Mahirpari Goswami

There’s a power imbalance between the two sexes in the 18th century and it’s reflected in Pamela and Mr. B’s relationship in the novel. Due to their different social classes in society, Mr. B and Pamela starts out having a completely unfair power imbalance; not only is Mr. B a man, but he is also a very wealthy man of authority and Pamela is a poor subordinate servant. Mr. B encapsulates men’s role in society as patriarchal and authoritarian and Pamela epitomises 18th century notions of femininity with her submissiveness and compliance.

In the novel, Pamela is viewed as the epitome of virtuous and christian femininity with her dedication to chastity, docility and humility. She’s emotionally fragile, hysterical and faints under stressful circumstances. People in the novel regularly praise her for conforming to the ideals of femininity with phrases like “you’re an ornament to your sex” and “called me an exemplar of all my sex”. But Pamela isn’t all passive and compliant, because she does courageously stand up Mr. B’s ill-treatment of her and is therefore quite complex.

Curiously, many of the same gender stereotypes we assign to men and women today also dominated the understanding of masculinity and femininity all the way back in the mid 18th century.

“You are so pretty, that, go where you will, you can never be free from the designs of some of our sex”

Mr. B describes men uncontrollable sexual thirst the same way the male gender is still sometimes stereotyped as sexually aggressive and fundamentally unable to control their urges. “Boys will be boys” kind of talk. Mrs. Jervis says to Pamela that she should “stay out of the way of men” if she doesn’t want to become a victim of rape or sexual harassment. This echoes the way many still blames the victim in sexual assault cases today.

Women are also accused of being vain, gossipy and obsessed with fashion. Pamela herself has a very low opinion of women;

“For well I know, sir, that nothing much excites the envy of my own sex, as seeing a person set above them in appearance, and in dress”

The novel also reveals the sexual double standards that are present today as well as back then. Men are free to call on prostitutes or relieve their urges by having a mistress without too much damage being done to their reputation. But the same cannot be said for women. As Pamela says:

“If he can stoop to like such a poor girl as me, what can it be for? He may, perhaps, think I may be good enough for his harlot; and those things don’t disgrace men, that ruin poor women” (p. 40)

1.2 Religion and morals

Samuel Richardson was a very moralistic and conservative writer. He was very inspired by the religious puritan ideal of innocence and virtue. He denounces the idea of sexual and materialistic “self-indulgence” and thinks it is the root of all evil. Pamela exemplifies the ideal puritan woman; she refuses any sexual relationship with Mr. B.

“I can so contentedly return to my poverty again, and think it less disgrace to be obliged to live upon rye-bread and water, as I used to do, than to be a harlot to the greatest man in the world”

Pamela also declines to receive any pecuniary gifts continually offered by Mr.B and his servants.

“Bread and water I can live upon, Mrs Jervis, with content. Water I shall get any where; there is nourishment in water, Mrs Jervis: and if I can’t get me bread, I will live like a bird in winter upon hips and haws, and at other times upon pig-nuts and potatoes, or turnips, or any thing. So what occasion have I for these things [money]?(p. 87-88)

And despite being delighted at receiving fine clothing and luxury items by the wealthy Mr. B upon his mothers death, Pamela rejects the fine clothing when going to her father’s poor village house in fear of being considered vain and out of place;

“But since I am to be turned away, you know, I cannot wear them at my poor father’s; for I should bring all the little village upon my back: and so I resolve not to have them” (p. 86)

Pamela’s purity and good behaviour is essentially “rewarded” with her being married to a noble man and the story having a happy ending.

Also throughout the entire novel, Samuel Richardson makes it clear that Pamela knows her place in society. She’s born lower-class and she embraces her family’s poverty. She’s by no means ashamed of it or repulsed by poverty like other haughty snobbish 18th century people were.

In the end, this is a moralistic conduct novel (as there were many of in the 18th century). Samuel Richardson is saying; this is how young girls should conduct themselves, if you resolve to be pure, innocent, religious and humble like Pamela, everything will end well for you.

1.3 Class

The marriage between the poor servant Pamela and the wealthy nobleman Mr. B caused quite an uproar in 18th century english society. It was scandalous that a servant should marry her master, someone so above her own class. But a lower-class girl marrying a higher-class man is a plotline found in surprisingly many romance-novels, and there’s a reason for it. In the 18th and 19th centuries, a woman’s social ranking was determined by either her father or husband’s place in the social hierarchy. To quote Mr. B himself:

“the difference is, a man ennobles the woman he takes, be she who she will; and adopts her into his own rank, be it what it will: but a woman, though ever so nobly born, debases herself by a mean marriage, and descends from her own rank, to that of him she stoops to marry” – Mr. B

This is probably linked to the legal doctrine of “coverture” which purports that a woman’s legal existence is ‘suspended’ during marriage and is ‘consolidated’ into that of her husband and the wife loses almost all the privileges she’d have as a single woman (to own property, keep salary, sign contracts etc). It may also be linked to why women has historically assumed her husband’s last name instead of keeping her own.

But the problematic thing about this, is that while the gender difference of ‘man and woman’ in an 18th century relationship is unequal (due to men being considered superior), the class distinction creates even more of a power imbalance. Pamela should not only listen and obey her husband because he’s male, but also because he’s higher-born than her. After their marriage, Pamela willingly continues to address her husband as “master”. Some of Mr. B’s friends even jokes that all wives should call their husband’s ‘master’.

Pamela herself, in the first few pages of the book, acknowledges that the class distinction between her and Mr. B should make their relationship implausible. She was also apprehensive about sharing her fear of Mr. B’s sexual advances with others, as they might consider her vain;

“But I say nothing yet of your cautions, or of my own uneasiness, to Mrs Jervis; not that I mistrust her, but for fear that she should think me presumptuous and vain, and conceited, to have any fears about the matter, from the great distance between such a gentleman and so poor a girl” – Pamela.

But it also seems that Pamela expects a sort of ‘respect’ from her master. Pamela is astonished to discover the motives of Mr. B to be completely antithetical to that of a gentleman. After all, an ideal gentleman would preserve her virtue, not ruin it.

Someone writing an analysis on Pamela on the website ‘Gradesaver’ encapsulates it perfectly, I think:

“If this hedging suggests latent class snobbery on Richardson’s part, however, the novelist does not fail to insist that those who receive privileges under the system bear responsibilities also, and correspondingly those on the lower rungs of the ladder are entitled to claim rights of their superiors. Thus, in the early part of the novel, Pamela emphasizes that Mr. B., in harassing her, violates his duty to protect the social inferiors under his care;” (source: http://www.gradesaver.com/pamela-or-virtue-rewarded/study-guide/themes)

So, Mr. B’s sexual advances towards her shows a lack of respect for her class; he doesn’t consider the reputation she’d lose nor her right to bodily integrity.

