Posts Tagged ‘human condition’
The Wesker Trilogy – by Arnold Wesker
The three plays in The Wesker Trilogy are akin to a piece of classical music with three movements. Various themes emerge, disappear and arise again throughout the drama. Some themes are strongly played at certain points, as is hope, conflict and enthusiasm in the first ‘movement’. But other themes such as family influence, the effect of relationship, historical events, also play important parts in the drama.
Regarding the question, if we define idealism as the practice of forming or following ideas, or hopes, that are in some way unrealistic or imaginative rather than realistic,[1] then I see it as uncertain there is much idealism in the plays at all. I say this because the struggles of the Kahn family and even Beatie, were to do with real historical or personal situations or events. They were trying to live something – Socialism – which was already an external reality. If their efforts to do so were at times not effective, that is a different matter.
At the time of the events portrayed Fascism was a very real threat. Being abused in the workplace was also a commonplace experience. Being uneducated and inarticulate left one open to such abuse. Beatie explains this to Jenny when she says that while in-between jobs she was not given unemployment benefit. When she asked for it she was told she did not have enough stamps. She goes on to say that Ronnie, “…. went up and argued for me – he’s just like his mother, she argues with everyone – and I got it. I didn’t know how to talk see, it was all foreign to me.”[2] Developing an understanding and vocabulary brings greater social advantage. Gaining insight into the functioning of politics and world events, was therefor not an idealistic pastime, but an endeavour focussed on realities. I am therefore choosing to explore the question of whether it is idealism or realism portrayed in the plays.
In 1933 anti-Semitism became the official policy of National Socialism (Nazis) in Germany. The opening stage directions of Scene One in Chicken Soup With Barley, give the date as 4th October 1936. That Fascism held a threat to Jews would have been known by then. Communism, according to its manifesto, is a system in which the major resources and means of production are owned by the community rather than by individuals. Its aim was an equal sharing of all work, according to ability, and all benefits, according to need.[3] This suggested that all workers and both sexes could find social recognition and equality. For a Jewish family, whose cultural literature and arts carry evidence of thousands of years of persecution, this would be a situation worth fighting for. As Sarah says to Ronnie, “All my life I worked with a party that meant glory and freedom and brotherhood.”[4] In saying this she is stating a prime motivation, one sustaining her through years of difficulty.
Part of the difficulty would be, of course, to have other people recognise the possible benefits of such a social system, and to motivate them toward building it. Without this Socialism would simply remain an idea rather than an established functional thing. This drive to educate others is well documented in the plays. Even Beatie attests to this in her dramatic speech at the end of Roots. “God in heaven, Ronnie! It does work, it’s happening to me, I can feel it’s happened, I’m beginning, on my own two feet – I’m beginning….”[5] Not only is she saying she feels change toward a new relationship with herself and the environment she lives in, but she is also saying that Ronnie’s attempt to show her means of change have worked.
In following this line of argument further, the characters in the plays might be categorised either as representing various ways of relating positively to this desire for a new social order, or as forms of opposition or disinterest. From the very beginning, for instance, we are told that Harry is weak. We find this in the words, “He is amiable but weak”[6] in the very first stage directions. Very shortly afterwards, as a comment on a question asked by Sarah, another stage direction says, “[This is her well meaning but maddening attempt to point out to a weak man his weakness.]”[7] The constant conversational harassment Sarah aims at Harry illustrates the irritation she feels that her husband, representing the forces of lethargy inherent in any system, does not match her effort and enthusiasm with his own. The friction that occurs illustrates the conflict resulting from any effort to change. Explaining how she feels about this, Sarah tells the story of the three men who are incapacitated from suffering a stroke:
“Then one day one of them decided he wanted to live so he gets up and finds himself a job – running a small shoe-mender’s – and he’s earning money now. A miracle! Just like that. But the other one – he wanted to die. … Well, it happened: last week he died. Influenza! … But Harry was not like either of them. He didn’t want to die, but he doesn’t seem to care about living. So! What can you do to help a man like that?”[8]
As the term to live or to be alive is used throughout the plays to mean participation in learning and striving for better personal and social life, Harry’s state fits that of a non-participator – someone who is not ‘alive’. As well as a husband, a possible partner or cooperant, he is also a father, who passes on his physical and perhaps psychological tendencies. In this role he is tradition, the past, part of the matrix we are moulded from. He is habit from the past that might restrict change. He is orthodoxy, retiring non-action, non-confrontational existence, which prefers to let things be as they are, with perhaps a few token gestures toward the new.
I see the plays directly considering this situation of the ‘given’. In present times there is an open and continuing debate about what is nature (given), and what is nurture, (received during growth or achieved by personal effort). The debate includes discussion of how much influence genetic structure has on behaviour. Apart from genes having been isolated that deal with colour of eyes or physical build and skin colour, there is also the stated possibility that genes influence sexual preference and life decisions. The study of some identical twins separated at birth, who show enormous similarities in life choices, suggests such possibilities. But my argument is not that genes are responsible, only that the plays actively debate this issue through the interaction of the characters, their dialogue, and the events. When Beatie’s mother, Mrs Bryant asks her to speak something novel, something she has thought for herself, Beatie replies, “I can’t mother, you’re right – the apple don’t fall far from the tree do it? You’re right, I’m like you. Stubborn, empty, wi’ no tools for livin’.”
This inhibiting influence toward change, personal or social, is particularly dramatised by Ronnie. He summarises this in his dialogue with Dave at the end of I’m Talking About Jerusalem. “But you’re right.” He says, “There isn’t anything I’ve seen through to the end … Isn’t that curious? I say all the right things, I think all the right things, but somewhere, some bloody where I fail as a human being. Like my father – just like poor old Harry.”[9]
From such scenes with Ronnie and Beatie I see the portrayal of a struggle with themselves as being agents of change. But the plays are many dimensional in considering both the possibilities of change, and the factors resisting such desired change. Dave and Ada, for example, portray changing strategies. At first they are active and perhaps militant, certainly with Dave who goes to fight in Spain and in the Second World War. But experience changes their approach. In attempting to explain to her mother the beginning of her change, she says, “Six years in and out of offices, auditing books and working with young girls who are morons – lipsticked, giggling morons. And Dave’s experience is the same – fighting with men who he says did not know what the war was about.”[10]
The change Ada and Dave make is toward a more family centred statement of their attempts to make a difference, rather than a socio-centred activity such as political activism. But their life and work do not become a nucleus around which dynamic change develops.
