The Tempest notes continued...

Prospero is paternalistic benevolent authority- however he causes the storm (so opposite)

·         But paternal when speaking to Miranda he reassures her ‘no harm done’ making sure she understands the reasons behind his actions for the storm.

·         Motivation for actions are caring for his daughter ‘nothing but in care for thee’ use of ‘care’ demonstrating benevolent nature, he also explains reasons and dictators don’t explain reasons.

Prospero is tyrannical dictator.

·         ‘Obey, and be attentive’- patriarchal order, an imperative verb is used ‘obey’ which emphasises an order that of a dictator as people listen to them.

·         Prospero is wanting to control power, he wants to control the land over Caliban.

·         Prospero also controls information that Miranda and audience know – he is a controller of history.

·         Prospero creates the storm- power malevolent, starts the whole play, wrathful, angry side over people, revengeful.

 

Characterization

·         What he does

·         What people say to him

·         What people say about them

·         Appearance

 

‘My dearest father’ Miranda to Prospero

Shows close relations, a personal pronoun is used ‘my’ and superlative ‘dearest’ which is indicative.

Or can be seen as desperate, groveling or flattery

Shakespeare is suggesting people’s language around power attempts to gain hand hold in power struggle.

Analysis of language

Iambic pentameter- 5 beats per lie of unstressed/stressed pattern (de dum)

Eg. Shall I comPARE thee TO a SUMmers DAY?

An example from The Tempest- @have sunk the sea within the earth, or ere’

‘I have nothing but in care of thee’—‘nothing’ is trochee, emphasize of the word.

High class characters speak with iambic pentameter

 

BLANK VERSE VS PROSE

·         Blank verse- unrhymed iambic pentameter (Prospero and King)

·         Poetry- rhyme scheme and iambic pentameter (Prospero and King)

·         Prose- no rhyming of metrical structure.

·         ALL ABOUT CLASS AND STRUCTURE

·         CASURAE- punctuation in blank verse

 

‘Dashed all to pieces. O, the cry did knock

Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perished.’

‘pieces.’- dramatic stop, its broken, there is nothing she can do to fix it, blunt.

‘O, the cry’- caesura, reflects on what she has heard lost for words for a second while thinking about traumatic experience she witnessed.

‘Against my heart’- personal pronoun ‘my’- makes it personal, sympathy, emphasis of compassionate nature.

‘Poor souls,’ caesura- reflecting on people no longer alive, spiritual, imagining their death, has to pause because it’s too painful reliving the suffering as she couldn’t stop it.

‘They perished.’- ending is blunt with the use of a full stop, indicating finality of death. Sense of silence to line stops everything.

 

Act I scene II

 

·         Confrontation of Ariel

·         Prospero alone seems to understand that controlling history enables one to control the present. When he speaks to Miranda he calls his brother ‘perfidious’ then immediately says that he loved his brother more than anyone in the world except Miranda.

·         He repeatedly asks Miranda ‘dost thou attend me?’ through questioning he commands her attention almost hypnotically as he tells her his one sided version of the story.

 

·         Prospero doesn’t seem blameless, his brother did betray him, and he also failed in his responsibilities as a ruler by control of the government so that he could study.

·         He contrasts his popularity as a leader

·         ‘The love my people bore me’ with his brothers ‘evil nature’

 

·         When speaking to Ariel- treats him as a combination of a pet whom he can praise and blame as he chooses, and a pupil demanding that the spirit recite answers to questions about the past that Prospero has taught him.

 

Spark notes: themes, motifs and symbolism

·         Prospero’s idea of justice and injustice is somewhat hypocritical—though he is furious with his brother for taking his power, he has no qualms about enslaving Ariel and Caliban in order to achieve his ends. At many moments throughout the play, Prospero’s sense of justice seems extremely one-sided and mainly involves what is good for Prospero. Moreover, because the play offers no notion of higher order or justice to supersede Prospero’s interpretation of events, the play is morally ambiguous.

·         As the play progresses, however, it becomes more and more involved with the idea of creativity and art, and Prospero’s role begins to mirror more explicitly the role of an author creating a story around him. With this metaphor in mind, and especially if we accept Prospero as a surrogate for Shakespeare himself, Prospero’s sense of justice begins to seem, if not perfect, at least sympathetic.

·         Caliban’s exact nature continues to be slightly ambiguous

·         Miranda and Prospero both have contradictory views of Caliban’s humanity. On the one hand, they think that their education of him has lifted him from his formerly brutish status. On the other hand, they seem to see him as inherently brutish

·         Nearly every scene in the play either explicitly or implicitly portrays a relationship between a figure that possesses power and a figure that is subject to that power.

