The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People

This play, for one so famous is remarkably thin on plot.  It relies exclusively on the wit of its word-play to get by (a wit that is even noticeable in the very title of the play).  It relies on contradiction, comedies of manners, and of course, puns.  The title itself is a paradox.  Serious people only become serious by avoiding trivial things, such as this comedy, for example.  Wilde knew this, and believed that it would be successful on its wit alone (it was).  The play as a whole mocks serious manners and is, as a whole, a satire about Victorian society, a play reminiscent of the Roman comedies of manners (see Horace's Satires).

The Importance of Being Earnest's biggest theme is one of triviality.  It is profoundly silly.  The lies of the two protagonists are not harmful to anyone, in fact, they really have no negative aims, they exist simply to avoid unwelcome or unpleasant social engagements, interestingly with the exact same goal, but with different methods (Jack leaves the country to go to town as Earnest, while Algernon seeks to escape the city by "Bunburying," both seek to escape social obligations by doing so).  In doing so, they each fall in love with a woman who loves their assumed name, but not themselves, with Cecily and Gwendolen.  It is playing on the words Earnest/Ernest as well as with the silliness of the women's views on names.  In fact, when the two protagonists are both revealed as frauds, simply on account of their names, both women break off their engagements.  The Importance of Being Earnest is simply about nothing at all; it has no grandiose ideas to impart morals into society, if anything, it is making fun of how serious society is.  In this way, Wilde is going against his contemporaries, who believed their work should have a greater meaning.  He refused to play the game.

It does, of course perform well as satire towards Victorian society, especially as it relates to marriage, and the lead up to marriage.  Cecily and Gwendolen both aspire to marry a man named Ernest, they both have this concept and pity any woman married to a man whose name is not Ernest.  The name makes the man, they seem to say (they would not agree that a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, unless it's name was Ernest, then it would smell even sweeter).  Lady Bracknell places much of her faith into Jack's assumed name, stating that Ernest is the only truly "safe" name for a man.  This is dashed when Lady Bracknell discovers that Jack was found in Victoria Station (I found it particularly humorous when Jack defends himself by saying that he was found on the Brighton Line, the upscale train to Worthing, in contrast to the poorer Victoria Station, of which there were two).

But beyond any themes, the play truly only shines when its language is taken into account.  Often, the language fails to contribute to the plot in any meaningful way, but instead serves solely to provide humor and amusement to the viewers.  Wilde was a master of witticism, and The Importance of Being Earnest is the greatest example that he produced.

Insert Pithy Title Here

So.  How crazy was Hamlet exactly?  Given the fact that this is one of the more discussed topics encountered when analyzing Hamlet, I struggle to find a way to present my ideas in a way that is not simply a re-hash of a more intelligent person's ideas.  But here goes anyway.

The short version of all of this is that I think Hamlet is crazy, or at least he is by the end of the play (in the beginning I genuinely believe that he was simply faking it).  My thinking on this is primarily centered on Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia, especially when considered in connection to their previous relationship.  Hamlet and Ophelia had a 'thing' going on, to the extent which Polonius felt it was his fatherly duty to remind Ophelia to not stay with Hamlet in private overlong, it didn't look right.  And yet, if Hamlet was truly sane, his treatment of Ophelia makes no sense at all.  He states:

"Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a
breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest;
but yet I could accuse me of such things that it
were better my mother had not borne me: I am very
proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at
my beck than I have thoughts to put them in"

He lashes out against Ophelia, the woman he once loved, perhaps too desperately, and says that she should not only remove herself from his presence, but get to a nunnery.  She ruins not just him, but all men by her presence, such that the world would be a better place.  This is unnecessarily damaging to his relationship with Ophelia, even if one assumes that he is only doing so to deceive Claudius and Polonius.  What's more, even if he did so with the intention of his actions going back to the king, it would have been extremely counterproductive.  Polonius already believes Hamlet to be mad as a result of his previous actions towards Ophelia (Hamlet barging into her room half-clothed and writing love-letters) and that this madness is the problem.  By being hostile to Ophelia, Polonius would be disinclined to believe that Hamlet is truly crazy.  Plus, he's pretty negative about himself, and that doesn't usually bode well.

