Remediating Generational Deficiencies and the American Caste System in "Rich Boy"

I'm going to make this blog short because I'm pretty swamped, but I'd like to begin by saying that the whole notion of blogging is actually so provocative for me: once I start in the colloquial, journalesque tone of  my blogs, my thoughts on whatever book we are reading seem to flow out, multiply, and reform themselves all at once.

Sharon Pomerantz novel "Rich Boy," is the story of a first generation college student trying to create a better life for himself.  While I am not a first or even second generation college student, I think that Robert's struggle in the novel is one that is deeply resonant with many graduates.  Robert, through colloquial and well-rendered dialogue, desires to overcome what he saw as the hardships of his past.  In his case, his childhood was deformed by relative poverty, always having to penny pinch, and live in the homogenized world of the not- quite- totally-defunct-but-almost lower class.  For all of us however, regardless of whether we come from Robert's circumstances or other's, I tend to think that we all, as increasingly individualized selves, are all just trying to surpass something from our parent's sphere of influence, and make a life for ourselves that is always striving to be better than the last.

"Rich Boy" and Stereotypes of Jewish Identities on the Conflicted Self

Sharon Pomerantz's novel Rich Boy captures the trajectory of young Robert's life as he moves between spaces defined by different ethnic and economic landscapes and illuminates how these spacial shifts impact and mutate his identity and sense of self.  In class, we discussed the possibility that perhaps, Robert is searching for an identity without "shame," perhaps leading him to deny at times, or at least suppress, his Jewish roots.

 I found this possibility to be very intriguing, especially in light of the group presentation we watched on Monday as well.  I personally come from a town that is roughly 40% Jewish--a very high percentage and one that is growing.  Growing up, many of my friends were Jewish; I even had one friend convince me that being Jewish was more fun than being Christian, and I left her house crying and begging my mom to sign our family up to be Jewish at, ironically, the YMCA, where at the time I thought you could register for everything.  Westport never has school on Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashana, we never got homework on passover or on the Hannukah days that fell during the school year.  I attended 27 Bar and Bat Mitzvahs between seventh and eighth grade, and probably would have gone to more had they not coincided with others on the same weekend. In fact, I attended both Orthodox and conservative synagogues more than I did church between 2001 and 2002. In essence, the presence of Judaism in my childhood was dominant, but not in an overwhelming way, just in a sense that it was a basic facet of normalcy growing up.


For this reason, it took me a while to fully grasp the concept of Antisemitism.  All the Jewish girls were the cool ones.  Their Bat Mitzvahs constituted awesome parties while my confirmation was austere and without fanfare.  I could not possibly conceive why anyone would complain about their Jewish roots or how anyone in the outside world could see Jews as a scapegoat.  I think with this mindset, growing up with the notion that Judaism was "cool," it is interesting to read about Robert's complicated and often negating relationship to his Jewish roots.  Ultimately however, I think that Robert's attempt at detachment is one that, at its origins, is not intrinsically linked to Judaism or any specific factor.  Instead, I think the relationship of anyone, Robert or otherwise, to their childhood, and the shaping pressures of the past, are inevitably a universal source of anxiety, especially in relation to the formation of selfhood.  In the end, it is only when Robert can reconcile his Jewish self with an understanding of his present sense of self that he is able to find balance in his life.

The Beatles "Money" and Values in Anisha Lakani's "Schooled"

Prior to one of our discussions of Anisha Lakani's novel, Schooled, we as a class listened to a number of songs, one of which was The Beatles' song "Money".  The song, while catchy, is an important and revealing anthem for the warping of material values and perspectives in society--a theme also resonant throughout Schooled.

In "Money," the lyrics of the first three verses are as follows:

The best things in life are free
But you can keep 'em for the birds and bees.
Now gimme money (that's what I want)
That's what I want (that's what I want)
That's what I want (that's what I want), oh-yeh,
That's what I want.

Your lovin' give me a thrill
But your lovin' don't pay my bills.
Now gimme money (that's what I want)
That's what I want (that's what I want)
That's what I want (that's what I want), oh-yeh,
That's what I want.

Money don't get everything it's true.
What it don't get I can't use.
Now gimme money (that's what I want)
That's what I want (that's what I want)
That's what I want (that's what I want), oh yeh,
That's what I want.


Like I said, the song and its tune are catchy and fun, but the lyrics, especially when written down, are dark and objectively troubling.  The idea that money can be more important than love, or happiness, or any other intangible facet of life I often think of as being beyond economization, is tragic, and in my opinion, represents a warped set of values and perspectives on money.


In Lakani's Schooled, main character Anna takes on this sort of mindset as she becomes sucked into the vortex of elite society, extreme wealth, and consuming greed.  Interestingly enough for me, it was the combination of both hearing the song and reading the novel that sort of helped me extract this sense of value mutation as transcendent and transformative. 


 I was actually prompted to analyze this notion further after watching a documentary in my Anthropology class called "Born Rich," a film made by Jamie Johnson, an heir to the Johnson and Johnson fortune.  In the film, Jamie interviews his friends who happen to all be heirs to private fortunes and live in New York City.  In essence, he and his friends, boys and girls who attended private academies like Chapin, Collegiate, Choate, St. Paul's, and Nightingale-Bamford to name a few, eerily mimic the world Lakani captures in her novel.  At one point, Luke Weil, an heir to a billion dollar gaming fortune states, "the thought of losing my money is really like trying to imagine a parent or sibling dying. You just cant."  While frighteningly shallow, Weil's allocation of money as a part of the family, as part of his identity from birth, speaks in an organic and powerful way to the transformative power of money in the novel, the song, and in real life. 

