My Paper

[6] When Joy is said to have “achieved” blindness, this suggests the self-consciousness of her refusal to acknowledge things she did not want to acknowledge. When Joy was a child, she was crippled in a hunting accident. She was shot in the leg which was subsequently lost to an amputation. The accident occurred when she was hunting with her father. The fact she was hunting, something that we do not ordinarily think of a girl as doing, may imply that she had a special attraction to her father. This gravitation towards her father likely has its beginnings in her feeling of being unattractive. She is after all not pretty but is a rather large, awkward girl. Given this, it is not surprising that she felt drawn to masculine pastimes, like hunting, rather than feminine ones because they freed her from feeling inferior to her more attractive peers. Because her mother was, even in Joy’s adulthood, always trying to make her dress more nicely and be more feminine, it is likely that she began this attempt to counteract Joy’s tendencies to flee from any situation that could conceivably put her in a bad light compared to other girls and encourage her to be more feminine which may very well have included a plea not to engage in un-feminine activities like hunting. The result of her attraction to her father was, of course, her losing her leg, something that decisively increased her feeling not only unattractive but also profoundly different from other girls. The text makes a point of saying that she never lost consciousness following her injury which means that she experienced it without the buffer of unconsciousness. Her having to undergo that suffering, not only the physical pain but also the consciousness of her having to live subsequently without her leg, must have been excruciating, physically and psychologically. This may have made her feel cursed, an attitude that would have made her even more bitter than she already was. Her parents divorced at some point after her accident. The divorce was almost certainly heavily influenced by Joy’s accident. It is not clear that the shot that wounded her was fired from her father’s gun, but it is a distinct possibility. However, whatever the case of the actual origin of her wound, her mother would certainly have blamed her husband for her daughter’s injury. Such a circumstance could not have but influenced the parents’ relationship and their subsequent divorce. If her father was the parent whom she related to primarily, her loss of him in the wake of the divorce would further explain the anger she has against her mother. Whether or not her mother and father had a good relationship prior to the accident, which occurred when Joy was ten, the fact that a divorce ensued some time ago—she is now thirty-two—suggests both that it was not the strongest to begin with and that the shock that followed Joy’s losing her leg may have led to its being incapable of surviving such a blow. Losing her father and her leg probably seemed to the young girl to indicate that happiness was not going to be in the works for her. Her having always to be the odd one out, the girl with the fake leg, together with the fact that she was not cute and that she was angry, undoubtedly made relating to her peers unusually difficult. Furthermore, given her attitude towards people in general that is evident in her as an adult, it is seems unlikely that she could have cultivated any friends to relieve her of the burden of being alone and weird. The fact that she lost her leg when she was ten rather than having been born without it only adds to her despair. If she had known only that circumstance, then the cruelty of the blow would have been less apparent. A ten-year-old, however, is old enough to have experienced life sufficiently to feel the loss of both mobility and normality keenly. The fact that she, a girl, was hunting at ten further suggests this. She was participating in life in a full way even at that age. The details of the accident are not given, but the fact that it was an accident implies the chance nature of this occurrence. This is not to say it would have been better had someone intentionally shot her; it is simply to say that it is glaringly apparent that a random event has scarred her life in a way that is irrecoverable. Her decision to concentrate all her energies on education is perfectly reasonable in that one need not be either beautiful or physically adept to succeed in the classroom. Furthermore, the fact that her mother seems to have no interest in intellectual matters, especially for women, may also contribute to Joy’s decision to invest in that aspect of life to the extent that she did. It will serve to keep her perpetually isolated from her mother. However, once her father left, her mother was the only remaining family that she had, and so when she was, she inevitably had to relate in some manner to her. This contact with her mother, however, was extremely upsetting to Joy because of what she regarded as her mother’s ignorance of what is important in life. One sign of this ignorance is that