Week 3 Discussion Questions

***These might be viewed more easily in the Word document you can find in Blackboard. I'm experiencing some problems editing the post and thus can't do much to make it more readable.

1. "Let me not to the marriage of true minds": According to critic Annemarie Muth: " ... in “116,” one of the final soliloquies, Shakespeare attempts to define his ideal of constancy in love. Tragically, he is unable to reconcile this ideal with his own experience of inconstancy as illustrated in sonnets “110," “119,” and others. Perfect constancy transcends his own experience. Nevertheless, by the end of the piece he has convinced himself to put his doubts aside and believe that such constancy in love is possible." As such, the critic implies a certain sense of irony arising from his beliefs and how they have actually played out in his experience. Comment on this interpretation, using details from the poem to support or refute her point.

2. "somewhere i have never travelled": Oviously, cummings relies on intense visual imagery to convey his experience of love, but he also uses other devices to, as critic Ryan Poquette notes, "describe everything he is feeling all at once" and that "The poet's goal is have readers experience the depth and potency of his love in the same way that he is experiencing it." Aside from visual imagery, which rhetorical devices/literary elements does the poet rely on to convey such experience? Do you agree with the author in terms of cummings's ultimate goal here?


3."Wild Nights -- Wild Nights!": This poem has traditionally been understood as a brief meditation/ode to a sexual encounter (largely given the use of archetypal images often used to stand in for sex: "Might I but 'moor' -- Tonight --/ In Thee" (Lines 11 and 12) Consider, however, whether this poem might suggest something about a relationship UN-moored by the fetters of marriage. Critic Sarah Ann Wilder offers the following as commentary on the "wife" poems written in the 1860s. While "Night!" is not one of these poems, it does offer a depiction of something other than the typical female marital experience. "Dickinson's own ambivalence toward marriage-- an ambivalence so common as to be ubiquitous in the journals of young women--was clearly grounded in her perception of what the role of "wife" required. From her own housework as dutiful daughter, she had seen how secondary her own work became. In her observation of married women, her mother not excluded, she saw the failing health, the unmet demands, the absenting of self that was part of the husband-wife relationship." Consider "Nights!", then, in a biographical context, explaining how/why this poem might suggest something more freeing than a conventional relationship.

4.A Doll House: In a critical essay, Paul Rosefeldt offers the following argument, taking fatherhood as a central analytical concern (when the focus is so often on motherhood in such criticism): “In A Doll's House, fatherhood, ordinarily associated with the authority and stability of patriarchy, is associated with abandonment, illness, absence, and corruption. To support his interpretation, Rosefeldt offers up evidence based on the following select observations:

“Mrs. Linde, Nora's friend, is the victim of an absent father.”
“In A Doll's House, the absent father permeates all classes. When Anne Marie, Nora's nursemaid and the caretaker of her children, gives birth to an illegitimate child, she is forced to take a position with Nora's family and to leave her children. But the absence of child's father lies at the at the bottom of her plight. She says of him: "That slippery fish, he did not do a thing for me" (155).”
“The polluted father also appears in the father of Dr. Rank, Nora and Torvald's friend. Because Rank's father kept mistresses and contracted syphilis, Rank inherited the disease and was "sickly from birth" (156). Rank must suffer for "somebody else's sins" (163). Rank extends his own condition to the condition of humanity, finding the "inevitable retribution of nature" (163) in every family. Thus, fatherhood itself is connected to universal pollution.”
“Torvald Helmer is another example of a failed father. He has little to do with his children.”

“Using these arguments as a basis for your own, explain why/how the play’s focus on fatherhood supersedes its examination of motherhood.” OR, conversely, explain why this focus is NOT the best/most interesting/useful context through which to understand A Doll House. If you disagree, you need to explain which interpretative focus you think is the best/most interesting/useful.

5.A Doll House: Critic D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke suggests the following: “It is against conventional middle-class values that Nora rebels. Of course, she has been made to believe that she was happy, that she was an ideal wife, and that her husband loves her, and she was living with the belief that an ideal husband like hers would, if the necessity arose, sacrifice his life to save her reputation. It is these illusions that are shattered at the end.” If this is so, to which values does the author refer? Against which elements of middle-class society might Nora rebel?

6. A Doll House: The criticism lodged against the play here belongs to Clement Scott, a theater critic for Britain’s (newspaper) The Daily Telegraph. As such, it’s a perfect example of “contemporary criticism” – Scott reads the play according to the conventions and morals of the day (1889). His overview Ibsen’s scandalous social drama:

this frivolous and irresponsible young person who does not hesitate to fib, and can, at a pinch, condescend to forge; a wife of eight years' standing who changes from a grown-up baby to an illogical preacher; a woman who, in a fit of disappointment, in spite of appeal to her honour, her maternity, her religion, her sense of justice, leaves the husband she has sworn to love, the home she has engaged to govern, and the children she is made to cherish; having introduced us to the sensual Dr. Rank, who discusses hereditary disease and the fit of silk stockings with the innocent wife of his bosom friend; having contrasted the sublimated egoism of the husband Helmer with the unnatural selfishness of Nora, his wife; having flung upon the stage a congregation of men and women without one spark of nobility in their nature, men without conscience and women without affection, an unloveable, unlovely, and detestable crew—the admirers of Ibsen, failing to convince us of the excellence of such creatures, turn round and abuse the wholesome minds that cannot swallow such unpalatable doctrine, and the stage that has hitherto steered clear of such unpleasing realism."

Is Scott’s criticism useful? Do you think it reflects social values of the day? Are the characters really so unsympathetic as Scott characterizes them? Discuss.

7. “The Things They Carried” : Consider Pamela Smiley’s interpretation of O’Brien’s central motive: “Herein lies the central project of O'Brien's The Things They Carried: to make the Marthas who stayed home during the sixties and seventies playing volleyball, going to college, reading Virginia Woolf, to make such women understand their brothers, friends and lovers who went to Vietnam. This O'Brien (the author) accomplishes through a series of female characters--Martha, Mary Ann, Lemon's sister, the woman at the reading, and Linda--through whom he de-genders war, constructs an ideal (female) reader, and re-defines American masculinity.”
What do you think Smiley means by “de-gender” war? Why would this be useful, assuming she attempts to offer a gender-neutral vision of war that might be understood without the constraints of gendered stereotypes and limitations? If the story “re-defines American masculinity”, (Smiley) and it has been said that it does in various guises, HOW does it do so?

8.“The Things They Carried”: Rena Korb’s critical essay on “The Things They Carry” highlights common concerns Through the burdens carried by Jimmy Cross and the rest of the men, “The Things They Carried” successfully juxtaposes the soldiers' physical reality against their emotional reality. So the things they carry are not limited to the tools of war, such as weapons, jungle boots, and mine detectors, but also to what each man finds to be a personal necessity.
What “things” do the men carry, and how do these concrete items symbolize something greater that each of the men “carry” in their heart?