Literature Journal

Overview of Journal Entries

These journal posts are completed as part of HUST 464, Colloquium IV: Modern Literature. They interact with the complexities of the texts read during the class and connecting them with elements of current media and life. These posts contemplate the various meanings of life as seen by authors like Mary Shelly, Virginia Woolf, and Tony Kushner. 

04/20/2023: The Displaced & The Carrying

Both the stories of refugees in The Displaced and Ada Limón's poems in The Carrying show the isolation that refugees feel through different medias. Lev Golinkin shares his experience becoming a Russian Jewish refugee in Vienna when he was a young boy in The Displaced. He recalls how his father snuck them into an art museum for shelter one day. He told his son, "You have to act like a human being." Because refugees are physically and culturally displaced from their communities into worlds that they hardly understand, they struggle to feel connected to other human beings. They are removed from humanity and ergo struggle to feel like they are human. Simple acts such as getting a postcard from the gift shop of an art museum can help refugees to feel that they are not "bleaching out... into a ghostly existence." Lev Golinkin utilizes the story of a single day and what he felt then to help describe how alone he felt in his new surroundings. Ada Limón describes a similar feeling of displacement but from a different source. The speaker of the poems is a woman unable to conceive while at the same time longing to fulfill the societal expectation of becoming a mother. The Carrying, her book of poetry, contains vast quantities of animal imagery, particularly comparing animals to children. She describes how she feels different and isolated within her community because of her inability to bear a child. The hit musical song "Waving Through A Window" from Dear Evan Hanson also deals with the feeling of being isolated while surrounded by others. In particular, the chorus of "On the outside, always looking in" captures the feeling of displacement. 

04/13/2023: Angels in America

Tony Kushner's play Angels of America explores the displacement of queer individuals within a society that does not accept non-straight relationships. The characters Roy and Joe feel isolated and displaced from their society as queer men because they are involved in the very conservative, religious, and Republican society that discriminates against LGBTQIA+ members. In the world of Regan, gay men, particularly those not of Caucasian descent, have fewer rights than straight men and women. This leaves queer characters such as Roy and Joe choosing between a socially successful career and life posing as straight men, or accept themselves as gay and become outcasts of society, shunned by all family and friends. When Roy is diagnosed with AIDS, he vehemently denies being gay to the doctor, instead insisting that "Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man who fucks around with guys." (Kushner47). Roy is desperate to keep his status as an influential man even though it means denying his sexuality. Joe, as his protégé, does the same thing. Louis discovers how conservative Joe is when he goes through the legal files that Joe helped Roy write. He discovers that Joe wrote, "homosexuals... are not entitled to equal protection under the law" (Kushner 248). Louis is furious that Joe can support such homophobic ideas even though he's gay. Joe felt that he had to reject his sexuality in order to be successful in life. Even Joe's conservative Mormon mother feels the pressure to conform to society. When she encounters the angel during one of Prior's prophetic fever dreams, she discovers that she might be gay when the angel kisses her and she orgasms (Kushner 261). However, as a conservative Mormon, she had never allowed herself to contemplate the fact that she might be queer before the angel released her from some of her mental bonds. The well-known meme depicting two male friends sitting far apart from each other in a hot tub as to not give off the impression that they are gay is an example of how, even today, being seen as gay is a negative thing. This is how queer members often felt they had to act like during the conservative 1980s. 

04/06/2023: Ongoing Fight for Civil Rights

The Civil Rights movement has been active since the 1950s but it has seen many phases and changes of stances. There are many similarities and differences between James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates. James Baldwin was an activist in the 1960s and observed how his compatriots fought for liberty. One of his main points was that the African Americans around him hated the whites as much as they hated them. He believed that African Americans must love and forgive White America otherwise they will never be any better than them. The Nation of Islam group wanted to create a new country for African Americans as reparations for the pain that White America inflicted on African Americans through slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and racism. Ta-Nehisi Coates, along with other 21st century Civil Rights activists, believes that monetary reparations ought to be paid to African Americans for the social, economical, and cultural pain that has been inflicted on them for hundreds of years. He states that we must acknowledge, celebrate, and heal the differences in the American experiences for different races. All of these activists are advocating for healing and payments in various forms, however now there is a stronger push for acknowledging the differences in race and respecting and celebrating them. My multimedia element is the cover photo of the book The Lions of Little Rock by Kristin Levine. I have always loved the image of the hands holding on to each other. It captures the possibility of interracial friendship while showing the stark difference between White America and Black America.

