31 May 2009
Beloved I / Andy Warhol Presents Flesh For Frankenstein
Please post your longer responses here, and feel free to incorporate any of the secondary readings from last week (especially "How Deep is Your Goth?" if you're responding to the film), as well as Shelley's novel, the Hoffmann tale, etc. etc. if you like. If you'd like to stick to the respond to one sentence format, feel free, though I'd like these longer responses to be structured around a provisional argument or claim.
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Gothic remains non, anti, and counter by definition, always asserting that the conventional values of life and enlightenment are actually less instructive than darkness and death…
ReplyDeleteThis quote is an excerpt from Gilda Williams’ essay entitled “How Deep is Your Goth?” This particular definition helps me, as a reader, understand what qualifies literature as “gothic,” as opposed to not. This, I confess, has been a recent musing of mine: What makes literary masterpieces, like Beloved and Frankenstein, related, other than the infamy of their female authors? What connects these works, and others like it, are their intuitiveness, their psychic femininity, and with that insight comes a leaning towards the disparity and grievance. Women, who are notoriously the more intuitive sex, consequently sacrifice enlightenment for personal haunting; that is to say, I know a lot more women who are haunted by “ghosts” than their sexual counterpart. Therefore it is no wonder that female writers have a pre-disposition towards the gothic: upholding the power of the dead over that of the living, intertwining life-and-death so that they
cannot be unraveled. Women have many unspoken obligations that come uninvited along with gender: our bodies, our children, our husbands, our families, all “instruct” (as Williams put is) our existences more than our conventions could hope to. Williams, in her aforementioned quote, herein addresses how the female therefore, and her otherworldliness, is the lifeblood of the gothic. and spells it out for the modern reader, helping her draw signifiers form modern literature and connect them to their leather-bound foremothers.
I think that the way that in which Nathanael is attracted to Olympia in “The Sandman” reveals something in the attractions that we see in both Frankenstein and Beloved.
ReplyDeleteIt was a little surprising that Nathanael could think of Klara as being mindless, and it was doubly surprising at a second glance to hear him say to Klara, “You damned, lifeless automaton;”! And then, Nathanael says of Olympia, “How beautiful, how profound is her mind! Only you, only you truly understand me.” This seems utterly backward. I think that Nathanael is blind to the actual qualities of the women (and robots) that he is attracted to because he only uses he relationships as a way to focus on himself. He rejects Klara because she rejects his creative efforts; he enjoys Olympia because she will never have anything to say back to him. My point is that he uses relationships as a way to look at himself at the expense of being aware of the true qualities of those around him.
I think Frankenstein’s relationship with his creation is similar in that Frankenstein’s feelings towards the monster often mirror the feelings he has for himself. While he has no shortage of rage towards the creature for the murders of his family and friends, Frankenstein is also filled with guilt and fear that we also see in the creature. The creature’s final monologue is effective in conveying that the creature has not been a emotionless murderer but is filled with many of the same feelings of doubt and guilt that Frankenstein has been troubled with for the entire novel. The most physical of the mirroring between Frankenstein and his creation is when Frankenstein destroys the unfinished body of the creature’s potential mate. This action leads to the death of Elizabeth; one potential mate for another. But yet, Frankenstein is almost entirely blind to the creature’s feelings while focusing exclusively on his own.
Paul D’s attitude towards Sethe seems to function in a similar way. When Sethe describes her back as a tree, Paul D begins to think of his experiences at Sweet Home with his fellow slaves rather than what Sethe’s feelings and thoughts are about having a mess of scars on her back. After copulation, Paul D thinks, “Now there was a man, and that was a tree. Himself lying in the bed and the ‘tree’ lying next to him didn’t compare.” While Paul D has mixed feelings towards trees and what it means to be a man, they are almost entirely derived through consideration of his own experiences rather than through a consideration of Sethe.
I suspect that Sethe has strong capabilities for empathy but it is buried underneath all the trauma she has experienced. On the other hand, these men are selfish inconsiderate jerks.
On another note, I have some thoughts about Flesh for Frankenstein that I don't want to take up class time with but that I absolutely need to get off my chest.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I have issues with everything about the Frankenstein's wife-sister. Her complete lack of eyebrows was infuriating; in each of her scenes I couldn't tear my eyes away from her bare brow. Furthermore, she must be the most insensitive character in all of film. When Nicholas is like, "Yeah, last night I got really drunk and my friend's head got cut off and I just finished burying his decapitated body," she's like, "Oh, too bad, now come to bed with me." Yeah, when a guy's best friend has just been murdered and his blood is still drying, that's the most appropriate time to make sexual advances.
