Posts Tagged ‘Literary Essays’

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 4^th 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

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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.

The New Poetry

Can poetry be seen as capable of representing a multicultural society?

Taken as individual statements, many of the poems in The New Poetry[1] show no sign of multicultural influence. “The radio is playing downstairs in the kitchen” Eavan Borland writes, in her poem Distances. The poem goes on to state that –

“The clock says eight and the light says

winter.”[2]

The imagery suggested by the words evokes a sense of almost any Northern European household in the cold dark months. The text gives no clue that Borland might be writing about Eire, where she was born and lives. In a similar way Michèle Roberts writes:-

This cathedral is God’s

great whorled ear. Under

a roof of giant cockleshells

sung prayers stream

up, shoals of bright fish

flicking through water

over pebbles of stained glass.”[3]

The word cathedral is associated with Christianity. That is the only cultural clue apart from God and prayers. It certainly isn’t talking about an Islamic influence, or the beliefs of Asia. So although in a few lines this poem gives definite cultural indications, it isn’t multicultural.

Selima Hill’s poem Monkeys, illustrates a slightly different aspect of the question. It starts as follows –

This is the bed

that I became a woman in,

that I lay naked on on tepid nights[4]

The simplicity of the words and theme make it possible to imagine the bed in almost any clime. But this is still different to being multicultural in its own right. So I feel the question has to be defined.

In doing this I see that Liz Lockhead’s poem Bagpipe Muzak includes references that are clearly multicultural. This can be seen in such lines as –

Aye it’s Retro Time for Northern Soul and the whoop and the skirl

o’ the saxes.

And

Over pasta and pesto in a Byres Road bistro, Scotland declares

hersel’ a nation.[5]

The reference to Soul in the first line quoted arouses associations with black Soul music, and lends to the use of the word saxes a connotation with North American musical influences. That this reference is merged in the same line with the word skirl, which describes the sound of bagpipes, gives a real sense of merging cultures and melting together of contrasting and strange mixtures. In the second quoted line, pasta, pesto and bistro are words not often found in general use in the UK fifty years ago. It was only from the fifties onwards that foods from other cultures began to become common beyond major cities. So the irony of the line is that Scotland is declaring itself an independent nation in the very midst of being infiltrated deeply by other cultures. There is a hint here, or a smile, suggesting that Scotland is no longer the virgin Celtic land it maybe still thinks it is. It is certainly a smile at the strange contradiction presented by a nation seeking devolution when it is now soaked through with foreign influences.

Interestingly with this poem, even the line “Or to jalouse we hate the Government”[6] is beautifully multicultural, illustrating the point of Scotland’s hybrid culture through a word integrated into the Scottish language through past connection with France.

But multicultural usually refers to several cultural groups living within the same geographical location, such as West Indians, Asians and English all living in one city. In a certain sense however, some cultures inhabit another country without actually living there. For instance when I stayed in Japan in 1984, Kentucky Fried Chicken businesses were just becoming common. White bread bakeries were new, taking the place of the traditional rice. American culture was inhabiting Japan, although looking around, there were almost no whites, and certainly no blacks to be seen. In this sense some poems show how other cultures, particularly America, has inhabited not only our streets, but in particular our mind. The following lines from Michael Hofmann’s poem Nighthawks depicts this.

Now we’ve arrived at this hamburger heaven,

a bright hole walled with mirrors where our faces show

pale and evacuated in the neon. We spoon our sundaes

from a metal dish. The chopped nuts are poison.[7]

Although hamburgers and sundaes did not perhaps originate in the US, their frequent display in American films, coupled with clever advertising, has been instrumental in making them part of British everyday life. But although Hofmann reminds us in the above text of American influence, he is interesting as an example of multicultural influences because he was born in Germany and later moved to live and work in London. This shows through in some of his poems –

… Of course you want to allow him

his bit of fun; after working all year for

Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder and your own.

And it’s probably more than you can provide

with your cooking, your meat-and two-veg sex,

the occasional Saurbroten … He deserves it.[8]

Poets like Hofmann – people born in another country who then live in the UK  – are a major influence in multicultural poems. Their very different viewpoints and styles can be seen particularly in the work of someone like David Dabydeen. His poem Canecutter’s Song illustrates this –

White hooman walk tru de field fo watch we cane cutta,

Tall, straight, straang-limb,

Hair sprinkle in de wind like gold-duss,

Lang lace frack loose on she bady like bamboo-flag,

An flesh mo dan hibiscus early maan, white an saaf an wet

Flowering in she panty.

O Shanti! Shanti! Shanti! [9]

Dabydeen communicates beautifully, dramatically, through the poem the enormous gulf separating him and his longing and lust from the white woman. Not only does he feel her calling him with her ‘safe, white and wet flesh’ but also he gives a glimpse of the barriers separating him from the white woman. He says later in the poem, “Bu daylight separate me an yu, and dis mud on me haan ..”[10] What he doesn’t say, strangely enough, is that threat of death or life imprisonment for him if he touched her, also separate them.

Perhaps because of my own experience of being second generation born in Britain, yet having another cultural heritage imprinted in me, I see that one of the most powerful multicultural influences comes from people who are natives of this land, yet have parents from very different cultures. When I consider what I find in The New Poetry to speak for such people, I am disappointed. Fred D’Aguir for instance was born in London of Guyanese parents. His poem Letter From Mama Dot does carry some message about the internal conflicts suffered by those of mixed culture, but it is to my mind rather traditional. He writes:-

You are travelling to them.

A West Indian working in England;

A Friday, Tonto, or Punkawallah;

Sponging off the state. Our languages

Remain Pidgin, like our dark, third,

Underdeveloped, world…[11]

My disappointment is that he re-states stale old complaints about how the British treat blacks and ‘foreigners’. It’s a dirt track with deep ruts in it. The accusations of sponging off the state have not only been well aired, but are also aimed at young whites out of work or work shy. And comedians like Lenny Henry have made a living out of speaking Pidgin and being black instead of a cross to bear. So I find this aspect of mixed culture particularly unrepresented in the poems. In fact someone like Lenny Henry does seem to represent a multi-culture, a real mixture and creative blending, instead of simply a complaining.

Therefore in general the large majority of the poems are not multicultural in themselves. They are still expressing particular niches of culture or nationality. Even those poets who are from a culture other than British – is there such a thing as ‘a’ British culture? – appear to be writing from their own cultural standpoint in many cases, rather than from a multicultural view. Fred D’Aguir in the poem quoted for instance, is writing about a view of the British from a West Indian viewpoint. Dabydeen is writing about the divide between the white and the black. Such poems are not multicultural. Only if we take the collection as a whole can we say it is multicultural. Therefore if multicultural means divisions and separatist expressions, then there are poems in the collection that are from very different cultural viewpoints. But if we define multicultural as a blending of various cultures in some sort of cohesiveness, then there is very little of this. The exception is Liz Lockhead’s poem Bagpipe Muzak.

Bibliography

Concise Oxford Dictionary.  (c) Oxford University Press – Software, UK, 1992.

The New Poetry. Edited by Michael Hulse, David Kennedy, David Morley. Published by Bloodaxe Books Ltd, UK, 1993. ISBN: 1852242450 (hardback). 1852242442 (paperback).

