The Obligatory Flashback Post

Wow, the last blog of the year! And what better way to cap of a year of highs and lows than by turning it in five days late? In all seriousness though, I really have enjoyed these blogs, despite what my inability to turn them in on time might suggest. So thank you for providing us a place to put down our thoughts about both the books we read in class and the world around us. Now, onto the blog!
We've read a lot of books this year, probably more than any year of school before. But that's a good thing! It's given me an opportunity to learn that much more. For example, from The Importance of Being Ernest, I learned the importance of being myself. From Things Fall Apart, I was educated about the dangers of cultural relativity. A Thousand Splendid Suns was a moving reminder that we can't be complacent in the fight for women's rights, because the world is not equal, and it will never be unless we try to change that. A Doll's House offered me insight into both the sexism that is inherent even in couples in love and my parent's own marriage, the details of which I'll spare you. The Picture of Dorian Gray's biggest lessons were A) never offer to sell your soul, because someone will take you up on it and B) society's equating appearance with quality of character is both deeply ingrained and deeply wrong, as most things are. Doctor Faustus drove home the "be careful with your soul" point, and also offered words of warning against being greedy and wanting too much. And finally, The Stranger taught us that none of the above matters, because life is one long, meaningless, absurd joke, followed by death. Thanks, Albert Camus.
The bottom line here is that this year of English, despite my failure to ever turn anything in on time, was my favorite of my high school years, and I'm so grateful that we had you to help us see the value in all of the books we read.

Dorian Gray Was Lucky He Was Rich

Oscar Wilde has many interesting things to say in The Picture of Dorian Gray. But one statement in particular caught my attention: "Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating." Although it didn't work out too well for the fascinating Wilde himself, I believe that this line perfectly captures the nature of society, Victorian and modern.
The past ten years provide the perfect examples of the truth in Wilde's words. Take the banking crisis, for instance. How many CEOs, insurers, bankers, hedge-fund managers, traders, and government agents were, at the end of the day, breaking the law? How many illegal acts were committed at the expense of us "peasants" to make sure the "kings of finance" could afford that tenth island, or that seventh Maserati? Quite a few, to put it mildly! Now, were some of them caught? Of course. But how many? Nowhere near the true amount of wrongdoers. But the ones that got away got away for many reasons that I'm not interested in right now. Let's just focus on the wrongdoers that were caught. Bernie Madoff will do just fine.
How would you describe the Bernie Madoff case in one word? Would I be wrong in guessing "scandal"? That's certainly the go-to word whenever somebody rich and famous gets caught doing something outrageously wrong, such as swindling billions of dollars worth of other people's money to line one's own pockets. But say a poor man from...Cleveland, let's say, did something equally outrageously wrong, such as killing his neighbor. If he gets caught, would we call it a scandal? No, of course not. We probably wouldn't ever hear of the case. Why? Because to society it is natural that poor people do bad things. Why did the Bernie Madoff case make such a splash, and why was it considered a heinous scandal? Because society does not believe that rich people do bad things. We watch them go through life surrounded by money and power, and cannot conceive that there would be any traces of the criminal within them. Their aura of respectability is like one of their tailored suits, it comes on and off. But clothes make the man, and the poor can't afford to have their clothes tailored, can they?
Wilde really hit the nail on the head with this observation. The gap between the apathy and derision we offer to poor people who do wrong and the shocked, "How could you?" mentality we adopt when rich people do wrong is telling. It shows that even in our supposedly "progressive" and "liberal" society, money talks. And people are more than willing to listen. For Dorian Gray, undeniably rich and apparently charming Dorian Gray, this works out quite well. His high social standing and monetary resources enable his crimes to go unpunished. His reputation for sin and wrongdoing and decidedly ungentlemanly behavior is met with only a few tuts and a shake of the head. Nobody ever says, "Hm. I bet Dorian's up to some shady, illegal business. Someone should look into that." If anything, trading in his veneer of respectability for one of mystery has given him more social and legal leeway. Because no matter what Dorian gets up to, he is still a rich man with a strong social presence. And who is anyone else to doubt that?

Responsibility: It's Sexism's Policy.

