by Chanel Hepworth
2017 SPX Writes Writing Contest winner for essays
If a jar were to be considered a culture for the candies that it holds, then each set of candies with contrasting colours would represent the binary pairs creating the culture’s assortment. This, is in fact structuralism. The literary theory of structuralism uses the understanding that culture is arranged in binary pairs and that each of these pairs build to create the larger structure of a culture as a whole. Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, are both examples of literature that employ binary oppositions to interpret and maintain the cultural values subconsciously understood within their contexts. Both novels examine culture and superiority, the effects of cultural standards on one main character, and the outcomes of those effects, to signify the cultural associations within their works.
Davies’ Fifth Business introduces the concept of structuralism through the binary pair of good and evil. His use of religious morality is what outlines the larger scale of culture and superiority. Morality, as a major topic in Fifth Business, is created through the town’s religions and strict narrow-minded beliefs. The presence of religion is grasped early on in the novel when the narrator and main character, Dunstan Ramsay, describes:
We have five churches: the Anglican, poor but believed to have some mysterious social supremacy; the Presbyterian, solvent and thought - chiefly by itself - to be intellectual; the Methodist, insolvent and fervent; the Baptist, insolvent and saved; the Roman Catholic, mysterious to the most of us but clearly solvent, as it was frequently and, so we thought, quite needlessly repainted. (Davies 9)
The descriptions of each church and faith within the community demonstrates the interest in culture and superiority in the town of Deptford. A certain hierarchical arrangement of the religions and their functions in the community sets the tone of how culture will soon form these negative impacts on different characters in the novel. Culture and superiority as a pair is utilized in this novel to expose the structuralist binary pair of good and evil. Readers see this exemplified when the wife of Deptford’s priest, Amasa Dempster, commits adultery. When Mrs. Dempster has gone missing one night, the town’s people begin to search for her whereabouts, only to find her in the gravel pit; a symbol of pure sin and damnation in Deptford. As she is caught in the act of copulating with a tramp, Mrs. Dempster describes her situation to her husband saying that the tramp “was very civil, ‘Masa. And he wanted it so badly,” (Davies 42). In this religious town, Mary rapidly becomes an outcast, and her answer to Mr. Dempster that night leads to her poor image in Deptford:
That was what stuck in the craws of all the good women of Deptford: Mrs Dempster had not been raped, as a decent woman would have been-no, she had yielded because a man wanted her. [...] Any man who spoke up for Mary Dempster probably believed in Free Love. Certainly he associated sex with pleasure, and that put him in a class with filthy thinkers [...]. (Davies 44)
The binary pair explored in this context is the portrayal of good and evil through culture and superiority. The village views Mrs. Dempster or any person who sympathizes with her as someone of lesser value. Committing adultery in Deptford makes Mrs. Dempster inferior to the community, especially regarding their religious outlook on morals. She is looked upon poorly because she has chosen to do what society deems wrong; yielding to a man’s desires. This overall demonstrates the culture’s unwillingness to forgive or even forget, foreshadowing how major characters like Dunstan Ramsay will be negatively affected.
