Lit & Civ: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

*SPOILER ALERT*

I very much disliked the movie "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" so I wasn't sure how much I would like the short-story. But I gave it a go, since my main problems with the movie were: the slow-as-molasses-Nawlins drawl and the fact that Daisy is hit by car, since I first watched the film a mere month after I was hospitalized from being mowed down by a Range Rover. (The only reason I went to see was because my acting coach is in it.)

So let's start with the basic differences between the film and short-story: location. New Orleans v. Baltimore. In the film, Benjamin was raised in New Orleans by an African American woman whose name I can't remember. In the story, his parents keep him. His major love in the film is Daisy, who does not exist in Fitzgerald's short story. Benjamin has a son with Hildegarde in the story but has no children in the film. Benjamin goes to college in the story, and I don't remember him going to college in the film. Finally, Benjamin was the size of a baby when he was born in the film but was 5'8" at birth in the short story, which is inconceivable.

A common theme between both, different as they are, is that Benjamin is an outsider. He cannot live a normal life and can relate to no one. The most powerful part of the movie is that Daisy understands and accepts him for who he is and even rocks him as he dies as a newborn baby and she an old woman. But without Daisy, that powerful love theme is completely completely lost in Fitzgerald's version. Not even Benjamin's own son, Roscoe, loves him. He is embarrassed by him. Benjamin dies alone in with his nurse.

The most prevalent theme in this short story is gossip, scorn from the community, and the loneliness caused by it all. I think that Fitzgerald wrote this story for everyone who is different, who doesn't quite fit in, or even anyone who has suffered from inconspicuous glances and whispers from those around them. Benjamin couldn't help the way he looked/aged but that didn't matter to his community, peers, family. Both his wife and son accuse him of "refusing" to stop his aging. Maybe, too, Fitzgerald was trying to get across that people fear what they do not understand and people ridicule what they fear.

Lit & Civ: The Yellow Wall-Paper

I have always adored "The Yellow Wall-Paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I first read this six thousand-word short-story in high school a few days before Halloween as part of our Ghost Story week. The interpretation of the story is apparently what stuck in my mind, because I was quite surprised to re-read it and discover a key fact missing: I was taught that the yellow wall-paper was the narrator's skin!

*pauses for reaction*

Doesn't that interpretation make the story a million times creepier? The mental image of her husband walking in to find her bloody, mangled self, totally unaware that she had just peeled off her own skin instead of the "wall-paper" she so hated. Grosssssss. I could have sworn that it was an explicit part of the story, but alas, the story ends with her husband fainting.

I then googled "The Yellow Wall-paper" to read some interpretations and was dismayed that I found none claiming that the wallpaper was her skin. Was my high school teacher wrong? Whatever. I like that interpretation and I'm stickin' with it!

But that wasn't the only reason I liked this short story so much then and now. I love how easy it is to read the narrator's mental decline to insanity. You can pinpoint exactly where she snapped: one minute she's worried about what her husband thinks and by the next entry, all is well and she's fine! She's not fine. But crazy people never know they're crazy!

I also love the self-denial in this piece. The narrator believes that her husband loves her and spends time with her, but I think he never saw her until the end of the story. Several times she mentions her "imagination;" I think she imagined that her husband cared enough to see her, when really, he locked her in a room because she scared him and he didn't want to deal with him. That's my take anyway.

All in all, I think this is a fantastic piece. It's an easy read showing the woe-some ways of past recovery techniques. Now we can see how ridiculous it is to put a mentally unstable person in a room by herself for months without anything to occupy her. It would drive anyone crazy! And that was precisely Gilman's point.

Literary Theory: Little Red Riding Hood

I can tell already that studying and challenging fairy tells in this course is going to be endlessly fascinating to me. I have heard several versions of Little Red Riding Head but never have I sat down and compared them, nor have I ever likened any of the stories to rape. I do have to say though, I always thought Little Red Riding Hood was stupid. (I was surprised and disappointed to learn that my revered Charles Dickens refers to LRRH as his "first love." That says a lot about his taste in women, doesn't it?) It's actually better, in my opinion, to know that this particular fairy tale was never initially meant for children, but rather used as entertainment for adults. Thinking about LRRH as victimless in a rape situation shines a new light on the story and makes me appreciate it in a way I never have before. Besides, the moral of this Kindergeschichte is good: never talk to strangers, and (at least in one story) listen to your mother.

On the same note of being having new light shone on an old idea, did anyone else find themselves stopping to consider practically every example in chapter two of Jonathan Culler's "Literary Theory?" I kept stopping and thinking, "My God, what is a weed?" and "What does Hamlet stand for?" This chapter further confuses the conversation we had in class about What is Literature. Is it a fortune cookie? Is it a song? Is it a recipe? My mind was blown... just a little. Before this Fall, I have never before questioned what falls under the umbrella of Literature but now I find myself questioning everything. Next to my computer right now is a picture of me leaning in to kiss the Frog statue in the snow. The picture frame says "KISS LIKE YOU MEAN IT." Literature? If that were a sentence in a novel, sure. What about a lyric in a song? If it can fit into either of those mediums, does the sentence as it stands on the frame count as literature?

