Sister Carrie

"Out for a little stroll, are you, this evening?"
Carrie looked at him in amazement, and then summoned sufficient
thought to reply: "Why, I don't know you," backing away as she did so.
"Oh, that don't matter," said the other affably.
She bandied no more words with him, but hurried away, reaching her
own door quite out of breath. There was something in the man's look
which frightened her.

Look at that a woman out for a walk and a creepy man approaches her.

I always loved Sister Carrie because it mirrored America's growth in economy and change from agricultural stories to the city. This is one of the first country girl in the big apple kind of tales and I find it fascinating how promiscuous Carrie, or any women, in a novel of its time is portrayed.

Dreiser shows us a different type of woman, i mean she's pretty out there . Carrie always reminded me of Daisy Miller. This short story was a cautionary tale. Women were not supposed to promiscuous and if they were, hey they died. But here we have Carrie succeeding in the end...well monetarily. But hey that's a huge step up from dying from "roman fever."

Let's Get it Together, Ladies

Reading Walkowitz’s essay “City of Dreadful Delight,” which paired quite nicely with last week’s Wilson reading, brought to mind the Lacanian theory of the “other” and its connection to the eroticizing of low culture. Walkowitz quotes critics Stallybrass and White, who offer a culturally symbolic explanation for the “low-other” fetish:

“The top attempts to reject and eliminate the bottom for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover not only that it is in some way frequently dependent on the low-other, but also that the top includes that low symbolically as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life. The result is a mobile, conflictual fusion of power, fear and desire in the construction of subjectivity.”

This image of subject, feared and desired, is so relevant, as it applies to any sort of prejudice that we as observers connect to the unfamiliar. In more conspicuous instances, the thought of race and race relations applies. America has had a history (and some may argue that is still exists today) of eroticizing the non-white subject, particularly women of African, Asian, or Hispanic descent, and fetishizing them only for their physical unfamiliarity. They not only pose a potential political threat, but they also become symbols of sexualized idolatry. Walkowitz applies this theory to the Victorian prostitute, noting the binary between “domesticated feminine virtue” and the “public symbol of female vice,” a culturally reinforced separation.

The fact that bourgeois men and women became so invested in the investigation of prostitution implies its fetish, the feverish need to know and consume the subjects in question. Certainly this implication also highlights the Victorian habit of sexual repression, and it seems to subjugate all working women as degenerate, lowly others, threats to moral society. Of course, with fluctuations and fragmentations of the “readable” city comes the changing of idealized thinking (a throwback to Wilson’s “Invisible Flaneur”), and multitudes of marginalized personalities begin to inhabit the space between the morally good and despicably bad. Despite the changing politics though, women still get the short end of the stick.

Female identity remains a generalized idea. Even though we’ve moved centuries away from being compared to societal plagues, that underlying notion of subjectivity continues to permeate cultural thinking. It’s a shame too, because it even exists within female circles – we shame each other for sexual expression, body image, etc., yet we simultaneously disapprove of those going against idealistic forms of female beauty and self-expression. This is a huge roadblock for society in general. I ask, why have we moved forward in so many ways for equal rights, when we continue to adhere to archaic forms of Lacanian thinking? Can we ever get over ourselves, girls?

Dorian

Since i'll be rambling about Walkowitz tomorrow, ill save you all the trouble now and talk about Wilde.

I surprisingly really enjoyed the story. Here we have the prime example of a Flaneur, in all his glory. Dorian Gray is an incredibly annoying and amazing character. The beauty of him, this goes both ways, is that he is the men and women we see today. I love connecting everything we read to whats happening now, so bear with me.
Our society is Dorian Gray and that bothers me a lot. We live in a world where youth and beauty is cherished. We, and i use we very loosely, we praise the celebrities and mock the ones that fall from grace. Plastic surgery, botox, and all those lovely fix ups enables our world to be constantly surrounded by YOUTH NOW.
I'm a 23 year old who enjoys celebrity gossip from time to time. sue me. So when i see all these Dorian's running around it drives me crazy. There are celebrities in their 20s who get work done, and why? so they can look better which leads to feeling better and having a better life. Dorian would not have been "happy" if he had lost his looks, it was all he really had. And here have Kim Kardashian, Megan Fox, Lindsay Lohan, and many others who use Basil paintings, aka plastic surgery, to hide behind who they really are. And because of social media and the "news" (gossip shows and online bs)
girls in my city strive for that small nose and full lips. Half the people in my city have had elective work done, I have run out of toes and fingers to count on.

