Romanticism Final Paper

Romanticism

            The beauty of a word is the multitude of meaning a single combination of letters can encompass. Beyond the literal, definitive meaning, words embody and take on feelings. The feeling a word possesses elevates the word from the page, to the mind of a reader, and ends up resonating in the heart of that reader. Words are also varied; one word can have multiple uses, formally and recreationally. Romance, is a word as complex as the notion it was created to convey. Looking specifically at romance in three contexts, primarily on the Romanticism movement in art during the nineteenth century, part of its complexities can start to be unraveled. In the nineteenth century romance seems to take on a different meaning in terms of paintings and in literature. This is also very different from what romance has come to mean to us in the context of stories and the twenty-first century. By exploring the artists and writers interpretation of romance and the way in which people viewed romance two centuries ago creates and interesting parallel to modern interpretation. William Blake is particularly intriguing because he was both writer and artist and is remembered today as a prominent figure in the Romantic Movement.

            The romanticism movement in painting on a basic level was societies’ response to the revolutions happening in France and America and the involvement of other European nations in those conflicts. The Romantics turned away from logic and reason and delved into the arms of emotion and feeling. Romantics focused on living and the beauty and real emotions of life. The art was rooted in the revival of Gothic styles and the medieval romance tales. A generalization of the art being produced is the use of deep rich colors and seemed to center more on the darker side of passionate romance than anything light or frivolous. Sublime was a heartstring of the Romantic Movement and was about beauty in gaining pleasure from the horrible. The sublime as portrayed in art was viewing something terrifying but it was invigorating and beautiful because the viewer was at a distance from it that kept them safe. To nineteenth century patrons this was romantic. Romantic art embraced the emotions of horror, terror, and awe. A rebellion against the industrial revolution, romantics wanted to explore nature and the authenticity of human emotion. William Blake serves as a perfect example and a leader in the romantic movement. His poems and drawings and paintings all show the exploration into romantic thought. His poem collections Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience express the mood of the era, that as a child a person is innocent and uncorrupted but that society, age, and industry ruins that purity. Nature was to be emulated and glorified while the industrial and city life was dull and destructive. Along with the poems, Blake included exquisite illustrations and page designs that captured the beauty and essence of his words. Art has the ability to convey an entire story without words, while stories paint entire picture without using paint. It is in this way that Romanticism was able to spread so far and incorporate so many different elements; artists were driving at the same outcome from a variety of approaches.

            Frye talks about the context of romance in chapter two and he opens the chapter by addressing Aristotle’s two principles, that art imitates nature and the distinction between form and content. Frye describes how it is different in literature because “the art is the form, and the nature which art imitates is the content, so in literature art imitates nature by containing it internally” (pg35). This is a complexly simple idea, for art to exist it has to be formed, to be formed it must contained content, to have content there must be inspiration, and inspiration comes from what is around us, and that is nature. The romantic movement was a revival of medieval romances and showed how the perpetuation of ideas occurs. An idea worth having, and preserving comes out of something else and may lie dormant for a period of time but people with naturally circle back to it and revive it, maybe with a new take or a fresh spin but originality is dead, everything is perpetually moving in a circular plain rejecting what has become normal and mundane and reverting to what has come before for vivacity and new introspection. Later in the chapter Frye addresses this idea and how “many works of literature, ends in much the same place that it begins” (pg51). Art is meant to express an idea, tell a story, and most importantly to entertain. Romantic artists, writers and painters, all wanted to escape the social upheaval and destruction of nature that was going on around them. They turned to nature and the simplistic and realistic beauty that it encompasses, and through that their art was able to create an alternative reality to that which was their day to day lives.

            The artists of the Romantic movement, whatever their medium be it words or canvas, progressed the idea of romance from what it was viewed as in the Medieval times they adapted it from and pushed it one step closer to the ideas of romance that are held today. Romance has now been pushed into movies and music and floods main stream society much in the same way that it did in paintings, poems, and music in the nineteenth century. It is as though we are currently in another regression into romance, society had become so industrialized and fraught with conflict and war that people were seeking the escape that romantic art provides. Movies and book series featuring fantasy love relationships that could never really work seem to captivate society. Adapting written stories into big screen blockbusters has become commonplace. If a person’s love life is not going the way they foresaw it there are endless romantic comedies to make a person feel simultaneously worse and better about their own situation. Everything is an adaptation, made to fit the void that general society is feeling. Frye discusses that vision is what creates the human and that “man lives in two worlds, the world of nature and the world of art that he is trying to build out of nature...the focus of this vision is indicated by the polarizing in romance between the world we want and the world we don’t want” (58). It is all a duality, what a person can create can only be fantasy. But the purpose is that it is the closest to the life in envisioned and lived in the mind of the artist.

            The individual is really what matters; each person’s perspective is different. That is why a word can have so many different meanings and feelings attached to it because no two people are the same. People do crave similar fulfillment and that is what allows art to be so all encompassing. Art, written and otherwise, shows people that there are others out in the world feeling the way they do, and that is really what romance is. Romance is the emotional connection to other people. Art is the universal language for people to relate to one another. Nature allows for similarities in people and art is the portal that it can and must be expressed.

