To The Lighthouse Discussion Questions

1. Mrs. Ramsay is the ideal Victorian wife and mother: devoted to her children, submissive to her husband.  The term for this, based on a poem by Coventry Patmore, is "The Angel in the House." (See examples on pages 6, 32, 39, 83, 107.)
2. Compare that aspect of her character with the following scenes: Lily's perspective (48-51); Mrs. Ramsay's desire to be "an investigator, elucidating the social problem (9) and her concerns on 58 and 103; Lily's "experiment" during dinner (90-92); Mrs. Ramsay's solution to the quarrel between James and Cam (114-115); Mrs. Ramsay's "triumph" on 123-124.
3. What is revealed about Mr. Ramsay during the Q to R episode on 33-34?
4. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay represent the Victorian marriage; Paul and Minta (172-174) represent the modern marriage. Judge each.
5. Is Lily attempting to be the angel in the house in the "boot" scene on 149-154? Does she succeed? Is there a difference in her attitude between this scene and her "experiment" at the earlier dinner scene?
6. What is the purpose of the "Time Passes" section?
7. What dilemma does Cam face (165, 169, 189)?
8. What dilemma regarding his father does James face? Is he similar to his father? Is his dilemma resolved? (184-185; 202-203; 206-207)
9. What is Lily's dilemma throughout the novel regarding her wish to be an artist?
10. What is the vision that Lily has at the end of the novel? (Also see 180-182.)

All Quiet on the Western Front

 

In my elective class we will be looking at this novel and at some World War I internet sites. Here are discussion questions I have posted and several internet sites.

1. Describe Paul Baumer as a person. Compare and contrast him to Katczinsky,Muller, and Kropp.
2. Who is Kantorek and what is his importance to the book?
3. What was German warfare like in World War I as presented in the novel. Give specific details.
4. What is the main theme of the novel and how is it developed?
5. How does Baumer learn that the enemy is not just faceless and nameless?
6. What are Baumer's opinions of Military leaders?
7. What does Baumer realize on his visit home?
8. What images and symbols are used in the book? What is the purpose of each?

 

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWW.htm

http://www.greatwar.nl/

http://www.firstworldwar.com/

http://www.worldwar1.com/

http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/

Tennyson

An interesting argument developed in class about interpretations of "The Lady of Shalott."

Some believe that Tennyson's purpose is a warning to women: If they become dissatisfied and want to bring about changes, they will be punished. (The proof for these students is the fact that the Lady dies when she breaks free of her bower.) Other students feel that this is Tennyson's warning to society: If you try to control women (or any group of people), they will rebel and rebellion can bring about loss and even death. Organized social change is, therefore, necessary.

Both interpretations seem viable to me and they are not necessarily opposite.

We'll be looking at Tennyson's "Ulysses" (a "dramatic monologue") next and contrasting that character with Homer's Odysseus as well as Dante's interpretation. My question is, what do the differences reveal about the Victorian sensibility? The specific passages in Homer and Dante are:

The end of Homer's Odyssey:
"Then flashing-eyed Athena spoke to Odysseus saying: “Son of Laertes, sprung from Zeus, Odysseus of many devices, stay thy hand, and make the strife of equal war to cease, lest haply the son of Cronos be wroth with thee, even Zeus, whose voice is borne afar.”
[545] So spoke Athena, and he obeyed, and was glad at heart. Then for all time to come a solemn covenant betwixt the twain was made by Pallas Athena, daughter of Zeus, who bears the aegis, in the likeness of Mentor both in form and in voice."

Dante's Inferno Canto 26 (look at lines 89 to 142):
http://home.earthlink.net/~zimls/HELLXXVI.html

“The Lady of Shalott”

Tennyson’s poem clearly portrays, I think, the conditions of the Victorian female. The image of the ideal woman during much of the Nineteenth Century was the virginal, the spiritual, the mysterious woman dedicated to her feminine tasks, meaning the care of her husband, family and household.

