MeganRitter: May 2006 Archives

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May 10, 2006

Nice Try, BigLucynell.

O'Connor, ''The Life You Save May Be Your Own'' -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)

"...now she was pulling the cherries off the hat one by one."

Lucynell's behavior here is indicative of an O'Connor theme wherein no matter how hard one may try to hide a flaw, it will always come out. Lucynell's mother may have dolled her up to look like an ordinary girl having an ordinary wedding day, but as desperately as Big Lucynell might want Little Lucynell to be like all the other girls, Little Lucynell just can't be stuffed in the mold. She may have looked like all the other girls for a short time, but all the trappings of fancy dress and fancy hat can't conceal for long that there is just something not quite normal about her. O'Connor comes back to this theme back and again - most strongly with The Misfit, but at other times too. No matter how hard anyone may work to superficially conceal it - with manners, religion, dress - a person's inherent flaw will always expose itself.

Posted by MeganRitter at 03:57 PM | Comments (0)

Am I My Sister's Keeper?

McBride, The Color of Water (1996) -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)

A significant theme of this novel is wrapped up in the diverse ways that different people respond to hardship. One of the driving points of the entire story is Mommy's unending, unbowing, unfailing strength and grace in the face of incredible odds, in the face of troubles that would flatten most of us. To any of us Mommy is the very model of courage. So it is interesting - both surprising and completely unsurprising - that the one time in Mommy's life she wasn't strong haunts her.

From page 201: '"I don't believe you,' she said. 'I know you're going back. Please don't go. Promise me you'll stay.' She sat on the bed and buried her face in her hands and cried, my little sister. 'Promise me,' she sobbed. 'Promise me you'll stay.'
"'Okay, I promise,' I said. 'I'll stay.' But I broke my promise to Dee-Dee and she never forgot it. And she would remind me of it many years later."

What is significant about this passage is what is not said. Mommy tells us that Dee-Dee never forgot, reminded her years later. But Mommy is the one who is remembering the incident in vivid detail. More importantly, Mommy is the one who CHOSE to tell this story. In the whole crazy story of her incredibly crowded life, Mommy thought that THIS incident was significant enough in her own personal development to recount. Mommy clearly still feels the sting of guilt and shame that is the central focus of this incident. This demonstrates how what we might think are obvious assumptions about characters are perhaps not so obvious. We look at Mommy and see uncomplaining Grace and strength. Mommy looks at a life full of accomplishment driven by love and isolates this incident to recount many years later.

Posted by MeganRitter at 03:53 PM | Comments (0)

Final Exams Already?

Roberts, Ch.17 -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)

My paper is on Flannery O'Connor, and we've beaten her work to death in class. Several important themes have returned time and time again in our discussions: religion and spirituality, tolerance and compassion vs. the lack thereof, race, class, and gender and how they interact, and the meaning of a handicap. While Roberts devotes a great deal of space to anticipating specific factual questions - characters, quotations, settings - I think in the context of a culminating exam for the entire course it would be more appropriate to have and we should expect to see the more general, comprehensive questions that he discusses in less detail. I think for the exam it is important to read each work for the overlying theme and to find examples that support that specific theme.

Posted by MeganRitter at 03:38 PM | Comments (0)

Formal Presentation Outline

Formal Oral Presentations -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)

I probably went a bit much into detail, but my presentation was essentially an outline of my paper, as understanding O'Connor's interpretation of death is essential to understanding her work as a whole.

O’Connor and Death: Faith and Suffering
Or, Why So Gloomy, Flannery?

