Tainted Love

Kate Chopin’s Désirée’s Baby superficially portrays the protagonist Désirée as woman who seems to measure her worth by the love and acceptance of her husband. “When he frowned, she trembled, but loved him. When he smiled, she asked no greater blessing of God. But Armand’s dark, handsome face had not often been disfigured by frowns since the day he fell in love with her.” Armand Aubigny, Désirée’s husband, rejects his wife and their child for their ‘color’ as a result of hatred of his own darkened skin. Désirée is gravely offended when Armand claims “that the child is not white; it means that you are not white.”

By the end of this short story, the audience is aware that it actually means Armand is not white. As a plantation owner set above slaves, Armand himself unknowingly “belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery.” This truth was never revealed to Armand since he did not know his black mother. His own reality falsely projected onto his wife leaves her with no reason to believe his accusation. “It is a lie; it is not true, I am white! Look at my hair, it is brown; and my eyes are gray, Armand, you know they are gray.” Then drawing an empirical comparison to that of her husband’s skin claims, “Look at my hand; whiter than yours Armand,” and then “laughed hysterically.” Her whiteness juxtaposed against his darkness made him more aware of his color by her comparison. The mockery of his own wife perpetuates Armand’s embarrassment, fulfilled by the birth of his son. The child of Armand and Désirée was the realization of their love and their genes mixed together, producing the mulatto child which Armand despised.

Désirée, in the end, seems to have felt Armand’s rejection of his own skin in the form of unrequited love. But Chopin strongly indicates that Désirée’s own happiness was threatened the greatest by Armand’s accusation that she was black. “My mother, they tell me I am not white. Armand has told me that I am not white. For God’s sake tell them it is not true. You must know it is not true. I shall die. I must die. I cannot be so unhappy, and live.” This reveals the sad truth that the threat of darkness in Désirée’s skin is more disturbing to her than the failure of her own marriage.

Tracing Freedom

In Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the main character Huck is juxtaposed with a slave named Jim. Their pursuit for freedom differs from their motivation and experience. The great Mississippi River is a powerful force of water that represents much of the freedom both Jim and Huck jointly feel as they float down the river. It doesn’t divide their experiences but reinforces the power the water has over them in controlling their movements and final designation. But away from the water left unguarded by civilized forces, the two find themselves facing differing motivations for seeking freedom. Huck seeks freedom from the ‘sivilzation’ attempt by Miss Watson who would say, “Don’t put your feet up there, Huckleberry;” and “don’t scrunch up like that, Huckleberry – set up straight!” Much of Huck’s reason for jumping at the chance of an adventure stems from his desire to be free from the constraints of a society that placed him in the care of Miss Watson.

Jim’s freedom is from a traditional of slavery that marks the man by the color of his skin and the amount of labor he’s capable of. Jim’s price for freedom comes at a higher cost than Huck’s boyish flee from Miss Watson. In Chapter 37, Tom Sawyer, the adventurous and imaginative friend of Huck Finn, speaks to Jim: “Every animal is grateful for kindness and petting, and they wouldn’t think of hurting another person that pets them.” Tom continues later on about the importance of prisoners having rats: “But, Jim, you got to have ‘em – they all do. So don’t make no more fuss about it. Prisoners ain’t ever without rats. There ain’t on instance of it. And they train them, and pet them, and learn them tricks, and they get to be as sociable as flies.” This conversation tends to 1) promote the image of man as superior to animal, 2) animals cared for would never hurt their owner, and 3) humans can teach animals, even rats, to go against their nature and become that which the human demands and trains of it.

Slavery, in its rough nature, takes a grown man and forces him against his nature to serve others before himself. Is Jim being compared to the very rat Tom Sawyer suggests he trains and “learn them tricks?” Jim seeks freedom from a world of servitude to others with a price sticker on his head. Huck, feeling imprisoned like a rat having to learn new tricks, despises the world of rules and etiquette. His real imprisonment was with his father kept him in the cabin. “He always locked the door and put the key under his head, nights.” Despite this cruelty, Huck describes “laying comfortable all day, smoking and fishing, and no books nor study.” The very freedom Huck sought after was a state of his own imprisonment.

The freedoms sought after in the Adventure of Huckleberry Finn demonstrate the motivation and experience in the characters Huck and Jim.

This is the Hour of Lead - Remembered, if outlived!

