maressa’s Blog

The play The Importance of Being Earnest written by Oscar Wilde, is an illustration of the life in the Victorian Era, representing any class but the upper class. The writer critizes this society full of rules and paradoxes, in which what matters the most is the “style”, the “position of you chin”, “how you eat muffins” and so on.

In this society, men and women are expected to act according to the social rules. Specially upper class women on Victorian period were brought up to be elegant, good wives and mothers. They were taught how to play the piano, how to sing, how to paint, to speak French or German, to dance etc. All these subjects were suppose to make them elegible ladies to be married. In fact it was all women were suppose to be. They could not be professionals, althought we know about some brave women who carried out her studies. In general, they were not allowed to express their opinion and should only take care of their families, behaving well among other ladies.

In the play we have Gwendolen Fairfax and Cecily Cardew as an example of these kind of woman. They were brought up in the way women used to be in that time, but, although they are part of that hypocritical society, they find their ways of breaking some gender rules over the play.

Gwendolen, in Act 1, for example, expresses her opinion quite directly to Jack. She says: “Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me so nervous.”

Cecily also expresses herself in a direct way, although she is really ingenious in many of her positions. In Act 2 we can see how she talks about her subjects of study and also about her ideal man.

“ But I don’t like German. It isn’t at all a becoming language. I know perfectly well that I look quite plain after my German lesson.” “ Horrid Political Economy! Horrid Geography! Horrid, horrid German!”

“Oh,I don’t think I would care to catch a sensible man. I shouldn’t know what to talk to him about.”

Both, Gwendolen and Cecily, at the end decide who they will marry. Actually Cecily decides herself that she would marry Jack’s brother ( who, in fact doesn’t exist). The reason she decides has all to do with what her uncle Jack told Cecily about his fake brother: a wicked and bad brother. In Act 3 Gwendolen goes to the Manor House to see Jack without the consent of her parents. As we can see Cecily and Gwendolen have their own expectations about the ideal man. Eventhough they were brought up to be like porcelain dolls, they take the directions of their own lives and in fact, they do what they want to do. It seems that they learnt very well how to act like society wants in one way, and how to use to make use of society hypocrisy to find ways in which they can decide their lives.

One could argue that they are full of trivialities and immature girls, but none can deny that Gwendolen and Cecily found ways of expressing themselves, what in the Victorian period, was a great challenge for any woman.

Glass Menageries is a play written by Tennesse Williams in the 40s. It is a four character memory play and has one of these characters as a narrator: Tom. He recalls the days of global depression in which he and his family lived, what can be taken as a strong reference to the economical crash in 1929 and the post war world. Everyone in this family has something in commum: the necessity to scape of real world somehow. Tom tries to overcome his frustations by goingto the movies every night. Amanda, Tom’s mother, makes a lot of efforts to keep her idea of an old world which doesn’t exist anymore. A time when her life was different, with some glamour and not so poor as it became. In this way, she still clings to whatever powers vivacity and charm can muster.  There is also Laura, Tom’s sister, who lives in another imaginary world composed basicaly for her victrola and her little glass animals collection. Both are part of Laura’s private world and represents the escape and the fragility of Laura, who is slightly crippled and has an extra-sensitive mental condition.

The fragility of Laura is going to be the central aspect of the play, and the fights between Tom and Amanda, the financial difficulties, and also her mother’s pressure to get her married as soon as possible, emphazise her fragility. After her mother finding out that Laura was not going to the bussiness school, it becomes clear how Laura’s difficulties to deal with reality were strong. She just couln’t face reality. In scene II, we have a conversation between Amanda and Laura in which she is called Blue Roses:

“Amanda: Why did he call you such a name as that?

Laura: When I had that attack of pleurosis – he asked me what was the matter when I came back. I said pleurosis – he thought that I said Blue Roses! So that’s what he always called me after that.”

It is through a misunderstanding that Laura gets her nickname. Although it sounds like a weird way to get a nickname, it becomes, together with the glass collection and the victrola, another symbol to represent Laura’s condition. She is as fragile as glass, beautiful as a rose and depressed as the blue colour, which is often used to express the idea of sadness. But we could say that she is also calm as a blue sky, pure and transparent as a blue water, but also mysterious and immense somehow.

A blue rose can’t be found naturaly. It can be created through genetics modifications, what shows how rare is to find it. It is just as rare as Laura. She is not a commum person and it is like as if she was “done” by her way of sensing life. 

Jim, the fourth character, invited by Tom to dinner with family, says that Laura is a kind of old fashioned girl, and he complements saying that it was so difficult to find very shy girls in those days. Jim touches Laura’s heart, although he is quite naivy in his world view. He also says that her problem is a complex of inferiority, trying to “fix” it as if it was a matter of deciding to be different.

