Blog Portfolio

Coverage:
We Were Meant to be Seen and Not Heard
Aesthetic Obsession
Female Liberation and Female Beauty
Duped by Feminism
Love? Said the Commander

Depth:

We Were Meant to be Seen and not Heard

In this post I reference ceremonies and traditions celebrated in Hinduism, and how many of these traditions could be considered somewhat sexist, but that no one seems to have a problem with this. 

Nina commented on my blog about Bell Hooks' piece on feminism. She wanted to know about my personal views on the topic Hooks discusses. She asks me about the importance of silence for the suppression of women, and how Atwood portrays it in The Handmaid's Tale. I responded telling Nina how I did feel that forced silence does play a large role in the suppression of women.

Interaction:
Talking Back and the Sins of Silence
Pooja and Monique had been talking about Monique's blog on the Sins of Silence, and Talking Back. We talked about the use of silence, and how it was either suppression or power. Pooja thought that silence created power, an idea from 1984, while Monique and I both thought that silence "gave men the upper-hand" in society.

Discussion:
Aesthetic Obsession
Jorina asked questions on my opinion towards the Barbie doll, whether I agreed with Gilman on her ideas about Barbie. Jorina argues that Barbie allows children to be creative and imaginative, whereas I respond saying that I thought this imagination was very limited, and restricted. Barbie molds the imagination of children, which isn't necessarily a good thing.

Xenoblogging:
A Rough Commentary: Falling Women
I had commented on Pooja's post with her commentary on the excerpt from The Handmaid's Tale. I really liked her commentary, and agreed with all her ideas. I asked a few questions regarding on of her paragraphs, because I found her take on "falling" and love as God, very interesting.

Wildcard:
Duped by Feminism
In this blog post I wrote about Susan Faludi's Blame It On Feminism. Faludi discusses how feminism has created unhappiness for women, even though women had become more successful. This was caused by the fact that women had lost men, they're one (biological) want. In all this newly achieved independence and "equality" women had, somewhere along the life, missed the feeling of needing someone, or having someone, being dependent--getting married, having kids.

Love? said the Commander.

This excerpt from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, shows Offred talking to the Commander about love and her thoughts and memories of it. In Gilead, no one loves anymore, love is just a memory. When Offred speaks in a tone that portrays her mixed views towards love.   Atwood also uses diction to show that Offred tries to hide that she is actually talking about her own memories and past. She also uses strong comparisons and imagery to depict her feelings of loss as well as her feelings of relief and pain that love has given her.

Offred clearly depicts mixed views on love through her changing tone. She uses words like “lovely” to describe love, only to be followed with the word “dire” in the very same sentence. These two words are opposite in nature, yet Atwood chooses to use both to describe one thing. This shows Offred’s very ambiguous feelings toward love, not sure if it had caused more happiness or more pain. She describes love as “dumb“, but “amazing“; it was “precarious“, but her friends had been “evasive” about it.

As Offred tells the Commander her thoughts on love, she repeatedly gives examples using the words "you" and "we" rather than using "I". This shows that even though it is clear that she has experienced the things she describes, it also shows that she is uncomfortable with the Commander knowing these details about her. She doesn't want to make it seem like its her own stories, though we can already tell. The last paragraph of the excerpt contains a lot of emotion, and the questions Offred asks seem highly personal, though she uses the word "you" throughout this paragraph, in the last sentence "What if he doesn't love me?", she uses first person.

Love is compared to God and god is compared to Love.

Duped By Feminism

By the 20th century, many considered women to have finally reached the same point that men have always seemed to be at. This can't be a bad thing, finally all that feminism has gotten us exactly what we wanted, equality, rights, freedom. Susan Faludi talks about how all this freedom and equality has brought about miserable women in her article, Blame it on Feminism. The more independent women become, the more unhappy they become. The reason for this unhappiness is loneliness, loneliness caused by the independence women had finally achieved. "It must be all the equality that's causing all that pain. Women are unhappy precisely because they are free. Women are enslaved by their own liberation." Women have achieved such high statuses, they have gotten all that they could have wanted professionally, but they miss getting married, having children, "the greatest female adventure", as Faludi describes it. Even if women were suppressed, their greatest pleasures came from men, and without men they were alone, childless, husband-less, even if they had a wonderful career to support them. With feminism women were so caught up in being equal to men, equal but separate, free, independent of men. And that is exactly what happened, it goes to show that women are defined by men, by the society, showing that they are not completely liberated yet. "Women have a way to go before they enter the promised land of equality." Before they get there, they need to find their own identity.