:::Obssessed:::

       It took me all semester but I have finally found two things that I am completely and absolutely obsessed with. I didn't really realize it until I sat down last night to finally complete my Oceans of Stories term paper. After starting about five different times with five different topics and an solid amount of time researching books, the internet and perusing blogs, I had found myself at my desk with no more time to dilly dally about this paper.
   That motivation lasted maybe five minutes, before I had checked my twitter, did a cursory sweep of Facebook and then turned to my obsession, the blog that I check from my phone and whenever I open my computer. I should just make it my homepage but there is something gratifying about having it sit up in my bookmarked pages and clicking on it that I don't want to let go of. The Thought Catalog. Its a blog that a friend sent me a link to about three weeks ago. I have posted in this blog about an entry I read on the website and thought was pertinent to this class and sharing with others. It wasn't until I found myself on about page 800 of the 1000 pages reading blog after blog, that i realized I was not closer to having my paper complete but I felt  so enlightened and so much smarter. I love everything about the blog, the multitude of authors all of different ages, places, and perspectives. I love how there are no limits or requirements for articles, its all open ended and you can read only what interests you. I become completely engrossed within the articles and lose all sense of time and space, I just read until the words become blurry from staring at the computer screen. I took another stab at writing my paper, but quickly found myself in a realm of thought that was rather inquisitive and not very well focused when I caught myself turning to my second obsession...
    OPI brand nail polish. This is a sick obsession that I am financially very invested in. And I have to emphasis that it is not just nail polish that I like, it has to be OPI. Not only do I paint my nails at least once a week, but I am not just a person who can wait for the old polish to chip and then slop on some more to cover it up. I am meticulous and engrossed in a specific ritual. I have to remove every last speck of the old polish, then soak my nails for two minutes, then cut, clip, buff, and prep my nails all before I can even think of what color I am going to put on them. I have ceased going to get my nails done professionally because I can't stand to watch someone else screw with my nails. I have about two dozen colors here ant school and at least that many more at my house that I share with my mom. Last night though as I was once again avoiding my paper, I was really struggling to pick a color, because I narrowed it dow to red....I then realized I have about 6 shades of 'red'. This is when it clicked that this was my obsession. Like the blog the names of the OPI nail polishes entertain and intrigue me, they are all witty and sometimes a pun and its the only way I can remember which color is which. Big Apple Red, The Thrill of Brazil, Bastille my Heart, Malaga Wine, Vodka and Caviar, Chick-flick Cherry, Color to Diner for...and those are only the ones that qualify simply as containing some pigment of 'red'. In the end I decided that I really should get back to my paper and only painted my toes, leaving my fingernails with a simple coat of clear.
    My obsessions are not intellectual or in the least way productive but they are me, but allowing me a time to escape and reflect. They will be there for me when I am bored, procrastinating, sad, or happy. For me they are healing and meditative and as long as they serve this purpose I will continue to be completely and unabashedly obsessed.

Realistic Romantic

The presentations of the “Perfect Romance” were so diverse and each so unique that I couldn’t help but think about how that reflects everyone’s different and individual takes on Romance. It also made me realize that I am not a romantic. While I think things like apparent deaths, happy endings, transformation, and revelation are all elements of a good story and stories that I will openly admit to enjoying, they just don’t seem real life enough for me. I hear the stories of my friends friends who had these long winded stories of how they met and all the glorious wonderful things that happened in their relationship. Honestly I think its all a little ludicrous. I like simple and honest. I think romantic comedies are starting to stretch themselves a little too far, just be true to what you are, a movie about to people that aren't supposed to be together or haven't happened upon their random meeting in some picture perfect setting. They get together they endure some form of strife, they endure and they overcome and they live happily ever after. I love it, be simple, be expected thats completely fine with me, thats where I find “romantic comedy” a bit of an oxymoron. What about romance is supposed to be comedy? 

When I think romantic in terms of a genre or style I can not help but have my brain venture to the Romanticism movement in art at the end of the Eighteenth century. The Romantic artists were emotional, exploring the emotions of horror, terror, awe and trepidation. These to me are what romantic connotes. And this is a far cry from the witty, ironic, endearing, and soothing movies that we have deemed romantic comedies. The romanticism movement also liberated the individual, after the many revolutions that Europe endured, art needed to show a new mindset. This notion of the individual is also not a component of our romantic movies, in order to have a relationship and some semblance of a good movie you need at a bare minimum three people involved. The two lovers and one other person who creates the obstacles the lovers must overcome in order to reach their happy ending.

This is where I came up with the realistic romantic, I would like to think that all the romantic ideals society has created are not myths and that they do happen, but I just can’t convince myself to be in full support of that mid set. Romance is far too complex to be that naive, but with its complexity there is a much larger margin for individual specification, and in the end what works for you is all that really matters.

