Friday, 1 April 2016
Tuesday, 29 March 2016
Explain Blood Diamond and Lagaan Movies are related to postcolonialism
Course M.A.
sem 02
Roll no. 21
Paper 08:
(Cultural Studies)
Batch:
2015-17)
Topic:
Explain Blood Diamond and Lagaan Movies are related to postcolonialism
Submitted
to: Department of English M.K.B.U. University, Bhavnagar.
Introduction
Post-colonialism is a period of time after
colonialism, and post-colonial literature is typically characterized by its
opposition to the colonial postcolonial literature often focuses on race
relations and the effects of racism.
Postcolonial studies is concerned, as the chapter on
theories explores, the oppression of the non-European races by European ones,
Cultural studies in a globalized age also needs to be conscious of the racial
zed nature of globalized/globalizing culture. That is the theme of race and
unequal relations has to be worked into any analysis of global cultures. For
instance, we need to ask how Hollywood films circulate globally. Does the fact
that audiences in Asia or Africa will be viewing these films influence the film
maker? How does a Hollywood film appear to poorer nations in these areas of the
world? Think of films like Romancing the Stone, Indian Jones and Blood Diamond
which explore other cultures how are these conceived by Americans and received
by other parts of the world?
Let’s discuss Hollywood film Blood Diamond related to
postcolonialism.
Blood Diamond
Director: Edward Zwick
Produced by: Marshall Herskovitz
Written by: Charles Leavitt
Blood Diamond is a 2006 American- German
political war thriller film co produced and directed by Edward Zwick. The title
refers to blood diamonds, which are diamonds mined in war Zones and sold to
finance conflicts, and thereby profit warlords and diamond companies across the
world.
This film is powerful film, and the best
picture. It combines action, drama and romance with a heart wrenching look at
violence in Africa. The story is captivating and builds to an emotional ending.
There is a lot of violence and “Blood Diamond” is certainly not for children.
This film instead to paint a realistic picture of the horrors of civil war.
Blood Diamond a thriller that promises and delivers in great style. This story
centres around two men –one black, one white.
Set during the Sierra Leone Civil war in
1996-2001, the film depicts a country torn apart by the struggle between
government loyalists and insurgent forces. It also portrays many of the
atrocities of that war, including the rebel’s amputation of people’s hands to
discourage them from voting in upcoming elections.
The film’s ending, in which a conference is
held concerning blood diamonds, refers to a historic meeting that took place in
Kimberley, South Africa in 2000. The
film received mixed but generally favourable reviews, with praise directed
mainly to the performances of Di Caprio and Hounsou; they were nominated for
the Academy Award for Best Actor and Best supporting Actor, respectively.
Simon During,
noted cultural theorist, outlines a set of reasons for connecting Post
colonialism with globalization studies (2000).
1)
All culture now is linked with the
supply of money.
2)
All cultures now have transnational
subsidiaries, opponents or collaborations.
3)
Cultures are no more territorial
and hence do not cohere or fuse into wholes or ‘traditions’.
Lagaan
Director: Ashutosh
Gowariker
Produced by: Amir
Khan and Mansoor Khan
Written by: K. P.
Saxena
Release dates: 15
June 2001.
Lagaan means “tax” – the tax paid by Indian subjects
to their British overloads; and the film Lagaan, set during the Victorian era,
is about a tax revolt by overburdened villagers. The tax revolt crisis leads to
a cricket match challenge between the villagers, who have never played the game
before- led by Amir Khan, in the role that propelled him to stardom- and the
British. It’s a feel- good movie on a grand scale about national pride made by
the same director as Jodha Akbar, Ashutosh Gowariker, but earlier in his
career. It’s great to watch post-colonial people talking pride in their culture
and history, even if it means playing up stereo types and formulaic plot lines.
Amir Khan is awesome.
An analysis of the use of cricket metaphor in
Ashutosh’s film indicates how cricket, the once proud cultural form of colonial
Britain, is subverted in such a way that it becomes a tool for decolonization. According
to Appadural, “decolonization is a dialogue with the colonial past, and not a
simple dismantling of the colonial habits and modes of life”. This treatment of
cricket, which is more of an appropriation of a reality that is fundamentally
colonial in character than of a rejection of the reality, provides important
insights into the tension between colonialism and post colonialism his appropriation
problematizes the conception of a dichotomous relationship between colonialism
and post colonialism and introduce a sense of historical continuity to the
broader picture of which the phases of colonialism and post colonialism are
part. It introduces a perspective that recognizes certain possibilities for
post colonialism in colonialism and an element of colonialism in post
colonialism.
