ENGL 4310

3/4 cup margarine
3/4 cup creamy peanut butter (I uses honey roasted PB)
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup white sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups rolled oats
Spread in an ungreased jelly roll pan and bake @ 350 degrees for 12 min.
Cool and spread with a thin layer of peanut butter and chocolate frosting.

Chocolate frosting topper:
1 cube margarine
2 cups powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla
3 1/2 Tb powdered cocoa
(or use your favorite choc. store bought frosting-it just ain't as good)

I know that I brought in examples of propaganda posters for our critical lens session on “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” but I am still fascinated by them I guess. Since so many of the posters were targeted towards women, I thought it would be fun to put a few examples of posters up against quotes from the book.

On Liberty Bonds:

“Miranda began to explain that she had no money, and did not know where to find any, when the older man interrupted: “That’s no excuse, no excuse at all, and you know it, with the Huns over-running martyred Belgium.”

“Miranda tried not to listen, but se heard. These vile Huns—glorious Belleau Wood—our keyword is Sacrificed—Martyred Belgium—give till it hurts
—our noble boys Over There—Big Berthas—the death of civilization—the Boche.”

On “Good Works”:

“…she went out to join a group of young women fresh from the country club dances, the morning bridge, the charity bazaar, the Red Cross workrooms, who were wallowing in good works. They gave tea dances and raised money, and with the money they bout quantities of sweets, fruits, cigarettes, and magazines for the men in cantonment hospitals.”

“I do worse,” she said soberly; “I write pieces advising other young women to knit and roll bandages and do without sugar and help win the war.”

With so many similar posters out there advising women as to how they can help “win the war” it doesn’t surprise me that Miranda seems to resent it. So many of these posters are so demanding and are purposely made to be frightening. It would be upsetting to be badgered constantly about buying bonds and saving sugar, let alone have your patriotism and femininity attacked if you did not do so. Or, how would you like this on your front door?

I know that we weren’t applying the Family Relationships lens to “The Lame Shall Enter First” but what we talked about in class reminded me of this story more than anything. The family system in “The Lame Shall Enter First” has changed because the mother died. Sheppard the father however refuses to accept that the system has been altered and insists on acting as if nothing has happened. Sheppard blames Norton for causing problems in the family because Norton keeps crying for his mother. Sheppard has made Norton the identified patient (yeah, I pay attention) and refuses to acknowledge that the family system has changed. Not adjusting to the altered circumstances eventually leads to tragedy. Norton needs someone to fill the absent element of “mother” but Sheppard refuses to fill it, so Norton turns to Johnson. Johnson takes on “motherly” responsibilities of mentoring and teaching Norton, and Norton takes these lessons to heart. Sheppard is too blind to see what is happening with his son until it is too late. Norton has naively accepted Johnson’s advice because he needed guidance. If Sheppard had just stepped up to the plate and had been willing to change his family element because of the altered circumstances he could have been a mentor to Norton to balance out Johnson’s bad advice.

Josie’s blog Language as a Dividing Factor struck a cord with me because it brought back memories of conversations we had in high school while we were rehearsing “The Miracle Worker.” “The Miracle Worker” is of course the play based on Helen Keller’s story of how Anne Sullivan ultimately taught her how to spell and speak.

For almost five years Helen Keller was completely unable to communicate. In her memoirs she described herself as being in the “double dungeon of darkness and silence” until Anne Sullivan taught her to communicate. Sullivan originally taught Keller how to communicate by having her spell things with sign language alphabet, but Keller did not fully comprehend that the things Sullivan was spelling actually were the names of the objects until she had an epiphany at the water pump. Somehow she remembered the word for “Water” from when she was a child, and connected that word with what the object was. From then on, Keller understood and was able to learn and communicate with those around her.

In the facisnating video on this page Anne Sullivan explains how Helen Keller ultimately learned how to actually speak. I just thought it would be interesting in talking about characters that are unable to communicate to remember the most famous example of someone who overcame that inability.

I thought I would do my best to fill in a few gaps in Sara’s The Ten Commandments blog.

IV. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
I am not 100% sure if it happened on a Sunday or not but Parker’s Mother dragging him to the revival could work for this commandment. Parker of course ran out of the meeting, and did not keep the Sabbath holy.

