I do not have much experience reading anything by Mark Twain, and I enjoying reading something that can be meaningful and funny at the same time. However, the short stories that have really interested me this week in class were “The Outcasts of Poker Flats” and “Under the Lion’s Paw” which were unbelievably and utterly tragic.
With Harte’s story, I don’t want to go too far with the poker metaphors but I started to try and see if it might go deeper than we discussed in class today. I think that when Mr. Oakhurst signed his own ‘epitaph’ as having a ‘streak of bad luck’ it probably applied to more characters in the story than just him. Obviously, none of them were lucky if they were being banished from their town, but that isn’t what I mean. I thought that, in the end, when Piney and the Duchess die together, Harte was using them as mirrors of each other—one as a sweet virgin and one as a prostitute—maybe to show how different life can end up when you are dealt a better hand to play with.
I have no interpretation for “Under the Lion’s Paw” simply because it depressed me so much after reading it. I had trouble getting at the underlying meaning, not because it was a bad story, but just because Garland evoked so much sympathy in me for his characters. For this blog, I tried to find an actual law that would support what Butler did to Haskins and his family in the story, but when I searched I could only find today’s laws that are more lenient toward the tenant than they must have been when the story took place. I’d be curious to see if anyone else in class wondered the same thing and if they found anything out about it.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Weblog 1
This was a question posed in class that was touched on, but not really answered in detail, so after taking it home and thinking about it, I decided to address in my weblog. Dr. Campbell asked about the ways that were used in talking about death in the Louisa May Alcott stories and in Whitman’s “Drum-Taps”.
Going back over the two stories, I saw quite a few places where Alcott writes about death, relating it to sleep. One of the most obvious places she does this is in “Hospital Sketches” chapter three in the very last sentence when the narrator describes leaving the patients at the end of the day “where rest, the sweetest, made our pillows soft, while Night and Nature took our places, filling that great house of pain with the healing miracles of Sleep, and his diviner brother, Death” (8). Another place in “Hospital Sketches” where Alcott uses sleep as a reference to death is when the nurse refers to a dead soldier as “the quiet sleeper” (6). In “The Brothers” this happens again, when Miss Dane is watching over Ned, the rebel soldier, in his sleep, waiting for him to either live or die. She says, “Sleep, the healer, had descended to save or take him gently away” (588).
Comparing Alcott’s and Whitman’s references to death, I feel that Whitman gives his readers a much more honest perspective of what he was seeing while dressing the wounds and encountering death than we get from the nurses in “Hospital Sketches” and “The Brothers”. In “Drum-Taps” Whitman does not shy away from telling us which men had life threatening illnesses and what those illness exactly were, when all Alcott writes about the characters in her stories that are close to death is that they are asleep.
It was brought up in class that Alcott used a writing style that was more straightforward when Whitman’s writing seems wordy and harder to understand. I just thought it was interesting that even though Alcott uses an honest tone with everything else in the stories, she sugar-coats death while dying seems to be one of the only things that Whitman doesn’t dress up with flowery language in “Drum-Taps”.
Going back over the two stories, I saw quite a few places where Alcott writes about death, relating it to sleep. One of the most obvious places she does this is in “Hospital Sketches” chapter three in the very last sentence when the narrator describes leaving the patients at the end of the day “where rest, the sweetest, made our pillows soft, while Night and Nature took our places, filling that great house of pain with the healing miracles of Sleep, and his diviner brother, Death” (8). Another place in “Hospital Sketches” where Alcott uses sleep as a reference to death is when the nurse refers to a dead soldier as “the quiet sleeper” (6). In “The Brothers” this happens again, when Miss Dane is watching over Ned, the rebel soldier, in his sleep, waiting for him to either live or die. She says, “Sleep, the healer, had descended to save or take him gently away” (588).
Comparing Alcott’s and Whitman’s references to death, I feel that Whitman gives his readers a much more honest perspective of what he was seeing while dressing the wounds and encountering death than we get from the nurses in “Hospital Sketches” and “The Brothers”. In “Drum-Taps” Whitman does not shy away from telling us which men had life threatening illnesses and what those illness exactly were, when all Alcott writes about the characters in her stories that are close to death is that they are asleep.
It was brought up in class that Alcott used a writing style that was more straightforward when Whitman’s writing seems wordy and harder to understand. I just thought it was interesting that even though Alcott uses an honest tone with everything else in the stories, she sugar-coats death while dying seems to be one of the only things that Whitman doesn’t dress up with flowery language in “Drum-Taps”.
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