Lagaan is a massive film and it has a lot of relevance
to my literary studies, so I have an inclination to talk of it like a work of
literature within the realm of British colonialism- Indian nationalism and
postcolonial discourse. Lagaan’s engagement in themes of nationalism,
colonialism and reverse colonialism came out than was healthy. Aamir himself
says, is always entertainment at its heart. Lagaan is an intellectual interest
in colonial British India and subsequently postcolonialism. Lagaan is, perhaps
above all other things, a story of Indian nationalism in rejection of British
colonial control. In order to save their village, which is being taxed to the
point of starvation, a group of men band together to fight against the odds and
play a game they don’t understand against their English overlords. It isn’t
necessarily nationalism in the strictest sense because it is limited mostly to
one village with some other characters, like the Sikh Deva, joining from
elsewhere- but I consider it a representative microcosm at the very least as
Indians come together across class boundaries in the united defence of their
land.
If you want to understand cricket- and even more, if
you want to understand some of the attachment of Indians to cricket- Lagaan is
a good place to start. Talking about cricket is also a good place to start with
Lagaan. Coming into the film with knowledge of cricket isn’t necessary but if
you don’t like cricket, you may want to beware. There is much more to the film
than cricket- in fact, cricket is just the vehicle of the film’s greater
colonial themes.
Lagaan also points to the dichotomy of cricket with
reference to colonialism. It is both a rejection of and a lingering attachment
to the British Raj. It offers both the chance to beat the colonizer at his own
game and the chance to join the colonizer’s game, playing by his rules. This is
what I consider one of the most fascinating lingering effects of colonialism on
India: the fervent, fanatical, almost religious attachment that Indians have to
a game given to them by colonialism.
Lagaan
perhaps seeks to point out a reason for this fanatical attachment that seems to
defy logic. It began as a way to best the colonial. The men become so familiar
and obsessed with the game in their intense desire to beat the British. The
film also contains several Indian characters who at first play along with the
British colonials for various reasons, most of whom are not faulted for their
association with the British. All, however, ultimately find that their
allegiance is to their countrymen, and the expression of their shifted
loyalties all comes out within the heat of the cricket match. Three such
characters fill this “wavering Indian” role: Lakha, who spies on the Indian
team for the British because of his personal hatred for Bhuvan; Ram Singh, who acts as an aide and
translator until he is struck at the match by Russell; and the provincial Raja,
who throughout occupies a precarious position that straddles the two worlds. If
themes of colonialism pervade and consume even the sports match in Lagaan, the
film’s love story is also able to evade the trappings of reverse colonial
discourse. The religious story is added perhaps as an attempt to distance the
Bhuvan Elizabeth relationship from its actual basis in racialized revererse-
colonial politics. It is an attempt to make sense of a relationship that is
about colonialism without using colonialism; in other words, it’s trying to
disguise the fact that it is about race and colonialism by using religion as an
alternate framework.
Lagaan creates a real character facing pressure from
overhead to collect more taxes and increase a grip on the peasants- a pressure
he in turn takes out on those beneath him. Russell also has a real family in
Elizabeth, a sister who runs off to teach his enemies how to beat him in the
cricket match that his career rides on. Irony for Russell and his singleminded
colonialism comes at the film’s end, when he is shipped off to central Africa.
There, of course, Russell will continue to participate in colonialism, but
among peoples even darker-skinned and more violent than the Indians.
1) Hindi films being financed by non-resident Indians.
2) Hindi films and
their popularity in other countries where both non-resident Indians and others
watch them.
3) The stage shows
performed by Hindi film stars abroad, extending Bollywood culture in other
ways.
Conclusion
The Lagaan film is set in the Victorian
period of India’s colonial British Raj. Blood Diamond film is rarity these days
that we see films that are set in Africa, which show the poverty, dictatorship,
conscription, war and pain of a nation. Thus, we can say that
Lagaan and Blood Diamond these two movies are related to postcolonialism and
cultural studies
.
.
Important Concept in Gerard Genette’s Narratology
Course M.A. Sem 02
Roll no. 21
Paper no. 07 (Literary Theory &Criticism)
Batch- 2015-17
Topic: Important Concept in
Gerard Genette’s Narratology
Submitted to: Department of English
Gerard
Genette - Important Concepts in Genette's Narratology
Contents
1 Life
2 Works
3 Important
concept of Genette’s Narratology
3.1
Order
3.2
Frequency
3.3
Duration
3.4
Voice
3.5 Mood
Life
Genette was born in Paris, where he studied at the Lycee
Lakanal and the Ecole
Normale Superieure.After leaving the French communist party, Genette was a member of Socialisms ou Barbarie during 1957-8.