Tennyson’s Lady is enclosed in a room in a medieval castle: “Four gray walls, and four gray towers/…And the silent isle imbowers” her. (I think it’s interesting that “imbower”—embower—is derived from the Old English bur and that “bound,” “husband” and “boudoir” are all related. The French “boudoir” literally means a place to sulk. I also find it interesting that she is encased in “gray” rather than being surrounded by color…or life?) She sits weaving all day and has been told that she will be cursed if she pauses in her work. “She knows not what the curse may be,/And so she weaveth steadily.” I’d suggest that this curse represents her indoctrination: She has been brainwashed by religious tradition and the social mores to believe that it is the Order of Nature that woman be passive.

The Lady cannot participate in the world but looks at it through a mirror “That hangs before her all the year,” and “Shadows of the world appear.” Her place is the domestic sphere—in the shadows rather than in the world which is the male sphere. Those spheres are separate and, according to the Victorian ideology, they were created for the female’s safety. At first she is content to weave these shadows while remaining passive and silent. Then Sir Lancelot “flashed into the crystal mirror” and she “left the web, she left the loom” and looks out of the window and sees Camelot, not the shadow. “The mirror cracked from side to side;/’The curse is come upon me’ cried The Lady of Shalott.” Even so, she leaves her bower and gets into a boat to go to Camelot. The boat becomes her funeral barge and she dies before reaching her destination.

There are, of course, many ways that the symbols could be interpreted: Seeing Lancelot arouses her longing for love and/or makes her aware of her loneliness and isolation; when she looks out the window and sees “the water lily bloom” she awakens sexually; her loss of innocence represents guilt which leads to death—the ultimate silence. All of these could be viewed as warnings to the Nineteenth Century woman. However, it seems to me that her “protection” is really a means of control. I think that her leaving her loom symbolizes woman’s dissatisfaction with the limits placed upon her. Her rebellion means that she can no longer be controlled and she is, therefore, feared. As she comes “Silent into Camelot” the people “crossed themselves for fear.”  What do they fear?

In one of the many conduct books she wrote, Mrs. Sarah Stickney Ellis (1799-1872) observes, “A woman’s highest duty is so often to suffer and be still.” Perhaps that says it all.

Montaigne

Reading another blog brought me back to Montaigne's Essays. I think that one of my favorite lines is in his essay "Of Solitude": "The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself."

I'm pondering what this means.

Reading List

Here are the reading lists for my two fall courses:

World Masterpieces 2 (19th-Century to Contemporary--Sophomore level)

 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
 Fathers and Children by Turgenev (Norton Critical Edition, translated from the Russian by Michael R. Katz)
 A Doll's House by Ibsen (Oxford World Classics, translated from the Norwegian by Jame McFarlane)
 To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
 God's Bits of Wood by Sembene Ousmane (Heinemann, translated from the French by Francis Price)
 Maus, Volumes I and II, by Spiegelman (graphic novels)

From Empire to Wasteland (Victorian/Modern Literature--Senior level)

Norton Anthology of English Literature--The Victorian Age (I will list the readings here after I select them)
All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque (translated from the German by A.W. Wheen)
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (Norton Critical Edition)
Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello (translated from the Italian by Eric Bentley)

Happy reading!!
 
 
  

Frankenstein...2

Near the end of Book II of Frankenstein, the creature compares himself to Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost.  It is during his narration of his experiences since he first "awoke" and Victor Frankenstein abandoned him. He says, "I, like the arch fiend, bore a hell within me" (Oxford World Classics edition, 111).  It refers to Satan's comment in Book Four, "Which way I fly is Hell, myself am Hell" (line 75). (See my post of June 10, 2011, "Evil Personified...Milton's Satan.")

This makes me think of another question:

Are there differences in emotions and motives between Milton's Satan and the Frankenstein creature?

