Identifying Information

Identifying Information: 

Sol Kim

11b3

111020
kimsol0211@naver.com

Adam, Eve, and Mark Twain

Adam, Eve, and Mark Twain

Excerpts from Eve's Diary and Excerpts from Adam's Diary

     Realism, like what its name expresses, focuses on the reality. Realists present plausible events, and in their stories they concentrate on the characters. The Excerpts from Eve’s Diary, and Excerpts from Adam’s Diary, written by a typical realist writer Mark Twain, are also written in realistic views. According to the link given, realistic writings “avoid the sensational, dramatic elements of naturalistic novels and romances (Campbell, Donna M. “Realism in American Literature, 1860-1890.”).” Just like what she said, throughout the whole story, Adam and Eve consider their reality; about something that happens around them. Nothing dramatic happens in the writing. Also the story concentrates on describing Adam and Eve more than the plot(most of the stories are composed of descriptions of Adam and Eve)-which is also a common characteristic of realistic novels- “character is more important than action and plot (Campbell, Donna M.)”.

     Moving on, this is the interesting part: Mark Twain expresses very contrasting thoughts to the common, prevailing idea of society back then. He portrays Eve-a woman-in such a positive way compared to what the society had done in Twain's time. Also, setting Eve as the first woman of the world in his story allows Twain to show as if women are naturally like Eve in his story-intelligent, organized, and active. These are very different thoughts considering the society's atmosphere at Twain's time. Twain also did it in his another novel, The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn; he tried to show how blacks-typically Jim in the novel-are not different from whites, which was something very far away from the society's prevailing idea back then.
     Not only was he trying to show women’s strengths, but the way Twain describes Adam and Eve and their differences seemed to me to interpret the piece as Twain trying to support women suffrage. Mark Twain was a big supporter of women suffrage, and Eve in his story is a perfect possible voter-organized, intelligent and passionate. Adam, in contrast, considered almost nothing else but only his comfort. Then doesn't it seem to be like Twain wanted to say, that women are even more appropriate to do the politics, since they are the ones who try to change this world to a better place? 
     In addition, through these two “diaries” I thought Twain wanted to express gender equality. In Excerpts from Adam’s Diary, on Monday of third week since Adam started writing-notice that Adam started to write in his diary around the day he met Eve while Eve started writing right after her creation-, Adam said “She told me she was made out of a rib taken from my body. This is at least doubtful, if not more than that. I have not missed any rib.” If this is true, it refutes one of the basic arguments of male chauvinists, which is that women are born from theft. Also, according to many interpretations of the Bible, the original sin was committed because Eve had lured Adam to eat the apple. But from Excerpts from Adam’s Diary, Adam eats the apple because “I was so hungry. It was against my principles, but I find that principles have no real force except when one is well fed. (from Excerpts from Adam's Diary)” 

    Other than that, Twain tried to express the difference between men and women throughout the whole two diaries. The two diaries have a lot of contrasting points, and even their styles of writing are different. There are things that Adam is better, such as thinking of adequate words for situations, and others that Eve is better, such as accommodating with the nature and participating to change the world. Plus, one of the notable differences between them is their perspectives on the world (or the nature): for Eve it is something filled with curiosity, waiting for her to “experiment” on it, while for Adam it is something just there and he only needs to use it for his comfort. Mark Twain, overall, tried to describe what he felt as real man and woman as realistic as possible.

References:

Campbell, Donna M. "Realism in American Literature, 1860-1890." Literary Movements. Dept. of English, Washington State University. 09/08/2011. Web. 03/27/2012

Mark Twain. “Excerpts from Eve’s Diary”

Mark Twain. “Excerpts from Adam’s Diary”

Comments:

Inhee Ho: I liked your writing! But I quite don’t get how Huckleberry Finn and Adam’s Diary/Eve’s Diary are alike. True that in Adam/Eve’s Diary Mark Twain seems to draw woman as somewhat idealistic creature, but does it link to Huck being unworried about Jim being a black? Plus, as reading the first sentence of your last paragraph, I expected some more about ‘diaries’. How a typical writing form of ‘diary’ may have contributed/distracted the writing could have been a great crucial topic, I think. And one thing more! This may be just my ‘personal’ opinion, but I think Adam in the story isn’t as negative. After all, Adam becomes much more ‘civilized’ and ‘intellectual’ in the end. Maybe this is showing higher capability of learning hidden in man? I don’t know. Anyway, I liked your points! 