Disney Lies

      A friend sent me a link to this blog and I have found myself captivated for an hour or so everyday since she did. Reading through the various articles and entries I have found myself completely enamored. The title alone provided enough intrigue for me to want to read all 990pages worth of entires, a "thought catalogue", how simplistically perfect. The ramblings of people I have zero affiliation with and most likely the only thing I have in common with the author is that we are all members of the same generation, and even that I am not positive of. Any way I came across this one in particular and thought it was suited for the subject matter of this class and the fact that I have mentioned Disney's lies in previous blogs. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.


               http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/10-lies-disney-told-me/

10 Lies Disney Told Me

God, I love Disney so much. In my spare time, I have been known to create entire dances to various Disney songs, and have not yet met princess fan art I won’t stare at for a decent 15 minutes while thinking, “Damn, I wish I could draw.” But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing; I’ve had to put up with a fair amount of deception — we all have. And here, the most significant lies told to me by my childhood guiding light:

APR. 5, 2012 

By CHELSEA FAGAN

1. If You’re Pretty Enough, You Can Communicate With Animals

From Pocahontas to Snow White to Giselle, pretty much any girl with a button nose and a decent wardrobe can just pick squirrels off a tree and get it to help her run her errands. I remember, at one point, going out into the woods behind my house when I was about 8 or so and trying to get the birds to come to me by sing-whistling at them. For a while, I was convinced that it didn’t work because I wasn’t a molten-hot princess in a super pretty dress. We were taught to believe that there was a certain class of women whose appeal and charm extended past princes to actually bring all manner of fauna to their side at their will. It was something of a disappointment when you started watching The Discovery Channel and realized that the people who actually spend their time figuring out the communication techniques of deep-sea squid were named Kevin and had more hair on their back than their head, and the squid didn’t dance around the research boat helping them clean the crew cabin.

2. Incredibly Rich, Hot, Popular Guys Are Husband Material

As much as Disney Princesses give girls a pretty tough standard to live up to in terms of beauty, wardrobe, and general behavior — the guys have it pretty bad, too. In order to bag a Princess/live happily ever after/be a hero, they have to be: ripped, two weeks away from coming into their inheritance, live in a castle, and have a face like looking directly at an orgasm. They have to be pretty perfect. And the thing is, guys that are beautiful, come from rich families, athletic, and charming do exist — look at Armie Hammer. The thing is, though, they are almost universally assholes. Remind me of that guy from high school who lived in that Victorian manor on the good side of town, and was captain of the lacrosse team, and had eyes like pools of sapphires, and a chest like Rambo — and he was super sweet and awesome and sacrificed everything to be with you? Oh, right, no. That guy’s diet was probably 40 percent jungle juice, and he only liked talking about the BMW that his dad leased for him. Not husband material, by any stretch of the imagination.

3. Pocahontas Was A Romantic Tale Between Two Consenting, Sexy Adults

Lol she was 12 and he was almost 40 in real life, and she probably didn’t have a whole lot of choice in the matter. Children’s movie material if I ever heard of it. She did have a talking raccoon best friend though, that part is true.

4. Ugly Girls Look Like Anne Hathaway

Oh, The Princess Diaries. How chock full of deception that film is, from beginning to end. (And we can also thank it, inadvertently, for making us suffer through Anne’s painful Oscar hosting with James Franco some ten years later.) But nothing in that film stands out as untrue quite like the idea that the dowdy, nerdy, unfortunate-looking girl at your school who has to be transformed is going to look like Anne Hathaway. We get it — she has puffy hair and glasses. But I think even the 12-year-old me watching the film was familiar enough with school politics to think to myself, “Wait a second — Anne Hathaway is actually smoking hot, you just messed up her hair and put grandpa glasses on her.” Disney wasn’t ready to give us the rough truth, that the school “ugly ducklings” are actually incredibly unattractive, and aren’t going to be transformed into starlet material with a simple chignon and swipe of mascara.

5. Disobeying Your Parents Can Only Yield Fabulous Results

I remember when Ariel was like, “Betcha on land, they understand, that they don’t reprimand their daughters,” and six-year-old me was like “Hoo child, if only. If only,” and then we smoked a cigarette together and commiserated about getting grounded. But in all seriousness, Disney films have been chock full of zesty young women breaking free from their overbearing parents and running off into the sunset to…get married several weeks later. And though my goal wasn’t necessarily to walk down the street past my bedtime and go get engaged to the neighbor boy, it certainly planted this idea in my head that if Belle can ditch her father and get a castle library out of it, I could at least probably stretch my TV-watching privileges past 7:30. Little did we know, though, that running away dramatically from your parents and doing the exact opposite of what they have decreed for you usually ends in crucial childhood privileges being taken away, including the right to watch the very movies we were getting our bad habits from. We should have left the rebellion to the Princesses, who had all those talking animals to help them in their exploits.

