VIOLENCE and LOVE
It seems that there is a special kind of connection between violence and love when kids enter the age of adolescence – according to the world of Roddy Doyle's “The woman who walk into doors”. Especially boys appear in general to be more menacing versus girls and consider themselves having the right to do so, to speak to or make comment on girls in indecent manners. As if girls in someway or another had treated them bad or deliberately sexually attracted them in a promiscuous way. And the boys have to keep distance by being rough and rude to not fall in the trap and become bewitched and lost for ever. As if it was the girls' fault.
It looks like that these boys' behavior is social and cultural inherited because their way of acting and speaking seem to have a touch of experience they probably yet do not possess; they are talking as they were grown up men – but they are imitating and socializing themselves to adult men's life.
The problem is just that the adult men doesn't seem to protect their daughter's – on the contrary they actively harm them, “My father called me a slut the first time I put on mascara” (45) and they even blame them for being treated bad! Men are absent but they directly define the world of women and indirectly that of boys. It seems to be a bad environment for both boys and girls to grow up in. A world were their fathers cannot be trusted emotionally.
When love is out of sight depravity and violence reign.
PARENTS and CHILDREN
One day Paula understands that Charlo has something in mind regarding their teenage daughter. He looks at her with hatred in his eyes and starts humming. Paula suspects he intends to violate her physically or sexually. Of what she has bad experiences. There is something going on, she does'nt know what, but perceives the situation very intimidating.
She gets completely crazy.
And as I understand, in that moment she would be able to die for her child. Nothing else than survival matters in that instant. It's just a question of pure instincts to survive. It's a mother who acts with the reptilian brain to defend her child.
It is true that she has long experiences of his incredible violence which has made her watch every move he makes.
His humming awakens a primal force within her giving terrible power - and she doesn't a moment think of the consequences of her actions. She could kill just to save her daughter's honor. The awful punches she distributes at the man's head with the skillet just confirms that her will to defend do not put up any limits. She wants the best for her child; she does it out of plain love.
READING LIST
Doyle, Roddy (1997). The woman who walked into doors. London: Minerva
PS
THIS WORLD of MEN
Of course I agree with your interpretation of the environment of men Paula is depicting, about men's harassment of women.
The author Roddy Doyle is a man. I'm a man. Does this by nature make us evil towards women?
Of course I've experienced bad behaviour in relation to women, but not at that extent Doyle pictures it as you describe. Even so, I understand nevertheless that it could happen. How come? It's really scary to know that this world of men's violence against women I have next to me – and within myself.
I figure there are circumstances in life or society that degenerate men to the kind I have come about in the novel. What are these conditions? Something tells me it has to do with the economic welfare of a society. Maybe it's a naive view and to abstract, but I think it's a good topic of conversation, to begin with, in order to improve a woman's life among men.
Saturday, 14 December 2013
Death of a Salesman (Miller)
THE AMERICAN DREAM
Willy Loman maintains a hard life to raise money for his and his wife's domestic economy. He is also deeply concerned about his adult sons' lives. In addition, Willy himself is about to lose his work and thus opportunities to support the simple life he has built up.
When his situation at times becomes heavy he falls back into exotic daydreaming about how his own father and brother once managed making their fortunes. Events that belong to a vanished mythical past, but are infiltrating and materializing Willy's everyday life; in an imagination his recently dead brother is telling him it's time to set off to the promised land.
The idea of the American dream becomes the straw of life Willy is clinging to, but it has not only managed to distort Willy's perspective on living, it also acts as a barrier to him understanding people and maintaining his own life. His naive faith that everyone can be successful simply taking advantage of one's inherent possibilities throttles Willy's ability to really see life as it is, resulting him not being able to listen nor understand his grown up sons' daily living. In his pride Willy cannot even accept job offers from a close neighbour due to the man's successful business - Willy is simply jealous of him - a solution that would help Willy get along with life.
The American Dream has imprisoned Willy from which he isn't able to wake up; he has to give up his life to free himself from the burden of it, to be able to live. In this paradoxical sense he is a true existentialist. Willy Loman has discovered the meaninglessness of living in a world without reason; God didn't define the american dream – man did. Willy do finally reveal that there isn't any focus in life, there is nothing; God is dead and man is continuously inventing himself – e.g. The American Dream - to endure the fact that there is no point go on living and that man is doomed to die.
ABANDONMENT
I realize Biff's situation with clarity the moment the young man is trying telling his father that he has stolen a pen from an employer at an interview that didn't take place.