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Notes

[1] As footnote ¹.

[2] Page 53.

[3] Page 150.

[4] Page 86.

[5] Page 126.

[6] Page 126.

[7] Page 265.

[8] Page 267.

[9] Page 224.

[10] Page 224.

[11] Page 286.

Frankenstein – By Mary Shelley

Discuss the themes of parenthood and creativity in the novel

One aspect of creativity is parenthood. Therefore the two subjects of the question can be linked. We can also create in an external way, as an artist does with a painting, and internally, as when we create or forge different aspects of our personality or skills. Although the story of Frankenstein offers so many possible ways of looking at creativity and parenthood, the particular direction that will be explored is in regard to a subjective creativity that produces change in the objective world.

In regard to this, Mary Shelley has placed at the very commencement of her book these words from Milton’s Paradise Lost –

Did I request thee,

Maker, from my clay

To mould Me man?

Did I solicit thee[1]

From darkness to promote me?

This is apparently a call from the human person to the Creator. The words ‘Did I request thee’ have a note of reproach. They reflect something of what may be called the pain of consciousness, the sometimes misery of having self-awareness. This is heightened by the words ‘From darkness,’ implying unconsciousness. Therefore the reproach is for having been brought into being from unconsciousness. In the story there is certainly an element of this. Victor Frankenstein at one point says to the creature he has given life – “Abhorred monster!  Fiend that thou art!  The tortures of hell are too mild a vengeance for thy crimes.  Wretched devil! You reproach me with your creation, come on, then, that I may extinguish the spark which I so negligently bestowed.”[2]

What Frankenstein has given  ‘the spark’ of life and consciousness to IS a reproach to him, but just as awful is Victor’s own self-rebuke. This is evident when, on witnessing Justine’s situation of public accusation as a murderess, and her sentence of death, Frankenstein thinks to himself –  “The tortures of the accused did not equal mine; she (Justine) was sustained by innocence, but the fangs of remorse tore my bosom and would not forgo their hold.”[3]

With such sentences the story intimates the theme of creativity that produces agonising self remorse and a sort of morbid self-destruction. In the story Frankenstein, from the womb of his own urgent longings for invention or creativity that would bring fame and world recognition, gives life to a creature external to himself. This tremendous quest is certainly not fuelled by love for other creatures, or a desire to heal the sick. Frankenstein spends most of his years alone in his laboratory, not communicating with anyone. So what drives him? “I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation”[4] he says. But underneath such idealistic rationalisations lurk other darker drives. Perhaps they are the real parents of the creature that destroys all Frankenstein loves around and within him. In fact he realises this for himself in the scene where he gives life to his creature – “I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”[5]

So there had been some sort of glamorous illusion – ‘the dream’ – that had pushed him on. Only when this hidden creative force had accomplished its purpose did it drop its disguise or illusion. At that moment Frankenstein suddenly realises what he has done. Not only had he been driven by something dark and hidden for years of his life, but the dark urges and presence in his life had led him to create something, to be the parent of something, that became a central force in all he later experienced. Just after relinquishing his rationalisation that it was high ideals that had driven him, he says –

“I slept, indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams.  I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt.  Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror…”

So here the dark creature, the loss of his mother, his fear of death, is felt. The terror that necessitated the illusive dream to hide the power of this darkness is felt. Too late. The creative act has been accomplished. Sex with the dark powers has been achieved. Enormous and passionate energies have flowed into the creative act. His own life energy has imbued something new with its separate existence. The dream portrays this in the form of Elizabeth. She is the illusive form cloaking the darkness. Once fertilised with the energy of his kiss and given form, the creature need no longer hide.

Taking the Creature Frankenstein has formed as an embodiment of his own previously unconscious fears and pain, as suggested above, the story unfolds what devastation this produces in his life.

There are twelve mentions of the word destiny in the book.  One of the first is where Frankenstein says, “… for when I would account to myself for the birth of that passion which afterward ruled my destiny I find it arise, like a mountain river, from ignoble and almost forgotten sources; but, swelling as it proceeded, it became the torrent which, in its course, has swept away all my hopes and joys.”[6]

Here Frankenstein is admitting that what he parented, and the drive to parent, are from ignoble and almost forgotten – unconscious – sources. He admits it was a passion that overwhelmed the best in him and in doing so destroyed his joy. The other side of this self-destruction is of course the nameless creature who was the offspring of this passion. It too names the sources of its madness and violence. Talking to Victor about the moment of rejection by Felix and his family, the creature says, “

“Cursed, cursed creator!  Why did I live?  Why, in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed?  I know not; despair had not yet taken possession of me; my feelings were those of rage and revenge.  I could with pleasure have destroyed the cottage and its inhabitants and have glutted myself with their shrieks and misery.”[7]

If the Creature is a manifestation of Victor Frankenstein’s own dark fears and pains; if he is indeed what has been embodied from those pains and dark terrors, then his curses express the forces of internalised destruction and ill will that Frankenstein becomes the victim of. The Creatures words are also telling us that its wretchedness arose from rejection and maltreatment. Therefore, as a symbol of Frankenstein’s externalised trauma, the trauma itself tells of the sources of its pain.

This very week a young man explained to me that from the pain of never having received love from his mother, an illusory quest began. The quest was to find his real mother and receive love. The pain driving the quest led to acts which not only destroyed any relationship he started with a woman, but also ravaged connections with family, his work situation, and any hopes of ordinary life. Frankenstein’s Creature does exactly this, and as Frankenstein admits near the end of the book, “… I must pursue and destroy the being to whom I gave existence; then my lot on earth will be fulfilled and I may die.”[8]

Frankenstein’s wretch is recognisably a creature of nightmare. Such beings often appear in dreams and have no other parent than our own fears and pain. In the following example we could easily substitute the name ‘Creature’ for the ‘Thing’.

“A THING is marauding around the rather bleak, dark house I am in with a small boy. To avoid it I lock myself in a room with the boy. The THING finds the room and tries to break the door down. I frantically try to hold it closed with my hands and one foot pressed against it, my back against a wall for leverage. I have one arm around the boy trying to protect him. It was a terrible struggle and I woke myself by screaming.” Terry F.

When Terry allowed the sense of fear to arise in him while awake, he felt as he did when a child – the boy in the dream – during the bombing of the Second World War. His sense of insecurity dating from that time had emerged when he left a secure job, and had arisen in the images of the nightmare. Understanding his fears he was able to avoid their usual paralysing influence.[9]

Therefore, so summarise, the themes I have highlighted with particular text show that:

Þ    Victor Frankenstein as a character is a metaphor representing the ability human beings have to use their passionate emotional and sexual energy to create a secondary personality. The parenthood in this case is that Frankenstein is the father of a shadow self.

Þ    The Creature was unwittingly created out of what were at first unconscious drives cloaked by a dream of love, idealism and fame. This force of creativity is extremely potent in human life, and is perhaps summed up in the words, ‘As you sow, so shall you reap.’

Þ    Frankenstein’s secondary personality was destructive because of rejection, terror, the fear of death and the loss of his mother.

Þ    The Secondary personality, represented by the creature is recognised by Frankenstein as an “Abhorred monster!” and “Wretched devil!”