her mother believes that she is the author of unique, highly insightful views of life that no one else could hope to duplicate, e.g., “Nothing is perfect.” Joy, on the contrary believes that her mother does not know anything. Mrs. Hopewell has certainly never reflected on the problems of truly understanding life that are the bread and butter of the philosophers Joy has studied and that she feels that she has mastered. Therefore, when her mother puts forward her trite opinions as though they were neither trite nor capable of being thought of by anyone else, it drives Joy crazy because her earning a Ph.D. in philosophy has shown her what real profundity of thought is. Even though what she has done is not something valued by ordinary people due to their ignorance of what is involved, she feels she can be justly proud of her academic achievements and has accordingly grounded her sense of self on her ability to read and understand the writings of philosophers. Because this is Joy’s standard for what is a noteworthy achievement, the obvious triviality of her mother’s insights is almost as upsetting as her belief that they have any significance. Adding to this aggravation is the fact that Joy knows her mother thinks her studying philosophy was a waste of time. For her things like dressing nicely, instead of wearing a sweatshirt with a cowboy on it, and learning to be pleasant around people would be much more to lead to her having a happy than her spending her time in such an odd way. Because Joy seems to feel that that kind of happiness would not be worth having, such a criticism is meaningless to her. The kind of happiness her mother speaks of in the lives of Caramae and Glynese, Mrs. Freeman’s daughters, is revolting to Joy. Caramae is fifteen, already married and pregnant, her bouts of morning sickness being one of the featured topics of the conversations between Joy’s mother and Mrs. Freeman. Glynese’s claim to fame is her preferring to have a husband with an old car who wanted to be married by a preacher to a man who has a new car . Beyond the ordinary contempt she has for girls like these, Joy is an atheist who feels anyone concerned with religious things does not know what is going on. She, therefore, sees nothing to admire or strive for in the lives of these ridiculous girls. She sees that her mother is interested in their lives because they are showing an interest in the same kind of issues that doubtless she had when younger, thinking that concern with landing a man is the most important thing for a woman to occupy herself with. Because she is sure no man will want her with her artificial leg, it follows that this is a view of life that is worthless even without mentioning its obvious superficiality. Her mother’s concern for such things together with her being disappointed in Joy for refusing to share her view of these things indicates that she has refused either to acknowledge the enormous loss her daughter has suffered or to appreciate the way in which Joy has mastered that difficulty, a matter for further anger. Rather than seeing her academic accomplishments as things to be valued, her mother takes Joy’s interest in these concerns as confirmation of the fact that her daughter is determined not to be a part of the modern world and is, therefore, determined to disappoint her, the woman who raised her. Not only is Joy perturbed by her mother’s views in themselves, but her feelings are further irritated by the feeling that, even though she is despising a conventional way of looking at social values, she in fact does not belong in human society because she has an artificial leg. Mrs. Freeman’s idiot daughters, Caramae and Glynese, on the other hand, are doubtless attractive enough to seem appealing to the equally idiotic boys who come around wanting to have sex with them. Joy does not feel she will ever be included in the roll of those who are going to be pursued in this way by men, and she tells herself that that is the way she wants it to be even though the thought that she is excluded from society is one source for her anger. She has tried to signal her acknowledgement of this exclusion by legally changing her name to Hulga, the ugliest one she could think of. This for her is symbolic of her disdain for how people think and for what they value. However, despite her desire to advertise her contempt for the world, she still has to “achieve” blindness to hide from herself the fact that her mother has abandoned her for those jokes Mrs. Freeman brought into the world. Mrs. Freeman’s girls’ success in the world, pitiful though it may be, is still something that Joy experiences as another trick the universe has played on her. Thus, the only way that she can maintain her sanity is to blind herself to the spectacle of the world as far as possible. Needless to say, she also experiences the fact that trying to “achieve” blindness is impossible literally speaking. Therefore, it might be suggested that her inability to “achieve” total blindness is the final thing that serves to fuel the anger that is her constant