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Student Midterm submissions 2013 (2013 midterm assignment) |
LITR 5831 World Literature
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Marichia Wyatt
Like Minds Produce Different Insights
We have spent an ample amount of time on dialogue and
intertextuality during the first half of the semester because you cannot read
Robinson Crusoe and Lucy side by side without discussing how they relate to one
another at length. It is apparent
that other classes have found this subject just as interesting as ours has in
the number of students who chose to write about it in their midterm essays
(myself included). The three essays
I chose to review all look at the dialogue within the two novels, and how they
pertain to the class as colonial and post-colonial literature.
Allan Reid’s essay engaged me with his ability to put so much
of himself into his essay “Dialogue and How it is Used by Defoe and Kincaid.”
He clearly enjoyed the way this particular class merges history and
literature, and took the opportunity to combine the two in his essay.
I especially enjoyed his incorporation of the term “pseudospeciation”
followed by the explanation that “the definition denotes two things: us and the
others; and we are always superior to the others.”
Not only was he able to teach me a new term, he was able to show me why
it was relevant to Crusoe’s relationship to Friday:
“Never is there one thought of equality in the dialogue between the two.”
Although the majority of the essay is spent discussing the differences of
two colonized characters, Reid is also able to provide his reader with
similarities between “the submissive savage Friday and the rebel teen Lucy, and
that is their reaction to religion.”
However, he is most compelling in his analysis over the differences in
their reactions to the colonizers Crusoe and Mariah.
Although I did not agree with everything in this essay, it is impossible
to disagree with his conclusion that “Friday, Lucy, Mariah, and Crusoe give us
important insight into the thought of colonial and post-colonial people.”
I could not help but to be curious of Tim Assel’s midterm
because he chose to write three separate short essays.
I found this approach to be straightforward and to the point; however I
felt that since the three essays touched on the same materials it may have been
better if he had combined them.
Regardless, Assel took a very interesting approach in the first essay “Colonial
and Post-Colonial Dialogue: Defoe
and Kincaid.” Assel brilliantly
plays with the intertextuality of “A Small Place” and Robinson Crusoe by asking
his reader “what if” questions in order to show how the narrative could have
easily changed. By using this
approach, he is able to see past the limitations of the novel and wonder how
race may “affect the dynamics of society and politics on Crusoe’s island for
future generations.” I found this
to be the most intriguing one of his essays as he invited his reader to see the
stories differently.
Assel’s second essay, “The Role of the Novel in Individualism
and Modernity” does a good job of expressing the importance of the novel as a
“necessary element of modernity.”
While this essay is nowhere near as engaging as his first, Assel was able to
incorporate the material clearly if not as thoroughly as one might hope.
I felt that this essay may have benefited by being combined with his
others.
In his last essay “Anglo-American Perspectives on
Post-Colonial Issues” Assel addresses the historical aspects involved with
Post-Colonial issues. Much like
Reid’s essay, the historical perspectives lead the reader to a deeper
understanding of the texts: “the
difficulty Anglo-American society has with understanding post-colonial issues is
caused by a tendency towards segregation that can be traced back to the early
days of colonization.” Again, Assel
does not limit himself within the pages of Crusoe, and pursues “the potential
for racial conflict in future generations.”
Even though this essay is well written, I believe he could have combined
the three for a deeper analysis into the issues he addresses.
Assel has a lot of good material here, and I found myself wanting to know
what he would have done in a longer essay.
I picked Melissa Hollman’s essay “American Ignorance to
Colonialism” based on the title alone.
How could I not? I was glad
I did because her first paragraph was the best introduction I read.
It is absolutely captivating, and absolutely true.
I enjoyed this essay from the beginning to the end.
Her explanation of the class is so simply put, yet it is precisely
correct: “The study of colonial and
post-colonial literature helps to tell the stories of people forever changed by
the force of another.” I found
myself agreeing with her wholeheartedly over and over, especially her ideas of
“the narrative...allows the reader the opportunity to empathize with his
loneliness and find happiness in his successes.” The way she related the texts
to each other was extremely well done, and was pleasantly surprised by how often
we agreed in our essays. Although I
cannot say that we are of the same mind when it comes to the relationship
between Mariah and Lucy, I thought the example she used proved the validity of
her perspective.
I believe that dialogue is one of the most important aspects
of this class, and I chose these three students because they believe it as well.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the different perspectives provided by all
of their essays, and I feel as if I was able to learn something from each of
them.
The Power of The Novel
Narratives and dialogue are a way of life;
they exist in everything from the billboards on the sides of highways, to the
legends passed down from one generation to the next; they are even present in
that dirty joke you heard last week.
Of course they are also on television, the big screen, and every book and
magazine Barnes and Noble could offer.