A comparison/contrast would be fascinating....and, of course, means rereading Paradise Lost.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

 

In one of the courses I’ll be teaching in the fall (my last semester before I can retire full time!), we are reading Frankenstein, first published in 1818. We’re using this text as representative of the Romantic Period rather than the usual Romantic poetry. I’ve been having a great deal of fun with the novel. Here are some discussion questions that I’ve come up with so far:

1. Why is the novel subtitled “A Modern Prometheus”? (We’ll have to look at the Greek myth when considering answers.)

2. Is it Victor Frankenstein or his creature who is being referred to as Prometheus? (Melanie’s excellent comments brought up this question.)

3. This is an epistolary novel. What is the reason for the various narrative frames?

4. Is Victor Frankenstein a hero or a villain or something in between?

5. The creature doesn’t have a name but Shelley apparently referred to him as “Adam” and uses Adam’s question to God from Milton’s Paradise Lost as an epigraph. What is the significance of the epigraph?

I’ll have more questions and, hopefully, some answers before the semester starts.

What is a pronoun……

The other day in the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip which I get on my igoogle page, Calvin is doing his homework and asks Hobbes what a pronoun is. Hobbes says, “A noun that lost its amateur status.” A reasonable answer it seems to me. (Calvin thinks that he might get credit for being original.) It made me start wondering about English names for the parts of speech.

“Pronoun” is from Middle French pronom, derived from Latin pronomen. Nomen translates to “name” and pro means “in place of.” As a prefix, “pro” indicates substitution. Thus, we get our meaning: A pronoun takes the place of a noun.

“Noun” is derived from the Latin for name, but what about “verb”? It is from the Latin verbum which means “word.” “Verbose” is word plus Latin ose meaning “full of.” And “adverb”? It’s from verbum with the Latin prefix “ad” meaning toward or about. Thus an adverb modifies (is about) a verb.

“Adjective” is from Late Latin adjectivum, from Latin jec (iacere—the “j” in Latin came about when “I” was used as a consonant) meaning throw and ad the prefix which also means attached or added. We get “project” (the verb not the noun which is pronounced differently but spelled the same in English) from the same root, with another meaning for the prefix pro meaning “to” (or “toward”). So an adjective modifies a noun, or is attached to it.

I’ve always known that language is “logical” (from the Greek meaning speech or reason).

Phrases…Cool and Collected

Gus and BooBear asked about this phrase. Both words “cool” and “collected” share the synonym “calm.” Cool in this sense has the connotation of clear judgment that is not influenced by emotion. Collected carries the sense of inner calm that has taken conscious effort.

The opposite of these terms is “distracted,” from Middle English, derived from Latin distractus, to draw apart. In other words, one has focus when one is “cool and collected” rather than having the focus drawn to something else. One is self-possessed rather than allowing something else to “possess” one. Interesting.

According to the OED, “collected” is used figuratively to mean having thoughts and feelings in order. In American usage, “collected” means self-possessed as the first definition. The OED shows that the first usage of collected as figurative is by Shakespeare in The Tempest (1610 or 1611 and possibly the last play he wrote): “Be collected. No more amazement” (I. ii. 13—Prospero to Miranda who is feeling distracted by the shipwreck, not knowing that Prospero has magically manipulated the entire situation).

It seems to me that the phrase is derived from a literally physical sensation. When one feels angry or emotional, one feels distracted and warm…hot under the collar, in fact. Now there’s another interesting phrase.

Fireworks

The summer that Brother put the stick of dynamite in the outhouse was the summer that came to be known as “The Drought of 1892.” It didn’t rain from May to September and it was so hot that the women left off wearing petticoats under their dresses—even Aunt Marie. I was ten and Brother was twelve and I told him that it was a stupid idea but he told me that I was just a kid and to stop pesterin’ him if I didn’t want to help. I had a proprietorial attitude toward Brother though and didn’t want him to think that I was afraid. He’d get that scornful look on his face that made his eyes darker and puckered up his chin and nose when he was mad at me. So I helped him.