It's not easy being a woman in today's world. Yes, we have, on the whole, way more rights and freedoms than we used to. We are allowed to get divorced, own property, vote, and control our own bodies (novel concept, huh?). But here's the thing: those are legal rights. For every legal restraint women are freed from, for every courtroom victory for the forgotten half of the human race, there is a social trap awaiting us. There are more than legal issues holding women back in today's society; indeed, in any society throughout history, the true oppressors are social responsibilities forced onto women.
 To make my point, let's look at The Awakening. The heroine, Edna, embarks on a journey of self-discovery and empowerment throughout the story. Unsurprisingly, that doesn't fly in 1899 New Orleans. Why not? Merely because 1899 New Orleans society said women were not allowed to exist outside of the shadow of the men in their life. There were, of course, laws that restricted women's rights, but really, the main problems for Edna stem from the culture she's surrounded by. Her desire to stay inside painting, instead of wasting the day chatting to society women she doesn't even like is met with consternation and disapproval by her husband. It's not because there were laws forbidding women from neglecting their perceived socializing duties. It's because there were perceived socializing duties, period. Leonce doesn't visit Doctor Mandelet and go "Hey Doc, I think there's something wrong with Edna. She's started committing crimes and it's starting to freak everybody out." No, he visits the doctor and goes "Hey Doc, I think there's something wrong with Edna. She's neglecting the responsibilities I and everyone else have told her she has to have or she's not a good person, and it's freaking everybody out." It's these preconceived notions of what a woman has to do without question that get Edna into trouble within The Awakening.
Poor Edna can't catch a break in the 21st century either, apparently. As we saw during the Socratic seminar, the general consensus is that a woman only has the freedom to do what she wants in certain situations. There are some things, however, where free will be damned, we've just got to suck it up and do what we're expected to do. Children, for example. Everybody hates Edna (and Nora of A Doll House, too) for leaving their children behind. It doesn't matter that they knew that they weren't going to be able to be the best mother for their kids, or that they did love them and that's why they were leaving. No way. If a woman has kids, a woman must give her entire life away for those kids, end of story. Forgive my language, but that is bullshit of unfathomable depths. Not only is the societal preconception that being a woman automatically makes you a good mother/caregiver dangerous for the freedom and health of women, it's dangerous for the well-being of the poor kids!
That's just one example of how women still aren't equal, even in the 21st century. We still carry the burden that society has shackled to our shoulders: responsibilities. Men are only expected to make something great of themselves. Women are expected to take care of society's needs and fulfill its wants. There's no time left for us to be ourselves. That's what burns me up when people (mostly men, some of whom attend 6th period AP English) sit back and go, "Well, you can vote, can't you? Stop whining that you're still being oppressed." No. It is your job to stop oppressing half of the entire human race. That's your responsibility, men. Can you handle it? Or do you need us to take care of it for you, along with everything else?

In Which I Get The Rug Pulled Out From Under Me, Twice.

Soda, or pop? It's a simple question, with a seemingly simple answer: soda. Unless, of course, you live in western Pennsylvania. Then the answer is clearly pop. So, which is the true answer? If you had asked me an hour ago, I would've replied that there was no true answer, because the difference in vocabulary was simply a difference in culture. How can one culture be more right than the other? They can't, obviously. That part of my answer hasn't changed. However, after reading the excellent article "The Challenge of Cultural Relativism" by James Rachels, I can no longer say that there is no truth, as easy as it that is to say. The soda vs. pop example is obviously not very dramatic, but there are indeed some aspects of life that are right and wrong. To illustrate this concept, let's look at Things Fall Apart, shall we?
While reading this book for the first time, I went through three "stages" of comprehending the text. The first stage was my initial reaction to everything. Okonkwo's multiple wives, his beating of them, the killing of twin babies, etc. It was general culture shock. After a while, I entered what I considered stage two of my reading, which was the "Cultural Relativism" phase. I watched as Okonkwo repeatedly beat his wives for not performing duties I found akin to those a slave would perform, and told myself, "I can't judge these actions, because they're acceptable within the culture they're surrounded by, and it's just different from mine, and that's okay." I watched Okonkwo kill the boy he had come to see as a son in order to cement his manhood, and thought "It's just part of a culture that isn't my own, that's why it seems wrong and I can't blame them for that." But then, I read Rachels' article. That led me to the third stage of Things Fall Apart.
As the article states, there are serious problems with the theory of Cultural Relativity. I believe the foremost among those problems is the false sense of security, if you will, that comes with the theory. If all we ever say is, "We're different, therefore there's no right or wrong here", we allow for wrong to exist when it should not. Things are wrong, as the article points out. Across the board, we as humans, in every society, have deemed murder and lying inherently wrong. But according to the Cultural Relativism theory, nothing can really be "wrong", because everything merely becomes "different", and people cannot be judged for their differences. Having been enlightened to the dangers of fully getting behind the theory of Cultural Relativism, I reexamined some aspects of Things Fall Apart. Certain things that bothered me before, such as leaving the twins in the forest to die, still upset me, but made more sense when I looked into the reasons behind such an act, instead of just saying "Well, it's different, so I don't have to worry about it." If the village believed that twins were a source of evil, doesn't it make sense that in order to protect their society, they would remove this threat? I believe it does. I also believe that under the protection of Cultural Relativity, I was allowing myself to forgive too easily the hand Okonkwo played in murdering Ikemefuna. I had been willing to accept that it wasn't something I could have done, but in a cultural that prized manliness, if Okonkwo needed to take part in killing his foster child, that's just a different culture and I can't judge. Well, as it turns out, I can judge, but not because the culture of the Igbo people is different from my own. I can judge Okonkwo for striking the fatal blow because he willingly participated in murder. I don't care where you're from or what your traditions are, as the article points out, killing people is not accepted by humanity as a whole. Okonkwo's voluntary part in the murder of Ikemefuna is not "different", it is wrong. And just as the article suggests we look past the Cultural Relativity theory to better understand each other, so too should we look past it to better understand literature.

