FREEDOM!!!

Over the Thanksgiving break, I’ve had the struggle of balancing my time between both reading The Age of Innocence, and spending time with my family, however, today I realized that I did not need to keep these two ideas completely separate from each other. As me and all my cousins gathered together to watch Braveheart, I knew exactly what my next blog would be on: the parallels between Mel Gibson’s epic film and Edith Wharton’s dynamic criticism of 1870s New York upper class social hierarchy and the gender standards of the time. While watching the movie, two major plot points stood out to me as being pertinent to the events of The Age of Innocence, the first being the struggle for freedom against the oppressive nature of established order, and the usurpation of pre-established gender normality. In Braveheart, the idea of freedom is very well established as being the pinnacle focus of Sir William Wallace, the Scotsman who urges his brethren on to fight against the tyranny of English King Longshanks and his incompetent son Prince Edward. Wallace tells his men how, “It’s all for nothing if you don’t have freedom”, as motivation to fight against the dreaded Englishmen who rule their Scottish lands. Wallace is willing to sacrifice everything, even his own life, for the sake of having a free Scotland, and is able to both inspire the hearts of his fellow Scotsmen and drive a burning stake of fear into every Englishman who dares dwell on the pastures of the liberated country. It is rather fitting that Wallace rallies his men to fight against the English with the call, “they may take our lives, but they may never take our freedom!” While this is only one side of the parallel, Wharton’s world of 1870s upper class exuberance is not all that different from the 13^th century world of Sir William Wallace. The best point of evidence for this is from Countess Ellen Olenska, a woman with a tainted and scrutinized past who comes to New York and forces the creation of a complicated love triangle between male protagonist Newland Archer and his fiancée May Welland. But aside from the realm of her love life, both the mesmerizing Countess and the fierce medieval Scottish warrior have one aspiration in common: freedom. While the Countess doesn’t explicitly state it, Newland Archer speaks her thoughts as he declares, “Women ought to be free-as free as we are” (Wharton. 35). With the progression of the novel, Ellen fights for her freedom (in a much less literal way than William Wallace) as she battles to free herself from the oppressive bonds of both other men and society itself. But she learns the struggle is much more difficult than she presumed, and as she vies with Archer to plead for her divorce from the Count, she entails the lawman, “But my freedom-is that nothing?” (Wharton 93). Like Wallace, Ellen learns that freedom does not come without a heavy price, and most certainly not without affecting those who she cares for most. The key element to Countess Olenska’s fight for freedom deals especially with the second aspect of the parallel, which is going against the gender standards of the time. In Braveheart, Princess Isabella embodied this idea, as King Longshanks appointed her as being a more competent ruler than his weak son Prince Edward to negotiate with William Wallace. Moreover, she knows that most effective path toward good leadership is not brutality like the ailed King or through weak passiveness like his son, but through mercy to allow the people to trust their leader and give them hope. Going back to New York, the concept of going against gender standards is clearly a quality of Ellen Olenska, but it is best seen by contrasting her to May Welland. Ellen is noted as a woman of strength and character, something that May, the ideal woman, does not embody at all. Archer notes how May, “seemed to have descended…to helpless and timorous girlhood…as a too-adventurous child takes refuge in its mother’s arms” (Wharton 126). May revels in the world of childhood simplicity and is perfectly content to eternally submit herself to the will of a wonderful husband and remain in her separate sphere of influence. For Ellen, she sees herself as beyond all the normal gender conventions of the time, and feels compelled to wear, say, and do whatever she feels like doing. Just like William Wallace, Ellen knows that she must do whatever is in her power to achieve the ultimate goal: FREEDOM!!!

