Rose Maxson/Rose Lee

2. Is Rose the most oppressed character in this story, or the most powerful?  (One way to decide your answer is to ask yourself if you admire her, or if you think she is a model for other women.)  Reflect on your answer.

Why are the titles of being the "most oppressed" and the "most powerful" mutually exclusive? In a literal sense, yes, Rose is oppressed--perhaps the most so, if oppression can be quantified. Because she is a black woman. She is a victim of the racism that is so deeply embedded within American society. She still feels the effects of centuries' worth of slavery. And as a wife, mother, and woman--"...that's what life offered me in the way of being a woman and I took it"(Wilson 98)--she has dedicated her life to a subservient existence. Her own identity is masked underneath the overlay of patriarchal institution.

So, yes, she is oppressed--but Rose is powerful in her own right. And her power should not be overlooked or underestimated.

Her power doesn't exist in the way one most often associates the word with. After all, she is bound by obligations and ties and social expectations. She cannot leave as freely as Troy does, and she cannot abandon her family to lead an entirely independent life. Her autonomy is incredibly limited. 

But Rose's strength is what sets her apart as the most powerful character in my eyes. Her power is conveyed through the weight of her words and through the resilience of her loyalty. This is a woman who dedicated years to someone else at the expense of her own being. She is selfless, and though she has invested much life and love in her husband Troy, she does not let him walk all over her. The moment Troy admits betrayal is the moment Rose shuts him off. After years of sacrificing selfishness and (what was assumed, on her part) mutual respect for their marital bond, Rose has to face the fact that the man she has given herself to entirely took her efforts for granted; and she is strong enough to walk away. She still performs her circa-1950's wifely duties of being a homemaker and a mother to Troy's children, but her heart has severed itself from her husband's, and her ability to do that--to emotionally distance herself from a man who has eighteen years of Rose in him--is indicative of such character strength.

King Lear reflection

1.) King Lear dream cast:

I agree with your opinion about Cordelia. Scarlett Johansson circa Lost in Translation would be perfect. Based on what I saw in Her (using her voice alone!), Johansson is skilled at portraying emotion, particularly love of the unconditional variety, a character trait critical to Cordelia.

Regan would be someone like Julia Stiles, someone who can be cunning and deceptive but also sympathetic.

Edmund would be Tom Hiddleston, because Hiddleston played Loki in The Avengers and Loki is to Thor what Edmund is to Edgar. It just works.

Albany would be James Marsden, just because I pictured James Marsden whilst reading it. And I guess he seems noble enough.

The Fool would be Chevy Chase if we're thinking him to be older. The more I think about this, the more I realize that Chevy Chase would actually be the perfect Fool. Actually, Chevy Chase would be the perfect Cordelia too. I change my mind and take it all back: Chevy Chase is every character.

2.) The character I most admire would have to be The Fool. His brutal and unforgiving honesty, while indeed an important facet of his character and arguably an even more important aspect of the story itself, is only one part of his character. His genuine kindness and his wise disposition are what make me admire The Fool.

3.) The scene that, in my eyes, includes catharsis most obviously is Lear's death. The very act itself is truly a culmination of his inner turmoil, his anguish, his madness, his broken state--all of the emotions Lear has felt surface, and together they are strong enough to grant him a final delusion of happiness: Cordelia, alive. Emotion vomiting indeed. The final fleeting "gift" of Cordelia's imagined resurrection is just another stab in the wound, making it that much more heartbreaking.

4.) Aging is a scary concept. I am scared that I will lose touch with my younger self. I am scared that I will decline into passivity, going through the motions but not really living. I am scared that I will become jaded. I don't want to forget that youthful vitality of life.

5.) The part that makes me feel "uncomfortably at home" in King Lear is the idea that good won't necessarily triumph over evil. There will never be an entirely "just" result. Karma isn't necessarily as clear-cut as the idea that those who do good receive goodness, and those who commit acts of evil receive punishment... I think this play exemplifies that. It's a realization that all at once makes sense but is unsettles me. (It runs contrary to everything Disney ever taught me.)

#4

Montag returns to the firehouse with Faber in ear. Beatty tries to freak him out by pitting literature against literature, demonstrating the "contradictory" nature of books in a strange monologue that truly terrifies Montag. All of this wordplay is mere setup for what comes next: the firemen leave to go burn down a new house, and Montag is caught off guard to find that the next victim he is getting paid to torch will be himself.