Whether we look at Sarah’s persevering against odds, with constant and unchanging attitudes; Ronnie’s self-doubt and constant re-appraisal of things, or Ada and Dave’s change arising from experience, the trilogy does not in the end make the statement that any of the approaches are effective. At the end of I’m Talking About Jerusalem, Dave says, “Face it – as an essential member of society I don’t really count.”[11] Nevertheless Dave and Ada, true to their form as adapting to need, are once more changing their lifestyle to accommodate what they have learnt. If there is any overall comment in the plays it is in the response Ada makes to Dave in the closing scene of the trilogy. Ronnie is on his knees in utter despair. Ada moves to comfort him, then Sarah does the same. Dave indicates restraint to both. He says to Ada, “Darling, did you post those letters off?” The stage direction here says, “[she understands that they must indicate that they are going on]” Ada then replies, “Yes, Dave, and the estimates went off too.”[12]
This return to the commonplace, to the ordinary affairs of everyday needs, seems to be as reality based as their original motivation to support and sustain Socialism. There is a suggestion that Socialism itself must evolve and adapt to change. The personal struggle, failures and success may not be the indication of ineffectual idealism, but of ordinary life with its constant shifting and uncertainty. Although the trilogy is about Socialism and family life, it doesn’t appear to present any rigid theory of progression. It comes back to ordinary people striving to survive in changing situations. People bruised but not broken. Robbed by events and experience of old values, but beginning to form new.
Bibliography
Concise Oxford Dictionary. (c) Oxford University Press – Software, UK, 1992.
Infopedia. Funk & Wagnall’s 28-volume Encyclopaedia on CD-ROM, 1994, USA.
Wesker, Arnold. The Wesker Trilogy. Published by Penguin Books, UK, 1979 – originally 1959. ISBN: 014048048X
Notes
[1] Paraphrased from the Concise Oxford Dictionary. (c) Oxford University Press – Software.
[2] Page 90 – top.
[3] Paraphrased from Infopedia. Funk & Wagnall’s 28-volume Encyclopaedia on CD-ROM, 1994, USA.
[4] Page 73.
[5] Page 146.
[6] Page 13.
[7] Page 14.
[8] Page 60.
[9] Page 217.
[10] Page 43.
[11] Page 216.
[12] Page 217.
Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
Is class conflict central to the novel?
There are a number of important themes throughout the novel Mary Barton. Sickness and loss through death are prominently mentioned. Ways women can earn a living or survive are dealt with and given particular colouring. As an example the fallen woman in the form of Esther, the sister of Mary, John Barton’s wife, is shown as someone pitiable but possibly beneath redemption. Late in the story however, a social and economic explanation is given of her situation.[1] Mary, John’s daughter, who is a seamstress, is shown as earning her living in an acceptable though slavish way, having to work two years without pay, and often stay till midnight. Margaret as a singer however, is the star of the working class in the coloration given in the book.
Although class conflict is certainly the most central theme, this must be defined more fully to do the book justice. John Barton’s grouse isn’t so much that there is a class system, as that those in the class with more available income are more mean with it than the poor. As he says to Wilson at one point:
Han they ever seen a child o’ their’n die for want o’ food?[2]
This scene of watching a child or member of family die is repeated in various ways throughout the book. Along with starvation, it is one of the main arguments given in connection with the working man and woman’s pain and suffering. There is not a plea for equality in society, only equality as a person, only call for recognition of basic human needs. The suggestion in the quote above is that with enough food, a decent place to live, and money enough for simple needs, the working class will be happy. Job makes this very clear late in the book when answering the senior Mr. Carson’s questions about John Barton. He says:
John Barton was no fool. No need to tell him that were all men equal tonight, some would get the start by rising an hour earlier to-morrow. Nor yet did he care for goods, nor wealth; no man less, so that he could get bread for him and his; but what hurt him sore, and rankled in him as long as I knew him … was that those who wore finer clothes, and eat better food, and had some money in their pockets, kept him at arms length, and cared not whether his heart was sorry or glad; whether he lived or died.[3]
This passage sums up many other statements and conversations made throughout the book. It gives a clear image of Barton/the working class, in his wisdom, knowing people could not be equal. By saying that Barton was no fool, the intimation is that if we the reader are wise, we will see this too. Such a stand is seen by some critics, MacDonald Daly for instance, as a sign that Gaskell did not in the end stand with the working class, that she used the Christian ethic to suggest the working class should remain in their place. Daly says that Gaskell’s comparison of the unhappiness of the working class with the often mentioned happiness of the moneyed class, is an attempt to align the reader with the ruling class. He quotes Chris Baldrick over the passage:
The people rise up to life; they irritate us, they terrify us, and we become their enemies. Then, in the sorrowful moment of our triumphant power, their eyes gaze on us with mute reproach. Why have we made them what they are, a powerful monster, yet without the inner means for peace and happiness?[4]
Daly points out that by the use of comparisons with Barton/us, labour/capital, poor/rich, bewildered/wise, suffering/happy, ignorant/knowledgeable, defeated/triumphant, in the above passage and the paragraphs preceding it, “Gaskell is washing” her hands. “She is inviting her readers to testify that ours are clean too, and offering us various inducements to ensure that they are, such as self-identification with the creative, wise and articulate.”[5]
While it can be read in that way, one can also see Gaskell as being a diplomatic and cautious apologist for the working class. Considering that Gaskell was a member of an elite circle in Manchester, and faced manufacturers and the wealthy in her everyday life, it would have been foolish of her to write as if she were a member of the working class. Also, if the book was not to be rejected by the very people who would be its readers – the middle and upper classes – then she must at least make it seem not to be an enemy to them.
In connection with this Daly has made much of certain sentences. There is a particular paragraph in which the art of apologist is being exercised:
Large houses are still occupied, while spinners’ and weavers’ cottages stand empty, because the families that once filled them are obliged to live in room or cellars. …the shops for expensive luxuries still find daily customers, while the workman loiters away his unemployed time in watching these things, and thinking of the pale, uncomplaining wife at home, and the wailing children asking in vain for enough food, – of the sinking health, of the dying life, of those near and dear to him. The contrast is too great. Why should he alone suffer from bad times?
I know this is not really the case; and I know what is the truth really in such matters…[6]
Daly remarks on this saying “There is an extraordinary inscrutability about ‘I know that this is not really the case; and I know what is the truth in such matters’.[7] He suggest the interpretation of this is that the “proletariat perspective on this is a deluded one: the affluent also suffer during slumps.”[8] If one could imagine Gaskell in front of the group of people she had daily to deal with however, one could equally argue that such statements were simply a means of making her argument more acceptable, and not a taking sides.