6. Captain Jack Sparrow Will Never Get Old

I remember settling in to watch the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie and thinking, “Wow! That Captain Jack Sparrow character is just hilarious! What can’t Johnny Depp do if given the right script and a little bit of makeup? ‘But where has the rum gone?!’ Comedy gold!! Gosh, I could watch a million of these movies and never get tired of it…ever.” Granted, I was already 14 when the first film came out, but I was still young and naive enough to believe. Along comes the second movie, which started to feel a bit tired, but still kept a somewhat fresh story line and decent banter. The third film came around, I felt like it was probably time for them to hang up their tri-corner hats for the last time and call it a day. And then of course, we found that a fourth film was coming out. A fourth film. And we were exasperated, tired, and just wanted Jerry Bruckheimer to let us sleep. But it came and went, and we made it through to the other side. And now IMDB is telling me that a fifth film is coming along. I thought only Tim Burton was allowed to exploit Johnny Depp until he’s a withered husk of a human being no longer sure of where he is or what he’s doing, only that he has a silly costume to wear and a couple cheesy lines to deliver. But it seems Depp signed some flaming contract with the devil, because he’s got more than one franchise/director/character to keep running into the ground until it has lost all meaning. Apparently “quirky goth guy” wasn’t enough for Johnny to do 12029383428 times — he’s also got Keith Richards Pirate Man left to ruin forever. God speed, Johnny. God speed.

7. Computer-Animated Films Are Going To Be The Greatest Thing Ever

Dammit, Pixar. You made Toy Story, and we were all like, “THIS IS THE FUTURE. WE ARE LOOKING AT THE FUTURE.” The film was so slick, and yet so warm and touching, and so perfectly crafted as to resonate through two stellar sequels over the course of 15 years. Between A Bug’s Life, Ratatouille, Wall-E, and The Incredibles, it seemed an infallible medium. And then the other films came — Planet 51, Shrek Forever After,Mars Needs Moms — that proved, without a doubt, that this was indeed just another movie medium. When it’s good, it’s extraordinarily good, and when it’s bad…it’s Ice Age 68: The Re-Freeze feat. That Hilarious Squirrel Creature Again. I would like to pass a law that only Pixar can make computer animated films from now on, and the rest of them should be scooted under the proverbial rug — except for Antz. Antz can stay in our national film registry if it wants to.

8. Life Was Pretty Sweet For Women At All Moments In History

Man, whether it was 1400′s Baghdad (excuse me, “Agrabah”), mid-18th century rural France, 1600′s Jamestown, or medieval Paris, things were good for the ladies. Sure, there might be an arranged marriage here or there, but they were quick to talk back, mill about town freely, and pretty much do whatever the hell they wanted. It’s an idyllic view of history, sure, but certainly not one that you want to carry with you, rosy-eyed, walking into history class. You remember Jasmine saying, “I am not a prize to be won!” and then you read a book or two and realize that, lol, girl, that’s exactly what you were. Belle? Would have been paired off with Gaston the second she turned 13. Ariel? I haven’t finished my Victorian mer-politics class yet this semester, but I’m pretty sure she and her 18 dancing sisters would have been in some kind of harem. Pocahontas? We all know what happened to her IRL. Mulan? Pretty sure she wasn’t going to get off with a slap on the wrist and a hot night with her former army captain, that’s for sure. Cinderella? Probably would have died of the black lung from cleaning chimneys out all day before she could ever put on a nice dress and go dancing. Life would have been pretty bleak for these ladies, but I guess that doesn’t make for as charming a story.

9. No One Had A Brighter Future Than Lindsay Lohan

I feel like Disney should be obligated to go pick her up wherever she is and take her to Disney Land and let her have a whole weekend where she just rides roller coasters and eats cotton candy and relives whatever childhood she clearly missed out on so, so hard. She gave them The Parent Trap, dammit. They owe her something! She played two roles in that movie at once, and she had the most adorable nose-freckles America had ever seen. Sure, Herbie Fully Loaded, Confessions of A Teenage Drama Queen andFreaky Friday were kind of lackluster, but she was a Disney kid/teen star! That company is legally required to squeeze their child actors like a tube of toothpaste until they get every last drop of adorable, charming youth out of them. And unfortunately, she (like so many Disney child stars before her), simply had nothing left when all was said and done. But if she — and maybe Kim Richards, too — could just have a little time to themselves to be normal kids, not hovered over by parents with dollar signs in their eyes and executives telling them to “do it again, but cuter this time,” they’d probably be okay. Disney, can you hook this up? You own half of the developed world. You could make it happen.

10. Everything — Absolutely Everything — Has A Happy Ending

If Disney has taught me anything, it’s that whatever bad thing is happening, or whatever negative feelings I’m having, it is clearly not over with until I’m singing a bouncy outro song and skipping into the sunset towards an awesome life. How sad I was to find out that people actually do break up, for example, and your ex is absolutely not showing up on a white unicorn under your castle window to apologize/let you in on his incredibly generous trust fund. And could you imagine my surprise when I realized that sometimes unattractive people don’t get transformed by a group of singing forest animals/royal staff into a gorgeous, charming princess that everyone suddenly loves unconditionally? It was like a cold slap in the face from reality when I found out that I would need 4 years of orthodontic work and an accutane prescription just to get to “mediocre ending,” let alone riding off in a chariot with Ryan Gosling. I guess, in some way, I still anticipate that things will have a Disney ending. When you grow up with it for so long, it’s hard to shake the idea that everything is going to end in a catchy song and flashy, bright colors. I guess I’ll just save a handful of confetti to throw whenever things are looking particularly bleak — no problem that couldn’t fix. 