A Tutor's Take on "Schooled"

As much as Anisha Lakhani's novel Schooled is about the dark realities of classroom life inside the prestigious Langdon Hall, what Anna Taggert, the novel's main character, engages in outside of the classroom is just as significant and telling as what she does inside of it.  Despite her initial remonstrations of and somewhat self-righteous abstinence from excessively over-priced tutoring (and cheating) with her students, Anna, driven by material need and desire, eventually gives in and follows suit.  In this, Lakhani presents an interesting and somewhat organic perspective on this often veiled yet highly impacting facet of elite, privileged education.

Although it was public, the high school I attended was probably better equipped than many private schools.  I know there is a stigma at Colby about the value of a boarding school education versus a public one, but my school by no means fits that.  We had small classes, plasma tvs in every classroom and every ten feet in the hall, au bon pain catering in our cafeteria, and indoor and an outdoor track (which is rare for schools), a tv and radio station, smart boards in every classroom, laptops for every student, state of the art science equipment, etc.  What I'm getting at is that even though I didn't go to private school, I related to this world of privilege and elitism in high school that Lakhani portrays.  With the luxuries my school had inevitably came students whose families could afford, via taxes rather than private tuition, to purchase all of our excessive amenities, and thus, the majority of the student body was very affluent.  Just like Anna's students in the novel, many of my peers had private tutors and often more than one.  It infuriated me to watch highly capable students spend absurd amounts of money needlessly on tutors (I had one friend who spent $20,000 a semester on private tutors alone--one for every subject and one or two for college/ test prep) just because they could afford it.  While I understand the parental desire to give your children all that you can, it has always struck me that that kind of tutoring really cripples the tutees: the tutors become more than a teacher; they are a crutch whom the students rely on so heavily that they lose faith in their own ability to do a semester's work on their own.  What's more, money can't buy innate intelligence, but it can definitely buy grades.  While the ability to do work and intellect are not bound by class, the students who could not afford tutoring, despite being just as smart if not smarter than many of those who could, were put at a disadvantage.

The world of private tutoring is a mysterious one, and it was interesting for me to read this book while working as a peer tutor in the writers' center.  Having come from a world where what Lakhani describes is all too omnipresent, I both related to Anna's plight and was repulsed by it.  In the Farnham Writers' Center, the crux of our ideology is to make student-writers better, not their papers.  We're not there to give student's the right words to say or tell them how to phrase something more aesthetically.  Instead, our goals are to help the tutees understand the roots of their errors on a general level, and learn how to self-correct their papers with a better understanding of mechanics, organization, and syntax that they can take with them well after they've turned in that specific paper.  In essence, the tutoring at Colby defies the student expectation that Lakhani describes that tutors do the work for the students.  In making this juxtaposition, it is apparent that tutoring should be a mechanism for improvement via exegetical probing and the acquisition of problem solving skills, not getting each assignment done perfectly with no knowledge on the student's part of what is fundamentally good or bad in her or his work.

I think I need to return to this topic in the future to concretize my opinion on the polar worlds of tutoring I experienced in both working as one, and reading one through the lens of Anna Taggert.  Regardless, and regardless of my qualms with Lakhani's writing style, Schooled invariably exposes the desperate and amoral world of hyper-tutoring that many students who live in Taggert's world, and mine, are blindly and often tragically conditioned into.

Identity and Animalism in "Beans"

As Abby noted in one of her posts on Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine, the novel is by no means a pleasant read.  Instead, we as readers are largely, if not entirely, isolated from the type of rural poverty depicted in the novel and become squeamish and uncomfortable with the Bean's and the totality of their family's perversion and decay. 

Like we readers, the novel's [essentially] central character Earlene is likewise intrigued and simultaneously disgusted by her neighbors, the Beans.  With an almost pornographic fascination, Earlene, at least initially in the novel, watches the Beans and their poverty-stricken lifestyle from the protective enclosure of her living room.  However, as the novel wears on, Earlene's obsession with the Beans begins, and then totally, becomes participatory, as she essentially transcends the glass of her living room window and becomes a part of the Bean clan. 

Despite the inexplicable lure of the Beans, Earlene maintains her attitudinal position that the Beans are a bestial family prone to wild, predatory, and animalistic ways that belong to a sub-human level of civilization.  This internal position becomes even more problematized as she joins their family while still maintaining this sentiment.  Like many of the novels we have read this semester, the comparison of the lower class to animals is highly present in The Beans of Egypt, Maine. Through the narrative perspective of Earlene, it is interesting to note how, in maintaining her disdain for the Beans, she seems to suggest that as a spectator to poverty, she is subconsciously lured in by the animalism while consciously repulsed by the juxtaposition of their lifestyle to her own. 

Ultimately, I think that Earlene and her subtle, subconscious descent into poverty and her becoming a part of the lifestyle she abhors testifies to the dominance of poverty on its surroundings.  The Beans, unlike Earlene, are largely unaware of their options for economic salvation (school, transplantation, welfare, work, etc.), and so in their maintenance of economic destitution, the permanence of their squalor becomes contagious, infecting Earlene.  In her total isolation with the Beans, Earlene finally succumbs to the Bean's predation, if not consciously than certainly on a subconscious level, suggesting that poverty entraps not only those who are born into it but those who live passively alongside it as well.

Is This Real Life? The Ambiguity of Time in Carolyn Chute's "The Beans of Egypt, Maine"

Today in class we had a striking conversation on Carolyn Chute's highly provocative novel, The Beans of Egypt, Maine.  In particular, I liked Faye's point about the ambiguity of time in the novel as it serves to represent the cyclical, inherited, and inevitable nature of poverty for the rural working class.  However, after more thought on the novel and its characters, I would like to expand on this interpretation and suggest that the ambiguity of time also forces us to interrogate our understandings of today's impoverished as not only anti-evolutionary but symbolically anachronistic.  This anachronism ultimately works to suggest that we as a society, so obsessed with the notion of progress, speeds forward blindly often forgetting those without the means to keep up.  It is only when we have the opportunity to look back through the lens of literature (like that of Chute's) that we can see how exclusive our progress is and how much it has inexcusably behind.