This becomes particularly clear in another passage, part of which has already been quoted above – “The people rise up to life; they irritate us, they terrify us”. This is followed immediately by the words:
John Barton becomes a Chartist, a Communist, all that is commonly called wild and visionary. Ay! But being visionary is something. It shows a soul, a being not altogether sensual; a creature who looks forward for others, if not for oneself.[9]
Here Gaskell is presenting John Barton as a man who dares to be a member of organisations opposed to what are considered middle and upper class interests. She associates this directly with being a visionary and forward looking. Although it has been pointed out that the word ‘creature’ can have the meaning of subservient, it also has the meaning of equality, as when used in all God’s creatures. Taking it in context with what has gone before, and as part of an argument for the working class, I take it as a suggestion of equality. If she was standing before her peers, her direct support for John Barton, even in his most dangerous aspect as a Chartist and Communist, puts her fair and square with Barton as a member of the working class.
So although class is certainly a major theme in the novel, it is not necessarily altogether class conflict that is being presented. If conflict means opposition and hostilities, there are times of this, but the text does not make this a major theme. Rather the major theme is one of presenting the needs of the working class, and showing how they are often abused and misunderstood. Whether Gaskell present a reasonable solution to the difficulties of the working class is another matter.
Bibliography
Elizabeth Gaskell. Mary Barton. Penguin Books. London. 1996. ISBN: 0-14-043464-X.
Notes
[1] Mary Barton. Penguin Books Page 160.
[2] Mary Barton. Penguin Books. Page 66.
[3] Mary Barton. Penguin Books. Page 384.
[4] Mary Barton. Penguin Books. Page 170.
[5] Mary Barton. Penguin Books. Page xxvi/xxvii.
[6] Mary Barton. Penguin Books. Page 24.
[7]Mary Barton. Penguin Books. Page xix.
[8] Mary Barton. Penguin Books. Page xix.
[9] Mary Barton. Penguin Books. Page 170.
Cultural Conflict
Comparisons between African and Caribbean writers
Texts used: A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi Wa Thiongo; Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe; An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English, edited by John J. Figueroa; Collected Poems, by Derek Walcott.[i]
The very first words in Things Fall Apart describe the character of the hero, Okonkwo, as someone who is admired by his fellows. They read: ‘Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements.’[ii] Early in the story another example of Okonkwo’s integration and acceptance by his people is given. He is chosen as an emissary for his tribe, and the event is described as follows: ‘And so when Okonkwo of Umuofia arrived at Mbaino as the proud and imperious emissary of war, he was treated with great honour and respect, and two days later he returned home with a lad of fifteen and a young virgin.’[iii]
Yet despite this popularity and integration with his countrymen, Okonkwo is shown in the text as a man with deepening conflicts. In fact one of his major contentions is shown as occurring precisely because he tried to live so fully as a male in the traditional way of his people. This is portrayed in the text in the scenes where Okonkwo is expected to take part in killing Ikemefuna the adopted ‘lad of fifteen’ he had fostered for three years. In killing his adopted son, Okonkwo not only cuts asunder the bonds of feeling that connected him with the boy, but also sunders the connection with his own natural son. He does this because, as the narrator says: ‘He was afraid of being thought weak.’[iv] The weakness being that it was the long custom of the tribe to kill slaves such as Ikemefuna. To avoid the custom could have been taken as a sign of fear and disagreement with custom. In the text, Okonkwo represents the stance of attempting to retain tribal custom as it is – or to be more precise, tribal custom as it was.[v]
An opposite polarity to this is provided by Okonkwo’s son Nwoye. When Okonkwo returned home after having killed Ikemefuna, the text says that: ‘Nwoye knew that Ikemefuna had been killed, and something seemed to give way inside him, like the snapping of a tightened bow. He did not cry, he just hung limp.’[vi] In fact this is the beginning of Nwoye’s move away from his father and his own traditional culture. This move shows the inherent discontent within the tribal people themselves with some of their traditional ways of doing things, such as the killing of a twin. Such discontent is a part of the complexity of attitudes readying some members of the tribal society for an alliance with an alien culture such as that presented by the ‘whiteman’ and Christianity.
This conflict with ones own people is also reflected in A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi Wa Thiongo. Once more the first words of the novel give a clue to much of its contents. They are: ‘Mugo felt nervous.’[vii] Mugo’s internal conflict also pertains to guilt he carries because of his part in the death of a fellow tribesman. But Mugo’s conflict has somewhat different circumstances attached to it than that of Okonkwo. The rebel, Kihika, seeks Mugo’s help because he has killed an important white-man. Mugo’s struggle is expressed in the words:
‘If I don’t serve Kihika he’ll kill me. They killed Rev. Jackson and Teacher Maniu. If I work for him, the government will catch me. The whiteman has long arms. And they’ll hang me. My God, I don’t want to die.’[viii]
The message in this text is clear. Mugo is torn by his own fear, a fear played upon by the power wielded by a foreign power ruling the country by force. He is terrified that Kihika will ask something of him that he is terrified of giving. Mugo is led by his fear of two external forces, to have allegiance to nobody – not his own culture, nor that of the white-man. But the text of A Grain of Wheat is not simply about a conflict of that nature. It, like Things Fall Apart, deals with the complexities arising out of change within the tribal people themselves, and change and opportunity created by an imperialistic and technologically advanced power dominating a tribal nation. The major difference between the two texts is that A Grain of Wheat deals with the period when Kenya is struggling to be free of the white mans rule, and achieves this. Things Fall Apart, on the other hand, deals with the period when white rule is just beginning, and Christianity is only starting to encroach on tribal beliefs. As bad as some aspects of white rule were, and as determined as some tribes were to resist it, there were nevertheless factors which acted against resistance. As the narrator says in Things Fall Apart:
… the leaders of the land in the future would be men and women who had learnt to read and write. If Umuofia failed to send her children to the school, strangers would come from other places to rule them. They could already see that happening in the Native Court, where the DC was surrounded by strangers who spoke his tongue.[ix]
The change was happening as inexorably as the movement of a tide. It could not be stopped, but working with it one might be able to direct it a little this way or that. Although the situation described in the two texts mentioned so far is one in which the native communities are ruled by an alien culture, the native peoples still inhabit their own land, and eventually drive out the aliens. This does not underlie the texts dealing with the history and culture of the Caribbean. The Caribbean black people were slaves from the beginning, and over a long period of time. They did not drive out their masters, and were not in their own native country. Haiti of course has a slightly different history. Jaques Stephen Alexis writes in African Literature Today that there is: ‘… evidence in some new literatures of a vital longstanding literary tradition which does not depend on anti-colonial polemics for its survival. The Haitian peasant novel is one such example.’[x] Despite this exception much of the writing from black Caribbean authors is deeply influenced by the history of slavery and the colonial influence. A metaphor of this is expressed in Martin Carter’s poem So That We Build:
I wish this world would sink and drown again
So that we build another Noah’s ark
And send another little dove to find
what we have lost in floods of misery.[xi]