Mildred, it becomes clear, is the one that called the police and informed them of Montag's book-hoarding tendencies. Yet Montag feels no ill will towards this "strange woman," even as she flees the scene in a taxi and leaves him to deal with his sins alone. He is forced to burn down his own house, but the experience seems distinctly euphoric for him. A pyromaniac's therapy, if you will.

Beatty taunts our beloved protag throughout this time, forgetting that he is teasing a flamethrower-wielding man in a lapse of judgement Montag later amounts to a death wish. A death wish fulfilled, as Montag torches Beatty after he threatens Faber. With this, our rebel becomes a full-fledged fugitive in a scene positively blazing with Bradbury's colorful description--Montag stumbles away after being bitten by, and subsequently killing, The Hound.

Beatty is such an ironic character. He is a sort of self-aware villain, full of contradictions and spouting dishonesty. He reminds me of The Joker, in a weird way--I wish I could think of an example with more significant literary merit, AP Scorers, but alas. The both of them enjoy playing mind games with the protagonist and our protagonists are often roped into empathizing with them despite it all. Though Batman never kills, and Montag killed Beatty. But I digress.

"The Sieve and the Sand" is, to me, the most interesting symbol of the novel thus far. Montag recounts a childhood experience in which a cousin promised him money in exchange for his getting sand in a sieve. Past Montag cried out of frustration at his own futility, and current Montag cries out of frustration at his own futility. In this case, "futility" is his incapability of understanding knowledge (in the form of literature) the way he desperately wishes to... the sand is truth, the sieve is Montag. He cannot possibly know everything in the world, but he feels like he has to in order to compensate for years of ignorance.

#3

After showing Mildred his secret collection of (about twenty) stolen books, Montag and his wife begin reading them-- or rather, Montag reads them and Mildred complains. Mildred is a fascinating character. But I'll discuss her later... continuing on with the synopsis, Montag desperately tries to reach out and grasp Mildred with his words, but she evades them easily, a slippery kind of human that disconnects as soon as something more substantial than the TV characters she calls her "family" is mentioned. 

Frustrated with these relics of knowledge that say so much but mean so little to him, he remembers the old man he met with once in the park, a former English professor. Montag retrieves his contact information and sets off to find this old man Faber. On the subway trip, Montag's senses are assaulted by commercialized and mass-produced sounds and words and thoughts and he panics, stumbling onto Faber's doorstep nigh hysterical. After gaining the old man's trust, Faber confides in Montag and shares with him the three-step secret to understanding:

1.) Acquiring quality information.

2.) Having the "leisure" to digest this information.

3.) Having the freedom to base future actions upon this learned information.

The section ends with Montag going about his fireman job with Faber's voice reading The Book of Job to him in a hidden earpiece. There exists major juxtaposition between this and Mildred's Seashell headphones, the ones that blare insect-like hums into her ears at night to send her to sleep.

Of course, whenever I analyze a work that features a small group of rebels working against the establishment, obvious comparisons bubble to the forefront of my mind almost automatically. Fight Club, 1984, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, etc. I've read it so much that rebellion seems commonality now, though the struggle in this particular novel seems infinitely more convoluted than any other I've had to think about. It's not just the government or the elite or the law working against the characters we empathize with--it's also the general population, it's also the millions of content ignorants. It's also the protagonist's wife. I am actually accumulating severe amounts of stress reading this novel because my mind tends to get sidetracked marveling at the sheer gravity of this conflict. It's so large and frightening. A war against intellect.

Re: "more on Mildred"; Millie's complacency is highly correlated with mid-twentieth-century gender roles. Her weak will agitates me and it's true that I find her character so frustrating, but it also forces me to reflect on the time period once again. The '50s feminist movement was essentially nonexistent. Conformity was fervent, agitators were shunned, and perhaps Millie's character represents this kind of forced submissiveness and perhaps Clarisse's questioning nature represents her foil. On a personal level, it's hard to read Mildred as merely a character in a novel instead of what I see her to be... that is, Bradbury's exaggerated criticism of the '50s housewife. Ugh. Where you at, Betty Friedan?

#2

Our dear and beloved protag, Montag, is left reeling by the burning woman. He comes home mid-existential crisis and realizes his wife has been a stranger all along, someone who has lived with him but has never truly known him. He wakes up sick the next morning, still feeling the fever-like heat of the flames that brought about that woman's end. Montag knows that, like her, he will never escape those flames as long as he lives, and there is no way he can return to the fire station with a clear state of mind.

He tells Mildred as much, but there is a disconnect in communication between the two so visible that it's almost as if they're on two slightly different planes of existence, as if she is present but absent all the same, and she responds superficially without truly hearing his words. It is a very strange dynamic, made even more evident by the fact that apparently neither of them can remember how they met each other.

