All the World's a Stage

For my poem blog this month, I decided to take a break from the ever cheerful Edgar Allan Poe and take up a different sort of poet, William Shakespeare and “All the World’s a Stage”. I felt that this was a great poem and analogy right now as we all enter into the time not only of the week of final exams but also into Christmas and other holiday celebrations to remember that we are all only here for a short time, and that we all ought to make the most of our time on the stage. That idea is powerfully expressed by Shakespeare’s beginning lines, “They have their exits and their entrances/And one man in his time plays many parts”. He then goes on to describe how each and every one of us plays seven different roles over the course of our lifetime, the first being that of an infant. While everyone does start out in a literal sense as an infant, it can better be interpreted how all people start off in a state of innocence and ignorance, and like a young child cannot interpret the world around us on our own, but must rely on the guiding wisdom of our parents. The state of infancy is one of naiveté, where there seems to be comfort in not knowing the true nature of the world. Yet ignorance is always ended by the same driving force: curiosity, found in the second and third stage with the “whining schoolboy” and “the lover/sighing like furnace with a woeful ballad made to his mistresses eyebrow”. Respectively, curiosity appears not only with the increased desire to learn with the schoolboy, but also with the growing desire to be with a woman as the boy grows into a man. The time of innocence is over as he is exposed to the wonders of adulthood, and reveling in his newfound knowledge and experience. He then finds himself in the fourth stage as a soldier, “Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard/Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel”. In this stage, the true test of adulthood is discovered, as the fantasies and aspirations of the young child are harshly swept aside in the brutal working world, one where the young man is forced to fight for his keep in his workplace and do everything he can do to survive and rise among the others, no matter the cost or consequence. The beauty of life slowly withers away as the man moves into the fifth stage, that of the justice, “Full of wise saws and modern instances/And so he plays his part”. The hard work that the man has put into his budding career has paid off, as he now finds himself at the top of the ladder as one who is both respected and carrier authority with his word. But just like every climax, once one has reached the top, there is only one place left to go: the sixth stage. Age begins to take its toll on the once great man, and he finds himself losing all the abilities that he has developed over his life. He begins to see how life is starting to repeat itself, as “his big manly voice/Turning again toward childish treble, pipes/And whistles in his sound”. With every passing day, the old man can only look at his reflection and see but a shadow of the person he once was, in a different time, in a different role. There is only one stage left, “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”. Death comes not as a grand finale, but as a slow painful closing of the curtain, and as the old man looks out into the darkened audience to get one last glimpse of the people watching his performance, he sees but a few pale faces, as most of them left a long time ago.

All the World's a Stage

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

William Shakespeare

Ellen and Nora

For the past few weeks, we have essentially been studying gender roles and social customs throughout the late 19^th century in literature, first through Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, and more recently through Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Now after having read both works, it has become increasingly clear just how much the two literary works have in common with each other, not only through their not-so-subtle criticism of the roles of men and women and the overall setup of a hierarchical and rather brutal society, but in some of the themes as well, the greatest of which I believe to be the struggle for individualism and freedom. The theme of course involves the overly explained gender and social norms of the time, but it transcends past the times in which they are set in, and is as real and applicable to this very day as when they were first written. In Wharton’s work, the struggle for individuality is most clearly epitomized by Countess Ellen Olenska, a concept I have also touched on in a previous blog. Throughout the course of the novel, Ellen is forced to fight off not only the scorn of society for having left her husband as a married women, but worse must face an equally condescending and malicious family, who see her solely as a woman of scandal. Early on the text when she is fighting for legal freedom from a man she does not love, she is struck down by the family’s pressuring to have her maintain her marital status for the sake of their integrity. To this, Ellen can only speculate, “But my freedom-is that nothing?” (Wharton 93). It is for her desire to lead a life of individual freedom that Ellen is discredited by her family, who increasingly act more and more like primitive people than the sophisticated upper classmen they claim to be. Indeed, the family functions no better than, “a tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe” (Wharton 278). For the sake of integrity, they would rather Ellen remain in misery than express her individual right for freedom. In A Doll’s House, the idea of freedom is a concept again taken on by a lead female protagonist, this time Nora Helmer. For her the idea of freedom is heavily contrasted with the early emphasis on her husband Torvald’s ownership of her, treating her more like a dog than a wife. Torvald comments, “It’s incredible how expensive it is for a man to keep such a pet” (Ibsen 4). Nora accepts this until she starts working toward her own struggle for personal freedom, which is working toward her own “miracle” (Ibsen 84) to happen, her having saved Torvald’s life through a borrowed sum of money and him now realizing how grateful he should be toward her. But that would mean the destruction of Torvald’s reputation, and as Nora harshly found out after Torvald read Krogstad’s letter, “Nobody sacrifices his honor for the one he loves” (Ibsen 84). To this, Nora realizes that she must put herself as an individual over her social obligations as a wife and a mother, in this case meaning that she must leave her husband to go out and discover who she really is and find the freedom that has been denied to her all her life by her father and Torvald. Both Ellen and Nora leave their marital obligations for a chance to discover something about themselves, something that neither could have done without having felt the need to discover their individuality. They were both tired of having men constantly believing that they were the ones pulling the puppet strings of their lives. Nora put it best describing how her “house has never been anything but a play-room. I have been your doll wife, just as at home I was Daddy’s doll child” (Ibsen 80). For Ellen and Nora, this was the chance to reject what everyone else believes to be right in exchange for what they know to be right, an idea that transcends past the world of 19^th century literature into our own lives today.