I just realized i massively detoured. Yeah i guess society will always be this way. The possibilities are endless with new ways to become forever young. Some celebrities have even fallen into looking like Dorian's Portrait because of it. (Mickey Rourke, Joan RIvers, Michael Jackson...)

Let's get back on some literary track...
Wilde has always been the type of author to point out the faults of the rich right off the bat. He really didn't care what came out of that beautifully ingenious mouth of his. He's rather amazing.

The novel was so different from what we have read so far and I am absolutely infatuated with it. But isn't that what got Sybil into trouble in the first place.
Oh yes, another story about a woman who cannot control her feelings. And before we forget, more homoerotic male relationships to dive into. Yes, Wilde knew what he was doing.

Let me also chime in on some Walkowitz before i go...
It's totally generic to call a city or country her right? Cause I found that amazing that the disheveled, blackened city was a woman. oh so lovely. i guess only the hardened countries are named after men. whatever, no time for gender fights right now. my brain is fried.

women flaneur and ramblings

So as noted in previous posts, we are introduced to the idea of the "flaneuses," the female version of the flaneur. I have always been fascinated by this idea of the "lounger" generation that was produced with the rise of bourgeoisie. It seems to me like they were an epidemic, just people strolling around without a care in the world because they didn't have anything. It is interesting to see the female version of that, since bourgeoisie women were usually seen in the Madame Bovary sense, useless. Lady Dedlock encompassed that in the beginning, perpetually bored and yet she had a sense of purpose that she never unlocked, well it was too late when she did. 

Baudalaire saw them as key to understanding the city. I mean who better to know the city but someone who participates without really participating. its like a privilege to be able to just watch without being noticed and take it all in. 

What really intrigued me however was how flaneur reminded me of the book/movie American Psycho. Batemen essentially becomes in what we see in Poe's "Man of the crowd," a man of the crowd. If you guys arent familiar with the character, he's basically a 20 something rich wall street dude who kills people for fun and thrill and never gets caught cause in the end no one really knows who he is or how he looks even though they work with him.

Its like he was able to be invisible by being visible all at the same time. 

The movie of course degrades women in all possible ways. They are used as sex objects, seen as perpetually bored and easily murdered by Batemen.

Which leads me to another though. Women, especially then, were kind of invisible. I mean they kept up the sales for all the fluff novels that were published, because they were at home and read for leisure, but what else did they really do. There hasn’t even been one heroine in any of the novels we have read. Their lives are dictated by the male’s reaction and what they want. I mean Esther didn’t choose Woodcourt; she was gifted to him. Mary, well Mary was just there and decided she loved Wilson, in my opinion, just to keep the story going. And sybil, poor Sibyl, is the beginning of Dorian’s descent into hell, and dictated her life according to his words and feelings. Women are essentially objects.

 “Yet although the male ruling class did all it could to restrict the movement of women in cities, it proved impossible to banish them from public spaces. Women continued to crowd nto the city centres and the factory districts.”

I wish I saw more of this, sure Lady D is in the streets, but she’s dead.

I still think the fear of women in the streets is around today. I mean now there are programs like “take back the night,” where women proudly walk in darkened streets because they CAN and not because they want to be raped or hurt. But, don’t we all have that strange fear that maybe you shouldn’t go through that dark alley or walk to your car alone. (maybe I watch too much Lifetime, yes I DO watch too much Lifetime)

I guess what I’m trying to get to is….have things really changed that much.?

bleak bleak bleak

I was gonna be clever and talk about the lack of growth in the characters...the bleakness of them..but its way to late for my brain to be funny or punny or anything for that matter.

The end is here. We've come across way too many characters, one unnecessary will that seemed to bring out the best and worse and inheritance of all kind. 

I just want to get into how creepy the second to last Esther Narrative ended up being for me. 

I don't know but her engagement to Jarndyce always rubbed me the wrong way, not because she was lying to herself but because he was her guardian. And i love how he casually gives her up and claims he will remain her father now...i know i know..this was probably totally normal and cool and all that..still freaked me out though. 

Now I many of you have talked about Foucault and Panopticism. so i hope i'm not repeating anything or being confusing...probably both.

Now this invisible power/anonymous power made me think of a couple characters in the novel. 1. Turklington: he seemed to have most of the knowledge and therefore carried most of the power but then again he wasn't so anonymous. he was in the beginning. 

2.Buckett...he'd just pop out of every which way and had the power of the panopticon would. in the sense that he could imprison and arrest.

Lastly we have the second narrator. I felt him/her having the anonymous power. 