Sir Lancelot

        To me, the story of Lancelot may be the perfect romance. I have restrained myself from making this claim about others we have read because I had a feeling that there would be one that I deemed more perfect, and I proved myself right.Daphnis and Chloe was too sweet and youthful for me, and the other stories have just not had the romantic edge for me. This is where Sir Lancelot fills the void, and maybe I am just falling into what Zimmer describes as Lancelot’s character and persona, but even if it is thats ok with me. 

    “Sir Lancelot is an incarnation of the ideal for 

manhood that exists, not in the world of masculine social

 action, but in the hopes and fancies of the 

feminine imagination” -pg 133. 

        Well if ever there were a point to rethink the finger pointing at Disney for ruining little girls by instilling a false image of a prince charming or valiant knight in shining armor coming to her rescue and chivalrously sweeping her off her feet, it may be apt to point a little further in the past to the time of King Arthur and the round table and the debonair Sir Lancelot. 

       The story of Lancelot has the four characteristics that we have deemed mandatory for a romance , quest, revelation, quest, death,and a happy ending. The other elements of his story are what make me enjoy it so much as a romance, the duality with which Lancelot is forced to live his life and the diversion from the usual knightly love tale. He lives as a human but raised in the faery realm and wrought with prophecies he cant control. He is apart of Arthur’s court and that provides a lot of rigidity with how to live life honorably and such. 

       His life as a perpetual bachelor because of his unfullfillable love for Queen Guinevere serves as another reason why this is my favorite romance. He is tricked by Elaine and banished by the hurt Guinevere and is then brought back into the bounty of Elaine and the son she bore him only to flee from there back to his real true love, Guinevere.

      Whether his love for Queen Guinevere was enchanted, bewitched, lustful, or unattainable it was love that both pushed them apart and pulled them back together, to me that is romance. 

        Lancelot again captured my attention when I was reading Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott for another class. Basically the Lady of Shalott is cursed and stuck in a tower forced to gaze out at Camelot, but she cannot look at it direct. Only through a mirror can she view the outside world. She sits up in her prison weaving a tapestry and lives monotonously...until Sir Lancelot rides into the frame of her mirror. The Lady of Shalott is so taken by him that she resolves to gaze upon him and build a boat that will carry her to him. Well, tragically, she never makes it to the ground, the curse kills her and she never gets to act on her love. To me this speaks to the enchanting and extremely handsome appearance of Lancelot. He is able to charm damsels by just his looks and is able to make them act beyond the bounds of their prescribed character. 

    Lancelot is a character enigma, but I feel like his irresistibleness and charm and knighthood make him both perplexing and strait forward enough to capture and perpetuate his allure, at least to the feminine psyche.  

Knowledge Lately

     So far this class has definitely had the greatest impact on my every day life. I find myself hearing stories, or reading texts, or even watching TV and pondering the story that it originated from or what the moral is or if it would qualify as a romance or not. To me this is the best thing I could ever ask for. I love when things from my classes transfer over into my life outside academics, like the validation of what I learned coming into play from just one class makes all the rest of my classes worth while. Last night I was watching one of my favorite shows, Chelsea Lately, Chelsea Handler is a raunchy comedian who has no censor for what comes out of her mouth and I love that. One of her many topics of discussion last night was about fairy tales and how parents today are not letting their children read or hear the traditional fairy tales because they send the wrong moral message and are too dark. She noted that one parents reasoning for not letting their child hear the story of Rapunzel because it is about kidnapping. I could not control my laughter at this. While I can agree that not all of Grimm's fairy tales or even those of Hans Christian Anderson are ideal for little kids because they may scare them, but for the blatant misinterpretation of Rapunzel as a story about kidnapping?? I was stunned. Nothing in any of those fairy tales is anything worse than what kids are exposed to in the news or anything related to pop culture and media.
      I couldn't help but enjoy this segment of the show and to anyone who has not watched her show I would highly recommend it, if for nothing more than a good chuckle. The perspective that this class has given me on stories is something that will stick with me indefinitely and will always factor into my approach to stories.

A Dime Piece and a Doughnut

            So there was this guy that was pretty good looking and wanted to wife a girl up, but she had to be a perfect 10. And not a fake one, but a real dime piece. He went to every bar, every night for months trying to find a worthy counterpart to his devastatingly good looks, he even went to different cities in search of this allusive woman he had his mind dead set on. He met a lot of women but none of them had the total package, something was always off, he absolutely could not find a girl to fit into the mold he had created for his ideal wife. A lot of girls were fake and had caked on facades that were easy to see through. Finally he got so fed up wading through the unworthy girls, he accepted the defeat and conceded that he may have had too high of standards and that no woman could ever meet them.