The ‘world’ Martin Carter is writing about here is not simply an island. It is an inheritance of a social situation created by many generations of slavery. It is an inheritance of a self-image that comes from being the heir of conquered forebears. Carter invokes in the poem a call for a new world cleansed of the past and of its mistakes and tragedies. The phrase ‘So that we’ marks the poem as one not dealing with an individual or personal issue, but a collective one. That Carter uses the image of the ark also suggests a mistake or a transgression prior to deliverance. But some of the issues expressed by Caribbean writers do have strong links with the difficulties faced by native Africans. One such issue is clearly expressed in Claude McKay’s I Meet an English Gentleman. Having been told that the Jamaican dialect had never been put into literary form by a ‘native boy’, the hero says:
I was not very enthusiastic about the statement, because to us who were getting an education in the English schools the Jamaican dialect was considered a vulgar tongue. It was the language of the peasants. All cultivated people spoke English, straight English.[xii]
Poverty is a thief of self-esteem no matter what race one belongs to, or what the colour of ones skin. Even so, to consider oneself ‘vulgar’, and uncultivated is a great disadvantage. McKay’s story particularly emphasises this difficulty because it is about the relationship of a young black man with a cultured member of the English upper-class. Other aspects of this type of personal or social conflict, which arises out of a comparison between an impoverished or technologically inferior race with a dominant one, are shown in the African writings. A particularly poignant example of this appears in Things Fall Apart. A great social crime has been committed by one of the Christian community in Umuofia. The leaders or ‘fathers’ of Umuofia deal very wisely and gently with the priest and the criminal. In return the white authorities humiliate the ‘fathers’:
The six men ate nothing throughout that day and the next. They were not even given any water to drink, and they could not go out to urinate or go into the bush when they were pressed. At night the messengers came to taunt them and to knock their shaven heads together.[xiii]
Until that time the tribe had an illusion of power and ability to determine their own way of life. After it Okonkwo in desperation kills one of the district commissioner’s messengers who was ordering the Umuofians to end a meeting they were attending. Okonkwo’s death represents the end of self determination as a culture. Death at ones own hand is an awful metaphor for what black tribal people were faced with when they recognised their powerlessness, their vulgarity, and were made to feel uncultivated. The reverse side of this is also illustrated by the text dealing with the imprisonment of the Umuofian ‘fathers’. Their imprisonment illustrates the obdurate attitude of superiority expressed by most white authorities. It is the attitude that native people are of no account, are ignorant, are superstitious. These many layered walls of difference were important parts of the conflicts which grew within both African and Caribbean black communities.
Some black writers, like Walcott and Figueroa, begin to find their way through these old barriers and pains. In Walcott’s case he does so by a global view of things – by standing above his own background and looking beyond it. We see this in the lines: ‘Ablaze with rage I thought, / Some slave is rotting in this manorial lake, / But still the coal of my compassion fought / That Albion too was once / A colony like ours, “part of the continent, pieces of the main …”’[xiv]
This standing above ones own culture is a form of internationalism. Walcott has taken on aspects of the information, historical perspective and wider viewpoint of other cultures. Or at least, he has taken on these aspects of the culture that dominated his own native background.
Looked at in this light there is much in all of the texts pointing to this same process of integration. If we look at the characters in the text as representing the different ways of relating to change, then many of the primary or secondary characters present a stand of taking on information and power from white domination. Karanja, in A Grain of Wheat for instance, stops resisting white supremacy and becomes an official working for the white men. Mumbi says: ‘Karanja always pointed out to me that my faithfulness was vain. The government forces were beating the Freedom Fighters.’[xv] When Thompson, the white commissioner is returning to England, Karanja realises he will lose the power he has gained through his association with the commissioner. On hearing confirmation of this news, the narrator tells us: ‘Panic seized Karanja. He played with his fingers behind his back. He would have loved to suddenly vanish from the earth rather than bear the chill around.’[xvi] Karanja’s conflict is therefore not one of overt aggression toward the colonial forces, but one that leads him to fear his fellow Africans because of his relationship with them. So once more the texts are showing the complexity of relationships to the central theme of white dominance.
But the fear Karanja feels comes late. At first there is power and its use. Karanja had gradually eroded Mumbi’s confidence in the return of her husband, Gikonyo from the prison camps of the white government. He had pushed Mumbi until she allowed him to have sex with her. This and the fact that Gikonyo had been demoralised emotionally and physically by his years in the prison camps, led to his hatred yet fear of Karanja. The meeting between the two men that occurred when Gikonyo had just been released from a prison camp is particularly expressive of these different roles and feelings. In this scene Karanja is the official dealing with someone with less power:
‘Come right in,’ Karanja said. Gikonyo was shaken with bitter incomprehension – Karanja, a Chief, Karanja sitting erect behind a table, now lowering his eyebrows, the frown adding severity to his face.
‘I said come in,’ Karanja repeated in a voice unnecessarily loud
Gikonyo walked in, gingerly, conflicting thoughts passing through his mind. He sat on a chair and bit his lower lip to steady a bitterness close to tears … And he saw Karanja, his old friend, was watching his every reaction, Karanja, who now talked to Gikonyo coldly as if he did not know him, as if Gikonyo was a criminal.
Comparing this officious Karanja with the one who faces Thompson, we see him as a metaphor for what can happen, what probably did happen, to many Africans who gained some sort of official power under white rule. This aspect of Karanja is obviously not as ease with the servile, Karanja who is dependent upon Thompson yet resents and fears him. Gikonyo on the other hand, is a symbol for men robbed of their tribal status through the intervention of a system that does not take into account the culture it dominates. This loss is shown in the manner Karanja speaks to his old friend and tribal brother and equal.
Olaudah Equiano states a clear example of this direct dominance, in its most gross form, in Equiano on his Way to Slavery:
In a little time after, amongst the poor chained men I found some of my own nation, which in a small degree gave ease to my mind. I inquired of these what was to be done with us; they gave me to understand we were to be carried to these white people’s country to work for them. … I had never seen among my people such instances of brutal cruelty, and this not only shown toward us blacks but also to some of the whites themselves.[xvii]
Equiano gives such vivid description of the horrors and pain of life on board a slave ship that one can see that the conflict faced by a slave might not even be one toward his captors, but with the fact of remaining alive:
… with the loathsomeness of the stench and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat … I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me.[xviii]
Equiano does not suggest that slavery was something unique to the white men who were his captors. He, as the persona of the text, was already a slave to black people before he was sold on to the whites. Nevertheless, the treatment given by the whites was horrific compared with that meted to him by his own countrymen. The cultural differences were so huge he felt terrified of being killed by what he felt must be demons, or at the other extreme, wanting to die due to being treated like an object and separated from people he knew, or from his own language group.