He received his professorship in French literature at the Sorbonne in 1967.
In 1970 he, Helene Cixous and Tzvetan Todorov founded the journal poeticque and he edited a series of the same name for Editions du seuil.
Among other positions, Genette was research director at the Ecole des hautes etudec en sciences socials and a visiting professor at Yale University.
Work
Gérard Genette's work (1972 and 1983) fits into the German and Anglo-Saxon academic tradition, and is intended to serve as both a culmination and a renewal of this school of narratological criticism. We should point out that internal analysis, like any semiotic analysis, exhibits two characteristics. Firstly, it is concerned with narratives as independent linguistic objects, detached from their context of production and reception. Secondly, it aims to reveal an underlying structure that can be identified in many different narratives.
Genette is largely responsible for the reintroduction of a rhetorical vocabulary into literary criticism, for example such terms as trop and metonymy. Additionally his work on narrative, best known in English through the selection Narrative Discourse: an Essay in Method, has been of importance. His major work is the multi-part Figures series, of which Narrative Discourse is a section. His trilogy on Textual transcendence, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second degree (1982), and Para texts. Thresholds of interpretation (1997).
Important concepts in Genette's Narratology
This outline of Genette's Narratology is derived from Narrative Discourse: an Essay in Method. This book forms part of his multi-volume work Figures I-III. The examples used in it are mainly drawn from Proust's epic In search of lost time. One criticism which had been used against previous forms of Narratology was that they could deal only with simple stories, such as Vladimir Propp’s work in Morphology of the folk tale. If Narratology could cope with Proust, this could no longer be said.
Below are the five main concepts used by Genette in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. They are primarily used to look at the syntax of narratives, rather than to perform an interpretation of them.
Order
Say a story is narrated as follows: the clues of a murder
are discovered by a detective (event A); the circumstances of the murder are
finally revealed (event B); and lastly the murderer is caught (event C).Add corresponding numbers to the lettered events that represent their order chronologically: 1, 2, and 3.
If these events were described chronologically, they would run A1, B2, and C3. Arranged in the text, however, they run B1 (discovery), A2 (flashback), C3 (resolution).
This accounts for the 'obvious' effects the
reader will recognise, such as flashback. It also deals with the structure of
narratives on a more systematic basis, accounting for flash-forward,
simultaneity, as well as possible, if rarely used effects. These
disarrangements on the level of order are termed 'anachrony'.
Order is the relation between the sequencing of events in
the story and their arrangement in the narrative. A narrator may choose to
present the events in the order they occurred, that is, chronologically, or he
can recount them out of order. For example, detective novels often begin with a
murder that has to be solved. The events preceding the crime, along with the
facts leading to the killer, are presented afterwards. The order in which the
events actually occurred does not match the order in which they are presented
in the narrative. This mixing of temporal order yields a more gripping, complex
plot.The term Genette uses to designate non-chronological order is anachrony. There are two types of anachrony:
1. Analepsis: The narrator recounts after the fact an event that took place earlier than the present point in the main story.
Example (fictitious): I woke up in a good mood this morning. In my mind were memories of my childhood, with Mum singing every morning, her voice ringing out.
2. Prolepsis: The narrator anticipates events that will occur after the main story ends.
Example (fictitious): How will my adventure in Europe affect me? I will never be able to look at my family and friends in the same way; surely I will become contentious and distant.
There are two factors that can enter into analepsis and prolepsis: reach and extent. "An anachrony can reach into the past or the future, either more or less far from the "present" moment (that is, from the moment in the story when the narrative was interrupted to make room for the anachrony): this temporal distance we will name the anachrony's reach. The anachrony itself can also cover duration of story that is more or less long: we will call this its extent"
Anachronies can have several functions in a narrative. While analepses often take on an explanatory role, developing a character's psychology by relating events from his past, prolepses can arouse the reader's curiosity by partially revealing facts that will surface later.
Frequency
The separation between an event and its narration allows
several possibilities.- An event can occur once and be narrated once (singular).
- 'Today I went to the shop.'
- An event can occur n times and be narrated once (iterative).
- 'I used to go to the shop.'