The Age of Innocence: A Final Insight

After having just finished reading Edith Wharton’s, The Age of Innocence, I felt it only appropriate to wrote a blog regarding my final insight toward the novel, which I can safely say I appreciate a lot more from the time that I wrote my first blog about it. I was stunned by how much more the book had to offer than I initially thought it would, going beyond the simple gender and social criticisms I have come to expect in novels read in AP Lit, but that it really had something to say about the struggle of finding meaning and purpose in life alongside the quest to determine and understand the reality all around us. I want to focus on the final chapter of the book and two interesting ideas found within it, the first being how the attitudes of Newland Archer toward the younger generation seem to mirror those that Edith Wharton herself could have possibly had, and also on the idea of the narrative ellipse between chapters 33 and 34 and the implications that this literary device has on the interpretation of the story. First off, the ‘epilogue-esqe’ final chapter was what I thought to personally be a stunning conclusion that I did not expect at all. I found it fascinating to see how Archer, now 57 years old, looks at the world so much differently because the world has changed so much. He notes just how lucky his eldest son Dallas is, saying “The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they’re going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn’t” (Wharton 294). Here Archer is making reference to his son’s natural assumption that he will say yes to his marriage to Fanny Beaufort. In the time long past when Archer was young, doing this would have led to the indiscreet scorn and hatred of all the other members of the upper class since Mr. Beaufort had suffered from severe financial fallout and he and wife were essentially exiled from society as a result. Archer looks at this moment with bitter remembrance as he also sees how his love for Ellen Olenska was in fact no different from his son Dallas and Fanny Beaufort, as his son so blatantly pointed out for him. In his older age, Archer feels, “shy, old-fashioned, inadequate: a mere grey speck of a man compared with the ruthless fellow he had dreamed of being” (Wharton 294). Archer remains the product of an age long gone, with most of its members dead, and from which society has clearly moved on from. It can be argued that both Wharton and Archer suffer from the same problem, which is seeing how much the world has changed and not being able to fit in with it anymore. Wharton wrote her novel in 1920, two years after the end of the Great War and a time in which disillusionment plagued the nation, as people aimlessly wondered what point and purpose to life there was after witnessing so much wanton violence. Wharton seems to be reflecting on the great tragedy of her time through Newland, who struggles to find meaning amidst a world so different from the world that he gradually fell away from. Finally, I want to discuss the meaning of the narrative ellipse between chapters 33 and 34, in which 26 years have gone by and Archer is the father of three children and May ends up dead from pneumonia. While some details are given, there are not nearly enough to encompass a quarter century of time that is left to be a mystery to the reader who can essentially believe whatever they want when it comes to what happened. The reason for the blatant narrative gap is found on the final page of the novel, where Newland is about to go see Ellen, but sits at the bottom of the stairs and imagining the situation instead, saying, “It’s more real for me here than if I went up” (Wharton 300). Like Archer, who will never actually know what Ellen looks like being older or how she would react, the reader is forced to think of something to fill the void in the story. No one will ever know if it is true, and no one will ever be able to prove or disprove it, but it is something that gives the reader a sense of personal satisfaction. The reason that the reader is drawn to fill in the gap with what could have happened is the same exact reason Archer fills in his own gaps with his views of Ellen, to satisfy his mind without ever knowing the truth. And for that both the reader and Newland Archer will forever remain in a moment of ignorance, an age of innocence.