VII. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Ok, this one is a stretch, but because Mr. Shiftlet married Lucynell and then abandoned her, I think it can be assumed that he will eventually technically commit adultery.

VIII. Thou shalt not steal.
Mr. Shiftlet’s stealing the car in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own…” was not mentioned, but I think that could be a valid example of this commandment.

X. Thou shalt not covet.
I think that there is a lot of this in “Good Country People.” First, I think that Hulga covets the life she once had as a scholar, not to mention, she covets the lives of other “normal” people because they do not have a handicap. “Mr. Pointer” obviously, for whatever bizarre reason, covets random tokens, such as Hulga’s leg and the glass eye he had previously stolen.


And I had a question about “Thou shalt not kill” because Sara had mentioned “The Lame Shall Enter First” as one of the stories in which a killing happened and I wondered if it was listed because Johnson effectively “killed” Norton by leading him to suicide, because Norton committed suicide, or both?

In Brittni’s blog Are you feeling it? she brings up the point that an author can sort of feel if a there story is meant to be a short story or a novel. I think this can be true in any art form. A poet chooses if their poem is going to fit into a certain form, or into an open form style. Or, just like Brittni mentioned, sometimes I also have trouble trying to decide if a story is meant to be a play or a short story. I agree with Brittni that I think it comes down to what “feels” right. If a work is pulling in one direction but the artist tries to force it in another, it often gets bogged down in itself.

We have talked about in class how our authors’ illnesses often interfered with their work. I think that this might have not only contributed to why they wrote primarily short stories but I also must wonder if they sort of became “programmed” to think of stories in a shorter context. I am not saying that O’Connor and Porter would have been unable to write a novel, but just like I mainly see the stories I concoct as plays because theatre has been ingrained in me, I wonder if because they’re lives were constantly interrupted if their brains thought of short stories instead of novels. The “feeling” was right for them to do shorter works because they just instinctively knew that their writing might be interrupted.

It is really interesting to think about how political, social, and personal situations might affect the way an author comes up with a story.

Rachel’s blog on Porter and Crane was interesting to me because I had also read Porter’s letters to and about Crane. Both of our authors know just the way to cut someone down to size with a sense of grace and wit that many people do not have. In her letter to Hart Crane on page 45 I was fascinated that Porter starts out quite benignly with “First about the lunch. I was disappointed too…” before she tells Crane that she did not go out to say hello to him because he called her a “whore and a fancy-woman.”

She writes, “You know you have the advantage of me, because I share the superstition of our time about the somewhat romantic irresponsibility of drunkenness, holding it a social offense to take seriously things said and done by a drunken person.” I just love how she will write something so matter-of-factly and underscore it with a biting comment. She later writes a little more bluntly, “I am beginning to believe that a sanitarium for the mentally defective is the proper place for you. If this is true, I should be sorry at having been angry with you. But I think it is time you grew up and stopped behaving like a very degenerate adolescent.”

When we talked about the letters in class, we were always fascinated by the way in which O’Connor and Porter get after people and how that wit often carried over into their stories. It’s a shame that people just can’t insult other people like they used to.

As I read "The Displaced Person" again, I began to wonder why the "black help" stuck around Mrs. McIntyre's farm. Both Mrs. McIntyre and Mrs. Shortley continually remind them that they are dispensable because there is a endless source of help just like them. They don't seem to heed any of these insults that are thrown at them, probably in part because they are so used to it. Thinking about this in terms of Marxism, though, I started to wonder if their adherence to the farm comes as a result of subtly operating ISA's. Could the farm represent an ISA in a similar way that a family would? The purpose of the farm is primarily production, and the help is nothing more than the means by which a product is created. The two men know that they are a small but essential part of a whole, and that their place on the farm is virtually guaranteed because the system would collapse without someone to fulfill their place. I think they know that even if they were kicked off this particular farm, they would inevitably find another just like it. It is in this way that they both adhere to the ideologies created by the farm as an ISA, and at the same time function as pillars which serve to uphold the system.

This leads me to question why, after finding out that Mrs. McIntyre intends to fire them, Mrs. Shortley becomes indignant and immediately begins packing. Unlike the black help, Mrs. Shortley is disturbed by the fact that Mrs. McIntyre sees her family as dispensable. Maybe the ISA's which govern the farm are different for "white trash help" and "black help," because apparently Mrs. McIntyre prefers the black help. This suggests that "white trash" doesn't fulfill an essential position on the farm, and they therefore don't have job security in the same way that the black help does.

