Category: 2021 Blog Posts

My initial interest with Rear Window started when I heard that Alfred Hitchcock is the director. Since I started taking film classes at Dickinson three years ago, he was one the first directors I learned about and has been mentioned in nearly all my film classes. Rightfully so, his 1960 film “Psycho” is one of the most studied films of all time (the shower scene specifically). It is palatable and easy to recognize in films since its time. In 2021 a movie called “The Woman in the Window” was released (screenplay of AJ Finn’s 2018 novel), so naturally this was heavy on my mind. In that story, an agoraphobiac (Anna) does not leave her apartment. She watches her neighbors for entertainment, and believes she witnesses a crime occur in their apartment, also through means of a camera. This is one of many stories inspired from a peeping tom narrator. Something that really interested me in Rear Window is the lack of scenery. The only setting the audience has for two hours is Mr. Jefferies’ apartment and what he can see from his back window. I think it works because he focuses on a handful of neighbors, so that provides the viewer small breaks from Jefferies’ life and think about the others. Hitchcock also directs with many subtleties in his films. I noticed the music in Rear Window, specifically in the first half, was mostly upbeat and just slightly nuanced. Having nonchalant music during a scene like when Thorwald is out all night with his suitcase, as opposed to no music or something playing that is explicitly daunting, tries to trick the viewer. It changes the context of the scene and tries to play with the audience to make them second guess themselves, if what they’re seeing is really the situation of the scene. This adds suspense to his films. In “Psycho” Norman Bates shows small facial expressions of anger and lack of control over himself. But, when he talks, he is polite and can conversate with others.

First Published in 1980, Audre Lorde’s memoir Cancer Journals follows her experience with Breast Cancer. In writing this as a journal, we see the ins and outs of her suffering, and her journalistic writing style makes the reader feel a personal connection to her process. The female body is a beautiful thing, and Breast Cancer is a sickness that threatens all of us. Throughout our lives, we are informed of the dangers of Breast Cancer and need to do scans to check for it within our bodies. The fact that this is something all women grow up with and can potentially suffer from makes this journal all more real as we read about her journey through it. All bodies are sacred, and one of the terrifying things is altering your body to prevent sickness. I’m drawn to Audre Lorde because I can relate to the fears of being a woman and the struggles of illness. It is difficult to know that you are dying and for something that may not even be your fault. Cancer is most literally defined as “a disease caused by an uncontrolled division of abnormal cells in a part of the body.” The critical aspect of this definition is the fact that it is uncontrolled. Lourde focuses her story on every aspect of this process, leaving the reader with a sense of fear, sympathy, and overall perseverance when faced with extreme adversity. 

 As Lorde writes about her one-breasted mastectomy in chapter two, the reader sympathizes with the struggles of feeling feminine in your own body.  This struggle of identity arises after removing something that society recognizes as an essential part of the feminine body. She talks about how lonely the process feels to be fighting alone because everyone around her cannot relate. She expresses a lack of ability to have anyone to turn to and led to her pondering the idea of the identity crisis that led to it. She began to question how she would tackle this adversity or if she could even tackle it all. This all ties together with her feeling concerned about her attractiveness and how her lover will perceive her. As mentioned above, the female body in all its beauty is unique as we were all created in God’s image. With such a strong sense of how we look, it is easy to assume that any change made to our appearances will be detrimental to our identity and self-esteem. 

In chapter three, Lorde discusses her strength and independence. She shows the reader this, opting out of a prosthesis after her right breast was removed. I found this incredibly powerful; even with such a drastic change to her image, she decided to show the world that she is proud of who she is and what she went through. Her courage is incredibly admirable, and I have learned so much from her struggle and strength. I admire how she would not let medicine or society determine anything about who she was. As she put it, the prosthesis would make her feel “empty,” like she was given a new body, but she wanted to keep the one she already had. 