Þ    Out of its pain the secondary personality destroys all that is good in the life of primary person.

Þ    Frankenstein attempts to correct this situation. Unfortunately he uses the very emotions and anger against the Creature that have given it life in the first place. It is not weakened.

Þ    The creature is recognisably the stuff of nightmares. Frankenstein also has his ‘back against the wall’ in dealing with his nightmare creature, just as Terry does in the example quoted. The creativity and parenthood in this case is that our unbidden passions and fears parent what feels and often is, a threat and an object of fear and destruction.

See: Frankenstein.

Bibliography

Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. The Gutenburg Project Electronic Edition. 1998.http://www.promo.net/pg/ – Downloaded from Internet site.

Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Wordsworth Editions Ltd. UK. 1993. ISBN: 1-85326-023-1.

Tony Crisp. The New Dream Dictionary. Little Brown. London. 1990. ISBN: 0-316-87957-6.

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Notes

[1] Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Wordsworth edition page 11.

[2] Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Wordsworth edition page 77.

[3] Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Wordsworth edition page 66.

[4] Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Wordsworth edition page 38.

[5] Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Wordsworth edition page 45.

[6] Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Wordsworth edition page 31.

[7] Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Wordsworth edition page 104.

[8] Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Wordsworth edition page 162.

[9] Tony Crisp. The New Dream Dictionary. Page 270.

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.

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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.

Middlemarch – To what extent is gender a dominant concern of the novel?

In any text concerned with the intimate and varied lives of human characters, gender is usually of prime importance. Therefore we might turn the question around and ask with what else the novel Middlemarch is concerned. Something else also relevant to the question is that evidence suggests that different cultures and different historical periods within the same culture, tend to rear male and female babies in different ways, giving rise to changes in roles. A feature in Hutchinsons New English Encyclopaedia says:

It has been plausibly argued, however, that gender differences are purely arbitrary, that societies with different child-rearing practices have different attitudes toward men and women and their roles, and that in an ideal world gender differences could be abolished and many of the inequities of present-day society eliminated.[i]

So, as the novel is about realistic people, of course gender is mentioned and dealt with throughout the book. Therefore I will modify the question and ask how the text presents gender, and what is said about the subject.

Considering that Eliot has written a prelude to the novel that is echoed at the end, we can look for clues in what is said. St. Theresa of Avila is used as a metaphor for the personal and social struggle of some women.[ii]

Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.[iii]

Connecting this with the later words –

… for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul.  Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.[iv]

– the mention of ardour, the yearning of womanhood, the spiritual grandeur and the meanness of opportunity stand out as key issues. Because the ‘common yearning of womanhood’ is mentioned in connection with ‘meanness of opportunity’, the passage gives the impression of a potential felt by women but which is only capable of expression when ‘opportunity is not ‘mean’. One might therefore assume the book to be mainly about the striving of women, especially as the novel ends with a return to a mention of Theresa and the noble or ignoble life of women – particularly the heroine of the novel, Dorothea. However, the history of how the novel came to be written, the merging of two novels, suggests that the life of Lydgate is as much a central topic as that of Dorothea.[v] Therefore we cannot assume this is simply about women weighing their potential against social and moral opportunity.

Turning to the main text, something that stands out is the incredibly detailed and lengthy description of the characters motivations in given situations. An interesting example of this is in the scenes where Fred Vincy tries to make some money by buying a horse to sell for profit. The narrator starts with the words, ” Fred was not a gambler.”[vi] The text then goes on to say:

… he had not that specific disease in which the suspension of the whole nervous energy on a chance or risk becomes as necessary as the dram to the drunkard; he had only the tendency to that diffusive form of gambling which has no alcoholic intensity, but is carried on with the healthiest chyle-fed blood, keeping up a joyous imaginative activity which fashions events according to desire, and having no fears about its own weather, only sees the advantage there must be to others in going aboard with it.[vii]

The passage in all continues for five-hundred words. Here the narrator first defines a condition – alcoholic gambling. By use of the past tense – he had – we are led to look back on Fred, and through comparison with the defined condition, see Fred in a healthier though perhaps naïve light. It is suggested to us that Fred is led by his ebullient desires which give rise to an imaginative appraisal of situations. This sets the scene for what follows, and carefully makes sense of why Fred acts in such an apparently foolish a way. Each twist and turn of Fred’s responses and reasonings are carefully followed in the text.

He felt sure that if he did not come to a bargain with the farmer, Bambridge would; for the stress of circumstances, Fred felt, was sharpening his acuteness and endowing him with all the constructive power of suspicion. Bambridge had run down Diamond in a way that he never would have done (the horse being a friend’s) if he had not thought of buying it; every one who looked at the animal–even Horrock–was evidently impressed with its merit.[viii]

In this passage, although it is the narrator speaking, the internal focus of the text makes us feel we are with Fred in his very thought processes. This is achieved by telling us that ‘Fred Felt’ and ‘He felt’. Lord Acton, on the news of George Eliot’s death, wrote about this extraordinary talent to Gladstone’s daughter:

George Eliot seemed to me capable not only of reading the diverse hearts of men, but of creeping into their skin, watching the world through their eyes, feeling their latent background of conviction, discerning theory and habit, influences of thought and knowledge, of life and descent, and having obtained this experience, recovering her independence, stripping off the borrowed shell, and exposing scientifically and indifferently the soul of a Vestal, a Crusader, an Anabaptist, an Inquisitor, a Dervish, a Nihilist, or a Cavalier without attraction, preference, or caricature.[ix]

Does she take such care, use such painstaking art, to portray gender issues? Yes, of course. The art is diffuse throughout the novel. Because it is diffuse however, the insights she gives are connected with whatever she touches. However, looking through the text, there is no sign at all of preaching or lecturing. Despite Eliot being an agnostic for all of her life as a writer, in the text she does not attempt to belittle or skimp on her descriptions of characters religious feelings. Neither is there any sign of making such beliefs pretty, or other than they are for those characters. The same applies to the description of political or social views. Taken as a whole, this quality of discernement, conditioned as it is by the times, is nevertheless an attempt at presenting an integrated picture of the world and of people’s part in it. If this is the case it is amazing that Eltiot did not attempt to press people into her world view. For myself I find this a real insight into what art really is. Carroll says of this:

In these works George Eliot can be seen continually returning to the central question: how do people make sense of the world? What is the relationship between the individual and the community? The story of her writing career is that of an increasingly complex vision of the relation of part and whole, and the acknowledgement in both social and psychological terms that each can only be understood in terms of the other. Middlemarch is the novel in which the need to make sense of the world and the difficulty of doing so achieve a fine equilibrium at all levels of the narrative.[x]

I realise this is but a cursory glance at this huge work. Nevertheless a glance is enough to impress. So in response to the questions pursued, although Eliot apparently sets out to make this novel a work depicting the potential of aspiring women in face of lack in opportunity, it is much more. It is a subtle and varied portrayal of both sexes, with their limitations, their emerging strengths and disappointments. It is a commentary on ambition, religion, foolishness and greed. It portrays an immense insight into human nature and what motivates people in the most subtle of ways. Into words and plot it breathes a magnificently wide view of human life.