Of course, his interactions with Ophelia are only the tip of the iceberg, though my favorite tip, as it happens.  One could also remark on the fact that Hamlet assumes Claudius is guilty when he runs out of the play about Gonzago Hamlet has put on.  That doesn't necessarily prove anything (even though it is true), for all Hamlet knew, Claudius could have simply had a bad case of indigestion and had to leave to, ah, relieve, himself.

He stabs a person unknown to him, just because they were hiding behind a curtain in his mother's room, though it did turn out to be Polonius, not the Claudius he was expecting.

I want to believe that Hamlet is sane throughout the novel, he speaks so well and wittily, but it isn't to be.  By the end, he's bat-crap crazy.

Oh Captain! My Captain!

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!	5
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
2 O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;	10
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,	15
You’ve fallen cold and dead.
3 My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;	20
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Beyond bringing to mind images of Dead Poet's Society (which I admittedly, have not seen), "Oh Captain! My Captain! is profoundly sad, which it should be, given that it is a elegy.  

The poem was written by Walt Whitman as a response to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln shortly after the Union victory that ended the civil war.  Whitman was a profoundly patriotic man and had an interest in politics.  He supported the North during the war, not necessarily as a result of any particular feelings of animosity towards slavery, but because he supported the concept of an actually united United States.  As a side note, while Whitman had at times opposed slavery in his poetry, he often viewed abolition as an unnecessarily radical concept which had as its only goal the dissolution of the country and was potentially against democracy.  As to leading to dissolution, he may have been justified.  The assassination occurred five days after the Confederate Army surrendered to the Union, right after Lincoln had won the war.

The poem opens with this victory.  Despite all of the hardships, all of the unnecessary death and violence and war, it was finally over.  Best of all it ends not with a broken, fractured America, but with a whole United States, even if it has more corpses now.  But despite all of this, the man who is responsible for this great victory, who had led the Union through this disastrous period and had led it out whole, the so-called Captain, is dead on the floor.  At first the speaker fails to fully recognize this, even though his captain fails to answer him.  The ship is safe but its captain is not.  The speaker continues to exalt the victory despite the death of his captain, believing the death to be merely a dream.  

The poem is characterized by alternating feelings of exultation combined with the death of the captain that achieved this victory.  By this the victory seems all the more sweet and the death all the more final, though both taint each other, in addition to emphasizing each other's traits.

The speaker often speaks to his captain, before and after he realizes he is dead.  The poem even begins with a call to the captain.  It also utilizes apostrophe in addressing the shore and bells in the third stanza: "Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!"  Again a contrast with the captain's death.  The first stanza begins overwhelmingly happy, victory is won!  Stanza two is celebratory, though doesn't seem quite right, and by the time the third roles around, the captain is dead and the speaker knows this.  Of course, each stanza ends with the same words, the captain has fallen cold and dead.

The saddest element is that despite the captain's unflagging hard work, he is unable to enjoy the fruits of his labor, his victory was stolen from him, though his efforts are left to be enjoyed by everyone else.  Seems rather selfless, even if it was done so inadvertently.  

Super-Fun Existentialism Time with Grendel! Yah!

As a person with a lasting interest in philosophy, I have an intense interest in the concepts espoused by both the dragon and Grendel, especially as they contrast with the beliefs of the men in the novel. 

            Grendel begins as a classic existentialist, and as an existentialist, he is a clear proponent of Absurdism, that is, the core concept that life has no inherent meaning outside of that which we as sentient beings prescribe to it.  He sees little or nothing of value in life, and yet continues to live.  He even specifically says that the only way he could die would be in a lunatic fit and jump to his death however I think it would not be so lunatic from his perspective.  In a life that his entirely meaningless and devoid of happiness, especially one consumed by depression, why not jump?  I would almost think that to him it would be preferable to jump, to end his misery that engulfs him so entirely.  But that fact that he chooses to continue his existence gives credence to the idea that Grendel, at least before his meeting with the dragon, is not entirely nihilistic.

            And here we see a key tenet of existentialism that Grendel is ignoring:  Authenticity.  Existentialists believe that people must find oneself and then live by that self.  They believe that the only actions that matter are those that are born of the free will of individuals, and that these actions can cause one to believe in some sort of meaning, and rightfully so.  Grendel has displayed no willingness to seek out a meaning to his life, he simply wallows in his trivial existence.  That is not to say that Grendel has no desire to have meaning, he clearly expresses that he wanted to believe in the Shaper and his words of God and glory.  Grendel is bound by the belief that, and it is this which takes him to nihilism, it is impossible to have any meaning, whether preordained or temporally created.