 

Sigh, Gone a memoir by Phuc Tran recounts his experience as a Vietnamese American refugee in Carlisle, Pennsylvania after the fall of Saigon. When Tran arrived in America with his family, he was only two years old. In the book, he reflects on his childhood and his formative teenage years in Carlisle. He was to navigate himself between two languages: the Vietnamese spoken only at home and the English pervasive in every other public context, which bleeds into the domestic as well. What I found interesting is how Tran finds diction to narrate communicative processes of himself and the people he is surrounded with; narrate from an adult point of view looking back at his younger self. Close-reading Tran’s choice of diction, as he describes linguistic processes happening around him in Carlisle, reveals the unstable and never-ending activities/performativity of linguistic and identitary subject.

The linguistic act of communication is described often in terms of a nominal language transformed into a verb. People in Sigh, Gone converse like this: “Chi and Chuong Vietnamesed with each other quietly” (40); “She Vietnamesed feebly” (31); “my father did most of the Englishing” (25); “I Vietnamesed quietly, embarrassed not to be speaking English in public” (153).

Tran’s (literary) style is often humoristic, sharp, and profane, so such diction might be interpreted as an excessively creative choice and then quickly glossed over, but I think it means more than it appears. The noun or adjective “Vietnamese” which denotes nationality, cultural identity, and a native tongue is transformed into a verb, a capitalized verb that encompasses all of these three markers in its very ongoing act of communication. “To Vietnamese” is not only to speak the language but also embody the language, the language as alive and in progress; it is not to treat the language as an object as in “to speak Vietnamese” or “to speak English.”

“To Vietnamese” can also be read as to perform the language and to perform the identity attached to that language; an progressively negotiative identity. Tran’s choice of transforming the noun of language into the active hybridity of noun/verb also depends on the context of communication and the person found in that context. The act of displacement from Vietnam to the US has destabilized the Vietnamese refugees’ identity and language since they are found in a foreign landscape and are Othered by the society occupying that context (the American town of Carlisle). So, Tran’s parents despite being geographically Vietnamese by birth into middle adulthood are described in her communication: “[Tran’s parents] Vietnamesed with each other quietly” (40); “[Tran’s mother] Vietnamesed feebly” (31); “[Tran’s] father did most of the Englishing” (25). “Vietnamese” as an identity and a language is a no longer stable object for them, but now is an act, “to Vietnamese” is an act.

In a scene where teenage Tran was shopping in a mall with his mother, he “Vietnamesed quietly [to his mother], embarrassed not to be speaking English in public” (153). It makes ostensible sense that growing up in America, his Vietnamese is unstable and his communication is designated with the verb/noun “to Vietnamese,” but also “to speak English.” English becomes an object for the teenage Tran to homogenize, to assimilate himself into.

(There are other incidents in the memoir, but at the moment, time constraint and exhaustion and the blogpost’s length don’t let me get to them here yet)

So far, I find Tran incredibly apt to transform the nominal language of Vietnamese into a hybrid process of verb and noun: “to Vietnamese”; which encapsulates the process of linguistic negotiation and identity formation of an diasporic subject. | Is the memoir making a case for such choice of diction? Not just to “speak” but to also contextually perform the linguistic act and embody the identity attached to it? But the conundrum here (for Tran and his family too) is that: if you are between two worlds (or more), two languages, is the verb+noun of one language, with its already destabilizing potential as a hybrid, enough to signify for the totality (or fragmentality is the righter word) of all the contexts within the subject?

 

I think a movie that had me rethinking my assumptions of it was the Sofia Coppola directed movie Lost in Translation. Starring Bill Murray as a washed up actor (Bob) who meets a young girl (Charlotte) played by Scarlett Johansson while filming commercials in Japan and makes a connection with her, this film has captured my mind for years. I’d call it my favorite movie to be honest.