Bibliography

George Eliot. Middlemarch. Oxford University Press. Oxford. 1986. ISBN: 0-19-281760-4

George Eliot. Middlemarch. Chatto and Windus. London. 1950. ISBN: 0-7011-1245-X

Infopedia UK ’96. Hutchinsons New Century Enc

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Notes

[i] Infopedia UK ’96. Hutchinsons New Century Encyclopaedia. CD ROM edition. Entry ‘gender differences’.

[ii] Teresa, St te.rize [1515-1582] Spanish mystic who founded an order of nuns 1562. She was subject to fainting fits, during which she saw visions. She wrote The Way to Perfection 1583 and an autobiography, Life of the Mother Teresa of Jesus , 1611. In 1622 she was canonized, and in 1970 was made the first female Doctor of the Church. She was born in Avila. Infopedia UK ’96. Hutchinsons New Century Encyclopaedia. CD ROM edition. Entry = Avila or Teresa.

[iii] George Eliot. Middlemarch. OUP ed. Page 3.

[iv] George Eliot. Middlemarch. OUP ed. Page 3.

[v] The unique structure of Middlemarch was not simply the result of a creative experiment by George Eliot; it was greatly influenced by the unusual way the novel came into existence, and by the realities of Victorian publishing. Originally, this study of provincial life was to have focused primarily upon the Vincy and Featherstone families, tracing the impact of the interloper Lydgate upon this Middlemarch community. The writing proved difficult, however, and ‘Middlemarch’ was aban­doned. In December 1870 George Eliot began experimenting with a story called ‘Miss Brooke’ which made rapid progress: ten chapters were written in two months, and the material was expanding. Early in 1871 the decision was made to combine the two narratives, presumably because the novelist saw significant links between the two major relationships of Rosamond and Lydgate, and Dorothea and Casaubon. This merging enabled the study of provincial life to be enlarged in scope, and also accommodated the developments of her new story. In the event, the first ten chapters of ‘Miss Brooke’ became substantially the first ten chapters of Middlemarch, and the next six (xi-xvi) were revised and reordered from the ‘Middlemarch’ narrative which had been abandoned in November 1870.

Quoted from the Introduction to the World’s Classics edition of Middlemarch. The Introduction and Notes were written by David Carroll.

[vi] George Eliot. Middlemarch. OUP ed. Page 194.

[vii] George Eliot. Middlemarch. OUP ed. Page 194.

[viii] George Eliot. Middlemarch. OUP ed. Page

[ix] George Eliot. Middlemarch. OUP ed. Quoted from the Introduction by David Carroll. Page vii.

[x] George Eliot. Middlemarch. OUP ed. Quoted from the Introduction by David Carroll. Page ix.

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.

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.

---

Notes

[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.

The Use of Private and Public Personae in the Poetry of Keats and Shelley

In defining the public and private personae of the two poets Keats and Shelley, it is helpful to compare their poetry with that of more recent poets. As an example to start with, the lines from Keats’ La Belle Dame sans Merci will be used.

I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautiful – a faery’s child,

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

And her eyes were wild.(3)

Although Keats is using the first person in starting, the meads or meadows he is writing about are ones of imagination. This is obvious from the first line of the poem starting as it does with the words “O what can ail thee, knight at arms”. The scene is therefore one of medieval times, and the woman one of myth or fancy. The personae who is the ‘I’ in these lines is the knight at arms who is being questioned in the first line, a knight who falls in love with the lady in the meads. Comparing this with a more modern poet, Eva Dobell, we have these lines:

Crippled for life at seventeen,

His great eyes seem to question why:

With both legs smashed it might have been

Better in that grim trench to die

Than drag maimed years out helplessly.(4)

This is not a mythical or imaginative scene, but a description of something Dobell has witnessed during the First World War, with personal responses added. So in La Belle Dame sans Merci, Keats is expressing through a personae of poesy, of myth and imagination. If Keats is expressing any private feelings, if he is giving any clue of personal relations or pains, then we must look for these in the tale of La Belle Dame sans Merci itself. At the end of the poem the knight’s dream reveals that “La Belle Dame sans Merci / Thee hath in thrall!”(5) The suggestion might therefore be that Keats felt at the mercy of his desires for women.

Looking at another poem by Keats, it includes the lines:

As Hermes once took to his feathers light,

When lulled Argus, baffled, swooned and slept,

So in Delphic reed, my idle spright

So played, so charmed, so conquered, so bereft(6)

This is described as a dream Keats experienced after reading Dante’s Episode of Paolo and Francesca. Like La Belle Dame sans Merci it is also expressed in imagery and language of mythology and imagination. Keats is thus placing himself, his personae, in a position akin to the Greek gods. He is saying, “As Hermes” once took to his feathers” so did I. Instead of a heaven however, he visits the “second circle of sad hell”.(7) That the sad hell includes the description of “Pale were the lips I kissed, and fair the form”, once more brings us to pain, or hell, in connection with a woman.

Many of Keats’ poems mention the lips and hair of women he has met, and sometimes their feet (there is apparently nothing in-between). Kissing is a frequent theme. So Keats’ public persona is at times one of poesy and imagination, far from any direct connection with everyday life. His private personae, assumed from the little read, has some aspects of being pained in relationships with women.

Shelley too has a very marked tendency to express within symbolic or mythic language, though perhaps not so markedly as Keats. In The Mask of Anarchy, a description and condemnation of the massacre of Peterloo, we have examples of this.

I met murder on the way –

He had a mask like Castlereagh –

Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

Seven blood-hounds followed him:(8)

By giving murder a gender – ‘He’ – Shelley, despite giving names and details, such as Castlereagh,(9) makes a symbol of the act instead of giving a straight description. For instance, what is Shelley referring to in these lines?

I bind the Sun’s throne with a burning zone,

And the Moon’s with a girdle of pearl;

The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim,

When the whirlwind my banners unfurl.(10)

The title of the poem is The Cloud, but once more Shelley has given the cloud an anthropomorphic identity. He is also ascribing to the cloud – I bind the Sun’s throne – a power of will and effectiveness. In the lines given, and in the other lines of the poem, he does not appear to be using the cloud as a symbol, simile or metaphor. If one were to write descriptive lines such as –

My thoughts arise like doves each day,

On Mercurial purpose bent they fly away,

Touching each corner of the world,

Arrows from my bow of mind are hurled.(11)

they could be seen as an uneconomic way of saying that publishing ones ideas allows them to reach other people the world over. Therefore, although this is obviously a generalisation, Shelley and Keats appear to have a public personae which poses as an identity with great learning and wide ranging mind. The pose is dressed in massive reference to simile and metaphor, and the wrapping of ideas in long and complex chains of words. Instead of “poetry” lifting “the veil from the hidden beauty of the world” – instead of the poet being the “heirophant of an unapprehended inspiration” as Shelley has suggested, it seems this personae may often be an obscuring force to what is plainly seen by many, but perhaps not put into words by them.

As for their private personae, the many poems of Keats on red and ‘pulp’ lips suggest hidden feelings.

Tis young Leander toiling to his death.

Nigh swooning, he doth purse his weary lips

For Hero’s cheek, and smiles against her smile.