Likewise, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye permits its readers to explore culture and superiority through its representation of black and white oppositions. In the American culture illustrated through Morrison’s novel, superiority is undoubtedly given to the white people. Pecola Breedlove, the main character, experiences a consistent desire to live up to the culture’s white bias, herself being a young black girl. The majority of the novel, however, is viewed through the younger eyes of Claudia MacTeer, a close friend of Pecola, who is considered deviant in her dealings with the white standard. In describing the pressures given by the American society, Claudia exclaims, “Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs-all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured,” (Morrison 20). With this quote, Claudia strongly hits on the issue of white supremacy in their culture, and exemplifies the tension between the racial identities. She continues to explain that those “which were supposed to bring me pleasure, succeeded in doing quite the opposite,” (Morrison 20). In the young girls’ culture, it is presumed that black people are ugly, and white people are the true representation of cleanliness and beauty, this being a direct opposing pair of culture and supremacy. However, Claudia’s deviant character demonstrates the unfairness of black inferiority that everyone else abides by. Skin colour is used as a determinant of one’s class in their society, and this is racially oppressive for Claudia MacTeer. This is specifically evident when introduced to Maureen Peal which can be seen as follows:
The disrupter of the seasons was a new girl in school named Maureen Peal. A high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes that hung down her back. She was rich, at least by our standards, as rich as the richest of the white girls, swaddled in comfort and care. The quality of her clothes threatened to derange Frieda and me. (Morrison 62)
Morrison presents this beautiful image of racial domination, correlating hand-in-hand one’s colour with their success. This binary pair of black and white pursues culture and superiority on a larger scale, revealing the unequal standards to which adolescent black girls are held, and their repressive effects on Pecola Breedlove.
By comparison, Fifth Business and The Bluest Eye both present binary pairs through the use of the larger opposition of culture and supremacy. While the binary pairs utilized in both literatures differ, they both will in turn affect their main characters, Dunstan Ramsay and Pecola Breedlove. Structuralists understand that culture is arranged in binary pairs, and Fifth Business and The Bluest Eye similarly use structuralism to portray the cultural associations within their works. In his literature review, Reflections of Cultural Conflict in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Dr. Shivshankar G Bhanegaonkar analyzes the use of structuralism in Morrison’s novel. He claims, “The novel dramatizes the process of ‘falling apart’ of a whole race that rejects its own authentic cultural identity and is fascinated by the physical features of another race which, they mistake, is virtuous and superior to their own,” (Bhanegaonkar 379). Dr. Bhanegaonkar argues that Morrison’s novel objects the social anomalies of both races by demonstrating racial superiority flaws and cultural conflict between white characters such as Maureen, and black characters such as Pecola Breedlove. This duality is also addressed by Patricia Monk, whose essay, Good and Evil, notes the binary pair associated with religious morality in Davies’ novel. She suggests:
The notions of good and evil current in the actual world are presented representatively by those current in Deptford. They are determined wholly by convention and are defined in the context of an extremely puritanical morality by a mixture of fear and practicality. [...] Charity (in Deptford) has its limits and the limits are imposed, as the villagers’ reaction to Mrs. Dempster’s willing sexual response to the tramp demonstrates, by a superstitious and prudish sexual morality. (Monk 67)
Monk outlines the culture of Deptford, respectively claiming that their strict moral codes are in fact determined by their metaphoric standards of spiritual cleanliness and disapproval of sinful acts. In essence, both novels observe the effect of culture on their characters by introducing binary pairs and creating the opposition of authority and inferiority amongst the characters.
As discussed previously, Fifth Business exhibits a culture in which religion is adopted as a method of defining between good and evil. The novel’s main character Dunstan Ramsay suffers from the guilt nurtured by Deptford’s culture, and as a character, creates his individuality through an incident that he vividly recalls from his childhood. Dunstan Ramsay is one character that experiences guilt due to the way good and evil is perceived by the Presbyterians, to whom he belongs. When one of his rivals, Percy Boyd Staunton, attempts to hit Dunstan with a snowball after an argument, Dunstan dodges the snowball, which results in it instead hitting the pregnant Mrs. Dempster. This induces her into labour, and is presumed to cause one of her major downfalls, this being her mental illness. However, Percy takes no responsibility and feels no guilt for the incident, thus resulting in a greater guilt for Dunstan as described in the following, “So I was alone with my guilt, and it tortured me. I was a Presbyterian child and I knew a good deal about damnation [...] But though I did not really suffer much physically I suffered greatly in my mind, for a reason connected with my time of life,” (Davies 16). This quote demonstrates the struggle Dunstan goes through in order to forgive himself for the snowball incident. His Presbyterian upbringing results in the guilt that he fosters from the snowball that hit Mrs. Dempster, and in turn, he trusts that his life must be damned as punishment. Dunstan holds on to the culture and the Presbyterian upbringing that has shaped his past and allows it to thrive in his misfortune. After returning from war and coming out of his coma, Dunstan returns to Deptford to visit his childhood home. The short visit ends in a realisation for Dunstan: “(I) left Deptford in the flesh. It was not for a long time that I recognized that I never wholly left it in spirit,” (Davies 105). Dunstan holds himself back from what his life could be, because of the damnation he imposes on himself as a young Presbyterian boy. While moving on with his life, leaving Deptford and experiencing the war on a first hand basis, Dunstan, rather than allowing the past to shape him, allows it to control him. He claims to have left Deptford, while always keeping it present in his spirit. This is important to grasp in order to understand how the guilt manifests in him and holds him back from escaping culture and superiority. He is in fact inferior to the guilt bound to him through morals. There is a clear depiction of the cultural standards held for Dunstan’s character, and it is evident that they in turn influence the continuous setback of guilt in his life.