Feminist: a woman who has in her the capacity of fighting her way back to independence.

Female Liberation and Female Beauty

In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf describes beauty as judgment for women. She claims that women are forced to conform to the society's beliefs of beauty. Wolf writes that as women become more and more liberated and "the more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly the images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us". Essentially women are undoing the equality they have achieved or are achieving by judging themselves according to beauty. The beauty myth is female beauty used as a political weapon against women's advancement; Wolf compares this to the old feminine ideologies that once had control over women. The “successful womanhood” used to be characterized as by the perfect housewife, cleaning and cooking, taking care of the children at home, now the this womanhood is characterized by “the gaunt, youthful model”.

 I agree with Wolf to the extent that this crave that women have for being beautiful makes  all of the advancements women have made seem pointless, but this is ideology of beauty is in no way recent. Women have always strived to fit the societies requirements of “good looking”, whether it is now, when women starve themselves in order to be stick-thin, or before when ‘beautiful’ was defined by other qualities. “The quality called ‘beauty’ objectively and universally exists. Women must want to embody it and men must want to possess women who embody it.” Men have always waned to "possess" women who are beautiful, women have always wanted the best husband, being beautiful  must have seemed like a way of getting him.

Aesthetic Obsession.

We all go through that Barbie phase,you know that at some point in your life, you have admired her, every girl wants to be a Barbie Girl. You've read those fashion magazines, flipped through the glossy pages looking at the beautiful models in their beautiful clothes. We all have wished maybe at least once that we could be more like them. Taller, thinner, tanner, beautiful. This is exactly what Susan Jane Gilman, and Anastasia Higginbotham write against in their articles. As children, teenagers, and even as adults we are forced to accept a fixed definition of beautiful. Do girls who don't meet this "definition" not count as beautiful? This seems to be the general idea that the media gives off.

 Gilman tells us how Barbie gave her the idea that she wasn't good enough, she wasn't pretty enough as a child. Barbie's characteristics are extremely fake, and her body shape is impossible to obtain, with completely wrong proportions. Yet this doll is seen as the epitome of beauty for young girls. Every girl plays with this doll, every girl admires her, loves her, wants to look just like her. Gilman tells us how this was definitely not healthy, girls of different races, beautiful in their own way, want to be blonde with bright blue eyes because thats what beauty is. "If you didn't look like Barbie you didn't fit in. Your status was diminished. You were less beautiful, less valuable, less worthy. If you didn't look like Barbie, companies would discontinue you,". As Gilman says, dolls, or really any toy, often give children an idea of what is considered important and valuable in society, it also determines for children what is "pretty" or beautiful, sadly Barbie is what determines this for young girls.

Higginbotham does almost the same thing only focusing on more of a adolescent fad, replacing Barbie dolls with teen fashion magazines. All of these magazines have photos and advertisements with breathtakingly gorgeous models, all tall and skinny. This is what will be considered beautiful by teenagers. This is what every girl wishes she looked like. Sadly, many of these models are photoshopped  or have loads of make up slathered onto them. Higginbotham discusses these fashion magazines and how they convince teenage girls that there is only one kind of pretty, everyone can strive to achieve this prettiness.

This regulation of what is beautiful or what is perfect is done by the media. In The Handmaid's Tale , it was done by the school at which the handmaids were taught. Aunt Lydia, repeatedly mentioned throughout the novel, can be considered the equivalent of the media in our society, teaching what is wrong and right, good and bad, like pretty and ugly.