I held the blue stick of dynamite tightly while he wound the specially waxed twine around one end of it. Then he carefully lowered it into the dark deep hole of the outhouse seat until it touched bottom. We trailed the twine twenty feet into the lilac bushes and I crouched down while he lit the match. We watched the smoldering sparks sizzle up the twine, making it look like a snake on fire. Suddenly Brother stood up and ran to the door of the outhouse. I hollered at him. “Wattya doin’?" I knew my voice was screeching.

“Hush. I wanna see what it looks like?”

“But you’ll be blown up!”

“The dynamite ain’t that strong.”

The smoldering sparks kept moving up the twine leaving a limp black tail of burnt dust. I watched with my mouth open as it neared the door. I held my breath. Brother followed it inside and stood over the hole looking down. Then there was a loud boom and I closed my eyes.

All the birds seemed to swoosh up in the air crying and fluttering around at once. The noise of the explosion seemed to go on and on, echoing with the birds’ cries. When it was still I began to smell the most awful stink. It seemed to come  in waves with the heat of the air. I turned around and ran through a gap in the bushes away from the smell. I looked over my shoulder and saw Brother running out the door, covered with brown slime, trying to wipe his eyes and his mouth but only managing to spread the muck around.

“Come on to the pond,” I yelled at him.

In a croaky voice he said that he couldn’t open his eyes so I ran back and grabbed him by the sleeve and raced to the pond in the field beyond the run-in-shed. As soon as I got the gate open he ran down to the edge and dove in, shoes and all. I could still smell the awful stench and, looking down, saw that the muck was all over the side of my dress so I dove in too.
The water was cool and sweet and I was barefoot so I could kick easily and get over to Brother in the middle of the pond.

“Wow! What a stink!”

He was laughing now and we started horsing around. Then we saw Daddy Brown running down the hill toward us. In the distance, with her skirts raised so high that her white knickers showed, Aunt Marie came in a sort of prancing run, lifting her knees up high. Behind her was Bingy, with her muslin dress bellowing so that it looked as if she were flying toward us on an umbrella.

Daddy Brown stood on the edge of the pond with his hands on his hips looking stern and puzzled at the same time. Aunt Marie and Bingy came up and stood on either side of him. “Come out of there this instant!” Aunt Marie’s voice was shrill with a sing-song elongation about the vowels that made the words wrap around our bobbing heads. It was her fiercest voice and signaled the amount of trouble we were in.

“I told you it was a stupid idea.”

Brother ignored me and we paddled toward the bank and our doom.

Evil Personified…Dante’s Satan

In the Inferno Satan, or “The Emperor of the Universe of Pain,” is trapped in ice from the waist down. His head has three faces: one is “fiery red,” another is “between white and bile” and the third is black. He has bat’s wings that keep flapping as if to help him escape but all they can do is “freeze all of Cocytus” (Dante’s name for the ninth circle). He is weeping and in his mouths he gnaws on three sinners whom he keeps “in eternal pain at his eternal dinner.” They are Judas Iscariot, Brutus and Cassius. (The center of Dante’s hell holds those “treacherous to their masters.” Judas betrayed Christ; Brutus and Cassius betrayed Caesar. Virgil  guides the character “Dante” through hell and these last two are for his benefit.)

Satan is gigantic as Dante describes him: “I am closer in size to the great mountain the Titans make around the central pit, than they to his arms.” Virgil and Dante leave the inferno by using the “Great Worm of Evil” as a stairway and “we walked out once more beneath the Stars.” (Interestingly Dante uses this word to end each of the three books of The Divine Comedy. For him “stars” are the symbol of hope and virtue in this epic poem of redemption.) And that is all that we have of Satan. He is trapped, weeping and eating for eternity.

It seems to me that he is too helpless to personify a cosmic force that produces injury. Of course in Dante’s literary universe the punishment fits the crime. Thus, he is portraying a defeated Satan.