- An event can occur once and be narrated n times (repetitive).
- 'Today I went to the shop' + 'Today he went to the shop' etc.
- An event can occur n times and be narrated n times (multiple).
- 'I used to go to the shop' + 'He used to go to the shop' + 'I went to the shop yesterday' etc.
Duration
The separation between an event and its narration means
that there is discourse time and narrative time. These are the two main elements of duration.- "Five years passed", has a lengthy narrative time, five years, but a short discourse time (it only took a second to read).
- James Joyce's novel Ulysses has a relatively short narrative time, twenty-four hours. Not many people, however, could read Ulysses in twenty-four hours. Thus it is safe to say it has a lengthy discourse time.
Voice
Voice is concerned with who narrates, and from where. This
can be split four ways.- Where the narration is from
- Intra-diegetic: inside the text. e.g. Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White
- Extra-diegetic: outside the text. e.g. Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles
- Is the narrator a character in the story?
- Hetero-diegetic: the narrator is not a character in the story. e.g. Homer's The Odyssey
- Homo-diegetic: the narrator is a character in the story. e.g. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
A distinction should be made between narrative voice and narrative perspective; the latter is the point of view adopted by the narrator, which Genette calls focalization. "So by focalization I certainly mean a restriction of 'field' – actually, that is, a selection of narrative information with respect to what was traditionally called omniscience". These are matters of perception: the one who perceives is not necessarily the one who tells, and vice versa.
Mood
Genette said narrative mode is dependent on the 'distance'
and 'perspective' of the narrator, and like music, narrative mode has
predominant patterns. It is related to voice.Distance of the narrator changes with narrated speech, transposed speech and reported speech.
Perspective of the narrator is called focalization. Narratives can be non-focalized, internally focalized or externally focalized.
In order to understand narratology's contribution to semiotics, it is important to grasp the distinction between its three fundamental entities: story, narrative and narration. The story generally corresponds to a series of events and actions that are told by someone (the narrator), and represented in some final form, producing a narrative. As a field of study, Narratology looks at the internal mechanisms of narrative, the form taken by a narrated story.
In the field of narrative discourse, we
endeavour to identify the common, near-universal principles of text
composition. Thus, we attempt to discern what relations are possible between the
elements of the narrative/story/narration triad. These relations operate within
four analytical categories: mood, the narrative instance, level and time.
NARRATIVE MOOD
When a text is written, technical choices must be made in
view of producing a particular result in the story's verbal representation. In
this way, the narrative employs distancing and other effects to create a
particular narrative mood that governs "the regulation of narrative
information" provided to the reader. According to Genette, all narrative
is necessarily diegesis (telling), in that it can attain no more than
an illusion of mimesis (showing) by making the story real and alive. For Genette, then, a narrative cannot in fact imitate reality, no matter how realistic; it is intended to be a fictional act of language arising from a narrative instance. "Narrative does not 'represent' a (real or fictive) story, it recounts it – that is, it signifies it by means of language. There is no place for imitation in narrative".
Thus, in place of the two main traditional narrative moods, diegesis and mimesis, Genette contends that there are simply varying degrees of diegesis, with the narrator either more involved or less involved in the narrative, and leaving less room or more room for the narrative act. However, Genette insists that in no case is the narrator completely absent.
Conclusion
Genette has developed a theory of Narratological poetics that may be used to address the entire inventory of narrative processes in use. According to Genette, every text discloses traces of narration, which can be studied in order to understand exactly how the narrative is organized. The approach advocated here clearly addresses a level that lies below the threshold of interpretation, and as such, it constitutes a solid foundation, complementing other research being done in the social sciences, e.g., in sociology, literary history, ethnology and psychoanalysis.
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Salient features of Victorian age and its poets too
Course- M.A. Sem- 2
Roll no. 21
Paper no.0 6 (((Victorian Age)
Batch- 2015-17
Topic:-Salient features of Victorian
age and its poets too
Submitted to- Department of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar
University
The
Victorian Age
The Victorian age is believed to be
from 1850-1900 when Victoria became Queen in 1837; English literature seemed to
have entered upon a period of lean years, in marked contrast with the poetic fruitfulness
of the romantic age. Victorian age is regarded as a very important period of
English Literature. In this age all forms of literature developed like poetry,
novel, essay etc. Many writers gave their unique contribution in making this
age important. In this age, the long struggle of
the Anglo- Saxons for personal liberty was settled and democracy was
established.
