Captivity to Conquest a Personal Concept

A journey from Witches to captivity to wild nights. I began this blog with the concept of self identity based on the captivity narratives and Young Goodman Brown.

Psychology defines the self concept as a mental model of the self. According to Personality :A Systems Approach by John D. Mayer from the University of New Hampshire; "The positivity or negativity of the self-schema is referred to as an individual's self-esteem. Models of the world,, on the other hand, are representations of the outside world by which we navigate our surroundings. the tell us the rules by which the world operates"(168).


The concept of self is one that transcends throughout all of the literature we have explored on this journey. Personal psychology is the essence of the interpretation of literature, in addition to historical knowledge and historical context. These two are essential in understanding and interpreting literature and applying what we read in history as well as in literature to our daily lives.

History allows us to have perspective and gives us the context of the time period in which a piece takes place. The importance of the history literature connection could not be depicted any better than it has been in this class. Imagine, reading Young Goodman Brown without any historical knowledge of the time and place.

“And, maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did Goodman Brown grasp his staff and set forth again, at such a rate that he seemed to fly along the forest path rather than to walk or run. The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing on ward with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil”.
When looking at this again and imagining it out of context it reminds me of the classic version of Snow White when she is lost running through the forest. Or an odd sort of narration of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

How would we view the Conquest of New Spain without the history that gives it meaning? How do we understand and interpret Self Reliance and Civil Disobedience without the historical knowledge?

The fact is, we don’t.

Back to personal psychology and the concept of self in literature; how do you prove who and what you are? Someone along the way posed this question in response to one of my blogs. I think a lot of the literature that we have explored in this class has asked us to deal with a similar version of this same question. How do you prove who and what you are to yourself and to others? How does Young Goodman Brown return to society after experiencing and seeing all that he has and try to appear unchanged by his experiences.

“The next morning young Goodman brown came slowly into the street of Salem Village, staring around him like a bewildered man. The good old minister was taking a walk along the graveyard to get an appetite for breakfast and meditate his sermon, and bestowed a blessing, as he passed on Goodman brown. He shrank from the venerable saint as if to avoid an anathema.”

For a man of this time to shrink away from the minister as if he were to be detested is frightening. How does Goodman Brown return to the town and understand his position in society, what does he call himself and how does he feel about all that he has experienced. We discussed this as a class briefly but I find this to be a crucial illustration of what these people experienced everyday.

This is beside the point, however, I have read this piece many times and this is the first time I noticed that the minister was “talking a walk along the graveyard to get an appetite for breakfast” I don’t know about other people but graveyards do not typically give me an appetite and I would imagine that if I were to give a sermon I would not look upon a graveyard as a place to meditate on that sermon. Though I have read this piece so many times this strange paring has never stood out to me as unusual until now. I assume that the graveyard is near the church yard as many are and were always and that is why the minister’s morning stroll would lead him past the graveyard but even knowing this does not exactly comfort me in the strangeness of this description.

Back to the Puritan experience: How did the people of Salem carry on knowing that at any moment they could be damned? How did the men aboard the Whale ship Essex sit back while crew members were being eaten and how do those that partook in eating their fellow men return to society in any normal way after experiencing these horrors? It is the extreme nature of these experiences that brings me back to the idea of the concept of self and who we really are verses who we project ourselves to be to others. The sense of self, like literature is very unpredictable and at the same time based on history.

Another mental model that personality psychologists talk about is referred to in the previously sighted textbook as the life story. The life story is a description of a typical sequence of events describing the protagonist and other people. The stories people chose to tell will highlight some aspects of a person or a life and de-emphasize other aspects that might not fit the purpose of the telling of the story."Such stories" states Mayer, " are the means, in part, by which we define our identity for ourselves and for others". In this way Mayer and other personality psychologists seem to be trying to provide an answer for our previously mentioned question, how do you prove who and what you are to yourself and others; in other words, how do you prove yourself to others and what is your own understanding of yourself?

Interestingly, enough it seems psychologists are saying that we often identify with ourselves and with others by defining our self concept which we are able to do by sharing our life story.

I find this to be a fascinating connection between psychology, history and literature. Our history is our life story which defines our psychology: the self concept which in turn creates our literature.

This was touched on in our Emily Dickinson facilitation by Tony DeGenero and I.

Emily tells us:

CVI

I felt a cleavage in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.