·         The object of chess is to capture the king. That, at the simplest level, is the symbolic significance of Prospero revealing Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess in the final scene. Prospero has caught the king—Alonso—and reprimanded him for his treachery

·         The play explores the psychological and social dynamics of power relationships from a number of contrasting angles, such as the generally positive relationship between Prospero and Ariel, the generally negative relationship between Prospero and Caliban, and the treachery in Alonso’s relationship to his nobles.

 

The Tempest- notes

Aspects of Shakespeare’s society seen depicted through characters

• hierarchy
• looking at how authority is overturned
• death of authority
• working classes being challenges
• God and Angels
• King- Gods representation on earth
• nobility
• middle class and working class
• animals
• Devils and Satan

• power is disrupted (power struggle)
• colonialization
• role of women- women being seen and not heard
• greed and revenge

Shakespeare starts with storm- symbolic connotations?

• creates sense of forbidding
• start with most dramatic element (storm) and the idea of the king being threatened as the king is Gods representation on earth
• symbolises turbulent political times-- Elizabeth didn’t produce an heir, catholic/ protestant civil war and gun powder plot to blow up parliament (order and control)
• it also can be seen to put everything on the same level and as they are all human in the face of death and hierarchy levelled in face of nature.

CRITIC- DR CHARLES MOSLEY- CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY-

• 'drama is a commercial undertaking' and the writers in the Jacobean era were 'competing for audience'
• 1603- James of Scotland became kind of England, and now there was a new royal family on the thrown, he wanted to bring about peace (as this was a time of the conflict between catholic and protestant) through the marriage of his daughters- social cohesion
• The theme of reconciliation as its aim- doing what people wanted to see.

POWER IN THE TEMPEST

DR CHARLES MOSLEY- CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY- THE TEMPEST AND THE RULE

'State of nature'- Caliban left who represents the natural man- up against people with different views

Caliban represents the normal human and when his values are questioned causes him to become angry.

--Issue of nature and nurture

FRANK KERMODE

Gonzolo- comes out with utopia vision of society (blue print)

Self-rule- Ferdinand has o rule himself (told to Prospero to keep away from Miranda up till marriage) rule over desire- animal instinct and power over yourself- personal.

Caliban transgresses boundary- eledged rape.

Most powerful thing you can do it give power away as it corrupts you/ poisons you until you give it away.

Marriage- state between rule and ruler

VIRGIL'S- Aeneid (renaissance period) rediscovering of classical texts, found new forms of literature, history and politics. - About training for power- impulses are still there and can still beat you.

Geographical the Tempest is found in the same place as Aeneid- reference to Dido.

Eating is symbolic of ritual- links to the ceremony of Christ (Jesus' last meal)

Other Shakespeare texts:

• Macbeth- need for absolute power over needs to be King but ends in death as wasn't open minded.

• King Lear- favourites due to corruption- results in death

• Henry 5th- marriage symbolic of political union- wise

• Henry 4th- parts 1 and 2- to 'laddy' and not serious enough for power.

• Richard 2nd- marriage was symbolic of state and union- too philosophical.

POWER IN ACT 1 SCENE1

Shakespeare is challenging the Kings authority (God's representative) - a man and the power are out of his control.

‘You are a councillor; if you can command these elements to silence, and work a peace of the present'

Boatswain is being sarcastic here; he is breaking boundaries of social conventions, while challenging authority and hierarchy.

The King is supposed to represent God on earth but he is powerless on the ocean- on the ship-

--Representing the great chain of being.

Power when faced with death becomes equal- use of off stage voices 'we split, we split'

Power is thrown away in face of danger and Shakespeare used the storm to disrupt power hierarchy

No one is in charge- audience position was fixed and rules given then freedom to explore anarchy.

ACT 1 SCENE 2

Expository scene- dialogue is used to give audience back story

Prospero holds majority of the dialogue- holds power- he has caused the storm.

Patriarchal society- in period daughters were seen and not heard.

Critical material for Wuthering Heights and Dracula-- Women

notes taken from:

Feminist criticism of "Wuthering Heights"

PATSY STONEMAN

Critical Survey, Vol. 4, No. 2, Feminist criticism (1992)

Gilbert and Guber argue that ‘the story is part of a bildungsroman about a girl’s passage from innocence to experience

Helen Moglen, writing in 1971, also uses psychoanalysis in a straight forward biographical way, reading 'the theme of Wuthering Heights as the development of the female personality from childhood to maturity.