Often at times in the novel I found myself wondering, "what decade is this??".  The novel is so conceptually foreign and at times, disturbing, that I found myself unable to imagine that such a scene, and such a grotesquely marginalized family, could live in the same world that I do.  However the novel's plot is one that is almost a layering of short stories becoming intertwined and seems to move in bursts rather than with a steady linearly narrative progression (a temporal movement so evenly organized that we are subconsciously jarred by its literary fracture).  In this rupture of our most normative interpretation of temporality, Chute offers the notion that rural poverty like that which the Beans inhabit transcends time, forcing us to see that yes, the collective 'we' of readers inhabit the same world as the Bean family.  As Sam mentioned in class as well, it is hard for us to reconcile our participation in a Capitalist system that has likely worked for the majority of our families with the fact that this same system has left families like the Beans without healthcare-- a major point of interrogation in the novel.

In essence, the Beans are metonyms of an often-overlooked form of poverty: that of the rural working class.  They force us to see that today's poverty is not necessarily the inability to put food on the table (which the Beans also face) but is the ignorance to know there is a way out, an escape.  The Beans, in their ambiguous temporal shifts, are real most definitely real life, and they finally rise to the surface of a society that does not always want to acknowledge them through the graphically descriptive advocacy of Chute.

Is Shakespeare a Barometer for Class on Brewster Place?

As a Shakespeare lover (hate me, it's fine), I often take for granted how accessible it has been to me over the past 12 years of academia.  Of course, at first it was extremely difficult, and it was only after I had struggled through a number of "No Fear Shakespeare" versions of his plays that I started to enjoy them, but my point is, I've been exposed to Shakespeare so often for so long that I have taken for granted its place as a cultural and class-based status symbol.  In The Women of Brewster Place, Cora Lee is a woman arrested by the fantasies of her childhood innocence and the vacuity of soap operas to the point that she neglects her own children's development.  It is not until Kiswana finds one of Cora Lee's children eating out of a garbage and invites her to attend an all-black production of "A Midsummer's Night Dream" that she is inspired to change for her children's future and pull herself out of her self-infantilization.  In essence, Shakespeare catalyzes Cora-Lee's desire to change, but what strikes be about this shift is how Kiswana, the only woman to come from means on Brewster Place, is the one to introduce her to it.  Not only was Shakespeare previously intangible to Cora-Lee, but it was practically unheard of.  Prior to the play, Cora-Lee had rejected Shakespeare as a product of the white history that systematically marginalizes and excludes non-whites and as a part of the academic culture people of her class do not have access to.

Beyond the racial polarization of Shakespeare, the works' Elizabethan language is only palatable after significant exposure and instruction, and this kind of education is often impractical or even impossible in lower-income neighborhoods of all backgrounds.  My mom works for an organization that promotes writing and reading skills in inner-city students through publication, and she often visits English classrooms in the Bronx, Harlem, and even at Riker's Island Prison where some students are still working on their reading skills in modern English.  After teaching at an affluent public school before her current work, she often tells me how radically different the curriculums are between schools and how much further ahead the students with means are in terms of reading level.  I dont think this discrepancy should come as any shock to anyone, and in Connecticut where I live, the achievement gap between wealthy and under-served schools is actually the greatest in the country.  What I do think is significant is the fact that the prevalence of Shakespeare in a curriculum and the ability to read Shakespeare often acts as a barometer for this difference.  In this sense, I wonder if Naylor's intent in using Shakespeare was as much a symbol for class divisions and the desire for social mobility as it is a symbol of the racial reappropriation of academic culture in The Women of Brewster Place.  Thoughts?

Gender and Sexuality in Gloria Naylor's "The Women of Brewster Place"

From the anonymity of Brewster Place's location in an unnamed city to the authorial use of stereotypes in the novel, Gloria Naylor constructs a vision of gendered subordination, racial discrimination, and class-based difficulties in a way that is metonymic of the struggles many women, blacks, and impoverished face in the US.  One of these metonymic constructs that Naylor interrogates is sexuality: residents Lorraine and Theresa are the only lesbians on Brewster Place, and through them, Naylor examines not only the difficulties and alienation the two women face in their community for their sexual choice, but how these difficulties are often the result of same-sex discrimination.

In the novel, all of the [predominantly female] characters face profound hardship; from social and familial exclusion and economic impoverishment to psychological shortcomings and maternal sufferings, Naylor's characters are linked by the commonality of pain.  Yet this common link is not necessarily a point of solidarity between the characters, and for Lorraine and Theresa, their sexual preference becomes a source of scrutiny and exclusion rather than acceptance and mutual understanding.  The other residents, and in particular, Sophie, instead see the two women as an opportunity to release their frustrated malice and hardened contempt.  In this way, Naylor shows how, in the repression and apathy for the other women of Brewster Place, these women ultimately turn on each other in ways that is not only counter-productive but fatally damaging as well.  The female-on-female violence we see in the novel works to suggest that the negation of society's marginalia only breeds needless violence.  The women of Brewster Place, who in their tangibly plausible stories come to stand for many women, show the essential nature of a female solidarity and the futility of misdirected rage

Route 66, Unfathomable Dust, and the Limits of Human Endurance

I often think when looking at my extensive collection of Advil, Tylenol (pm, night time, day time, cough and cold), Sudafed, Zantac, Prilosec, Alleve, Nyquil, etc., along with any prescription medications I've been given over the years, that I would never survive if I lived in an earlier time that predated these simple yet powerful panaceas.  In writing this, I realize I look like a hypochondriac, and to be honest, I probably am, but my point is that today, we have become so reliant on prescription drug culture and the immediacy of quick-fix over-the-counter pills.  I veritably could not imagine life without these simplicities, but during class today I was struck by the group presentation's inclusion of the luxury items that many westward migrants chose to forgo for economic reasons, and how these travelers illuminate a much more tested and extensive limit of human endurance.