So we have three vanquished characters: Iago arrested and standing mum; Milton’s fallen Lucifer; and Dante’s trapped  Satan. Do any of them personify evil?

The theme of good versus evil has given us some great literature and memorable characters with good usually the victor. I’ve been wondering how modern writers would compare. The work that comes to mind (possibly because the final movie is coming out in a month)  is the Harry Potter series. That would mean rereading all seven volumes. Perhaps a project for another day.

Evil Personified…Milton’s Satan

In his epic poem Paradise Lost (published in 1667), Milton created, perhaps unintentionally, one of the most compelling and complex characters in literature. His Satan is eloquently skilled in the art of rhetoric. He is also, it seems to me, very “human.” In the first book of the twelve-book epic, we learn his motives: “Th’ infernal Serpent. He it was whose guile/ Stirred up with envy and revenge deceived/ The mother of mankind” (lines 34-36). Again it is jealousy that causes “evil,” that causes “Lucifer” to fall and to seduce Adam and Eve “to that foul revolt.”

Satan (derived from the Hebrew word meaning adversary) first feels jealousy when the “Father Infinite” declares that he has a son who is exalted above the angels: “This day I have begot whom I declare/ My only Son…whom ye now behold/ At my right hand. Your head I Him appoint” (Book Five, lines 603-606). The archangel Raphael tells Adam that Satan was “fraught/ With envy against the Son of God that day” and “could not bear/ Through pride that sight and…resolved/ With all his legions to dislodge and leave unworshipped, unobeyed, the throne supreme” calling God a tyrant (lines 661-670).

He is next jealous of Adam, “a creature formed of earth” as Satan tells his fallen comrades, and given a “Magnificent…World” or paradise and angels to serve him. Satan sets out to revenge what provokes his envy and he enters paradise in the form of a serpent. “But what will not ambition and revenge/ Descend to?…Revenge, at first though sweet,/ Bitter ere long back on itself recoils./ Let it; I reck not” (Book Eight, lines 168-173). At this point jealousy has overpowered reason and Satan does not care what form he must take to accomplish his goal.

There is another time when Satan loses his “reason” by which I mean that he is overcome by emotion: when he first sees Eve, my favorite lines in Paradise Lost. “Such pleasure took the serpent to behold/ This flowery plat, the sweet recess of Eve…her heavenly form/ Angelic, but more soft, and feminine,/ Her graceful innocence, her every air/ Of gesture or least action overawed/ His malice…That space the evil one abstracted stood/ From his own evil, and for the time remained/ Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed/ Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge” (Book Nine, lines 455-466). However, the “hot Hell that always in him burns…soon ended his delight” and he continues with his plan of revenge.

If we understand evil as a cosmic force producing injury—that is, something that has no motive—as with Iago, I don’t consider this Satan “evil.” Like Iago, he feels betrayed and therefore believes he is  justified in the injuries he attempts to perpetrate. We may not agree with his actions but I think we can understand their cause.  Perhaps to find evil that is “thoughtless” or without purpose, we need to look at an earlier work: Dante’s Inferno.

Evil Personified…Iago

In the New York Times Sunday Book Review of June 5, 2011, in his review of Sarah Winman’s When God Was A Rabbit, Henry Alford gives as an example of one of life’s biggest questions, “What makes Iago evil?” It is a question that scholars have debated for a long time but I’ve always found the answer simple: Jealousy.

From the very first scene of the play we know that Iago resents the fact that Othello has made Cassio a lieutenant when he claims that “Preferment goes by letter and affection.” In other words, he thinks that favoritism is Othello’s motive and that “there’s no remedy. ‘Tis the curse of service.” Iago feels that he is the victim of an injustice; he feels frustrated because he is helpless to right the “wrong.”

Not only is Iago jealous because Othello promoted Cassio over him, but also he thinks that there is a possibility that Othello “slept” with his wife, Emilia. In his soliloquy closing Act I he says:

  “I hate the Moor,/ And it is thought abroad that ‘twixt my sheets/ [H’as] done my office. I know not if’t be true,/ But I, for mere suspicion in that kind,/ Will do as if for surety.”