For the children of those who survived such appalling journeys and changes, there were different problems to face. Generations grew and only knew slavery as their situation, and another country as their home. In fact even their new home becomes the home for others. Chinese and Indian immigrants shared the land with them. The mix of races, still deeply influenced by Anglo/American culture, had to find their own balance with each other. V. S. Naipaul, himself from Indian stock, writes about the subtleties of the attitudes to be dealt with in this cultural mix. In The Baker’s Story, he says:
When black people in Trinidad go to a restaurant they don’t like to see black people meddling with their food. And then I see that though Trinidad have every race and colour, every race have to do special things. … I myself, when I was getting my place in Arouca fix up, I didn’t employ Indian carpenters or masons. If a Indian in Trinidad decide to go into the carpentering business the man would starve. Who ever see a Indian carpenter? I suppose the only place in the world they have Indian carpenters and Indian masons is India. Is a damn funny thing[xix]
In a slightly different way, what Naipaul is describing here is very much the same as mentioned in McKay’s I Meet an English Gentleman. In the latter, the attitudes are to do with what is seen as cultivated language and what is vulgar. In Naipaul’s story, the attitudes are reflecting who is skilled at what. The black community, according to the story, does not see black cooks as skilled, but feel good about themselves as carpenters. Chinese are seen as good bakers and launderers, but the first-person storyteller explains to us: ‘If a black man open a laundry, you would take your clothes to it? I wouldn’t take my clothes there.’[xx]
The conflict is not all on the side of the black communities though, whether in Africa or in the Caribbean. The texts also point out conflicts experienced by the white characters in the stories. The texts are at pains again not to give stereotypical characterisation to whites however. In A Grain of Wheat a scene is described where Thompson the district commissioner witnesses a bull-mastiff belonging to a white woman attack Karanja:
Suddenly the dog started barking as it bounded across the compound towards the group of Africans. … One man could not run in time. The dog went for him. The man tried to edge his way out, but the dog fixed him to the wall. Suddenly he stooped, picked up a stone, and raised it in the air. The dog was now only a few feet away.[xxi]
The dogs owner arrives at this point and calls the dog off, but blames the African, Karanja, for threatening the dog. Watching this scene, Thompson was: ‘relieved and vaguely disappointed that nothing had happened.’[xxii] He then stops the woman, Dr. Lynd, from accusing the Africans of attacking her dog. But the text says: ‘He wanted to tell her about the dog but somehow felt it difficult.’[xxiii] In these short pieces of text Thompson is shown as having a mixture of feelings about the Africans he is the authority figure for, and also a conflict about how to relate to a white colleague. ‘He wanted to tell her the truth – but he would have to tell her about his own paralysis – how he had stood fascinated by an anticipation of blood.’[xxiv]
Why does Thompson want to see an African torn by a dog? Why is it difficult to tell his colleague directly that she must control her dog? This is gradually revealed in other parts of the text. The narrator explains the history of this as if it is Thompson’s thoughts or memories:
The silence. Sudden. Like Rira. There the detainees had refused to speak. They sat down and refused to eat or drink. Their obduracy was like iron. Their eyes followed him everywhere. The agony, lack of sleep, thinking of how to break the silence. And in the dark, he could see their eyes. In the men at the library, he had recognized the eyes, the same look.[xxv]
So Thompson’s struggle is with power, with those who resist his authority and the system he represents. The text above, in describing his ‘agony’ in connection with trying to break the will of the prisoners he was in charge of, depicts Thompson as deeply identified with his role and the authority it gave him. That helpless tribesmen in fact had so much power over him; that they could be so strong against him and all the forces he wielded, cut him deeply – deeply enough to want to hurt back. But how can he, Thompson, be seen to enjoy the discomfort of one of his black staff? The human Thompson and the Thompson as a representative of and symbol of the British Government are in conflict.
Is there an even deeper and widespread symptom underlying Thompson’s personal responses, underlying the white race’s drive for dominance? The text already quoted above portrays a race who are brutalised and brutalising: ‘… such instances of brutal cruelty, and this not only shown toward us blacks but also to some of the whites themselves.’[xxvi]. Later in the story Equiano compares the actions of the whites, with their stated religion of love: ‘Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you.’[xxvii] His descriptions of treatment are particularly interesting, as they are an eyewitness account of his own experiences as a slave.
Equiano was one of the very first black African/Caribbean and black American writers. Turning to look more fully at more recent Caribbean writers, the areas of conflict expressed within their text is less dramatic, less horrendous. A community life and a culture have developed beyond slavery. The dialectics of these modern texts has more to do with tensions within a more established yet obviously still changing group of people who have at least a sense of nationality and history, even if that history is productive of regrets. There is more humour and more irony in these texts. A particularly good example of this, and the more subtle conflicts expressed, is found in RSVP to Mrs Bush-Hall.[xxviii] The overall theme of the story, or at least one of its themes, is the relationship that exists between the black/brown community and the white upper class in modern Barbados. Areas of difficulty in this relationship are early expressed in the passage in which Mrs. Bush-Hall, the main black/brown character, is looking at her daughter and her presumed future white son-in-law:
At an old-fashioned desk littered with sheets of writing paper and envelopes, were bent two heads, one of them, her future son-in-law’s, pure Nordic gold, the other, her daughter’s – and here a transient frown ruffled her sleek brow – well, she wished it didn’t remind her so much of molasses froth. But never mind that, she thought, ever mind. It could pass for blonde …[xxix]
By comparing the two hair colourings, and by using positive suggestion in ‘pure Nordic gold’, and negative suggestion in the worry connected with ‘molasses froth’, the introduction of concerns over ‘blackness’ as compared to ‘whiteness’ is introduced. Mrs. Bush-Hall, who has risen socially from working as a prostitute in her youth, to the heights of wealth and social acceptability, is thereby depicted as having a conflict about her ethnic background and its effect socially. Even so the language, in such phrases as ‘But never mind that, she thought, never mind. It could pass for blonde,’ has a touch of humour and irony.