The thought behind I strove to join
Unto the thought before,
But sequence ravelled out of reach
Like balls upon a floor.


Is this not an intriguing look at creating literature and the intrinsic nature of the mind and the self?
Miss Dickinson has a very unique representation of the "I" in her work that is not unlike other poets though her stylistic approach is. She sometimes uses the "I" as herself such as in this piece or in other pieces she writes from another persons point of view making the "I" someone else such as in,


XVI

I ’m wife; I ’ve finished that,
That other state;
I ’m Czar, I ’m woman now:
It ’s safer so.

How odd the girl’s life looks
Behind this soft eclipse!
I think that earth seems so
To those in heaven now.

This being comfort, then
That other kind was pain;
But why compare?
I ’m wife! stop there!

The unique aspect Emily Dickinson takes on in this piece is directly related to her life story in that she has embodied Susan Huntington Gilbert, (former bestfriend/lover) present sister in law. Yet, even thought the I in this piece serves as Susan or 'Sue" speaking she is actually mocking Susan's role as the wife because she resents it. In the second stanza she even speaks to herself; the girl with the soft eclipse mentioned is actually most likely referring to Emily. So what lesson would Emily Dickinson teach us about the self concept and life story?

_-_-_-_-_-_-_





What have we learned about literature and history, and literature and the self concept on this journey together?

Literature is always current no matter how historical it is. Cotton Mather: On Witchcraft still speaks to us today. Emily Dickinson's love poems carry on themes of love that we still experience today. I was personally able to make a connection in class between Poe and Jeffery Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides. An older text and a contemporary one.

History is absolutely necessary to make literature come alive. Literature cannot sustain itself without history and contextual evidence of those historical underpinnings. (see Goodman Brown.

and last but never least,

We rely on the concept of the self, image of the self and self theory in order to create the life story and this is what allows all of us to be writers of great literature.

NEVERMORE

American Literature a Series of Unreliable Narrators

Edgar Allan Poe
" Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not"? (The Black Cat).

He calls it a "perpetual inclination" to break the law, to defy what we know as good and right.
Is this something perpetual, cyclical, something put into motion long ago that cannot be stopped? Should any man or woman who feels the inclination to do such horrid things as to hang their first true love their trustworthy cat, act upon that inclination?

If we could divide every moment, every decision, every idea we have ever had and divide it into what is true and good verses what is wrong and bad what would we find lurking behind those decisions?

After all, Poe's narrator tells us, he committed the act simply because he knew it was wrong!

Doesn't every good girl want a bad guy sometimes? Doesn't every guy want what he can't have?
Doesn't every girl in the Chasity Club ( thank you Glee) want to be a little bit dirty sometimes? We've all heard of the overprotective father or mother that keeps their daughter so sheltered during her young adult life that when she is in college she quickly goes from

The ideals of Chasity to the ideals of Christina?













(Sorry Christina I know you're not like this anymore.)

These are overgeneralized stereotypes but don't we see these common themes in all of our dramatic comedies played over and over again, a different group of big name actors a different setting and time?



In our class discussion today we talked about about insanity and what insanity means.
Some questions were brought up that I found to be interesting:

Does environment make a difference?
What is the influence of sound?

The question of environment brings to mind Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall Paper
this story about a woman who is confined in one room in her house as her psychosis progresses. She becomes infatuated and obsessed with the wall paper in the room and she is both haunted by it and seems to adore it in some ways as her mental health declines.


We also talked about other haunting questions like,
Who and what governs me?
Who decides what is right and best for me?
What do I tell myself about ME?

Poe's narrators tells us that we cannot rely on the self. The self is dangerous, it is an entity that perpetuates destruction. They banter with Thoreau and Emerson's Self Reliance, saying, I pitty you fools that rely on the self, you that depend on yourself to govern the mind and the soul because the self is out to get you! The self will corrupt and destroy you because the self plays off of it's own vulnerability, the self knows exactly where its Achilles heel is, exactly where all the crippling painful memories are stored that can be so utterly debilitating.
Tim Burton knows the essentials to making the horrors of the Gothic genre hilarious by putting a satirical spin on it..... listen and watch closely for Poe's Black Cat as you watch this...and don't forget to look for the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper..scrawling with a pen about the house possessing her...






Tim Burton's Vincent in the voice of Vincent Price


Who is Vincent Price: The legend behind the voice?