When she takes the glass unicorn to show Jim, she says very significant words:

“ - Oh, be careful – if you breath it breaks!” ( Scene 7)

Also, after it was broken:

“   Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are. [...] the things fall of them.” (Scene 7)

As we said before, the symbols used to draw Laura’s character work together in order to describe her characteristics. The fragility of a rare blue rose and a glass is evident and as Laura said the nature of the glass prevent things on being holded on it (as Laura is inside -she also can’t hold anything inside her to make her different). The blue rose is just like that, it is, in itself, unnatural and the beauty and fragility are not something made up. It is how it is in its essence and there is nothing to be done about it. Glasses break easily, blue roses are unnatural and Laura is all of it. In this way, I think she could be perfectly called  “glass blue roses”.

As soon as we are introcuced to lady Macbeth in the play we are close to draw a femme fatale who is so heartless and dark . she could be easily seen as a beautiful witch. We first see her when she is reading the news about the witches salitationsa nd the prophecies. With a sudden determinations she decides to amke the promises come true. So here we can ask ourselves: What made her decide so fast to make the prophecies come true? What kind of pre-exitencial ambitious was it?

It is just one of the moments in the palu that makes me think that lady Macbeth was as guilty as Macbthe in the murder of the king Duncan.

After receiving the news, she instigated her husband to kill Duncan and although she seemed to be quite naivy about the consequences, she wanted so much to become queen, no matter it would take.

I think that Lady Macbeth just didn’t take the sword to kill Duncan.  It had been her intention to kill Duncan and she didn’t do it because Duncan resembled a lot her father. It offers us a good insight about lady Macbeth’s character: Was she taken by emotions when she saw Duncan sleeping? She had been demonstrating so much strength and the resemblance of her father puts her away from killing Duncan herself.

The power of ambition made her look into Evil, by herself, before she met Macbeth. In act I scene 5 she says: ” Hurry home so I can persuade you and talk you out of whatever is keeping you from going after the crown”.

I keep asking myself if she isn’t guiltier than her husband once I think that if she wanted him to not kill Duncan she would have had enough possibilities on persuading him to not assassinate the king. Although he also looked into evil  and did that alone after he killed Duncan, I think Lady Macbeth played an important part on the crime and since the first moments after they are crowded king she starts to show the naiveness of her mind and her guilty appears, showinh that she is not that femme fatale from the beginning of the play but a lot of a mother and a wife.

MACBETH AND LADY MACBETH  – King and Queen of  Scotland

To Counter Malthus – Margaret Avison

None us in this so
burdened earth has known
how to live, let alone
who is too many.

Presence, each day
Afresh , you give a
Purifying signal to
Sting us alive.

Vast territories and seashores
still bear these thronging
strangers. May none die
without somebody caring.

To know even one other is
Costly. And being known.
Alive, among so many
more now? a concern…

Hunger makes men desperate, threatens
to congeal the quandary. Yet
Presence abides untouched
in the churn of Quantity.

In this poem Margaret Avison counters the ideas of the British economist Thomas Malthus on population growth. In 1789 Thomas Mathus published anonymously the first edition of his essay. His fatalism was considered the only truth for many people. Malthus considered the misery an inevitable end to human beings, once the population would grow faster than the food production. Trough out the years his catastrophic previsions were considered with no serious fundaments, mainly because of the techniques that promoted an increase of productivity.

A first aspect that caught my attention on Avison’s poems is how she takes an actual world problem and makes it work trough her verses as important as it is, but also in a way we would have never thought about. In the verse she put every single person in the same position when se says: “None of us”; and also at the same place: “in this burdened earth”. I think this is a way of criticizing Malthus, saying that he was not different of us, and he was living in the same troubled world.

She continues the first stanza saying that nobody knows how to live here.The use of comma before the “let alone who is too many” is as if she is saying “we don’t have the right of deciding about who is too many” and of course, as she is countering Malthus, neither does he.

The link from the first and second stanza is the change of focus. She starts the poem focusing on us, on our incapacity of understanding life and letting people alone. Then in the second stanza she evokes the “Presence”, who is a reference of God. The actions in this stanza are all related to the Presence who, each day, gives us a signal to force us to be alive.

In the third stanza the subject of the action “bear” is the “Vast territories and seashores”. It reminds me of the crowed places around the world such as China, India, USA, Pakistan, Japan and also Brazil. They are all “vast territories”, and the poet seems to give them voice on her poem when she says that they kind of tolerate this multitude of strangers. She uses the term stranger giving attention to what we could call the only real problem in the world: the lack care and love on the relationships. As she says the vast territories and seashores I recall a bible verse in the book of Romans, chapter 8 verse 22: “We know that the whole of creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” And before, on verse 19 we have: “The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.” I think that Avison touches in this point. All the pain in the earth is waiting for the action of the God’s son. What should not be a spiritual revelation, but a way to be revealed, shown, so everybody could see. She hopes that “none die without somebody caring”.