                Grendel could, for all intents and purposes be the poster child for existentialist despair, the supposed void that those who take similar views fall into.  And, as this relates to the existentialist tenet of despair, the collapse of hope following the destruction of one’s worldview and sense of meaning.  This is said to happen when one’s life takes a drastic turn, say you’re a janitor who closely identifies him/herself with their position, and are fired.  Such a situation leads to despair, depression, etc.  However Grendel does not experience this, he never identifies a role for himself and loses it, he begins by believing that he is meaningless rather than having meaning ripped away from him. 

                I believe in an existentialist existence can be a positive one, because meaning inherited from a divine or natural force is not as powerful as a meaning that comes from within, one that is inherently individual and free.  Without such a meaning, or even a quest to obtain one, Grendel is doomed to suffer his fate, which we all know is to die at the hands of Beowulf, and worse, not just to die, but to die after accomplishing nothing.

A Response to the Poems of Chino and Jane

First up, we have a response to Chino's poem:

Chino's Blog:  http://totheenderstronghold.blogspot.com/

First of all, I really enjoyed your use of a modernist poem, it is from a period I am rather fond of, and because I don’t believe I have the same knack for analyzing them that you seem to possess, I found your analysis very interesting.  The really amazing thing, for me at least, with modernist poems, is that you can be absolutely sure that every single word means something, and that something is debatable, which can lead to several different meanings for different people.

The people in the crowds of the metro have indeed lost the life in themselves, because life isn't supposed to be a set routine, it needs to be changing and always varied, such repetition is suited only for machines at best, and that is what these people are becoming.  No, wait, they’re becoming less than that, they are the shades of the people that once were, and that must mean that they were once alive.  And the only thing that’s sadder than not having something as valuable as life is having that life and then losing it.  And yes, while I believe that the water is this poem serves more to enhance the melancholy of the scene, I still find it refreshing because it is nature, even if it is a dismal presentation of one.  Though the bough too has lost its life, much like the people in the station once had and lost their own.  It contrasts the philosophical loss of life that the people experience with the near actual loss of life of the branch itself.

Overall, I found the poem and your analysis of it fascinating, and moreover, it reminded me of why I like modernist works so much, because of the value of every word and the variable presentations they can make to different individuals.

And now to Jane:

http://clippyscorner.blogspot.com/

I think you sell yourself a bit short when you say that you have found no deeper meaning of the poem, sure, there’s no great metaphysical ideology, but I think that’s the point of the work.  The words tell of the cat’s actions, but it is really the cadence of the poem that fully envelopes you into the situation. 

Through the cadence and the rhythm of the of the poem you get a sense of not just the bland actions of the cat, but a feel for the actual movements in a way that is often understood only by those who have been around cats for a great while.  While I can say that I share no great love for cats (I fear that they and I are doomed forever at an impasse resulting in mutual respect at best), I feel that this, and not prose, best captures the actual movements of a cat, though your description of the grandiosity of their movements comes close.

And I, too, found it interesting that the cat would step into a flowerpot on its way to the pantry.  I am just wondering, why, when there is perfectly good found just round the corner, but an empty flower pot becomes more interesting to the cat   And by the way, a jamcloset is a cellar used in Victorian times to store foodstuffs such as jam that needed the cool and couldn’t be kept in the main kitchen area, not necessarily a pantry, and I think it makes it more interesting visualizing the cat sneaking into the cellar, rather than a door in the kitchen, even if it doesn’t change the meaning of the poem.

Virtue by George Herbert

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
    The bridal of the earth and sky;
The dew shall weep thy fall to night,
    For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue, angry and brave,
    Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye;
Thy root is ever in its grave,
    And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
    A box where sweets compacted lie;
My music shows ye have your closes,
    And all must die

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
    Like seasoned timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
    Then chiefly lives.
-George Herbert

I chose this poem because I found the dichotomy between the world and the virtuous very interesting. The most basic definition of the poem is that everything in the world is doomed to end, even the most beautiful, and only the most virtuous amongst us has the chance to live on. Plus, I thought the wording sounded really pretty :).