Dark Romanticism and Poe

Dark Romanticism and Poe

The Cask of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart

     “For these Dark Romantics, the natural world is dark, decaying, and mysterious; when it does reveal truth to man, its revelations are evil and hellish. …… works of Dark Romanticism frequently show individuals failing in their attempts to make changes for the better (Wikipedia).” Edgar Allan Poe is the typical author of Dark Romanticism, as he expresses it through his stories. For him humans are “evil and hellish,” and the main character of the two stories is insane.

     However, the first impression I got from The Cask of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe was that Poe is clever. It seemed like he wanted to make the whole process of murder a work of art. Nor the screams and the bones were something that impressed me first; it was how Poe makes the crime in his pieces so elaborately. Poe may have wanted to show these two things: first, as well known, the dark side of human instinct such as vanity, greed, brutality, and second, how a murder can be such elaborately-eventually in some ways, beautifully-held.

     The dark romanticists saw the world as it is full of evil, and they revealed that ideas in their pieces by showing how ugly human instinct is. Like them, Poe wanted to expose the greed, vanity and brutality of human instinct that people does not usually show on their outside. Those ideas are clued on parts where Fortunato calls Luchesi “ignoramus,” and when Fortunato keeps on asking to see the Amontillado, though Montresor warned him a couple of times. Montresor played the role of Poe in the story, who tries to reveal the ugly instinct of humans at the bottom, because he knew Fortunato would not stop though he warns since it was Montresor himself who talked about Luchesi and made Fortunato to be in vanity. And though he knew, he kept on warning in order to expose the ugly side of humans- vanity and greed, for instance.

     The next part is that for me Poe seemed to be beautifying murder with such elaborate descriptions and constructions. It seemed to me that Poe wanted to make his writing a piece of art rather than just a brutal murder story. His wonderful selection of words, which almost every word he used gives horror to the readers, and his elaborate foreshadowing that not only frightens the readers extremely but also makes them awe at Poe, are what made me think of his work a piece of art. Eventually I got to feel of murder in Poe’s story as something beautiful, as a part of art, something different from ordinary murder. Murder in his story is not just a killing act, but a masterpiece that is drawn out of tons of elaborate plans and vivid descriptions. To explain, take Montresor’s warning: they come up in horror at the end of the story, letting the reader to feel what really Montresor had meant. Also, the careful foreshadowing such as: “And I to your long life” from The Cask of Amontillado and the talented descriptions like: “Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well” and “So I opened it-you cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily-until at length a single dim ray like the thread of the spider shot out from the crevice and fell upon the vulture eye” from The Tell-Tale Heart show how the story was so elaborately planned and described, eventually making the readers feel it close to their skins. Did Poe want his writings to be a work of art? I can’t say for sure, but it is sure that surely he wrote his stories very carefully.

     Not only those two stories, but The Pit and the Pendulum also have these points. The protagonist of the story feels the extreme anxiety that he feels when the huge pendulum comes down from the ceiling, swinging fast. He tried to reveal humans’ urge for survival, gave a lot of foreshadowing at the beginning of the story, and a whole bunch of wonderful descriptions about the man’s extreme nervousness and panic.

Comments

Soho: Umm… I got your point, but I feel kind of confused what “beautiful murder” means…… Does it mean that the process of murder itself was elaborate and carefully-planned, or that the descriptions in the story are kind of ‘non-violent’ or not radical? You might give some quotes from the story.

