So not only did I just remember that I was supposed to post way past the 48hour thing, but I can't remember which post I signed up for, because I'm the worst kind of human being. Soooo I'm just going to post on all three of them and hope that kind of makes up for it at least a little bit.
The Angel in the House
My first thought reading this poem was why, oh why, oh why is chivalry so dead? Lemme tell you, if any guy EVER said that it was me who made him a noble man and that all he wanted to do was write poems about how beautiful I was for the rest of his life (especially if those poems were actually songs played on an acoustic guitar and he sang to me with piercing blue eyes and a sexy accent...but whose getting picky here?), I'd probably husband him on the spot. Or jump his bones. Either or. But then I read the poem a second time and I found myself being a little offended. The way I took it (which could be totally wrong because I do that sometimes) was that he was saying he wanted to sing her praises because she was the perfect, conformed wife. He never really says WHY he loves her so much, except to said she is worthy as a "Maid and Wife." He also comments that she is meek, and that women just wish to be desired. It took me back for a second. Like, are you saying all these nice things because you love her and her flaws? Or are you saying all these things because she's conformed to the perfect ideal image of a wife? And even better, he's trying to make his wife almost like a model to other woman. She is the perfect wife: she is submissive and meek and you should all be just like her because that's what it takes to be an angel like her. Ummm....how about no? I guess back during this time period, she would be the perfect wife because of all these things, but it'd be nice if he loved her for her instead of because she knows how to clean his shirts the right way and be seen and not heard. But I guess that'd be too much to ask for.
Wow....when did I become such a feminist...?
Porphyria's Lover
Soo the poem starts off on a dark and stormy night in a cottage in the middle of nowhere. Of course, I'm either expecting a) the mass murderer of the town wielding a giant, scary axe or B) Hagrid, bringing Harry his squished eleventh birthday cake. But I learn that both my theories are wrong as a girl with a name I cannot for the life of me pronounce does not walk, but glides into the room. She goes around and spreads cheeriness and happiness to all as she builds a fire and makes the cottage go from sad and dark to warm and safe. She has the classic blue eyes and pale skin thing going for her, along with her "yellow hair", something that sends up the "It's just like that damned green light in the Great Gatsby! It's a sign! It's a sign!" part of my brain because it mentions her yellow hair not once, but THREE times, so I figure I should pay attention to it. In my head, I'm also thinking she has the typical features of an angel. So then, not only does she strip the cabin of darkness, but she quite literally strips herself of the outside world as well. She goes over to the guy and starts to soothe him with her bare body (because we all know that literature believes that sex is the ONLY key to happiness) and she starts telling him how much she loves him. He realizes that she represents all that is pure and good, and that in expressing her love and devotion to him, that means all that is pure and is good is currently his. The problem is, he thinks, that she could only temporarily represent all that is pure and is good. She did just come in from the rain and storm, the horrors of the outside world. They could afflict her, and then she'd no longer be so pure. But she is in this moment. So obviously, the natural reaction? Let's kill her. That's obviously what I would do too (sarcasm, people, just in case there was any doubt). If this girl isn't open to all the horrible things in the world, then she'd just be pure forever, even though she's not really living, right? He's doing something so dark by killing her, but he's also doing something to try and keep the goodness. But the thing that strikes me most though is the way he chooses to kill her. He uses her yellow hair (GREEN LIGHT. GREEN LIGHT.) which I took to be the true representation of her purity because he was saying how she spread it "o'er all", to kill her.He uses good to kill the good. I had a really deep life moment here, trying to think this through and of course, I had a ridiculous amount of trouble putting my jumbled life questions into words. If you use good wrongly to keep good, is it still wrong? Obviously I'm not saying that choke a girl with her own hair is perfectly a-ok, but like, outside of that. Especially since we all know killing is against God's will, but God did not frown upon them after the speaker did it. The way I kind of thought about it was like with a soldier. You use a good soldier to kill another good soldier to keep good people safe. That's probably not the best example and I'm sure I'll be randomly spitting other examples at people who have no idea what I'm prattling on about now all day tomorrow, but I think it works. Regardless, it blew my mind a little. Food for thought (and for my stomach unfortunately because I enjoy eating almost as much as I enjoy thinking about deep life stuff, and the two together is just fantastic. Thanks for the calories, Browning.)