Even though the infidelity is merely rumor, Iago will act as though it is a fact, giving himself an excuse to “tenderly” lead Othello “by th’ nose/ As asses are.” His jealously and resentment of Othello probably have a racist foundation. One of his actions is to create discord between Othello and Brabantio, Desdemona’s father. He tells Brabantio “an old black ram/ Is tupping your white ewe.” An underlying cause of racism is a feeling of superiority. The fact that Othello is his superior in rank feeds Iago’s resentment.

At the end of the play after he has killed Desdemona and learns from Emilia the truth about the handkerchief,  Othello asks why Iago, “that demi-devil,” has “ensnar’d my soul and body?” It seems to me that Iago’s answer shows that he regrets nothing: “Demand me nothing; what you know, you know: From this time forth I never will speak word.” His unwillingness to apologize, in either sense of that word, proves to me that he feels his actions are justified.

Jealousy is a malicious intolerance that blinds one to anything beyond that emotion. It makes Iago a schemer and a manipulator who deceives and betrays everyone. Is he the personification of evil?  One of the definitions of evil (noun) is “a cosmic force producing " injury. Perhaps that is what Shakespeare had in mind when creating Iago, who has more lines in the play than Othello does. However, if it is a “cosmic force,” evil needs no motive. I see in Iago all too human motives.  Instead of personifying evil, Iago may be Shakespeare’s depiction of all that is negative in the human character when emotion is uncontrolled by reason.

Another literary “personification of evil” is Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, the character I’d like to consider next.

Meanderings of the Mind……Poppies

The other day as I was making lemon poppy seed bread (delicious with homemade lemon curd), I wondered if these were in fact the poppy seeds I could use to grow the brilliantly colored flowers. I did some research via Google.

These tiny black seeds are from the opium poppy. (The species name—papaver somniferum—means sleep inducing.) However the seeds used in my bread are from the ripened flower’s dried seed pod. Opium is derived from the “latex” of the unripe fruit. The seeds were used by many ancient civilizations. For example, the Egyptians used them as sedatives. Others thought the seeds had magical powers of invisibility. (Pondering how that belief came about.) It is said that the seeds help to alleviate asthma, whooping cough and insomnia. Today many countries use them to make a paste for such dishes as puddings, cakes and pastries.

Thinking of poppies brought to mind John McCrae’s World War I poem, “In Flanders Fields.” It’s in the form of a French rondeau: thirteen lines of eight syllables, plus two half line refrains of four syllables, in three stanzas using only three rhymes in a  scheme of AABBA, AAB with the C refrain, AABBA with the C refrain. The refrain is identical with the beginning of the first line of the poem.

http://public.wsu.edu/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/mccrae.html

John McCrae (1872-1918) was a Canadian physician and became Lieutenant Colonel and commander of the Canadian General Hospital at Boulogne during the war. He wrote the poem after a friend of his was killed in the fighting. He was apparently sitting in a dressing station and looking out at the fields of poppies growing on the graves. Scholars have been arguing whether the poem is pro or anti-war ever since it was published in Punch in December, 1915. (The poem seems to me to be a lament about war and lost lives. The speaker is dead, one of the many buried beneath the poppies.)

In my research I did find how to grow poppies. The seeds like the chill of winter so you need to spread them on prepared soil in the fall and come spring you will have a field of vibrant-colored petals.

Word-Hoard…Moveable Feast

The other day I was reading a review in the New York Times of David McCullough’s The Greater Journey Americans in Paris, tales of 19th-century American travelers to Paris. In her conclusion to the review, Stacy Schiff contrasts these with later American visitors when she writes that, “the movable feast came later.” I immediately thought of Hemingway.