            He returned to his parents’ house very disheartened, and to top it off mother nature had decided to send a huge storm over so he was sequestered to stay inside and stew about his frustration at the lack of decent women in the world. An unexpected doorbell ring gave the guy a perfect excuse to escape the torture of the romantic comedy movie his parents had decided to watch.

            To his shock, it wasn’t some annoying salesperson but a much disheveled looking woman. She looked awful, her mascara was halfway down her face and she smelt like a wet dog. Why she was out in the storm he couldn’t figure out and she looked horrendous, but taking pity on her he invited her inside. She claimed to be a super model but with the way she was looking this present night there was no chance that she could be telling the truth.

            His mom was equally suspicious of her being a real super model, so she set up a test that would prove if she was telling the truth. His keen mother put a doughnut on the nightstand in the girl’s room, knowing that a real model would never eat refined sugar, and empty calories for fear of ruining her figure.

            In the morning the mother peered into the room and sure enough there the doughnut sat, untouched, just where she had placed it the night before.

            No one but a real super model would have left such a delicious and tempting treat untouched. So the guy then knew that this was the woman he had been seeking, for in the morning she proved that she both looked and acted like a real super model.

Romantic Comedy?

      Lucius or the Ass definitely made me laugh, which was not something I expected when I sat down and started reading out of Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature. Now as I am trying to think of a blog topic for this particular story I can't help but feel this may have been one of the first romantic comedies. Lucius starts out with the motive of wanting to see the witch perform magic, who ironically ends up being the wife of the host he is lodging with. That reason then leads him to a girl, Palestra, with whom he engages in sex with in order to get her to show him the mistress's magic, but I speculate that he did started to developed some sentimental feelings towards Palestra. In a Hollywood rendition he definitely would have fallen in love with her. So Lucius as a result of Palestra's oversight gets turned into an ass, instead of the bird he desired to morph into. After a succession of brutal attempts on his donkey life, Lucius finds fame in being a smart and well trained donkey, finally living the good life in his donkey form. Somehow or another a girl falls madly in love with his donkey form, a few bizarre events later and Lucius finally finds some roses to munch on and turns himself back into his glorious human self. 

      He is finally out of his donkey prison and free to do manly things once again. So of course his first order of business is to seek out the girl who loved him as a donkey and enjoy her love for him in his new man form. The part where this story diverges from romantic comedy and into some other weird genre that may be more similar to scifi than romance, is when the girl refuses him because he is no longer a donkey. Now full disclosure, I am chuckling to myself as I am writing this because I find is so funny, that she completely shoots his confidence down in a matter of sentences, while the entire story has been centered around his quest to be a glorious man once again. 

    After pondering this story I actually think it could make a great movie, no one would expect the ending because it is so different from what we have become accustomed to seeing at the end of a romantic comedy. 

Ekphrasis: Gerard & Longus

 Daphnis and Chloe

François Gérard

    After perusing both my art history books and google image I have settled up this tantalizing oil painting by the Neoclassical painter Francois Gerard. This painting is considered a history painting because of the story it is retelling, the story of Daphnis and Chloe that we have all grown familiar with. To me Gerard does an excellent job of capturing both the innocence and the lust, which the young blossoming relationship encapsulates. This painting does nothing to enlighten readers on the actual story, but it non the less transfixed me, most likely because I already know the story and this gave me the imagery I was craving . It is as though Gerard took the mental storyboard I had created and gave me a few scenes of it in just one painting.

   "Because absolutely no one has escaped Love, and no one will escape him as long as there is beauty and as long as there are eyes to see with" (pg 137, Daphnis and Chloe). 

     This quote struck me for a few reasons, one is that Love is masculine, which is odd only because it is normally given feminine qualities. In this painting I feel that Gerard may have been reflecting on this line, by giving Daphnis a red cloak draping over his naked body. red is a very sensual and lustful color and it is definitely where the viewers eye is first drawn to. A second reason I feel this quote and this painting go together is because of Chloe's closed eyes. She is clearly in love with Daphnis at this point and even though her eyes are painted closed it is as though she is in a dream or trance where she is thinking of herself with Daphnis. She also looks very at peace and she is not at all at unrest, Daphnis provides her the blanket of love that she can rest comfortably in. As far as the story goes, neither one o f the young lovers can escape their feelings, Chloe is struck first by Daphnis's beauty and he not long after, the painting makes it hard to discern if this is at the point when they both have realized their love or when just Chloe does, but in the end it doesn't really matter because neither can escape Love. 

    This painting is a history painting by definition of genre, but it does seem to be lacking some sheep or goats, nymphs or Pan. Still even with this narrative omission, I cannot help to see the beauty of the romantic love story that Gerard is depicting. His Neoclassical style makes the classical painting of Daphnis's body fit Longus's description of how Chloe first realized her feelings, when she sees him naked bathing in the cave. This may be shortly after that first sighting, as she is helping him dry off. That may be another reason why I like this painting and think it fits the story so well, because I can see it fitting into many different points of the story. Just like the story there are many different levels and elements that make it appealing to me, Gerard has created a painting that has many levels and phases that make it equally appealing and pleasing to me.     