“I said, ‘I won’t stay’”
‘You won’t, hussy! Do you know whom you speak to?’
“I lost all fear and all respect, and said “Yes, I do, sir, too well! Well may I forget that I am your servant, when you forget what belongs to a master’”

The quote reveals Mr. B’s sense of entitlement; how dare Pamela refuse his advances and talk back to him when he is her superior. Richardson’s negative portrayal of the immoral, pompous and entitled Mr. B suggests that he might’ve drawn some from the real world of 18th century society. In another scene, Mr. B actually blames Pamela’s cheekiness as the reason he’s been ‘rougher’ with her. In response, another servant insists that Pamela should know her place. This conversation puts the blame on the victim, not the perpetrator.

“Do you hear, Mrs Jervis?” said he, “do you hear hear the pertness of the creature? I had a good deal of this sort before in the summer-house, and yesterday too, which made me rougher with her than perhaps I had otherwise been”
“‘Pamela, don’t be pert to his honour,’ said Mrs Jervis; ‘you should know your distance; you see his honour was only in jest’

Pamela believes in the puritan idea that ‘humility’ is a virtue. These religious ideals also intertwines with her class – as lower-class persons should ideally ‘embrace’ and acknowledge their social class and their place the hierarchy. Pamela does this by discarding her late Lady B’s fine clothing and by continually being “humble” and excusing herself in the presence of ladies and gentlemen. In the same vein, higher-class people should acknowledge their place in society and act accordingly. When Pamela marries, she feels it acceptable to finally wear her late Lady B’s fancy clothes without too much guilt.

The book also describes the condescending and disrespectful attitude upper-class eighteenth century individuals often harboured towards the lower-class – especially the supercilious and downright abusive way employers treated their servants.

“Why, Creature,’ said she, flying into a passion, ‘dost thou think thyself above it? Insolence!’ continued she, ‘this moment, when I bid you, know your duty, and give me a glass of wine; or-‘“

Lady Davers’s mean treatment of servants even stretched as far back as her childhood, which means her sense of superiority must’ve been internalised very early on.

“‘Lady Davers’ added she, ‘when a maiden, was always passionate, but very good when her anger was over. She would make nothing of slapping her maids about, and begging their pardons afterwards, if they took it patiently; otherwise she used to say, The creatures were even with her’”

But to be fair, her brother, Mr. B did speak about her in a disapproving way whilst explaining his sister’s supercilious tendencies.

Mr. B is complex in terms of how he engages with his own class and class differences in 18th century society. On one hand, he looks past class differences when he marries his waiting-maid but is at the same time very aware of his social status and exploits it to seduce and abduct female servants in his household. After all, Pamela isn’t the first girl he has sexually pursued, a former servant of his became pregnant and died in childbirth – which Pamela apparently think she deserved because she forfeited her virtue (actually, throughout the book, Pamela is quite a judgemental person – but I digress). Like aforementioned, Mr. B thinks people of high birth are often spoiled and arrogant in behaviour because of lack of discipline, he himself acts this way “he was very urgent with me to go ashore, or to go the voyage: I could have thrown him overboard in my mind; for being impetuous in my temper, spoiled, you know, my dear, by my mother, and not used to controul, I thought it very strange, that wind or tide, or any thing else, should be preferred me and my money:”

1.4 Marriage Life in the 18th century

Curiously, Mr. B chose a maidservant – a lower-class person – to be his wife, specifically because he knew she would be obedient as opposed to someone of high-birth. A woman of of fortune and privilege, he says, would’ve been raised without being subject to control or discipline, and therefore would’ve been too headstrong and independent to be a decent wife.

“We people of fortune, or such as are born to large expectations of both sexes are generally educated wrong” (…) “We are usually headstrong in our wills, and being unaccustomed to controul from our parents, know not how to bear it” (…) (p.499) “(…) a wife is looked for: birth, and fortune, are the first motives, affection the last (if it be at all consulted): and two people thus educated, thus been headstrong torments to every one who had share in their education, as well as to those to whom their owe their being, are brought together; and what can be expected, but that they should join heartily in matrimony to plague one another?”(…) “Neither of them having ever been subject to controul, or even to a contradiction, the man cannot bear it from one, whose new relation to him, and whose vow of obedience, he thinks, should oblige her to yield her will entirely to his.”

Mr. B does not, like other high-born men, want to marry someone who is “accustomed to have her will in everything”. He abhors the idea of men having to “compromise” with their wives, which is today, I think, conversely thought of as being one the key standards of a happy and balanced marriage.

His wife should “have shewn no reluctance, uneasiness, or doubt, to oblige me, even at half a word” and always show a high opinion of her husband whether he deserved it or not and “draw a kind veil over my faults”.

After hearing his lecture, Pamela decides to scribble down 34 rules he expects a wife to follow. It’s very interesting to read and, I think, differs a lot from how married people interact and engage with each-other today and showcases staggeringly and frustratingly unequal gender relations that women had to deal with in the 18th century. Pamela comments on all these rules though, in her journal, and some of them she agrees with more than others. I’m happy Samuel Richardson also included Pamela’s own independent thoughts on those rules.

Citation

Wednesday 16 December 2020

A Tale of A Tub

The Title and Structure

The first thing that's puzzling about A Tale of A Tub is its title. The preface explains that it is the practice of seamen when they meet a whale to throw out an empty tub to divert it from attacking their ship. The whale that this tub is thrown out for most obviously represents Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. Swift's tub is intended to distract Hobbes and other critics of the church and government from picking holes in their weak points.

The Tale, with its two appendages ('The Battle of the Books' and 'The Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit') is Swift's first important prose work. It was written during the 1690s, when Swift was living with his patron Sir William Temple, and it was published in 1704. Most modern scholars read the revised fifth edition published in 1710. Like Swift's other major prose - including Gulliver's Travelsand A Modest Proposal - A Tale of a Tub was published anonymously. But unlike with those later works, Swift was obsessively concerned with preserving the anonymity of his authorship of the Tale. His authorship of the Tale was never publicly acknowledged in his lifetime, nor did it appear in authorised editions of his collected works.

But although Swift vigorously maintained the fiction of anonymity in relation to A Tale of a Tub, never at any point did he try to suppress the book as a whole; he only tried to obscure his direct connection with it. But despite the fact that he was desperate that no one should ever know that he wrote A Tale of a Tub, he also seems to have been extraordinarily proud of his satire. The one comment that we have on record from Swift about the Tale comes from a letter transcribed for the Earl of Orrery:

'There is no doubt but that he was Author of the Tale of the Tub. He never
owned it: but as he one day made his Relation Mrs Whiteway read it to him,
he made use of This expression. 'Good God! What a flow of imagination had
I, when I wrote this.'

There is a strange paradox here: Swift wanted to disavow his connection with the work, yet at the same time he wanted the genius evident in the satire to be recognised as his.