The use of certain registers and language is also cleverly used to suggest Mrs. Bush-Hall’s origins and the amusing side to her ambitions towards social climbing:
‘Her bosom rose and fell again. This time the sigh reverberated.
Two heads were raised in enquiry.
‘Was only thinkin’, pet. You got down that master at the College? The one that does write poetry?’[xxx]
The use of colloquial grammar in her language, helps the reader to create an image of Mrs. Bush-Hall as belonging to a less educated class than her daughter, Pyrlene, who replies: ‘Lucas isn’t impressed mamma. He thinks it is much too derivative.’[xxxi] The struggle to attain a different class, or perhaps to have a self-image or self-esteem that Mrs. Bush-Hall assumes the white gentry and ladies have, is also presented in other parts of the text. The ‘gentry and ladies’ of her circle, to whom she aspires, are presented in a comic way to illustrate perhaps the foolishness of her own aspirations. They have names like Dr. Dooms, Mrs. Celestial Barker, Miss Eurine Potts, and so on.[xxxii] So the text highlights not only the struggle a black/brown woman has in finding some sort of self-respect, and the conflict she suffers regarding her social origins, but also laughs at this struggle. In fact the story illustrates how the desire to better oneself can easily lead to being vulnerable to trickery. She was so enamoured of the fact that her future son-in-law came from an aristocratic background, that she falls into the trap of trusting him, enabling him to run off with her jewels. He also left her daughter pregnant. But the text looks at this betrayal of trust in an unusual way. When Mrs. Bush-Hall realises Lucas, the escaped son-in-law, has gone, the narrator tells us:
It was strange, he had made a complete fool of her, and yet … she bore him no malice. She had lost out. Lost maybe six or seven thousand dollars, lost the son-in-law of her dreams, every thing she had planned, had hoped for, had boasted about … and yet. … She liked Lucas. She had enjoyed those months of his stay more than any other period of time she could remember. He was the only man she had really ever liked.
This is an interesting piece of text, because instead of feeling betrayed and belittled by the cheat, she feels she had received something good, even if it was taken away from her. Is this a metaphor that the white race, having cheated the black race out of their land, their liberty, their labour, nevertheless gave them something of value? In Mrs. Bush-Hall’s case, she possessed a form of wealth and economic independence she might never have had as a native black woman. She was emancipated as far as needing a man to ‘look after’ her. She had realised her own capacity to be smart and capable with money. She had an easy acceptance of her own type of sexual and reproductive needs. In a gentle way, with humour and irony, the story says that this untutored black woman has many things a tutored and cultivated white woman might lack. She is free of the complicated and deadly guilt about her own sexuality. Having married an ageing but wealthy man who is suggested to be sterile, she has an affair with a white man, and with no sense of social shame, keeps the resulting daughter. Even promotes her socially:
Not unnaturally harsh things were said, but as Mr Hall made no comment (indeed he had lost the power of speech some time previously) and as there was no one to dispute the child’s claim to legitimacy, Mrs Hall was quite pleased with the affair, assuring all and sundry that the arrival of an heir, though female, was the long deferred answer to her husband’s prayer, and that now she would not be at all surprised if he departed in peace. Which he did shortly afterwards.[xxxiii]
Therefore, although this text does in fact show the conflict a black woman might have about her skin colour in a white dominated society, and about her standing in that society, it also shows what has been gained, what has been achieved. It shows the strengths a black/brown woman has inherited from her own culture and from white culture.
In summary, the texts examined present a wide range of different responses to the social, political and cultural situations described in the books. The texts do not attempt to stereotype the characters or oversimplify the problems faced. As with Things Fall Apart, the book does not offer any simple answers to the conflicts between cultures, or those within the one culture. Mugo in A Grain of Wheat, and Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart, both kill themselves. Both these books are thereby suggesting that important aspects of personal and cultural life died in the struggle to meet the changes and the dominance by another very different culture.
The Caribbean writers however, impart much more of an overall – or what I have called ‘international’ – view of themselves and their situation. Stories such as The Baker’s Story, and RSVP for Mrs Bush, suggest this is through being more exposed to many different cultures, and finding a place within them. There is certainly a great deal more humour and pleasure expressed in these works. The conflicts expressed are not enormous in that the texts are not about political and social revolution. The revolution for black Caribbeans was in the long past. It was a bloody and tragic revolution. It cost a lot. But from the perspective of Mrs. Bush and the ‘Baker’, the survivors have gained a lot too.
This does not come out in the African texts. Both the books end with much uncertainty, with much lost and no sureness about what might now come. This in itself is a point of conflict.
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Bibliography
Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart. Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., London, 1958.
African Literature Today 7 – Focus on Criticism, Edited by Eldred Durosimi Jones. Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., London, 1975
African Literature Today 9 – Africa America and the Caribbean, Edited by Eldred Durosimi Jones. Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., London, 1978.
An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Edited by John J. Figueroa. Heinemann International. Oxford, 1982.
Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1983.
Encyclopaedia Britannica on CD-ROM.
Infopedia UK Ltd. Hutchinson New Century Encyclopaedia on CD-ROM.
The Post Colonial Studies Reader. Edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. Routledge, London, 1995.
Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat. Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., London, 1967.
Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems. HarperCollins (Noonday Press). 1986.
Ways of Reading. Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss and Sara Mills. Routledge, London, 1992.
[i] See bibliography for full publication details.
[ii] Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart. Pg. 3.
[iii] Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart. Pg. 9.
[iv] Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart. Pg. 43.
[v] The past tense is used here because change was already under way through colonial dominance.
[vi] Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart. Pg. 43.
[vii] Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat. Pg. 3.
[viii] Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat P. 169.
[ix] Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart. Pg. 128.
[x] African Literature Today No. 9 – Africa America and the Caribbean, Edited by Eldred Durosimi Jones. Pg. 90.
[xi] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Edited by John J. Figueroa. Pg. 233.
[xii] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Edited by John J. Figueroa. Pg. 159.
[xiii] Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart. Pg. 138.
[xiv] Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems. Pg. 20.
[xv] Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat. Pg. 131.
[xvi] Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat. Pg. 140.
[xvii] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Edited by John J. Figueroa. Pg. 85.
[xviii] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Edited by John J. Figueroa. Pg. 85.
[xix] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Edited by John J. Figueroa. Pg. 111.
[xx] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Edited by John J. Figueroa. Pg. 111.
[xxi] Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat. Pg. 38.
[xxii] Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat. Pg. 38.
[xxiii] Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat. Pg. 39.
[xxiv] Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat. Pg. 39/40.
[xxv] Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, A Grain of Wheat. Pg. 42.
[xxvi] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Olaudah Equiano. Equiano on his Way to Slavery: Edited by John J. Figueroa. Pg. 85.