Likewise, Toni Morrison’s character, Pecola Breedlove is confronted with the standards set out by white beauty. As a young black female, it is evident that Pecola cherishes the thought of life through the lense of a white person. The standards that her culture has created for her, that is - solely recognizing beauty in the shape of a white girl with blue eyes - negatively affects Pecola and her self image. She begins to develop guilt towards the ugliness of her existence, and allows this to induce a change in attitude towards her current life. Claudia MacTeer explains this effect in saying, “It had occurred to Pecola sometime ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights-if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different,” (Morrison 46). She prays each night for blue eyes, believing that maybe if she were to be seen as beautiful in regards to society, her parents and everyone else would treat her differently, with more dignity. It is this thought that demonstrates the guilt Pecola develops for holding a negative self image and resenting the black culture into which she was born. This quote represents the deterioration of self-pity, and the setback that it fosters in her young character who is unable to truly grasp the black and white oppositions in her culture.
Comparatively, Dunstan Ramsay and Pecola Breedlove are two characters that are negatively impacted by a guilt created upon each of their cultures. Dunstan forms his guilt from the standard of morals that are drilled into his younger character, and upon that creates this abnormal personality that relies on damnation as a result of one wrong action. He faces a religious cultural upbringing which leads to the setback of guilt for his character in association to the opposition of right with wrong. Likewise, Pecola begins to feel liable for the culture and body through which she lives. In his essay, “What The Bluest Eye Knows about Them: Culture, Race, Identity”, Christopher Douglas states, “Real ethnic cultural identity and false stereotypes-understood by much ethnic minority criticism to be in opposition-are really two sides of the same coin,” (Douglas 227). Douglas argues that there is a psychological violence of white cultural standards and black response that springs from the false beauty stereotypes that are interpreted as cultural identity. This manifestly results in Pecola Breedlove becoming a menial character in the shadows of white power; one who is destroyed by the culture’s identity formed through white beauty standards. On the contrary, Patricia Monk’s essay, Good and Evil, notes this similar behaviour to succumb to the cultural expectations. She emphasizes that “Ramsay’s [...] understanding of good and evil as he learns it in the actual world of his childhood is changed by his experiences with the mythic as he grows from childhood to adulthood,” (Monk 67). This suggests that Dunstan Ramsay is deceived by the morals of Deptford, resulting in his subconscious surrender to guilt as he transitions to adulthood with the constant pressure of the snowball incident. Unquestionably, Dunstan Ramsay and Pecola Breedlove are influenced by their separate cultures and the expectations that they instill, thus creating this superficial guilt that, of course, has contrasting repercussions in both characters’ lives.
