"Pisces"
gmail.com> wrote in message
news:125dc2f3-3e3c-47f2-888e-d85970c72268@8g2000hsu.googlegroups.com...
On Apr 5, 7:45 pm, "Rev. 11D Meow!" Spork.Corn> wrote:> Joyce Carol Oates has often expressed an intense nostalgia for the time
> and
> place of her childhood, and her working-class upbringing is lovingly
> recalled in much of her fiction. Yet she has also admitted that the rural,
> rough-and-tumble surroundings of her early years involved "a daily
> scramble
> for existence." Growing up in the countryside outside of Lockport, New
> York,
> she attended a one-room schoolhouse in the elementary grades. As a small
> child, she told stories instinctively by way of drawing and painting
> before
> learning how to write. After receiving the gift of a typewriter at age
> fourteen, she began consciously training herself, "writing novel after
> novel" throughout high school and college.
>
> Success came early: while attending Syracuse University on scholarship,
> she
> won the coveted Mademoiselle fiction contest. After graduating as
> valedictorian, she earned an M.A. in English at the University of
> Wisconsin,
> where she met and married Raymond J. Smith after a three-month courtship;
> in
> 1962, the couple settled in Detroit, a city whose erupting social tensions
> suggested to Oates a microcosm of the violent American reality. Her finest
> early novel, them, along with a steady stream of other novels and short
> stories, grew out of her Detroit experience. "Detroit, my 'great'
> subject,"
> she has written, "made me the person I am, consequently the writer I
> am-for
> better of worse."
>
> Between 1968 and 1978, Oates taught at the University of Windsor in
> Canada,
> just across the Detroit river. During this immensely productive decade,
> she
> published new books at the rate of two or three per year, all the while
> maintaining a full-time academic career. Though still in her thirties,
> Oates
> had become one of the most respected and honored writers in the United
> States. Asked repeatedly how she managed to produce so much excellent work
> in a wide variety of genres, she gave variations of the same basic answer,
> telling the New York Times in 1975 that "I have always lived a very
> conventional life of moderation, absolutely regular hours, nothing exotic,
> no need, even, to organize my time." When a reporter labeled her a
> "workaholic," she replied, "I am not conscious of working especially hard,
> or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so
> richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of
> the word."
>
> In 1978, Oates moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where she continues to
> teach
> in Princeton University's creative writing program; she and her husband
> also
> operate a small press and publish a literary magazine, The Ontario Review.
> Shortly after arriving in Princeton, Oates began writing Bellefleur, the
> first in a series of ambitious Gothic novels that simultaneously reworked
> established literary genres and reimagined large swaths of American
> history.
> Published in the early 1980s, these novels marked a departure from the
> psychological realism of her earlier work. But Oates returned powerfully
> to
> the realistic mode with ambitious family chronicles (You Must Remember
> This,
> Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart), novels of female
> experience (Solstice, Marya : A Life), and even a series of pseudonymous
> suspense novels (published under the name "Rosamond Smith") that again
> represented a playful experiment with literary genre. As novelist John
> Barth
> once remarked, "Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map."
>
> The dramatic trajectory of Oates's career, especially her amazing rise
> from
> an economically straitened childhood to her current position as one of the
> world's most eminent authors, suggests a feminist, literary version of the
> mythic pursuit and achievement of the American dream. Yet for all her
> success and fame, Oates's daily routine of teaching and writing has
> changed
> very little, and her commitment to literature as a transcendent human
> activity remains steadfast. Not surprisingly, a quotation from that other
> prolific American writer, Henry James, is affixed to the bulletin board
> over
> her desk, and perhaps best expresses her own ultimate view of her life and
> writing: "We work in the dark-we do what we can-we give what we have. Our
> doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness
> of art."