[xxvii] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Olaudah Equiano. Equiano on his Way to Slavery: Edited by John J. Figueroa. Pg. 87.
[xxviii] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Olaudah Equiano. Equiano on his Way to Slavery: Edited by John J. Figueroa. RSVP to Mrs Bush-Hall.
[xxix] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Olaudah Equiano. Equiano on his Way to Slavery: Edited by John J. Figueroa. RSVP to Mrs Bush-Hall. Pg. 117.
[xxx] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Olaudah Equiano. Equiano on his Way to Slavery: Edited by John J. Figueroa. RSVP to Mrs Bush-Hall. Pg. 117.
[xxxi] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Olaudah Equiano. Equiano on his Way to Slavery: Edited by John J. Figueroa. RSVP to Mrs Bush-Hall. Pg. 117.
[xxxii] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Olaudah Equiano. Equiano on his Way to Slavery: Edited by John J. Figueroa. RSVP to Mrs Bush-Hall. Pg. 119.
[xxxiii] An Anthology of African and Caribbean Writing in English. Olaudah Equiano. Equiano on his Way to Slavery: Edited by John J. Figueroa. RSVP to Mrs Bush-Hall. Pg. 121.
A Taste of Honey – Does the play represent more than a dramatisation of the cycle of deprivation?
Texts Used: A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney.
If I had to give a title to my view of the play, it would be ‘Windows of Opportunity and Despair’. I say this because the five characters in the play express quite a narrow range of social, economic and personal responses to opportunity. The opportunities that do arise for any of the characters are usually taken into some form of despair. Nevertheless the play appears to be more than a dramatisation of deprivation. It could equally as well be seen as expressing the pitfalls of inadequate communication, or unacknowledged dependence. It dramatises the many dimensions of experience of the two main characters, and demonstrates how they constantly limit and undermine each other.
The aspects I will argue are therefore connected with how the characters limit themselves, communicate badly, and continue their deprivation.
In the opening line of the play, Helen says, “Well! This is the Place.” This, along with Jo’s reply, “And I don’t like it.”(1) spell out a present and past situation existing between them. It tells us there has been no communication about the place in which they are both going to live. Jo has obviously never seen it before, and has been given no choice. Helen goes on to clarify even further that her own choices are made without any mutual agreement between herself and her daughter. She says, “When I find somewhere for us to live I have to consider something far more important than your feelings … the rent. It’s all I can afford.”(2)
This short and sharp exchange also explains the resentment Jo feels toward her mother. Having been given no choice, having been left out of any ability to help find a decent place to live, she has no feelings of participation or wanting to make anything of the flat. But there is another factor too. Helen says the flat is all she can afford, yet soon afterwards, when she sees some of Jo’s drawings she suggests Jo should go to a “proper art school” and says, “I’ll pay. You’re not stupid. You’ll soon learn.”(3) So we must assume Helen has obscure or unstated reasons for wanting them both to live in such a decrepit flat.
Another aspect of the interchange is that it depicts Helen as a character who treats her daughter as someone she doesn’t really want in her life. There are exceptions to this, but it is a prevailing attitude. It is particularly illustrated when Helen goes on her honeymoon. Jo pointedly expresses her need to be cared for, or perhaps her desire to be wanted and included in her mother’s life when she says to Peter, “…. What are you going to do about me Peter? The snotty nosed daughter? Don’t you think I’m a bit young to be left like this on my own while you flit off with my old woman?”(4) Helen’s response is, “We can’t take her with us. We will be, if you’ll not take exception to the phrase, on our honeymoon.”(5)
This exclusive behaviour is then continued by not including Jo in her marriage ceremony. There is no attempt at communication about Jo’s welfare or needs at this time, and Helen leaves for her wedding with the words, “I’ll be seeing you. Hey! If he doesn’t show up I’ll be back.”(6) In fact Helen doesn’t come back for months, leaving Jo to her own devices to survive.
The interactions already quoted highlight something else that, although a quiet theme in the drama, nevertheless remains constantly in the background. The characters all have a tendency to treat each other as if they have no personal or social links. Our social existence arises from an obvious web of interconnections. Few of us have made our own shoes, woven the material for our clothes, worked at generating the power for the light and heat in our houses, or grown our own food. Many or most of the advantages in our life come to us out of our relationship either with other individuals, or from the collective effort of groups of people. Obviously many of the ills arise in the same way, but in the play there is a great one-sidedness toward alienation from other individuals or ‘society’ in such forms as work or education. Instead there is a constant reiteration of the attitude of not needing each other. This has already been show in the relationship between Jo and Helen, but is particularly dramatised in other parts of the play.
For instance, although pregnant, Jo actually manages to remain in the flat, but this is with the help of Geof. When Geof arrives, Jo has to almost beg him to stay with such phrases as, “Please stay Geoff, I’ll get those sheets and blankets.”(7) Despite being homeless, Geoff resists such offers, finding it very difficult to admit his own need, and is not explicit about what he has to offer.
Later in the play, when Helen has left Peter because of his affair with another woman, she does not admit her feelings for her husband, but instead, when Jo says, “I think you’re still in love with him.” responds by saying, “In love? Me? … You must be mad.”(8)
Although Geof is an extreme characterisation of not being able to stand up for what he wants or needs – allowing himself to be thrown out of the flat for instance – Helen and Jo also exhibit the same tendency. Helen does this by not fighting for her marriage, which although difficult has a lot of advantages, and such advantages could have been shared with her daughter and the coming baby. Jo does it by not expressing herself unequivocally when her mother is obviously going to ‘leave her behind’ when she gets married. This ambiguity in relationship seems to be another sign of failing to recognise the social and personal web one is a part of. The failure leads to feelings of powerlessness and personal inadequacy. Geof has in fact developed a working and caring relationship with Jo, and she with him. He fails to see the place he fills in her life, so allows himself to be levered out of the house by Helen.
This alienation that is partly self-inflicted and partly inflicted by others, reaches its height in the scene in which Helen, talking about the food Geof has brought in to the house, says, “You can bloody well take it with you, we don’t want it.” The following actions then dramatise the situation more explicitly:-
[GOEFFREY empties food from his pack on to the table while HELEN thrusts it back. HELEN finally throws the whole thing, pack and all, on the floor.](9)
These self-limiting behaviours in the play can be seen to result in lack of, or loss of, ongoing steady relationships, a reasonable place to live, better economic state, and a system of mutual support between individuals. As an extreme opposite we have what has been called the ‘old boys network’ in which individuals take great pains to give and receive support. The lack of self-revealing or explicit dialogue about needs, about dependence and what each person can offer, between the characters is also part of the system of defeat they are all running. Perhaps such systems were put into place originally by feelings that one would not be heard even if needs were stated. In the situations dramatised however, the system of retreat, denial, lack of explicit communication, along with its failure to recognise the social web and ones part in it, all contribute to present misery. The impoverished situation is as much a result of such failures, as it is a cause. Helen and Jo could mutually support each other if they stopped in the middle of their person-to-person battle and wondered what they wanted from each other. Geof could have stood his ground. Perhaps as a character he might not have done this through forcefulness. He could have recognised his value to Jo however, and stood his ground for her sake. But I use thes remarks as examples – they did not happen.