03/30/2023: The Plague

Albert Camus was a staunch existentialist, as expressed in his 1947 novel The Plague. In the beginning of the chronicle of a fierce plague, everyone in the town creates their own existence and deals with the epidemic. The newspapers show how little the citizens care about each other because they didn't report the human deaths "because the rats died in the street, and humans died in their beds. And the papers only concerned themselves with the streets" (Camus 38). Existentialists believed that only an individual can create their own moral code to follow. During World War II, many individuals under the rule of the Nazis and other totalitarian dictators felt isolated and displaced from each other. No one felt safe confiding their thoughts and beliefs in each other because if they were caught, the governments would brutally punish them in labor camps or by execution. After the war, many of these citizens that had been displaced by Hitler and other rulers wandered around trying to find their homes again. These displaced persons shared their sorrows in common and created groups in refugee camps. In a similar fashion, the citizens in The Plague bond together to create a shared moral code due to the "collective story of the plague and the feelings everyone shared" (Camus 177). Their experiences shaped the way that the citizens created their own moral code. The townspeople were physically displaced from one another and this caused and shaped their mental displacement from each other just as in World War II. The images below show the solidarity of refugees after World War II. The pain and disillusionment in their eyes reflects the sorrow and isolation felt by the people in The Plague.

03/07/2023: The Jungle

Vincent van Gough’s oil painting Factories at Clichy, painted in 1887, reveals the late 19th and early 20th century obsession with the relationship between nature and man. The Industrial Revolution caused a large boom in factory production and urbanization. Stretches of factories, like the ones depicted by van Gough and Upton Sinclair in his novel The Jungle, became increasingly common as the 20th century approached. The Jungle follows what a city of factories can do to a family while the painting focuses on the contrast between the man made buildings and nature. The harsh darkness of the chimney stacks as they belch smoke into the air seem out of place in the scene. Van Gough uses a closer attention to detail and rigidity of line on the factories than he does on the grass and sky. This represents the scientific and logical mindset of the Industrial Revolution in contrast to the creative and increasingly abstract mindset of artists. His unique use of vivid colors and short visible brush strokes are a precursor to the highly abstract artwork of the Modernist Movement. In particular, the style of brush strokes that van Gough utilizes creates a fuzzy effect on the painting, as if one were looking through a glass of water. The painting is less of a description of what van Gough sees and more what he believes to be the true essence of the scene. This was one of the primary goals of Modernist artists such as Pablo Picasso. Vincent van Gough worked during a transitional period between the Romantic artists who believed in the awesome and superhuman power of nature and the disillusioned Modernists who saw the negative impact humans were having on nature. 

03/02/2023: Mrs Dalloway

Art, literature, and poetry portray how many keenly felt the loss of innocence after World War I. The novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, the poem “The Wild Swans at Coole” by William Yeats, and the drawing “Stormtroopers Advance Under a Gas Attack” by Otto Dix are all examples of such disillusioned works. Mrs. Dalloway is an woman in her early fifties who is starting to feel the effects of the last several decades on her health and mental status. This is symbolized within the novel through the careful attention to clocks and the passage of time. Various clocks around London striking every half hour provides the structure for the stream-of-consciousness novel. Two times Mrs. Dalloway describes how “the leaden circles dissolved in the air.” (Woolf 72 & 283-4) when the clock chimes. This description gives the impression that time is heavy and weighing on Clarissa’s mind while at the same time she feels as if her chances in life and her youthful innocence are slipping away. This feeling of lost innocence can also be found in Yeats’s poem. The speaker of the poem declares: “now my heart is sore” (Yeats 14). The speaker mourns the pain he has received from World War I and how it has changed him and his world for the worst. Like Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway, the speaker is struggling to accept the loss of his youth and innocence. However, they both accept their fate in the end. Clarissa decides to be grateful for the life that she does have after Septimus commits suicide; the speaker reflects on how the scene before him is still “Mysterious [and] beautiful” (Yeats 26) despite the sorrow. Artwork of the period was becoming increasingly chaotic and abstract. The dark bug-like eyes of the soldiers in Otto Dix’s drawing point to their dehumanization and loss of innocence. They are losing the veneer of humanity through the war.