O horrid dream! See how his body dips

Dead heavy; arms and shoulders gleam awhile:

He’s gone: up bubbles all his amorous breath!(12)

Considering that Leander swam treacherous sea to make love with Hero, today we might simply say, I am dying to have sex with you. In fact this poem is a very powerful statement to be made publicly. If we take Leander and the Hellespont to be symbols of what Keats feels, and what Keats is addressing to Miss Reynolds who is the object of the poem, then Keats is struggling almost to the death with turbulent forces in order to arrive at love making with Miss Reynolds. The turbulence may be emotional, or it may be the social forces or attitudes against which Keats must swim in order to arrive at the delight of sex. In the end lines though he is suggesting he cannot make the journey to the island of her sex. He drowns, he dies under the massive currents and energy against which he pits himself, or against which his natural urgent desires press him.

Therefore, in ascertaining the personae of these two poets from today’s viewpoint, it appeared very necessary for them to publicly dress themselves in cloaks of learning and poesy. I mean by the latter word an expression in action and words of living in a mental emotional world more beautiful and tragic than ‘normal’ humans, a world of vision and unusual inspiration. I am not saying they did live in this world, only that they wanted to, and wanted to appear to do so.

Their private persona seems tied to this. What they did outwardly was an expression of their own personal ambitions and uncertainties. If their outer expression was less passionate and direct than their feelings, then we must assume they hid personal pain. The social attitudes in which they lived, and that were alive in them, were forces against which they both fought. Clues to the private world underlying their social personae, may only be arrived at by a close reading of a wider sample than I have managed. However, the few poems mentioned do throw some light on this.

Bibliography

John Keats – The Complete Poems. Edited by John Barnard. Published by Penguin Books, 1973, UK. ISBN: 0-14-042210-2.

Reilly, Catherine – editor. Scars Upon My Heart. Published by Virago. 1981. ISBN 0-86068-226-9.

Shelley – Poetical Works. Edited by Thomas Hutchinson. Published by Oxford University Press. 1970. UK. ISBN: 0-19-281069-3.

(1)

Notes

John Keats – The Complete Poems.

(2)

Shelley – Poetical Works.

(3)

John Keats – The Complete Poems. Page 335. Fourth verse.

(4)

Scars Upon My Heart. Eva Dobell. Pluck. Page 31.

(5)

John Keats – The Complete Poems. Page 334.

(6)

John Keats – The Complete Poems. A Dream, after reading Dante’s Episode of Paolo and Francesca. Page 334.

(7)

John Keats – The Complete Poems. A Dream, after reading Dante’s Episode of Paolo and Francesca. Page 334.

(8)

Shelley – Poetical Works. Mask of Anarchy. Page 338.

(9)

Robert Stewart Castlereagh was foreign secretary from 1812, when he devoted himself to the overthrow of Napoleon and subsequently to the Congress of Vienna and the congress system. Abroad his policy favoured the development of material liberalism, but at home he repressed the Reform movement, and popular opinion held him responsible for the Peterloo massacre of peaceful demonstrators 1819.

(10)

Shelley – Poetical Works. The Cloud. Page 601.

(11)

My own fancy free.

(12)

John Keats – The Complete Poems. On a Leander Gem which Miss Reynolds, my kind Friend, Gave Me. Page 101.

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.

Identity

Its representation and significance in literary texts

The texts used are: Grapes of Wrath; Another Country; The Colour Purple.

Before the texts can be discussed in relation to what they suggest about identity, it is necessary to establish how texts create a sense of a distinct person. The term must also be distinguished from what is meant by character or characterisation.

Regarding how the subject will be dealt with in the analysis of the texts, the aim is to show the ways identity is established in the texts, or the means by which changes in identity are represented. In defining the word identity, fundamentally it is the sense one has of oneself, or of someone else, being a distinct person. For instance one might know oneself as Helen instead of Joyce, or George instead of Stan.1 Character is defined as:

‘The collective qualities or characteristics, especially mental and moral that distinguish a person or thing; moral strength (has a weak character); reputation, especially good reputation; a person in a novel, play, etc.’2

So in looking at how identity is represented, we have to consider how we arrive at a sense of a particular and distinct person in the text, rather than considering the list of personal characteristics. Nevertheless, the two things do link, and we arrive at a sense of meeting a character partly through the description of personal characteristics given. For instance in The Color Purple, some of the first words are:

‘I am fourteen years old. I have always been a good girl.’3

Through the use of the word ‘I’ in both sentences we are immediately given an impression of a particular person speaking. Because the book is written in the form of letters to God, or to a sister, this address does not have the full impact it might if we were addressed directly. In fact this device, one which makes us feel as if we have suddenly looked through a door into a person’s private life, creates a slight tension. That the person isn’t named or described by a narrator or themselves heightens this.

Nevertheless we still feel a very personal address is being given, and immediately have the sense of a specific person. Also, the letter has been addressed to God, and we are reading it. Does that subtly place us in a role of deity? Certainly we unconsciously read the letters from the viewpoint of a white or black skinned person.

Later in the text the same character, who still hasn’t been given a name, says:

I keep hoping he fine somebody to marry. I see him looking at my little sister. She scared. But I say I’ll take care of you. With God help.4

The difference between the two quotes is that in the first, we have the impression of a person, unnamed, describing something about herself. We do not know if the information is correct, but we do arrive at a feeling of a particular person. In the second sentence there is something quite different. We are told of this still unnamed person’s response to another person who is also unnamed, but who is described as ‘my little sister’. So character one, who we later learn is Celie, is describing a response to a situation regarding another person, who we learn is Nettie. The stated desire to protect her young sister from sexual abuse builds for us the image of a distinct person. It does this because we know there are many alternative responses to this situation. That Celie attempts to, and later manages to, protect her sister, builds for the reader the sense of special strength, of singular characteristics. Out of this we have the impression we are meeting or learning about a specific person distinct from any other person. The sense of a specific identity we arrive at as a reader has a certain type of reality for us. Characters in literature may have as profound an influence on some people as anyone living they know. Therefore identity can be communicated not only by the language used, such as ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘you’, but also by described events or responses in relationship to characters or to the world of the novel.

Looking in Baldwin’s Another Country for such primary means of producing a sense of identity for the reader, quite another approach is apparent. The approach is slower, more indirect. The following quote illustrates this:

It was past midnight and he had been sitting in the movies, in the top row of the balcony, since two o’clock in the afternoon. … twice he had been awakened by caterpillar fingers between his thighs. … – but he had growled in his sleep and bared the white teeth in his dark face.5

Although there is a lot of information to be gleaned from this piece of text – such as a mood which had kept the character asleep in a cinema and the rejected sexual approaches – it does not immediately present us with a communicating character as with Celie. Who is ‘he’? In the first pages of Another Country one has to gradually build up a sense of who the character is, and what is unique about him. The mention of ‘his dark face’ for instance is ambiguous. Later we learn Rufus is a black American, but ‘dark face’ could mean he is black skinned, or it could suggest ‘dark’ in the sense of evil, sinister, sullen, angry – such as a dark mood – or little known and mysterious.