Moreover, while Dunstan Ramsay encounters the major setback of guilt associated with the snowball incident from his childhood, his character also learns to break free from the binary standard. Liesl, a woman whom Dunstan refers to as “certainly the ugliest human creature (he) had ever seen,” is the first person capable of fully grasping his attention and acceptance of advice (Davies 205). After an intensive physical fight between Liesl and Dunstan one night, Liesl returns to Dunstan’s bedroom to converse. In this conversation, Liesl begins commenting on Dunstan’s life, saying:
You should take a look at this side of your life you have not lived. Now don’t wriggle and snuffle and try to protest. I don’t mean you should have secret drunken weeks and a widow in a lacy flat who expects you every Thursday, like some suburban ruffian. You are a lot more than that. But every man has a devil, and a man of unusual quality, like yourself Ramsay, has an unusual devil. You must get to know your personal devil. (Davies 230)
Liesl helps Dunstan to understand the binary pair upon which he has built his guilt, and makes him aware that he has succumb to this damnation rather than accepting it. She exclaims that in order for Dunstan to break free from his ultimate setback of guilt, he must accept that which is his devil - his guilt from the snowball incident. This is the first time Dunstan understands the effects of culture and superiority on his life. Later, on his journey in Salzburg where he had fought in the war, Dunstan is reunited with the Madonna upon whom he saw the face of Mrs. Dempster during his last moments in war. He reflects upon seeing the Madonna, “Photography in the exhibition was forbidden. But I needed no picture. She was mine forever,” (Davies 256). Dunstan clearly listens to Liesl’s advice from earlier on. He accepts the guilt of the snowball incident, and through doing that, gets to know his personal devil. He finally breaks free of the binary pair of good and evil by forgiving himself regardless of the Presbyterian upbringing, morals, and expectations. From this, Dunstan Ramsay finally achieves redemption from his ultimate hindrance.
Contrarily, Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye fails to break free from the binaries of black and white. As a young girl, Pecola’s culture teaches her only to be infatuated with the beauty of white skin, and to truly believe in the inferiority of black people in terms of beauty and social class. Pecola becomes impregnated by her father, but loses her child due to the circumstances. She is faced with every difficulty possible, and the culture solely impresses on her its supremacy, causing the deterioration of her mental state and acceptance in society. When Pecola drops out of school, and moves to a house just outside of town with her mother, Claudia expresses her view of the detrimental culture that her friend was not strong enough to endure:
All of our beauty which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us-all who knew her-felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used-to silence our own night-mares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. (Morrison 205)
In this quote Claudia MacTeer focusses on the person that Pecola becomes after fully succumbing to the pressures and the effects of her culture on her. She transforms Pecola into a symbol of the opposition of black and white in terms of sufferance and prosperity, as well as ugliness and beauty. All of Pecola’s guilt is created as a result of the expectations forced upon her by the community. She is the epitome of beauty, however herself and the people around her cannot see it because of the standard of white beauty that the culture has embraced. As it is described in the quote, Pecola Breedlove does not recover from the effects of the binary pair in her culture, and rather becomes overwhelmed by the pressures and guilt, to the point that they drive her mad.
Both Dunstan Ramsay and Pecola Breedlove experience the effects of culture and superiority, however this is where the two of them greatly differ. Dunstan Ramsay gains control of his life and eventually forgives himself for the snowball incident, with this leading to the redemption of his damnation and guilt. Pecola’s madness, however, illustrates the loss of control that she experiences from the cultural expectations rooted in her. In his essay, Christopher Douglas exclaims that The Bluest Eye involves the black and white pair to demonstrate how the cultural codes explored around multiculturalism are derived from power of the white race. Thus, Pecola is solely provided the opportunity to take the burdens of others and collapse under their weights. Contrarily, it is suggested by Patricia Monk in her essay, “The Actual, The Mythic, and The Real”, that Fifth Business presents two worlds for Dunstan Ramsay - the actual and the mythic. These worlds are the two halves of Dunstan - inwardly and outwardly - which create his ‘real’ self. Her essay states, “Like Dunstan Ramsay, we have got our heads above the sea of particularity, and we are not going to drown in it-at least, not immediately. But, also like him, we have to stay afloat, breathing the air of mythicity and aware of its importance,” (Monk 79-80). Outwardly Dunstan lives a life where he has moved on and “left Deptford in the flesh,” but inwardly is where his guilt resides as he “never wholly left it in spirit,” (Davies 105). Not until the end of Dunstan’s journey does he understand and accept the two halves of himself, aware of the importance of the mythic portion, and only then does he becomes his ‘real’ self. Essentially, while both characters go through similar downfalls of guilt as the byproducts of binary oppositions, they ironically become a binary pair themselves in the end: Dunstan breaks free from cultural associations, and Pecola breaks down because of them.