>
> from some website or another
>> kate chopin's awakening pissed me off
I can totally see how that'd happen:
Kate Chopin's Awakening, depicts the life of a woman, Edna, in the early
1900's who revolts against the social status quo and leads the life of an
independent female regardless of all the risks. It is a story that unfolds
the two parts of her life, only to see them both fall apart. Thus we see the
unreasonable conflict between her exterior world, the role of a wife and a
mother that society has imposed on her and her interior reality of emotions
and sexuality which initially are asleep and awaken through the course of
the novel. For the arousal of each aspect, two men are responsible, Robert
and Arobin, which correspond to the two sides of her existence. The
complexity of Edna's character, the richness of the novels details,
stimulate the reader to probe deeply into the characterizations and meaning
of her life. Edna has lost touch with the chain of humanity and the society
in which she lives, as a result, she cannot make a true commitment to life.
Based on this fact, the novel's development shows a repeated movement down
to the depths of Edna's unconscious and back to her conscious world. Edna's
emotional awakening was stimulated by Robert whose presence built up her
confidence allowing her to break out of her private inner world reinforcing
a totally different angle of viewing her life. Intense emotions were foreign
to Edna so she had always kept her distance from them. When she surrenders
she becomes a victim of these emotions Edna bit her handkerchief
convulsively, striving to hold back and to hide, even from herself as she
would have hidden from another, the emotion which is troubling - tearing -
her. Her eyes were brimming with tears (p.689). Before Robert came along,
feelings of anguish, troubled dreams, intense heart beats, the delight of
feeling male arms folding around her body or simply missing someone just as
one misses the sun on a cloudy day..(p.693), were strange and distant from
her reality. As Freud would explain in his psychoanalytic theory, we are
conscious only of one tenth of our desires and motives. Robert brought the
emotional aspects of her inner troubled world to the surface, stimulating
her desire for love, intimacy and the ecstasy of Romance. But this emotional
awakening was double-edged. On the one hand it delighted her and opened new
depths in her and on the other hand, it became her consolation in the sense
that she couldn't live the life she dreamt of. Edna's mondus vivendi was
suffocating. She was trapped in a world that didn't satisfy her in any way.
There was a great hasma between what she really wanted out of life and what
was expected from her by society. Edna's sexual instincts or life instincts
according to Freud, were awakened by Arobin. He aroused her sexual drives,
fulfilled her need for a male figure to substitute for the absent Robert.
Arobin is the sensation of passion, the one who stimulates, arouses and
pleases her bodily need to be touched and admired, She had become supple to
his gentle, seductive entreaties (p.709). The perfect match for Edna would
be love and passion at the same time but she compromises and experiences
feelings of regrets for nourishing only her body with Arobin, She felt
somewhat like a woman who in a moment of passion is betrayed into an act of
infidelity, and realizes the significance of the act without being wholly
awakened from its glamour (p.713). Arobin's character corresponded to the
unconscious of Edna's physicality taking advantage of her vulnerable state,
Alcee Arobin's manner was so genuine that it often deceived even himself
(p.713). Edna was a confused woman, Arobin was a master in handling woman
and took advantage of her. In the concluding part of the story, certain
moral and human ideas begin to emerge with greater clarity. Edna realizes
the horrifying meaning of her life in the sight of the sea, which offers her
the freedom, for which she rebelled for. We are now more aware of the
desperate complications of her mind, Despondency had come upon her there in
the wakeful night, and had never lifted. There was no one thing in the world
that she desired. There was no human being whom she wanted near her except
Robert; and she even realized that the day would come when he, too, and the
thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone (p.741).
By choosing death, she fry's herself from the tyranny of continuing a
miserable existence. Life was not worth being lived without Rodent Good-by -
because, I love you (p.742). Her dissuasion to commit suicide, is according
to Freud, a death wish towards another person of which one feels great anger
and regrets for feeling that particular way. Edna interjected the lost
object and her anger was turned inward as a defense mechanism called
sublimation. When Edna swims out into the water until death, she actually
drowned Robert along with her hopes. Her death was liberation and an act of
great courage.