Gilbert and Gubar propose 'the following parodic, anti-Miltonic myth: There was an Original Mother (Catherine), a daughter of nature. . . . But this girl fell into a decline, at least in part through eating the poisonous cooked food of culture. She fragmented herself into mad or dead selves on the one hand (Catherine, Heathcliff) and into lesser, gentler/genteelers elves on the other (Catherine II, Hareton). The fierce primordial selves disappeared into nature, the perversely hellish heaven which was their home.

Homans stresses that the narrative is organised by Lockwood and conforms to his need endlessly to defer the realisation of desire; unlike Gilbert and Gubar, she also sees Heathcliff, even as a child, adopting the compensatory strategies of symbolisa-tion.51T he elder Catherine, in contrast, by seeking literallyt o replicate the joys of her childhood, is threatened by madness and ends in death. Thus 'Brontë probes the psychic and imaginative possibilities that the literal represents, yet in the end she identifies these possibilities as dangers within the only terms in which she can write, and she seals up her novel's defenses against them.

Nancy Armstrong, in her essay, 'Emily Brontë in and out of her Time' (1982),  gives a historical dimension to the formal characteristics of the novel, pointing out that Wuthering Heights appears to change genre from Romantic passion to Victorian Realism.

 

CAPITALISM OR PATRIARCHY AND IMMORTAL LOVE: A STUDY OF 'WUTHERING HEIGHTS'

Author(s): MARGARET LENTA

 Source: Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, No. 62 (May 1984), pp. 63-76

Published by: in association with the Berghahn Books Faculty of Humanities, Development and Social Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Arnold Kettle's, published in 1951

 It ends with the claim that the novel is  ‘an expression in the imaginative terms of art of the stresses, tensions and conflicts, personal and spiritual, of nineteenth Century capitalist society. .. The men and women of Wuthering Heights are not the prisoners of nature; they live in the world and strive to change it, sometimes successfully, always painfully, with almost infinite difficulty and error.’  This emphasis on the seriousness of the book is necessary and valuable.

 

DRACULA

A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula

John Allen Stevenson

PMLA

 Vol. 103, No. 2 (Mar., 1988), pp. 139-149

Published by: Modern Language Association

Both Craft and Maurice Richardson call them Dracula's "daughters" ( 110, 4 27);  Carol F ye terms them "wives"( 21);  Leonard Wolf the count's " beautiful brides"( 249); and C. F. Bentley says that" they are either Dracula's daughters or his sisters " but insists that an "incestuous "  relation existed between them in the past (29). The difficulty here is a false either/or: these women must either be kin or be wives. What these readers  ignore is the possibility that Dracula's relation to these women has, quite simply, changed, that they have occupied both roles not simultaneously, as in incest, but sequentially, because of the way vampire reproduction  works.

Stoker's description of the first women we see in Dracula, the vampire women at the castle, strongly emphasizes their overt sexuality. The word voluptuous is repeated they have" voluptuous lips" and a "deliberate voluptuousness" in their approach to Harker (46). And he, in turn, is quickly aroused by their seductive appeal, as he feels" a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips" (46). They project themselves as sexualized beings and have power to inspire asexual response in others. The pattern is exactly repeated when Lucy’s transformation into a vampire is complete. Shortly after Van Helsing  and Seward note the disappearance of the wounds in her neck, the young doctor reports that she speaks in a "soft, voluptuous voice, such as I had never heard from her lips" (167); and when the whole band confronts the undead Lucy outside her tomb," we recognised the features of Lucy Westenra.  Lucy Westenra, but yet now changed. The sweetness was turned to . . . cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness"(217).

 

 

Lamia notes- John Keats

 

Notes on 'Lamia'

Negative capability- concept  by John Keats, who was of the opinion that literary achievers,  should be able to come to terms with the fact that some matters might have to be left unsolved and uncertain.  some certainties were best left open to imagination and that the element of doubt and ambiguity added romanticism and specialty to a concept.

Lamia transforms from a half woman/half serpent into a woman. Metamorpheses. This is slick and crafty, showing that she cannot be trusted. It's an allegorical poem- it has deeper meanings. It is also ambiguous, which is how Keats always refers to women, as ambiguous.
 
Lamia was written in 1819, and published in 1820, after going to Rome and learning about his illness. Just before he wrote Lamia, he had a brain haemorage, so he knew he was dying. His brother had also just died, and his brother George was in financial difficulty. George stole from his mother and went gambling much of the time. When George asked John for money, John had Lamia published to provide the money.
 