Religious Orthodoxy

Swift says in the 'Apology' that was added to the 1710 edition that A Tale of a Tub was partly intended to attack the religious groups that he saw as threatening the hegemony of the Anglican church. In the Tale, Swift uses the analogy of the three brothers - Martin, Peter and Jack - to represent, respectively, the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church, and the Low Church, or Dissenters. In doing so, he is trying to demonstrate that the spiritual practices of the Catholic Church and dissenting sects were based on a false interpretation of the true Word, the Bible. However, the sweep of Swift's irony in the book, and, the destabilising and confusing nature of its changes in satiric personae meant that many of his contemporaries read the Tale as an attack all religion.

For a young Anglican churchman intent on a speedy ascension through the ranks of the church, this was a very damaging charge. Swift's decision to publish the apology in the revised edition of 1710 likely is related to his anxiety about his career at this time, and the Tale's potential to compromise his position. Late 1710, was perhaps the most exciting and promising time in Swift's career; he was being courted by the rising Tory leader Robert Harley to join the Tory cause, and power and importance seemed imminent. Swift was to believe for the rest of his life that his failure to secure the ecclesiastical promotions that he wanted was due to influential (including royal) disapproval of the perceived irreligious tendencies of A Tale of a Tub.

Authorship and Identity

Portrait of Jonathan Swift

Portrait of Jonathan Swift [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

But there may be more to Swift's desire to remain guarded about his authorship of A Tale of a Tub than just its potential to compromise his rise to power. Swift seems to be ambivalent about his ownership of the work not just in the original text of 1704, but also in the 'Apology' added in 1710. The 'Apology' is a very strange document: it purports to be a straightforward clearing up of unnecessary misunderstandings, but it actually fails to clear anything up at all.

It is supposed to be an intervention in the controversy over the intended meaning of the Tale. However, the author of the 'Apology' does not admit to being Swift, or even the author of the Tale. Swift creates a third person figure that seems to ventriloquise a defence of the work that is part on behalf of an enraged and violated author, and part an outsider coming to his rescue. The apology refers consistently to the author, saying that 'the author cannot conclude this apology without…' or 'the author observes'. But the tale is complicated by the Apology's use of an 'I' in it, a figure that is differentiated from 'the author'.

What then is the authority of the 'Apology'? Whose is this intervention? Does it matter if we do not know? Does it make a difference to the way we read the text if it is prefaced with a foreword by the author, as opposed to someone else? And once we get into the argument of the 'Apology' itself, there seem to be rather contradictory arguments at work about the role of the author. On one hand, the speaker inveighs against all those who have sought to identify Swift as the composer of the parody:

'He thinks it no fair proceeding, that any Person should offer determinately
to fix a name upon the Author of this Discourse, who hath all along
concealed himself from most of his nearest Friends.'

However, further on, he seems to assert the originality of the work, and suggests that there is only one original genius that could have composed a work of such verve and erudition. Taking issue both his critics' charges that he had plagiarised the work, and with the fact that a man called Thomas Swift had recently claimed to have written the Tale, the apology asserts:

'It indeed touches the Author in a very tender Point, who insists upon it,
that through the whole Book he has not borrowed one single Hint from any
Writer in the World; and he thought of all Criticisms, that would never have
been one. He conceived it was never disputed to be an Original, whatever
Faults it might have'.

What we seem to have here is the desire to disown the text, to disown

responsibility for it, to suggest that a book's authorship is irrelevant.

But we also see the urge to lay claim to it, on the grounds of some notion

of original genius.

Originality

The idea of originality is vexed by A Tale of a Tub. As we've seen here, Swift both dismisses the importance of authorship and fiercely defends it. These ambiguous and contradictory concerns are is mirrored within the text, which in some ways it seems to push the boundaries of what can be called an original. A Tale of a Tub is profoundly postmodern in its intertextuality, its play with literary forms, and its changes in speaker and genre and that constantly undermine readerly expectations of the text. It parodies bookseller's catalogues, scholarly treatises, scientific works, effusive dedicatory prose, and it borrows, magpie-like, from a wide and disparate range of sources. A Tale of a Tub is a patchwork of unattributed quotations to Dryden, Marvell, Richard Bentley, Thomas Browne, and Joseph Addison.

After the Tale appeared in 1704, William Wotton, an Anglican clergyman incensed by what he saw as Swift's impropriety, published a critique of the work. It was entitled Defense of the Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, With Observations upon The Tale of a Tub(1705). In the critique, Wotton offered an explication of the story of the three brothers, attempting to demonstrate that the Tale was a work of radical impiety. When Swift brought out his revised 5th edition in 1710, he cheekily copied the explanatory material of Wotton's attack and had them printed as notes to the new edition his own text. Thus, from 1710, part of the Tale was made up chunks of Wotton's attack on it, cut and pasted in as the Tale's textual apparatus. So in one sense, since it derived so many bits and pieces from other authors, none of the Tale is original. Yet on the other hand, Swift used these other works to compose a wholly new text, one he asserted roundly in the apology was 'an Original, whatever its Faults might have been' and which he later declared was the product of a magnificent 'flow of the Imagination'.

These ideas about originality are reflected in the Tale's relationship to one of its major influences. The text that the Tale most explicitly situates itself in relation to is one that also poses problems of classification as 'original work': John Dryden's Translation of the Works of Virgil in English, of 1697. Dryden's Virgil was the big publishing sensation of the decade. The former laureate issued his definitive version of the great Latin's epic poems, and Dryden's Virgil remained the standard edition until well into the twentieth century.

Swift's A Tale of a Tub was composed at the same time that the Virgil was printed, and in A Tale, Swift takes it upon himself to attack Dryden's work. Swift represents Dryden as a midget cowering in gigantic Virgilian armour, an author who represents the worst of modern literary narcissism. Dryden's extraordinary multiplication of prefaces, dedications, and illustrations offer a model for the external structure of A Tale, which parodies these excesses by incorporating an unfeasible amount of prefatory material before we ever get to the main text: Swift's Tale has an 'Epistle Dedicatory to Prince Posterity', followed by a preface, and then an introduction.

So when Swift snidely suggests that any 'very Considerable Addition to the Bulk of the Volume' is 'a Circumstance by no means to be neglected by a Skilful writer,' he is taking a swipe at Dryden. But Dryden's Virgil is also very interesting in relation to the idea of originality, and plagiarism; like all translation, it is at once a version of an older text, and a new work in its own right. To whom did the lines of the Aeneid belong? Dryden or Virgil? To complicate matters, in producing his edition, Dryden stole words and phrases on a large scale from previous translators, particularly Lauderdale. And to turn this same scrutiny upon Jonathan Swift, is A Tale of Tub is actually an enormous compilation of quotation claiming inspired originality?