Vincent Price - House On Haunted Hill - Trailer check out this trailer to see who Vincent Price is in his work

Interesting biographical information on Poe: Edgar died unexpectedly and of unknown causes. It is said that he died of "congestion of the brain" which could be related to several different disorders and physical states. It is said that Poe said a quick prayer before he died saying, "Lord, help my poor soul".There are many theories and ideas surrounding the cause of Poe's death from rabies to epilepsy.

An odd charter with an even more mysterious death.

"Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it. They regard such children as property, as marketable as the pigs on the plantation; and it is seldom that they do not make them aware of this by passing them into the slave-trader's hands as soon as possible, and thus getting them out of their sight. I am glad to say there are some honorable exceptions. ".

I find this part of the Jealous Mistress: from Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl to be interesting in the worst way. Historically it was common for slave owners to get young female slaves pregnant and sell those children off. It was something that was swept under the rug most of the time but every once in a while a case would be brought up. Most often these children would go on as slaves and never know who their biological father was.

This is a story with a sad beginning between two people and ends with four. It starts with a horrible interaction between the slave owner and the slave and ends with her, him, their child, and his wife. Some of these woman would marry a man knowing that he was already the father of many slaves others would go into the marriage and be naiive to the fact that he was forcing himself onto his female slaves. The later were the women that were mortified to discover his transgressions just as the case Harriet describes with her own situation.

These young girls are violated in every possible way. They have no privacy, no individual identity, their sexuality is violated and they are humiliated. This chapter clearly describes the way that they are used as a tool between husbands and wives and on plantations to acquire more slaves for the trade.

As a Student Hall Director I have many important conversations with young women on a daily basis. Sadly, some of these conversations remind me of the experiences described by Harriet and other young women affected by the slave trade. The emotional and physical abuse that occurs in the relationships of highschool and college age women is unreal. Many women have been subjected to this kind of abuse and have not been able to achieve healing or redemption because they first cannot forgive themselves for choices which may have led up to the assault or like the girls and women in the slave trade, they are manipulated beyond their own understanding. Manipulation is a key factor in all of this. Harriet mentions learning how to write and the way that her master would have frowned upon this and forced her to stop until he realized that it could be an advantage to him because he could write her notes; so that her verbal/emotional abuse could be received in a more secretive way. This is the same type of manipulation that goes on in relationships today.

We saw prime examples of this relationship aggression in the video clips from Wedding Crashers that we watched in class. Those men wanted one thing from those women:sex; they were going to do anything they could to reach that goal. They lied about everything and made up complete persona's in order to win the hearts... no not win the hearts but to get those girls to sleep with them. They didn't care about their hearts; again there was only one thing those guys wanted form those women.

This is the same mentality when characterized through men that leads to the stereotype: "all men are dogs".

How does this relate to Harriet Jacobs and the life of a slave girl?

All slave masters were men; most married; most "cheated" on their wives by soliciting their slaves for sex; or essentially raping them. All slave masters are characterized as brute forces, forcing themselves on women and children a like to get what they want; manipulating women into marrying them only to disregard those marriage vows for sex.



This brings me to another thought: the modern slave trade. All across the world young women are being prostituted by their own family members for money to by food in order to feed other children in the family. Or they are bought as sex slaves, there are entire massive rings of these being discovered everyday.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=676587n

"Hundreds of thousands of young, desperate girls are trafficked each year as sex slaves. Some are lured overseas with the promise of a good job, only to be enslaved once they arrive. Others are simply abducted". (This article from CBS news found at the link above) hosts videos and more information about the sex trafficking currently happening around the world.

As I said before there are multiple victims in these stories. Each page presents a new opportunity for someone to be made a victim. Harriet tells us that she felt sympathy for her masters wife because he was supposed stick to his marriage vows and make her happy yet he was doing the exact opposite.

Do you think some women in slavery used this jealousy factor to their advantage?

If all of these cases from the 1800's were revealed how many children in the slave trade do you think actually belonged to slave owners?





shoes of Holocaust Victims


What are the implications for slavery and power in the future if we have traveled a long journey from the 1800's with the African Slave Trade to genocide during the Holocaust to Sex Trafficking all over the world?

Self Reliance Relying on The Self

Becoming the Archetype of Self Reliance :
Alice and Ralph

"The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act of word, because the eyes of others have no other date for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them"

Ralph Waldo Emerson: ON Self Reliance:
Set all things aside, things of the world, self indulgence including charity and conformity in order to come to self awareness. In order to be yourself, to become whole and complete one must be centered on self reliance.