The poem obviously has some religion connotations. The only thing that has the ability to survive the ravager that is time is a virtuous soul, and the only way for one to live throughout eternity would be in the afterlife, meaning that you must get to heaven to survive. This makes quite a bit of sense that Herbert these things, as, in addition to being a poet, he was also an Anglican priest.
The poem is composed in four stanzas of four lines each, and in the first three stanzas, he makes a metaphor for the inevitability of death. In each stanza he presents an element of the world in a beautiful way, and then crushes it by explaining its mortality.

The first stanza speaks of the day; it is “so cool, so calm, so bright” words that are certainly positive, it makes the day a good thing, and even the dew weeps at the days lost to night. The day is an element of beauty so wonderous that even inanimate objects weep for the loss of it. And that is the key point, that the day is lost to night. Even the most beautiful is equally susceptible to being quelled by time, and it is this first example of death that sets the theme of the poem.
The second stanza is much the same as the first, it describes something that is both beautiful and fleeting, in this case a rose. And a rose is indeed beautiful, it has a vibrant and daring color, so much so that those who look upon it rashly are apt to weep tears and need to wipe their faces. But then Herbert must mention that the rose is already halfway in its grave, as its roots are in the ground. Yes, the rose is beautiful like the day, but similarly so, it is doomed to die, and it is even closer to its grave than the day is.

The third stanza is a again a repetition of Herbert's formula. He presents the spring as beautiful, even more so than a rose or the day, because it contains both in abundance. Herbert presents the spring as the time of year when everything sweet in the year is compacted into one season, and uses this to say that not just certain things, but everything will die.


 And then the fourth stanza arrives, and joyous day! Something lives! And this something is the virtuous soul, because, unlike the world stuck in its mortal coils, the virtuous soul is immortal, and though all the four things in the poem are described as sweet, it is the virtue that separates the soul from those things that die, from the whole world that must by necessity turn to coal.

Wing Biddlebaum

In class we went over some questions about Wing Biddlebaum that I was meaning to bring up during our Socratic Seminar, however I never had the chance (admittedly partially because of my fear to speak in public), and so I would like to discuss my thoughts on Wing here.

First of all, do I believe that Wing was a homosexual?  Well, I'm somewhat conflicted as far as that goes.  I found it extremely interesting that Wing had tried through his gestures to impart the dream into his students (and George Willard) and that the child that accused Wing of molesting him came upon this idea at night in a dream.  The result of his teaching was that, "Under the caress of his hands doubt and disbelief went out of the minds of the boys and they began also to dream."  A chance occurrence?  I think not.  While I certainly do not believe that Biddlebaum actually molested that young boy, or had any intention of doing so, I believe that something of himself was imparted with his touch along with what he was trying to teach his students.  However inadvertent in may have been, I believe that Wing's touch revealed his homosexuality to his students in such a subtle way that it would only manifest in their dreams.

I am reasonably sure that Wing, or Adolph Myers as he was known is not a molester, as the book rather explicitly says that the boy made it up:  "A half-witted boy of the school became enamored of the young master. In his bed at night he imagined unspeakable things and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts."  He made up his story, and the only relevant things from his fiction are the time and place of his imaginings.  

Wing is also out first look into grotesques, and he embodies many of the traits that we have come to expect in the others of the novel. He is an outcast from the rest of the town, and is very isolated/lonely, with George Willard being the only character that speaks to him on a regular basis.  Additionally, Anderson often has his grotesques lack a fundamental ability to communicate and interact with others, which is obviously one of the factors in their loneliness.  But ironically, Wing once had the ability to interact with others and express ideas well, but he voluntarily gave that up along with the use of his hands because he believed that it led to the accusations of molestation against him.  Wing's truth is a rather obvious one, his obsession with his hands, and it is by his fervent belief that his expressive hands are the cause of all his suffering, and as a result he hides their use, and when he does use them, refrains from using them expressively and to communicate, as he had, but instead he "closed his fists and beat with them upon a table or on the walls of his house."  It is also this "truth" that sets the stage for the rest of the grotesques presented in the novel, and it is against Wing that we are initially forced to make comparisons.