We Were Meant to be Seen and not Heard

Bell Hooks writes about suppression of speech as a woman, and how she tried to overcome it during her childhood and after. Hooks describes the control a patriarchal society that existed when she was a child. At this time children weren't meant to speak much, "to make yourself heard if you were a child was to invite punishment...to speak when one was not spoken to was a courageous act" (15). This applied to most children but often boys were encouraged to speak, whereas girls were always suppressed. This begins to show the sexist principles that Hook was forced to grow up around. Because boys were capable of becoming preachers, they were often made to speak, whereas for girls it was thought better to keep quiet in submission to the society ways. 'The right speech of womanhood', Hook describes is the "talk that is simply not listened to", though women could talk, their words weren't to be remembered, they could be tuned out (16).
In society today there are still large traces of patriarchal authority, where men are given more importance than women, more power, more freedom. Much of this can be seen in the different cultures of today's society. For example, in the Indian culture there are still a fair amount of male dominance shown. You have sisters tying rakhis on their brothers wrists which symbolizes the sister's prayers for her brother's well-being. You have wives fasting for husbands in order to insure that they have safety and long lives. Much of the times these things are celebrated blindly by women and are just considered to be tradition. There doesn't necessarily have to be meaning behind it, and there isn't much questioning. Should the husbands not have to fast for their wives? Should brothers not have to tie rakhis on their sisters? No one bothers asking these questions, and if they do, they never seemed to answered. They don't matter, tradition is tradition even if it connotes traces of sexism. I know my family and I still follow these traditions, and whenever I question them, I never get any satisfying answers. Would Hook consider this as women's submission to the patriarchal society? I probably would.

Blog Portfolio

Depth: 

In this blog I didn't make any direct references to other sources other than We, but as I was writing I did think about and get ideas from other sources such as The Grand Inquisitor. When I was thinking about how Harrison says human's need something to believe in and always need proof, I related it to when the God was tempted to give His people a miracle in order to prove that He was actually God and was capable. God wanted His people to believe in Him without needing proof, but because of  our human nature is naturally curious God's people didn't believe him. Harrison talks about Vico's Giants in the same way, the people in the forests were at first oblivious but then saw lightening and questioned it and needed to find answers. In the same way God's people needed answers from God, but he wasn't willing to give them to the people. 

First the Forests

Interaction:

Monique has valid ideas in which she explains how people will eventually feel inhuman if they are treated that way, which is how Shin from a prison camp in North Korea felt. However, I believe that because these people in the prison camps haven't ever been treated any better, nor have they seen people being treated better, they can't know they are not being treated as humans. Shin says that he never thought that being in the prison camp was unfair, he never knew a world that wasn't the prison camp. Therefore he would not be able to make a differentiation between humane and inhumane, because when we use these terms they are associated with our  way of life in the outside world, rather than his world inside the camps.

Born and Raised in a North Korean Gulag-- Monique

Discussion: 

Saumya raises a point that was brought up in one of her blogs about the North Korean Gulag, saying that the transition between elementary school to high school can be compared to the transition of moving from a prison camp to escaping and being free. I completely see where she, and Anuraag (who posted on her blog first bringing up this idea) are coming from, but to me the transition seems a lot more hard. Yes we go from a fairly ignorant stage to a less ignorant stage, but do we ever really come leave the oblivion as long as we're in school? Transitioning from elementary school to high school takes 12 years, an extremely slow process, in which every year we prepare for the next, this however does not happen in prison camps. If we use the analogy of prison camp being equivalent to 1st Grade then, we would have to say that Shin was in "1st Grade" for 20+ years, when he escaped and was immediately put into "12th Grade". 

North Korean Gulag

Xenoblogging: 

Comment Primo:

I was the first to comment on this Tom's blog on Questions of Conquest and the Illusion of Individuality. This was my first comment in general, and it was more of a critical comment  rather than a comment discussing the topic of the blog. I thought that Tom's blog could have used more analysis and connections to We.

Response to “Questions of Conquest” and “The Illusion of Individuality”

Comment Grande: 

My first comment on this blog discussing how I thought that Winston and Shin were different from each other because Winston was never ignorant towards the Party, whereas Shin was in complete oblivion to the world outside of the prison camp. Winston had always chose to go against the Party, and Shin never thought the camp was unfair to him. These differences if related to 1984, would make Shin any other Party member, who was influenced by someone to go against, or leave the Party, whereas Winston made the choice himself, by realizing that the Party treated people wrong.