During the dust bowl, midwesterners escaping to California, much like the Joad family in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, were trapped in overheating cars while lung-clogging dust swirled around them, threatening their ability to eat, drink, see, and breath.  Access to water was scarce, eating nutritiously was often hilariously impossible, sand infiltrated unprotected eyes, and crept into lungs leading to a number of breathing conditions.  And yet these Okies persevered and pushed forward despite these conditions that today we probably would liken to the lowest rungs of hell. While it has fortunately become highly unlikely that we will find ourselves in a situation as deplorable as the Joads and their fellow migrants on Route 66, my point here is that we've become so insulated by our modern and instantly-accessible comforts that we have no sense of our limits or capacity for strength.  Some of us are pushed to the brink in different, specific ways, but the Grapes of Wrath and the realities of these American refugees truly illustrates the outermost limits of humanity's capacity for survival, not just during one day, not just mentally, not just physically, but totally and for an indefinite amount of time.  Ultimately, after seeing today's presentation, not only am I more grateful for the luxuries I have access to that I formerly saw as trivial and basic, but I am more conscious of the fact that so often when I think I cannot endure, I really have only begun to test the mettle of that innate human capacity for survival and endurance that has been masked by time but not diminished by it. 

The Vacuity and Simultaneous Control of Wealth in John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath"

From the start of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, I was immediately struck by the nearly tangible presence of poverty in the novel.  In fact, Steinbeck is bluntly allegorical in his use of tractors as an image to represent the cold, metallic, and ignorant impersonality of banks, the rich, and industrialization over the poor farmer families of the dust bowl region of the American midwest.  In doing so, he creates a tangible tension between the bucolic, salt-of-the-earth farmers like the Joads who live in a poverty that is powerful yet not without solidarity and the unfeeling and inhuman elite, bankers who strip farmers like the Joads of their land, and in that, so much more.

However, one passage in the novel has stood out to me as a true indicator statement on the role of wealth.  In chapter 18, a fellow westbound traveler tells Pa Joad about a "newspaper fella near the coast" who has a million acres of land (206). Instead of being enviously amazed by this "newspaper fella" (who is a real life reference to William Randolph Hearst), Pa and Casy agree that such displays of excess, such unnecessary wealth, are merely signifiers of a personal disappointment, a fear of dying, and a lonely emptiness. Casy says poignantly:

If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it 'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he's poor in hisself, there ain't no million acres gonna make him feel rich, an' maybe he's disappointed that nothin' he can do'll make him feel rich-- not rich like Mis' Wilson was when she give her tent when Grampa died.  I ain't tryin; to preach no sermon, but I never seen nobody that's busy as a prairie dog collectin' stuff that wasn't disappointed (207)

It seems in the novel that, despite the power wealth has over the Joads, it is not something that they necessarily lust after.  Instead, to have too much is to try and fill a void within with the material in a way that is impossibly quixotic. On the other hand, true wealth is the ability to give to others in need.  Mis' Wilson's ability to give her tent to dying Grampa was far more significant and meaningful than the lonely wealth of  men like Hearst. The Joads and Casy may speak with improper grammar.  They may be covered in dirt and rags, and they may get swindled out of selling all their possessions for lack of ability to negotiate, but their senses of selves are far more rich than even the wealthiest robber baron.  In essence, poverty in The Grapes of Wrath is not a lack of money or possessions, but a lack of control to define personal happiness.  Farmers like the Joads, people tied almost intrinsically to the land they were born on, understand who they are thoroughly and organically.  Their identities are not predicated on a number in their bank account or on performing their class for others (like so many other characters we have seen throughout the semester).  It is the banks that take away the land that impose poverty and lack on the Joads.  It is the anonymous faces who have never felt the land with their bare hands who ultimately come to link possessions with happiness in a way that, as evidenced by the scared and empty "newspaper fella," kills the self and the soul irrevocably.

Fitzgerald's Portrayal of the Idle Rich in "The Great Gatsby"

Throughout his novel, The Great Gatsby, author F. Scott Fitzgerald offers both subtle and flagrant images of wealth, inheritance, exclusivity, and the treachery of this insular world on the self and the soul.  Almost all of Fitzgerald's portrayals of the Buchanans are ripe with social commentary and an acknowledgement of the corrupting power of money.  Both Tom and Daisy are characters with potential: in both Tom and Daisy's emotional (and physical) infidelity they suggest that they do, even if on the most minute levels, have the capacity for authentic feeling independent of their class restrictions.  However, in their ultimate decisions to hide behind the insular and impermeable boundaries of their wealth, they further adulterate their capacity for humanity with denials of authenticity in favor of money.

In particular, Fitzgerald's descriptions of Daisy work to create a vision of the self capable of love and happiness beyond the scope of shallow social constructions of the wealthy class but at the same time marred by an inability to sacrifice these shallow comforts.  Towards the end of the novel Fitzgerald offers a recollection of Daisy and Gatsby's nascent relationship when she was still caught more evenly between the worlds of wealth and love:
                "Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked
                 fashionably as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth...Gatsby was
                 overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the
                 freshness of many clothes and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot
                 struggles of the poor" (Fitzgerald, 117).
Daisy is at once untouchably beautiful in her ivory tower of wealth and yet simultaneously imprisoned by the myopic and regressive ideologies of her class.  She is "safe" "above the hot struggles of the poor"-- a position that makes her both ignorant of the struggles of people not like her and vulnerable against a perceived threat of poverty.  This description of Daisy is only one of many offered by Fitzgerald about the Buchanans and their shallow yet exclusive contract of a marriage.  Ultimately, Fitzgerald recognizes the dreams of love, marriage, and the glamorous fantasy of the world of wealth, yet he knows these dreams are corrupt, adulterated by naive perspectives and archaic ideals that remain tragically and fatally fixed in solitude.