Overall, the literary theory of structuralism permits the understanding that culture is arranged in binary pairs. Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, are two novels that strongly utilize binary pairs to signify the cultural associations interpreted in their contexts. Both works recognize binary pairs within the larger opposition of culture and supremacy, exemplify the impact of the culture on each of their main characters, and reveal the outcomes of those effects on each character. Morrison and Davies utilize the theory of structuralism to an advantage in each of their novels, revealing the complexity of culture in itself. Their works suggest that problems themselves are not the results of culture, but rather those of the oppositions that build the culture and can easily break the person down. The opposing threats must be viewed not for the differences that they possess, but for the meanings that they signify.
Works Cited
Bhanegaonkar, Shivshankar G. “Reflections of Cultural Conflict in Toni Morrison’s
The Bluest Eye.” (2012): 379-382. Web. 30 Nov. 2016.
Christopher Douglas. “What The Bluest Eye Knows about Them: Culture, Race,
Identity.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007. 209-232. Print.
Davies, Robertson. Fifth Business. Penguin Books, 1996.
Monk, Patricia. “Good and Evil.” Mud and Magic Shows: Robertson Davies Fifth
Business. Ed. Ontario: ECW Press, 1938. 78-81. Print.
Monk, Patricia. “The Actual, The Mythic, and The Real.” Mud and Magic Shows:
Robertson Davies Fifth Business. Ed. Ontario: ECW Press, 1938. 78-81. Print.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York, 1993.
Look up at the night sky. See the stars shining sharply, flickering fabulously, swimming in a dark lake of infinity. Imagine the lifeless planets orbiting their star, carelessly, following the rules of physics perfectly without the slightest shadow of a doubt about how they have to robotically perform their dance in space. Hear asteroids subtly caress each other, hear the boom of the explosions far away in the galaxy. Realize the vastness of space surrounding the earth, realize how small and powerless people are to the Universe. There is nothing left to do but to remain genuinely astonished by such a beautiful and profound scenario that opens up every night to those who are willing to seek the experience.
For so long humans have tried to ask themselves the same question. A question that perpetuates through time, omnipresent and limitless, during wars, ceremonies, weddings, graduations, funerals and throughout one’s life. People have always asked what the meaning of life really is. It’s one of those fundamental existential questions that the mind desperately tries to understand and grasp, in most cases without realizing it’s not meant to conceive such abstract concepts.
Douglas Adams, an English writer known for “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”, stated in his book that 42 is the number that represents the meaning of life. For years people have tried to figure out what secrets the number could mysteriously hide, as if it were a safe that held the key to the game room for anxious little kids wanting to kill time. Nonetheless, with time many things can be achieved, and, believe it or not, but meanings related with the magic number quickly started to arise. An example is the sentence, “It's the answer to life, the universe, and everything”, which exactly contains 42 letters. Light also refracts off water at 42 degrees to create a rainbow and 42 is 101010 in the binary counting system.
Is this a sign to be acknowledged from the laws of the Universe itself or is it disappointingly a mere coincidence? Vsauce’s latest video on Youtube, called Math Magic, explains with great simplicity how if anyone looks hard enough, there are theoretically infinite numbers of coincidences between any two things. Therefore it’s not so surprising to find how 42 can be related to many other events occurring in nature and in society. In later years, Douglas himself admitted that the number was purely casual and was merely a joke to entertain his audience.
