Writing in the Style...

            She did not like it when Maude ordered her to clean the steps, and it had happened three times in the past week. It was winter, and the snow lay heavy on the ground. She did not have a heavy cloak, and on the coldest nights she lay shivering and cursing her lot in life. It was pointless, but she found herself cursing anyway. That was when her godmother came to visit

            Mrs. Simms was a tough old broad—rough red skin, small dark eyes that missed nothing. And she could drink more than most men. She was glad to see her though. No one else in this miserable world actually gave a damn about her. Besides, it would be someone to pass the time with while they utilized a little of her stepmother’s ale.

            “Why do you stay here?” Mrs. S. asked her, once they’d settled in for an evening of cold and damp and drink.

            “Where else would I go?”

            “Anywhere. Somewhere.” It seemed as though Mrs. S. had probably started utilizing before she’d even arrived at the castle that afternoon.

            “That’s all well and good,” her young goddaughter answered. “But looking like this is a curse, when you think about it. You can travel all through France and Spain and wherever and nobody will trouble you. I attract unwelcome attention. I’d end up ruined.”

            “Oh, poor me, I’m so attractive!”

           

            “Make fun if you like,” she stifled a burp. “It’s me who’s stuck here with my dreadful stepmother and her horrible daughters. I wish someone would rescue me. I would adore to be rescued.”

            “That’s rot. You’re a clever chap. Rescue yourself.”

            “But I’m not a chap! I’m a helpless girl.”

            “Oh, Lord. I can see I’m going to have to step in. Fix you up. First, we need to get you the hell out of here and into town. If you’re so set on catching someone’s eye, you’ll have to get cleaned up.”

            “I’m so glad you’re here to help!” Cindy sighed happily.

            “Good God.” Mrs. S. rolled her eyes.

            The next day, Mrs. S. took her young charge into town. She produced a few gold coins from the depths of her massive gown, and traded them for a new gown for Cindy. She hired a girl from the village to fix Cindy’s hair. Mrs. S. had never been very good with the female arts.

            That evening, she snuck Cindy into the royal ball. It was a beautiful affair, and half the kingdom was in attendance. The young prince of the realm made a big entrance around ten, and everyone gasped and clapped. He was a tall, well-made boy with golden hair. Predictably, he took one look at Cindy’s face and he was gone. Now that it was actually clean, it was clear she was very pretty.

            Cindy nearly messed up the entire deal by tripping on the way out, but Mrs. S. turned the mix up with the shoe to their advantage.

            The royal wedding was held a few weeks later. Mrs. S. had earned herself a room at the palace, and all the fine wine she could utilize. They all lived happily ever after, until the prince was killed in the war a few years later. That’s the thing about happiness. It doesn’t really last.

           

But wine and riches—if you play your cards right, those can be forever.

O Brave New World!

For today's reaction post, take on the persona of one of the main characters of Huxley's Brave New World. 

Write a narrative from this character's point of view--you may employ either internal monologue or dialogue, or a combination of both.

Minimum word count: 700 words.

Please post your initial reply by class time on 11/12. Post at least one reply to a class member by 11/13.

Here's mine!

            It wasn’t about Lenina, although that’s what they thought—Bernard, Hemhotlz, and the others. How could it have been? She wasn’t real. She didn’t exist. She was manufactured. They all were. Only I was an accident. An actual person. I was as excited as Miranda to see them, that first day, those first few days. The brave new world and the people living in it. But that world doesn’t require bravery, or fear, or heart. It requires only soma.

            I couldn’t live in their world. They didn’t even realize what they’d lost. What had been taken from them. All for their own good. Mustapha Mond told me, “you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave” (Huxley 201). Ignorance is bliss, clearly. But it is not for me. It can never be for me. You cannot unknow. “What’s done cannot be undone.” Pope brought that book of Shakespeare to Linda, and I read it. It became a part of me. Mond read it too, and then he hid it from the rest of the world. Someday, soon, there will be no one who could even begin to understand it.