Second, in the scene where Frankenstein is digging around in the female monster's body, we get it, alright? His hand is having sex with her gallbladder. This is obvious. Why, then, must we be forced to watch him mount her immediately afterward? Was he not able to finish the job? And what's with the obsession with the gallbladder?
Third, in the final scene where Frankenstein meets his death, how the heck was he impaled without falling forward? The monster was definitely not moving fast enough to spear him cleanly.
(warning: all caps ahead)
Furthermore, Frankenstein's motivation for creating the monsters is completely nonsensical. Supposedly he wants to create a new race that will obey him. Guess what buddy? If all you've done is mix and match body parts, YOU HAVEN'T MADE ANY KIND OF NEW RACE. If he wants to consider these monsters to be a new race because they are made up of different parts of different people, fine. But the offspring of these monsters are NOT GOING TO BE STITCHED TOGETHER. Surely Frankenstein's great scientific mind knows this? And why are Serbians the best? Is this Frankenstein an allegory for Hitler?
And Otto? Dude, seriously? Why did poor Olga have to die? And what's with the tongue?
Oh, and why couldn't the monster let his friend down from the chains before he ripped his own guts out? Was this movie the inspiration for Mortal Kombat?
“I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running – from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Garner: it cost too much! Do you hear me? It cost too much. Now sit down and eat with us or leave us be” (Morrison 18).
ReplyDeleteOne of the themes most pronounced in the book is the perverse effect the slavery had on the formation of African American families. The book is filled with the examples of people displaced in time and place – the people carrying in them their longing for a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves – a network of family ties. The image of a tree planted on Sethe’s back seems to have absorbed the tragedy of her life – it is a brutal and inhumane way to “paint” a family tree. This “tree” represents a scar both on the body and soul of a woman who attempts to free her children and herself from the bounds of slavery. As a mother, Sethe is a natural “trunk” of the family, a link that holds together memories of the past and is able to weave them together into a cohesive tale of a family suffering. She fought hard to rid her children and herself of the misery of Sweet Home; however, her quest for freedom has been laid out with tough decisions. She does carry a family tree on her back, but as her skin is hardened and insensitive – dead to the touch, so is the tree itself: it belongs to the past - like the child whom Sethe left behind. Her determination to give freedom to her family must have been bigger than life if it drove her to end her child’s life. Now the deceased child in a ghost form comes back to haunt the mother’s house. On the one hand, we have a “dead tree” representing Sethe’s family which stayed in the past; on the other hand, we have Beloved who has come out of the past to claim her mother. And Denver, a living daughter, is a link between the two, the only “branch” that stayed with Sethe - the others either dead or left her long ago. She may have escaped her torturers and rescued her children but the price of freedom turned out to be too high: her own children have become afraid of her; other people judged the soundness of her decision and, finally, her motherly heart bears a burden almost too heavy to continue her very existence. It is impossible to understand what she felt in the shed cutting her child’s throat to prevent it from future misery. It seems inhuman and, as later Paul D says, hers was not the only way, but who can judge her decision? Motherly love and quest for freedom are closely intertwined in the book and these themes seem to carefully lead us to the question: is life in slavery better than no life at all?
“If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place- the picture of it- stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there, outside my head…. If you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you.”
ReplyDeleteSethe’s thoughts, ideas and memories are talked about as if they are physical things. And why not? The memories are made out of physical things: her husband, children, earrings, even her wedding dress that she had to disassemble immediately after she wore it- all exist in this metaphysical state where the once-alive overlaps with the yet-to-be-born. Her past will outlive her by the virtue that it is already gone. Her past is as much in front of her as it is behind her, and yet her presence has nothing to do with it. It is as if she has given birth to it, and like a child, it exists with or without its parent. Her past is not a part of her, but it is a separate animal, capable of interfering in the lives of others, just as anyone else’s past may cross her. Baby Suggs illustrates this point when she says (in one way or another) that there is no point in moving because everyone’s home is filled grief.