The Ancients and Moderns

How do Swift's concerns about originality and authorship reflect on contemporary cultural debate? 'The Battle of the Books', along with the Tale, was perhaps the most impressive English contribution to the so-called quarrel of the Ancients and the moderns. The history of this quarrel can be traced back to the Renaissance. Rediscovery and publication of the philosophers and poets of ancient Greece and Rome generated a huge sense of intellectual and cultural liberation for many sixteenth century writers. But with this revival came a questioning of assumptions about the value of the classical texts.

In literary terms, the debate polarised around the question of whether present civilisations could hope to outdo the achievements of the ancient world in the arts, and in science and technology. Some contemporaries, 'the Moderns', were excited by this possibility. There were moderns who were classical scholars, like Richard Bentley (who is satirised in 'Battle of the Books'), who believed that there was nothing sacred about classical texts. He believed that the classical past should be seen as a body of material that could be dated and analysed, and above all historicized. The classics were not a body of transcendent truths for all time, but an historical source about a much less advanced classical past. So he produced editions of classical texts with endless footnotes and appendices re-contextualising and analysing the poetry in terms of this historical past, not unlike modern critical editions of the works of Shakespeare.

But 'the Ancients', among whose number Swift counted himself, realised with horror that aspirations of this kind threatened the educational and cultural structures that Europe's elite had shared ever since the Renaissance rediscovery of the classical past. Educated in a humanist tradition of scholarship, 'the Ancients' believed that the values derived from Greek and Roman literature continued to provide authoritative standards of virtue, rationality, and aesthetic taste. The classics weren't remnants of a past and primitive culture: they were culture, and were cornerstones by which all human endeavour could be measured. They were not to be questioned or dissected by scholarship in the way Bentley attempted.

Swift was tied in to this debate heavily because his patron at the time of writing the Tale, Sir William Temple, was a key figure among the group of Ancients. Swift's 'Battle of the Books' engages fully on the side of the Ancients: through the figure of Scaliger, Swift attacks Bentley for his lack of grace, observing the irony that the classics have failed to infuse their decorum and civilising influence on the scholar. Swift writes, "All Arts of civilising Others, render thee rude and untractable." The social and cultural superiority of the Ancients is reflected in their imperviousness to the assaults of the moderns, and this is illustrated in the mock-epic passage near the end of the 'Battle of the Books', where the Anglican churchman and modern defender of Bentley, William Wotton, hurls a lance at William Temple but we are told that Temple "neither felt the Weapon touch him, nor heard it fall".

This debate about ancient and modern learning is clearly intimately bound up with the interrogation of authority and authorial status that we see in A Tale of a Tub. The Ancients and Moderns debate was in essence about a question of origins, and of textual authority. It was about how far the authority of the classical poets extended. If you took the Ancients argument to its logical conclusion, no truly newgreat literature could ever be produced, because the summit had already been achieved. The best that was left was imitation. And so you could read the tissue of allusions and borrowings that constitutes the Tale as a trope for the indebtedness of modern literature, for its dependence upon earlier texts that render the idea of modern originality meaningless. And in formulating a brilliant work out of a collage of older ones the tale, Swift gestures toward the way in which the ancients can continue to generate new and imaginative literature: the habits of allusion and imitation that were at the centre of the neoclassicism of the Ancients could also be generative.

The Tale is self-consciously digressive, and attacks the modern writers unmindful of the past and obsessed with the idea of being up to the moment. The narrator of the Tale is fatuously scrupulous in recording this contemporaneity by recording the most trivial domestic circumstances and everything that enters his head at the moment of writing, including his thoughts on the writing of his thoughts. In drawing attention to its newness, A Tale of a Tub parodies the novelty associated with the romance and early novel, always presenting new scenes and "surprising adventures".

Swift also satirises contemporary developments in the book trade: the expanding commercialism of the literary marketplace, and the hybrid forms of scholarship, history, and pamphlet that it was spawning. The Tale is just such a hybrid. And it makes a nonsense of typographical innovation, the random and pointless use of asterisks, hyphens, and parentheses gesture towards an over-excited print culture whose sense of literary merit has got lost in new and various forms of textual egotism.

Paralleling this obsession with textual modernity comes a corresponding collective cultural amnesia. The moderns are so obsessed with being new, that they have forgotten their past. This is made explicit in section six of A Tale of a Tub:

'Memory being an employment of the mind upon things past, is a
faculty for which the learned in our illustrious age have no manner of
occasion, who deal entirely with invention, and strike all things out of
themselves'.

The invention that is being satirised here is both scientific and literary.

Parody and Allegory

Martin Luther

Painting of Martin Luther, on whom Swift's 'Martin' is based [Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In addition to the 'digressions' that form a satire on modern learning and print culture, A Tale of a Tub's more obvious satire is that on abuses in religion. The satire works through the allegory of the three brothers: Martin, Peter, and Jack. Martin symbolises the Anglican Church (from Martin Luther); Peter symbolizes the Roman Catholic Church; and Jack (from John Calvin) symbolises the Dissenters. Their father leaves each brother a coat as a legacy, with strict orders that the coats are on no account to be altered. The sons gradually disobey his injunction, finding excuses for adding shoulder knots or gold lace, according to the prevailing fashion. Martin and Jack quarrel with the arrogant Peter (the Reformation), and then with each other (the split between Anglicanism and Puritanism), and then separate. As we might expect, Martin is by far the most moderate of the three, and his speech in section six is by the sanest thing anyone has to say in the Tale.

Both parody and allegory work by implicitly, or explicitly, comparing one sort of book with another. As a broad generalisation, they are concerned with intertextual relationships, and how you can use one text to invoke or critique another. But the distinction is that allegory teaches its readers to see beyond appearance to recognise truth, while parody teaches its readers to see beyond appearance to recognise error.

In the case of the allegorical story of the three brothers, the ultimate pre-text is the Bible: the father's last recorded words take the form of a will, a dead letter, defining and confining the ways in which the sons are to live their lives:

'You will find in my Will (here it is) full Instructions in every Particular
concerning the Wearing and Management of your Coats; wherein you must be
very exact, to avoid the Penalties I have appointed for every transgression
or Neglect, upon which your future Fortunes will entirely depend'.

The later subversion of the will provides us with an allegory of misreading. The abuse of the living coats (the Church) provides an allegory of desire and corruption. The brothers abuse and misinterpret the will as a way of figuring misuse and misinterpretation of the Bible. The attack on Jack, representing Dissenters, is particularly biting: it targets the sectarian groups who exalted the individual worshipper or small congregation with their claims to inner light and private conscience, unchecked by tradition and institutional authority.

In the case of the satire on writing and scholarship, as we have seen in the first half of this lecture, texts like Dryden's Virgil and scholarship of Bentley that are being undermined. They are works whose claim to authority is spurious, and whose authors fail to pay homage to the only true originals of classical civilisation.

In this reading of The Tale of a Tub, then, there seem to be clear distinctions between parody of lesser forms and allegory of higher forms, which roughly corresponds to the twin foci of Swift's work. Both the parody and the allegory are concerned with discerning true and false models of textual authority.