"Virtues are in the popular estimate rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pat a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade."

This is to say that virtues have no value but popular opinion?

A man must acquire the ability to judge another man's look of disapproval as a means of survival. "The bystanders look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlor."


How do we rely on the self without self discovery? Without self awareness? How do we come to terms with ourselves when we cannot even carry a meaningful conversation with our self?

The self is a complex character, one that is mischievous misleading and deceiving even to the mind which it inhabits. The actual self, reflects the nature of others (close friends, relatives) and loathes the qualities which are opposite of those the desired self desires (for lack of a better word). We often see this competitive nature within our own psyche; the epic battle that rages between the actual self, the projected self and the desired self, these are who we are, who we think we are and who we wish we were. These are the me's the I's and the if only I were... that we look for everyday in our day to day struggle with the world. Pressures, media, influence, desires,wants, passions...these interfere with our understanding of our true self, our actual self. Emerson is trying to get to this literal idea of the self and the formation of that self in his essay Self-Reliance. I find that his ideas are both compelling and inhibiting in many ways.


Emerson's quotes are littered throughout the world found on postcards and in inspirational cards, "lift me up's" if you will. But honestly, this essay is depressing. If you look at it literally he says, cast off happiness, cast off pleasure and reward, cast off charity and religion because a man must rely entirely and completely on himself before he can advance in the world.

But one could also read this as positive in the truth that a man cannot fully love another until he loves himself and he cannot trust another until he trusts himself.

To bring it back to the quote I started with a man cannot trust himself completely until he believes in his own consistency. One cannot have truth without consistency. When a man is so encumbered by his past acts he cannot move forward he is not trusting of himself; Emerson describes this feeling as a fear of self trust.

The Pimp Vs.The Coquette

Eliza is searching for something more. She wants to be free to "date" as she pleases without the influence of others particularly the influence of her parents. After her first suitor an old man chosen by her parents dies due to illness she is excited to explore her options. Many express interest in her intellect, beauty and flirtatious nature yet, Stanford (the pimp) tries to seduce her and eventually succeeds. Boyer is a nice option, pious and gentle yet he has a motive of his own. Boyer is interested in finding a wife because he wants someone to love and have a family with he is in every way, ready to settle down. Eliza displays opposition to Boyer's claim of love because she does not want her freewill to be tied down in a marriage. Due to her desire for freedom Eliza makes a huge mistake in falling for Stanford's flattery. His flattery destroys her goodhearted qualities and leaves her void of herself.

This is a story of the struggle of passion and of social conformity. Conformity is often based on social rules of society, no matter how ridiculous those may seem at the time everyone is expected to conform in order to be considered 'normal'. Eliza resisted conformity when it came to her own relationships and her own ideals about social networking. Eliza like many of the protagonists of literature was far beyond her time. She like Emily Dickinson did not want to be stuck in a social conformity cloud. She was in a constant struggle of what was right and wrong vs. what was right for her.



This reminds me of the power of manipulation that we saw in Puritan society. How easy it is to get caught up in something appealing, menacing and evil? How easy is it to chose evil when what is seen as good is so boring and seemingly lacks insight? How hard is it to hold onto what is good and comfortable and pious when we can turn to the exciting, indulging things/people of the world?

Eliza struggled with wanting freedom from the opinion of others and not knowing how to decide for herself without the influence of others. Imagine how vastly different Puritan society would have been without the extreme importance of the opinion of others? How often did the people do organically what they thought was right without letting the ideas of others crowd their mind and alter their true feelings? Look at this in comparison to culture today: How many of you girls out there choose a guy without looking for a wink of approval from a mother/sister/bestfriend? How many of you guys have chosen a girl with out looking for a nod of approval from your dad/buddies/brother?

Too often we base the decisions we make on the opinions of others, the approval of others or rather the disapproval of others. When do we say enough is enough? When do we follow the decision that is true to ourselves? How do we decide what is true when the opinions of others are constantly interfering? Isn't the decision to follow our hearts/ our own intuition the most important decision we can make? These are the struggles Eliza faced and the decisions we face with each new challenge of life.

Eliza was most likely written as a symbolic version of what to do and not to do in this era. She was a woman who wanted the worldly things yet at the same time wanted nothing to do with it. She broke the rules. She resisted conformity.