Blake and Grendel

Last week in class we were introduced to the great Romantic writer, poet, and artist William Blake and also to one of his most acclaimed works, Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The collection of poems reflects many of Blake’s own views, as he divided the collection into two parts, the first set of “Innocence” including poems about the state of being before knowledge and “the Fall” of humanity in many times an ethereal state of childhood ignorance, and the second set of “Experience” having poetic works based around a world full of painful knowledge and experiencing the torments of everyday life. Blake uses the positive and negative aspects of both perspectives to remain in a paradox of his own, where both are right. As we explored more and more poetic works from Blake’s collection, it became increasingly evident of how many of the thematic and philosophical ideas of John Gardner’s Grendel can also be traced back to the 18^th century figure. Many of Blake’s ideas concerning the folly of both the path of the innocent and experienced are exactly like Grendel observing the folly of the ways of the Shaper and the Dragon, with the Shaper being the way of innocence and ignorance and the Dragon being that of knowledge and the embracement of a cold and bitter reality. Blake seems to delve into the paradoxical opinion of these two opposing sides by writing poems in the two separate parts that seem to fit with each other, starting with “Introduction (Song of Innocence)” and “Introduction (Song of Experience)”. The opening poem for the first part merrily starts by saying, “Piping down the valleys wild,/Piping songs of pleasant glee,/on a cloud I saw a child,/And he laughing said to me”. From these first few lines, much can be said about the true nature of innocence and tie it back into Grendel.  For starters, Gardner also among the first few chapters explores the childhood years of the infamous monster of the English language, a time when he and his mother were “one thing, like the wall and the rock growing out from it” (Gardner 17). But like the little child in the poem, he has no idea of the true nature of the world because of him being stuck in the realm of childhood fantasy. And to make things worse, neither Grendel nor the child seem to have any true thought the real nature of the person they are looking up to. For Grendel, his mother is revealed to a brutish and rather stupid creature who cannot even speak properly, and for the child, the Piper referenced may very well be an allusion to the Pied Piper himself, the man who led all the children of Hamelin away after not having been paid for curing the city of rats, never to be seen again. On the other end of the spectrum is the idea of Experience, having all the knowledge that allowed for naiveté to thrive in the days of youth, but also serves as an overbearing yoke of sorrow and woe and the true nature of the world. The time of Experience is recalled in Blake’s poem with, “Hear the voice of the Bard!/Who Present, Past & Future sees;/Whose ears have heard/The Holy Word/That walk’d among the ancient trees” . Blake’s poem almost carries a tone of prophecy, and sounds eerily like the all-knowing dragon that Grendel encounters in Chapter 5, who tells the confused monster, “I know everything…the beginning, the present, the end” (Gardner 62). Both the Bard in Blake’s poem and the Dragon of Grendel bring forth the opinion of experience, showing the truth after one has taken from the “ancient tree” of knowledge. While the truth is illuminated in both perspectives, the idea that absolute knowledge is truly good remains in question. Ultimately, each should strive toward Blake’s own personal paradox, where both Innocence and Experience can come together and work to create a perfect balance of naiveté and knowledge, blindness and sight, and life and death.

 

The Age of Innocence: An Initial Insight

In class on Friday we split up into Lit Circle groups to start reading Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence on our own and meet in our groups to fulfill various roles regarding several different aspects of the book’s social and gender criticisms. While I have only read the first two chapters of the book, I thought now would be the perfect time to write a blog that can sincerely reflect my first initial reflections on what I have read so far and a lot of the different criticisms that Edith Wharton is making. After reading the first few paragraphs of the book, I immediately realized who Wharton’s target of the rest of the book would be: the opulent and rather prideful upper class New York hierarchy in the 1870s. Newland Archer is portrayed as being a man completely absorbed in what society has pre-determined his role to be, which is a member of the ostentatious upper class and is something he finds to be quite natural. While at the opera listening to Christine Nillson sing in French, “this seemed as natural to Newland Archer as all the other conventions on which his life was moulded: such as the duty of using two silver-backed brushes…and of never appearing in society without a flower in his buttonhole” (4). To Archer, the stratified world that he finds himself at the top of is full of a plethora of nuances that are upheld to the highest extent. It becomes increasingly clear that he is part of a culture that values the superficial and materialistic over anything else that someone or something may have to offer. On top of the elegant lifestyle constantly pervading his life, Archer seems to also have a very dominating attitude over others, particularly women. Here the gender criticism comes into play, as Archer describes the relationship with his fiancée May Welland to be one of ownership over mutual love. He toys with the idea, “with a thrill of possessorship in which pride in his own masculine initiation was mingled with a tender reverence for her abysmal purity” (6). Archer, while having a small amount of respect for the purity of the woman he is soon to be wed to, feels overall more compelled to dote upon his ownership of her than any other personal feelings he may have for her. It seems as if the entire idea of being in a relationship with a woman is not so much about developing an unbreakable personal bond with another human being, but rather, it is more of a competition between the men of this stature to see who can acquire the best “piece of property”. While Archer does in fact have some personal romantic fantasies about how his life with his future wife will be, these are overshadowed by the next paragraph, where he describes how he wants May to turn out. Again this ties back in to the already dominating criticism on male-dominated society and the runaway egos that seem to fuel it. Wharton’s other key point of criticism shows up in Chapter 2, best summarized by Archer saying, “No indeed; no one would have thought the Mingotts would have tried it on!” (10). Archer is referring to Mr. Sillerton Jackson’s comment about the box on the other side of the opera house, where he sees May’s cousin Ellen Olenska, who brings attention to herself by her rather showy dress and is even referred to as one of the “few black sheep that their blameless stock had produced” (10). Here Archer embodies Wharton’s criticism of how quick the stratified and prideful upper class men are to judge not only a woman but someone who is of lower social stature than they are. Archer seems to know very little real knowledge about who Ellen is yet he still calls her an outcast among the others in her family, giving the presumption that he knows what is best. Perhaps the greatest criticism being made in these first to chapters is that of how quick people seem to be to judge that which is different or less than what they believe to be the “norm”. It is the inability to truly understand that makes the opulence of the upper class seems all the less human.