It is nice to see the aesthetic process of creation that Avison uses on her poem. She started talking about people living in this earth. She evokes God and considers Him the One who would help us. Then she talks about the earth again – territories and seashores – and the people living in this earth. At the end of the third stanza she focuses on people relationship. The next stanza is dedicated to this theme: people’s relationship. She says it has a high cost “to know one other and to be known”. She relates this difficult in having relationships with one person to even thinking about being “alive, among so many more”. If it is so costly to have relationship with one person, how can we do it with the whole world? She ends the verse with the word concern as if telling us that it is something to think deeply.

In the stanza four the poet continues with the process and before closing the aesthetic circle of people-earth-God- people – people -earth -God, she talks about the hunger of men, which according to Malthus is the result of population growth, but according to Avison it is the result of men selfishness. The despair provoked by the hunger fixes the problem, not solving it. So, we seem to be in an unsolved situation, but she states on her last verse that the Presence is still “untouched” among the “quantity” or, in other words, among all of us, until we choose to touch and to be touched by this Presence in order to change something in our world.

“A moment the wild swallows like a flight
Of withered gust-caught leaves, serenely high,
Toss in the windrack up the muttering sky.”

On these first three verses we have an image that represents the moment before the thunderstorm. The birds flying as a metaphor of how the “withered […] leaves” fly and as they, the birds, are “toss” in the sky, we can see the movement of the birds, just before the storm, and the sky that is being prepared to “shout”, but now just “muttering”. It implies in an image, but also in some kind of sounds, not loud sounds, but as if it was coming from far away.

”The leaves hang still. Above the weird twilight,
The hurrying centres of the storm unite
And spreading with huge trunk and rolling fringe,”

While the leaves continue “hanging still”, other movements are happening, especially on the sky that coloured with a “weird twilight”. I ask myself what colours would be this and I guess it is like a sunset not very lighted, but a bit grey, and dark. On the second and third verse of this part, we have this strong movement of the storm, which is its centres “hurrying” and “spreading”. It seems to be a movement on the sky, when the clouds are getting together, as if they are dancing all around. I am not sure but I imagine that these movements implies in a sensation, as if we could fell the wind on our face, on our body.

“Each wheeled upon its own tremendous hinge,
Tower darkening on.”

The words “wheeled” and “hinge” give us the format of the movement that is happening on the sky. The moments that happen before the rain is like the background of a paint process. In fact the description made by the poet seems to create the picture as if he was painting it. When the poetic voice says: “tower darkening on”, it represents the colour, but also the grandiosity of the nature, the thunderstorm is like a tower. Up to here we could not identify anything but the movement of the sky.

And now from heaven’s height,
With the long roar of elm-trees swept and swayed,

Just from this point on is that we can see other movements happening. The wind that came from the “heaven’s height” brought a sound when it reached the elm- three (a “long roar of elm trees”), making them swept and swayed.

And pelted waters, on the vanished plain
Plunges the blast.

Now we have the climax of the poem. We can almost hear when the poet says “on the vanished plain plunges the blast”. This is the moment of the thunder, the instant of the explosion, the loudest sound and lightest flash.

Behind the wild white flash
That splits abroad the pealing thunder-crash,

The poet continues, as if going to paint the details of this picture. Built with the senses of sight and hearing, the “white flash” mentioned above, that is separating and pealing the ‘thunder-crash’, holds behind itself another scene.

Over bleared fields and gardens disarrayed,
Column on column comes the drenching rain.

It is behind the “white flash” that the obscure field and the disorganized gardens receive over them the rain that comes as in “column on column”. It implies in a wonderful image created from up to down in order to describe how the thunderstorm starts and how it finishes, having its sequent movements on the fields, gardens and trough the rain.

This poem has in its process of creation a linear composition as we can see trough the analysis. Almost all the parts of the poem stimulate our senses of vision and hearing but we can also talk about feeling, about the sensation of being touched by the wind and by the rain, as if we could be in the garden waiting for the storm. In the formal aspect it is a sonnet and its rhymes follows as: abbaabbadeffde.

Welsh History – R.S. Thomas

We were a people taut for war; the hills
Were no harder, the thin grass
Clothed them more warmly than the coarse
Shirts our small bones.

