Chuck Woolery

James Joyce is no Chuck Woolery in the love connection department or maybe he is. According to the infallible Wikipedia, "Of the roughly 22,000 couples who met on the show, twenty nine were eventually married and eight became engaged."

Why did I just bring up an '80s dating show? I just saw an advertisement for it while I was flipping through TV channels. No, I don't own a time traveling DeLorean; it was on GSN. I felt it would be a good idea to include a bizarre opening in this blog post, so mistake or not, I'm running with it. The other option was LL Cool J's song "Mama Said Knock You Out." Seems like a win-win situation to me, but I determined that Chuck Woolery needed some attention in this blog post.

Let's get the Love Connection connection out of the way first. I thought the fact that works from the two authors we recently looked at use similar themes of isolation and broken relationships to get their points across was noteworthy. "Araby," "Eveline," "A Painful Case," and "The Dead" all seem to end in disappointment and isolation for the main characters who are trying to find a connection. Joyce presents a scenario in each of these stories where the main character seems to be detached for one reason or another and they try to establish a connection with another, but they wind up alone and dejected. We also see Lahiri's "A Temporary Matter" and "Interpreter of Maladies" end on similar notes. This repeated striking out more or less mirrors the tv show's success rate. I didn't enjoy Joyce's stories as much as Lahiri's primarily due to my preference for the writing style, but I found Joyce's stories to be just as interesting as Lahiri's.

With talk about Love Connection out of the way, I think I'll move on to other stuff I noticed. I was kind of unsure what to make of "Araby" before I read the essay about it. Some of the Orientalism stuff in the story stuck out, but I didn't completely get how critical Orientalism was to Irish identity at the time and some of the references Joyce makes to writers, thinkers, and personalities of the time were missed. However, the story and essay effectively demonstrate attitudes of the Irish toward British colonization/imperialism.

I thought "The Dead" was an intriguing story about the dinner party guests and ultimately about the conflicts in Irish society. Isolation and the search for control or identity are very apparent in this story. There's a lot going on in the story so I'm just going to make quick note of three things I noticed in the story.

Gabriel feels above, yet subordinate to the party hosts and other guests. He doesn't really seem comfortable with anyone from the moment he steps in the door and interacts with the servant Lily while she takes his coat and boots. When dealing with his peers he seems out of place. He's not sure to define the audience for his speech and he's also called a traitor against Ireland because he writes harmless book reviews for a pro-British newspaper. This scene where he's basically called a traitor also exposes his affinity for continental Europe over his homeland. All this adds up to create an image of a man who doesn't feel like he has a place in Ireland that really suits him.

On page 179, Gabriel's aunts try to track down Mr. Browne so he can come in from the cold. I thought the first two lines of dialog spoken about Mr. Browne by Mary Jane and Aunt Kate reflect a cautious acceptance of certain people in the community. The women essentially say, "Brown is out there. He's everywhere." Considering the fact that most, if not all, of the other party guests are Catholic, this not only demonstrates that he's always around the house, but Protestants in general are everywhere in Irish Catholic communities and it's impossible to get away from them. English influence is seeping into all corners of Irish society.

In addition to expressing dissatisfaction with English presence in Irish life, Aunt Kate complains about the Catholic church's faults. On page 169, Joyce writes a scene in which Aunt Kate questions the wisdom of the Catholic church and the Pope after the Pope banned women from singing in church choirs. This can be seen as one woman complaining about the fact she can't sing in church anymore, but I see it more as a reflection of Irish society at large and how unpopular decisions made by Irish Catholic authorities, or any authority figure, can result in discontent in the most enthusiastic supporters.

Who Are You? Who, who? Who, who?

(Quick note: Ridiculous title, I’m sorry. And now I’ve got the opening of CSI (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WseRJMQf1U) stuck in my head. Anyway, this is a completely revised version of my original post. I suppose the original post was fine, but it felt lacking in some regard. I got kind of long winded on this version. If you don’t want to read it, just assume that I wrote Antoinette is a mad, beastly woman and she got what she deserved. You can comment accordingly.)

I hate you blog post five. Well, not really hate, but you certainly made me rethink how to approach this more often than I had anticipated. Spivak, curse you as well. Anyhow, with my outbursts against a block of text and the author of an essay out of the way, let’s move on to the details.

I suppose I should explain what caused some second and third (?) guessing with this week’s post. It’s not so much that I had trouble wrapping my head around things, more that there is so much to touch on that I wasn’t sure where to go and I kept wanting to go back and look at other things mentioned in the essay. Looking at the phrase “other things” and how I ended up approaching this, I suppose one could take that to mean things about the other because I got somewhat fixated on the idea of the other and identity in this instance. This isn’t to say that previous blog posts haven’t been about the other or identity because they all have to some degree. (Isn’t what part of what this class has been about? Who’s who? In what context are we defined and who’s the one coming up with that definition? How does one interact with another to change things?) However, the combination of Spivak’s essay and WSS more obviously laid out the conflict with identity more than any of the other stories we’ve read so far. So this is going to be an amalgamation of Spivak’s points, but they all seem to involve Antoinette’s identity.

I’ll start with things on the third page of Spivak’s essay (242) and kind of jump around from there. Here Spivak explores Antoinette’s sanity, which I agree is intact, and that leads into a discussion about Antoinette’s identity and her belonging in both England and the West Indies. Not only does Antoinette represent the other, but she also represents the other’s other. So, she also kind of represents the self in that regard. In this context I don’t feel that the broader question of whether she was insane or not is the most crucial, but questions regarding what the “insane” outburst might have said about Antoinette, and ultimately the lasting impact colonization has on the colonized population, are important.

As Spivak notes, Antoinette’s attack on Mason was not one of an insane person, but rather one of a competent, yet possibly irrational, person (242). It is not as if Antoinette leapt at Mason as soon as she saw him or immediately after he began speaking. In her recollection of the scene, Grace implies that the conversation carried on for some indeterminate amount of time before Mason said, “I cannot interfere legally” and Antoinette’s subsequent attack (150). This reflects some level of composure, control, or sanity and not unrestrained madness on Antoinette’s part. Spivak and Rhys also note that the attack coincided with Mason’s mention of the term “legally.” Now, this could have been nothing more than a marker word used to show when Mason was interrupted. However, if we continue along Spivak’s line of thought and examine why the phrase “legally” might have set off Antoinette, the argument that this brief episode marked the point at which the repressed part of Antoinette’s psyche was rekindled can be made. Again, not in an unbridled mad manner, but simply that the non-English other that was a critical part of Antoinette finally reached a saturation point (in terms of dismissal and abandonment) and struck out at the idea of English control that Mason represented at that moment. Not only was the imposition of English law preventing her salvation, but she was being abandoned and left to wither in the hands of English (Rochester) control, much like foreign lands/people colonized before. Following the attack we find Antoinette is largely unaware of what transpired. We’ll say she blacked out or something, but that blackout episode further reflects the repression of the other and Antoinette’s forced adoption of Englishness. An interesting aspect of this part of Spivak’s essay is that she is consistently referring to Antoinette in England as Bertha, just like Rochester does in WSS and Jayne Eyre, in order to demonstrate the new identity that Antoinette was coping with. I suppose it also demonstrates the end of Rhys’ original narrative and the interweaving with Bronte’s. However, if this is considered further, it becomes apparent that this blackout episode was less about a blinding rage and more about a situation where there was a fleeting repression of Bertha, which allowed a for a small rebellion against the colonizer and, indirectly, the English self that stood idly by.