Dickinson’s words describe the body’s response to a shocking, emotionally painful event. This event could be anything humans find to be the cause of great suffering. The timeless portrayal of pain response is likened to that of Christ’s suffering in the first stanza, the ultimate suffering which bore the since the sins of the world. The first stanza writes “The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore, and Yesterday, or Centuries before?” The pain in which the authors writes happened the day before and is questioned to have been one of the sins of the world that Christ died for, just as the sins/pain of centuries before. This reaffirms the timelessness of pain, in that it is blind to each generation and spares none. The readers understand the pain which Dickinson describes which will be remembered, only “if outlived.” The survivorship seems unlikely at the time of a painful event, but eventually the pain subsides and the “great pain” becomes a memory.

In psychology, we learn that the body’s response to a painful loss is depression, which removes your ability to function normally, often limiting your mobility. It is for this that we protect ourselves. If, after a painful event, we continue to carry out our daily tasks, we are more of a danger to ourselves because of an intense distraction and our reduced ability to reason. Dickson gives a somber detailed look at the body’s own reaction to the pain. “The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs.” Biologically, our nerves synapse at a rate that gives us the ability to move, think, and feel. If the nerves, cold and awaiting death like “tombs,” react in this manner to an emotional pain, how do nerves function after a physical blow – pain which uses the sympathetic system to alert the body to flee from a dangerous situation and more importantly, requires the body the heal itself. The parasympathetic system controls the restful states of the body, perhaps the one in which Dickinson describes in the first stanza.

Beat! Beat! Drums!

I agree with Neely in his claim that Whitman saw the Civil War as primarily about union, not emancipation. According to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Whitman came to see the war as a necessary step in nation-building. He admired Abraham Lincoln and later mourned his death with the elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd” and the minor but famous “O Captain! My Captain!” (Wikipedia). If great influences in Whitman’s life are reflected in his poetry, the void of mentioning the Emancipation Proclamation would anticipate criticism from Civil War Historians, like Mark Neely. Perhaps he saw the executive order as a means of restoring the union which affirmed his humanist philosophy on the worth and dignity of all people (Wikipedia).

“Beat! Beat! Drums!” depicts the Civil War as challenging all people of the nation to rise up and hear the beat of the drum. No one can escape the sound of the drum; “Beat! beat! drums! -- blow! bugles! blow! Through the windows -- through doors -- burst like a ruthless force, [i]nto the solemn church, and scatter the congregation, [i]nto the school where the scholar is studying.” The Civil War tested the strength of the entire nation, divided by two. “Make no parley -- stop for no expostulation” recognizes the different voices in the war and tests the character of the American people to “[m]ind not the timid -- mind not the weeper or prayer, [m]ind not the old man beseeching the young man, [l]et not the child's voice be heard, nor the mother's entreaties.” Despite natural tendencies to sympathize with the aforementioned, war tears at every soul in the nation. “So strong you thump O terrible drums -- so loud you bugles blow.” These terrible drums steal peace from the nation and rob people of our decency.

Whitman’s perspective in “Beat! Beat! Drums!” speaks to everyone in the nation and does not use illusions to describe the influence the war has on the union. In Timrod’s “The Cotton Boll,” the cotton ball is linked to the earth (from which it came) and a bird pulls the narrator up into the sky to view the confederacy. This view is difficult for the reader to understand since it challenges normal perception of the world. It is more easily understood by the reader in Whitman’s poem that the sound the drums beat at the heart of everyone in the nation, including the dead. “Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses.”

There is a sense of nationalism in both Timrod and Whitman’s poem. Timrod describes “In offices like these, thy mission lies, My Country! And it shall not end as long as rain shall fall and Heaven bend in blue above thee.” The notion of “My Country” is great and he later describes that war is hard, but worth it to fight for. In Whitman’s poem, the nation is not directly described, the people who make up the nation are. I feel there is a greater humanist view portrayed in Beat! Beat! Drums! in that it personalizes the war and the toll it takes on the people. The strength of a great nation is tested in Whitman’s depiction of the war and yet Timrod exclaims “Oh, help us, Lord! to roll the crimson flood back on its course, and, while our banners wing Northward, strike with us!” Timrod’s perspective is more aggressive and begs the Lord to take sides. Whitman depicts a passive role that individuals play in hearing the sound of the drum instead of beating the drums themselves.