But perhaps there is more overlap between parody and allegory than there seems at first glance. If we think about the brothers and their coats as an allegory of misreading, we can see that the notion of the Bible as sacred pre-text is complicated by the fact that what the brothers can so misread and miscontruct the words of the will that they are able get it to justify whatever they want it to do. We slip out of allegory and into parody, as Swift mocks as his ludicrous pretext false exegetical analyses of the Scripture. Initially, the Will has the power to protect the brothers from their fallen nature, but slowly and insidiously, the relationship of masterful text to obedient interpreter is turned around. Led by Peter, the Catholic, the brothers subvert the terms of the Will by means of wilfully self-seeking interpretation. The simple, explicit dictates of the Will are twisted to serve as a canonical sanction to justify shoulder knots on the cloaks. Flame-coloured satin is said to be 'found' in a codicil of the will, a dangerous supplement, which corresponds to apocryphal additions to the Bible. Embroidered images are forbidden, so they are excused by the sophistry that the new fashion in images is different from that which existed in the father's time, and is therefore acceptable.

By the time the brothers have finished, the Will, or the Word that they are authorising their actions with is no longer the true, original, sacred word, but their corrupt and self -serving version of it. The pre-text underwriting the allegory of the coats is no longer the Bible, but a distorted misreading of it, a fallen text that must be discredited. Thus we have moved across into parody. The impact of an allegory is to reveal the privileged status of the pretext, while a parody aims at undermining the value of the pretext.

One of the implications of the shifting and unstable nature of the satiric forms employed in the Tale is that it makes it difficult to establish what Swift does take to be his ideal point, the true perspective against which the follies satirised can be measured and found wanting. Because we're not sure of the interpretative framework we're working within, allegory or parody, it's hard to be confident about the moral thrust of the work. It is no wonder that contemporary readers so frequently misinterpreted Swift's intentions, to Swift's professional detriment.

Citation

Cite:Jonathan Swift and 'A Tale of a Tub' by Abigail Williams, Kate O'Connor at http://writersinspire.org/content/jonathan-swift-tale-tub. Accessed on Wednesday, December 16, 2020.

Tuesday 10 November 2020

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Monday 5 October 2020

Critical approaches to Othello

Introduction

Othello was crafted at the dawn of the 17th century, shaped by complex social and geopolitical issues that new historicist critics, who seek to place literary works within a historical framework, have recently sought to unravel. Yet from its first staging to the present, Othello has also been among the few Shakespearean plays to be repeatedly staged to enthusiastic audiences, not only in England, but across the globe. This continuing appeal suggests that the tragedy transcends the time and location in which it was written, provoking new interpretations from generation to generation, place to place. In order to fully appreciate Othello, we need to see it in its multifaceted historical context – then – and consider the myriad ways it speaks to audiences now.

1] Postcolonial reading: ‘something from Cyprus’

Postcolonial readings focus on the play’s representation of Ottoman Turks. Shakespeare derived Othello’s plot from a short narrative in Giraldi Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi (1565), but set his play within the context of Venice’s struggle during the 1570s with the Ottoman Empire for control of Cyprus, the eastern Mediterranean island that overlooked the shipping lanes between Europe and trading centres in the East. Venice owned Cyprus from 1470 to 1569, but in 1571 Turkish forces seized the island. Later that year an alliance of Christian powers defeated the Turk in the famous naval battle of Lepanto. As a young man, James VI of Scotland (James I of England in 1603) celebrated that battle, fought ‘Betwixt the baptiz’d race, / And circumcised Turband Turkes’.References throughout Othello to ‘the Turk’ or ‘turning Turk’ evoke the intermittent conflict between Europe’s Christian powers and the Islamic Ottoman Empire, which was as much an economic competition as a clash of religions. In sermons and treatises, English writers like Richard Knolles, who published The General Historie of the Turks (1603), demonised the Ottoman Empire as barbaric and cruel, even as they admired its military success and bureaucratic structure.

Shakespeare draws upon the Christian-Turkish binary but also undercuts it by making the play’s most villainous character a Venetian and its hero an outsider. Fearful of vesting military power in one of its own citizens, Venice’s republican government contracted with foreign mercenaries who could easily be dismissed once the crisis was over (as Othello is in Act 5). Although Othello has been chosen by the Venetian government to lead its army, ‘the Moor’ (a term that originally referred to practitioners of Islam) remains an alien in Venice. Like the liminal island of Cyprus, he is caught in the middle, neither European nor Turk yet embodying both, and in his suicide he highlights his service as a Christian hero by killing the ‘turbaned Turk’ within, who ‘beat a Venetian and traduced the state’ (5.2.352–53).

Othello’s geopolitical impact is not limited, however, to conflicts between Venice and the Ottoman Empire. Othello’s blackness and his background as a foreign mercenary prefigures the hybridity postcolonial theorists have identified in colonial subjects. Brabantio and Desdemona are fascinated by his strange stories of cannibals and anthropophagi; Othello’s first gift to her is a handkerchief given to him by an Egyptian charmer, ‘dyed in mummy [a black liquid distilled from corpses] and steeped in the ancient lore of charmers, sibyls and magic’.The Moor’s stories allow Desdemona to experience the exotic/erotic delight found by many early modern readers in travel narratives that described the ‘antres vast’ of unexplored territories in Africa, the East and the New World.

2). New historicist reading: ‘far more fair than black’

New historicist critics often debate whether or not race was a factor in early modern representations of non-English peoples. Although Othello’s racial identity is clearly a factor in Shakespeare’s text, when the play was first performed the audience would not have seen it as squarely focussed on race as we do. As editor Michael Neill observes, ‘to talk about race in Othello is inevitably to fall into some degree of anachronism, while to ignore it is to efface something fundamental to the tragedy.’ As a result, Shakespeare’s Othello has been appropriated worldwide as a vehicle for the exploration of racial and ethnic tensions.

In the opening scene Iago refers to Othello as ‘the thick-lips’ (1.1.66) and later he raises a toast to ‘the health of black Othello’ (2.2.29). Through these and other comments we learn that Othello is a black African of sub-Saharan origin. In 1604 England was not yet formally immersed in the slave trade, but as early as 1565 English privateers had bought captured Africans, and Shakespeare may well have known some of them or other people of African heritage. Contemporary conceptions of race and racism, influenced by the history of racial slavery and 18th-century pseudo-science, are often based on hard and fast racial categories that were only incipient in Shakespeare’s England. While Iago’s and Brabantio’s remarks in Act 1 exude what is today accepted as racism, the Duke’s pronouncement that Othello is ‘far more fair than black’ and Montano’s claim that ‘the man commands / Like a full soldier’ (2.1.36–37) indicate the high esteem others have for him. Nevertheless, references to Othello as black and a Moor, as well as his lack of understanding of Venetian customs, establish his liminal position in Venetian society.