Other sentences in Another Country, such as the following, while naming a character, still does not pinpoint an identity in the way suggested earlier:

Beneath them Rufus walked, one of the fallen – for the weight of the city was murderous – one of those who had been crushed on the day, which was every day, these towers fell.6

Here, although the character is now named, and we learn that he is crushed by his culture, his life in the city, and his social relationship, there is still not a powerful connection with the character as a unique identity. It means that we have to work hard, or exercise patience to become acquainted with Rufus in the text in the way one became quickly intimate with a sense of Celie. In fact, whether on purpose or not, the text arouses a lot of questions that are only slowly answered:

He remembered Leona. Or a sudden, cold, familiar sickness filled him and he knew he was remembering Leona.7

This is page sixteen and Rufus is still mysterious – and who is Leona? It is not until page nineteen that she is revealed in any detail and given some body as a character. Therefore this approach to arousing a sense of identity in the reader is quite different. What in fact it does is to largely obscure identity, ore even suggest that identity is at a low ebb or missing.

Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath has another approach completely. The main character, Tom, doesn’t speak to the reader directly as does Celie, but a detailed physical description is given, building up a picture of a particular type of body and a person expressing through it:

He was not over thirty. His eyes were very dark brown and there was a hint of brown pigment in his eyeballs. His cheekbones were high and wide … His upper lip was long … His hands were hard, with broad fingers and nails as thick and ridged as little clam shells … and the hams of his hands were shiny with callus.8

This detailed physical description follows immediately after Tom is first mentioned in the text. It produces an impression of real physical presence, and a subjective image to build on. In Another Country there is no physical description of Rufus even thirty pages in. As readers we have to create our own image of his appearance. Nevertheless a sense of Rufus’s identity emerges, and is created by the gradually revealed personal responses and exchanges. The identity we form is of course shaped, perhaps manipulated, by the manner in which he, Rufus, is presented to us via the text. It is an identity which from a place of contact and light, has sunk down into the shadows and the margins of society.

Steinbeck, however, as with his early physical description, uses the technique of personal exchange very early in presenting the character of Tom:

The driver looked quickly back at the restaurant for a second. ‘Didn’t you see the No Riders sticker on the win’shield?’

‘Sure – I seen it. But sometimes a guy’ll be a good guy even if some rich bastard makes him carry a sticker.’9

The two characters are deeply defined by this short and simple exchange. The driver for instance is shown as hesitant by his looking back at the restaurant. He seeks authority by referring to the sticker rather than making a statement of his own will such as ‘No, I don’t take riders!’ Tom, on the other hand, shows no hesitancy at all. There is no subservience, no pleading. Instead there is a bold and challenging statement and suggestion from which the driver doesn’t extricate himself. Such remarks, that are extended in the following paragraphs, present Tom as someone who, although having spent some years in prison, has not been made artful or cowed by the experience. This is made more evident by placing Tom up against the character of the truck driver, who is artful or devious, and who responds in a defensive way to Tom. This type of delineation of character is often achieved in Grapes of Wrath by a mixture of conversational interaction and by the narrator’s remarks, as in the following piece:

His eyes (the driver) began at the new cap, moved down the new clothes to the new shoes. The hitch-hiker squirmed his back against the seat in comfort, took off his new cap and swabbed his sweating forehead with it. ‘Thanks, buddy,’ he said. ‘My dogs was pooped out.’

‘New shoes,’ said the driver. His voice had the same quality of secrecy and insinuation his eyes had. ‘You oughtn’ to take no walk in new shoes – hot weather.’

With a very few words, Steinbeck here manages to use several techniques at once. Not only are the two characters acting as a sort of comparison to make each other’s personal traits more visible, their conversation also gives the impression of flowing out of very different subjective attitudes. At the same time the narrator inserts descriptive pieces, making sure the reader does not miss the cues. Even the negative statement of the driver – ‘you oughtn’ to’ – is a part of the comparison. It stands against Tom’s positive ‘Thanks buddy …’ suggesting entirely different temperaments. The overall scene also implies that Tom is capable of exerting his own self-assertiveness to get what he wants from someone who is only ready to cooperate when coercion is used.

The fascinating aspect of such pieces of text is that they help form an illusion that is very convincing. After all, a personal sense of identity is a very amorphous yet real thing. When we view other people we also have some sense of them experiencing their own identity, and of ourselves meeting or confronting it. Similarly, reading about Tom and the driver, we have an impression of meeting two definite and distinct people.

Although the characters in The Color Purple are also means of making apparent the different dimensions of each other’s personality, the technique to achieve this is quite different. Because everything is written in the first person with just two narrators, as a reader we are only reading these two viewpoints. Nevertheless, the impression of various identities, or shifts in what we perceive of identity, is still achieved. Celie, describing her relationship with Shug, writes:

Me and Shug sound asleep. Her back to me, my arms round her waist. … It warm and cushiony, and I feel Shug’s big tits sorta flop over my arms like suds. It feel like heaven is what it feel like, not like sleeping with Mr. ______ at all.10

This is a very different Celie to the one who relates to Mr. ______ , her husband. Because of the character Shug is presented as being, Celie can be shown to explore aspects of herself that would not strike the reader as real in relationship with other characters. We can therefore accept the different aspect of Celie when she says to Shug about her sexuality with Mr. ____ :

Naw, I say. Mr. ____ can tell you, I don’t like it at all. What it is like? He git up on you, heist your nightgown round your waist, plunge in. Most times I pretend I ain’t there. He never know the difference. Never ast me how I feel, nothing. Just do his business, get off, go to sleep.11

The technique uses the apparent relationship between Celie and Shug to develop a conversation in which particular information can be presented. Even the question in the paragraph – ‘What is it like?’ – enables the answer to be given more fully. This is a device used often in this text. Overall it is very different to Steinbeck’s mixture of dialogue, narrator’s commentary, and character interactions. Here the dialogue does the whole work. Though as already mentioned, the dialogue can emerge because of the relationship between two characters.

However, this particular piece of dialogue does a lot more than describe an event. In terms of identity it graphically suggests what it is like to be Celie, and the attitudes Celie lives with. Celie is not crying, or in a certain sense, complaining. She is coolly responding to a question about a most intimate and deeply felt, even traumatic, part of her experience, as if she were talking about whether she liked rhubarb pies. If Celie were portrayed as crying or feeling angry the impression would be quite different and much less disturbing. As it is, we are given the image of a misery so long standing that Celie has stopped feeling anything. She has become passive and disconnected. This is emphasised by the text that immediately follows where Shug addresses Celie, saying:

She start to laugh. Do his business, she says. Do his business. Why, Miss Celie. You make it sound like he going to the toilet on you.

That what it feel like, I say.

She stop laughing.12

Because of this response, there is no need for a narrator to fill in the gaps by saying that Celie, underneath her calm exterior was hurting. In a sense, Celie is portrayed as saying it herself – ‘She stop laughing.’ Nevertheless, within such apparently simple language and interaction, a very powerful sense of Celie’s identity is communicated.