What's So Great About Gatsby? The Titular Irony of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"

The Great Gatsby is a novel of skeletons in closets.  All of the characters have a past, and while we are not always privy to the specificities of these haunting secrets, we see their manifest effects on the present throughout the novel.  Battling against the looming pressure of past lives is the universal belief in the possibility of change that all of Fitzgerald's characters cling to.  For Gatsby in particular, the desire to transcend his origins and escape memory allows him to create projections of idealism that he believes are love and authenticity.  That is to say, Gatsby, in his desire for reinvention, confuses the idealization of wealth, power, and Daisy Buchanan with genuine love and inclusion in a way that leads to his ultimate loss of self both physically and metaphysically at the end of the novel.

Throughout the novel, Gatsby, in his luxurious mansion, throws elaborate and expensive parties fraught with all facets of 1920s hedonism and elitist escapism.  His guests clamor to know the elusive Gatsby who, in his fabulous displays of material excess, becomes a sort of god of nightlife and glamour.  Yet as Gatsby's past begins to emerge at the end of the novel, his popularity disappears along with his guests who we realize were never really Gatsby's friends in the first place.  In Gatsby's ultimate solitude and relative anonymity at the end of the novel, Fitzgerald posits a very clear binary between being noticed versus being known.  And beyond that, being known versus being loved.  The world of Gatsby was one of fetish and fantasy, and in his ultimate downfall, it is clear that he had confused signifiers of wealth and affection, as well as the means to an end, with real love.  When Gatsby finally realizes that Daisy is as superficial and protected as he had been trying to be, we readers are forced to see that, in the metaphysics of the novel, self knowledge is ultimately impossible.  After all of his lavish parties, his countless colored shirts, his beautiful rooms, and his fatally fast cars, Gatsby is left vacant and anonymous to the world he had so desperately tried to (and almost succeeded at) being a part of.  In the end, we see that Gatsby was never really great at all.  He was a human who, like the rest of us, just wanted to be loved in a way that was genuine amidst superficial and imageaic constructions of wealth, selfishness, and dishonesty.

The Meaning of Travel as a Symbol of Wealth in "The House of Mirth"

After examining Lily Bart as a character in a more generalized, over-arching sense in my last post on Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, I want in my second post to essentially zoom-in on a more specific facet of the novel, travel.  In the beginning of the second book we find Lily traveling aboard the Dorset's yacht, Sabrina.  Her escape to the Mediterranean immediately follows on the heels of her near-mental collapse at Gerty Farish's after realizing how truly limited and dependent she is not only financially but inherently as well because she is a woman.  For we readers, this escape to Europe immediately seems like a tactical avoidance of personal problems on Lily's part, yet we soon realize that for the upper class abroad, the drama, gossip, and aloof idleness is as omnipresent as ever and Lily, try as she might to deny it, cannot run from her problems.

Instead, Lily's wealthy circle of friends is as insular as ever, and for Lily, having new people to admire her beauty only makes her critics more vicious.  While I have always felt that Lily's ego is her primary downfall, and her unwillingness to play by the rules for the things she wants ultimately prevents her from getting anything, her beauty is something that she cannot help possess.   Lily is widely resented and judged more quickly by her alleged "friends" because of the attention her looks receive, especially from married men.  Regardless of what she does, or who she speaks to, she is always scrutinized and gossiped about by so called friends who care little about whether these rumors are true.  Fueling the drama's inescapable nature is the fact that, though in Europe, Lily's friends refuse to leave the security of their isolated yachts and quasi-incestuous social groups.  With the exception of a few carefully calculated interactions with royalty, Lily's friends essentially transplant their existing social scene in New York to Europe with little change from their life at home: the backdrop may change but the drama remains the same.

This passive absorption of other cultures by the wealthy upper class reminded me of Mark Twain's "The Innocents Abroad".  While Twain's narrator takes a more observant, journalistic tone in his exposé of traveling to the middle east, his fellow luxury liner passengers engage Europe with an air of superiority that I think is highly reminiscent of Lily and her friends.  First of all, both wealthy groups can afford to spend months away from their lives in the United States.  Ironically, the people who do very little are the ones who feel most justified in escaping the not-so-harsh realities of their normal lives.  Second of all, both the characters in Twain's piece and Lily's friends do not seem to have any desire to understand or experience the cultures of the countries they visit; they merely want to consume them.  Ultimately, I believe that the characters' travel to Europe in The House of Mirth becomes richly telling of their lives and interactions in the novel: they seek to escape the insularity and exclusivity of idleness they themselves have created, only to find that the drama they both thrive on and fear in New York is as omnipotent and pervasive as ever.  Wharton's exposure of the leisure class's dark underbelly forces we readers to recognize the treacherous and fictitious nature of elitism and the a-moral and degenerative forces it creates to destroy Lily.

Response to Veblem's "The Theory of the Leisure Class"

Despite the density of Veblem's turn-of-the-century language in his "The Theory of the Leisure Class," his work sheds necessarily objective light on the practices, ideologies, and characteristics of the upper class much in the same way Jacob Riis did for the ways of the lower class in "How the Other Half Lives".  With an expository style, much of Veblem's writing focuses on the upper classes relation to labor and consumption.  In doing so, I thought that Veblem exposes one of the great ironies of the upper class: they have earned the most money and yet accomplish the least.  As we have discussed, much of the money these members of the upper class had was passed down through generations, and hence there was no need for them to work.  Regardless however, money is finite, and the "conspicuous" spending that forms the crux of upper class activities undoubtedly eats into these funds significantly.