To His Coy Mistress

    I have read Marvell's poem before and honestly I didn't get it the first time, then I put on my literary eyes and read for more meaning and it was like a completely different poem. I really can see Marevell's argument though, coyness and flirting is great if you have the luxury of time to engage in it. Being a metaphysical poem, the physical and the spiritual are brought up and time being a physical and earthly drain is the central motivation for why they should not wait to be together and that time will only bring age and dwindle her beauty.
   One of my favorite lines of the poem is when Marvel compares the man's love to vegetable love and says that "My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires". In Marevell's time vegetable love meant the lowest kind of love, like love between peasants. His saying that it will start there, on the most basic level and grow to be vaster than empires seems to imply that he will love her from the bottom of the spectrum to the top of it and everywhere in-between. This is actually a sweet sentiment, as is much of the poem, Marvell is expressing love on every level from lust to true romance. Time is a main conceit of this poem, and that if he has eternity he would admire the young beauty for hundreds and thousands of years, but alas they are only human and that means mortality will unfortunately come between that lofty desire. It is the lingering question that still faces us today, you only have one life to live so why wait? 
    Many metaphysical poems address the issues of time and how mortality is the real hindrance at life achievement but that there is an entirely different spiritual world in which people can operate and be better that they were in their current life. No other metaphysical pots, in my opinion however, does such a persuasive job as Marvell in the presentations of his regiments for why the young girl should just give into him. Through metaphor, and jarring imagery Marvell complies a series of valid arguments that leave me wondering did it work on the girl he was seducing? And to me a good piece of literature always leaves me with a few lingering questions. 

K.A.R.M.A

    Karma...most of us say it, refers to it, threaten with it, but what is it? To me the golden rule of doing unto others as you want other to do unto you, and Karma have always gone hand in hand. Karma is what will come and reap revenge on someone who wronged you, without you having to dirty your hands by doing it yourself. Karma provides that blind faith that everyone will get whats coming to them.
   The story of Abu Kasem's Slippers brings up karma in that he took someone else's slippers and then never escaped the downward spiral that came as repercussion for his action. In this way the narrator tells readers that "not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny...This is the law of Karma" (23). I have recently been thinking a lot about how the decision I am making now will be the ones that can wield a huge effect on the rest of my life. I have been told repeatedly that I am young and there is time for me to change or reverse the decisions I make now later on. But I cannot get over that the reality that they will still change my future. If I do not generate enough good Karma now will I become the victim of bad Karma in the future as Abu Kasem suffered?  "...shows how finely woven is the net of Karma, and how tough its delicate threads" (23). Sure you may be able to change your luck, but is Karma as easily swayed? That time when I was four and I took my brothers Halloween candy, is that going to somehow come forth now and stop me from succeeding at a current endeavor? Or have I already paid that Karmatic dept? This is the fickle nature that Karma Law seems to correspond with. The narrator of Abu Kasem's Slippers also shares that "involuntarily and lovingly we have patched together the shoes that carry us through life; and we shall remain subject, in the end, to their uncontrollable compulsion" (21). This in the end is what we have to realize, that if I live my life the way I want and can fully support my actions then all I can do is put on my shoes one foot at a time and step out and onward in the world.

   My mom sent me a card at the beginning of this semester as I was about to embark on my senior and final volleyball season and the card read:
   "Give a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world" - Bette Midler
On the inside she wrote "I wonder if Bette had ever thought that volleyball shoes would be the shoes that can conquer----"
   In the end it all becomes a mentality, Abu was too zealous to look for his own shoes and that woefully hindered his life path. For me, volleyball shoes have served as my way of navigating life, and thus far they have taken me to a place I cannot complain about.

First Love Cannot Remain Hidden for Long

"they did not know what they desired. This only knew, that the kiss had destroyed him and the bath had destroyed her" - Daphins and Chloe (pg 149).

     Daphins and Chloe share what I deem the most pure time of love. They are truly bonded together in their friendship and the way in which their lives have been intertwined since each of their interesting births. Their births may be the element of the story that makes it a worthwhile and memorable story. Frye seems to highlight that a story must catch attention in its narrative aspects in order to be a story worth telling. The love that blossoms out of their early childhood can correlate directly to a connection made from their origins initially.
     Chloe is the first to recognize and identify her feelings towards Daphins. She is innocently helping him bathe and realizes then that "he seemed beautiful to her. And because that moment was the first time he looked beautiful to her, she thought that the bath was the cause of his beauty" (143). It is an interesting idea that she thought he was beautiful as a result of the bath. I know from personal experience that sometimes you never really see a person. It takes just that one altering glance or that one instance when you really and truly look at someone that your view of them changes. This I think is what Chloe is undergoing, she has know Daphins for so long and this bath was the time when she really sees him. But even after this she has a hard time explaining to herself that she does in fact have these feelings of love for her dear friend.
    Daphins is different in that it took their first physical encounter for him to uncover his romantic feelings for Chloe. After being chosen for a kiss by the already desirous Chloe Daphins reacts "like someone who had been bitten rather than kissed...Then, as never before, he was filled with admiration for her" (146). He requires that physical awakening where as Chloe was visually stimulated. It seems as though the male and female ways of discovering love are varied, but that if those true feelings of love exist there is no way to keep them hidden for long.