In Shakespeare’s time Othello was performed by Richard Burbage, a white actor who wore black make-up and a wig of black lamb’s wool. (Burbage’s powerful cross-racial performance should not be confused with the caricatured blackface used in 19th-century minstrel shows.) Still, by the early 19th century, a truly black Othello was no longer tenable in England and America. The English actor Edmund Kean chose instead to appear as a North African in light brown make-up, suggesting an African from the Mediterranean rim rather than a sub-Saharan. With the exception of Ira Aldridge, a black actor who portrayed Othello throughout northern Europe in the 19th century, the role was taken by white actors in various shades of make-up until the African-American actor Paul Robeson undertook the role in London (1930) and New York (1943). Since then, black actors have usually impersonated Shakespeare’s Moor.

3) Feminist reading: ‘a maiden never bold’

Feminist critics highlight the ways Shakespeare portrays gender roles. In Act 1, Scene 3, Brabantio describes his daughter Desdemona as ‘a maiden never bold’, yet in choosing a foreigner she has violated the Venetian norm of arranged endogamous marriages (the practice of marrying within a local community or ethnic group) and rejected her father’s authority. Still, she honours the patriarchal dictum that, once married, the wife owes her husband the same respect and duty she had shown her father. Emilia, too, defers to her husband Iago’s wishes. Even after she realises the full extent of his villainy, she admits, ‘’Tis proper I obey him, but not now’ (5.2.194). At the same time, romances, poems and plays often countered patriarchal authority in favour of romantic love. Just as the Duke overrules Brabantio’s demands in Act 1, Scene 3, in fictional narratives the blocking father figure cannot prevail and young lovers marry. If Othello ended after Act 1, it would be, as many commentators have observed, a romantic comedy.

Alas, Desdemona and Othello’s love is no match for Iago’s plots and the green-eyed monster jealousy. Infidelity was the ultimate marital crime in early modern England. The prospect of illegitimate children subverted the bedrock of the era’s social and economic system, the inheritance of property from father to son. In a speech that is often described as ‘proto-feminist’, Emilia argues that a wife’s infidelity is a response to the husband’s behaviour:

Say they slack their duties,
And pour our treasures into foreign laps,
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us; or say they strike us,
Or scant of former having in despite –
. . .
Yet have we some revenge. (4.4.82–88)

Desdemona rejects this reasoning, promising ‘Not to pick bad from bad, but by bad mend’ (4.4.100). As she nears death in the play’s final moments, she exonerates Othello by claiming no one has murdered her except herself.

From the play’s earliest performances, audiences responded sympathetically to Desdemona’s plight. After a 1610 production at Oxford, Henry Jackson recalled that Desdemona ‘entreated the pity of the spectators by her very countenance’.That changed in the late 20th century, however, when feminist critics underscored Desdemona’s initial independence and Emilia’s eventual strength, and outlined the ways both women – as well as the courtesan Bianca – were constrained by the male characters’ patriarchal suppositions. From a feminist perspective, early modern England’s preoccupation with cuckoldry demonstrates a basic male insecurity about women’s sexuality.

5) Marxist reading: ‘’Tis the curse of service’

Marxist critics are concerned with the economic and psychological impact of early modern England’s hierarchical social system. In 1604 James I took Shakespeare’s acting company under his patronage, making Shakespeare a ‘servant’ of the king. Indeed, service to someone in a higher position was expected from the lowest kitchen maid to the lords and ladies of the king’s court.The pecking order in Othello is clear. The Duke and aristocratic members of the Venetian Senate give orders to Othello, who in turn commands his Lieutenant Cassio. Ensign Iago is subordinate to both. All three ostensibly serve out of loyalty to the state and for the status their military position brings, but they can be dismissed at the pleasure of their superiors. Iago resents Cassio, a man with ‘a daily beauty in his life’ (5.1.19), hates being tied to Othello’s service and yearns for preferment.

The different gradations of status embedded in the text are often represented in military terms, with Iago presented as a rough-speaking non-commissioned officer, resentful of Cassio’s rank and courtly manners. But the play’s exploration of rank and class go beyond the military. Iago’s repeated advice, ‘Put money in thy purse’, suggests that a new economic model has replaced the feudal obligations of service, which had been based on a bond of loyalty and duty between servant and master. As a ‘servant’ of the king, Shakespeare – who applied for a coat of arms to be named a ‘gentleman’ but was also an entrepreneur who loaned money and invested in land and rents – was implicated in both models.

Work citation

Critical approaches to Othello. (2015, December 09). Retrieved October 05, 2020, from https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/critical-approaches-to-othello

Tuesday 26 May 2020

A Journey into Capitalist Failure

Capitalism is said to provide the opportunity to achieve "The American Dream". With
good work ethic, financial sense, and a little bit of luck, everybody could become a wealthy
entrepreneur. However, this dream is hopelessly outdated and become increasingly difficult to
achieve. "The American Dream" has turn to a myth and a means of laying blame. People who
themselves try to achieve "The American Dream" may suffer the highest costs of this excessive
capitalism. "The 'working poor' as they are appropriately termed, are in fact the major
philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others
will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and
perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a
member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor to everyone
else" (Ehrenreich, P. 221). Tyson believes that it is what the capitalist culture has done to its
people, "Every family wants to own its own home on its own land is a capitalist ideology that
sells itself as natural by pointing, for example to the fact that almost all Americans want to own
their own property, without acknowledging that this desire is created in us by the capitalist
culture in which we live" (P. 53).
Marx analysis about "The American Dream" reveals that it is just an ideology, a belief
system that is employed by the capitalism, not a natural way of seeing the world. It blinds its
pursuers to the enormities of its own failure. O'Neill in Long Day's Journey concerns about this
failure and reveals the reality of "The American Dream" in the capitalist society. He represents the failure of American man, American values, and American culture. He shows the man who
is looking for a fulfilled life but he cannot find it in the real unequal conditions that are created
by capitalism. Metaphorically, O'Neill sees "The American Dream" as a way of escaping from
this painful reality.