They seemed to know outside the realm of esther, hold all the power because they had the most knowledge and we never knew who they were. 

i know we talked about how it could possibly be Esther narrating afterwards or it could be Dickens' voice, but i prefer it being this anonymous entity watching over not only the characters, but esther as well. Like even though esther had her own part in the narration, this one had more control and shadowed her. Like she looked to it for answers and protection. 

Probably babbling...what else is new. 

Oooh. How about the ending of this.

Not only does Esther conveniently get to be with the love of her life, but they literally move into the bleak house. i was hoping they would be moving out of it.

but as her closing narrative states, all was well and she was even more beautiful than before. how cute. 

I guess that were my problem with Dickens has always lied in. His constant need to wrap things up in a bow. blegh. no thanks. 

Let's talk about woman mannnnn

So Dickens is notorious for having these little boys become men and women are either crazy as balls or sometimes legit (both these titles belong to Lady Havisham...obviously) and before anyone complains and shows off their Dickens trivia...i have only read like three dickens novels (he's not my cup of tea, sue me ;]) and from what i gather, only one other book has a female role. So that's pretty cool, i guess.

Now Lady Dedlock, in the beginning,  is  most boring high society annoying woman in the history of ever-town. She totally reminded me of Madame Bovary, and guess what, her sex life pretty much matched up at one point or another. (what with rich women and "slummin" it then being destroyed after?)
Anyways...Dedlock starts off pretty lame...then BAM we got this crazy secret, this cool passionate love story, and disguises that would shame Buckett. And the best part is that she isn't a cheating gold digger like most women in novels like this, she did her bad news bears before she got married. much respect.

Now, as for Esther. She's the typical super awesome heroine that has a terrible introduction. She's shy, thinks little about herself, thinks she's not "clever" enough....but here's the thing...Esther's narratives are actually the only ones I care to read and enjoy...even though she can get pretty self deprecating and you find yourself screaming at her...THESE PROBLEMS ARE NOT YOURS.

Yeah so I had this grand idea i had going about dickens and women
and well i'm not sure where i was going...
Women generally suck in his novels...(the 2 that i've read....notice how i went from 3 to 2...)
Does Dickens give us a cool heroine, a woman we can look up to the 19th century
or is she just another shadow of the two most typical females
1. the rich, bored, whore who dies alone in poverty cause she wasn't good to her man
2. the good kid who takes care of everyone except herself and maybe gets what she really deserves..


time will tell.
til then i'll just enjoy the novel..which is slightly hard.

Oh and don't we have other women who just plain suck
like the maid who sets dedlock up for murder.
cmon man.
--_=

Benjamin.

Walter Benjamin’s term, “wish images,” confused me a bit but when I re read it a couple times I realized the beauty in the idea. Then again, I could have read it completely wrong…seems to happen a lot with me.

He states that “wish images” are combinations of the old and the new…the old being Marxists? Notions…So we have this combination of the arcades that correspond with the idea of a “wish image.” The buildings carry the oldness of “the classical Greek sense” but are constructed by the new material: iron. So we have this co-mingling of iron; “a material used for the first time in the history of architecture” and the architectural premise of the Greeks.

I seem to be summarizing this one page people its what confused me the most. He seems to be in awe of this new use of Iron; since he compares it to the failure of its use by the Empire. He connects this to Napoleons failure of domination.

It is as though the buildings are in conjunction with government…which is totally understandable. Right? Here we have two foundations, that if build incorrectly, even if they miss a screw, they crumble. Iron seems to be this majestic material that brought these buildings into form. It as if Napoleon had missed his “iron.”

Ah, I don’t know…now I probably sound completely insane. Ah.

Back to “wish images.” We always have this back and forth in lit theory about the old against the new. How Formalists pushed out Romantics and how this patterns continuously pushed out another. The “wish image” could combine this new and old and make this glorious thing…this phenomena. (my 501 class is clearly controlling my brain, but hey, makes for interesting connections) ah but Benjamin’s Paris never received this utopian wish image…

Let’s go to Haussmann now. I have read and seen the structure of the Haussmanization in Paris. I have never heard it referred to as “Barricades” but what a perfect description of it. Here we see the definite connection between building and government. Just like in Manchester, the city with the poor in secluded areas and secret passages for the rich, Haussmanization is able to control the rich and poor just by design.

“The true goal of Haussmann’s projects was to secure the city against war” (12). That’s nice and all but the way it is structured keeps the rich in and the poor out. The more you travel outside of this elaborate sun rayed structured city, the “ghetto-er” it gets. Its reminds me of a elevator laying on its side. The higher the elevator goes, the higher the position of the worker (in a business, wall street type of way) so the “higher” you go into the city, the better the citizen.