This often inexplicable phenomenon lies at the heart of Veblem's work, and in his exegesis he illuminates how the appearance of the ability to do nothing, that is, to have someone else do all of the work instead, dominated upper class ideologies.  Furthermore, within the hegemony of wealth there were a number of sub-stratas, characterized by the number of servants one had and the triviality of tasks that could be avoided through the help of servants.  This is of course, where Veblem comes to define the term "Conspicuous Leisure": as much as wealth was (and often still is) a performance for the upper class, more often than not this performance involved doing literally nothing or as little as possible.

Illusions of Wealth and Self: Escapist and Imprisoned Sentiments in "The House of Mirth"

Edith Wharton, in her novel "The House of Mirth" creates a vision of wealth that is simultaneously painfully vapid and heartbreakingly complex.  That is to say, as objective outsiders, we readers see the aloof idleness of Wharton's upper class New York elite at an altitude: the realities of their shallow cliques and menial gossip are too trivial to be real to our more modern gaze.  However, when we become privy to this world of idle wealth through the personal lens of Wharton's main character, Lily Bart, we are able to glimpse the very real complexities of the pressures and performative expectations that someone like Lily, who lacks necessary financial means, experiences in trying to keep-up with her cohorts.

Wharton's dichotomous contrast between objective scrutiny of wealth and class and subjective sympathy for Lily is somewhat of a revelation of the novel's contents.  Like the dualities we readers experience in our perspectives of the novel's themes and ethos, the contrast between the desire to be wealthy and the desire to be free plagues Lily Bart's sense of self throughout the text.  For Lily, wealth represents a freedom from creditors and the stress of trying to act above her means.  At the same time, the calculating nature of her "friends" and their predatory gossip appalls her on a deeply personal level. She sees the "world" of wealth as a "cage" and the world beyond this cage as "alluring" (Wharton, 55).  As much as she needs money, she sees the idle, conformist nature of her wealthy companions.  Their relationships are guised and inauthentic and fraught with quick, eager, self-serving malice.  As someone just beyond the outer limits of this class from a financial standpoint, Lily recognizes the more genuine, honest world that exists outside the pressures of wealth for someone like Lawrence Seldon.  While Lily needs money to soothe her material desires, her emotional sense of self, the self that is not a performance, desires Seldon's world of honest contemplation and forgiven, detached non-conformity. 

Conversely however (and I find this antithesis ironic), Lily often finds herself drawn to the tempting glamour of wealth in a way that is not just remediate but veritably desirable, albeit materialistic.  When looking at Gwen Van Osburgh Stepney's wedding jewels, "the glow of the stones warmed Lily's veins like wine.  More completely than any other expression of wealth they symbolized the life she longed to lead" (Wharton, 89).  Lily, like an indecisive magpie, sees freedom beyond the bars of her cage and yet is drawn to the glittering bars themselves as well.  It is this soul-splitting indecision that I believe ultimately incarcerates Lily, who cannot reconcile her material desires to resurrect her childhood class with her adult aspirations to find the space to be herself. Thus, wealth (and the renunciation of wealth as well for that matter) is both an escape and a trap for Lily who seeks both financial and intellectual/ emotional freedom in a social realm where having both is not only impossible but taboo.

A Titular Twist in Howell's "The Rise of Silas Lapham"

To be perfectly candid, I have to admit that I feel like a bit of an asshole.  After finishing "The Rise of Silas Lapham" last night, I could not help but feel that the title was ironic: Silas Lapham doesn't rise, he falls!  However, after today's discussion, I realize that my myopic conclusions about the text in relation to the novel's title overlook the possibility that "rises" are not limited to the monetary sort.  Silas Lapham, and many of the novel's other characters, experience a moral uplift at the end of the story in the face of great material loss (and thus loss of class status as well) which is indeed a "rise" on its own accord.  Not only do I feel somewhat materialistic for being blind to this possibility, I have to admit that my resolutions about the ending of the novel have greatly improved since our class discussion.

Ultimately, I am more satisfied by the novel now knowing that while Silas Lapham lost what money he had earned, the experience left him and his family vastly wealthier from a moral standpoint. To see Silas Lapham's fate as a tragedy is to deny his capacity for tenacity, vigor, and strength--faculties we know he possesses not only in the realm of business but at home in a more personal sphere as well.  At first I saw Silas Lapham's return to his Lapham paint farm as a pitiable downgrade--Silas is right back at that proverbial square one after years of hard work and sacrifice.  However, Silas's journey is anything but a futile failure.  While he does return to his humble roots, it is not without immense personal growth and the recognition that the upper class, while seemingly glamorous is a morally debunk caste of exclusivity and wasted potential.  Silas no longer can afford the luxuries he and his family had become used to, but his recognition of true morality and honest values is a triumph far more endearing and permanent than anything money can buy.

William Dean Howell's "The Rise of Silas Lapham" I

During our class discussion of Howell's "The Rise of Silas Lapham" yesterday, I started thinking about the fierce duality that is "old money" and "new money".  I think that for many people, rich is rich, and to an extent, that's certainly true in comparison to those without.  However, I also think that many people, particularly those who are wealthy, make the distinction between wealthy based on the origins and age of the said wealth, much in the same way that we see the Corey's do in Silas Lapham.  For the old money Anna Corey and her daughters, the thought of her only son Tom condescending himself to marry into a family only recently rich is a travesty.

As a modern reader, it's almost comical to witness the women essentially freaking out over a situation that is truly insipid in comparison to large scale world issues like hunger, poverty, violence, etc.  However, despite the superficiality of the Corey's plight, this schism between new money and old money is very much alive in the United States today.