Biff has grown up with a man who throughout his life has been somewhere else than at present in his son's life. When Biff is a child his father Willy Loman is travelling around in business. Back home, he is busy with his own dreams about the boy's future. He doesn't really see Biff. He is just talking about the world and looking at it from his own perspective. Willy Loman doesn't really listen to what the boy says.
Biff himself is desperately trying to get in touch with the imaginary character of himself his father continuously is creating. But the puppet becomes a ballast to him, causing him losing contact with himself. This exclusion leaves Biff rootless in the world and he fails in creating something permanent.
At an important turning point in Biff's tender age, when he really needs his father's support, in a most important matter concerning studies, Biff figures out his father's illusions. It makes Biff completely lose faith in himself and his future. The mistress Willy is hiding in the bathroom is a symbolic view of reality he ought to have show his sons, and in someway tried to explain, from the very start of their lives. However, his father has replaced those facts of existence with his own dreams that consume his son and disaffect the boy from life.
This loss of truth is the very circumstance through Willy Loman's sons are trying to find their way in life; Happy has found his path by balancing on lying, but Biff can't manage navigating at all, he want to do the right thing but the abandonment his father has cause him is a psychological weight he isn’t able to free himself from. We can just hope his father's death will give Biff time to find peace and strength to continue stand up for authenticity and Happy reasons to start minimize his double-dealing.
BETRAYAL
I just wonder how it's possible go on living under the weight of a continuous betrayal manners, as I think you mean Willy does, daily throughout his whole life.
The play is completely soaked with betrayals in your point of view, maybe that's why this rubber tube appear once a while as an enigma to everyone, actors and audience, Gods and fairies, as life itself is a closed book, a deep secret.
Or, are there any persons in life not doing wrong; would there be any life at all if errors didn’t exist? Doesn't life itself need this panorama of normally defected people; we all need to combat daily living with a little lie here and a nice betrayal over there, just to figure out the way of living, just to learn about ourselves and the one's next to us.
Well, if everything and everyone was clean, without spots of wrong, from the very beginning of life, I wouldn't have spending time doing this note, it would have been completely useless, without sense. Without themes of deep betrayals the play "Death of a salesman" never had been written.
We really need Willy Loman's (low man!) betrayals to perceive or mirror ourselves to get to know ourselves and one another the better; the moment we see and understand Willy we get in touch with ourselves and we become reborn. The author Arthur Miller has created the Jesus of the 20th century; finally we have a character who we entirely can identify us with.
Willy Loman maintains a hard life to raise money for his and his wife's domestic economy. He is also deeply concerned about his adult sons' lives. In addition, Willy himself is about to lose his work and thus opportunities to support the simple life he has built up.
When his situation at times becomes heavy he falls back into exotic daydreaming about how his own father and brother once managed making their fortunes. Events that belong to a vanished mythical past, but are infiltrating and materializing Willy's everyday life; in an imagination his recently dead brother is telling him it's time to set off to the promised land.
The idea of the American dream becomes the straw of life Willy is clinging to, but it has not only managed to distort Willy's perspective on living, it also acts as a barrier to him understanding people and maintaining his own life. His naive faith that everyone can be successful simply taking advantage of one's inherent possibilities throttles Willy's ability to really see life as it is, resulting him not being able to listen nor understand his grown up sons' daily living. In his pride Willy cannot even accept job offers from a close neighbour due to the man's successful business - Willy is simply jealous of him - a solution that would help Willy get along with life.
The American Dream has imprisoned Willy from which he isn't able to wake up; he has to give up his life to free himself from the burden of it, to be able to live. In this paradoxical sense he is a true existentialist. Willy Loman has discovered the meaninglessness of living in a world without reason; God didn't define the american dream – man did. Willy do finally reveal that there isn't any focus in life, there is nothing; God is dead and man is continuously inventing himself – e.g. The American Dream - to endure the fact that there is no point go on living and that man is doomed to die.
ABANDONMENT
I realize Biff's situation with clarity the moment the young man is trying telling his father that he has stolen a pen from an employer at an interview that didn't take place.
Biff has grown up with a man who throughout his life has been somewhere else than at present in his son's life. When Biff is a child his father Willy Loman is travelling around in business. Back home, he is busy with his own dreams about the boy's future. He doesn't really see Biff. He is just talking about the world and looking at it from his own perspective. Willy Loman doesn't really listen to what the boy says.
Biff himself is desperately trying to get in touch with the imaginary character of himself his father continuously is creating. But the puppet becomes a ballast to him, causing him losing contact with himself. This exclusion leaves Biff rootless in the world and he fails in creating something permanent.