However, I see it very differently as an adult versus when I saw it as an early teen. Younger me found it an endearing story of love in a difficult disconnected time, where Bob unable to deal with his problems at home found escape and solace in Japan and with someone he felt more of a connection to. As an adult, I see that differently. Lost in Translation is a story of miscommunication and lack of communication — one might read it very directly as Bob lost in literal translation, unable to understand Japanese who settles for botched English that does not remotely probably cover what was originally said (a great bonus for bilingual viewers, as there are no subtitles for an audience to hear what Bob doesn’t understand), but I also see Lost in Translation as Bob struggling to truly find love even with the connection he makes with Charlotte. The romance with Charlotte is fleeting and vapid in some ways, it’s a connection built on two people’s feelings of isolation and not a sweet meet-cute of people who relate to each other. It’s because they have no one else that their adventures in Japan together feel romantic to us.

The ending scene of the movie really sells this point home to me. Bob is leaving to head back to his family in the U.S, and the scene starts with him saying goodbye to Charlotte before being forced to take photos with his Japanese entourage. As he leaves, we get shots of him riding alone in a car driving through the dense Tokyo, with shots of crowds underscored by mostly ambient crowd noise, and Bob walking among them as he walks out of the car which only serves to further emphasize his isolation. He finds Charlotte in the crowd as they hug and cry, and Bob whispers something inaudible to the audience to her.

As a literal example of the unsaid, I always wondered what he said. Part of what the scene does is let the viewer fill in the gap with their own assumption about their take on the movie and the relationship, and younger me found it sweet and romantic. Older me really sees it different: it’s just further driving home the narrative of the disconnect, the ‘lost in translation’. This point is lost on us, and us wondering what the point of it is defeats part of the message of the movie, which is not every relationship is built on real feelings or real communication. I conclude this is a moment in the film for us to walk away with a reverse catharsis of sorts: leave the assumptions at the door and feel unfulfilled, just as this romance did for very good reasons, which is what Sofia Coppola and her great actors tried to tell us.

By the way, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson kept what was said between them. Sofia Coppola’s choice to keep it a mystery only sells the narrative mystery and the deeper movie of the meaning further. And you know what? That’s beautiful. For years I and other fans agonized about it, but when I think about how it really gives us a true ‘lost in translation’ moment, I think it’s a great form of storytelling.

Watch the ending scene here.

I first encountered Vibration Cooking: Or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl in my first year seminar. The language of Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor is so welcoming and easy to be entranced by, as she is skilled in storytelling. This is the main reason as to why I enjoyed this cookbook so much because she treats this work to creatively express herself, which we have seen in Alice Walker’s piece, was not a reality for many African American women and Smart-Grosvenor includes that that fact.  

Smart-Grosvenor uses her background in storytelling, which is a large part of Geechee culture, to share her culinary experience in a way that does not discount the history of these recipes and the impacts that they have on her life and others. She finds the process of cooking, while a strictly feminine one, also to be one that is spiritual and a part of the shared experience of African American women. Food, as Smart-Grosvenor includes in the section “Demystification of Food”, is a large topic that affects many cultures around the world, and unlike some English or Italian cooks would like to do, no one can take claim over specific recipes and dishes because they are shared across the borders of race and ethnicity. Following this same logic, this insinuates that no one cuisine is superior to another and “[t]here is no mystique. Food is food! Everybody eats!” (Smart-Grosvenor xxxvii). A simple observation like the need to eat is lost in culinary field and the discussion surrounding food, and the raw and uncomplicated approach that Smart-Grosvenor pushes forward in her book allows for readers to gain confidence and interest to making her recipes and cooking in general. It also creates a space for inclusivity and an observation on how race affects food, because the cultural foods of some races and ethnicities are treated in the same regard as those from French cuisine, as an example, in the United States because of the power that certain races and ethnicities hold over others.  