Having grown up in New England, I've met a number of people who are relatively (relatively because, as we've established, the United States is by no means an "old" country) old-money wealthy, and these people tend to look-down on those only more recently wealthy in a way that is guised and tacit yet still totally present.  HOWEVER, what I'm wondering is, is this elitist phenomenon unique to the more historic New England states as opposed to the rest of the United States??

Recently I was visiting my extremely wealthy aunt in California who happens to be dating a guy even wealthier than she is and made all of his money founding a very large software company.  Im not going to name names because you can totally google both of them, but the jist is, both are self-made, and have worked hard for their "new" money.  And yet, new money didn't really seem to exist as a category out in California, at least from what I saw.  Many people in the Silicon Valley area where they live have made their money on technology, an obviously more nascent industry, and hence, wealth only transcends a couple generations at best.  Granted, I'm not from California, so I probably didn't get a fully nuanced perspective, but this is something I observed while out there, but it just made me question the subjectivity of this categorical exclusion based on wealth and time and see just how shallow this type of classification truly is.

Jacob Riis' "How the Other Half Lives"

Jacob Riis' "How the Other Half Lives" is a New Historicist, journalistic piece that chronicles the immigrant, tenement lifestyle that Stephen Crane uses as his setting in "Maggie".  Where Crane takes a distanced, objective view in his narrative voice, Riis goes even beyond that, using a language that is almost legal sounding in its account of the horrific conditions immigrants were forced to endure in New York City.  While Riis' piece is not a descriptive narrative like Crane's, it does offer a lot of insight into "Maggie" which I found to be very insightful and exegetical.  For example, in Riis' second chapter, "The Awakening," he writes of tenement dwellers, "The tenements had bred their Nemesis, a proletariat ready and able to avenge the wrongs of their crowds" (Riis).  I found this observation to be fully applicable to Crane's characters, particularly Jimmie, who scorn law and landlord alike.  While Maggie's family is forced to endure the exploitation and poverty that characterized life in the tenements for immigrant family's, this very lifestyle hardens them into a community distrustful of anyone from the outside world.  Because they know of nothing else, the tenements offer Maggie's family, and others, one of the few comforts they have: predictability.  

Yet where Crane's characters come from a specifically Irish background, Riis' more lofty, objectively journalistic style offers a more all encompassing view of the ethnicities that comprised particularly the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the heyday of immigration in the United States.  However, that is not to say that Riis is fair and forgiving of all these groups.  In fact, he ironically ethnicizes the abject lives of immigrants in poverty while superficially appearing to try and defeat it.  I was struck by his adherence to ethnic stereotypes and his penchant for superiority in his attitudes towards areas like Chinatown and Little Italy.  As we've discussed in class, America is a nation of immigrants, regardless of when and wherever we have come from, and for Riis to come off as "more American" simply because he has been in the United States longer than some of his subjects is ironically hypocritical.  Ultimately, despite my weariness of Riis' tone, I found his piece to be an illuminating portrayal of the immigrant plight in the United States.  I have to imagine that his stereotyping, while inexcusable, was probably tame for the time period, and at the very least, Riis gives necessary exposure to a group of people otherwise marginalized and forgotten by society.  And of course, I have to mention his photographs-- more expository than any piece of writing, Riis' photos capture his subjects in the realest of forms. 

Stephen Crane's "Maggie" II

When I was in seventh grade, my parents took my brother and I to Ellis Island off New York City to see my mom's grandfather's name, Andrew Nortagiacomo, inscribed on the wall outside of the building.  The wall is famous; it carries the name of all the immigrants who passed through Ellis Island on the way to the United States, and as a thirteen year old just beginning to appreciate my heritage, seeing his name was akin to seeing the origins of my family's beginnings as Americans.  Looking back, the experience was both enlightening and uplifting, but it was also ironic.  All the names on the wall are inscribed uniformly, all in the same font, same size and with the same lack of further information beyond first and last name.  And yet, the experiences of those who passed through the walls of Ellis Island, the immigrant experience, was anything but uniform.  Andrew came from Naples, Italy, but the names above him, below him, and on either side may have been from anywhere.  The people his names has come to share a space with may have never even seen Italy, or him for that matter, and in this way, the wall seems to alphabetize the immigrant journey rather than honor it. Regardless, the wall is a wonderful testimonial to the immigrant experience of a vast array of cultures all funneling into the same arena all at once, and of course, it would be impossible to honor the lives of every immigrant individually, but what the wall ultimately does not reveal is the inevitable chaos that occured with the mixing of so many ethnicities, cultural practices, and ideologies.

Stephen Crane, in his novella "Maggie," works to capture some of this chaos as he describes the lives of immigrants living in New York City after they have come into the United States.  When immigrants first entered New York Harbor, they were greeted by the statuesque beacon, the Statue of Liberty, but what they could not see were the far-from-glamorous realities that lay beyond the picturesque city-scape.  For Crane's characters, the city, and more specifically, the tenement community, is an insular world of violence, ignorance, and hopelessness.  As baby Tommie and Maggie fall victim to untimely deaths, Crane's objective and journalistic narrative voice, moreover, creates a sense of regularity to this morbid mortality.  In fact, Crane discusses tenants' suicides as if they are an escape from a nightmare rather than an untimely tragedy.  Ultimately, Crane's imagination of the tenement community becomes a vision of hopelessness and dead ends: with the inevitability of an early death or prolonged misery in life, we readers come to see beyond the facade of possibility that famous emblems like the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island have come to represent and see the dark underbelly of America's rich past.