The Greek myth behind the poem is that Lamia had an affair with Zues (one of the Gods). Zues' wife, Hera was outraged when she found out, and punished Lamia by condemning her to a life of sleeplessness. Hera also killed Lamia's children, according to some versions of the myth. Lamia hunted for children to replace the ones she lost, and Zues gave her the ability to take out her own eyes so she could sleep.
 
In the Victorian era, people thought that Lamia actually hunted for men, not children, which emphasised the shockingness of her promiscuousness.
 
However, Lamia is also a woman who has emotions and needs- she is not just a repulsive creature.
Keats believed the poem to be a masterpiece, hoping it would "start a fire in people and give them either an unpleasant or pleasant sensation". (in a letter he wrote). He wanted people to experience the poem, whether they had a good or a bad time reading it. 
 
Lamia is possible example of Negative Capability- transforming into mortal woman. As how it happens is left to our imagination.
 
Critics
 
R.H Fogle commented that 'Lamia appears to lend itself to allegorial interpretation'.
 
Garrett Stewart has remarked that the poem 'seems to invite allegorical reading'. In most cases the allegorical readings focus on the ways in which the three main characters in the poem, Lamia, Lycius and Apollonius may be said to represent something other than themselves. For example, Lamia could represent Fanny Brawne while Lycius represents Keats himself, and Apollonius could represent Charles Brown.

Keats does not seem to be on the side of any particular character and by the end of the poem they all seem equally inadequate.

The tone of the poem is by turns: Ironic, Sarcastic, Dramatic, Self Conscious.

The story begins with Hermes seaching for a beautiful nymph. He asks Lamia, a snake creature, to help him find the nymph. She says she will do this, if he changes her back into a woman so that she can be with the mortal she loves, Lucius. Hermes grants her wish and she is transformed into a beautiful woman. Lucius falls in love with the beautiful Lamia, not realising that she is a snake that assumed human form in order to win his admiration. Lamia knows that Apollonius, a wise old man, will recognise her and reveal her secret. So she asks Lycius not to ask him to the wedding. Apollonius talks Lycius into letting him attend, and he exposes Lamia at the wedding feast. She disappears and Lucius dies.

source- http://www.keatsian.co.uk/keats-poetry-lamia.php


The Love affair
The poem starts with a love affair between the god Hermes and a nymph, which is a prefatory literary idyll. It highlights by ironic contrast the principal narrative where not one of the main characters is thoroughly desirable.

Critics

Leigh Hunt: Triumph of thought over feeling, feeling over imagination. Lamia has a soul of humanity. She is not a mathematical truth.
Some critics view the poem as a satirical denunciation of philosophy (or rationalism).
David Perkins: no heroes/villains, showing Keats’ ambivalence. The poem is about the consequences of being a dreamer.
Hazlitt (essayist and Keats’s mentor): ‘’the progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry.’

Source- http://englishtutorbournemouth.co.uk/john-keats-biography/lamia/

Characters-

Hermes: astronomical/heavenly imagery: ‘star of Lethe’, ‘bright planet’, has ‘serpent rod’. He grants love aspirations.

Lamia also has astronomical/heavenly imagery: ‘silver moons’, ‘mooned body’s grace, stars’, starry crown’. Lamia as a serpent also suggests Satan. Lamia is mocked in Hermes’ ‘beauteous wreath’.

Lycius is a hoodwink’d dreamer, falling in love with Lamia who has ‘elfin blood’ and lingers by the wayside ‘faerily’, with whom he lives in a magical palace with a ‘faery roof.'
(http://englishtutorbournemouth.co.uk/john-keats-biography/lamia/)