At an important turning point in Biff's tender age, when he really needs his father's support, in a most important matter concerning studies, Biff figures out his father's illusions. It makes Biff completely lose faith in himself and his future. The mistress Willy is hiding in the bathroom is a symbolic view of reality he ought to have show his sons, and in someway tried to explain, from the very start of their lives. However, his father has replaced those facts of existence with his own dreams that consume his son and disaffect the boy from life.
This loss of truth is the very circumstance through Willy Loman's sons are trying to find their way in life; Happy has found his path by balancing on lying, but Biff can't manage navigating at all, he want to do the right thing but the abandonment his father has cause him is a psychological weight he isn’t able to free himself from. We can just hope his father's death will give Biff time to find peace and strength to continue stand up for authenticity and Happy reasons to start minimize his double-dealing.
BETRAYAL
I just wonder how it's possible go on living under the weight of a continuous betrayal manners, as I think you mean Willy does, daily throughout his whole life.
The play is completely soaked with betrayals in your point of view, maybe that's why this rubber tube appear once a while as an enigma to everyone, actors and audience, Gods and fairies, as life itself is a closed book, a deep secret.
Or, are there any persons in life not doing wrong; would there be any life at all if errors didn’t exist? Doesn't life itself need this panorama of normally defected people; we all need to combat daily living with a little lie here and a nice betrayal over there, just to figure out the way of living, just to learn about ourselves and the one's next to us.
Well, if everything and everyone was clean, without spots of wrong, from the very beginning of life, I wouldn't have spending time doing this note, it would have been completely useless, without sense. Without themes of deep betrayals the play "Death of a salesman" never had been written.
We really need Willy Loman's (low man!) betrayals to perceive or mirror ourselves to get to know ourselves and one another the better; the moment we see and understand Willy we get in touch with ourselves and we become reborn. The author Arthur Miller has created the Jesus of the 20th century; finally we have a character who we entirely can identify us with.
To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
Society vs. the Individual
The small community of Maycomb is a sleepy little town where there is a kind of social convention about what is right and wrong, a sort of prejudice, some sort of social framework of how to think or act in certain situations, sometimes a social conduct that is not supported by the general law.
Scout, the narrator, is mocked at school because her father, the lawyer, is going to defend a black man, a right granted by law to every human adult, but in white people's minds the coloured man is an inferior being hence he is considered deprived that right, a view white children have inherited from their folks. In its most extreme manifestation, this attitude can slip into a serious crime in the eyes of the penal code: taking the law in one's own hands, but little, if a crime at all, in an individual's eyes: a lynching is averted, but this situation in which not only the perpetrators do not realize the extreme gravity of, but also those who prevent it don't make an official report about it to the authorities.
Aunt Alexandra, in addition to her code of conduct as a woman, and as an adult member of the society, thinks Scout should dress herself according to Scout's future role and chores as woman associated to gender, in gown; the girl herself rather dresses herself for the moment in pants, to be able to do things. Regarding people in common Aunt Alexandra has the same opinion, one should hang out with those who are of the same kind as oneself. In its most severe expression, this attitude can lead to a serious consequences: as when a father in his lost honour makes up that his daughter has been subjected to rape, the father can in his shame neither to himself or socially handle, or comprehend that his daughter has felt natural desire to a black man, and the general opinion accepts the father's version of the facts and the court judges the coloured man for the alleged crime despite serious flaws in the evidence. The society itself can not bear the shame that its caste system is disturbed which could lead to the collapsing of foundations and social chaos.
This ceaseless confrontation - society versus the individual; legislation and how individuals relates to it or live their parallel lives in their own ethical and moral beliefs - is revealed through Scout's experiences and vivid narrations that highlights this lopsided way to run a society that keeps double entries.
Throughout the book runs the story of a neighbour who Scout never have seen but only heard stories about, despite her maybe 8 years of age. Due to myths, rumours and children's vivid imaginations the proportions of this neighbour becomes very grotesque. The adults are at a loss and do not know how to meet or deal with the children's delusions; adults just murmur to show respect, well grown-ups understand there is a gulf between the reality and kids fantasies. But are the adults, and in extension the society, aware of that they are the responsible ones of the children's lack of behaviour? It is perhaps here that society beats knot on itself: the double bookkeeping paralyses - at one hand a society's Constitution and the rights and duties of its citizens, at the other hand groups of individuals with their private beliefs that destabilise the society - the adults and their inability to dislodge what they themselves have created off the agenda.