Mary's words show that Tyrone is a practitioner of "The American Dream" and he
comes to this land for the financial success. The Tyrones are hopeless people that by drinking
and consuming morphine try to escape from the reality of their life. They are shocked by the
failure of their dreams and now alcohol and morphine are kinds of protection for them. Mary is
repeating a song of fatalism that "But I suppose life has made him like that, and he can't help it.
None of us can help the things that life has done to us" (P.22). O’Neill addresses the problem of
existence in the capitalistic Man.
In a capitalistic society, a man is not a “Man” until he is subjectified by the monetary
discourse. O’Neill has no hesitation in demystifying the “ugliness of American reality” behind
the innocent discourse of "The American Dream”. Unlike Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman,
O’Neill chooses not to romanticize the castrating effect of Money with a dreamy outlook, but to
foreground how this unconscious language can regulate the living body. In the play, Mr.
Tyrone’s rise to prosperity represents the birth of the modern, masculine Subject—the economic
Man. Marcelle Marini believes that O’Neill forces the reader to see that a man like Tyrone is
“caught as a whole, but like a pawn” in the play of the capitalistic signifier, “and this even
before the rules are transmitted to him. . . . Such an order of priorities has to be understood as a
logical order, that is, as an always actualized order” (P.45). While pleasure in itself may not be a
linguistic phenomenon, the idea that Money can give pleasure is certainly related to what
James M. Mellard claims, “the ordering function of the culture, a culture that separates man
from nature, by inscribing him from the start in language, in the founding law whose
primordial interdiction” (P.395-407) is that of the law of the father. The fear of lack on the
ontological level is translated by the capitalistic discourse to become Tyrone’s fear of poverty,
the “fear of poorhouse.” In O’Neill’s play, Mr. Tyrone has no hesitation in forgoing what he
truly likes in order to achieve "The American Dream". With all his money, he ends up saying, “I
don’t know what the hell it was I wanted to buy” (P.5).
Tyrone measures all human relations based on the notion of "productiveness" or "use
value". In Mr. Tyrone’s eyes, Jamie is an “evil minded loafer” (P.24) because he is depraved and
unproductive. Edmund is disappointing for he is weak in terms of his health or financial wellbeing. Mr. Tyrone learned this lifestyle from the capitalist society. He is the only character in
the play that is exempt from despair and confusion of values. Thus, Mary notes, “Ten foghorns
couldn’t disturb” (P.17) Tyrone. To a miser like Tyrone, the world is a very stable, easily
readable zone: his enemy is the one who wants to “have the house ablaze with electricity at
[night], burning up money!”(P.26). He sells his talents for money, spends his money on many
“bum piece[s] of property,” and ends up celebrating his life by drowning regrets with alcohol.
The paradox of success and non-being, happiness and unhappiness eventually leads Tyrone to
utter—with clear-headed sincerity—something that he really desires to do and never desires to
put it into action: “On my solemn oath, Edmund, . . . I’d be willing to have no home but the
poorhouse in my old age if I could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have
been” (P.51).
Tyrone is the result of capitalism. He wants to save both his family and his money, but
he is unable to manage both of them. In the capitalist society, everything must be scarified for
money. Tyrone's soul is destroyed by possessiveness and greed. He creates a dream of success
for himself but at the end, he and his family go disappointed they find their dream false and
inaccessible in the unequal capitalist society. They come to the point that they have been
betrayed by what "The American Dream" has created for them.

Work Citation

Babaee, Ruzbeh. “Long Day's Journey into Night; a Journey into Revelation. International Journal of International Social Research. 4.19 (2011): 7-14 Print.” Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/1046883/Long_Days_Journey_into_Night_a_Journey_into_Revelation._International_Journal_of_International_Social_Research._4.19_2011_7-14_Print.

Psychoanalysis , Repression , Oedipus complex

Mary

The members of the family are not happy within their respected slots.
Long Days Journey can be regarded as a play of fate, where the family is encompassed by forces of resentment, lust, blame and remorse.
The bewailing attitude of the family members hardly allows them to
recognize their love for each other. For any family to be happy it is imperative that the roots remain strong in order to strengthen the entire family, but here we have a family where the mother finds contentment in relapsing into her past through her morphine addiction. She
blames her husband for her present unhappy condition. Mary always
thinks of her blooming youth when she got married to a handsome
Shakespearean actor, giving up her intense ambition of being a nun
to serve the divinity. Psychologically, she is under the firm grip of her
subconscious that doesn’t allow her to come out of her past blooming youth. Mary feels that her ambition is not fulfilled and desires to
roll back from her present life. This sense of sacrifice ruined her family
relationships. There is disproportionate Ego (her reality) and Id (the
world of her own) within Mary. It is also seen in the drama that her innate state of denial doesn’t allow her to accept the fact that Edmund
was suffering from tuberculosis. Mary, a product of Electra Complex,
knew within herself that confiding to the fact would put her in a similar state as before, when she witnessed her father’s death due to the
same disease. Desperately trying to escape the similar pain for the
second time, she deliberately chooses not to accept the disease of
Edmund as being Tuberculosis, but terms it as a normal cold. She is
happy to live in a fake world of denial rather than facing the painful
reality.

James Tyrone

The father of the family is eager to save money in every way possible. He is positioned in a precarious situation within the family. Trying
to balance his attitude of money saving with the needs of his family,
James is driven by the so called American Dream. It was his childhood
desire to become super rich within a very short span of time. Such a
penny pinching attitude of the father, leads to many complications
within the Tyrone family. His wife Mary is addicted to drugs, courtesy of the cheap doctor that was hired by James during Mary’s pregnancy, who prescribed her to inject morphine for the temporary relief
of her labor pain, which then became a lifelong habit. The character
of James Tyrone was suffering from a dual – personality disorder. On
one hand, he is desperate to understand the feelings and emotions
within his family, by comforting everyone, despite continuous blame
and regret. On the other hand, he is a penny pincher. He intends to
admit Edmund into a cheap sanatorium for his cure from Tuberculosis.
He also hired a cheap doctor for his pregnant wife who had injected
morphine as a curative relief from the pain. He is materialistic in action, but contrary through his intention. James Tyrone can be termed
as a character with a shade of Schizophrenia. The Psychological imbalance of “Id” and “Ego” within his psyche is evident. The unconscious
impulse of the characters is unsuccessful in negotiating with their
present situation, due to the unconscious repositories that are actively functioning within their psyches.

Jamie Tyrone

The elder son, Jamie Tyrone is a product of the Oedipus complex. His
acute oedipal repression searches leeway in the form of incestuous
relations, with mistress’s of his mother’s age. He tries to corrupt his
younger brother, by trying to lead him in his immoral ways, because
he senses his mother’s affection for Edmund which becomes intolerable to him. Jamie says to Edmund,” But don’t get me wrong, kid. I
love you more than I hate you” (O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night,
1984, p. 166)

Edmund

The Author had found his character in the character of Edmund. He
is the only character, seen with a ray of hope within the Tyrone family. O’Neill had desires for his mother and his intense oedipal complex
searched for the love of his mother in his three wives. The author subconsciously yearned for his mother’s love, which is portrayed through
his characters in all his major plays like Mourning Becomes Electra,
Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, and many others. One can
say that O’Neill was trying to relive his emotional frustration through
his dramas unintentionally.

Work Citation

Fathima, Sabreen. “The Consequence of Psychological Imbalances in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night.” Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/29094520/The_Consequence_of_Psychological_Imbalances_in_ONeills_Long_Days_Journey_into_Night.

