she had known cases of it. But she would not
do so. For her only one reparation could make up for the loss of her daughter’s honor: marriage”
(Joyce 40). Combining so many forces and striking at the right time is proven to have paid off, and
Mr. Doran is confirmed to have married Polly Mooney in one of Joyce’s later publications, and he is
of course absolutely miserable. Despite women being the ones to set their respective marriagetrains in motion in these examples, there are many hideous cases of men manipulating women in
similar fashions. However, men don’t need women to garner social power, as that comes with the
territory of being male. What the men tend to want runs more along the lines of sins of the flesh.
One prime offender is Corley, from ‘Two Gallants,’ who uses a woman’s affections for him as a tool
to weasel money, cigars, and sex out of her, all the while non-committally alluding to the possibility
of marriage further down the line. “‘We went out to Donnybrook and I brought her into a field there.
She told me she used to go with a dairyman.... It was fine, man. Cigarettes every night she'd bring me
and paying the tram out and back. And one night she brought me two bloody fine cigars -- O, the
real cheese, you know, that the old fellow used to smoke.... I was afraid, man, she'd get in the family
way. But she's up to the dodge.’ ‘Maybe she thinks you'll marry her,’ said Lenehan” (Joyce 30).
Despite his later insistence that he dismissed that suggestion, it’s very obvious that Corley has
found a lucrative racket in seeing this woman. In Dubliners’ final vignette, ‘The Dead,’ the main
character’s marriage to his wife Gretta is explored. From the beginning of the story, it seems to be a
very happy union. Gabriel admires his wife’s beauty and fusses over her well being to the point of
borderline-neurosis, though it never comes off as unsettling. Towards the end of the story, Gabriel’s
romantic and sensual feelings for his wife begin to reach a boiling point. This seems to be a positive
thing, at first. “She leaned for a moment on his arm in getting out of the cab and while standing at
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the curbstone, bidding the others good- night. She leaned lightly on his arm, as lightly as when she
had danced with him a few hours before. He had felt proud and happy then, happy that she was his,
proud of her grace and wifely carriage. But now, after the kindling again of so many memories, the
first touch of her body, musical and strange and perfumed, sent through him a keen pang of lust”
(Joyce 146). Gabriel plans to seduce his wife once they reach their hotel room, but just as his precise
moves seem to be paying off, his wife bursts into tears and begins to reveal a deep, emotional secret.
Her husband becomes very cross and cold, both in his inner monologue and out loud. “The smile
passed away from Gabriel's face. A dull anger began to gather again at the back of his mind and the
dull fires of his lust began to glow angrily in his veins” (Joyce 149). This sits very strangely with the
reader, as, just moments before, Gabriel had been waxing poetic about his love for his wife, but now,
in the throes of one of her darkest moments, Gretta’s husband is not sympathetic or worried, but
rather put-off that she wouldn’t put out. The difference between Corley and Gabriel, in this respect,
is that Corley makes no bones about what he is: he knows that he’s a hypersexual tramp, and he
knows no shame. Gabriel is worse in a way, because he has convinced everyone he knows that he’s
a gentle poetic romantic, but what’s more, is that he has convinced himself of this falsehood as well.
However, this occurrence in his hotel room very quickly shatters this illusion (along with several
others which also pertained to his self-image) and he realizes that neither he nor his wife truly love
one another. “He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years
that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live. Generous tears filled
Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a
feeling must be love” (Joyce 152). Gabriel now knows that while his seemingly boundless affections
for Gretta were actually quite flimsy, he also learns that throughout their entire marriage, she’d
actually been in love with a long since deceased flame from her youth for the entire duration of
their relationship. In Dubliners, one is hard pressed to find a romantic relationship that might be
considered healthy.
While societal and religious pressure is one thing, greed is another. Instead of being an outside
force that pressures you, materialism comes from within, and it undermines all better judgment for
want of money and, in the case of our Dubliners, alcohol. In ‘After the Race,’ a young boy named
Jimmy is preparing to invest in a hotel that belongs to a French acquaintance of his. If he had played
his cards right, Jimmy would have had a life of luxury and ease ahead of him, but because he
succumbed to both drink and gambling, he wasted his ticket to fortune and landed himself in debt.
“Play ran very high and paper began to pass. Jimmy did not know exactly who was winning but he
knew that he was losing. But it was his own fault for he frequently mistook his cards and the other
men had to calculate his I.O.U.'s for him” (Joyce 28). Had he resisted the urge to get plastered or
even resisted his intoxicated avarice after the fact, Jimmy would have been in the clear, but he didn’t
quite manage and his foolishness cost him a happy life of wealth. It is also worth noting that his
French compatriots very likely set him up to avoid having to let him invest, so their avarice and
haughtiness pushes them to help an average Joe ruin his life by steering him towards the most illconsidered option available. In ‘Two Gallants,’ Lenehan, Corley’s pathetic wingman, is also easily
swayed by the power of capital, especially when that capital is exchanged for liquor. “Most people
considered Lenehan a leech but, in spite of this reputation, his adroitness and eloquence had always
prevented his friends from forming any general policy against him. He had a brave manner of
coming up to a party of them in a bar and of holding himself nimbly at the borders of the company
until he was included in a round” (Joyce 30). In order to fuel his noteworthy drinking habit,
Lenehan has sacrificed his dignity and his personality alike. Instead, he sycophantically shadows
Corley and a number of others, telling them what they want to hear in exchange for a scrap of
money or a drink. This is not dissimilar to Corley’s exploits with his lady friend. Even in its least
harmful form, alcoholism causes alarm and discomfort for everyone involved. In ‘The Dead,’ both
Freddy and Mr. Browne are aging deadbeat drunkards, and the Christmas party’s hostesses spend a
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sizeable chunk of their time fretting over the former’s behavior. “‘He's not so bad, is he?’ said Aunt
Kate to Gabriel. Gabriel's brows were dark, but he raised them quickly and answered: ’O, no, hardly
noticeable.’ ‘Now, isn't he a terrible fellow!’ she said. ‘And his poor mother made him take the
pledge on New Year's Eve. But come on, Gabriel, into the drawing-room.’ Before leaving the room
with Gabriel she signaled to Mr. Browne by frowning and shaking her forefinger in warning to and
fro. Mr. Browne nodded in answer and, when she had gone, said to Freddy Malins: ‘Now, then,
Teddy, I'm going to fill you out a good glass of lemonade just to buck you up’” (Joyce 126). Even
though Freddy is already notably inebriated, those around him often point out what an
improvement this is over previous years, which implies that he has proven himself to have been a
big disturbance in the past, possibly even a violent one. Mr. Browne is a nuisance throughout the
story, fueling Freddy’s habit and intermittently shouting out at largely inappropriate times.
Whether it’s ruining your Christmas party or ruining your life, alcoholism is usually ruining
something.
Between the negative strain of internal and external forces, every character in Dubliners suffers
from a sort of figurative paralysis that keeps them all rooted firmly in their miserable little lives.
Eveline, who is poised to escape the emotional wasteland that was her home life gives into the fear
that years of psychological conditioning had caused and remains i Dublin, rather than catching her
boat ride to freedom. “She felt him seize her hand: ‘Come!’ All the seas of the world tumbled about
her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the
iron railing. ‘Come!’ No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the
seas she sent a cry of anguish. ‘Eveline! Evvy!’ He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to
follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive,
like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition” (Joyce 23).
Eveline’s story proves that often, anxiety and listlessness overpower one’s desire for freedom.
Meanwhile, in ‘Two Gallants,’ Lenehan sits alone at a hole-in-the-wall of a restaurant, and he is
forced to acknowledge the crushing loneliness that pervaded and continues to pervade his meager
and pitiable existence. “In his imagination he beheld the pair of lovers walking along some dark
road; he heard Corley's voice in deep energetic gallantries and saw again the leer of the young
woman's mouth. This vision made him feel keenly his own poverty of purse and spirit. He was tired
of knocking about, of pulling the devil by the tail, of shifts and intrigues. He would be thirty-one in
November. Would he never get a good job? Would he never have a home of his own? He thought
how pleasant it would be to have a warm fire to sit by and a good dinner to sit down to. He had
walked the streets long enough with friends and with girls. He knew what those friends were
worth: he knew the girls too. Experience had embittered his heart against the world” (35). Despite
probably having a personality underneath all of the eloquent bootlicking, Lenehan feels that it’s
almost too late to dredge it back up or try to strike up an honest relationship of any kind with
anyone, and his weakness for hard drinks can only deter him from this pursuit. He’s too set into his
behaviors and his reputation to really change things now, and he recognizes this consciously
enough to not feel very pressed to put any effort into making himself decent again. On the exact
opposite side of this spectrum is Mrs. Kearney, who has fought tooth and nail just to secure her
daughter honest work and honest pay. “‘I'm asking for my rights.’ she said. ‘You might have some
sense of decency,’ said Mr. Holohan.‘Might I, indeed?... And when I ask when my daughter is going to
be paid I can't get a civil answer.’ She tossed her head and assumed a haughty voice: ‘You must
speak to the secretary. It's not my business. I'm a great fellow fol-the-diddle-I-do.’ ‘I thought you
were a lady,’ said Mr. Holohan, walking away from her abruptly. After that Mrs. Kearney's conduct
was condemned on all hands: everyone approved of what the committee had done” (Joyce 99).