His memoir of 1920s Paris, published posthumously in 1964, was given the title A Moveable Feast by his widow who used a remark Hemingway had made to a friend, Aaron Hotchner:  “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast” (from the “Foreword” of the Restored Edition by Patrick Hemingway, 2009). (Both spellings, moveable and movable are accepted. The OED prefers the latter.) According to his son, Patrick, Hemingway used the term in the metaphorical sense similar to the feast of St. Crispin speech of Henry V in Shakespeare: an experience that becomes part of you. It also carries the connotation of things which change over time.

The term’s etymology has religious associations.  In 325 CE, the First Council of Nicaea set the dates for both Easter and Christmas. The latter is not a moveable feast since it always occurs on December 25. Easter, on the other hand, is a moveable feast because it’s always on the same day of the week but the date varies. It is on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox and it is the date used to organize other Christian feasts or fasts (Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday for example). Before 325 CE Easter was associated with Passover, 14 Nisan in the Hebrew calendar. Interestingly, “Easter” is derived from the Old English name for the goddess of spring, Eostre. “Feast” is derived from Latin festa meaning festive, joyful, merry, and is associated with feriae, holiday (holy day) and fanum, temple. It’s connection with food goes even further back to agrarian cultures when food was used as sacrifices to the gods.

I always connect “feast” with Paris where I rented an apartment for a month several years ago and experienced probably the best food in the world—better than the food in New Orleans, which, of course, has a French connection. Even “fast food” is good there.  I remember getting a ham sandwich off of a mobile food truck outside the Grand Palais. The truck had a route up and down the Champs-Elysees. That meal was the best combination of bread, butter and ham that I’ve ever tasted.

All of which brings me nicely back to the moveable feast which is Paris.

“La Belle” Influences (Concluded)

In a letter to his brother George dated April, 1819, Keats wrote: “The fifth canto of Dante pleases me more and more—it is the one in which he meets with Paulo and Francesca—I had passed many days in rather a low state of mind and in the midst of them I dreamt of being in that region of Hell. The dream was one of the most delightful enjoyments I ever had in my life—I floated about the whirling atmosphere as it is described with a beautiful figure to whose lips mine were joined at it seem’d for an age—and in the midst of all this cold and darkness I was warm—even flowery tree tops sprung up and we rested on them sometimes with the lightness of a cloud till the wind blew us away again….O that I could dream it every night” (The Oxford Authors John Keats, 1990). A few days later he sent a draft of “La Belle Dame sans Merci” to George.

Keats’ dream was probably induced by opium which he took in the form of laudanum, a mixture of wine or brandy and opium. At that time it could be purchased “over-the-counter” and was taken as we take aspirin for pain. (Regulation began with the foundation of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain in 1841 which sponsored the Pharmacy and Poisons Acts of 1868.) At any rate, in his dream Keats completely missed Dante’s point.

For Dante the punishments in his Inferno fit the crime. Thus, though Paulo and Francesca are with one another for eternity, swept in a great whirlwind, they are “shades” rather than bodies and can never touch. Francesca tells Dante that they began their “dalliance” after reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. (The lovers were caught by her husband—his brother—who killed them. Canto V, Circle Two The Carnal.)

Since the knight in “La Belle” is not gleeful as Keats was in his dream, I’m wondering if we could read the poem as Keats’ version of an inferno.

Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci”-- Influences

It would be interesting to read the poem as an autobiographical statement. Keats met Fanny Brawne in 1819, the year in which he produced some of his greatest poetry: “La Belle,” “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode on Indolence,” “To Autumn.”

In the first of the thirty-seven surviving letters to Fanny from Keats, dated July 1, 1819, he writes: “Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom….I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”  In another letter to Fanny (July 15, 1819), Keats tells of a dream he had after reading an “oriental tale.” The dream is of an enchanting lady in a garden “of Paradise.” After men fall in love with her she makes them close their eyes “and on opening their eyes again [they] find themselves descending to the earth in a magic basket” and are “melancholy ever after.”  Keats tells Fanny that he compared the enchantress with her but “could not bear you should be so” and concludes that, though as beautiful, Fanny is not as “talismanic as that Lady.” (Letters are from The Oxford Authors John Keats, 1990.)