Salient
Features
1) An era of peace (the oxford
movement)
2) Conflict between science and
religion
3) Material Development
4) Intellectual Development
5) Morality
6) The Revolt
7) The new Education
8) International Influences
9) The Achievement of the age
The
Victorian age is especially marked because of its rapid progress in all the
arts and sciences and in mechanical inventions like spinning looms to
steamboats and from matches to electric lights. All these material things as
well as the growth of education have their influence upon the life of a people,
and it is inevitable that they should react upon its prose and poetry; though
as yet we are too much absorbed in our sciences and mechanics to determine
accurately their influence upon literature. This age can be called as the Age
of Compromise. In other words, we can say, there was death of
agriculture. When everyone went to city, it became overpopulated. As people
were working in industries, they got money and food but getting shelter was
their main problem. There was dark and gloomy atmosphere everywhere. Majority
of people were poor. The dominant people were money minded and so humans were
used as machines. Workhouses were getting full as people were in search of job
to earn money.
Workhouses
looked like prisons. They were given a fixed amount of meal. Women were kept
away from men and their husbands too. Children too were kept away from adults. The people in the workhouses had to work
for twelve hours whether it is a child or an adult. They had the permission to
bath once in a week. Ill people were kept in sick wards. A number orphanages
and prostitutes increased as woman many a times didn’t get work anywhere. She had to involve in prostitution and then
chances of getting pregnant increased.
If this
happened, the lady had to deliver the child and then left that child to
orphanages. There was severe socio-economic depression people were threatened
by the name of God. People had to work in harsh conditions as there was not
enough. Electricity each job was hard and everyone hard to suffer a
lot.
Achievements
The Oxford movement
This
movement took place in the nineteenth century. It was an outcome of a
long controversy and ideological conflicts amongst different Christian sects
and Churches and therefore it may be called a religious movement. Its name was
Oxford movement as it was cantered at the University of Oxford that sought a
renewal of Catholic or Roman Catholic, thought and practice within the Church
of England in opposition to the Protestant tendencies of the church. This
movement is also called Tractarianism Movement as it was carried throughout the
tracts and pamphlets. The origin of the Oxford movement can be traced to the
opposition of the scientific discoveries against age old religious beliefs and
faiths. The aim of the movement was to rehabilitate the dignity of the church,
to defend the church against the interference of the state, to fight against
rationalism.
MAJOR WRITERS OF THE AGE
Alfred Tennyson (1809-92)
Throughout
the entire Victorian period Tennyson stood at the summit of poetry in England.
Tennyson’s life is a remarkable one in this respect, that from beginning to end
he seems to have been dominated by a single impulse, the impulse of poetry.
His
work
The
princess,
Dora,
The
Memoriam,
Crossing the bar
Plays
Queen
Mary (1875)
Harold
(1876)
The
falcon (1879) is a comedy based on a story from Boccaccio.
The cup (1881) is based on a story from
Plutarch.
The
foresters (1892), dealing with the familiar Robin Hood them was produced in
America
Robert Browning (07 May 1812-12 December
1889)
He was
an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially
dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. Of all the
poets in our literature, no other is so completely, so consciously, so
magnificently a teacher of men. He feels his mission of faith and courage in a
world of doubt and timidity. He is better known today for his
shorter poems such as The Pied Piper of Hamelin and How They Brought the Good News
from Ghent to Aix. By Twelve, Browning had written a book of poetry
which he later destroyed when no publisher could be found. He was a great
admirer of the Romantic poets, especially Shelley.
His work
Poems
Paracelsus,
Pauline,
Men &women,
The ring
and the book,
The ring
and the book the poem is composed of twelve books and four volumes from
November 1868 through to February 1869.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (06 March 1806-29 June 1861)
Among
the minor poets of the past century Elizabeth Barrett occupies perhaps the
highest place in popular favour. She was one of the most prominent English
poets of the Victorian era. Her poetry was widely popular in both Britain and
the United States during her lifetime. Her first adult collection, The Seraphim and
Other Poems was published in 1838. She wrote prolifically between
1841-1844 producing poetry. Elizabeth’s volume Poems (1844) brought her great
success. During this time, she met and corresponded with the writer Robert
Browning, who admired her work. She is remembered for poems like How Do I Love Thee
(Sonnet 43, 1845) and Aurora Leigh (1856). She wrote her own Homeric Epic the Battle of
Marathon: A Poem. Her first collection of poems, An Essay on Mind, with
other poems, was published in 1826 and reflected her passion for Byron and
Greek politics.
Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822-15 April 1888)
In the
world of literature Arnold has occupied for many years an authoritative
position as critic and teacher, similar to that held by Ruskin in the world of
art. He was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of
schools. Arnold published his second volume of poems in 1852, Empedocles on
Etna, and other poems. In 1853, he published poems: A New Edition,
a selection from two earlier volumes famously excluding Empedocles on Etna, but
adding new poems, Sohrab and Rustum and The Scholar Gipsy. In 1854, Poems: Second
Series appeared; also a selection, it is included the new poem, Balder Dead. In 1867, Dover Beach depicted a nightmarish world from which the old
religious verities have receded. In his poetry, he derived not only the subject
matter of his narrative poems from various traditional or literary sources but
even much of the romantic melancholy of his earlier poems Senancour’s
Obermann. Arnold, as shown it his essay on the study of poetry regarded poetry
as “a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such criticism by the
laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty”.
<Dante
Gabriel Rossetti (12 May 1828- 09 April 1882)
He was an English poet,
illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood
in 1848, with William Holman Hunt and john Everett Millais, and was later to be
the main inspiration for a second generation of artists an writers influenced
by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne- Jones. His early
poetry was influenced by John Keats. His later poetry was characterised by
the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet
sequence The
House of Life. He frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures,
spanning from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Astarte Syriaca (1877), while
also creating art to illustrate poems such as Goblin Market by the celebrated
poet Christina Rossetti, his sister. He worked on English translations of
Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova.
Charles Dickens (1812-70)
Charles Dickens was the most influential novelist
of this age. More ever he was a social reformer. Dickens is one of our greatest
artists. A glance through even this unsatisfactory biography gives us certain
illuminating suggestions in regard to all of Dicken’s work. First he was child,
poor and lonely, longing for love and society, second he was clerk in a
lawyer’s office and in the court, third he was reporter and afterwards as
manager of various newspaper and fourth, he was actor, always an actor in
spirit.
His work
‘The pickwick papers’
‘Oliver Twist’
‘A tale of two cities’
‘David Copperfield’
His popularity was exploited in journalism for he
edited ‘the
Daily News’. In 1858 Dickens commenced his famous
series of ‘Public reading’. They were also given in America with the greatest
success.
conclusion
This age was also a period of great scientific discovers and progress. As a conclusion we can say that The Victorian
Age represents the precursor of the modern era. It was, indeed a period of
great achievements in all the domains, contributing essentially to the
development of the British society.
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Evaluate Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is study of Repression and Hysteria
Name: Joshi
Tejasvi A
Course:
M.A. Sem: 02
Roll no. 21
Paper: 05
(Romantic age)
Batch:
2015-17
Topic:
Evaluate Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is study of Repression and Hysteria
Submitted
to: Department of English.
M.K.B.U. University
Bhavnagar.
Introduction
Marry Shelly written Frankenstein in1818.
‘Frankenstein’ the title of this novel is based on the central character of the
novel. The main themes of this novel are love, loneliness, hunger for the
Knowledge, science and nature and ‘Repression’ and Hysteria’ there are some
main themes of the novel. Let’s discuss in detail about Repression and Hysteria.
Repression
Oxford Dictionary defines that the meaning
of Repression is ‘Tending to keep your feelings or desires hidden.’
An eighteenth-century doctor
increasing Shelley’s fictional portrayal of grief in Frankenstein not only
prefigures Godwin's response to an emotional crisis, but it replicates the
sensibility of Reason and emotional restraint. Shelley creates the same
terrible struggle for moderation between a learned father who shares Godwin's
"philosophy" of logic and a passionate son struggling for
self-control. In her representation, Alphonse lectures Victor on "the
folly of giving way to immoderate grief" as the guilt-ridden protagonist
mourns the deaths of William and Justine. Shelley's character can avoid further
censure only by adopting a strategy to avoid his father "until I had
recovered myself so far as to be enabled to conceal those feelings that
overpowered me. She illustrates that the
son has learned the father's lesson by having him uncritically repeat
Alphonse's homily that "a human being in perfection ought always to
preserve a cam and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or transitory
desire to disturb his tranquillity"
Given the coincidence between the scathing condolence Shelley received
from her father and her fictional representations of grief, it is
understandable that Anne Mellor would find Victor Frankenstein's statement of
emotional control to be an "authorial credo and moral touchstone”.
