11.30.2005
Gainful Employment
After much too long a time of sitting on my ass, singing "What Do You Do With a B.A. In English/It Sucks to Be Me", I have entered into employment with a big corporate bookstore. Hooray for paychecks!
11.19.2005
Aren't we all just a little bit Foucault?
You are Michel Foucault! You wrote groundbreaking
histories of prisons, hospitals, asylums, and
sex. Interestingly, you thought basically the
same thing about all of them. Your historical
accuracy is a bit dodgy, but that was never
really the point. You were very obsessed with
power roles - so obsessed that you frequented
gay S&M clubs, and died of AIDS in 1984.
What 20th Century Theorist are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
11.10.2005
Sue Monk Kidd's Mermaids
I confess, I never finished The Secret Life of Bees. I got up to the part where the girl met the bee ladies and then was distracted by something else and never got around to it again. But I liked what I did read okay, so when my aunt gave me The Mermaid Chair, saying she had liked it better than the other, I was totally on board. The result? Meh. I liked it much better at the beginning than at the end; it was better plus mystery than after the mystery was solved. I like thinking of it as a modern gothic, sans creepy castles and thinly veiled classism, adding more intimate touches and thinly veiled Freudianism.
But of all things I didn't like the way the mystery was "resolved." And I've actually read the unabridged Mysteries of Udolpho, so I know from unsatisfying gothic endings (and that's a totally different story). First of all, I wanted more emotion from Jessie when she learns the truth about her fahter's death. Ok, she falls weeping into her mother's lap, but c'mon--she's just learned that all the people she's looked up to for guidance across the years, all the people who've raised her have been lying to her and letting her believe that she was responsible for her father's death--give me some accusations of betrayal, some yelling, some recriminations, hell, even some passive-aggressive sniping. Like, real human reaction to stupendous news, not freakishly Zen acceptance. That's totally the last of the five stages, not the first. (And, no, I will not buy that she's been working towards acceptance throughout the book in some unconscious way. Also, I have no need for a bridge in Brooklyn.)
I think, in part, this is a failure inherent in the first person narrative. Although in theory we get closer to the narrator that way, in fact we can only know what they know, or--in cases where the story is being told in retrospect, as this one is--what the narrator wants us to know. Even the most introspecitve of us can't entirely penetrate the id/ego split. Freud couldn't and he invented it. So maybe we've got Jessie censoring her story in some way. But this doesn't entirely explain why no-one (including the 3rd person omniscient narrator who hovers over the shoulders of Jessie's men and who abandons the novel at the end) seems to realize that there is no psychological resolution for Jessie as a result of the events covered by the novel. This is my WTF? issue--it feels like a waste of time when a character arc is not so much an arc and more like a dot. (Very post-modern, though.)
Although she seems to think that her time on Egret Island has changed her life, what really has changed? She has let go of her guilt over her father's death, perhaps--but she's also replaced it with guilt over her affair. She's based the shape of her life around being culpable, being able to sink ships--her father's and that of her marriage. In this sense we can draw a parallell between Jessie & St. Senora, but where the saint is a mermaid trapped on land, Jessie is a human who has the chance to be a mermaid, but refuses it. Which is not to say that she made the wrong decision; right and wrong are not entirely the point, besides which, I think I would have disliked it equally if she'd run away with Whit. It's the proposition that this interlude has re-vivified her, brought back her painting, reawakened her to love--but I don't really believe it will last. Not while she's waiting desperately for "forgiveness meted out in precious sips"--the bizarre submissive language in which she describes her return to her husband. Meladramatic "covenant with the self" moments are very cinematic, true, but they don't really have anything to do with the bravery needed to make happiness, day-to-day.
But of all things I didn't like the way the mystery was "resolved." And I've actually read the unabridged Mysteries of Udolpho, so I know from unsatisfying gothic endings (and that's a totally different story). First of all, I wanted more emotion from Jessie when she learns the truth about her fahter's death. Ok, she falls weeping into her mother's lap, but c'mon--she's just learned that all the people she's looked up to for guidance across the years, all the people who've raised her have been lying to her and letting her believe that she was responsible for her father's death--give me some accusations of betrayal, some yelling, some recriminations, hell, even some passive-aggressive sniping. Like, real human reaction to stupendous news, not freakishly Zen acceptance. That's totally the last of the five stages, not the first. (And, no, I will not buy that she's been working towards acceptance throughout the book in some unconscious way. Also, I have no need for a bridge in Brooklyn.)
I think, in part, this is a failure inherent in the first person narrative. Although in theory we get closer to the narrator that way, in fact we can only know what they know, or--in cases where the story is being told in retrospect, as this one is--what the narrator wants us to know. Even the most introspecitve of us can't entirely penetrate the id/ego split. Freud couldn't and he invented it. So maybe we've got Jessie censoring her story in some way. But this doesn't entirely explain why no-one (including the 3rd person omniscient narrator who hovers over the shoulders of Jessie's men and who abandons the novel at the end) seems to realize that there is no psychological resolution for Jessie as a result of the events covered by the novel. This is my WTF? issue--it feels like a waste of time when a character arc is not so much an arc and more like a dot. (Very post-modern, though.)
Although she seems to think that her time on Egret Island has changed her life, what really has changed? She has let go of her guilt over her father's death, perhaps--but she's also replaced it with guilt over her affair. She's based the shape of her life around being culpable, being able to sink ships--her father's and that of her marriage. In this sense we can draw a parallell between Jessie & St. Senora, but where the saint is a mermaid trapped on land, Jessie is a human who has the chance to be a mermaid, but refuses it. Which is not to say that she made the wrong decision; right and wrong are not entirely the point, besides which, I think I would have disliked it equally if she'd run away with Whit. It's the proposition that this interlude has re-vivified her, brought back her painting, reawakened her to love--but I don't really believe it will last. Not while she's waiting desperately for "forgiveness meted out in precious sips"--the bizarre submissive language in which she describes her return to her husband. Meladramatic "covenant with the self" moments are very cinematic, true, but they don't really have anything to do with the bravery needed to make happiness, day-to-day.
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