This definition by opposites is more than simply a way of showing a different facet of a character’s personality however. The twists and turns of the text in Another Country again and again use the different social or cultural background to highlight how, because of a character’s unique identity, the world the characters face in the novel not only appears different, but also responds to them differently. The reaction of the police and the public to seeing a white and black couple in the street for instance. An event illustrating this occurs when Cass goes to Eric as a lover. They are just getting acquainted and Eric tells her of his male lover, Yves, saying Yves hates his mother. Cass replies, ‘That’s not the usual pattern, is it?’ Eric replies that most street boys he met in Paris hated the police, as the police ‘liked to beat the shit out of them.’13 This creates an unusual response in Cass that shows the great divide in their subjective life:

It was strange how she now felt herself holding back – not from him but from such a vision of the world. … She had never had to deal with a policeman in her life, and it had never entered her mind to feel menaced by one.14

Just a few words, and yet the very different worlds, objective and subjective, between Eric and Cass are graphically illustrated. Without effort we have an impression of Cass’s identity as someone who is secure because of her relationship in marriage to a successful white male, who is straight sexually and socially, and who herself has never before stepped beyond those boundaries. Whereas Eric is shown as a homosexual male who, although white, does not have the status or background to feel so unaware of the power of the police.

So far the emphasis has been on examining how text may suggest unique identity, but some text is thought to present a more archetypal or stereotyped view of identity. This is particularly mentioned in feminist criticism. Nellie Y. McKay writes:

Critics identify two distinct narrative views of women in Steinbeck’s writings. In one, in novels such as To a God Unknown (1993), and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), the image is positive and one-dimensional, with female significance almost completely associated with the maternal roles that Kolodny and others decry. In the other, for example Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice and Men (1937), East of Eden (1952), … the portraiture is socially negative. Whores, hustlers, tramps, or madams are the outstanding roles that define the majority of these women.15

Words such as mother, whore, and tramp may be referring to a particular person, but they are also words referring to particular roles, or to stereotypical views of people. We might say of a woman, ‘She is a mother’ – or ‘She is a whore’. In either case we are defining a person’s role or status in a particular way. Of course, in different cultures or periods of history, the connotations of such definitions would be very different. Whether we apply this to motherhood or to any other typical role such as being a father, a son, a daughter or a boss, a simple word may be used to identify, or place some measure of identity on a character. So McKay’s argument could equally apply to words such as father, male-prostitute, or dropout. They also suggest the role of motherhood is one of little account, even though many cultures have seen motherhood as the highest possible human activity. The suggestion of motherhood as a negation of personal achievement or power is possible one linked very directly with capitalism, where power and personal achievement are measured in terms of ones ability to gain financial wealth.

Such words can also be seen simply as ready-made templates in which to place a character. In Another Country for instance we learn that Eric is a homosexual. Depending on who the reader is, and what their associations are with homosexuality, this immediately places on Eric the identity of a person who loves, feels easier with, and perhaps has sex with, another man or men. In the texts being considered however, such fundamental giving of identity achieved by using such words as mother or homosexual, are only foundations or templates upon which complexity is later built. As an example, Eric – the homosexual – becomes the lover of Cass – the wife and mother – in a mutually passionate heterosexual relationship.

Steinbeck perhaps uses what I have called templates, or what have been called stereotypical characters, more than the other two writers being considered. At least, his descriptive passages have this tendency. So, although The Grapes of Wrath uses the word ‘ma’ when referring to Mrs. Joad, we also read:

Her full face was not soft; it was controlled, kindly. Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding. She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since Old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt and fear, she had practised denying them in herself.16

This is a much quoted passage, and from a feminist critique presents the character of Ma Joad as someone who denies her own needs for those of her family. However, my argument is concerned with the representation of identity, not whether Ma Joad is male dominated. As in other pieces quoted from Grapes of Wrath, the delineation of character, and the suggestions to the reader of an underlying identity, is very full and graphic. To ‘mount pain and suffering’ and to achieve an overview of human life through it; to protect others and to care for their needs, sometimes by denying ones own, are qualities to be found in almost any man or woman who has achieved even a small measure of professional life or leadership. They are words sometimes applied to heroes and eheroines. The passage stamps us with the full maturity and strength of Ma Joad. It communicates a sense of leadership and power to deal with many and varied life experiences that the later descriptions of Ma Joad expand and unfold.

Stereotypical statements do something other than give a ready-made description. In a certain way they are also like the opposite characters used to accentuate identity traits. In Another Country, black skin and white skin is mentioned throughout the book.

This is a form of ready-made information that links with the reader’s in-built associations with race or skin colour. The same is true of The Grapes of Wrath where motherhood and fatherhood are used as ready-made templates. Such terms produce a sense of order, probably because as a reader one meets something that is felt to be known. They also save a lot of need for description. We know what a black skin is, and we know what a white skin is. We know what a mother and a father is, or a brother or a sister. This is reasonably obvious, but it is mentioned because in most pieces of text such ready-made terms, such apparently knowable pieces of information contrast with the obscure and little defined. Baldwin, in Another Country, particularly explores the opposite of the known:

And something in him was breaking; he was, briefly and horribly, in a region where there were no definitions of any kind, neither of color, nor of male and female. There was only the leap and the rending and the terror and the surrender.17

This vivid description goes beyond the usual concept of identity as a sense of something definite – I am a woman; I am a man; I am a mother; I am a father; I am white; I am black; I am no good; I am wanted. It is a description of a feeling Vivaldo meets in his uncertainty about his relationship with Ida. It presents identity as something that in the end has no defined boundaries. It suggests that events have stripped away from Vivaldo the comfort of believing himself as someone definite and clear-cut. It takes us, the readers, to somewhere beyond the stability we might long for in a character or in ourselves.

Another Country frequently presents us with this view over the edge – over the edge of personal control inside oneself – over the edge of control in a relationship – over the edge of firm convictions of who one is. As an image this is presented clearly in the text:

Vivaldo took another large drag and squatted on the edge of the roof, his arms hugging his knees.

‘Don’t do that, man,’ Lorenzo whispered, ‘you’re too near the edge, I can’t bear to watch it.’18

Here the metaphor provided by the roof edge not only says how dangerous and frightening this edge of identity is, but perhaps what a different or wider view it gives. But this unknown is presented in other ways too. In The Grapes of Wrath there is a scene which simply describes events and leaves a void for us to fill as to what it means. Tom has just arrived home and Ma recognises him:

‘She moved toward him lithely, soundlessly in her bare feet, and her face was full of wonder. Her small hand felt his arm, felt the soundness of his muscles. And then her fingers went up to his cheek as a blind man’s fingers might. And her joy was nearly like sorrow. Tom pulled his underlip between his teeth and bit it. Her eyes went wonderingly to his bitten lip, and she saw the little line of blood against his teeth and the trickle of blood down his lip. Then she knew, and her control came back, and her hand dropped. … ‘Well!’ she cried. ‘We come mighty near to goin’ without ya.’

Apart from saying ‘her joy was nearly like sorrow’, there is little description of what is going on other than the movements and observations. Nevertheless we as readers are given the impression of intense emotions for both Ma and Tom, and a sense of a whole background of enormously understated love, contact, and family attitudes between them, feelings and attitudes that are never exteriorised in speech but are known by both. The text makes these hidden parts of the characters more real by not describing them. Strangely, the non-description presents a more powerful feeling of meeting two real identities than if many words of description had been used.

Although there are many attempts at describing the hidden and sometimes dark side of human nature in Another Country, it is in The Grapes of Wrath that one finds several passages that open the hidden with little other than the stating of an event. The scene of the dying man at the end of the book is witness to this:

Ma’s eyes passed Rose of Sharon’s eyes, and then came back to them. And the two women looked deep into each other. The girl’s breath came short and gasping.