If there is such a thing as a ‘cycle of deprivation’, I don’t think the play dramatises this in particular. It seems more, from what has been looked at, to deal with self-perpetuating systems of failure in personal and social relationships – including poor communication and blindness to the social web, leading to alienation.
Bibliography
Delaney, Shelagh. A Taste of Honey. Published by Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1992 (originally 1959.) ISBN: 0413316807
(1)
Notes
(1) Page 7.
(2) Page 7.
(3) Page 15.
(4) Page 34.
(5) Page 35.
(6) Page 45.
(7) Page 48.
(8) Page 80.
(9) Page 84.
Comparing the symbolic treatment of Childhood in Blake and Wordsworth
Both Blake and Wordsworth particularly emphasise childhood in their poetry. Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience for example especially appear to treat childhood as a symbol of the human condition as seen from Blake’s perspective. His poem The Voice of the Ancient Bard in Songs of Innocence, starts with the lines:
Youth of delight come hither
And see the opening morn,
Image of truth new-born.(3)
This sense of pleasure and newness is typical of the impression Blake gives throughout Songs of Innocence. In a mixture of words such as ‘Little boy / Full of joy’(4) – ‘When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy’(5) and frequent usage of rural imagery, lambs and sunshine, Blake uses childhood and joy as a symbol of an aspect of human experience. But it is only when the Songs of Innocence are read against the background of Songs of Experience and other writings such as All Religions are One, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that one can begin to grasp what childhood symbolises in Blake’s writings.
In ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ we read that “Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained”(6) and “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires”(7). Blake is maintaining in such lines that as humans we have no lower nature – ‘everything that lives is holy’. For Blake Heaven was what he called Poetic or creative genius. Hell was man’s body and all the energies of movement, emotions and delight that it generated.
Comparing the positive imagery of ‘Innocence’ with the changed tone of ‘Experience’ we find such lines as:
In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind forged manacles I hear:(8)
As Blake is also writing about childhood in ‘Experience’ we cannot simply assume the difference is between childhood and adulthood. The poem Infant Sorrow makes this plain:
My mother groaned, my father wept!
Into the dangerous world I leapt,
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.(9)
Who is the fiend and what the cloud though?
Perhaps this is clearer in the poem A Little Boy Lost.
The weeping child could not be heard;
The weeping parents wept in vain.
They stripped him to his little shirt,
And bound him in an iron chain.(10)
Something has been hidden, something bound, something stripped of its possible apparel. Blake appears to be describing what he calls the natural ‘energy’ that is the opposite to nursed ‘unacted desires’. He is delineating how different the world appears when we are bound by religious or social views that lead to constraint. Blake was a self-taught youth, allowed to read and explore in his own manner, and he may well associate his own genius with this ability to follow natural inclination. Apart from this however, he makes it plain that aspects of religion and social restraints lead to social and personal sickness – ‘Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion’.(11) Blake does not appear to mean a simplistic judgement by this. More likely it refers to the sort of social attitudes that not so long ago led many women to madness or suicide when they were pregnant with an illegitimate child. Today we would think such levels of stress very strange in an unmarried mother.
Michael Mason, in his Introduction to Blake’s poems, warns the reader that one must resist the temptation to simplify Blake’s intent. To quote Mason, “Blake, who is so readily simplified by his readers, was the great anti-simplifier, always probing for contradiction and tension.”(12) Blake may even be pointing out a way of doing this when he wrote, “I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s.”(13) “Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.”(14) To have ones own response to life, full of its contradictions and conflicts, and attempt a marriage of these antipodes of human experience, is recommended by Blake.
Wordsworth writes in quite a different way about his physical surroundings and childhood, but nevertheless, still describes nature and youth as representing something more than simple trees, rivers or scarcity of years. In his poem Michael, we read:
Careless of books, yet having felt the power
Of nature, by the gentle agency
Of natural objects, led me on to feel
For passions that were not my own, and think
(At random and imperfectly indeed)
On man, the heart of man, and human life.(15)
Just as a story in a book may lead us on to form a picture, or even an understanding that is not explicit in the words, so Wordsworth is suggesting in the above lines that nature intimates or leads to certain thoughts or understandings about human life. He defines this further in Lines – Tintern Abbey:
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams …
To me was all in all. – I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood …”(16)
The words “what then I was” refer to childhood, and the state defined as “That time is past.”(17) This with the words ‘all in all’ suggest the experience of nature in childhood was complete in itself, experiences that have meaning, but perhaps meaning which is the very think known, rather than what may later be thought or interpreted, written about.
But Wordsworth at some point in his life had a vision of the wonder of birth, ““Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!”
It suggests that not only is birth a holy event, but we exist before our birth, and that we have enormous awareness already.
Bibliography
William Blake. Edited by Michael Mason. Published by Oxford University Press, 1994, UK. ISBN: 0-19-282305-1
Wordsworth. Complete Poetical Works. Published by Oxford University Press, 1936, UK. ISBN: 0-19-281052-9
(1)
Notes
William Blake. Edited by Michael Mason. Published by Oxford University Press, 1994. ISBN: 0-19-282305-1
(2)
Wordsworth. Poetical Works. Published by Oxford University Press, 1936, UK.
(3)
William Blake. Page 66.
(4)
William Blake. Spring. Page 64.
(5)
William Blake. Laughing Song. Page 65.
(6)
William Blake. Page 75.
(7)
William Blake. Page 78.
(8)
William Blake. London. Page 124.
(9)
William Blake. Page 125.
(10)
William Blake. Page 127.
(11)
William Blake. Proverbs of Hell. Page 76.
(12)
William Blake. Introduction. Page xi.
(13)
William Blake. Jerusalem.
(14)
William Blake. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Page 77.
(15)
Wordsworth. Michael. Page 104.
(16)
Wordsworth. Lines – Tintern Abbey. Page 164.
(17)
Wordsworth. Lines – Tintern Abbey. Page 164.