No matter where you live or who you are, stories surround and shape you
as they are an inherently human characteristic.
The novel is the defining genre of modernity because of its ability to
use narrative and dialogue to reveal and/or create the circumstances of the
world at a particular point and time.
This is especially apparent in colonial and post-colonial literature.
By imitating the actual world, the novel perpetuates these stories
through different characters with narrative and dialogue in order to reveal the
societal issues through metaphor.
As the first English novel,
Robinson Crusoe has been taught great
and wide. The first time I read
Robinson Crusoe I thought it was a romantic book about one man’s journey to find
himself through his adventures at sea and being cast away on a deserted island.
I never once thought about it as a colonial fiction within the genre of
realism. This class has allowed me
to see Crusoe’s island from a completely different perspective.
Of course the notions of romanticism are still present in the text (the
sublime, grotesque, etc), but Crusoe is in fact a colonizer.
Defoe encapsulates modernity in his
novel as Crusoe is breaking away from the traditional way of life and venturing
out in a very capitalistic way. He
set out to make his fortune, being unhappy in his original circumstance, and
indeed conquered the wild terrain by imparting his cultural attributes to the
soil as well as the indigenous Friday.
Although it is very short on actual dialogue, the reader is given
Crusoe’s firsthand account of colonizing the island.
However, with the lack of dialogue we are left wondering whether or not
to trust the narrator as far as Friday is concerned.
Through the narrative, the reader is given an account of
Crusoe’s colony. Since he has
nothing but time, Crusoe cultivates his “kingdom” to resemble the comforts of
home as much as possible. Crusoe
even makes Friday as English as he can through language, dress, and eventually
religion: “ I
was greatly delighted with him, and made it my business to teach him everything
that was proper to make him useful, handy, and helpful; but especially to make
him speak, and understand me when I spoke” (Defoe, 14.25).
This colonialist approach of making the other resemble the self is
mirrored in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small
Place when she says, “they should never have left their home, their precious
England, a place they loved so much, a place they could never forget.
And so everywhere they went they turned it into England; and everyone
they met they turned English.” By
reading these two texts together, the reader is able to use intertextuality to
better understand Crusoe’s need to familiarize the other to the self.
Kincaid continues to say that “no place could ever really be England,
and nobody who did not look exactly like them would ever be English.”
This is reflected in Crusoe’s own description of Friday:
“[H]e
had all the sweetness and softness of a European in his countenance… His hair
was long and black, not curled like wool… The color of his skin was not quite
black, but very tawny; and yet not an ugly, yellow, nauseous tawny, as the
Brazilians and Virginians, and other natives of America are, but of a bright
kind of a dun [dull
brown] olive-color, that had
in it something very agreeable...
His face was round and plump; his
nose small, not flat, like the negroes; a very good mouth, thin lips, and
his fine teeth well set, and as white as ivory” (Defoe, 14.16).
Friday is presented to the reader as better than some, but
not European enough to be equal to Crusoe.
Because there is so little dialogue in the novel, Friday’s actual feelings are
rarely given in his own voice.
As Crusoe is the first person
narrator, he tells the reader how he perceives Friday to feel paternalistic
towards him: “for never
man had a more faithful, loving, sincere servant than Friday was to me: without
passions, sullenness, or designs, perfectly obliged and engaged; his very
affections were tied to me, like those of a child to a father” (Defoe, 14.22).
There are a few points in the story where Friday is given a voice;
however, the first words Friday speaks in the novel are only to set up how
Crusoe plans to make his escape. Perhaps the most interesting scene of dialogue
between Crusoe and Friday is during Friday’s religious education.
Because Friday was viewed as a savage, Crusoe took it upon himself “to
lay a foundation of religious knowledge in his mind” (Defoe, 15.11).
Imparting religion upon the “savage” is a widely upheld tradition in
colonization. It calls to mind a
poem by Phillis Wheatley entitled “On Being Brought from Africa to America:”
‘Twas mercy brought me
from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul
to understand
That there’s a God, that
there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither
sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race
with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a
diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black
as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join
th’ angelic train.
As a
common theme in colonial and post-colonial literature, religion is used to make
the uncivilized, civil. The
colonized must conform in order to be “saved” from their hedonistic ways; they
must denounce their false idols and worship the one true God. The other must be
turned into the self. Kincaid argues
that in doing this, the English “made orphans:
[with] no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy
ground…For isn’t it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this
crime is the language of the criminal” (Kincaid, 94).
This sentiment is again echoed in Kincaid’s Lucy.
Although
worlds apart in time and place, it is amazing how well
Robinson Crusoe and
Lucy correspond when read together.
By drawing from her own transmigrational history, Kincaid presents a
completely different aspect of colonization in Lucy.