Despite being somewhat hot-headed, Kearney is a perfectly agreeable person, and had she been a
man with even one iota of the initiative she displays, her transaction would have run smoothly, but
because she’s female, she’s expected to remain a subordinate accessory, despite the fact that the
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men running things around her are a gaggle of self-interested drunkards. Mrs. Kearney’s paralysis
stems from the fact that, no matter how good she is, her abilities are completely wasted due to her
predetermined role in society. Gabriel also suffers from paralysis. At first, one might think that he is
paralyzed by social anxiety, but by the end of the story, it becomes obvious that the root of his
troubles is elsewhere, and all of his preconceived notions about himself shatter in one night. “He
saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning
sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous
fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror” (Joyce 150). Gabriel fancied himself a sensitive
poetic type, but he is forced to come to grips with the fact that he really is just as self-absorbed and
libidinous as everyone else. On top of that, his entire marriage has been a sham, meaning that the
majority of his life has been wasted on tending to and coddling fabrications. By this point in his life,
he was too old even to think about trying to turn himself around and start again as Lenehan seemed
to be playing at, so all that Gabriel can really do is spend the rest of his life waiting for his death and
the deaths of his loved ones, all the while aware that his meaningless life would result in a
meaningless death.
Joyce’s book paints a miserable picture for his readers. Based on what can be observed in Dubliners,
life’s many negative aspects seem to be backed up by a nigh foolproof system. If the external
pressures of societal norms and religion applied to you don’t ruin your life, your intrinsic human
weaknesses and selfishness probably will, and vice versa. The Dubliners who end up married and
even those who consider marriage are destroyed by the legalities and emotional strain that are
associated with marital bliss, while others still are controlled by their own addictions and greed.
Many of them suffer from both afflictions, but all of the characters find themselves philosophically,
emotionally, or financially paralyzed. The bleakness of Dubliners is made all the more disturbing
when one is faced with the knowledge that the pitfalls of the fictional men and women are traps
that still affect real people today-- including ourselves.
MID-CENTURY
Harold and Maude
Joey Santoro
Harold is a wealthy, 20 year old young man who is obsessed with death. He acts out several suicides to
shock his mother and is always going to random funerals. He meets Maude at one of these funerals.
Maude is the total opposite of Harold. She’s 79 years old, poor but very happy and in love with life.
Harold and Maude start a relationship that changes how Harold sees the world.
I believe that the main message of this film is that life is how you want see it. You can’t live fearing and
being stuck in the same place. Maude taught him that he was free to change how he lived his life. Maude
taught him that no matter what happens in life, there is still beauty all around you. You have a choice to
see the bad or the good, understanding this was like a rebirth for Harold. When Harold puts his head
through the vagina statue at Maude’s house, it symbolizes rebirth. Also, at the end of the film when
Harold drives his hearse over the edge of the cliff, it symbolizes him putting his of way of thinking behind
him and a new beginning. There are several messages in this film, but this is the one that was the
strongest to me.
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School Desegregation
Demetri Metaharakis
In this essay we will be discussing the civil rights movement. The year is 1954, and nearly all
schools in the United States are segregated either by law as in the South or by neighborhood as in
the North. Even though the 14th Amendment clearly enforces the absolute equality of the two races,
blacks and whites, schools remain segregated. I will be discussing this rule of “separate, but equal”
by proving how it is unfair to people of color. I will do this by referring to our Constitution, which
contains the rights that have been amended to include all people of this country. The Constitution
was meant for everyone no matter one’s race.
I feel that the law of school segregation is a means to continue keeping the black man down. It
prevents him from having the chance to become an equal and independent person. By segregating
in schools, the white man is able to keep the best teachers, the best schools and the best chance of
advancement. The white man still has control over most if not all aspects of the black man. By the
use of a literacy test, the southern states are able to keep the black man from achieving any sort of
educational equality. Despite the 14th Amendment’s objective supposedly enforcing the absolute
equality of all races, the black man is still treated as inferior to the white man.
If schools are not integrated, there is no chance of becoming equal. Just the word segregation speaks
of two groups of people instead of one. An example of this is the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy
was a man of mixed race. In 1890 in Louisiana, the law required separate railroad cares for whites
and blacks; they were supposed to be of equal accommodations. If this was so, why couldn’t Plessy,
being of a mixed race, sit in either railroad car? I feel this holds true of schools that are not
integrated; if we are the same, why are we kept apart? On paper, it seemed clear that the 13th, 14th,
and the 15th Amendments were honest, but in this case, they are just words. As a case in point, look
at the right to vote. It was ratified on February 3rd, 1870. However, due to poll taxes, literacy tests
and other means, most black men, especially in the South, did not vote. Why were they still in a
minority when it came to registering to vote? They lack the education and the understanding of the
process because they don’t have experience in voting. Despite the law saying they are equal, by
keeping them segregated, they still are not given the same opportunity as the white man; the white
man is keeping the black man in the dark.
By keeping whites and blacks separate, there are limited chances of becoming one nation, one
people under God. The amendments are there, but if you don’t integrate, you don’t learn to relate.
To understand another idea, opinion or point of view, you have to have a conversation to get to
know one another and to have an understanding of being in another person’s shoes. To do so, you
cannot be separated by schools, buses or by neighborhoods. We must be a nation that is together so
we can form stronger ideas, stronger values and a stronger future for ourselves and the generations
to come as our Constitution so clearly tells us to do.
61
ADVENTURES IN BIOLOGY
CELL REGENERATION IN PLANARIANS
Joey Santoro
Introduction
Background: Planaria is the common name for Dugesia tigrina. They are in the class Turbellaria,
which is in the phylum Platyhelminthes. Planarians are a type of small non-parasitic flatworm that
live in freshwater rivers, streams and ponds throughout North America and Europe. They are
famous for their ability to regenerate. They hide under rocks, leaves and debris to avoid light.
Planarians have no definite eyes: just eyespots that are sensitive to light. Planarians can reproduce
both sexually and asexually. In sexual reproduction they produce eggs that hatch into baby
Planarians several weeks later. Planarians are hermaphroditic, possessing complete male and
female systems. They produce asexually by fragmentation and tail dropping in which they
spontaneously drop their tails, and each end regenerates the missing part. Planarians eat both
living and dead organic matter.
1. http://animals.howstuffworks.com/worms/planarian-info.htm
2. http://www.planarians.org
3. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/462868/planarian
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Question: Does a Planarian that has re-grown its body have the same reactions to stimuli as it did
before it was sectioned?
Procedure: In this lab, we will be observing the regeneration process of planarians by cutting them
at different locations and also examining whether or not the regenerated planarians behave any
differently to stimuli. Initial observations will be taken before the procedure, and their reactions to
stimuli will be tested. After the planarians are cut, we will make observations on their progress.
When regeneration is complete, their reactions to different stimuli will once again be tested and
compared to their reactions before they were cut.
Materials and Methods
Materials:
-
2 living planaria
2 small plastic petri dishes
1 large plastic petri dish
Petri dish covers
Pond or spring water
Scalpel
Glass Slide
Pipettes
Magnifying glass (to observe planaria)
Sharpie
Method: Before beginning the procedure, two planarians were observed using a magnifying glass,
and their response to different stimuli was tested. Pipettes were used to gently suck up one of the
planarians from the large petri dish and place it on a glass slide. Once Planarian A was still, a scalpel
was used to cut it just below its head (see diagram 1 below). The two severed planarian parts were
placed into one of the small petri dishes filled with clean spring water. The petri dish was then
covered and labeled with a Sharpie. The same process was repeated for Planarian B, except it was
cut across the middle of its body (see diagram 1 below). Some time was taken to examine each of
the cut planarians up close and to record observations. Further observations on the planarians’
regeneration progress were made when the water in each of the petri dishes was changed (twice a
week). After around 10 days, the planarians were entirely or almost entirely regenerated, and their
responses to stimuli were then tested.
63
Results
Right after the two planarians were cut into four, all four severed planarians seemed to survive the
cut. They were still active and moving around. Three days after the procedure, only three of the
planarians were alive. Both the head and body of planarian A were alive. However, the body of
planarian B was floating and was starting to decay. Of the three remaining planarians, the body of
planarian A was the healthiest and most active, and the other 2 survivors were staying very still,
even when poked. The healthy planarian had finished healing, and was in the process of re-growing
its head. It had a very light head that was just starting to develop. A week after the procedure, when
the water was changed for the 2nd time, I observed the planarians under a microscope. The body of
planarian A was still re-growing its head, but it was much more developed and almost looked
normal. The head had gotten darker and the eyespots were now visible under the microscope, but
the shape of its head was not as long as it had been before it was cut. I also fed the planarians this
day, and the healthy planarian ate much more than the other two. One of the planarians, the head of
planarian A, seemed not to eat anything. On the 10th day, the body of planarian A seemed to have
completely regenerated its head, and after being observed under the microscope, it had all the same
features as it had before it was cut. Under the microscope, the surviving planarian B looked like it
had almost fully regenerated its body, however it was not moving around very much and took longer
to respond to light than planarian A.