companion. [9] Subconsciously, Joy’s trying to “achieve” blindness is a sign of her deeply ingrained sadness. Her perpetual anger is the outward manifestation this sadness. She says that she despises the world and all the ordinary people in the world, but she must want to be loved and accepted like everyone else. The fact that her mother tries to ignore Joy’s difficulties means that she is unable to accept what happened to her daughter, and even though it is understandable why it would be difficult for her take, her essentially stonewalling the acceptance of Joy’s condition means that to Joy it seems as though she is not accepting her and not accepting how she is as sad and as upsetting as that condition may be. Even though she probably chose education as her field in part because ti would be unsettling to her mother, she, nevertheless, would have liked her mother to value what she is doing especially as she is not going to be able to do a lot of other things to achieve recognition. However, her choosing this path is doomed to fail because her mother is not going to be able to stomach having a daughter who is not only crippled but also an intellectual. These are simply not things that she is able to grasp and appreciate with any ease. This is in some sense the result that Joy wanted in that it proves her mother is bad which justifies the anger she is feeling but it also justifies the sadness she feels at losing both her hopes for a regular life but also for having a loving relationship with her mother. The blindness she “achieves” does serve its purpose as a buffer against the stupidity of the world and her mother, but it also simultaneously serves to protect her from sadness. If she is angry at her mother consciously she is less likely to feel the subconscious sadness arising from her knowing that her mother does not in fact appreciate what she is doing. She may very well recognize subconsciously that there is a distinct possibility if she had taken another path, if she had tried to acclimate herself to the norms of society in somewhat the way that Caramae and Glynese have that her mother would have been more supportive. This further aggravates both her anger and her sadness but in this instance it may be as much against herself as against her mother. Subconsciously she probably recognizes that she has sabotaged her hopes for being able to make a connection with her under these circumstances. [10] In the text’s view when Joy “achieves” blindness, this is both good and bad. It is good insofar as this “achieved” blindness allows her to function with a reasonable degree of efficacy in the world. By denying to the extent that she can what her situation is in fact, she can force herself through her life and tell herself that, although the world is foolish and although she is handicapped, she has the upper hand over its idiotic inhabitants. That this “achieved” blindness allows her to live in such a way that she is at least partially protected from the overwhelming reality of her loss is good. However, her “achieving” blindness is also bad in that it is both blindness, a keeping out of what is in fact the case, and a point of view that leads her to be in constant conflict with virtually everyone she comes in contact with, especially her mother. This is not to say that her mother’s way of blindness is superior to hers as its relentlessly denying Joy’s situation, of course, has its own liabilities, but it is possible to argue that trying to be as positive as one can, as she does, is not a bad thing. However, to the extent that Mrs. Hopewell’s approach to things serves actually to prolong Joy’s incarceration in the prison of her own blindness–i.e., her anger at her mother is one of the prime motivations she has for continuing with the blindness she “achieved” through this supreme effort of will–this would make this persistent attempt to cast events in a positive light not so good. At the same time, Joy’s reveling in her disgust with the world is a hard point of view to support completely even though the reasons for the feelings she has and the strategies she employs are perfectly understandable given her circumstances. Overall, when Joy “achieves” blindness, the text sees this as bad by perhaps a slight margin. Her refusal to accept how her life is with even moderately good grace is hard to praise. This is underlined by her contempt for other people even though the text portrays both her mother and Mrs. Freeman in a strongly negative light. It is these negative portrayals of her adult companions that make the text’s overall negative judgment so slight. If Joy were disdaining people who were treating her with respect and who were seen to be kind, nurturing people, this would make her a much more negative character. The text protects her by making those people she is rejecting the kind of person whom one is inclined in fact to look down upon. However, despite this protection, it is still hard to argue that, although it is impossible to deny that Joy has been dealt an incredibly bad hand in life, that acting the way she does is in fact good.