Yes, Virginia, you DO relate to Hamlet.

At this point, this blog post is so late, it shouldn't even be given any credit. I'm just forcing myself to sit down and do it to clear my guilty conscience. Someone else suffering from a guilty conscience is my good friend Prince Hamlet. Hamlet knows all about the emotions that come with letting things go too late: regret, anxiety, and most powerful of all, guilt. Throughout the play, we see the prince assign himself the task of avenging his father's death. It seems  pretty clear cut, but Hamlet struggles to accomplish his goal. It may be frustrating for modern teens reading the play to understand Hamlet's delay in acting. They simply get annoyed by his waffling and toss the book away in disgust, not wanting to "waste" their time reading Shakespeare, least of all Shakespeare in which "nothing happens". But if Hamlet's character was examined a bit more closely by my peers, I believe they'd find they have quite a bit in common with the gloomy prince.
First, let's talk about the regret aspect of Hamlet's character. What, exactly, does he regret? The death of his father, of course. But more than that, Hamlet regrets his own weakness. He regrets the fact that even though he knows (or believes he knows) what he has to do, he can't bring himself to do it. In his admittedly long-winded soliloquies, Hamlet expresses frustration and regret that he struggles to take action against Claudius, bemoaning the fact that a fictional character in a play can "force his soul to his own conceit" faster than he can. This leads in to the next emotion getting in our hero's way: anxiety. One would think that the young, well-liked heir to the throne of a powerful country wouldn't have too much to worry about, but this is a tragedy we're talking about here. Following Hamlet's regret at his plight comes the anxiety. Why hasn't he taken his revenge yet? Did he pass up the only chance he'd ever get to kill his uncle? Is he even capable of avenging his father's murder? Why would his father assign him this task if he couldn't follow through? Does that make him a worthless person, or worse, a worthless son? These are the types of questions I picture flying through Hamlet's head while he hems and haws and schemes and doesn't take action. After all, when something goes wrong, especially one's plans for revenge, we like to look for somebody to blame. And for every cynic who says we only blame others, there are two people like Hamlet who know from experience that the doubt and anxieties never truly leave your own shoulders. Completing Hamlet's vicious trifecta of crippling emotions is guilt. Despite his mandatory heroic flaws, I would argue that Hamlet really is a good prince and son. He recognizes that what Claudius and his mother have done is bad for both Denmark as a nation and the royal family. What child wouldn't be willing to come to the defense of their parent (or carry out a revenge killing in their honor, as the case may be)? That's where Hamlet stumbles into the wicked swamp that is guilt. As Shakespeare makes painfully obvious, Hamlet really wants to do his father's (ghost's) bidding. He wants so badly to kill his traitorous uncle and set things right in Denmark. And as we see, he does, eventually. But it takes him so long. And all along the way, he's hating himself for it. The responsibility placed upon his shoulders is a cut and dry deal, yet he cannot bring himself to do it, and that's when the guilt starts piling on. His father's well-being in the afterlife is riding on Hamlet, and he's failing. There could be no worse feeling for the poor prince, and to me, that's where the tragedy in this play truly lies: watching this young man fall apart, only receiving a Pyrrhic victory for his struggles.
So we've established that Hamlet is a pretty miserable guy. Understandably so. But what does that have to do with connecting modern youngsters to this 400 year old play? Everything. Because as much as we teenagers moping through English class don't want to admit, we are all Hamlet. People don't change; regret, anxiety, and guilt are all emotions to which those of us are accustomed. I'll use myself as an example. Without boasting, I am a very good student. I love my classes, and I want to do well in them; much like Hamlet was a good prince, who loved his father very much, and wanted to do right by him. Yet sometimes, the pressure I feel and the workload I am given causes me to make a mistake and miss assignments. Despite my best efforts, I often struggle to make them up due to intense feelings of guilt, shame, etc. One would think that feeling guilty would encourage one to redress the issue sooner, but for me at least, it just adds to the quagmire and slows everything down. My point that I'm attempting to make here is that everyone can relate to the tragic hero of Hamlet, because the emotions he feels and expresses throughout the play are ones that everyone, especially teens in high school, have felt before.