Discussion
Question Restated: A Planarian which has re-grown its body can indeed have the same reactions to
stimuli as it did before it was sectioned, assuming it regenerated correctly and completely.
Analysis: My results provided me with an answer to my question as to whether or not a planarian
which has regrown its body has the same reactions to stimuli as it did before it was sectioned. The
planarian that regenerated correctly and completely did respond to light and touch the same way as
it did before it was cut and regenerated. Its regenerated eyespots were equally sensitive to light as
they were before, and it also contracted its body when touched as it did before it was cut. Its behavior
also returned back to normal by the 10th day, and it was just as active as it was before the
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procedure. However, my other two planarians that did not regenerate completely were slower to
respond to light, and their behavior is different than before the experiment. They used to be more
active and now they seem to not be as healthy.
Problems/Improvements: The main problem I encountered in my experiment was the death of 2
planarians. I think if I had kept the water in the petri dishes cleaner and didn’t wait a week to feed the
planarians, then maybe those two would have been able to recover. Another thing I could have done
better is recording observations. I did lots of observing, but I didn’t write down everything I saw. If I
were to perform this lab again, I would take more observations and also take better care of the
planarians.
Brain
Development and
Learning
Joey%Santoro%
65
How does environment affect brain development?
To answer this question
We must understand how the brain
Develops and Works...
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Neurons, Synapses & Myelin
When we are born, our brains are made up of nerve cells called neurons. We are born with about 100
billion. It’s believed that almost all of these neurons are developed by birth. A newborn baby’s brain
allows them to do many basic body functions like eating, sleeping, maintaining heart rate and organ
functions, hearing, seeing, and making sounds.
Once we are born, our brains then begin the majority of their growth and development.
The neurons in our brain begin creating pathways called synapses. These pathways organize all the
informa2on that we are exposed to physically and mentally. Synapses are vital to our brain development
and learning. They develop at a rate of almost 2 million per second in a child’s early years. By age 3,
most brains have more than 1000 trillion synapses. The synapses that are most important will grow
stronger, while others rarely used ones will get discarded by the brain as it organizes itself to be the
most sufficient it can be.
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Another important process taking place in a child’s developing brain is myelination.
This process of white fatty tissue, called myelin, that insulates the brain and helps clear transmission of
signals to occur through the pathways of the synapses. This process begins in early childhood in the
lower parts of the brain that deal with primary motor and sensory skills, then progresses to higher
functioning parts of the brain into young adulthood. That is why a young child processes information
much slower because s/he lacks the myelin to send clear neuron messages quickly.
The majority of the brain’s growth and development in a child’s brain take place after birth. This higher
region of the brain involves regulating emotions, language and abstract ideas. As children are exposed to
more and more experiences, their brains respond by developing pathways, and the more they are
exposed to something, the stronger these synapses (pathways) become.
Now that we know how the brain works and develops, we can answer the question:
Does environment affect brain development?
The answer is YES
“A child’s brain must be exposed to a caring, healthy, supportive environment that offers interactive,
educational stimuli.
If a caregiver is uncaring or hostile, the child’s brain may be impaired and not
develop correctly.”
Negative Environmental Impact
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In a 2012 study, neurologist Gabriel Corfas of Harvard Medical School and his team led by fellow Harvard
Med neuroscientist Manabu Makinodan examined the effects of childhood neglect on brain
development.
In the study, they took baby mice and put them in isolation for two weeks and then returned them to
their groups. When the mice reached adolescence, the researchers compared their brains and behavior
to mice that hadn’t been isolated. The mice that were isolated had antisocial behavior and memory
problems. The myelin in their brains was unusually thin, especially in the prefrontal cortex, a brain
region important for cognition and personality.
Similar patterns of behavior have been seen very often in children raised in orphanages or
neglected by parents.
“What this work certainly says is that the first years of life are crucially important for brain
architecture” says Nathan Fox, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Maryland.
Sources Sited
• hKp://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/09/ neuroscience-­­of-­­neglect/
• hKps://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/issue_briefs/ brain_development/effects.cfm
• hKp://www.extension.purdue.edu/providerparent/ child%20growth-­­
development/braindev.htm
69
RHODE ISLANDERS
Short Stories in the Style of James Joyce’s Dubliners
The Rock
Ryan Summers
195 Nelson Street was quiet until the children were released from Robert F. Kennedy elementary
school. The children were confined within the dreary halls of a once prominent place. Many
children cherished their freedom once the final bells brought the day to a close. In the front was the
schoolyard where children were frequently lost when they set on their long journey home. The
building was red brick layered from the pinnacle point of its roof to the depths of the dungeon. One
boy in particular, a young Peter, was an established scholar of religious studies. He was tall in
stature, had blonde hair, and had visions of becoming a local priest in his community. The lad had
been informed that his parents planned to transfer him into an institution of Catholicism for his
education.
Once he had heard this amazing news, he had run home to inform his parents that he was thankful
for their interests in his aspirations. Upon returning to his household on Dorchester Street, he ran
into Mister O’ Brien who was long-time friend of his parents. “Hello, Peter! How are you on this fine
day? I’m afraid your Aunt Jennie has gone to a better place. She has passed away and I’m sorry you
were not able to be with her. I know she loved you very much, and I understand she is who gave you
dreams of becoming a priest. My deepest condolences are with you and your family at this difficult
time.” Peter was paralyzed and shocked to hear about the passing away of his aunt. His aunt was the
reason he aspired to become a priest, and she taught him everything about the role God played in
the lives of his precious people. Peter began to weep away his sorrows when his father and mother
came outside. They knew his aunt didn’t have much time left in her current state of health; they also
didn’t want to alarm the helpless child seen bellowing tears of sadness and despair in front of them.
At the dinner table, Mr. and Mrs. Jennings blessed the family meal and began to distribute the
cranberries and turkey. Young Peter was dumbfounded that his parents were not discussing the
matter of their loss. Peter didn’t quite understand why the family was not sharing its feelings about
Aunt Jennie. He was inclined to question his parents’ odd behavior but decided that it was out of his
place. The night dragged on for hours, and he was not interested in the daily chats his parents
engaged in on a nightly basis. His parents jabbered to their hearts’ content about their lives: “I was
given a promotion at the law firm, and Mr. Doyle would like to give me a new office!” “Steve, I’m so
proud of you honey!”
Peter was distraught with the immense loss of someone who meant so much to him. Jennie was not
only his aunt but his mentor and his life. Every now and again, the two would divulge something
precious in their lives. Both individuals would debate about the role religion played in society. She
conversed with Peter about the disadvantages of today’s society. In the latter part of the 20 th
century, many people decided to leave the Book behind them, and according to her, this was
immoral. “I thank God that you are not one of the Neanderthals who are not compliant. The first day
I met you, I knew that you were blessed, and I’m hopeful you will always be true to your duties sent
forth by God!” Now, Peter was convulsing over the reminiscence of the events played out during the
time spent with her. For some reason, he felt free in a sense; he was not only saddened by the loss,
but he was relieved he would not have to stomach Jennie any longer.
Recollecting the memories of his aunt, the night still began to unfold. The bleakness of the night’s
sky was hovering over the boy’s dwelling. He was remembering something quite special about
Jennie. He could recall the first time he ever met the mysterious woman. Mourning the loss of his
70
uncle Jack, he was distraught and confused. He was fascinated by Jennie’s intellectual input at the
funeral as she led the services with readings from the gospel. He was inspired by the message she
was depicting. “Even though I walk through the valley of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with
me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” –Psalm 23:4 When Peter finally had enough courage
to approach Aunt Jennie, he was whisked away by the surge of the emotional crowd. Peter’s mind
was filled with dismay about the whole situation with his lost aunt. The woman is what drove his
instincts to follow his newly developed passion toward priesthood. The night he was introduced
with her, she took instant interest in the boy’s thoughts. Jennie viewed him as a “child touched by
God’s hands and was very blessed.” She had at one time believed that there was no hope for her
family. The family had not had a priest or pastor since the reign of Pope John XXIII. Her father did
the honor of representing the Jennings’ name and was faced with reform amongst the leaders of the
church. The emotions flooded the streets of Downtown Providence, and the boy could not find any
meaning in the newly praised sense of freedom. He was questioning the idea of becoming a priest
but was convinced that the ideals expressed by his aunt were not in vain. Peter cherished every
moment he had spent with his aunt and was determined that the path of priesthood would fulfill the
wish he had promised Jennie. However, the boy could see Jennie’s trickeries played upon his
innocent soul. “I can remember the way she would not only convince me to do things, but pressure
me into doing things,” thought young Peter as he was gazing into the evening sky.