Lit & Civ: Ezra Pound

I am not a realist.

That is one of those things you vaguely know about yourself but are rarely confronted with actually admitting such a label aloud, or here, through a blog. I do not like Ezra Pound's poetry, plain and simple. (At least the pieces we were required to read.) The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism states that Ezra Pound believed that poetry should "imitate spoken language rather than conventional meters and should contain 'nothing, nothing, that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say'" and that his slogan was "Make it New."

*Heavy sigh* That's like people who argue that "real movies" don't have happy endings because "life isn't full of happy endings." Yes, which is exactly why I don't want to pay $12 to see a movie end badly: there are enough bad endings in real life! I watch movies for the romantic notion that things do end happily ever after, that good triumphs evil, that the protagonist always gets his girl.

To me the very point of poetry is the beautiful, lyrical language employed by the poet, not to hear everyday language. Will contemporary poets soon be using texting slang in their poetry? Will they insert LOL after certain couplets? Shorten people to ppl? Insert brb instead of breath marks?

Label me a romantic, but I prefer my poetry to be poetic.

Literary Theory: Intro to Fairy Tales

I can honestly say that I have never enjoyed an introduction of any book as much as I enjoyed the introduction to The Classic Fairy Tales, edited by Maria Tatar. I am sitting in my bedroom at my lakehouse, doing homework aside three of my best friends after an afternoon on our seadoos. I was guffawing so loudly they insisted on having me read aloud. I mean really, how is spinning straw into gold the same story as downing seven plates of lasagna??

Joking aside (really only the first page is laugh-out-loud funny), I am pleased to learn that fairy tales are 'indispensable," even in times of war. I'm a bit surprised that fairy tales are second only to the Bible but maybe that's for the same reason - most people know Bible stories just like most people know fairy tales. The familiarity is what makes both comforting.

In another class, Lit & Civ 2, we were asked to define Literature and had to identify whether Shakespeare, a car manual, comic books, and a picture book about the state fair were all considered Literature. I was thinking about this discussion while reading about "the merit" of fairy tales.

The mention of "happily ever after" struck me as odd, because not all fairy tales end happily! American fairy tales do because Americans like happy ending. Many fairy tales are based on the Grimm brothers stories and in the original German of these stories, most all of them end with "und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute" which roughly translates to "and if they're not dead, then they're still alive today." That's not only not "and then they lived happily ever after," but it ends that way to remind the reader/listener that the stories are FAKE because if they weren't, the characters would still be alive. (I should note I took a course on German fairy tales. I'm a German major.)

Okay, off my soapbox for today.

P.S. Ladies, comment if you definitely do NOT dream of being Sleepy Beauty, as page xiii claims, but rather dream of being Mulan and saving yourself and your country. (I realize Mulan is not technically a fairy tale but hey, it's Disney, so I'm going with it.)

Lit & Civ: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

The conciseness of the language used in Ernest Hemmingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is what makes the piece such a quick read as well as adds to the overall callous tone. But the tone is a direct contradiction, in my opinion, to what the piece is really about. The sentence defining this is "He had a wife once." I love pieces that slap youth across the face with the idea that "old people" are not "nasty things," as the waiter claims, but that they were young once too and that young people could find themselves to be the sad old man looking for a clean, well-lighted place to drink. Hemmingway also suggests that youth arrogantly believes that their time is more valuable than the time of the elderly, as seen in the following exchange: "I want to go home to bed." "What is an hour?" "More to me than to him." How sad. I feel exactly the opposite. I imagine that time would seem much more precious the older you get.

One fairly irrelevant note: one thing about this piece that struck me was the inclusion of the sentence, "The girl wore no head covering and hurried beside him." I love tiny details like that.

Another theme I scoffed at was the idea that money equals happiness. Now normally I laugh at that, saying that obviously no one ever bought a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel if they think money can't buy happiness. But in all seriousness, I wanted to smack the waiter for not being able to imagine why someone with plenty of money would want to kill himself. Money isn't everything; it certainly doesn't solve all of your problems aside from money-related ones!

The Story of the Good Little Boy / Bad Little Boy

These are two of the most interesting MT stories in my opinion because they are dripping with irony. Just by the title, you have a preconceived notion of how the stories are going to go, especially since I think most of us had not idea about MT's dark side.

The Story of the Good Little Boy is concise: boy is good, boy helps people, boy follows Sunday school teachings to a T, boy has bad thing happen to him, boy dies. The end! Righteousness is punished. In The Story of the Bad Little Boy, the boy is a total jerk and does awful things to everyone, grows up, murders his family, and becomes a respected politician. Sinfulness is rewarded.

Now, this could be categorized under the theme of Luck, but could just as easily fall under Training, in the sense that training ISN'T everything, that you can be trained to do the right thing but still find yourself unrewarded. MT must have had little respect for Sunday school teachings and organized religion in general.

There I go, off on religion again. It's just one of my favorite MT themes! His views on religion in this story fascinate me. Thoughts?