Another component of Marxism that I see in this story is alienation of the laborer. When Mr. Guizac first comes to the farm, Mrs. McIntyre and Mrs. Shortly are doubtful of his capabilities. As time goes on, however, Mrs. McIntyre begins to realize his value as a laborer. Mrs. Shortley, on the other hand, maintains her pessimism because he is slowly taking over the Shortley's function on the farm, which she subconsciously knows will render them useless. Very quickly, Mrs. McIntyre begins to see the improvements on her farm, and pays less and less attention to Mr. Guizac as a foreign "displaced" person with a wife and two children; to her, he just becomes the source of an invaluable commodity. He is thus alienated up until the point when she discovers his plan to bring his cousin to live on the farm. When this happens, all illusions are wiped away and he becomes unalienated, and therefore a "displaced person" once again. Unfortunately, Mrs. McIntyre cannot reestablish him as an alienated laborer, and therefore knows that she can no longer employ him on the farm; he has destroyed the ideologies which designate him solely as a laborer because he attempted to connect with Mrs. McIntyre on a human level by trying to make her see the injustice of his cousin's circumstance.

I have so many ideas about postcolonialism which I find contradict each other at times and I can not seem to understand fully what the whole deal is. There are so, many complex arguments about postcolonialism that no matter how many times I form an opinion, there is something else out there that defeats it. With that in mind I tried to read "Flowering Judas" keeping what I know about postcolonialism in my mind, and after our discussions about postcolonialism I read the following passage from "Flowering Judas" a couple of times:

Some day this world, now seemingly so composed and eternal, to the edges of every sea shall be merely a tangle of gaping trenches, of crashing walls and broken bodies. Everything must be torn from its accustomed place where it has rotted for centuries, hurled skyward and distributed, cast down again clean as rain, without separate identity.

What I found particularly interesting was the last three words, "without separate identity." What I find so interesting about postcolonialism is while it serves an important purpose in helping us to understand not to "other" people, it also creates a problem in my mind. While I agree that literature should not be defined with the assumption that all people would agree, I can't understand why there is an insistence on being so separate in our identity. What if I said,"I am a white middle class female and insist on being treated like I am"? I guess in certain situations I would insist on being seen as what I am, but I don't want to be shoved into the same group as everyone else. On the other hand I sometimes want to be seen as something more than my identifying group or nationality of something. It seems so important but only on the surface. I mean, I guess it is easy for me to say this in my position as a "colonizer." And this may not make any sense whatsoever and I apologize for that. I'm not saying postcolonialism is wrong, in fact I completely understand why some issues are brought up in this theory.

I feel like Porter takes the above passage as an opportunity to explain how "separate identities" of people are less important than the whole of our existence as a community. Of course, I am an individual and no doubt want to be treated as such. Literature should be defined with diversity in mind, but diversity should not be defined by one group.

I know that we didn’t use the critical lens of Post-Colonialism on “Noon Wine,” but I can’t help but focus on the idea of “othering” in this story. I don’t know much about Post-Colonialism but I know that it carries the idea of creating an other. The Thompsons “othered” Mr. Helton when he came to the farm because he looked, and spoke (and because he didn’t speak) differently from the family. They disliked the way how he was not a person who spoke much, and when he did his accent was very different from everyone else that they knew. Mrs. Thompson even helped to other Mr. Helton because he didn’t eat as much as she thought that he should.
Mr. Helton further othered himself when it turned out that he was a very effective worker. He created something that the family wasn’t use to having, which was a productive, strong farm. He enjoyed working, because he was able to make the farm a success where Mr. Thompson had failed because he hated the work.

Although it is very interesting that in the end of the story Mr. Helton is no longer considered an other when another stranger and other (Mr. Hatch) comes to the farm. Only when Mr. Hatch points out that Mr. Helton should be an other does Mr. Thompson recognize that Mr. Helton is now like a member of the family. It is also interesting that if Mr. Thompson had kept Mr. Helton as an other, then Mr. Thompson wouldn’t have felt the need to protect him, causing the death of Mr. Hatch.