            But Mond is wrong. There remains tragedy: this world is a tragedy, as long as I live to see it. The words of Shakespeare are all lost. What else is gone to dust, lost forever, that I will never know? We ought to all have been the heirs of everything that came before. But now mankind are the heirs of childish chants and feelies, decanting and soma. Lost—all is lost. And I am the only one who knows or cares. No one here can connect to me, and so I will remain alone.

"Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy:

This wide and universal theatre

Presents more woeful pageants than the scene”

Wherein we play in." (Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2 Scene 7)

But the woeful pageants are ended. Happiness revolves in an endless parade. But it is a hollow, empty happiness. How can they appreciate the light when they never know the darkness? They do not even notice when one another dies. The nurse at the hospital could not even give me the most basic, decent, human courtesy as my mother lay dying. Because I committed the unpardonable sin of saying the word mother. She could only focus on conditioning those horrible, endless twins. Those poor little monsters, who were never meant to be. Horrible, terrible magic: to take that one child and split him apart, over and over again, pervert him into something terrible and base, twenty where there should have been one, and all degraded.

That is the worst of it, those poor nameless bastards, and they are everywhere, cleaning and cooking and smiling their stupid smiles. That awful lab where they commit these atrocities: it is like the witches of Macbeth: “How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags! What is’t you do?’ --‘A deed without a name.”

            But in the end it’s not about the girl, or the soma, or Linda, or Mond. They don’t matter, and neither do I. It’s really about that boy who was never born, the egg which was blasted apart, the poison they fed him—he will never be. Could he have been the next William Shakespeare, before he became twenty window-washers with bad manners? It’s not about the loss of Shakespeare. He is dead and gone, his words are of the past. It’s the fact that there will never be another writer. Hemholtz is the last creative man alive, and the best he can do is that trash at the feelies. No more magical words will ever be written. No more songs will ever be written or sung, unless they’re childish rhymes to pacify the Gammas and the Betas. No more poems.

            I could write something so beautiful it would make a man cry. But there are no more men left. The Indians understand only the violence and the blood—Pope left that book on the floor like a piece of garbage. And no one in the brave new world could read anything written about pain, or loss, or real life. It would be a joke to them, just as Romeo and Juliet was.

            So there’s no point. There’s nothing more to do.

“Not a whit, we defy augury: there's a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,
'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the
readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he
leaves, what is't to leave betimes?” (Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2)

            

Romantic Monsters, Rational Scientists, and Gothic Monsters

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is an example of a Romantic novel, and it also includes many of the conventions of the Gothic style.

However, Victor Frankenstein’s character is—or strives to be—highly rational—and to approach life (and death) as a scientist. In this regard Frankenstein belongs to the Enlightenment, those whose logical world view the Romantics were reading against. To Victor's way of thinking, why respect the mystery of life and death (as the Romantics surely do) if there is a rational, scientific way to recreate life?

The Gothic movement, in many ways, grew out of both traditions:

“…cultivation of a Gothic style was given new impetus in the mid-eighteenth century with the emergence of Enlightenment beliefs that extolled the virtues of rationality. Such ideas were challenged in Britain by the Romantics at the end of the eighteenth century, who argued that the complexity of human experience could not be explained by an inhuman rationalism. For them the inner worlds of the emotions and the imagination far outweighed the claims of, for example, natural philosophy. The Gothic is at one level closely related to these Romantic considerations, and poets such as Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Byron at various times used the Gothic to explore, at different levels of explicitness, the role that the apparently irrational could play in critiquing quasi-rationalistic accounts of experience… However, although the Gothic often shares in such anti-Enlightenment ideas (because it focuses on thoughts and feelings), it is important to acknowledge that the early Gothic appears to be highly formulaic, reliant on particular settings, such as castles, monasteries, and ruins, and with characters, such as aristocrats, monks, and nuns who, superficially, appear to be interchangeable from novel to novel. Nevertheless, these stories are not as stereotyped as they may seem, and it is necessary to look beyond such narrative props in order to consider the anti-Enlightenment impulses and related themes and issues which are central to the form” (Smith 2-3)

Consider the interplay of Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic irrationality in the novel. Does Victor’s tragic fall function of a condemnation of Rationalism?
How about the monster? To which movement does he most clearly belong, and why?