Sethe provides a visceral description of the way her past makes itself present: “Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up… It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.” Just like most of the passages in this novel, this one has a lot going on: 1) The physicality of the scene that Sethe sets contrasts with the notion that we, the reader, understand memory to be something that takes place within the mind. For Sethe, the memory is something out in front of you. It decides on its own when to make itself known and to whom to make itself known. This physicality is only heightened by phrases such as “bump into,” or “hear something or see something going on,” as if what takes place in the memory is right there in front of you. Furthermore, the memory that you “bump into” may not even be your own. 2) The term “rememory.” It’s a marriage of the words remember and memory, a verb and a noun. The term is used in reference to something that is inside a person (“in my rememory”) and also as something that one can bump into outside of oneself, even if it belongs to another. The term also conjures the idea that memory can be mingled, a re-written, thus becoming a kind of rememory. This re-writing helps carry the memory on. Denver knows the story of her birth and it has become a part of her conciousness. Although she never witnessed it, she was there in the state of waiting to be born.
also, josh: "Her complete lack of eyebrows was infuriating." you have me laughing.
"Sethe was bothered, not because of the kiss, but because, just before it, when she was feeling so fine letting Beloved massage away the pain, the fingers she was loving and the ones that had soothed her before they strangled her had reminded her of something that now slipped her mind" (115).
ReplyDeleteI found this whole scene of Sethe being strangled by the prayer rock incredibly intriguing. The supernatural element, which is woven into the entire story, is very prominent. Sethe, calling on Baby Suggs to soothe the pain of the information Paul D tells her about her husband Halle, feels the suffocating fingers of Beloved strangle her. In turn, Beloved caresses and kisses the bruises on her mother's neck. This idea that she is both the predator and the nurturer is interesting. Sitting with her mother and sister on the rock, Beloved feels all the abandonment and pain of her situation. Though she continues to tell Denver, and later even Paul D, that she "don't love nobody but [Sethe]" (137), all of the anger and resentment manifests itself in this scene. The abandoned child gets a muted revenge before appealing to her mother's pain. This need to exact revenge on the woman who wronged her, however, is not as strong as the connection and love she has for the woman who gave her life. In this scene, she seizes opportunity to both create and alleviate Sethe’s pain. With that, the contrasting feelings of anger and love are often conflicted in Beloved’s mind.
When Sethe recognizes that “the girl’s breathe was exactly like new milk” (115), she is alarmed. Identifying milk as a kind of nourishment, you can read this as though Beloved is nourishing her mother’s pain with both her “heavenly” (114) fingers and her breathe. This reference to heaven not only suggests that Beloved is, in fact, the reincarnation of the baby ghost, but also that she is a kind of godsend- put on earth to soothe Sethe’s painful past. Beloved, herself, is constantly inciting the narrative of both Sethe and Denver’s past. Paradoxically, her own past is shrewd in mystery. Those small hints that we do hear about her past are reminiscent of the other’s character’s history. Perhaps, Beloved symbolizes the past and the history of this family’s past. If so, then Beloved’s “heavenly” fingers are meant to massage life into the painful past that Sethe, Paul D, and all the Sweet Home boys have fought so hard to forget. It is through these narratives that Beloved incites that she gets Sethe to “relive” her past. This mechanism of storytelling is a way to force Sethe to recognize who (or what?) Beloved really is. However, from this scene, we can see the resistance from Sethe to do so.
For this quote, I also found it interesting how Sethe almost recognizes that it was Beloved who strangled her, not the ghost of Baby Suggs. This is somewhat recurring for Sethe. Where Denver realizes almost immediately that Beloved is the reincarnation of her baby sister, Sethe is more reluctant to believe this because of her strong aversion to the past and all the pain it caused her. This is also a big fault for Sethe as, in neglecting to recognize Beloved as her own daughter, she neglects to give Beloved what she wants. With that, however, Sethe does treat Beloved like a daughter, by taking her in, feeding her, clothing her, and defending her as she defends Denver. Between Denver and Sethe this struggle for Beloved attention is interesting. Denver feels a much stronger connection to Beloved because of the infatuation she had with the baby ghost as a child and the ensuing loneliness and solitude. Sethe, neglecting to believe a small truth, obtains much more attention from Beloved. This is the idea that, in contrast to the revenge, all the abandoned child wants is attention from the parent that wronged them.