MAN VS. WoMAN

WWE WWF... what ever they are calling it these days. Fake wrestling on television is disgusting. I do not think it is entertaining because it degrades women. I think in this country we too often see a fine line between entertainment and subjecting the rights of others. Entertainment should be something that challenges the intellect in a way that helps mold an idividuals' inward concept of self or outward view of the world. The type of wrestling we watched in that documentary is challenging no doubt but in a very different kind of way.

In looking at this documentary and the films 300 and Wedding Crashers we are presented with a very unique image of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman.

A Man is obviously someone that should lie to women and children regardless in order to protect them from the truth. As we saw this in all of the above excluding 300. A man is a violent character that kills without looking back and treats women like dogs, literally making them crawl on their hands and needs and strip tease on command.

A woman is a submissive creature that is talked out of her pants with false heroism and bravery(the purple heart: Wedding Crashers). She will change her image in any way possible to please a man including undergoing painful expensive surgery (China). A woman is something to be attained, something containing monetary value (this we even see in the reading).

What does it mean this picture of a man and this picture of a woman have to coexist together?
Who is the weaker sex?
Is there a weaker sex?
In the end who has the ultimate power?

These are the questions we face in a society so obsessed with money, sex and beauty.

Concept of Self

"Are you one of us?"
"Who are you now?"


How do you identify yourself in a torn world?
How do you decide what's right when your personal feelings don't account for anything?
How do you have a personality or voice for yourself when individual expression of self is not an option?

Where is identity in all of this...





In response to the readings:
In looking at the captivity narratives and the film showing the Native American perspective vs. the Puritan perspective.....

If I lived during this time I think I would find it tempting to explore the Native American culture, their ways are projected as connected, a true sense of familial love, a community bonded by the worship of many gods and a deep sense of spirituality. There seems to be a true sense of fellowship and communal love that is almost what the Puritans strive for but will never attain due to the distance that exists amongst a divided people. I am at a loss when I try to imagine what it must have felt like...

To imagine the individual and social psychology of trauma that these people faced upon experiencing a change in identity, the way that they had to respond to themselves and this foreign environment; to imagine the freedom of the wilderness a horrifying space of uncertainty, is terrifying. To be a woman taken captive and welcomed by her captives on account of her bounty, to be worth something and to know that worth when you are being starved to death. The unmatched pain of losing a child, while another one dies helplessly in your arms, then to hold it through the night knowing that in another time and place you would have never conceived this as a possibility. To know that when you do eat you are eating something that you would never deem edible because it is a matter of life and death.

And after all this you have to return to the old life you once knew, one that is far removed from this wild place of cooked horse legs and dead babies. You return to that life with uncertainty only to face the scrutiny of old friends and neighbors.

Is that you Mary? Beneath that estranged face and tainted soul they search for something, they want to accuse you but approach you with caution. You are no longer one of them, you are no longer a simple face in the crowd, you are CHANGED. You will not continue living in this place with the same identity internally or externally. No matter who you are, who you once were or who you have become, you are no longer just Mary but you are another, you have been CHANGED by interacting with a different sort of people, by eating animals parts that would otherwise not be accepted for food. By holding your baby as it died with no means to help it. By sharing wigwams and nuts with THEM. Sitting at their fire side and smoking their pipes, you are no longer YOU but someone else.

This is not a time of acceptance or understanding, everything and everyone must fit into a category, no in-between, no gray area, no diversity...and when you get a glimpse of that there is no returning to your original state of mind.

____________-From a Historical approach-__________________
The people that came to settle in the Wampanoag lands were those who wanted to find separation from the Church of England in hopes to form a "New World" which would more ideally be self governed. In some ways I think these settlers left the oppression they faced and transferred it to a different part of the world in which they could essentially become the oppressors. Nearly 70 or so years later this same group got so encumbered by power struggle that turned the lands of the Native American tribes into battle ground between France in England in hopes to obtain power of North America. Before that even, King Phillips war occurred in 1675 which ended in immense bloodshed and terror.

How do we put blame on one group or another, clearly, I have stated an argument here along with evidence of historical findings... but how do we place blame or should it be blame that we are looking for?




In response to the facilitation:

I think the world today and the world then would be very different if we went back to that first Thanksgiving and continued creating a common ground between these two very different worlds of the wilderness and the settled lands...

I think we would see a very different world and a very different level of acceptance for diversity in America...

This is debatable depending on which approach or discipline we might apply it to