However, critics who credit the thoroughness of the character's emotional
repression overlook the problems raised by Shelley's model of artificial
tranquillity. Shelley's novel complicates the question of emotional control by
revealing its problematic implication with gender. According to Godwin's model,
as we have seen, expression of grief characterizes only the common
"mob" of women; therefore, the Promethean
protagonist of Frankenstein resists "unmanly"
emotions. While the monster illustrates the expression of Victor's unspeakable
masculine desires, Shelley uses Victor's body to show the dangers of
unspeakable feminine ones. She observes that because a social and psychological
system categorizes strong emotion as feminine and common, the men who
experience such emotion risk chaos: a redefinition of gender and class status.
In examining Shelley's depiction of Victor's repression of the feminine, we
must take into account the social and political consequences w Shelley's attention to repression in Victor's code of masculinity
is significant because his version of the "manly" is maintained only
by constant vigilance. Like William Godwin, Victor accepts an ideology of
masculine control, feminine nurturing, and the sanctity of home at the expense
of communication with family members. Yet after the creation of the monster and
the crisis it precipitates, Victor no longer can meet these rigid demands.
Victor has proven his feminine capacity for procreation and then denied that
aspect of him by abandoning his monster/child. The rejection of his
disappointing, but powerful offspring unleashes a truth about the denial of
human feeling that sheer masculine repression can no longer control. Shelley
makes its inadequacy clear in Victor's aborted attempt to share his emotional
problems with Alphonse. Tortured by the guilt of irresponsibly engendering a
life that has destroyed his family, Victor claims, as he has before, to have
murdered William, Justine, and Henry. Although he would have "given the
whole world to have confided the fatal secret," Victor always had refused
to explain his self-accusations for fear of being labelled insane. His father,
who previously had ignored these outbursts, now responds in the manner Victor
has predicted: "are you mad? My dear son, I entreat you never to make such
an assertion again." Victor recalls that his statements convinced my
father that my ideas were deranged, and he instantly changed the subject of our
conversation, and to alter the course of my thoughts. He wished as much as
possible to obliterate the memory of the scenes that had taken place in
Ireland, and never alluded to them, or suffered me to speak of my
misfortunes hitch occur when control gives way to an
emotional transgression.
Hysteria
Oxford Dictionary defines the meaning of
Hysteria is ‘extreme’ or ‘uncontrollable emotion’.
Eighteenth-century
doctors increasingly defined hysteria as a "nervous disorder"
associated with insanity; therefore, an examination of this social phenomenon
must consider the terms in which hysteria and the "English Malady"
are discussed during the reign of George III -- Percy Shelley's "old, mad,
blind, despised, and dying king."
Hysteria's
etymological and historical associations with the feminine are well known, and
its manifestations in Victorian women have been the object of much study.
Hysteria in late eighteenth-century England has not received as much critical
attention, but the ailment was so prevalent in 1784
that Thomas Sydenham routinely suspected it when diagnoses of female
patients proved difficult.
Shelley illustrates this redefinition most
clearly in several episodes of hysteria that she associates with Victor -- a
character who may be less the phallic aggressor that some have described than a
prototype for Freud's Dora. By attributing hysteria to a male character,
Shelley invites us to look for problems in the cultural orthodoxy of
masculinity, especially as represented in Victor's project. The representation
of a male hysteric in Shelley's text illustrates her belief that, despite a
culture's artificial division of emotions by gender, the male body can, if need
be, speak in a "feminine" voice.
Victor can voice the unspeakable, and then
his body speaks volumes on his wedding night. Here, Shelley brings to a climax
the issues of hysteria and sexuality, just as the monster has promised all
along. She has shown us Victor's perception that a union with his "more
than sister" will prove problematic. Gilbert and Gubar see the
relationship as one of "barely disguised incest," and even Shelley's
Alphonse wonders if Victor "regards her as your sister, without any wish
that she might become your wife". The narrative associates Victor's future
bride with unnatural monstrosity in two forms. In an early dream after creating
the monster, Victor's kiss transforms Elizabeth into Victor's dead mother. He
awakens from this vision of Elizabeth/Caroline to view the monster standing
over his bed. This nightmare scene, George Levine notes, "conflates
remarkably with the actual wedding night murder; in both, the Monster appears
in the moonlight, looking in the first instance upon Victor's body, then upon
Elizabeth's." In addition to the doubling Levine observes, Shelley
connects Elizabeth to the monster in another instance. On their honeymoon trip
to Evian, the
same trip where Victor stumbles over the term "lover," his vision
becomes blurred while "gazing on the beloved face of Elizabeth". Just
as a "mist" obscured Victor's view of the monster and the dead
Clerval, so now "a sudden gush of tears blinded my sight
and. . . I turned away to hide the involuntary emotion." Victor
is concealing "unmanly" emotion, but he also is concealing the face
of the woman whom he has married -- the woman he associates with his
uncontrollable creation and with an incestuous relation. Victor's last words to
Elizabeth, then, are doubly loaded. When she asks "what is it you
fear," his reply that "this night is dreadful, very dreadful,"
addresses both his stated apprehension about the monster and his unstated fear
of consummating their marriage.