Aurora Leigh
So I'm only going to write about the first book of Aurora Leigh or else this blog post will be the longest blog post to exist and I'll still be typing it up in class tomorrow with no sleep and about five coffees (so basically any normal day in my life). So in the first book, Aurora's father dies and she is shipped off to live with her aunt in England, abandoning her lovely home in Italy. So then we got some comparisons of Aurora and her aunt dealing with birds, which of course I fell in love with because they were such cool comparisons. Aurora's Aunt was a caged bird, which was super interesting because usually I feel myself pitying to the caged bird because the caged bird normally just wants to be free. But in this instance, the caged bird doesn't know what its like to be free. It thinks that what is expected of it should be good enough and that it should be happy with what it has, especially since it is just given clean water and food and it's trapped from all the harm behind the bars of its cage. Aurora is the wild bird, free to experience and free to live. And now she's being brought to the conformed lifestyle. And then the poem basically turns into the stuff hidden in between the lines of The Angel in the House.The aunt tries to make Aurora into the perfect little christian girl. She sews for skill instead of leisure or creativity, she learns fact instead of beauty, she learns that she can teaching thinking and can comprehend thinking but she's not allowed to actually think. And so, while her aunt is trying to make her the vision of a perfect Angel, Aurora finds herself in her own personal cage of hell. And you knew it was going to be that way from the beginning, when Aurora tried so hard to describe her aunt as loving and her aunt is actually kissing her with cold lips and being described as wearing dark clothes and basically being a stuck up bitch. She takes away everything that is actually a normal angelic quality of Aurora as well: her curls, her love for nature, her happy-go-lucky, appreciative and loving personality, etc.
Oh, and then I got so excited because there was an allusion to lime tree bower and nature always being there pure and good and wise and I recognized and understood it before I even read the footnote! It really is the little things that make you happy.
So my big take on this poem was how interchangeable heaven and hell can be. What was Aurora's (and most sane people's) personal hell was her Aunt's glorious form of heaven. And what was Aurora's heaven was to her aunt the equivalence of the worst kind of hell (aka my world lit class, but I never actually said that...). But it just makes you think again about how everyone is different and that really nothing is completely just one thing. Like, the color blue isn't just the color blue but its a bunch of shades of different greens and it could represent so many different things. And this pretzel didn't just show up in my hand covered in hummus-y goodness; it has a story and a path it has taken to get to where it is now. And good and evil aren't just good and evil, heaven and hell aren't two separate and solid entities.
I think that's about all I've got in me. But hopefully I'll post for Jane Eyre tomorrow night, which I should probably just sharpie on my forehead because I'll bet good money I forget again. Guess its a good thing I'm cute on occasion. See you all in class!
I'd have to say that I totally agree with your critique on "Angel in the House." I mean even the title says so much about what he thinks of his wife, which a typical Victorian way of thinking - a wife who tends to the kids and the taking care of the house and is not much more. "So meek, unlike our own" On the surface it seems so sweet that someone could be so in love with this wife that he precedes to write this poem singing her praises. But like you said, the second time you read it you catch little snippets that make you say "wait, what?" And it seems like most of Patmore's contemporaries followed that pattern too - they liked it in the beginning until big bad Woolf came and ripped the it apart. I just am still wondering what the wife's reaction was to this whole thing.
ReplyDeleteYour post on "Angel in the House" had me laughing out loud, especially with that feminist comment at the end. But anyways, I also had the same experience with this poem. When I first read it, I was like damn.. he's good. I believe that Patmore definitely displayed women in a positive aspect throughout the whole poem. He used many strong positive descriptive words, which is obviously what we first picked up on when reading this poem. But then, those "simple" terms popped up and made me wonder if maybe Patmore had a different message that he was trying to portray. Honestly, I didn't read the paragraph at the top of the page until after I read the poem a couple times, and even your blog post, but once I did, it was obvious that he was not presenting women in the best light. I guess, due to the time period, this ideal of women was normal.. and I found it very funny that Patmore's contemporaries favored it. But, thankfully, it fell out of favor due because feminist critics stepped up to the plate and exposed this poem for what it really was.
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