What trips me out the most is how the French Revolution happened but the English one never did. It seemed to be way worse in Manchester than in Paris.

Maybe I made some sense. :] 

Mr. Tangle

I will not be posting my usual witty and ever hilarious blog this week. I have failed my audience!
But I would like to note MR TANGLE. oh sly Dickens. you punny punny man. (scheduling conflicts has lead to my absence) I will come back strong next week!

OKAY EVERYBODY now that you have all hopefully finished the book, my post will no longer be a spoiler alert. If it still is then too bad so sad. No but really. Wasn’t the ending kinda, you know, lame? Here we have an epic tale of class vs. class and it just ends. With no really winner except for love. Frankly I’m sick of such endings...anyways...

"Many of the improvements now in practice in the system of employment in Manchester, owe their origins in short earnest sentences spoken by Mr. Carson" (page 374)

Well here, our lovely friend, Gaskell wants us to have a nice, lovely, and tidy ending for not only Mary and her beau but for all her little factory friends. I'm not trying to be cynical but after reading excerpts from Engels, Vaughan and all the others, I doubt Carson did anything for these people...or anyone like Carson for that matter

I mean did her and Eliot have a pow wow about how to rob us from a legit ending? I mean Eliot gives us a slight hint to Silas losing his job because of the revolution...and we see his old town demolished into crap town USA....but he still has that lovely fairy tale ending. 

So dude, what are we supposed to get out of such endings? I get it, Eliot was bringing in Realism and all that jazz and Gaskell was trying to break boundaries...but at least give us the right Reality. Love is great, everyone should have it at one point in their lives, but that cannot be a solution to a story. 

Barton's father killed Mary's only chance of having a comfy rich life. Again, i sound really messed up but that's reality sometimes. Then Jem almost dies for her, which is all nice, but he prevails and ends up in Canada.

OH CMON...

it took John like days to walk to London and here Jem is galavanting around.

Whatever, clearly i'm bitter. 

What doesn't the ending tell us? hm?

that the revolution continued to ruin lives.

That the revolution killed children and tore families apart

that the revolution did n't get better til much later on?

hey that's realism baby!

Engels and Gaskell should have combined their stories and had a legit ending. 

my vote!

Mary Barton and Us

I really suck at blogs, which will explain the rest of my post...

Ok so I have ready this novel too many times. At first I really could not stand it. It just bothered me to no end. I was more interested in Hardy and Eliot. I just wanted to be able to care about the story. But I never did. So this time around I decided to read it differently. I decided to read it with the mindset that Mary could have been someone I knew. I know, I know, what the hell am I talking about? Do I even make sense...probably not but it makes sense to me. 
This storyline is something we've all probably seen a million times, especially on Lifetime. Cmon ladies, don't lie. How many times have we heard about the poor little rich girl getting a chance with the rich man's son but still chooses the man who is on her level? ALL THE DAMN TIME. It's one of those love stories that shows the underdog and all that jazz. But if that's what Gaskell was doing then this story would have been pretty lame. And here I went and ruined a very well written story. It's what i do -_-
No to be honest, we could see the story as just that and for a long time I did. I thought it was just one of those easy novels that really meant nothing. But coupling it with all the articles, Norris, and even Silas Marner, I see it as something pretty great. 
Gaskell was able to portray the anxiety of the new industrialized world. Show how it ruined everyone's spirit and how it even effected the rich man. WHO WOULD HAVE KNOWN. 
I'm babbling cause i suck at blogs...and at a lot of other things as well. 
We see this fabulous example of the super poor and the seemingly growing rich merging together in this strange love triangle. 
This love story helps show the big differences in the classes, how others are treated, and what the future holds. As depressing as it sounds, I feel like this stuff happens all the time. I mean it never stopped being like this. eh, I digress...

I really liked the relationship Gaskell portrayed with Jem and the others. Here we have a hero amongst the poor. And his opposition in my opinion would have been Mr. Barton. While Mary’s father kills for civil unrest, Jem takes the blame to pacify the people and help out his true love. It’s odd to see the under dog actually come on top now and days.

Gaskell creates hope. Hope that even if you have a Carson on your hands, you can strive for a Canada. (Don’t we all just want to go there now)

Both Eliot and Gaskell show this strange side to hope. A hope that maybe community is helpful and even if the industrialization ruined lives it also gave way to some amazing changes that needed to be address. I know Gaskell wanted Europe to see the con to it all, but she also gave us glimpse of that fairy tale ending everyone strives for.