Lamia- a sorceress who is transformed from a serpent into a beautiful women
Orpheus- legendary musician, poet, and prophet in ancient Greek religion and myth, ability to charm all living things and even stones with his music
Pluto-ruler of the underworld in classical mythology, represents a more positive concept of the god who presides over the afterlife.
Hermes- One of the greek gods who leaves olmpus (home of the Gods) in search for a beautiful nymph.
Jove- (Jupiter) the king of the gods and the god of sky and thunder
Nymph- mythological nature spirits that appear as beautiful young women (divine spirits who animate nature)
Satyrs- lustful, drunken woodland gods. In Greek art they were represented as a man with a horse's ears and tail
Proserpine-Goddess of the Underworld
Olympus- Home of the Gods
Apollo- a wise advisor and former tutor of lycius
Eurydice-oak nymph or one of the daughters of Apollo, She was the wife of Orpheus, who tried to bring her back from the dead with his enchanting music.
Thetis- goddess of the sea and the leader of the fifty Nereides
Plato(ic)- philosopher and mathematician in Classical Greece, and the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world.
Lethe- one of the five rivers of Hades
Circe(an)-goddess of magic, daughter of Helios, the god of the sun, and Perse, an Oceanid.
Crete- largest and most populous of the Greek islands
Corinth- the mythical founder of the city was believed to have been King Sisyphus, famed for his punishment in Hades where he was made to forever roll a large boulder up a hill.- winged-horse Pegasus became a symbol of the city,  the narrow stretch of land that joins the Peloponnese to the mainland of Greece, roughly halfway between Athens and Sparta.
Elysium- conception of the afterlife that developed over time and was maintained by certain Greek religious and philosophical sects and cults.
Nereids-sea nymphs (female spirits of sea waters.) They often accompany Poseidon (god of the sea, the god of the sea, and can be friendly and helpful to sailors fighting perilous storms

Explore the ways in which Keats depicts power in 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci.'

Explore the ways in which Keats depicts power in 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci.' 

The poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci is a ballad, a medieval genre which John Keats revived making his poem simple. by using this form Keats is able to make his poem accessible for people to understand leading him to speak to his audience and place his views across. The poem is about a knight who is on the verge of death, the poem isn't explicit about why the knight is dying. However, it is left partly to our imagination. Ultimately, the poem is about the dangers of obsession and fixation. La Belle Dame Sans Merci was written towards the end of Keats's life, after his brother Tom died of tuberculosis but before Keats found out he too was dying of tuberculosis. During Keats life he had suffered and lost many important things and has experienced many tragic losses which he portrays in his poetry. He wrote this poem in 1819 and it was published in 1820. Keats depicts power in many ways throughout La Belle Dame Sans Merci, he uses the characters to represent different aspects of living during that time he witnessed.

First of all, the protagonist who is the knight is shown as weak with the first stanza. As the reader we can automatically see something is wrong with the knight as he is 'alone and palely loitering?' The knight doesn't fulfil the traditional chivalric idea of a knight as he is 'pale.' With the use of 'loitering' this could suggest he doesn't know what to do with no direction in life. The consonance of the L sound makes the line sound musical, drawing attention to the words. Keats uses the character of the knight to symbolise himself as he wrote this poem after his brothers death as he would of felt many strong emotions and felt like he didn't belong in society. The knight is weak in the poem as the narrator is asking all the questions and its not until stanza 4 where the knight actually speaks reflecting the powerlessness he has. Keats uses flower imagery  to describe the knight. 'I see a lily on thy brow' this metaphor suggesting how haggard the knight looks, it also conveys his paleness. The lily is also the flower associated with death and therefore contributes to the deathly feel of the poem.

Keats depicts power  through the use of the narrator in the poem who is a powerful character. The narrator takes control of  the poem however nameless, is still able to frame the narration. The narrator starts the poem with a question  'O what can ail thee. Knight- at- arms' which then is repeated in the second stanza as the knight doesn't answer immediately. Therefore, the unnamed narrator has to repeat the question due to voiceless knight. The effect of the dysfunctional communication could represent the poet as the speaker and poetical inspiration as the knight who is has lost its voice and lost its inspiration as in the days where Keats was writing, inspiration was very little. However, Keats then finds Spenser which is his inspiration and this is represented when the knight replies, as it's Keats finding his inspiration. The narrator also describes the knights appearance by using the adjectives 'haggard' meaning tired looking and 'woe- begone' meaning the knight is obviously sick and depressed and these words describe the knight which highlights how deathly and drawn he looks.


The title of the poem translates into a beautiful women without mercy, suggesting she is powerful due to the fact she has no mercy. We met the fairy lady in the story, where the knight 'made a garland for her head/ And bracelets too, and fragrant zone.' However in the next stanza 'I set her on my pacing steed,/ And nothing else saw all day long.' The knight thinks he has control and power over her as she sat on his horse however this could be sexual connotations. The knight is so absorbed with his erotic encounter with this fairy lady that he saw nothing else for 'all day long.' She was able to hypnotise him with her beauty suggesting she has the power. Similarly in the next stanza the fairy lady is feeding the knight 'she found me roots of relish sweet,/ And honey wild, and manna dew' Keats is suggesting she holds the power over the knight as she is able to provide for him.