Mark Twain's "The $30,000 Bequest" II

After reading Melanie's post referencing the Time Magazine article about wealth in respect to happiness, I thought she posed some provoking questions regarding how this principle applies (or doesn't apply) to Twain's characters Aleck and Sally in his story "The $30,000 Dollar Bequest".  While the Time article applies to the present day, and thus the salary in question, $75,000, is not what it would have been in Twain's day, I think the premise is very much still applicable to Twain's short story.

As Melanie pointed out, the Time article claims that an average income of $75,000 correlates to a person's peak level of satisfaction, and after that, his or her happiness plateaus regardless of whether or not his or her income (and therefore standard of living) increases.  In her post, Melanie questions whether or not this same premise works to describe Aleck and Sally's financial situation, and I too can see the ambiguous nature of her query.  I think the majority of the differences between the Time article and Twain's story stem from the fact that, for Aleck and Sally, the money is never real.  For them, wealth is a limitless fantasy that allows them to imagine a life they do not yet have but believe they will.  In the Time article, a certain level of income and standard of living has presumably already been achieved, and thus the actual manifestations of wealth on the person's happiness is measurable and actualized.

At the same time, Aleck and Sally experience the same sort of moral decay that many people who actually are wealthy experience in both today's society as well as in the past.  Testifying to the unfettered nature of greed and desire, Aleck and Sally, despite never having any money at all, begin to break important traditions to them such as observing the Sabbath and ignore each other's and their daughters' needs in favor of managing and imagining their wealth.  Ultimately, while their wealth is never real, the effect of money on Aleck and Sally is very much a reality as it would be for someone who genuinely did have too much money.  Pedigree becomes more important than personality, and Aleck and Sally, believing themselves to be royally wealthy, forget the influence and importance of humanity on their family and on their daughters' futures in a way that is very much in line with the Time article's assertion that wealth cannot, in fact, buy happiness.  In this sense, I think that Twain's story is highly effective because, although the wealth is never real, his characters' limitless desire is very much so, illuminating the universally insidious and corrupting nature of greed in the realms of both reality and fantasy.

Stephen Crane's "Maggie" I

Like Twain, Stephen Crane, in his novella "Maggie," uses over-dramatization to imagine the dark underbelly of the immigrant lifestyle in early 20th century New York City.  Using a journalistic style, Crane moves from a position of sympathy with Maggie to a more distanced, universalist depiction of reality.  While Crane, in his use of over-dramatization, creates an attitude that is somewhat humorous in it's depiction of tenement living, "Maggie" is a profoundly dark illustration of marginalization and poverty.

Using dialect and dialogue, I think Crane effectively constructs characters that are flat yet nonetheless work to enact a vision of decadence and hopelessness.  Ultimately, I found that I wasn't particularly engaged in the lives of the characters in "Maggie"; the distance Crane establishes between his narrative voice and Maggie's family's life is too great to feel any real attachment to.  That said, I think that this lack of emotional solidarity made me see Maggie, Pete, Jimmie as more allegorical figures who in aggregate, create a more objective vision of the immigrant plight as a whole.  That is to say, while I couldn't find common emotional ground with Crane's characters, I thought that they were effective in forcing me to recognize just how truly abject the lives of immigrants were in New York.

Moreover, I thought the characters' penchant for swift and unthinking violence also helped to effectively represent the absence of legal aid and recourse for these immigrants.  In seeing the lawlessness of the tenement community, it becomes apparent for we readers just how closed-off these tenements were from the workings of wealthy society.  It is as if the tenements were a society unto themselves totally beyond the scope of the legal system (or the healthcare system and education system as well for that matter).  In any case, I thought that Crane's use of characterization, although totally allegorical and distanced, was successful in forcing me to see clearly the lives of immigrants and their horrific living conditions in a way that has altered my understanding of poverty both past and present.

Mark Twain's "The $30,000 Bequest" I

After reading Mark Twain's "The $30,000 Bequest" last spring in Paula's Twain class, it was interesting to return to this short story with a more content based focus.  Last year, we approached the piece with a critical lens on Twain's use of literary devices such as inversion, irony, names, etc.  With that previous discussion in mind, it was especially interesting to re-examine "The $30,000 Bequest"with our attention more on the dynamics of wealth and fantasy in the story and how thematically, Twain's representation's of wealth and desire are significant to the underlying ethos of the story.

One thing that I was confused about in our class discussions, and in my second reading of the story, was Twain's inversion of gender roles. Last semester, we discussed Twain's use of inversion in general, and how his surprising twists work to force we readers to question the story we are reading and examine it with a more awake, critical eye.  In this more specific context however, (i.e. not in the context of Twain's body of work as a whole) I wondered, and still wonder, what his inversion of gender roles says about his readers' expectations of wealth management and female agency.  Are we supposed to scoff at the notion of a financially savvy female, Aleck, and see her husband, Sally, as pathetically emasculated?  In a thematic context, that is, regarding the general theme of wealth and fantasy, I have a hard time understanding why an inversion of gender roles serves to make us question the illusory and adulterating nature of wealth as happiness.  Why is a woman in control so unrealistic? Let me also say that I do not mean to sound rhetorical in my questioning of Twain's device.  I recognize that at the time, society did perceive women less capable and more dependent; I'm just still unsure how this inversion, in this case, is effective in it's critique of wealth's corrupting potency.

Regardless of my uncertainty, I think Twain's inversion of reality and fantasy is a highly effective technique that works to expose the warped and degrading nature of incessant greed and desire.  That in the end of the story we realize that Aleck and Sally's grand plans and assured visions were mere illusions is kind of a mind-fuck (for lack of a better expression).  The form of the story, a constant mounting tension used to describe the build up of wealth, is a sort of "form as a revelation of content" technique in that in the end, we realize that the story never happened just as wealth never happened for Aleck and Sally.  Ultimately, Twain's use of illusion and reality works to expose the all-consuming nature of greed and desire and how blinding this desire is in the face of reality, morality, and veritable happiness.