Fate and Humans

Fate and Humans
The Ambitious Guest
 

    Along with Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne is considered as an American Dark Romanticism writer. In Dark Romantic novels, the natural world is dark and mysterious, and it reveals itself to humans as evil. Humans tend to be vain and not wise. The Ambitious Guest by Nathaniel Hawthorne has some of these characteristics of Dark Romanticism and in this story, with fate; the story shows the helpless and vain humans in front of fate.

     The story starts with a nice scene of one family gathering around their hearth, smiling and laughing. Father and mother “had a sober gladness” on their faces, children laughed, the eldest daughter, seventeen, “was the image of Happiness”, the aged grandmother “was the image of Happiness grown old.” This happiness is, however soon interrupted by the appearance of the ambitious guest, a young man with an ambitious dream: “He could have borne to live an undistinguished life, but not to be forgotten in the grave.” To the family the guest says that he cannot die until he achieves his destiny, and then “let Death come: I shall have built my monument.” The father of the house is soon affected by the abstract dream of ‘wanting his own monuments’, dreaming of having a good farm, earning reputation as an honest man. The seventeen-year-old daughter smiled with sadness, recognizing her lonesomeness. The grandmother expresses her dream of having her grave well-arranged, and how she is worried about it. And all these dreams ended soon after, when the rockslide came. They “fled right into the pathway of destruction”, and “the victims were at peace. Their bodies were never found.”

     Here it seems like Hawthorne wanted to show the helpless and vain humans. The families were helpless; they could have lived throughout the slide if they listened to its sound carefully and noticed that it would not affect their fireplace like it did before. They could have also lived when others listened to the little boy and actually went to the Flume, and they could have lived when the father did not hesitate to open the doors-as usual-for the wagon riders, letting them take the family a ride to the Flume like what the little boy said again. Chances did come-chances that could keep them alive. However, they did not take all these chances, and it shows that they were determined to die throughout the rockslide. The stranger could not say “let Death come” after he achieved his “destiny”; Death came no matter when he wanted it to come, and he could do nothing about it. They- the families and the stranger- were helpless because they could not change their fate to the way they wanted but had to get what was determined for them.

     In front of their fate, every ambition of them was vain. No matter what they dreamed about their monuments, their fate was there, waiting for them. The families and the stranger dreamed about their monuments, but they were actually remembered by their death under the rockslide, and the stranger was even doubted to have existed. The grandmother would have never had her fine grave-clothes she had prepared years before, and did not have to worry about her grave because she could not even have one; her body was never found. 

     The story, moreover, made me think about myself; I myself have my own dreams, and most of them are distant from now. But who knows if I die from an earthquake several minutes from now? That thought really made me feel helpless, and soon one more thought came to my mind; that those concerns would not stop me from dreaming. I will dream about my distant future, though something strong like fate may distort my way toward there; it is because that is the best thing I can do. That is the best thing I can do if, for instance, Death is there waiting for me. But not only dreaming like what the ambitious guest did-he has done nothing-, rather I will be trying to do something right now, this every instant to achieve my dream, because again, happily running towards my dream every instant is the best thing I can do as a helpless human, if humans really are.

Comments

Joelle S.W. Jung: I agree on your basic point that we plan ahead too much when we could die today. Carpe diem, and memento mori, as they say. Your point seems slightly different than what Hawthorne intended, though. Could you make the link * here much clearer? Why did you get that impression?

(I deleted the part * when modifying my essay.)

Hyejoon Lee: I don’t think the biggest theme of this story is ‘fate’ but it’s really interesting that you actually thought that this was about fate. So, because your topic itself is quite unique, I think you should have elaborated more on why you believe FATE is the theme rather than spending the whole second paragraph on what would have happened instead. And about the “meaningless” part, maybe the whole ambition was not all meaningless because it had some impact on the family. Actually, it had a big impact. If it wasn’t for the fervor created by the ambition, the family would have spent a peaceful and calm afternoon and wouldn’t have (as Mr. Menard mentioned before) ran out so blindly “into” the rockslide. So ambition is what killed the family.