As the clock struck midnight, the boy had at last made up his mind. The woman was not there
physically but was there spiritually. He believed his decision was just, and he contemplated the
consequences of not following Jennie’s wishes. In a last ditch effort to ease the pain, he daydreamed
about a world in which you were free from obligation and free from pressure. As Peter made his
descent down the spiraling stairs away from the heavens, he knew there would be no turning back.
Peter was now on his way to break the news to his parents, and as he crossed the final sloped step,
he knew the Book was lost, and his hands would now be clasped around the keys of a brighter
future.
Plans
Emily Thuotte
She stood at the corner of the top of the road, staring blankly down at the black tar and fine sand
coating it. Her backpack hung heavy on one shoulder, her hair hanging in her face, keeping her from
seeing anything but the road beneath her feet. It was early still, and she was tired.
Cars flashed past her, but she barely noticed them, despite the strong wind they created,
occasionally blowing her fine mahogany hair in her face. Her expression was pale and tired, brown
eyes slightly glazed and fixed.
Despite this tired appearance, Anna’s mind was a whirl of activity. This was not due to the
approaching day of school, although the reason she was standing here in the brisk weather with
noxious car fumes blowing by her was because she was waiting for the bus. Her preoccupation was
due to an event occurring after the school day ended. Her childhood friend was going to visit her.
This particular friend was one Anna had not seen since the beginning of the school year--almost
three months ago. They passed briefly in hallways, but thus far her friend had always been too busy,
forced to cancel at the last minute.
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Today would be different. Anna looked up at the sky, painted in beautiful colors of yellow and
orange with hints of blue as the sun rose. Such a beautiful sunrise always meant a beautiful day
ahead.
The bus squeaked to a halt in front of her, opening its glass see-through doors to let her on. The
doors opened with a squeak, rusty and disjointed. Anna climbed aboard the bus, taking her seat in
the anonymous, decrepit, single-space green seat in the back of the bus. It was closest to the
window; a glass window barred with cross wiring that reminded Anna of chicken wire.
Anna recalled having fancied that it was sharp, that touching the glass would feel like poking
chicken wire. She was much disappointed to have one day run her hand along the glass and found
no feeling of chicken wire at all--just smooth glass. Smooth, cold, clear glass, the same as any other
window she had ever touched.
That had been the end of that. Today, though, Anna had something else to occupy the ride on her
cold, hard seat. She crouched down in the seat, eyes fixed on the peeling silver duck tape covering
the hole in the leathery material of the back of the seat in front of her, remembering the times with
her childhood friend.
Hunts for creatures, climbing trees, races... Anna recalled all these things vividly: the crunch of
leaves and sticks and the tickle of grass on bare feet, the thump of asphalt beneath them, rough bark
scraping skin, running amok with her friend through the sparse trees around her house that barely
hide them from view. She and her friend had played together often in those woods, picking leaves
and building small houses. Today, Anna envisioned doing those things all over again.
The ride on the bus, uncomfortable as it was with the hard material of the seat poking her in the
back, was over surprisingly shortly. As Anna moved to get off the bus, she noticed, for the first time,
the bus driver. He was a middle-aged man with short gray hair. Stepping forward to step off the bus,
Anna hesitated, and then nodded to him as she stepped off and approached the building.
It was a red and gray brick-walled place with two glass doors leading in. There were no windows
that could be seen from the front. The only windows were at the back of the school: small, high up
rectangular windows that revealed a tiny slice of sky and nothing more. Anna pushed the door
forward and stepped into the hall, teeming with students. A flinch of slight discomfort, and Anna’s
eyes glazed slightly once again. She moved through the hall robotically, approaching her locker and
opening it.
Anna stepped back and studied her locker. It wasn’t really hers. It was the same as every other
locker in the hallway--red, thin, tall, cramped. She stepped closer again and lowered her textbooks
into the locker, carefully placing them so as to make as little noise as possible when they hit the
metal bottom of the locker. She stood, notebooks in one hand, a pencil behind her ear, hair still
straggling in her face, although most of it was now pushed behind her ears. Anna closed the locker
door, slowly and carefully so it made as little noise as possible as the locker shut. The
temperamental lock refused to stick, leaving her locker slightly open. Anna left for class anyway,
wondering if she was right in thinking that no one would attempt to invade her locker.
The classes of that day went by in a blur. Anna never paid them any attention--they were simple
hours of boredom, spent whiling time away in silence, staring at her desk, mindlessly and absently
drawing, alone in her corner in the back of the room. Lunch was a solitary affair but not a lonely one.
Anna spent her short time alone at the table whispering to herself, repeating the story of Cinderella-the real one.
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It was funny how the sisters cut off parts of their feet trying to be someone they weren’t. Things
ended well for Cinderella...but Anna wondered what happened to the sisters. Where did they go?
Anna returned to the blur of class and the blur of hallways. Typical hallway behavior ensued-nothing Anna wanted to pay close attention to, nothing involving her.
Finally, at long last, the day ended.
Anticipation grew the whole long, loud bus ride home. Anna was nearly bouncing in her seat by the
time she arrived.
Stepping off the bus, Anna saw the day had turned gray and rainy, with mist so thick she could
barely see through. It was sudden obscurity.
Clicking her key in the lock and opening the door, Anna stepped into the musty, dusty hallway, the
place she had always lived. Pushing open the wooden doors to her living room, she stepped on the
squashy and faded green carpet. No light shone through the window.
Anna removed her shoes. In this weather, perhaps board games were more appropriate than
running around in chilly mist. She took them out in the silence of her empty house. Her mother
wasn’t home yet, it seemed.
Anna placed the board games neatly on the table. “Perfect,” she whispered. Then, because she liked
the sound of her voice breaking the silence, she repeated it, louder. “Perfect.”
Anna sat on the couch, watching and waiting.
Five o’clock passed.
Then six o’clock.
Seven o’clock.
Eight.
Nine.
Anna stood and looked out into the dark, cold night. She could no longer see anything. With no word
from anyone, Anna stood there, staring alone out into the cold, pitch black, unfriendly, starless and
moonless night.
Anna still waited, hoping against hope that her friend would still come.
Her friend. Who had always been too busy, always had ‘something better’ to do...
“Always,” Anna whispered, eyes wide as she looked out, “something ‘better’ than this. Better than
games...”
Anna whirled around, faced the board games, ran to the table and shoved them off it. She saw now.
She had been foolish to hope. These were childish things...and her friend was never coming back.
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Idles
Chelsea Riordan
It seemed that Spring had dawned once again, beating away the usual finespun frost and replacing it
with morning dew. The morning itself was still somewhat chill, but that didn’t stop many of Rhode
Island’s youths from dressing in lighter garb. They filed out of their houses and down the street and
strode in the direction of their respective schools, shoulders hunched under the weight of their
backpacks. They passed what seemed like innumerable rows of pastel-colored cape houses along
the way. Some older students were lucky enough to have cars, and they were much more
comfortable in their travels. Exhaust poured from innumerable tailpipes, and pedestrians were
regaled with a few passing strains of the same tired old pop songs escaping out of open driver-side
windows. The scent of damp mulch had returned, and the cherry blossom trees were beginning to
bud again. Kimberly Tavarossi was just passing a clot of them when the familiar feeling of relief
sunk in. No, she realized, she wouldn’t be late to homeroom this time. However, she barely had a
moment to stop by her locker and select the appropriate materials for her first three classes.
She slipped into the classroom and took her seat not a minute before the loudspeaker fizzled with a
start and the Pledge of Allegiance began. Despite her knees, sore from the morning’s requisite trek,
she rose with the group. Though she’d had the Pledge memorized from the age of six, Kimberly
never paid much attention to what she was saying. Following this recitation was the usual series of
daily announcements, delivered by a woman with a jangly Warwick accent. Mainly, this broadcast
pertained to the day’s lunch menu and midterm reports, which were coming up in the next week.
Just hearing the word “midterms” made most students’ chests tighten. Kim focused very hard on not
thinking about them for too long, keeping the ever-present concern of developing worry lines in
mind.
The blaring of the loudspeaker soon subsided, signing off just as unceremoniously as it had
twitched to life. When the clock struck eight, the bell rang and the students traipsed out and onward
to their respective classes. Kimberly’s thoughts were somewhat fuzzy this morning, but her legs
were kind enough to autopilot her to Tenth Grade Algebra on the second floor. The teacher, Mrs.