In my second comment on this blog I agreed with Pooja's comparison with D-503 and Shin, explaining how they both were never against their oppressors, in fact they both wished that they could go back to being oppressed and oblivious at one point or another. I contrasted this to Winston who always wanted to revolt against his oppressor and was forced to give in to the Party's ways in the end.

Born and Raised in a North Korean Gulag-- Pooja

Wild Card: 

I really liked blogging about this because the topic of the blog was slightly shocking. After reading  about totalitarianism and oppression using ignorance, it was interesting and unfortunate to see that this actually happens in the world. There were so many connections between Shin's life and the life of D-503 and Winston making it really fun to compare and contrast each of them, not just in my blog, but also in the comments of other blogs.

North Korean Gulag Blog

Reaction to NY Times article on North Korean Gulag

Shin Dong Hyok was born and raised in a North Korean gulag, the life he was forced to live was the only life he knew existed. To us, or at least to me, it seemed as though this lifestyle, the way these people were treated in these camps was completely barbaric, it was something that doesn't really happen, something that we only read about. This makes it strange to read about someone who only knew this life and nothing outside of the walls of his prison camp. Shin assumed that everyone lived the way he did and he never thought it was unfair. 

Shin's life relates to the life of the Party members in 1984. To the reader it's clear that the each of the members of the Party are treated is wrong or unfair, but to them it's standard, they love the Party, and they think there's anything bad about it enforcing the idea of Ignorance is Strength, a piece of the Party’s slogan which is similar to the saying that ignorance is bliss. Winston however, is one of the few who can even vaguely remember how life was previously causing him to be unsatisfied with his life now

It's hard to accept that Shin found this way of life normal. The world I was born into is the world I know, the world I find normal, making it shocking to know that Shin never questioned the way he was forced to live in, showing how much surroundings affect one's thinking. Ignorance is bliss. It makes sense when Shin says sometimes he wished he could go back to before he knew about the rest of the world, before he knew about anything because in a sense his oblivion never brought him problems, he "only had to do what [he] was told", finding his life now more difficult than it was in the camp. Shin having lived in the camp for so long knew nothing more than it, being pushed into a bigger world and seeing completely new things has to be hard.

Reaction to The Psychology of the Novel

The chapter Psychology of the Novel, from Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel seemed very purposeless to me. I don't quite understand why someone would write a chapter explaining what is necessary in a novel, or what many authors need to do to make their novel appealing. To me, they way an author chooses to write their novel should make the novel appealing to its readers, of course there are certain measures the author must take to make it that way but there aren't any rules. It's never guaranteed that all types of readers will read these novels, but some will because they relate in some way to the novel. Smiley mentions this relationship in the Psychology of the Novel repeatedly. "When a reader reads, she is communicating with herself, but when she feels a sense of kinship with a particular novel, she feels that the author is communicating with her," (85). I agree with the idea that every reader when reading a novel tries to relate themselves with the characters or plot, by reading they think as the author had thought, thus communicating. But it isn't absolutely necessary to have built a relationship with the author in order to enjoy the novel. Being comfortable with a novel may compel a reader to continue reading the novel, but it is not as significant Smiley makes it out to be. Smiley continuously emphasizes this idea of comfort, using multiple examples to show multiple approaches of creating a connection with the reader, which for me got boring. 

In the beginning of the Psychology of the Novel,  Smiley mentioned how the author needs to keep the reader’s attention but I feel like she didn’t do a very good job of keeping mine, many of the statements made by Smiley seemed like generalizations which bothered me a bit. While reading this chapter I kept getting bored by how repetitive and useless it seemed. Smiley’s Psychology of the Novel really just gave an impression of being guidelines for writing a novel, which I find unnecessary. A novel is a novel, and should be written how the author chooses to write it, instead of analyzing the methods other authors used, and definitely without all this “psychology”.

