He killed that, too.

Initially when I was reading Trifles, I wasn't very enthusiastic. It was an okay play, but nothing that seemed really exciting for me. But then I got to this line, and I suddenly felt the tone become very somber. It's almost a throwaway line, with Mrs. Peters immediately saying that they don't know who killed the bird. The thing is, I'm pretty sure they both knew that Mrs. Hale was not talking about the bird, especially with her use of the word too.

This line implies to me that the murder was a result of domestic  violence. Wright was abusing his wife, and she got fed up and killed him. The ladies talk about how Mrs. Wright used to love to sing, but that her husband "killed that". This to me is more metaphorical than literal. When they say he "killed" her singing, they mean that he took any joy and happiness she had and crushed it. Immediately after making the remark about killing her singing, Mrs. Hale remarks that she "knew John Wright", which to me means that she knew what a terrible and abusive man he was, so it would not suprise her if he killed the bird.

This makes the store extremely sad to me, because at this point it's not really a murder mystery, but a story about a woman who was pushed to the edge after suffering abuse, but never gets justice. It kind of reminds me of Tess of the Durbervilles. No matter what she does she gets abused and pushed down and in the end she still doesn't get a happy ending.

Sir Thomas Wyatt ≈ Bruno Mars

I am not a fan of Bruno Mars. I'm not a fan because virtually all of his music follows a single theme and pattern. Bruno Mars meets a girl, she dumps him (usually because he was a jerk) and then he cries about it for the rest of the song. He writes songs about jumping in front of trains, blowing himself up with grenades, and medicating himself into oblivion because he can't face the sadness that comes with a girl leaving him. 

If Bruno Mars had existed during the Rennaisance, They Flee from Me is the type of poem/song he would have written.

They Flee from me is the story of a man lamenting the fact that his once submissive and demure lady-friend (or friends) decided she wasn't interested in him any more and left him. There are bits of the poem that suggest some sexual action "did me seek with naked foot, stalking in my chamber" and "When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, and she me caught in her arms long and small". There are clearly some ladies wandering around in the speaker's room without shoes and with their clothes falling off.

But then there's also the lines that imply that these ladies aren't exactly keen on the speaker, like "I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, that now are wild and do not remember", or "ow they range, busily seeking with a continual change." So, now the speaker is saying that this lady who used to be "gentle and meek" is now wandering away from him, looking for new, more exciting adventures.

The part of the poem that most reminds me of Mars is the last line "I would fain know what she hath deserved." Here the speaker is saying that he doesn't know if he was good enough for the lady. Did she deserve better than him? Is that why she left him? This entire poem is about a guy looking back on a sexual experience and wishing his partner hadn't left him and wondering what he did wrong and what he could have done better. It sounds exactly like any one of Bruno Mars's songs.

**A little historical conext: Wyatt was part of King Henry's court (The same King Henry who kept killing and banishing his wives and then getting remarried) and during that time it was extremely common to men and women in the aristocracy to fool around with one another and even keep one or several mistresses.

Loss of Faith

Dover Beach has been one of my favorite poems for years, which is saying something because I really hate poetry. I remember the first time I read it I was supposed to be doing an analysis on the symbolism in the poetry, and for the first time I really got into it. My favorite part of the poem is this stanza:

"The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world"

I love this section because I feel that it really embodies the over feeling of the poem. Here, Arnold is comparing his faith, which he was once confident in, to the crashing and receding waves of an ocean. The same way that a huge powerful wave breaks and is eventually pulled back by the tide, so has Arnold's faith receded, even though it was once very strong. Arnold feels as though the rug has been pulled out from under him. He was once very blissful and happy in his cacoon of faith, but now it's been torn away and he sees the "naked" world for what it really is.

I can really relate to the idea of the poem; that one can live in blissful ignorance thinking everything you beleive is fine and will always be that way, only to realise that things aren't really the way you thought it was. That you were lead to beleive a lie or were tricked. I can see this idea reflected in a lot of different ways, from no longer beleiving in a religion that you once had complete faith in, to being cheated on by a lover, or finding out that someone has broken into your home while you were a school. There's a feeling of betrayel and a broken sense of security that comes after all of those events, and I think that's what the poem was getting at.

PS. I don't know what went wrong there with the indentation. I can't figure out how to fix it 

Are women ever NOT sexual?

There is a section of this part of the book that really got me thinking. Two authors, Kristeva and Cixous, both make comments about how feminist writing comes from feminine sexuality. Cixous in particular says "Write your self. Your body must be heard", and goes on to say that the key for women to enter the realm of writing is to become intuned to their sexuality.