•Flannery O’Connor’s portrayal of the issues surrounding death has come under fire from some critics who say that her work is evidence of a lack of basic compassion.
•Her critics aren’t wrong when they say that O’Connor’s images of death are completely without any kind of human sentiment BUT this is not because she was an awful, insensitive, cold-hearted person.
“A Good Man is Hard to Find”
•Her entire family is evidently gunned down. Does the grandmother give any evidence of caring? Not really. No.
•Immediately after shooting the grandmother, The Misfit picks up a cat to cradle it. He’s just gunned a person down and is now showing affection to a cat. The Misfit is meant to be slightly imbalanced, yes, but it is powerful symbolism that he will show tenderness to an animal while completely disregarding human life. (O’Connor 29)
•The Misfit is a murderer, but is not really such a bad man. He praises his parents to the skies, shows all the little courtesies of a proper Southern gentleman, and freely discusses his ideas about theology and morality. That the purveyor of death can be shown in such a sympathetic light is indicative of O’Connor’s theories that maybe death wasn’t really such a bad thing. (O’Connor 22-29)
“The River”
•Bevel/Harry is just a child, yes the image is clear that he embraces his own death. He certainly is rational terms may be unaware of the implications of what he does. However, we have grown accustomed to the Dylan Thomas sentiment that we must “not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light” and it shocks us that anyone, but especially such a little boy, would embrace death not in this way, not as a the means of escape that some believe suicide offers, but as something to strive for. Imagine for a moment what a stir this must have created in the more innocent world of the 1940s South. (O’Connor 22-29)
“A Late Encounter With the Enemy”
•Sally Poker is on pins and needles that her grandfather won’t live until her graduation. This isn’t because she’s especially fond of her own kin who she’s lived with for probably all of her life. It is instead because she wants the status that comes from having her grandfather sit on the platform as a dignitary. (O’Connor 155-156)
•He dies in the middle of the stage and nobody notices. Wait, what? (O’Connor 168)
“The Displaced Person”
•When Mrs. Shortley dies, Mrs. McIntyre tells us that “anyone would have thought they were kin” (O’Connor 240). She also tells us that it took her three days to get over the death of this person who was like kin to her. Three days. (O’Connor 240)
•Mrs. McIntyre, Mr. Shortley, and their African-American farmhand all see that Guizac is about to be crushed to death by a tractor, a pretty horrible fate. The text never describes them as “frozen with shock and horror” or anything redeeming like that. They apparently just don’t care. (O’Connor 249-250)
•Mrs. McIntyre is fairly annoyed when she catches the priest administering last rites to Guizac. (O’Connor 250)

•One problem I have had with my thesis – I guess this would be the antithesis – is the problem of proving that O’Connor was not trying to make a point about the inhumanity of her characters in depicting death so dispassionately.
Possible answers to antithesis
-It is significant, I think, that none of the reactions of her characters are consciously cruel. (Even the Misfit can come off as a lovable nut.) Her characters are simply apathetic. It is as if death is a non-issue, which, to O’Connor, it was.
-I’m open to polite guidance.
Why O’Connor Wasn’t Just Cold-Hearted and Crazy
•O’Connor understood better than most the inevitability of death. It is significant that she watched her father die of lupus, so that she could virtually chart the course of her own illness according to her memories of his brief life. In her mind, I would imagine, it’s going to come when it comes, so why should anyone bother to fight it?
•O’Connor’s Catholic faith told her that heaven offered something better than anything that could be found on earth. This is most clearly illustrated in “The River” with the tragic tale of Bevel/Harry.
•To O’Connor, there was a kind of spiritual purity in death that we all should be striving for all our lives. This philosophy is illustrated again most clearly by Bevel, but also by The Misfit’s little epigram on the grandmother’s life.
•O’Connor: “For me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in this world I see in its relation to that.” For O’Connor the central aim and end of human life was your faith journey toward the face-to-face encounter with Jesus Christ himself. Death is simply the last step on that journey, the portal to a world where Jesus lived. How could she possibly think death was a bad thing if it brought her that close to Jesus? Instead, it was something to be celebrated.

Posted by MeganRitter at 03:30 PM | Comments (0)