Reflection on First the Forests and We

    First the Forests, a chapter from Forests: A Shadow of Civilization describes Harrison's view of humanity and what it is. He suggests that humans more similar to animals which directly contrast to Zamyatin's portrayal of humanity in We, where humans are constantly depicted as more machine-like. 

    In First the Forests, Harrison says that at firsts humans will choose to leave their natural environment, forests, and will slowly begin to leave the forests in which they live. Similarly, Zamyatin's implies that humans will move further away from their true animalistic selves and move towards science and technology. Both portray the development of humanity as a cycle and that eventually after humans have "alienated [themselves] from the animal kingdom" they will start revert back to their original bestiality.  In We I-330 is a representation of humanity starting over this cycle, “its fall back into bestiality".

Harrison states that there are three universal institutions of humanity: religion, matrimony, and burial of the dead. These three institutions are depicted, even though differently, in Even though Harrison’s and Zamyatin’s implication of humanity are very opposed, whether it is machine-like or animal-like, neither description follows these three institutions, making humanity neither of these two according to Harrison. Another feature that neither technology nor animals have that humans do is curiosity about the world, or the universe. Humans naturally have an innate curiosity that drives them to find explanations and answers to things. Harrison uses Vico’s Giants to explain to explain this. In the beginning people lived in the forests, this was when they were most similar to the animals around them; they were oblivious to the sky, to anything in the world outside of their forests, this concept is described by Vico as “bestial freedom”. The first time these humans encountered thunder and lightning, they became aware of the sky, due to fear. This fear caused curiosity and thus led to answers, which in this case lead to the concept of God and Heaven and divinity. This is something neither animals nor machines have the capability to do. In We, all of the numbers including D-503 are living in oblivion, but when D-503 left the boundaries of the Green Wall and saw the people of Memphi was when he became aware of the rest of the world.  

Though Harrison and Zamyatin describe humanity as either animalistic or mechanical, but really humanity is somewhere in between the two…

Questions of Conquest and We

The Questions of Conquest by Mario Vargas Llosa and We by Zamyatin both describe very similar aspects of a society, or in the case of We a utopian society. Llosa talks about the same high power of people dominating over the the majority of lower class people who were"incapable of taking individual initiative". In the structure of the Tawantinsuyu, an individual had zero importance and "virtually no existence in that pyramidal and theocratic society whose achievement had always been collective and anonymous". This concept individualism as being insignificant is displayed endlessly in Zamyatin's We, where the entire community of the One State worked as a whole rather than individually. Another huge similarity between the One State and the Inca society as that a "state religion", in the case of We, the Benefactor, took away the freedom of individuals and "crowned the authority's decision with the aura of a divine mandate". Llosa uses the term "sovereign god" to describe this authority, in We the Benefactor is constantly characterized with a God-like ambiance thus making him equivalent to a "sovereign god". Another similarity is that the life of an individual was completely planned and supervised by a network of administrators in Tawantinsuyu , this in We, could be analogous to the Table of Hours where basically each hour of a number's life was determined.
The concepts used in the Tawantinsuyu are directly similar or relate with the concepts used by the One State of We.

Zamyatin's "On Language" and "We"

Zamyatin's On Language discusses the concepts he thinks are necessary for good writing, he tell us that there is no actual division between poetry and prose but instead between lyrical work and epical work. Lyrical literary work would include "the revelation, the verbal portrayal, of the author's personality" whereas, epical literary work would include the "portrayal of others, external to the author". Zamyatin focuses greatly on the way language should be used in order to create good  literary works. He clearly follows these concepts in his novel, We.
Throughout the novel the reader can see that Zamyatin speaks as if he is from the time or has the same background as his characters. For example, Zamyatin writes “if this were being written by one of my hairy ancestors a thousand years ago, he probably would have described her by that funny word "mine".” This is one of the biggest concepts Zamyatin describes in On Language, "language of the milieu and period portrayed" which helps brings the reader into the atmosphere of the story line. Zamyatin could have easily used the word “mine” to describe O-90, but by doing so he would leave the milieu, or environment of We, made his own language visible, rather than the character’s language.
These concepts of using language to portray milieu, atmosphere, and the time period keeps the readers present throughout the novel as it does in We.