She said: ‘Yes.’

… She moved closer to the corner and looked down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then slowly she lay down beside him. … Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. ‘You got to,’ she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. ‘There!’ she said. ‘There.’19

The area of the unspoken in this passage is enormous. Even a simple thing like the image of the sick man feeding from Rose of Sharon’s breast is left to ones own internal imagery and fantasy. But the huge area of the unspoken that can work for ages in ones own response to the text is what it says about the identity of the two women involved. In itself it doesn’t, of course, say anything. There is not a word of description trying to coerce us to think of Ma or Rose in a particular way – yet we do.

The stereotypical term such as ‘black’ or ‘mother’, and the ‘hidden’ that is revealed by such actions as that quoted above, both conspire to represent yet another aspect of identity. It is the aspect of identity that can be called cultural, racial, or sociological. For instance, without specific information to say that Rufus is black, it would be difficult from many of the things described in the novel, to arrive at a positive feeling that we definitely knew his racial identity. When Rufus speaks words like: ‘I’ve been working uptown. You promised to come and hear me. Remember?’20 There is no sense of any particular racial type or skin colour. A little of such ‘colouring’ is added however, when he says: ‘Nobody ever has to take up a collection to bury managers or agents,’ Rufus said. ‘But they sweeping musicians up off the streets every day.’21

The difference is effected by simply removing ‘they are’ and replacing it with ‘they’. This shift in speech pattern is very mildly used in Another Country. Nevertheless it does manage to give some impression of a black identity or s light difference in culture or social background. With The Color Purple however, the use of very obvious speech mannerisms are used throughout. We therefore read things like:

Wonder if she still mad Sofia knock her teef out? I ast.

Yeah, she mad. But what good being mad gon do? She not evil, she know Sofia life hard to bear right now.22

Such language gives a very powerful impression of racial identity, which builds up and establishes itself as the novel proceeds. Barbara Christian writes of this:

Walker demonstrates the richness of this language (black English contrasted with standard English) by contrasting it with the staid standard English of Nettie’s sections so that we can see how blacks have transformed a language not originally theirs into a unique version of English.23

In The Grapes of Wrath shifts from standard English are also used as part of the characterisation. Thus we read Ma Joad saying: ‘I never had my fambly stuck out on the road. I never had to sell – ever’thing.’24

But the text does not rely simply on such verbal shifts to evoke a sense in the reader of knowing a person and their different cultural background in depth. The subjects talked about, the manner of talking about them, and personal interactions, as already described, also integrate to give this powerful sense of difference.

In summarising, certain important things have become apparent in examining the texts for ways in which identity is represented. Firstly, when we read a piece of text, even when a character is shown as talking or being present, all we have in front of us is text. If the text is in a foreign language we do not know, then it is completely meaningless except that we might recognise it as a form of writing. With text with which we have ready-made word associations, we have a subjective impression of things happening, of environment, and of particular characters who have unique identities being communicated. This amazing process of spontaneous imagination or experience is of course dependent upon the skilful use of certain techniques in the text. For instance our sense of relationship with a character in the text is shifted into a feeling of direct address when the character says ‘I’ or refers to us as a readers directly. We shift to observer when a character addresses someone else. Many other shifts are possible. In The Color Purple for instance, when the letters from Celie to God change to the letters from Nettie to Celie, an alteration occurs in our perception of who the identity is behind the letters. This may be due to the difference in language used as already pointed out. But in Ways of Reading an argument is put forward saying:

… an individual can be classified on the basis of some characteristic – race, ethnic group, gender, age, sexuality, size, skin color, disablement, etc.25

This is suggesting that a character is given identity – distinguishing characteristics – by a role. Ma Joad for instance appears as a unique person largely because of her role as mother and leader of her family. A feminist viewpoint might argue with this and say that in fact such a role of motherhood takes away a women’s unique identity. However, for the argument I am following, it seems evident that Ma Joad becomes clearer as a unique character because of the descriptions given of her as a mother. For example she is highly distinguishable from Pa Joad or from young Tom Joad.

Lastly, reading text implies a form of gestalt awareness.26 This is particularly so in regard to the text quoted where little is said, yet we feel so much, or associate so much more than the text itself says. Therefore, like the dots of newsprint photographs which we unconsciously put together to form a meaningful picture, we also form a sense of identity out of the many parts of the text that in themselves do not literally have in them any clear cut image or description. This forming of a whole from many parts is, in the end, one of the most powerful factors in the arriving at a sense of identity in regard to characters represented in text.

Bibliography

Alice Walker. The Colour Purple. The Women’s Press. London, 1992.

Barbara Christian. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Monarch Notes. Prentice Hall. USA. 1987. Concise Oxford Dictionary. Oxford University Press. On disk PC version.

David Wyatt. New Essays on the Grapes of Wrath. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. 1990. Encyclopaedia Britannica on CD-ROM.

Infopedia UK Ltd. Hutchinson New Century Encyclopaedia on CD-ROM.

James Baldwin. Another Country. Penguin Books. London, 1990.

John Steinbeck. Grapes of Wrath. Minerva. London, 1995.

Ways of Reading. Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss and Sarah Mills. Routledge. London. 1992.

Notes

1 a the quality or condition of being a specified person or thing. b individuality, personality (felt he had lost his identity). identification or the result of it (a case of mistaken identity; identity card). (Concise Oxford Dictionary. OUP) 2 Concise Oxford Dictionary. OUP. Search ‘character’.

3 Alice Walker. The Colour Purple. Pg. 3.

4 Alice Walker. The Colour Purple. Pg. 5.

5 James Baldwin. Another Country. Pg. 13.

6 James Baldwin. Another Country. Pg. 14.

7 James Baldwin. Another Country. Pg. 16.

8 John Steinbeck. Grapes of Wrath. Pg. 5/6.

9 John Steinbeck. Grapes of Wrath. Pg. 8.

10 Alice Walker. The Colour Purple. Pg. 98.

11 Alice Walker. The Colour Purple. Pg. 68.

12 Alice Walker. The Colour Purple. Pg. 69.

13 James Baldwin. Another Country. Pg. 285.

14 James Baldwin. Another Country. Pg. 285.

15 Nellie McKay. ‘Happy[?] – Wife – and – Motherhood’: The Portrayal of Ma Joad in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. In – David Wyatt. New Essays on the Grapes of Wrath. Pg. 52.

16 John Steinbeck. Grapes of Wrath. Pg. 83/84.

17 James Baldwin. Another Country. Pg. 297.

18 James Baldwin. Another Country. Pg. 305.

19 John Steinbeck. Grapes of Wrath. Pg. 535.

20 James Baldwin. Another Country. Pg. 46.

21 James Baldwin. Another Country. Pg. 47.

22 Alice Walker. The Colour Purple. Pg. 85.

23 Barbara Christian. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Pg. 46.

24 John Steinbeck. Grapes of Wrath. Pg. 87.

25 Ways of Reading. Pg. 181.

26 Gestalt is here defined as – an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts. a system maintaining that perceptions, reactions, etc., are gestalts.