As I read this cookbook in an academic circumstance, I paid more attention to the language and implicit meanings of it more than I would if I were reading it for pleasure. But as I was still a first-year, there is much that I had not learned yet in terms of how to read a text, and I was focused more on the context of the class, which was food and gender. While I did focus on the impacts of race and culture, I did not go into much depth about this significance, especially within the context of diaspora and identity within the United States. Now that I have read this text again, I can appreciate more of her narration of her life not as simple, personal accounts, but stories of themselves that employ purposeful language and organization. For example, the organization of Vibration Cooking is unique as it follows a stream of consciousness of Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor and while I noticed this importance in my initial reading of the text, in terms of my thesis topic, I would state that it is significant because of the creative outlets in which African American women had access to were mainly storytelling. So, Smart-Grosvenor’s cookbook follows these oral traditions by using language that is universal and colloquial reveals that culture cannot be separated from the discussion of food. The narrative voice also acts as an opposition and revolt against jargon and Western and White claims about culinary and food studies. Smart-Grosvenor states that “[f]ood is not racial” (Smart-Grosvenor xxxv,  not to diminish the significance that food has on cultures, including her own, but to state that there is much more beyond trying to divide food into racial categories, and more of just letting the spirituality that comes with food to bring yourself, and others, joy. 

Smart-Grosvenor, Vertamae. Vibration Cooking: or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl. Athens, The University of Georgia Press, 2011.  

In the early years, I viewed the Holy Bible as just a book that had some sort of mystique to it, a judgmental aurora, an essence of power. 

I grew up in a “kind of” religious family. However, we would only go to church on holidays, and even that half-efforted attempt of faith fizzled out as my sisters, and I began to assume our sovereignty. 

I always felt the messages to be obsolete and unable to be understood through all the fancy dress, decorations, and sacraments. I never felt a spiritual connection in my time in the Catholic Church. 

In contrast to my family, my best friend’s family is very religious. The type of religion that other people, even myself, view as obnoxious or misguided. However, I always admired their passion for their faith; and my relationships with their family allowed me to experience faith differently. 

My friend’s family attended a nondenominational Christian church that read and interpreted the Bible in a way that I was not familiar with. So I spent several months being very devoted and making an effort to read the Bible and do as much as possible with the church. 

The beauty that came with uncovering this type of version of Christianity versus what I had been used to in Catholicism. Comparing my friend’s family with my own family, I learned more about how the Bible has worked following society. 

I observed how there were many different and more appealing ways of celebrating and worshipping God. Yet, the one constant was the Bible. 

I also observed through reading the Bible that my family was just as religious as my friends’ family. Without blatantly speaking religiously, my family’s values and attitudes were apparent through stories and wisdom articulated in the text.  

Despite all of the diversity of all these things, the one thing that all of these things had in common was they are all based on this book. Hundreds and thousands of years, and this book was still standing. Hundreds of thousands of years and new interpretations are still forming every day. 

When I got to Dickinson, I began reading and learning more about English literature. I read countless poetry and prose with allusions to biblical stories. I learned about how the first manuscripts of Shakespeare and John Donne were made, how they persisted, and subsequently how nothing came close to perpetuating time quite like the stories in the Bible. 

 My interest in the Bible lies in my fascination with faith and spirituality. Specifically in how it expresses wisdom on human nature. Also, I am fascinated by the historical aspect of Christianity and how atrocities are justified by specific interpretations of the Bible. 

I am also moved and humbled by the power of literature. It fascinates me how some stories and books can perpetuate time like Shakespeare, Homer, Aristotle, and the Holy Bible. I feel as if there is great power and influence in these works that touch a certain part of our spirits and beings we may not comprehend. Given this, I feel it is important to study and work to understand these texts- even if that understanding comes from the paradoxical wisdom of Socrates “The more I know, the more I realize I know nothing.” 

I also heard this quote a few years ago and believe it captures this power: 

“Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded his empire upon love, and at this hour, millions of men would die for him.”

 

 

I first encountered If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin in the summer of 2020, during the peak of the pandemic. Those few months felt incredibly intimidating, often cold, and suddenly unsafe. In this novel, I found solace in exquisite writing about a potent romance. Its undeniable beauty served as a promising comfort. This first read forgot analysis at home, sat a chair on the beach, and kissed distraction on the cheek.