Monday 25 May 2020

Mother figure & guilt , dependence from Goswami Mahirpari

Work Citation

Barnes, W. (n.d.). Guilt and Dependence as Practised Family Religions in Eugene O' Neil's Long Day's Journey Into Night and Marsha Norman's 'night Mother. Retrieved May 25, 2020, from https://www.academia.edu/6731500/Guilt_and_Dependence_as_Practised_Family_Religions_in_Eugene_O_Neils_Long_Days_Journey_Into_Night_and_Marsha_Normans_night_Mother

Tuesday 19 May 2020

Guilt and dependence

Eugene O’Neill in
Long Day’s Journey Into Night conveys the struggle which arises out of the growing social and psychological problems which face the victims of addiction and personal trauma in an America that increasingly subverts the accepted morality of older European religious beliefs. The decline of
family and community in O’Neill’s play represents a trauma that is unique to a Catholic viewpoint.

The shadow of old religious values looms consistently throughout the play; for example even within O’Neill’s character Edmund’s appropriation of nihilistic European literature to his personal beliefs
he feels a debt to his mother and excuses her self-martyring addiction.

Recognised as America’s “first important playwright” (Harold Bloom, Eugene O’Neill; Modern Critical Views-Updated Edition, New York, Infobase Publihing, 2007, 1) O’Neill used an autobiographical sense of family to imbue Long Day’s Journey into Night (completed 1942, first performed 1956) with an internally destructive familial hubris in an attempt to replicate the effects of Greek tragedy for the American stage. The overhanging moral albatross represented by the influence of a particular form of Irish-American Catholic guilt permeates this play, with it themes of addiction, self-destruction, blame and regret all reflecting the conflict of reverence and damnation which the Tyrone family accord to their family history and to each other. In a sneeringly judgemental display of the allocation of guilt regarding their family’s decline, James Tyrone intimidates his wayward son Jamie into accepting responsibility for his brother Edmund’s ill-health and lack of contentment:

Tyrone: The less you say about Edmund’s sickness the better for your conscience.

You’re more responsible than anyone!

Jamie: (Stung) That’s a lie! I won’t stand for it, Papa!

Tyrone: It’s the truth! You’ve been the worst influence for him. He grew up admiring

you a hero! A fine example you’ve set for him. You’ve made him old before his time, pumping him full of what you considered to be worldly wisdom,

when he was too young to see that your mind was poisoned by your own

failure in life, you wanted to believe every man was a knave with his soul

for sale, and every woman who wasn’t a whore was a fool!”

(O’ Neil, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, London, Nick Hearn Books, 1956 1

191 Act 1, 16, 17)

Tyrone’s singling out of Jamie for responsibility comes loaded with a sense of patriarchal moralismthat is aligned significantly in his belief in the “one true faith of the Catholic Church” (O’Neill, 44).His son’s turning away from the influence of this ideological stronghold, as well as turning awayfrom the works of their father’s beloved Shakespeare and towards reading more modernist andnihilistic works of Nietzsche and the British Fin-de-Siecle poets invokes a rage in their fathertowards their self-destructive rebelliousness which eludes taste in literature with their personal
decline. Jamie’s response to his father’s accusations asserts that he was merely acting out of hisbrother’s best interests, that the nihilistic streak was already alive in him despite his religiousupbringing to the contrary, and that he only offered him frank advice with regards his decadent
pursuits;

Jamie: (with a defensive air of weary indifference again) All right, I put
Edmund wise to things, but I knew he’d laugh at me if I tried the good
advice, older brother stuff. All I did was make a pal of him and be
absolutely frank so he’s learn from my mistakes that...(He shrugs his
shoulders, cynically) If you can’t be good you can at least be careful.
(O’Neill, 1:16, 17.)

This sense of disregard for their parent’s moralistic standards contributes to the familial decline.However it also establishes an unusually dependent relationship between the two brothers. Jamiehas Edmund comply in many of his decisions throughout his lifetime, yet it is Jamie who isdependent on Edmund’s role as the “Kid” in the family to define his role as his brother’s keeper andthe wayward, bitter son. Edmund is the son who replaced the dead brother Eugene, whose infantdeath their mother blames Jamie for, yet both have catered to Jamie’s fragility and whimsthroughout his life. Jamie has as a result borne the majority of the guilt which the family wage oneach other, yet he takes it upon himself, in much the same way in which his mother acts out her role
of martyrdom.

In being the personification of a morally abhorrent bad influence on his brother, Jamie is determined to prove his parents’ accusations towards him to be true. This is explicably made apparent during the scene of Jamie’s confession to Edmund, which in the sense that it is spoken by a lapsed Catholic conveys Jamie’s wishes to absolve the wrongs which he feels he has committed to his brother. Jamie confronts his brother with the damning truth after he arrives home drunk after Edmund is diagnosed with tuberculosis. Needing to confess what he sees as his continuing moralising against his brother he speaks of his self-accused intent on ruining Edmund’s life:

Jamie: Never wanted you to succeed and make me look worse by comparison.
Wanted you yo fail. Always jealous of you, Mama’s boy, Papa’s pet!
(He stares at Edmund with increasing emnity) And it was you being born that
started Mama on dope. I know that’s not your fault, but all the same, God
damn you, I can’t help it, I hate your guts!
(O’Neill, 4: 103)

By saying this, Jamie is not only announcing the transparency of his maliciousness but also opens the audience to the understanding of the shared maliciousness of the Tyrone family unit. In this light the critic Michael Hinden posits Jamie as the Tyrone family scapegoat, the sone who bears the burden of blame and the psychological contamination that his family expounds upon each other as solely the responsibility of himself; “O’Neill has Jamie function as a familial scapegoat, scourging his own conscience but also symbolically bearing away the various contagions that plague the Tyrones. (Michael Hinden, Long Day’s Journey into Night: Native Eloquence, Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1990, 59). By giving Jamie such an uncompromising admission of guilt in the confession scene, O’Neill conveys him as the prophet of the family’s moral demise

Work Citation

Barnes, W. (n.d.). Guilt and Dependence as Practised Family Religions in Eugene O' Neil's Long Day's Journey Into Night and Marsha Norman's 'night Mother. Retrieved May 25, 2020, from https://www.academia.edu/6731500/Guilt_and_Dependence_as_Practised_Family_Religions_in_Eugene_O_Neils_Long_Days_Journey_Into_Night_and_Marsha_Normans_night_Mother

Mahirpari Goswami

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Thursday 29 April 2021

An Artist of the Floating World - 6

An Artist of the Floating World - 5

An Artist of the Floating World - 4

An Artist of the Floating World - 3

An artist of the Floating World - 2

An Artist of the Floating World - 1

1984 PPT - 4

1984 PPT - 3

1984 PPT :- 2

1984 PPT :- 1

Monday 26 April 2021

PPT An Artist of the Floating World - 5

PPT An Artist of the Floating World - 4

PPT An Artist of the Floating World - 3

PPT An Artist of the Floating World - 2

PPT on Artist of the Floating World - 1

Wednesday 23 December 2020

Pamela some important points