Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess"

"My Last Duchess" is a poem in which the speaker, the Duke of Ferrara, shows a visitor round his mansion. The visitor is a representative of the young woman that the Duke is going to marry. The Duke shows the representative the portrait of his former wife, who is now dead. In the Duke's remarks about his dead wife, he seems happier with the portrait of her, "as if alive," than he was with her when she was alive. What's wrong with his dead wife? In this dramatic monologue, how do you describe the personality of the Duke?

Sylvia Plath and the Electra Complex

In an introduction to "Daddy" prepared for the BBC, Sylvia Plath explained that

"the poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other--she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it."

The figure of "Electra" used by Plath is a Greek daughter whose relationship to her tyrannical father--Agamemnon, who sacrificed his other daughter, Iphigenia, to the winds--is erotically charged. After Agamemnon is killed, Electra's mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, abuse Electra because of her loyalty to the memory of her father. Out of her hatred toward her mother and her love for her father, Electra urges her exiled brother to return and to kill Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.

The conflation of Agamemnon-father-Hitler-husband is both haunting and powerful in "Daddy," in which the pull of patriarchy is so strong that the daughter/speaker needs to kill her father/husband in order to free herself from them. However, even when she has resolved to kill her father, she is still half in love with him. Give me some lines or imageries that for you illustrate this emotional ambivalence.

spaces of the senses

In today's class, we discussed Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" and his picture of a happy world of senses. In the poem, Keats is listening to an unseen bird whose presence cannot be located but can only be "heard." The sense of sight must yield to other senses--the senses of smell, taste, and hearing. In stanza 5, the poet writes:

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Here we are first introduced with the sense of smell, in the form of "soft incense." In darkness, the poet cannot identify the flowers, but the darkness is "embalmed," which means "fragrant," and the seasonable fragrance helps Keats guessing the identity of each odor. As the lines continue, the poet anticipates the tasting of the "dewy wine" coming from the musk-rose, which also attracts the insects, whose "murmurous" sound suggests the sense of hearing.

From what has been analyzed above, you can see that the sense of vision is dethroned from its privileged dominance in the hierarchical realm of the senses. What have been given a priority are the senses that used to be subordinated to the predominant sense of seeing. Why does the poet debase the sense of "sight" and elevate other senses? In today's culture in which the sense of the visual dominates (as manifested in the ubiquity of TV screens,advertisements, neon signs, photographs, visual images) and eclipses other senses, can we say that we modern people have somehow lost our ancient capacity of hearing and smelling? Which sense do you trust the most? Do you believe that "seeing is believing"? or do you mistrust the sense of sight and, instead, favor other bodily perceptions such as touch, taste, smell,or hearing, by which you navigate the world?

Is Barbie a bad influence on girls?

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Barbie turns 50 years old this week. For some young girls, Barbie represents an ideal of perfection. However, for some social critics, Barbie has a toxic influence on female children because the doll sends the wrong message to female children who mistake the anatomically fantastic Barbie dolls as the true ideal of beauty. In Marge Piercy's "Barbie Doll," the girl tried to change her appearance to fit the commercialized notion of body image and ended up in a tragedy. In West Virginia, a state lawmaker proposed a bill last Tuesday to ban the sales of Barbie dolls. The following news article comes from msnbc.com:

The Barbie Ban Bill, proposed by Democratic Delegate Jeff Eldridge (D) Lincoln County, says such toys influence girls to place too much importance on physical beauty, at the expense of their intellectual and emotional development.
"I just hate the image that we give to our kids that if you're beautiful, you're beautiful and you don't have to be smart," Eldridge told West Virginia news station WOWK.

The delegate concedes that the chances of getting the bill passed are slim, but adds that he stands behind it.

"I knew a lot of people were going to joke about it and poke fun at me," Eldridge said. "I couldn't get anybody to sign on the bill with me but I said I'm still going to introduce it."

A Mattel spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. The Barbie doll officially turns 50 on March 9, and the toy maker has made big plans this year to mark the anniversary.

Barbie has had her foes over that half-century. Critics say the doll promotes materialism and an unnatural body image.

The bill has been sent to the House Judiciary Committee.

What do you think? Do you agree with Jeff Eldridge? or do you think it goes overboard in the issue of body image?

Jhumpa Lahiri on Becoming an American

Nationality, tradition and belonging: The themes of Jhumpa Lahiri's fiction spring from the complexities of the author's own life. Born to Indian parents in London and raised in Rhode Island, the author of Unaccustomed Earth (2008) and The Interpreter of Maladies (1999) says she's struggled for four decades to feel like she belonged in America.

"For me," Lahiri tells Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep, "there is sort of a half-way feeling [of being American]."

But, she says, her parents never thought of themselves as American, despite the fact that they applied for and received citizenship.

"They've lived here now for more than half of their lives, and they raised a family here and now have grandchildren here. ... It has become their home," says Lahiri. "But at the same time, for my parents, I don't think either of them will ever consciously think, 'I am an American.' "

Lahiri says her parents were always isolated from mainstream American culture. Despite the fact that they spoke English, they were "betrayed by their accents." If the family went to buy a washing machine, the sales clerk would talk to Lahiri, assuming her parents couldn't understand.

"The accent, the fact that my mother wore traditional clothing — that marked them immediately as soon as we went out in the public sphere," says Lahiri.

Growing up, Lahiri's loyalty to her parents conflicted with her desire to fit in: "It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different," she says. "I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different."

Lahiri says her parents didn't mix with her friends' parents in an easy, comfortable way — not because they didn't want to, but because there was a barrier that they couldn't overcome.

"I think this was a two-way street," she says. "It wasn't just that they were afraid or unwilling — there was a fear, an unwillingness on both sides."

Lahiri says creating characters who also struggle with the immigrant experience has helped her confront the truth of her life.

"A lot of my upbringing was about denying or fretting or evading," she says. But through fiction, Lahiri says she's learned to accept that her parents will always be tied to two different parts of the Earth.

"It has been liberating and brought me some peace to just confront that truth, if not to be able to solve it or answer it," she says.

Source cited from NPR.org. Listen Now.

Story Hour in the Library - Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise at UC Berkeley

Here you can have a chance to be the virtual audience of the "reading series" at UC Berkeley that was held on October, 9th, 2008. The readers invited in the Story Hour Reading Series are Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise, who have been married for 45 years and both teach in Berkeley's English department.

"For me, my fiction is a way to get in touch with my inner bad girl"--Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee, the author of "The Management of Grief," was born in Calcutta in 1940. Traveling to the United States to study creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she rebelled against her father's command to come back home and marry the man he selected for her when she fell in love with her classmate, Canadian writer Clark Blaise, and married him impulsively during her lunch break after only two weeks of courtship.

In "The Management of Grief," the topic of arranged marriage is one of the story's themes of cultural difference and dislocation. Here you can listen to Mukherjee's 2002 interview with NPR, in which she talked about arranged marriage in Hindu societies, her father's choice of husband for her, how she dared to break parental rules, her 2002 novel, Desirable Daughters, the conflict between traditional India and modernity, her struggle with the immigrant experience, and her view upon women's condition and being an Indian-born American writer. Write down anything that you notice as particularly interesting or impressive.