In my current read of If Beale Street Could Talk, I have instead tried to stay aware of my reactions in order to source them. A newfound appreciation for Baldwin’s maneuvers in character development and narrative structure has replaced distraction and imagination. In the novel, Baldwin seems to be using Tish’s femininity to empathetically and meticulously analyze Fonny’s masculinity and the implications of racism in the United States.

I initially interpreted Tish’s reflections on Fonny’s situation to be nothing more than an encapsulation of what it means to truly know and love someone. As soon as the narrative introduces Fonny, Tish articulates, “You see: I know him. He’s very proud, and he worries a lot, and, when I think about it, I know – he doesn’t – that that’s the biggest reason he’s in jail” (Baldwin 7). Now, I think that my original admiration for these descriptions was a subtle awareness of the intricacies of Baldwin’s character placement and development. In presenting Fonny through Tish’s gaze, Baldwin allows space for Fonny’s pride to be deconstructed. If the narrative were to come from Fonny, the pride that Tish sees would cloud any awareness of how he ended up in jail or the effects of his situation. Femininity enables an intimate analysis of masculinity.

When I first read the novel, Tish’s nightmares and daily stresses broke my heart and made me want to protect her. However, Tish’s femininity also reveals the external, familial, and emotional ramifications of racism in the United States. Due to conflict and tension between Fonny and a white male police offer, Fonny is wrongfully imprisoned for the rape of a woman that he did not commit. Many novels and essays deem tracking this type of experience enough, and it usually is. I see now that Baldwin’s choice to place the narrative voice in Tish was a way to hold hands with that narrative but to walk in a new direction. “We’re counting on you – Fonny’s counting on you – Fonny’s counting on you, to bring that baby here, safe and well. I held the white bar more firmly. My freezing body shook” (Baldwin 158). Tish’s struggles, notably feminine in her ever-present pregnancy, extract the analysis of racism in the United States from strictly Fonny’s experience and expose the cracks that spread with the jolt of police brutality, wrongful imprisonment, and torture within the prison.

Finally, Baldwin marks Tish’s femininity as Fonny’s solution and salvation. “Every day, when he sees my face, he knows, again, that I love him – and God knows I do, more and more, deeper and deeper, with every hour. But it isn’t only that. It means that others love him, too, love him so much that they have set me free to be there. He is not alone; we are not alone” (Baldwin 223). Baldwin uses Tish’s femininity as a tool to develop and escape Fonny’s masculinity, but her femininity also provides the potential for Fonny to develop and escape, too.

Baldwin, James. If Beale Street Could Talk. Dial Press, 1974.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier is a work that I have always felt very connected to.  I first encountered it my junior year of high school.  In my British Literature class that year, I had a final paper assignment that allowed students to pick any literary text that we wanted to write about.  My aunt recommended that I read Rebecca for this assignment because she thought it would be of interest to me.  Through my first reading of Rebecca, I had an analytical framework through which I was looking at the text because I was reading it knowing that that paper assignment was coming up.  I thought about it mostly in terms of identity and tracking how the text thought about the narrator and Rebecca.  It was very similar to the way that I read texts for English classes now; I always like to take notes of patterns, images, etc. in case I find compelling evidence for later essay assignments.  Partially, I wonder what it would be like to have read this book for the first time for simple enjoyment and not analysis.  Though, I think ultimately I would have missed much of what makes this text so rich and thought-provoking if I wasn’t being intentional with my reading in the first place.  This text was really one of the first books that I genuinely practiced close reading while reading, as much of high school English dealt with thematic analysis on a larger scale.  I think that my relationship with the text will be largely the same as I still have the reverence for it that I always have, but after spending much of college practicing close reading and analyzing, I think I will be able to take larger strides in analysis of the reading I will do now.

I’m drawn to Rebecca because of the way that it weaves elements of multiple genres together, such as the mix of romantic, gothic, and detective tropes.  I am also really drawn to the ways that the novel offers complex questions about identity, gender, power, and sexuality.  These themes have always been the most interesting fields of analysis for me.  Many of these theoretical frameworks offer insight into larger psychological arguments that I enjoy thinking about.  I am always interested in the expression of “the self” in characters and how their expressions are influenced or shaped by their environments.  The women in this text and the expression of their identities are so complex, and so I continue to be drawn to this text because I think that there is always more analysis that could, and should, be made.