Whereas Crusoe’s perspective was that of the colonizer, Lucy has left her
colonized island and come to America.
It is incredibly interesting to see how well Friday’s and Lucy’s dialogue
about Christianity coalesce. Both
characters ask such simple questions, and neither ever receives an actual
answer. Lucy’s mother shakes her
head, and at first Crusoe pretends he did not even hear Friday, yet both are
expected to overlook their questions and blindly believe in God.
According to Crusoe, Friday is able to let this slide and is “now a good
Christian” (Defoe, 15.25). Lucy
cannot do this, and equates God’s “dominion” over the world to that of the
people of her homeland being “minions” as they were “a dominion of someplace
else” (Kincaid, 37).
Lucy, as
a very angry teenager, sees the world for what it is; she sees “the
disappointment of reality” (Kincaid, 4).
She felt the need to move away from the tradition of home, and much like
the modernity in Crusoe, searches for a new life elsewhere.
Lucy believed “that with my one swift act—leaving home and coming to this
new place—I could leave behind me, as if it were an old garment never to be worn
again, my sad thoughts, my sad feelings, and my discontent with life in general
as it presented itself to me” (Kincaid, 7).
However, as the self-other relationship presents itself throughout the
novel the reader sees that Lucy can only process her feelings of other people by
relating them to her past. This is
an echo of turning the other into the self, yet it is less physical than in
Crusoe, and is more apparent in Lucy’s inner dialogue.
Within her inner dialogue, Lucy is in a constant battle of trying to
erase her past, yet incapable of thinking about anything else.
Lucy is
unable to react to situations without reliving a story from her homeland, yet
her inner dialogue is constantly varied than her outward dialogue.
Coming from a place dripping with tradition, mostly passed down from the
colonizers, Lucy wonders if she can put enough “miles” and “events” between her
and her home, “would [she] not be free to take everything just as it came and
not see hundreds of years in every gesture, every word spoken, every face?”
(Kincaid, 31). The answer is
simple, she cannot. Every person
Lucy encounters is mirrored in one way or another to someone from Lucy’s home.
Kincaid brilliantly blurs the lines of the
self-other relationship throughout the novel.
This is most prevalent with her
relationship to Mariah, as she sees her as a more modern version of her mother:
“The times that I loved Mariah it was because she reminded me of
my mother. The times that I did not love Mariah it was because she reminded me
of my mother” (Kincaid, 58). It is
in her modern ways that Mariah is very different from Lucy’s mother; she does
not hold her mother’s traditional views of woman’s place in the world and
encourages her to read books of great women.
Mariah gets a divorce, where Lucy’s mother upholds tradition and stays
married to a man who allows his mistresses to try to kill her and her children.
Mariah also allows Lucy to be friends with whomever she pleases, unlike
her mother. Yet Mariah was not her
mother, Lucy is in fact their “visitor” who was “just passing through, just
saying one long Hallo!, and soon would be saying a quick Goodbye” (Kincaid, 13).
Mariah was Lucy’s other, no matter how many times she associated her with
her mother, they were different; Mariah was her employer.
However, through her relationship with Mariah Lucy is able to start
understanding herself. By turning
Mariah into her mother, the other into the self, Lucy is able to gain the mother
daughter relationship she did not know she always longed for; adding a touch of
sentiment into the novel full of realism.
The novel is the defining genre of modernity
because it can make the world anything it wants to through its power to reveal
or create. By mirroring the actual
world, the novel can allow the reader to see the world through a different lens;
the world can be as magical, horrifying, depressing, or joyful as the author
makes it through narrative and dialogue.
Novels have the ability to transport people to different times and
places, which is why they are so important for colonial and post-colonial
literature. Through
Robinson Crusoe,
A Small Place, and
Lucy we have seen different
perspectives of the world, with differing opinions on why the colonizers do what
they do, and differing views on how the colonized react.
You cannot get that through a history lesson, you can only feel the
journey through a novel.
Research Proposal
After reading several research proposals I have chosen to do
the research posts. I was leaning
towards this option but was undecided until I came upon
Sarah DeLaRosa’s proposal that very accurately
stated: “doing two smaller papers instead of a larger research project would
work better for my life right now—at home with my baby it is easier for me to
work in short spurts!” I could not
agree with her more. I believe this
choice will definitely make the assignment less daunting as I will be able break
it up into two parts.
For my first post, I would like to start with a subject close
to my heart by examining the effect The Trail of Tears had on the following
generations of American Indians. I
would like to start with the text The Cherokee Removal:
A Brief History with Documents, and then possibly find other avenues to
pursue from there.
For my second
post I would like to examine the lingering effects of slavery in the United
States. I have not completely
decided on which approach to take with this subject, but I am leaning towards
mirroring the two posts to cover the same material within the different
cultures.