Anyway, Montag's boss, Captain Beatty, shows up, having understood that Montag's sickness derived from his experience watching the woman burn. He explains to him that their job as firemen is to keep the people docile and happy, burning the fiction that spreads lies and the nonfiction that promotes counter-ideology and subsequent conflict. And conflict is the enemy. Critical thinking is the enemy, and Montag and Beatty share the all-important mediatory role of censorship. It is during this section that, with all the feeble dramatics of this sentence I am writing, Montag finds out Clarisse is dead (four days postmortem).

I don't know if this counts as a text-to-text connection, but there is a storyline present within it so I'll state my thoughts: the burning woman reminds me of the Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức, who set himself on fire to protest the persecution of Buddhists. He is the focal point of that iconic image in which he suffers silently: 

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia?

In F421, the woman burns along with her books to prove a point that Montag extrapolates on later--that burning a book is equivalent to burning a person. "...[F]or the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that before."

I can relate in particular to Montag's conclusion that a person he's considered himself close to by conventionality alone for years is truly a stranger, and Clarisse, the neighbor girl who didn't know him a month, was a dearer person to him in the end. Though he can't remember her face, just as he can't remember where he met his wife. It seems that the systematic dulling down of intellect hasn't spared him. I also feel somewhat strange when I haven't read in a long time, like I'm looking through a magnifying glass that has a lens too hazy and fogged to make images of.

#1

"Blog post number one," alternatively titled, "I actually wanted to read On The Road but that was a bit too long to binge read on the final day of summer, and I'll be damned if I don't complete this assignment with mere hours to spare".

I picked up Fahrenheit 451 only after experiencing a silent internal crisis deriving from Kerouac's word count. I saw the name "Bradbury," thumbed through the pages, and decided that yes, this would be the book I was going to fully dedicate myself towards dissecting before 7 AM tomorrow morn. This shall do.

The beginning pages paint a picture in which a man named Montag indulges his pyromania. One of the very first things I noticed myself enjoying about this book is Bradbury's knack for illustration, and his language absolutely claws itself out from the paper in the opening description: 

"With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal the ruins of history."

We later learn Montag to be a fireman--though in this kind of dystopian world, such an occupation requires him to start fires rather than extinguish them. Many contradictory elements exist in F451's futuristic arena; people get arrested for going too slow on the highway rather than speeding, pedestrians are equivalent to criminal loiterers, and burning books is an act of justice.

Montag ends his day at the fire station and runs into a girl, Clarisse McLellan, a new neighbor. Clarisse says a bunch of peculiar things and bids him goodbye by asking Montag, "Are you happy?" Of course I am, he insists at the time, but by the time he's entering his bedroom (which he notably compares to a mausoleum) the truth of his unhappiness is eating at him. Things are further complicated when Montag finds his wife Mildred in a hazy, half-alive sort of state after she downed an entire sleeping pill bottle. "Strangers" pump her stomach and replace her blood and the amateur medics make remarks so offhand it's almost as if they're talking about the weather. Suicide attempts are apparently incredibly common in this world: "Someone else just jumped off the cap of a pillbox," one of them says.

The next morning, Mildred denies having done such a thing. Montag goes to work as usual and over the course of the next several days finds himself being more and more affected by Clarisse McLellan's peculiar words. By the end of this section, Montag is doubting the supposed history of firemen and steals a book from a house rather than burning it with the others. The house in particular belongs to a woman who dies with her books purposefully like a martyr; her death marks the end of this particular section.

Throughout reading this I had flashbacks to The Book Thief (which I also, by pure coincidence, read last-minute the day before 9th grade). Though Bradbury weaves a world filled with fictionalized history, TBF has its roots in actual events--Nazi book burning. The protagonist of that novel also steals a text from the flames she is expected to fan. Rebellion in the form of preserving the written word is an interesting concept.

Placing this novel in the context of the situation it was written in--the world Bradbury lived at the time--allows for my further understanding of the past as a reader. Television is an almost escapist medium in F451, and because this book was written in the early '50s, it makes so much sense that this author would fear the TV takeover. Also in this novel, teenagers are noted to frequently act out (sometimes violently) to demonstrate their nonconformity, indicative of the Beatniks and the greasers and the subversive subculture much of 1950's youth found home in. As I really enjoy history, I personally find this piece of fiction to bridge the 60+ years that separate me from circa-F451 Bradbury.