· The poet starts the poem bringing an image of Welsh people as a kind of people who are used to wars. This might be an ancient image from the Celtics. The poetic voice is the Welsh people voice and it says that “the hills were no harder” what can be read as a comparison between the Welsh people difficulties and the hills, because the “thin grass clothed them [the hills] more warmly than the coarse shirts our [the Welsh’s] small bones. The tone here is kind of a self admiration, what can make us think of a difficult but also glorious past, of active people, with the desire of conquering more and more.

We fought, and were always in retreat,
Like snow thawing upon the slopes
Of Mynydd Mawr; and yet the stranger
Never found our ultimate stand
In the thick woods, declaiming verse
To the sharp prompting of the harp.

· The poetic voice continues using the image of the war relating it to the Welsh people. In my opinion the tone is the same, the poetic voice says that they fought and their strategies, even when they didn’t bring then the victory, it were their way of fighting. It seems to me that they were always in defense of their land. I am thinking of this “ultimate stand”, and I can’t stop myself on thinking of the moment of death. The prompting of the harp is connecting these things on my mind. If it is like I am thinking, the poetic voice can be mentioning how they concerned about their image and kept their image secure. Or on the other hand it can be a war position and as something they have never done. It is kind of a confusing part!

Our kings died, or they were slain
By the old treachery at the ford.
Our bards perished, driven from the halls
Of nobles by the thorn and bramble.

· Here we have an abrupt change of image and the picture now is the destruction of the people. In this part we have the Welsh people without a king and a bard, so it means that they don’t have a political leader nor an artistic voice, probably the voice of their culture. It gives us such a devastating situation because they can’t trust anymore (treachery), they don’t have an assured way. Welsh people’s past is represented now as rupture, what they were before and after the lost of their political and artistic voice.

We were a people bred on legends,
Warming our hands at the red past.

· It is explicit here that this rupture on their past brought them at this sense of being paradoxical, contradictory, because they were “bred on legends” from that first glorious past. The red past, is probably the past full of blood, a reference to the many wars they had won, the memories of being the conqueror, not the conquered ones.

The great were ashamed of our loose rags
clinging stubbornly to the proud tree
Of blood and birth, our lean bellies
And mud houses were a proof
Of our ineptitude for life.

· Now the poetic voice is still describing this past that is not glorious but ashamed. I think that the “great” might be the great past or the great ancient people who were part of the glorious days and were ashamed of the dominated people and their “loose rags”. It is interesting how the poet connects the dominated Welsh people to their genealogy, “the proud tree of blood and birth”, and it was as if they were being hold on tightly to this tree, in a way to make them see who they are, where they came from. The poet says that their “mud houses” and their “lean bellies” “were a proof of their ineptitude for life”. How sad it is to be confronted with your past and admit that you are not able to have any attitude forward life.

We were a people wasting ourselves
In fruitless battles for our masters,
In lands to which we had no claim,
With men for whom we felt no hatred.

· The poetic voice seems to give a step in the direction of the present, leaving the idea of the glorious past and the domination behind for a while and looking to them as if these two pasts didn’t exist. Pushing the focus to the right place, where they were living, what they were doing, with whom they were arguing. This part is giving attention to the central question of Welsh people lives.

We were a people, and are so yet.

· Here we are! This verse changes the time, and with a bit of luck, the hope of the Welsh people. The poetic voice realizes that they are still a PEOPLE, even with the problems raised before. The greatest thought for the present is: WE ARE A PEOPLE.

When we have finished quarrelling for crumbs
Under the table, or gnawing the bones
Of a dead culture, we will arise
And greet each other in a new dawn
Armed, but not in the old way.

· This last part is full of expectations of what Welsh people will have in their future. The first three verses still talking about their present that is a situation of “quarrelling for crumbs under the table” and gnawing the bones of a dead culture”. The first metaphor is the subjugation that Welsh people are still under, the economical, political forces that come from the England. The second metaphor talks about the idea so criticized by R.S. Thomas that is the appealing of the glorious past on Welsh’s mind. The last two verses give a celebration image, but a moderated celebration, in which they “greet each other”. The poet uses the word ARMED. He says that the Welsh will be armed, “but not in the old way”, what means that they wont need the old arms, they will be armed by their consciousness of who they are, what are theirs, where they want to get, and who they want to became.

Here we are! New needs, new tools, and new expectations. Learning in a technology based enviroment is an exciting proposal. I don’t know about you, but I feel stimulated for an education that takes the path of our globalized world and makes our lives immersed on learning.

I hope that we build a space where our words will take us to new worlds. Our lives connected not only by an obligation of writing but specially by the desire of considering, respecting, understanding the Other, and consequently getting a clearer view of who we are.

Welcome you all!

Maressa Leque