Rapossa, was situated at the front of the room behind her desk, looking down at something
obscured by the assortment of picture frames and worn textbooks arranged on the tabletop. She
was a plump woman adorned with a plentitude of bronze jewelry and a pair of thick-framed
rectangular glasses. Her false fingernails were long and painted hot pink. When she was annoyed,
she habitually tapped them on whichever hard surface was closest. She couldn’t have been much
older than thirty-five or so, but she still sported her Pilgrim High class ring. Kim took her seat
between Jason Crabill, a crew-cutted boy to whom she’d never spoken, and Jamiee Walsh, a girl she
remembered from middle school. After waiting quietly for the bell to buzz and end the passing
period, Mrs. Rapossa got up out of her seat and addressed the class with her standard directions:
“Good morning everyone. When we last met we were looking at polynomials, and your homework
was page two-forty-six, problems eleven through fifty-three, so we’re gonna continue our review on
page two-forty-seven...”
Little more needed to be said. The sound of pages flipping swelled for a few seconds and then
diminished. Due papers were passed forward, and corrected work traveled back in return. On the
corrected looseleafs, there were bright red check marks drawn on after every answered problem.
The class period dragged on uneventfully enough for Kimberly. After a very brief exposition, the
teacher left her charges to their own devices (granted that they were quiet) and turned her
attention to some pressing preoccupation of her own. Kim filled in a few blanks absentmindedly,
74
knowing full well that her lackadaisy would cost her some free time when she got home. It wouldn’t
be any great feat, though, completing the assignment, and she could just as easily shirk it altogether
without doing any serious damage to her final grade. Still, one omitted chore could easily
accumulate into fifteen. Fixing her gaze on a runty shrub out the window, Kimberly decided not to
care about this assignment, nor did she care about the homework that would come afterwards.
Her next class was General Science, taught by a small ruddy man with big teeth and very
unfortunate taste in neckties. He was younger than Mrs. Repossa and much more energetic, but he
was also graying prematurely, even down to the hair on his knuckles, if one was pressed to examine
them. At this point in the day, Kimberly was a bit more alert, and she was able to take in some of Mr.
Lombardi’s booming lecture. He babbled on for some time, standing firmly in place and
gesticulating, interrupted only by himself to silence a student’s hushed side-conversation or
promote diligent note-taking. This second class period ended soon enough though fortunately with
no homework this time. Kimberly then moved on to woodshop, where she was forced to whittle a
family of miniature cows, and following that, at long last, she was allotted a twenty minute block
dedicated to lunch. Relieved to have a short break but all the same disappointed that none of her
truly close friends had the same meal period that day, Kim settled beside Rachel King after some
milling and premeditation.
King gave the impression of having diminutive stature, although this may well have been an illusion
caused by her perpetually hunched shoulders and craned neck. Her blonde curls were unruly and
frizzy, falling just sort of shoulder length. Her hands rested limply on her knees under the table
where her fingers pinched down tightly the cuffs of her long sleeves. She and Kim had several
classes in common.
“What’s up?”
Rachel shrugged, staring down at her tray of food resignedly. Cafeteria food always left something
to be desired. Kim, on the other hand, only had a somewhat squashed energy bar to subsist on.
Despite her companion’s shyness, she pushed the conversation forward between bites.
“Did you watch the new Degrassi last night?”
“I don’t really watch that show.”
Kimberly produced a disappointed sound. From the handful of conversations she had shared with
this girl, the only information she was able to garner pertained to things that she did not do. She did
not have a Twitter, she was not on Tumblr, she did not watch much TV, she did not listen to Lady
Gaga. The brunt of Kim’s attempts to find a common thread had failed.
“What class do you have next? Are we in gym next?” Now she was grasping at straws. She’d long
since memorized her schedule, but at least her inquiry would elongate the faltering chat’s lifespan
by a few seconds.
Rachel turned reflexively to look at her company for the first time that day. She looked somewhat
vexed. “Yeah...”
“Uhg, I’d really rather not go today.”
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“Me too,” she replied, scratching steadily at her forearm through the fabric of her sleeve. “It’s a big
damned waste of time.”
Kim nodded and “mmm-hmm”ed, swallowing the last of her energy bar. Her elective courses were a
bore, and her academic classes were all redundant stressful bores, but their shared saving grace
was that they did not involve any physical activity. That was gym’s greatest pitfall. She nearly
shuddered at the thought of herself, grouped together with withering Rachel and fifty other kids,
dressed in smelly and often ill-fitting sweats that proudly proclaimed “PROPERTY OF PILGRIM
HIGH SCHOOL,” running circuitous laps on that meticulously manicured footpath, the squat old gym
teacher barking at them from the sidelines all the while. With all of her strained hollering, the blue
veins in her forehead and calves would always pop into prominence most grotesquely, and her
beady eyes crinkled under that grooved old brow line. If only she had a whip to crack, that would
surely complete the image.
Recovering from her moment of dread, Kimberly looked back at her company, who was
methodically slicing through the edges of her styrofoam tray with her fingernails. Out of habit,
Rachel returned her gaze, but her nervous, rabbit-like expression didn’t fade. The sound of one
hundred different conversations blared around the cafeteria, but the congregation of kids around
her suddenly seemed to cause her discomfort. Kimberly began to feel the same way, and her mouth
became a grim line. She tented her fingers apprehensively.
When lunch ended and the herd was ushered out into the hall, Tavarossi looked around at her
fellows. Flocks of children trafficked themselves in all directions in a chaotic yet perfectly
maintained current. Some of them laughed and jostled one another, whooping and vociferating as
they plodded through the shiny hallways, vying for attention. Most of the kids just chattered
amicably, clutching their books to their chests. A minority of students were completely quiet and
reserved, arching their backs defensively and maintaining perfect glares. Sound bounced readily off
of the flat walls. Despite going in the same direction, Kimberly and Rachel had been divorced,
though they didn’t look very hard for one another. Kim kept her eyes forward, and she was directed
to her destination by the steady trend of motion around her.
Language Layers
Kira Wilson
Drrrriiiiiiiiiiinggggg.....
Piercing through my sleep like a strange, suffering scream, my alarm pulled me with an iron fist
from sleep. My arm instinctively flung out to seize it without need of permission from my nerves,
which were still dormant. I groaned as the word Thursday floated through the clouds of my
mind. Granma didn't pick me up on Thursdays. I winked open an eye for the clock, which only
confirmed my beliefs, so I shut it immediately. Half a minute later I grunted in protest as I pulled
myself up from the rear, then the rest of the way up, folding my legs under me and resurrecting my
spine. I felt my hands touch the lower part of my ceiling that came down on each side to make a
shape like a barnhouse, causing the entire room to look crowded and small at first glance. I crawled
out of bed and put on The Weather Channel, then made my way to the bathroom.
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It was too chilly that morning to take a shower, I decided, so I applied a face mask and let it dry
while I prepared the kitchen for myself. After pouring a glass of orange juice, I took an extra sip
after swallowing all of my pills in one hefty gulp. I felt the juice wash over my brain as if it were
returning from a long absence. I rubbed the mask off of my face with a wet cloth and checked the
time again. 5:55. I threw some leftover pizza and snack foods into my lunch box, joined by a
Silkbox and an ice pack. Zipping it up, it dawned on me that Mom had not gotten up to hiss at me
that I was absolutely too noisy and must stay upstairs until the very last minute so the baby
wouldn't stir. She must have gone to work late last night after I fell asleep. That meant I had no ride
to the bus stop and needed to make time to walk.
Snatching a veggie breakfast biscuit from the freezer and throwing it in the microwave, I ran
upstairs, threw on some stretchy plain skinny jeans, a tee and a sweatshirt, and started at packing
my bag. I now had a half hour to get ready and go, and my rushing almost prolonged me more with
the fear that I would forget something. I ran a brush through my hair, which I had basically sheared,
and sighed in relief. It had cooperated today, and did not need straightening or gelling or
spraying. I looked around for the book I was most recently addicted to and threw it in my bag with
my homework folder and personal notebook. Some people had journals, some had blogs; I had
notebooks. My thoughts were too jumbled and sporadic to put in a single entry, so whenever an
idea struck me I would write it down, and whenever I felt anxious and unorganized I made lists of
whatever my priorities were. At that point I had no time for such scribbling, so I stuck to the list in
my head and finally I had nothing more to do than make myself a coffee and heat up my breakfast
bun.
"Ryan, wake up, I have to go to the bus stop." I said militantly after turning on my brother's
light. He moaned sleepily and I pulled off his covers. "Come on, bud. I don't have time to wake you
up again. I have to go. It's long pants, T-shirt and sweatshirt weather." He nodded, and I rushed
out the door with my coffee in one hand and a buttered, egg, cheese and veggie bacon filled bun in
the other hand.