Virginia Woolf’s sixth novel, Orlando: a Biography, has drawn me since I first read it in my English 220. It is a unique novel that transcends the bounds of time, spanning around 400 years, and undermining the constraints of gender as the male protagonist awakes halfway through the novel under an oak tree, a woman. The significance of the oak tree symbol fascinates me in how the natural world could be connected to gender fluidity and freedom, and the tree also is made out to be a safe space for poetic expression throughout the novel as well, as Orlando hides their poems there. I remember there being so much to unpack and despite how challenging at times it can be to read Woolf’s stream of consciousness writing, I resonated with her language and reflections on society in the novel. It can also be confusing in how she incorporates and manipulates time, but I think it could be interesting to relate that to works of the modernist era when industrialization and urban society was really kicking off. The time period and historical context of her work makes her novels hyper aware of changing landscape and setting, and the shift from rural and small town life to industrialized, bustling cities with new technology.

When I first read Orlando, I was very new to the English major and it was my first final paper in college, so I had a lot to figure out. However it sparked an interest in ecofeminism and how the environment can be tied to gender/the body which inspired several of my other final papers throughout my English classes and major. It also made me interested in how the oak tree became such a source of power that is almost mythological. Looking back now, I think this novel is deeply rich in the nature and gender binaries and I am looking forward to reading it again soon with some more theoretical knowledge and background from my reading list. It also occurs to me now that the ecofeminist implications of Orlando becoming a woman in a natural space could be slightly problematic, as often women and nature are compared in terms of sexuality and even sexual assault. Perhaps Orlando was reinforcing the masculine “society” and feminine “nature” by this gender swap in the ways the character Orlando changes in the two halves of the book, and this is something I would be interested in reading for when I come back to the novel in the coming months. 

This poem is a classic example of a chivalric romance from the Medieval era. A man aspires to become worthy of the object of the princess he loves, however, what sets this apart from a child’s bedtime story is the social, emotional, and personal obstacles that the protagonist must overcome. As is common with Medieval romances, the white knight figure must prove himself, but what modern audiences often fail to recognize, is not that the protagonist must prove their Wirth in order to deserve love, what they are actually being asked to do, is to begin a journey of self-discovery and personal development. The narrative style dictates, that the protagonist must change in some way either. From a modern perspective, it may seem as if this plot is superficial and that it is wrong for a man to have to prove himself rather than being loved for who he is, but that is not the medieval perspective as the goal of the heroic journey is not to gain affection, but conversely to discover oneself in the process of encountering strange and challenging things.

Another aspect of this poem that is hard to overlook is the presence of the natural world in the poem. The poet goes on and on about the garden that the squire retires to when he is feeling sad about his position and inability to be with his love. In this way, nature is treated as a respite. However, it is not just a garden, it is an escape from the pressures of society. The garden is a place where each bird, whether a “swalowe”, “larke”, or “sparowe”, contributes to the ambiance (bird song) and each tree, whether a “cyresse”, “sykamoure”, or “fygge-tre”, contributes to the visual beauty of the overall atmosphere (Copeland). If we compare this garden to the outside world we see how in nature, but not in the strict hierarchical society of medieval England, each creature under the sun has something valuable to contribute, even if they are not the same and equal.
something to contribute. This then represents the theme that runs throughout the poem that a virtuous person, despite a lack of funds or noble status, can achieve their goals. The story then becomes less about deserving good things, but that chivalric actions and mindsets will win out over villainy (even when that villain is richer and has a higher position in society).

“The Squire of Low Degree.” Edited by Eric Cooper and William Copeland, Robbins Library Digital Projects, University of Rochester, 2005, d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/kooper-sentimental-and-humorous-romances-squire-of-low-degree.