Finally, why does this idea and this character have such resonance for us as a culture? Why does Frankenstein’s monster endure in popular culture with such ubiquity?  

Smith, Andrew. Gothic Literature. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013. Questia School. Web. 31 Oct. 2014.

The Style of The Sun Also Rises

I don’t really trust those people who look down at their lap when you’re out to lunch, or dinner. It’s not that I mind their looking at their phone, so much. But if you’re going to do it, have the decency to put the damn thing up on the table. Don’t be a sneak, like Robert Cohn.
            The guy was pretty spineless.

            He’d started at the office a few months ago, and I found out all about his story. He was a computer-programming prodigy at Princeton. His professor stole his ideas and sold them to Apple. It was all very tragic. But I always had a suspicion that Robert Cohn had never been the computer prodigy of Princeton; maybe he was obsessed with computers and cell phones because no one actually liked to talk to him in real life. Maybe he wasn’t really texting anyone right now. Maybe he was sending out Instagram posts that no one would ever read.

            “Do you want to order?”

            “Yeah, I’m ready,” he answered. “Say, do you know they’re predicting that thirty percent of people will have brain cancer within the next twenty years?” He picked up his enormous phone. “From the radiation.”

            “What the hell, Robert?” I asked him. “What the hell?”…

~~~

No matter whether folks are fans or not, most everyone who reads his work agrees, Hemingway had style--a very distinct writing style. 

For your response post this week, begin by making some specific observations about Hemingway's writing style. (Remember, style is more about HOW a story is told than the content of that story). 

I'm not going to give you a number; I don't want to limit your creativity. But if you only make one or two, how will you hold your head high in the AP Lit blogosphere?

For the second part of the post, write your own micro-piece, altering your own style to match Papa Hemingway's as much as you can. The twist? Employ some version of his characters, but set your micro-tale in the present day. 

I took a micro-stab at this part, above. I won't share my style observations with you just yet. 

Two-Part Initial Post-due midnight 10/15

Replies this week are optional in honor of HoCo. 

Wuthering Heights Reaction Paper Post

Craft a response to one of the two prompts of at least 500 words. Include text support and cite using MLA.

• Initial response due by class time 9/17.
• Post at least two substantial replies to class members by class time on 9/18.

Select one of the following prompts: 

--Discuss the structure of Wuthering Heights: be sure to discuss the various narrators, and the limits of each point of view. How is the story structured in terms of chronology?—and how do these structural elements connect to the meaning of the work?

 --Many critics have pointed out that the story of WH essentially repeats twice, first with Hindley terrorizing Cathy and Heathcliff, later with Heathcliff terrorizing Hareton, Cathy II, and Linton. Defend or challenge this notion using support from the text. 

Remember to include in-text citations and list your reference(s) at the end: 

Examples: 

“I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer—but yours! How can I?” (Brontë 195)

Works Cited

Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights.  New York: Scholastic, 1961. Print.

Welcome to the LMP AP Literature 2014-15 Blog Circle!

Welcome, or welcome back, to Blogger!

Please create or rename your AP Lit blog and reply to this post with the link. I will link this central blog to all of the class blogs.

You will use this forum to post your reaction papers to term reading. Use the links (which will soon appear on the right side of this blog page) to respond to class members' posts.


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HOW TO TURN OFF CAPTCHA IN BLOGGER:

1. In your Blogger Dashboard, click on Settings.

2. Nested under Settings, click on Posts and comments.

3. Scroll down to "Show word verification" (in the Comments section) and select "No". Save. Done.