The bun was gone by the time the bus picked me up, and I sipped my coffee on the way to Kennedy
Plaza. There, I waited for the next bus on a steel bench placed near my bus berth. It was chillier
here than in Warwick, of course, and I had forgotten to throw on an extra sweater, so I hugged my
legs while the morning breeze licked the nape of my neck with an icy tongue. A man having a
cigarello nearby commented on the weather. “Aren’t ya cold? Dis weather lately has been crazy.” I
said I was warmer when I huddled up, and he talked more of the strange weather while I agreed
and nodded awkwardly. He looked like he was in his late fifties, but the cigarello, hoarse voice and
ashy dry skin told me he was actually in his early to mid-forties. I rocked side to side anxiously
while he continued. “Hey how old are ye, what, 21, 22?” I said that I was seventeen. He looked
surprised and his eyes spelled oops, but his mouth fumbled for an answer. “Ahh, where ya go to
school?” This question I answered with more confidence because only about 10% of people my age
had heard of my school. “Aw I never did too great in school meself.” He looked down and stamped
out the rest of his cigarillo and then began to make his way across the street, throwing an “Ey, have
a nice day” over his shoulder. He walked towards the ice rink, from which I saw an older woman in
an electric wheelchair cross the street for a third time. A few minutes later I was relieved by my
bus.
School went as usual. I became splotched with paint in Printmaking, took notes in Designing
America, walked to Barras with Vanessa at lunch to get an Arizona, humored Steve in Physics, and
gossiped in British Literature. Thankfully, it warmed up to a comfortable temperature. I made my
way to the bus stop in peace. No conversing occurred besides that between the bickering birds and
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the wind whispering to the trees. Flower buds peek-a-booed through fresh mulch and nature
seemed to be feeling increasingly friendly lately. When I arrived at Kennedy Plaza, it turned
somewhat angry. Wind raced over the back of my neck, spun around my arms and threw my hair
every which way. I sat down and placed my ear buds snugly in my ears. A few minutes later a man
sat down near me, and I continued intently with my music listening. After a while he started talking
to me, which I didn't realize for a few sentences until I yanked out my defenseless earbuds. “Yeah,
that guy at that food truck, aw he’s a great guy he gave me a hot dog for free cuz I told him I had no
money.” He waved around his hands as he spoke, and I noticed the prepaid cellphone in one hand
landing on his Aero khakis. I agreed it was nice of the man to do, but wondered if the homeless who
slept at Burnside ever walked over to the $1 hot dog truck to ask for a spare dog.
“Man nobody gets hiyahd these days. I got fiyahd a month ago, I was a taxi driver for eleven
yeahs. Eleven yeahs! Man they only want kids who don’t know what they work is worth. Dey
expect me to get a job to pay for a phone and an apahtment, when I gotta have those things to get
hiyahd! Damn rats.” I agreed that things were tough right now. He went on to talk about how he
blew all of his money as a teen. “Yeah I wish I’da known what I know now back then. Damn, I was
stupid. And my mom and sister didn’t give me no money after they sold the house! They took off, I
dunno where they are, fuck em. I just gotta concentrate on gettin’ this job righ now.” I put my ear
buds and tablet away and gave him an “Ohh” while he continued to talk about things that suck. It
was all muttering about how shitty the economy had gotten in the last 20 or 30 years.
It had been shitty as long as I remembered, as far as I knew, mostly after my Daddy had to stop
welding. The doctor told him that his back was broken because of injuries he got from fishing and
because he had spent so much time bent over boat parts and welding. He didn't stop welding for
work until after that, though. His medicine made him sleep all day, stay up all night, take half an
hour to pee, and look sick all the time. I remember when he stopped it cold turkey, and Mom yelled
at him for not going to the Doctor about it. She was worried about his blood pressure, but he said
he hated being on that kind of medication. He told me opiates were very, very bad, and never
should I rely on a drug. His moods were wild and he acted like a rabid ape for about a month, then
he went back to his normal rabid state. He apologized for his craziness and made me promise to
always rely on my mind. That would never fail me, he said, then he would rant about Stephen
Hawking. Most of all he would say: “The only person you can ever trust, Kira, is the person in the
mirror.” He always regretted dropping out of college to go fishing, never achieving his dreams, so
told him I would buy him college and a mansion when I get rich. He would laugh and tell me to just
worry about myself, that my happiness was his dream, but I told him the same thing. It always
made me feel important to make people happy. Maybe not important, useful is a better word. I felt
that as a living organism, the best thing for me to do would be to spread positivity. I began to
wonder in my head how I would go about becoming wealthy while fulfilling all of these dreams,
lighting the endless amount of dark places in the world, but I was startled out of my head.
"But I'm about to lose my apartment if I don't get me this job, yaknow, but they don't want peoples
like me. They want the young'uns, yaknow? Man, if I could go back, I'da hadda whole different
life. It's so much easier to be young." I blinked and thought of the trauma that I had encountered in
high school, wondering if he was right. If being an adult was more difficult emotionally, I wasn't
sure I ever wanted to be one. But I doubted that I would have to experience the same things then,
or I hoped, at least. I had grown much smarter. Mom or Dad never got too too involved with my
personal experiences and pain, but their advice always found a way to scratch itself into my brain
and stay there, even in the company of any other chaos. To Dad’s phrase, I had always asked: “But
even you, Daddy? I can always trust you.” He said I should trust me more, but I never understood
until I was older. Mom’s advice was more frequent and less memorable- don’t put your elbows up
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at the dinner table, don’t always do what a boy asks, tell her everything because she knows how it
is, clean up after yourself, take better care of yourself, you won’t always have what you have now. I
didn’t understand that stuff either until I learned for myself.
I nodded to the man as my bus pulled up, and I hurried on, hoping to sit alone with my
backpack. Others flooded in, and I realized I would have to tolerate a seat partner. I moved my
bag. A young guy in a grey sweatshirt with a skateboard sat next to me and put his ear buds in. The
tension in my back that had built up around the Kennedy Crazies that day eased; he didn't wish to
vent at me. I watched the dirty city go by and wondered why the friendliest people at Kennedy
Plaza were crazy creep-os. If Skateboard Guy started complaining about the economy, I would have
been happy to join in. He would have been much more relatable. I wondered if it was right that I
was creeped out by most of the older people who talked to me. Come to think of it, the only older
people who ever talked to me at Kennedy Plaza were men over the age of 30. I blinked in surprise
at this. Perhaps I was not being so unfair. It felt more appropriate for me to associate with people
my age, or women or mothers, but I was perplexed by this.
Perhaps it was all about energy. Perhaps it had more to do with experience. I gazed up out the
window as the bus turned onto a ramp and the sun claimed the receding sky. Its rays shined on the
designs on Skateboard Guy's board. I would have admired it and commented how everybody
longboarded instead these days, but I had little energy left in me, and the lull of the bus continued to
drain me. I decided not to disturb him. I had had enough encounters for one day. When I got home,
I collapsed onto my bed, and Onyx greeted me with a mew and a mirrored collapse onto my bed. I
glanced at the clock. I still had a couple hours until dinner, and I was temporarily free. I flipped
open my latest addiction and prepared to dive in, but Onyx was jealous. He plopped himself down
onto the pages and gazed up at me through adoring green eyes surrounded by charcoal colored
fur. I rubbed his cheek, glad that he used a simpler language than I, and set down my adventure for
a while.
Stalls
Amanda Rose
The boys stared longingly at the brick façade as they passed the spindled gate, hoping one day to be
invited inside the girls’ academy.
“Dayum, if I went there, I wouldn’t cut gym!”
“Yeah, maybe for once you wouldn’t get beat up.”
“Fuck you, gym’s for pussies. Besides, the ladies there gotta shower after—nay-ked!
“Of course they shower naked, fuckin’ retahd”
“’Dem sweet sweet…”
The girls tittered at the fading conversation that drifted through the open window. The giggles
diffused throughout the classroom, erupting in pockets of real laughter here and there. Mary
struggled to ignore the interruption but continued to push out perfect cursive on the page. Each
letter stung the mammoth callus on her right middle finger, but she never stopped writing. She
rolled her eyes at how immature the other seniors were and even pitied them for a second.
“Lay-lay-l-l-adies, please,” the small chair whined beneath Sister Pauline’s hefty girth “Exa-actly
thir-thirteen minutes left.” The room collectively drew in a breath and noiselessness stifled any
remaining silliness.
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The tinny rattle of the bell penetrated the silence just as Mary finished her exam. She’d written
lengthily about cellular adaptations and parthenogenesis in haplo-diploid insects. Confident that
her essay had concisely summarized more biology than Sr. Pauline had ever seen in her entire life,
Mary fiddled with the shiny crucifix around her neck. She surveyed the other girls absentmindedly
and thought eagerly about the rest of her day. While she was ordering her books by class (AP Calc,
AP Chem, AP Stats, and cue groan: Poetry), her eyes locked on Cora’s fiery curls as her classmate
strolled to the front of the room. Mary was struck by her mannerisms and how breezy she always
seemed. They had been very close since preschool. Sometimes they ate lunch together.
Mary squinted and realized that Cora’s short answer section looked about two pages longer than
her own. She bit her cuticle and made a mental note to study an extra hour that night as penance.
“She doesn’t even work hard,” Mary grumbled testily. Considering Cora’s new Louis Vuitton while
snapping her own vintage Gucci knapsack shut, she decided it was a knock-off and hastily moved on
to the next room.