May 03, 2006

The Living Wall

A friend of mine is part of the group that planned Seton Hill's Living Wall, a memorial to U.S. soldiers who have fallen in the war on terror. I've been telling her all along that I think it's a fantastic idea. She did not, I think, believe that I really thought it was a fantastic idea, because in April when Seton Hill hosted the "Eyes Wide Open" exhibit and panel, the Seton Hill College Republicans, of which I am a member, all objected quite strongly. My friend was convinced that we would also oppose the Living Wall. I think she was terrified that we would stage some kind of protest.
The full Living Wall ceremony on Monday lasted from ten in the morning to five in the afternoon. I spent the last two and a half hours at the ceremony. It was simple. Students, professors, staff, anyone who wanted to participate was given a stack of cards, each card carrying the name, age, rank and hometown of a man or woman who has died in Iraq or Afghanistan. One at a time for seven hours readers went to the microphone, read off their cards, and handed them off to be sttached to a massive plywood American flag erected behind the podium. Once an hour a trumpeter came out to play taps.
This is the difference between the Living Wall and Eyes Wide Open; this is why I hated Eyes Wide Open but was moved to tears by the Living Wall ceremony: The opening speech, the closing speech, and every press release issued by the students in chrage of the Living Wall stressed that we were honoring our soldiers for living their principles. The Living Wall reminded us that whether or not we agree with the politics of the war, the soldiers who are there are sacrificing because they choose to sacrifice. This is the difference between anti-war radicals and everyone else. The Living Wall recognizes that to some people there are things worth dying for. Eyes Wide Open did not. Eyes Wide Open tried to tell us that America is not worth dying for, that principles are not worth dying for. Nobody really wants to die; death is always a tragedy. But Eyes Wide Open tried to tell us that the sacrifices of out troops have been wastes of life. The Living Wall reminded us that it is an insult to our men and women in uniform to try to tell them that their sacrifice is in vain. Maybe you agree with the war. Maybe you don't. But all except the most radical among us recognize that there are things worth dying for. The Living Wall reminds us that whether or not we agree with the politics of the war, to the men and women of the U.S. military, the work they are doing is worth dying for.
I salute Dr. Klapak's Public Discourse class for taking on this project. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. tells us that, "A man who won't die for something is not fit to live." For all the radicals out there: it doesn't really matter if you think the sacrifices of our military in vain, as long as they themselves know that their sacrifices are not in vain. Thank you to the Public Discourse class and thank you to the U.S. military.

Posted by MeganRitter at 08:37 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 02, 2006

Nice try, Big Lucynell - "The Life You Save May Be Your Own"

O'Connor, ''The Life You Save May Be Your Own'' -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)

"...now she was pulling the cherries off the hat one by one."

Posted by MeganRitter at 09:13 PM | Comments (0)

Different Kinds of Value

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:LindisfarneFol27rIncipitMatt.jpg O'Connor, ''The River'' -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)

"'That's valuable,' he said. 'That's a collector's item,' and he took it away from the rest of them and retired to another chair."

This is quite a deliberate and obvious use of irony on O'Connor's part - but only if the reader has a frame of reference from which to begin.

Before the dawn of the printing press, the whole point of existence for the average monk was to copy the Bible by hand. As in, the monk would spend his entire day that was not absorbed by eating, sleeping, praying, chanting, or tending the goats would be devoted to copying the Bible out. Lest you think that every medieval home had a quality monk-produced Bible, let me point out that these quiet bald men were not in the business of mass production. In fact, one monk typically spent his whole life producing just one Bible. Were they reeeeeaaaaaaally slooooooooow writers, you might understandably ask. No, the writing isn't what took all that time. Instead, their whole lives were devoted to illustrating such masterpieces as this. This, my friends, is an illuminated manuscript. A monk would spend his entire life working to make the single Bible he produced a thing of glorious beauty. This was not because our ascetic friend was thinking of how much he could sell the finished produce for. Instead, the point of his lifetime of labor was to create something that would truly glorify God. The value of these books lay not in graceful illustrations of elaborate lettering or gold-leafed pages - the real value of these Bibles lay in the wisdom contained between their pages.

So too it should be with the book that Bevel/Harry has come home with - The Life of Jesus Christ for Children Under 12. To those reading this story from a certain frame of reference, that value of the book lies in its ability to educate, to evangelize. To thisfriend of Bevel/Harry's parents, the value of the book has nothing to do with its wonderful potential to illuminate the young mind. Instead, to him, the value of the book has only to do with the fect that it is very old and nicely bound and someone could get a lot of money for it from a collector. This is the sort of double-edged irony that O'Connor does so well: if you're coming from a Christian background you get it and if you're not you probably don't. With this passage O'Connor is illustrating the competing values of two competing worlds: the transcendental world of the Christian, which values a thing for the good it can do in the world, and the earthly world of Bevel/Harry's parents and people like them - a world which values things only according to their market value.

Posted by MeganRitter at 07:57 PM | Comments (2)