Childhood Habits

     One of the most important and self molding experiences I had as a child was my mom reading aloud to my brother and I at bedtime. It was cemented into our nightly routine and something I certainly remember looking forward to. He is three years older than me so the stories were usually novels, not picture books, The entire C.S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia series was the most memorable for me, but I know that Gulliver's Travels, Charlotte's Web, and many other adventure stories were also in the rotation, because my brother was the one who got to choose the majority of the time. I do remember though, very specifically, in the time before I drifted off to sleep the stories that I was hearing and the mental picture my imagination was creating must have been very different from the one my brother and my mom had. Rereading the same stories now provides me the small window into my child psyche. I think I can attribute my desire for literature and the passion I have for stories and reading to be originated from this nightly ritual.
     I don't remember hating or loving the happy endings or being particularly drawn to any certain type or genre of story. I was enthralled by my mom's voice and her enthusiastic reading and character voices. It was a sort of comfort that I cherished and even to this day when I hear my mom read anything aloud there is a nostalgia that I cannot evade. I certainly was instilled with the desire to read from my mom, and we still share a good book when we happen to come across one. My childhood habit and passion is now continued and like the stories that change over time my relationship of reading with my mom has grown and changed over time. 

Words Containment

      I always enjoy when my classes cease to parallel and there is a cross over between the material. William Blake is one man who has come up in three of my classes so far this semester. His first appearance was most obviously in my 19th century Literature class, he made his second appearance in my Art History class as an example of Enlightenment ideals. And finally in this class, where stories and words are the forefront of topic and their ability to survive time and change. Frye mentions Blake in regard to "double tradition, one biblical and the other romantic, growing out of an interest in Blake which seems to have contained them both...the distinction underlying this relation is our first step" (Frye, 6).  The word that most struck me was "contain" it seems to me that while words can live in a sentence or be the structure of a single story there is something ambiguous that makes them unable to be fully tamed. To me connotation and denotation are the easiest way to explain this; while the denotation of a word may mean one thing, the connotation of the word is just as if not more important than the actual meaning. Popular culture and slang also plays into the complete value of a word and that changes over time as well. While a word may remain constant in spelling and denotation, the word can completely change in its use and  everyday meaning. 

      Blake enters the picture for me via his poem "The School Boy", more specifically the fourth stanza. 

                              How can the bird that is born for joy

                              Sit in a cage and sing?

                              How can a child when fears annoy,

                              But droop his tender wing,

                              And forget his youthful spring?

It came up in class discussion of this poem that this stanza and the metaphor of the bird and child could also be imposed to be a reference to words and the inability to cage them. Even though these words exist in this poem in this order, they are merely put there by Blake. And one person cannot get the same meaning from the poem as another simply because words do not mean, or connote, the same meaning to people universally. I think that Frye too would agree that words cannot be caged, it is their nature to move and change in meaning and from story to story. While the context of words, or application of a genre or description for the text as a whole, these may only be able to provide a linear explanation and sort of imposed boundary on words they are still unable to be tamed. Perhaps this is why words and the tradition of story is such an interesting an complex study.

Liquid Stories

"As a body of myths expands, it absorbs other stories, especially the stories connected with specific local places and people that are called legends...Such an absorption of legend marks the political and social ascendancy of a society with a central mythology, as it takes over other areas, and this mythical imperialism is possible because of the structural similarities among all forms of story." -Frye, 12-13.

         Frye's explanation of stories allegiance with geographical and cultural local makes for an interesting perspective gain on Rushdie's explanation in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Haroun is taken to the place where all stories are kept in liquid form and his guide Iff helps to shed light on the massive collection Haroun is so enamoured with.

"Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here...And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and become yet other stories." -Rushdie, 72.

       While most stories that are read or told today have already been told before in some capacity, be it a similar form, a generic recipe of peril and salvation, or a play off of characters and hero's, there is still reprise in the newness to an individual. As Frye explains, stories are inherently connected to the place they were first told, or where the setting of the story is. The audience also plays a key roles in why a story may be altered or changed, as it came up in class Friday, Disney may be the most influential offender in the manipulation of stories. Disney does a phenomenal job of altering stories in way that they will be appropriate to little kids. They are addicting though in that as those children grow older and the stories and movies that were "Disney-fied" for them as children are what still makeup the reality of those stories to the now grown children. Culturally an American child may fall more predominantly into this realm than say a European child who grew up with the more closely original version of the same story.

    It is however well within Disney's rights to alter the stories as they see fit. This is what Iff is explaining to Haroun, that the liquidity of the streams of stories allows them to be changed and if nothing else encourages that sort of fluid nature. Anything that is worth carrying on as time passes must have some ability to change. Since the "only constant is change" for a story to withstand the tests of time it must be able to fit the changing needs of a certain culture or group as their needs change and shift.