Mary’s advisor had suggested that she take at least three humanities that semester, but she’d opted
only for poetry since Caltech was practically a sure thing next year. None of her English classes had
ever made much sense to her because she often got lost in vagaries of possibility. Definite answers
were easy. She craved their simplicity and thrived on the neatness. Precise. Clean. She smoothed her
bony hands over her long skirt and looked forward resolutely. Her first choice would only be a lock
if she got a perfect score on the stupid poetry midterm.
Mary made a birdcage with her hands and pulsed her palms back and forth. The blank test glared
back at her from the old mahogany table. Beside her, Cora was bent prone over her paper, brows
knitted and eagerly filling in multiple-choice bubbles. “Not so nonchalant are you now, bitch.” Mary
snapped the rubber band on her wrist for such a cruel thought. “God, forgive me,” she prayed. The
pregnant circles on the Scantron sheet swam before Mary’s eyes. The sun glinted on her friend’s
metallic Caltech pin and she was blinded for a moment. A fly buzzed persistently around her head.
The trees of the ancient oak rustled outside. “Early Decision,” they whispered. She turned away.
The runners traced loops around the parking lot outside, cheating the edges of the large rectangle.
It had once been a tennis court that produced a stream of Rhode Island state champions; all that
remained were harsh white lines that gave off the appearance of an asphalt mousetrap. The crosscountry team moved as one fluid unit, hovering soundlessly above the black surface. She coveted
the thin frames that glided efficiently without the burden of any excess weight or pressure. The fly
slammed into the pane, sending Mary’s consciousness careening back to the chamber. She took a
deep breath and winced as the buttons of her skirt bit into her flesh. She could feel them burning
circular indentations into her waist as time drained from the final. Each stroke of the clock beat
cruelly into her hollow skull. Picking up her pencil, she pretended to skim the test and then quickly
filled out the answer sheet. She was careful not to smudge the ink just beneath her left sleeve.
Cora finished her test and sauntered to the girls’ lav. She’d always had a knack for English, but she’d
decided to major in chemical engineering and programming next year. She yawned as she passed
the mirror. Readjusting her blouse, Cora admired the black lace on her new brassiere. She let out a
contented sigh as she fantasized about inevitable success in Silicon Valley after Caltech. It would be
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a lark just like everything else. She began applying ruby red lipstick to her perfect pout when Mary
walked in all bloodshot and over-caffeinated.
“Looky, looky from Virgin to Magdalene in one poetry exam,” Cora’s eye flicked lazily towards Mary
in the mirror.
Mary stumbled and stared at her hands, “I-I-I…”
Cora watched Mary squirm and began to chant softly, “Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do ya do? Don’t
drink, don’t smoke, what do ya do?”
“There was nothing else—”
“—There must be something inside,” Cora blotted her lips and sucked them together, making a “puh”
sound with her mouth. She admired Mary’s long legs and realized she’d never seen her out of
uniform.
Mary backed deeper into the corner. She cast about for somewhere—anywhere—to direct her
tearful focus, finding only the graffiti stained stall doors. She had always been disgusted by the
crudely drawn genitalia and amateur tags. Beside the words “fuck” and “coño,” someone had
written “Luke 12:2” in sharpie. How very Catholic.
“I won’t tell,” Cora put her lipstick away and fingered the clasp of her purse.
Mary adjusted her gold locks and examined the mask of sincerity affixed to her friend’s reflection.
Tears threatened to flow anew, but she bit her lip to hold them back. The buttons pinched her side
as she murmured a hesitant “Okay.”
Cora placed a hand delicately on her friend’s shoulder and cocked her head to the left, “That’s quite
a lovely necklace, Mary.”
A Lesson In Hanging out As Far as Possible from Your Preparatory High School
Camilla Sennett Mehdaoui
Edgar's penthouse apartment offered a fine view of the Providence skyline: a place he picked
particularly for its ‘thriving art scene.’ His iPod played David Bowie softly in the background, filling
him with words only he and a few choice others have ever heard. As he turned to leave, his button
covered messenger bag brushed against and subsequently tore the corner of his Anarchy poster.
The raised fist made him angry and passionate, although he wasn't quite sure why, so he thought it
best just to leave it there. Perhaps he could come up with a good story as to why it was ripped. With
the slightest spring to his step, he made his way to his tiny electric car and was off to grungy and
glorious South Providence, where, in Edgar's mind, the real people lived.
After parking his car a few streets away and double-checking the locks, Edgar made his way
towards Crossroads, piping hot cup of low fat vanilla soy latte in hand. Outside of the homeless
shelter sat a woman with a shopping cart full of blankets and another with a small child on her lap
and a handful of men leaning against the wall. All of them were smoking. The men recognized Edgar
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and called him over, one with a plastic bag tied over his head offering him a store brand cigarette.
He accepted it graciously, flattered that they'd give up one of their cigarettes for him.
“Thank you, HAYsoos,” Edgar said loudly to the man, taking great pride in pronouncing the name as
it was said in Jesus’s native country of Honduras. Jesus nodded and returned to his conversation,
beckoning Edgar to follow.
“You know, I wish you guys got it. Got how much we really feel your struggle. Like, you know, I’m
jealous of you guys. You guys are, like, real. Like this is real life, you feel me? Everyone back where I
live is just, fake you know? You can’t experience life with shiny cars and rich parents! Art comes
from within, from the ‘real’ person. People like you guys. I can only imagine the art in your souls,”
Edgar said with as much passion as he had.
“Ya man, I get it. We’re real. You know, you’re always welcome to bum the night with us, man. For
the sake of your art, of course,” said Jesus with a smile.
“Haha yeah, definitely, just not now, you know; I’ve got a lot of stuff going on at the moment,” Edgar
replied quickly. Jesus laughed loudly and jammed his cigarette butt against the wall. Putting an arm
around Edgar and turning to the others, Jesus nodded at a man across from him with scraggly facial
hair and an Aeropostle shirt and asked him to finish describing his latest robbery. This warranted a
collective loud laugh from the others, who were more than happy to fill in details. The men got a
good amount of amusement out of telling Edgar the recent events in their lives, his face growing
more and more shocked with each gruesome detail of yesterday's multiple gang fights and the three
bank robberies of last Wednesday. Edgar assured himself the coughs filling his throat were from
surprise and nothing else.
Edgar was in the midst of finding himself. So when the people he bummed cigarettes off of began to
feel overwhelming, he would go sit in the Brown Bookstore to discuss things like nihilism and slip in
words like 'anarchy' and 'revolution.’ Edgar wasn't really sure he cared about any of these things,
but being around other intellectuals made him feel important. So with that, it was absolutely vital
that Edgar go to the bookstore.
While Edgar waited outside for the others while looking very important and refined, a young guy of
Edgar’s age and stature approached him. Leaning against the wall next to Edgar, the man
straightened his leather jacket and ran a hand through his overly gelled hair. Pretending to see
something interesting across the street, Edgar moved to get up, but a question from the kid stopped
him.
“Jamie, where ya going?” he called out, grabbing Edgar’s head. Instinctively, he froze up.
“My name’s not Jamie” he replied.
“Sure it is man, Moses Brown, class of ’09,” he said with a large smile. “We sat next to each other in
Chemistry, remember?” The man was getting frustrated.
Edgar snapped his fingers and pointed at the newcomer, as if just realizing something: “Mitch?
Mitch Gray, right? How’s it going, what are you doing here?”
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Mitch looked all too pleased to answer: “I’m attending NYU up in New York City. Got a great place in
the Upper West side. I’m majoring in Philosophy actually; did I mention how great my philosophy
teacher was? I feel real you know, like I’m actually learning. What have you been up to Jamie?”
Edgar felt just the slightest bit flustered as he stammered out: “Um, you know, I’m actually
attending Brown. I’m majoring in Art History. Best thing ever, a good teacher is. I totally feel ya,
man.”
Just as Mitch opened his mouth to respond, one of Edgar’s classmates from his CCRI pre-Calculus
class walked up, about to address Edgar. “Edgar hey! Who’s this? Doesn’t matter, I got your test
from yesterday, I went to drop it at your place, but your roommate said you were out. He told me
you’d be here by now so…yeah…” he said in one quick breath. Edgar’s face was becoming a bright
shade of red.
“Edgar? Nah man, I know this guy, his name’s Jamie: we graduated from Moses Brown together a
few years ago,” said Mitch, looking a bit confused.
The new man looked just as confused as he looked back at Edgar. “Moses Brown, Edgar? You said
you went to went to school in Brooklyn.”
“Wait who’s Edgar?” the first guy replied. With a sigh, Jamie trudged off in the direction of his car.
He did not turn NPR on during his ride home. As he reached his door on the 7th floor, he tore off the
peeling picture of the raised fist and thought to himself: “There’s really no job opportunities in Art
History.”
Overgrown
Mike White
The late August air blew warm through the cul-de-sac with enough chill to remind the street that
the warmth wouldn’t last much longer. The breeze was just strong enough to rustle the wellgroomed branches of shrubbery that lined the freshly cut lawns. The late summer sun had set a few
hours earlier, and the neighborhood-wide curfew was in full effect.