Out of all the living beings that are known to exist, humans are by far the most intelligent, complex and emotional. Since the first civilizations that have risen, in the Middle East, India and Egypt, as early as 5000 B.C., its societies needed a way to explain the phenomena that made up their daily lives. How does the sun rise every morning? Why does it rain? Where do people go when they die? Of course at the time science as a discipline had not yet been discovered. Therefore people, for as much as they knew, attributed such events to greater beings: portentous gods.
Religion does indeed play a crucial role in how individuals view life. Beliefs give a strong meaning to existence, independently from which religion one believes in; after the mortal years are over there will be a sweet and painless afterlife awaiting. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism are just some of the most prominent ones. For some practices, even if someone kills ten thousand people, the doors to life after death will remain open as long as the soul of the person will have properly felt regret and apologized for the “misconduct”. For many believers the true meaning of life is in fact worshiping their God, following the rules indirectly given by Him and reaching the afterlife; the greatest purpose is getting to the final destination while living the mortal, mediocre and painful life on Earth.
As science started becoming more prominent and diffused in society, a different view of the world was given. A more materialistic and natural perspective to answer many existential questions came to spread in cities and acculturated communities. Life became the product of genes, natural selection, evolution and chance. There was no greater purpose than the one to procreate and keep the species thriving with more individuals. This ideal was initially thrown off and rejected like a rock falling down a cliff. The Catholic Church was its prime opponent and it had to fight all throughout the Renaissance and Illuminism periods against scientific revolutions which starred brilliant scientists such as Galileo, Nicolaus Copernicus and Giordano Bruno. Although, as more and more people started to understand and make sense of this new concept of existence, the Church had to come up with apologies and become more acceptant towards further discoveries.
As a result of these new discoveries, the meaning of life started to bring an unpleasant feeling of melancholy and uselessness to individuals. One’s field of study might not spark interest anymore, a relationship’s initial passion may seem to have died down over the years, work doesn’t give the feeling of contributing to society nor of making life better for others. This feeling of emptiness can all be related back to the meaning of life that is constantly being searched for. The twentieth century philosopher and writer Albert Camus stated that life is to be lived all the better if it has no meaning. What did he mean by that? His intentions were to demonstrate how if someone were to give no higher intention to life but its material existential value, then that person wouldn’t feel as if there was a greater purpose to accomplish. This started the Absurdist movement, which signifies the conflict between the tendency to find a higher purpose in life and the inability to find any.
This isn’t a cynical view of the world that surrounds us. It rather is a call back to reality. Instead of giving life an objective meaning, it should be given a subjective purpose, as it does indeed vary for each and everyone of us. Communication, service and understanding are more tangible and fulfilling approaches that anyone can thrive to achieve in life. By living by these three simple, yet concrete, principles life will acquire a new discovered taste, like the one of eating for the first time at a young age something sour. It won’t be smooth at first, but as the palate acquires its taste, it will realize what it had earlier missed on.
The meaning of life isn’t something to overthink. It’s more like a journey that lasts until our final breath. It is a continuous search that enhances the perception of the surroundings and challenges the individual to make real, tangible changes to life. It’s a discovery that can’t really be controlled nor predicted. It can be found anywhere, at any time. Like planets in the galaxy, life’s meaning revolves around a central star that pushes us to the best version of who we are, that attracts us to its harmonious elliptical path. A lifelong journey.
Works Cited:
Adam, Mad. "The Meaning of Life." YouTube. YouTube, 27 Apr. 2015. Web. 19 Feb. 2016.
Motwani, Rohit. "Why and How Is 42 the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything?" Quora.
22 Nov. 2014. Web. 19 Feb. 2016.
Oech, Roger Von. "Creative Think." 'Creative Think' 11 Dec. 2006. Web. 19 Feb. 2016.