I have to say, I was a little underwhelmed. When I saw the title, I was expecting someone more than "the key to feminist writing is sex!' which really doesn't seem all that different than the key to male writing of female characters, which is also sex, albeit in a different way. Throughout history men have been guilty of writing, generally, two types of female characters. The sex symbol, and the anti-sex symbol. A woman is either gorgeous, desireable, and attractive, or she is an ugly, repulsive old hag. Regardless of any other traits, women would nearly always fit into these two categories.And that's without even going into the "good women don't have sex" and "bad women are sluts who get their comuppance" sub-categories.

I realise that at the time the dead was written, female sexuality was suppressed. However, it still upsets me to read this sort of critisism because I am sure that if we were to read an essay on how to be a good male writer we'd see mentions of internal and external inspiration, observations of how society can affect writing, the theories of romanticism, realism, the sublime, etc. etc. etc. But NO! Women's righting of course has to be all about sex, sex, sex. Like it always has been.

I understand where the writer was coming from with this viewpoint. But reading it is a modern woman in a modern world I would have to say it's a failure as a feminist work. Feminism is all about breaking away from the norm and showing women that they are more than a sex organ that exists only in relation to men. In my opinion this critizism did the opposite. It only reinforced the idea that women and sexuality are one and the same, and that men always have to be part of the equation.

I love this topic!

This chapter talks a lot about reader responses and how what one person can interpret can be wildly different from what another person interprets.

This has actually been one of my favorite topics of discussion in regards to reading for a long time. I really love seeing how different people can read the exact same thing and understand something totally different. I also love trying to figure out what the "true" meaning of text is, or weather the author even meant for there to be any specific meaning.

There is a line early in this chapter that I disagree with. Adena Rosmarin says that a "literary work can be likened to an incomplete work of sculpture", and that to really understand it you have to be able to visualise the big picture of the work in your head. But I don't think that's true. When I read something I don't usually visualise the entire, finished work as I am reading. Rarely do I ever even "analyze" while I'm in the process of reading. That comes after. In my opinion, if a work really is like a sculpture, then it's more like the kind of sculpture that kindergarteners make, where you just kind of go with it and let it form into whatever it's going to be and then decide what it all means in the end. I think if you try to understand what you're reading from the very beginning, you might accidentally end up inserting your own meaning or trying to force whatever you initially thought to fit into the work.

There is another section which stood out to me, which was that "reading is a 'rule-goverened transformative activity' in which the readers actively transform the text by paraphrasing and interpreting it" To me this goes right back into the idea that one reader can interpret a work much differently than another, depending what a reader decides to give importance to. Take this sentence:

"The homeless man trudged down the road slowly, looking off into the deep blue water of the lake that ran parallel to the street"

Some readers may focus on the colors and physical imagry of the sentence more than anything. Their first thought may be that the lake's deep blue color is representative of the man's sadness, and that's why he's walking slowly. Or that the lake being parallel to the road is symbolic of the man's long and seemingly never ending journey. Others might focus first on the man, the human element of the story. They might wonder why he is homeless, or feel bad for him, or feel disgusted with him. If you asked all these people what the sentence was about, one might say "It's about a poor, unfortunate man", another might say 'it's about sadness", another might say, "it's about the difficulty of human life", another might say,"it's a cautionary tale about working hard so you don't end up like this guy" etc. Just a single sentence can have so many different meanings just depending on which word you focus on, so an entire book or literary work can have a much bigger and even more different, or "off-the-wall" meaning, as the Reader-Response Critisism puts it.

Intros are hard

I really like it when books cut to the chase and "start in the middle". The beginning of the dead does not give an introduction or lead in, it simply jumps right into the action. The beginning is always the most difficult for me in any piece of writing. Introductions always seem very stilted and awkward to me, so I prefer to just start writing without any lead in.

Book Readings

On page 250 Manguel remarks that "reading publicly was...the best way to aquire an audience" and goes on to talk about how reading publicly helped both the author and the book-publishing house, because it garnered the people's attention and caused them to want to buy the published version. This very much reminded me of public book-signings, where authors will often read a passage of their book and fans can come and get their copies signed. I thought it was interesting to note how the order is now backwards though. Where once an author became famous because he went out and read his book out loud, nowadays authors do book signings because they already are famous. He also later goes on to say that these readings were also a sort of "proofreading" step for the authors, who would often go back and amend their works depending on how the reading went and the reactions of the audience. This would be almost unheard of in modern times, I think, because normally books, once they are published in their final form, do not typically get edited and changed by the author. The exceptions I can think to this are textbooks, which change sometimes as often as annually, or in instances where publishing houses find typos in books.