A middle-aged man walked noiselessly on argyle socks across the room to crack open one of the
long, floor to ceiling windows that looked onto the deck and large back yard. The late summer air
blew the fabric of his evening cardigan, which ended just below where his khakis began. His eyes
seemed dull as he finished his third drink and offered the man in the kitchen a second. His thinning
gray hair was slicked back just a few inches above a furrowed brow as he listened to his younger
friend momentarily pause his monologue.
“No, I promised her I’d be sober tonight,” he said, sounding confident in his promise.
“And you’re saying your wife’s ever kept a promise like that to you?” said the first man, slyly.
“Fair enough,” said the younger man, laughing as they poured two more drinks. “But as I was saying,
John, you have got to take care of that lawn. Even Elwood and his wife recovered their yard after the
hurricane knocked down three trees out front.”
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“I just don’t have the time,” John said, leaning against the island counter-top, trying to conceal his
face with a quick sip from his drink.
“Just hire a Mexican.” After John chuckled at the idea, the friend continued, “No, I’m serious. They’re
cheap, and they work hard.”
“I’m okay, Dave, real-”
“They work whenever you tell them you won’t be here. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday nights right?
They’ll come once a week and you won’t even know that they were here.”
At this, John looked at the man. He had a full head of thick, black hair, chemically enhanced by the
drugs the doctors gave him after his chemotherapy to induce healthy hair growth after the
treatments. John looked at his full head of hair with jealousy regardless of what David had to go
through to get it. It was the end regardless of the means. David had a lot going for him, starting with
a lucrative business in medical supply, which had peaked over the last two years. His marriage was
fully intact and his two daughters hadn’t failed to make the honor roll in the last five years. He also
had an in-ground pool half the size of John’s first floor.
“All right, all right, I’ll think about it.”
“That’s what I like to hear. Well I have to be heading out. Can’t stay longer and give you an excuse to
pour another drink for me,” David said, as he got up and walked toward the door and began to put
on his loafers.
“Well, say hello to your wife for me,” John said, sounding resigned and ready to head to his bedroom
after his friend left.
“Have a good night,” the friend responded extending his hand facing down.
“You too,” John said with a half smile, shaking the hand and clapping his friend hard a couple of
times on the shoulder before he left. “Drive safe,” he added before he closed the door and sat back
down in a stool at the island in the kitchen. Looking defeated, he finished off the last sip of his drink
and washed the glass. John put it down hard and washed a few more dishes. His wife, Connie,
walked in from the lounge, which was connected to the kitchen by a short hallway.
“John, what are you still doing up?” “Dave just left; I was just cleaning up the glasses. Say, what’s
your feeling on hiring some uh… help… for the garden?” John asked. Connie responded with a short
pause, saying, “Well, it’s kind of lazy, but since the hurricane, I can’t seem to get it back together.
Sure, that sounds great. Why do you ask?”
“Good, so I’ll give Dave a call and see who he uses.”
“Okay,” Connie said, walking toward him. “So… how would you feel about staying in my room
tonight?”
Smiling he started, “Well, -”
“Oh, honey,” she cut him off, “you know I can’t sleep next to you when all I can smell is bourbon.”
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“I’ll just stay in my room for tonight anyway; I have a long week coming up,” he said, his voice
sounding resentful.
“Well, okay. Good night,” Connie said as she left the room and went up to bed.
John lingered for a moment and turned off the lights before heading to his room in the dark through
the study.
After approximately a week, John gave David a call and asked for the phone number of the company
he used for his yard. This was followed by a quick phone call to the landscaping company, which
resulted in John’s hiring of the workers for his yard. The interaction was a mix of relief and a feeling
of laziness, but John didn’t let this worry him for very long.
John sat at the large desk in his office. His office was on the fourth floor of a large business building
on South Main Street. The desk was heavy mahogany with a small plate reading “John Walls, CFO.”
The fluorescent lights made it hard for him to read his paperwork while nursing a mild hangover.
His face looked heavy. He bore an expression of someone who had seen a battlefield, but the reality
was more like he had seen the bottom of too many bottles of scotch. The paperwork was piled high
on his table and those were only the piles of work the company wanted him to do. This did not
include his home life at all. At least he knew that he no longer had to tend the yard.
Through the floor to ceiling glass that divided his modern office, he saw the CEO’s secretary walking
toward his office. John winced as the secretary came in, loudly, through the office door.
“Mr. Walls, Mr. Welsh requests that you meet him in his office as soon as possible.”
“Why couldn’t Ted just ask me himself?” John questioned in a gruff, revealing tone.
“He said it had to do with the vote in the state legislature. It sounds important,” she responded.
“Hmm. I’m sure. Thank you, Ms. Mancini,” John said as the secretary exited quietly.
“I don’t have time for this shit right now,” John groaned as he picked himself up from his desk and
walked to the office.
John looked resentful and appeared to be puzzled for a while. The lights were worse on his eyes on
the way to Ted’s office, making his headache worse. However, before entering Theodore Welsh’s
office, he picked himself up slightly and tried to look more alert as he opened the door.
“John, how are you doing?”
“Fine, you?”
“I’m great. This weather’s incredible. It always puts me in a good mood, and did you see the trees?”
Ted said, sounding oddly giddy and a bit nervous.
Bluntly, John responded, “Yes, they’re great, but I’m assuming you didn’t call me here to tell me
about the trees.”
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“Well, no. I asked you to come in today to remind you that the vote in the state legislature is coming
up. Fast. Have you set the ball in motion for Mr. Rochambeau to win this vote? Have the proper
monetary accommodations - ?“
“Yeah, I have it all taken care of. I’ve moved the money from the company account to Mr.
Rochambeau’s.” At the short pause, Ted tried to break in when John continued: “And yes, I am
aware of the positives and negatives of how we play this and the final decision in the state. That’s
why I’ve kept a close eye on the vote. Are we finished here?
“As long as Rochambeau’s vote is secure, then yes, I guess we’re done here, Ted said, sounding
resigned.
“Good,” John responded. His shoulders relaxed visibly, and he seemed to sink slightly. “I’ll be taking
the rest of today from home; I just need some time.”
“Okay. Are we still on for the 22nd?”
“Sure. I’ll see you on the green, Ted. Tell your wife I say ‘hi,’” John said as he walked toward the
door.
The drive home from the office building was twenty minutes. However, the Mercedes was quiet,
which was a relief after the noise and fluorescent lighting in the office. He kept his sunglasses on the
whole ride. John spent most of this time with glazed eyes listening to whatever came on the pop
music station that his children left playing. He eventually turned to the fifth CD in the player and put
on Mr. Jones by Counting Crows. The conversation at the office just seemed to weigh on him. The
end justified the means.
John Walls stepped into his house, and while he was removing his shoes at the door, the golden
retriever came running up to him to greet his early return home. Shoving the dog aside, he went to
the kitchen and started to make himself a drink. The long, hungover day at work had taken a
physical toll on him and he looked like he hadn’t slept in three days. After a long sip of his scotch on
the rocks, Connie came into the kitchen.
“What are you doing home so early, John?” she asked.
“I just needed some time off the job… It wasn’t a good day,” he said apathetically, taking another sip
of his drink.
“First the kids and now you too. It’s just a hell of a day,” Connie said.
“What happened to the kids?”
“Some punk in their school wasn’t happy with the week they just had off so he had to fake a bomb.
Everyone got sent home in a state of emergency.”
“Jackass.” John responded, already halfway done with his scotch.
“How many glasses is that today, John?” said Connie unfalteringly. “It’s really becoming a problem. I
notice. The kids notice.”
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“How about you get off of my case, okay?” John retaliated, raising his voice.
The couple’s two kids were downstairs. The daughter was playing darts and the son was watching a
movie on their second television. Both stopped what they were doing when they heard the voices
raise from upstairs.
The kids heard their mom say, “Look at yourself. This just isn’t healthy. You’ve been acting strange
ever since your company started dealing so much with this “vote” that’s coming up and I don’t trus-”
“I take damned good care of this family.” They heard John counter. “Look at the roof over your head
right now! You’ve never had to want as long as I’ve had this job!” The son and daughter glanced at
each other when they heard a fist slam against a counter.
“But the money just brings more stress and the stress just brings more booze. I can’t do this,” they
heard their mother shout.
Following the sound of a glass breaking, their mother’s footsteps, and then the slamming of a door,
the whole moment flowed by in a kind of surreal way. The kids resumed, hoping that all would just
blow over.
John remained in the kitchen and stared out the window over the sink while he poured a new
scotch on the rocks to make up for the one that was all over the floor. When he looked outside, he
remembered that it was a Tuesday; the new Mexican landscape crew had started getting the yard
straightened out and on a fast track to recovery. After staring at his drink for a while, John began to
pour the scotch down the drain. He still felt lazy hiring a crew to do his work, but at this point, that
was the least of his worries. The end justified the means.
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