2/9/2023: Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella, The Heart of Darkness, explores the complex issue of imperialism and tries to break away from Conrad's own racism. Romanticism is a heavy influence in Conrad's writing; the mystical, powerful, and awe-inspiring imagery of nature is a hallmark of the Romantic belief in nature's perfection over humanity. The jungles of Africa make "the earth seemed unearthly" (Conrad) and the foreign landscapes feel ominous and foreboding. This sets Africa apart from the rest of the world, particularly Europe. Imperialists in the 19th century used Social Darwinism to justify their rape of Africa for profitable materials like ivory. Throughout the novel the 'natives' are often referred to with animal characteristics or simply as savages, subhuman. And yet Conrad explores "the thought of... remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar" (Conrad). Conrad sees the inhabitants of Africa as foreign and lesser beings and yet also as intrinsically human and connected to himself. 

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein also contains a sort of fascination for nature and how man has perverted it. The Creature is represented as a twisted mockery of humanity and puts him on a level far below Frankenstein, like the 'natives' in The Heart of Darkness. However, neither situation is clear-cut as both authors toy with the beauty and humanity in the seemingly perverse. Furthermore, the books are both written as frame narratives through sailors telling of the tall tales they hear. The East Offering it's Riches to Britannia by Spiridione Roma depicts the economic mindset of imperialists and the desire for new goods and materials. An 1885 sketch of a British officer getting his shoes polished at Cairo, like The Heart of Darkness, expresses the belief that the native populations were only useful for performing basic labour and demeaning tasks.

2/2/2023: Frankenstein

In Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, Frankenstein, the lack of female characters, particularly influential women, reveals the importance of motherhood and female nurturing. Throughout the gothic novel, there are only a handful of significant women, and no mothers. Victor Frankenstein's mother passes away at an early age, a reflection of Mary Shelley's own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, dying shortly after childbirth. The other major female influence in Victor's life is his cousin and bride, Elizabeth. She is considered "docile and good tempered" (Shelley 25), but has little actual power because she "submit[s] with... grace" (Shelley 25) to the men in her life. Elizabeth is the strongest motherly figure in Frankenstein's life. His lack of a mother figure makes him obsessed with the idea of creating life, something only a mother can do. He is desperate to make up for the lack of this vital nurturing element in his life. Similarly, the Creature, a reflection of Frankenstein's inner conflicts, has no parenting figure and laments that "no father had watched [his] infant days [and] not mother had blessed [him] with smiles and caresses" (Shelley 112). Frankenstein's Creature questions his humanity because he did not have the fundamental mother figure in his life. He attempts to befriend a French family to replace his nonexistent family, however, his desperation and disfigurement causes the family to flee from him. The lack of a caring woman in Victor Frankenstein and his Creature's lives causes them to struggle to replace the nurturing influence they lost. Two modern songs encapsulate the issue of a lack of a mother. In the song "Dead Mom" from the musical Beetlejuice, the character Lydia attempts to reconcile the lost of her mother. "How Can A Moment Last Forever" from Beauty and the Beast reveals Belle's emotions as she finally discovers how she lost the mother she never knew.

1/26/2023: A Woman of Colour

In A Woman of Colour, Olivia is faced with the difficult choice of either staying in England and try to make a life in a play that has given her mostly tragedy or return to her childhood home in Jamaica. In the end, she decides to return to Jamaica and her beloved governess and community, a decision that was right for her. Throughout her time in England, Olivia faces harsh racism from both family and acquaintances. By her marriage's annulment, her fair-weather friends see her as only a "woman of colour," (A Woman of Colour 150) as one of the ladies defines her in a falsely consoling note. While mingling in upper class English society, Olivia cannot escape from the belief that her skin causes her to be lesser than her peers. At the time when A Woman of Colour was written, very few books had characters of colour, let alone principle figures of colour. The voice of the non-white population was silenced by the domineering society. Olivia would not have been able to have a voice to express her intellect and emotions if she continued in England. While Olivia may face some physical hardships in Jamaica, she will be surrounded by people who see her as a human because they also have experienced racism. According to the historian Bryan Edwards, in Jamaica, people of colour are "entitled... to respect" based on their "education and baptism" (A Woman of Colour Appendix D 233). Olivia received a good education from her governess and was born into a Christian setting, therefore making her worthy of respect in the eyes of her peers in Jamaica.