Reference list
Lee, Harper, To kill a mockingbird, Heinemann, London, 1960
PS
But aren't the heroes or the bad guys in the novel depicted a bit too stereotypical; is it because of this Harper Lee uses a child as the narrator, and easily come around the fact that humans are complex beings; a young mind who isn't really able to reflect on peoples behavior; children often distinguish people just good or bad, not both.
To Harper Lee it isn't enough to draw the coloured guy just coloured, as if Tom Robinson's version on the alleged rape at the trial against him wasn't enough evidence to prove him innocent; Harper Lee has to make him criple to, to make us really understand that this guy could by no means have done the horrid crime he is accused of.
In Tom Robinson there is no evil. He is poor, having a hard life, with a big family, and he is a bit naive to, he help white folks; maybe he was warned about it, but he is depicted as he doesn't understand these kind of sophisticated informations. And, how come he is so stupid trying to esape prision; running like a frightened animal? He must have been aware of the armed guards! Well, Harper Lee knows we have preconceptions about black people, by letting the novel be told through the eyes of a child, Harper Lee is trying to disguise it.
The small community of Maycomb is a sleepy little town where there is a kind of social convention about what is right and wrong, a sort of prejudice, some sort of social framework of how to think or act in certain situations, sometimes a social conduct that is not supported by the general law.
Scout, the narrator, is mocked at school because her father, the lawyer, is going to defend a black man, a right granted by law to every human adult, but in white people's minds the coloured man is an inferior being hence he is considered deprived that right, a view white children have inherited from their folks. In its most extreme manifestation, this attitude can slip into a serious crime in the eyes of the penal code: taking the law in one's own hands, but little, if a crime at all, in an individual's eyes: a lynching is averted, but this situation in which not only the perpetrators do not realize the extreme gravity of, but also those who prevent it don't make an official report about it to the authorities.
Aunt Alexandra, in addition to her code of conduct as a woman, and as an adult member of the society, thinks Scout should dress herself according to Scout's future role and chores as woman associated to gender, in gown; the girl herself rather dresses herself for the moment in pants, to be able to do things. Regarding people in common Aunt Alexandra has the same opinion, one should hang out with those who are of the same kind as oneself. In its most severe expression, this attitude can lead to a serious consequences: as when a father in his lost honour makes up that his daughter has been subjected to rape, the father can in his shame neither to himself or socially handle, or comprehend that his daughter has felt natural desire to a black man, and the general opinion accepts the father's version of the facts and the court judges the coloured man for the alleged crime despite serious flaws in the evidence. The society itself can not bear the shame that its caste system is disturbed which could lead to the collapsing of foundations and social chaos.
This ceaseless confrontation - society versus the individual; legislation and how individuals relates to it or live their parallel lives in their own ethical and moral beliefs - is revealed through Scout's experiences and vivid narrations that highlights this lopsided way to run a society that keeps double entries.
Throughout the book runs the story of a neighbour who Scout never have seen but only heard stories about, despite her maybe 8 years of age. Due to myths, rumours and children's vivid imaginations the proportions of this neighbour becomes very grotesque. The adults are at a loss and do not know how to meet or deal with the children's delusions; adults just murmur to show respect, well grown-ups understand there is a gulf between the reality and kids fantasies. But are the adults, and in extension the society, aware of that they are the responsible ones of the children's lack of behaviour? It is perhaps here that society beats knot on itself: the double bookkeeping paralyses - at one hand a society's Constitution and the rights and duties of its citizens, at the other hand groups of individuals with their private beliefs that destabilise the society - the adults and their inability to dislodge what they themselves have created off the agenda.
Reference list
Lee, Harper, To kill a mockingbird, Heinemann, London, 1960
PS
But aren't the heroes or the bad guys in the novel depicted a bit too stereotypical; is it because of this Harper Lee uses a child as the narrator, and easily come around the fact that humans are complex beings; a young mind who isn't really able to reflect on peoples behavior; children often distinguish people just good or bad, not both.
To Harper Lee it isn't enough to draw the coloured guy just coloured, as if Tom Robinson's version on the alleged rape at the trial against him wasn't enough evidence to prove him innocent; Harper Lee has to make him criple to, to make us really understand that this guy could by no means have done the horrid crime he is accused of.
In Tom Robinson there is no evil. He is poor, having a hard life, with a big family, and he is a bit naive to, he help white folks; maybe he was warned about it, but he is depicted as he doesn't understand these kind of sophisticated informations. And, how come he is so stupid trying to esape prision; running like a frightened animal? He must have been aware of the armed guards! Well, Harper Lee knows we have preconceptions about black people, by letting the novel be told through the eyes of a child, Harper Lee is trying to disguise it.
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