Shelley's exploration of her character's
fears of sex and loss of control culminate in the scene of Elizabeth's murder.
His reaction to Elizabeth's murder seems passive, or simply cowardly, only if
insulated from questions about his ambivalence toward marriage, or more
specifically, heterosexual passion. Victor's body shows, in effect, his fear
that desire will kill the woman he has considered only in terms of her purity
and innocence. When Victor hears his wife scream, "the whole truth rushed
into my mind, my arms dropped, the motion of every muscle and fibre was
suspended. . . this state lasted but for an instant; the scream was
repeated, and I rushed into the room". Here, the character faints, just as
he did when viewing Clerval's body. However, Shelley explicitly contrasts his
former paralysis with the active role he takes after Elizabeth's death: "I
rushed toward her, and embraced her with ardour" (emphasis
mine). Significantly, Shelley crafts the novel's only erotic embrace to include
a lifeless body, one that cannot arouse uncontrollable sexual passion and that
will preserve the brother-sister relationship threatened by nuptial union. Her
language suggests that Victor's paralysis in a situation demanding action is
due to both the fear of defiling his bride's virginity and the fear of the
unleashed powers of sexuality. Immediately after Victor hears screams, Shelley
interrupts the narrative to have Victor recall Elizabeth as "the best
hope, and the purest creature of the earth."
Victor's
hysteria results from his emotional constraints, in addition to the ethical
questions raised by his creation of the monster. Not only must he restrain his
grief for lost family members, but he also must cope with his feelings of guilt
and responsibility for their deaths. Perhaps most difficult, though, is the
repression of the self-doubt he feels about the moral questions the monster
raises. His final speech, in which he reports that "I have not been
occupied in examining my past conduct; nor do I find it blameable," protests
his innocence rather too much to indicate a guilt-free conscience. Victor has
brought a creature into the world and abandoned it; a review of his actions,
for all his rationalizing, seems to find him culpable.
Shelley shows that Victor's failure is not so much that he made a
monster, but that he failed to tell anyone about it. Because his scientific
discoveries are covert and his personal fears are hidden, Victor faces his
deepest fears in rational, manly privacy. Shelley indicates that the division of
gender roles is dangerous not just because of its instability, but because it
produces this isolation. To Freud's question "What do women want?"
the hysteric would answer "everything": including, but not limited
to, unconditional love, sexual gratification, and the support and empathy of
family members. Like Freud, even William Godwin seems to divine that his
daughter's despair articulates an unfulfilled desire.
In her last moments, even Elizabeth seems to
hear the hollowness in her instructions to "be calm, my dear Victor; I
would sacrifice my life to your peace. We surely shall be happy: quiet in our
native country, and not mingling in the world." Victor reports that
Elizabeth weeps at her statement, "distrusting the very solace that she gave;
but at the same time she smiled, that she might chase away the fiend that
lurked in my heart". The fiend lurks in Elizabeth's heart as she
altruistically attends to male discomfort, sacrificing her own desires in order
to shore up men's emotional stability. It lurks in Victor's as he dutifully
refuses to attend to the passionate, immoderate, "feminine" side of
his nature. Mary Shelley's novel illustrates the manner in which a rational
society has relegated even emotions to a Godwinian "proper sphere" in
arbitrarily dividing them by gender; in the process, it has taken away the
words of both men and women. The policy of reasoned control can be breached
through the language of the body, but only imperfectly: this mute message
carries force and integrity, but it ultimately depends on the sensitivity and
skills of the interpreter, and, as we have seen, none of Shelley's characters
can read Victor's somatic cries of distress. Shelley's characters must
articulate their most essential needs with only the vocabulary of their bodies.
In the silence that results, many monsters will be formed.
Conclusion
Throughout the study of this whole novel we
can say that “repression” and “hysteria” played vital role in this novel
“Frankenstein”.
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