His friend Charles Brown feared that Fanny would entrap Keats and didn’t want a relationship to develop. (Brown’s “protection” of Keats would be another interesting exploration.)  After Keats died, Fanny wore mourning for three years and did not marry until she was thirty-three. All of this, I think, speaks of a strong but doomed love.

There is another influence on the poem, however, that should be explored: Dante’s Inferno.

“La Belle” Artistic Interpretations (4)

The final painting of “La Belle Dame sans Merci” that I want to consider is by John William Waterhouse (1849-1917).

http://cgfa.acropolisinc.com/waterhou/p-waterh48.htm

According to Christopher Wood, Waterhouse’s typical enchantress is “not a witch, but a beautiful girl with long hair and a seductive, child-like expression. This was the distinctive femme fatale…the beautiful, wistful nymph who lures men to their doom, almost apologetically, because she simply cannot help it” (Victorian Painting). And that is another possible answer to my question about La Belle’s reason for giving “sweet moan,” weeping and sighing “full sore”: She is the unmerciful seducer because she must be; it is her purpose. She doesn’t want to hurt the knight and feels sympathy for him. However, her very existence necessitates her betrayal of men. Waterhouse’s interpretation of La Belle depicts this haunting dilemma.

The two are in a forest with flowers and brambles surrounding them. She is sitting on the ground and her feet are bare, an image of helplessness. La Belle’s pale face, with its sensitive intensity and bright red lips, is the lightest thing in the painting. She looks at the knight almost as if she were pleading with him. He is trying to get support from the trees and branches around him but they ensnare him just as La Belle does. She has her long, silky straight hair wrapped around his neck and seems to be pulling him toward her. He is in full armor with his visor up and his face dim. His expression and posture show that he is desperately trying to withstand the temptation that La Belle offers. But even as we look, he seems about to fall into her arms.

This was painted in 1893. Wood writes that “from the 1890s onwards, all Waterhouse’s pictures are of women; men only appear as victims.” It was during that decade, according to Peter Trippi, that “a panoply of menacing females [were painted] triggered by the perceived threat of the New Woman” (J.W. Waterhouse).  A very interesting cause and effect that I want to explore further. 

“La Belle” Artistic Interpretations (3)

In Frank Dicksee’s (1853-1928) painted interpretation of “La Belle Dame sans Merci” we definitely see the knight “in thrall.”

http://www.artrenewal.org/pages/artwork.php?artworkid=228&size=large

La Belle is on the knight’s horse but seems to be in full control of the situation. She is leaning over toward him with her red hair lush and flowing behind his head—enveloping him.  She is holding the horse’s elaborate reins with one hand. Although she seems to be in control of him as well, the horse is stomping with one foot and has his head thrown down as if in nervous rejection.

The knight, however, sees nothing but La Belle. He is looking directly into her eyes and seems unable to look anywhere else. His arms are thrown out as if to balance against a fall, emphasizing his abandonment to the “lady in the meads.” He’s in full armor except that his helmet is attached to the horse’s harness. There is a long red scarf wound around the helmet, the favor given to the knight by La Belle. The scarf is a metaphor of courtly love: The damsel gives her knight a gift of clothing before he goes into battle. However, what is represented here is not courtly love because the damsel is neither virtuously modest nor in distress. The opposite seems to be in case: The knight looks innocent though ignorant of any distress. (A good book, in part dealing with the stages of courtly love in the Medieval Period, is Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror.)

The landscape around the couple indicates spring, a literary metaphor of awakening. However, the sky off in the distance seems to be of a setting sun which connects to a theme of loss. La Belle is bewitching the knight and the helplessness of the man makes us want to come to his aid . In a sense, Dicksee has forced the viewer into the position of the warning ghosts in the poem.