[11]Joy Hopewell attempted to “achieve” blindness as one way to deal with the pain, both psychological and physical, of having lost her leg at the age of ten. She did this in part as an attempt to counter her mother’s deliberately ignoring the enormity of what had had happened to her daughter. She developed the strategy of finding alternate ways of establishing her identify, principally in seeking a Ph.D. in philosophy which gave her a platform from which to scorn the world from she felt herself excluded. Underneath the anger she trumpeted to the world was a deep sadness which powered this anger. The index of how powerful her sadness was was the very persistence and implacability of her anger. The text understands and sympathizes with Joy’s dilemma and accepts, in part, the necessity of someone in her position’s needing to defend herself against being overwhelmed by the helplessness she feels about being excluded from the world of romance and pleasure theoretically open to everyone. However, she darkness of the fate to which she condemns herself by taking this path is ultimately seen as tipping the scales against her way of handling herself.

[1] Statement of hypothesis, introductory paragraph

[2] Summary of body paragraph(s)

[3] Wrap-up sentence

[4] Topic sentence

[5] Passage

[6] Translation

[7] Summary

[8] Conscious discussion

[8a] Description and analysis of textual situation

[8b] Description and analysis of the background of the textual situation and integration of this background with analysis of textual situation

[9] Subconscious discussion

[10] Text’s view

[11] Conclusion

Guidelines for Introductory and Concluding Paragraphs

In your opening paragraph, you should begin with a general statement of your hypothesis: [1] "In 'The Veldt' George is the source of the family's problems because for most of the time he is unable to see past his infatuation with the technology." Then you will have summaries of your body paragraphs. For each body paragraph you will have a label sentence which is essentially your paragraph's topic sentence followed by a summary which will be proportionate to the length of your body paragraph. The rought proportion will be a 1 ½ page discussion will require a four-sentence summary.

For example:

[2]George is the one most responsible for what happens in "The Veldt" because he intentionally blinds himself to what is going on. George's low self-esteem leads him to try to find some value for himself outside himself. What he latches onto is the amazing technology of the house and nursery which he brings into his family's life. He needs this technology to be perfect so that he can use to support his own foundering idea of himself. Because of this need, George has to blind himself to the possibility of the technology's fallibility without which he would feel himself weak and incapable.

You will note I used not quoted evidence and that I was not summarizing the story. I was summarizing my argument about George and blindness.

For each body paragraph you will one such label sentence and one such summary. If your body paragraph is unusually long--over 1 1/2 pages say--you will probably need about four sentences to summarize your argument. Thus, a three-page paragraph would need an eight-sentence summary.

The final thing in your opening paragraph is your wrap-up sentence. This is a generalization like [3]“These things lead us to see George as the cause of the problems in ‘The Veldt.’” This is so that your introductory paragraph doesn't just end with the last sentence of the last summary.

Your conclusion is just a shortened version of your introduction. Here a 1 ½ page discussion will require only two-sentences to summarize it. You may also add here any personal reflections you wish about the value of the story for you.

Fundamentals of Writing Papers

For the papers you write for me, the basis of what you write are the words from the text that you choose to discuss. After you choose your passage and put it in your paper, everything after that should be dedicated to exploring the meaning of the word from that passage you are working on.

The sample paper I have given you, based on Flannery O’Connor’s story “Good Country People,” contains all the basic parts that each of your papers should have.

The paragraph has 7 elements

[1] The topic sentence

[2] The passage

The passage you choose to write about should be at least one sentence long, but it should only be as long as you need to provide a context for the word you are going to write about. Sometimes if you are dealing with dialogue, you might want to include the preceding sentence so that the context of the sentence containing the word you are writing about will be clear. The passage should be indented. Each passage that you use should be properly cited. (This is covered on the Bibliography and Parenthetical Notation hand-out.)

[3] The translation

Immediately after the passage, you should take the specific word you are going to be talking about out of the passage and translate it.” When Joy is said to have ‘achieved’ blindness, this suggests the self-consciousness of her refusal to acknowledge things she did not want to acknowledge.” What this does is to allow you to propose what you think the feeling behind the word you are analyzing is. You are not defining the word. Obviously “achieved” does not mean this. This is your interpretation of what you think the significance of the word is for the character in question. When you do your translation, don’t just restate the text: “When Joy is said to have ‘achieved’ blindness, this means she became blind.” This does not help you. What you say here will be your initial guide to what you are trying to say. What the translation is will not always be clear when you start. If so, just skip this step for now, and proceed to your discussion. Eventually, your discussion will lead you to a perspective on the text that will allow you to formulate a reasonable translation.

[4] Context

This is what I call 3-4 boring sentences. “Joy, now thirty-two, had had one of her legs shot off in a hunting accident when she was ten. The woman whom she is ignoring here, Mrs. Freeman, works for her mother, and although she is highly annoying, Joy’s mother has determined not to let this deter her from employing her as she is someone who can be relied upon, unlike the white trash she has had the misfortune to hire previously.” This is simply the narrative background necessary to understand generally what is going on in the passage. You do not want to say anything interesting because that will be taking away from what you will be saying in your discussion. Something is interesting if it amounts to an interpretation of what is going on in the text. This may involve some speculation, but it should only involve things that you take to be facts. However, we do not need to speculate about who shot Joy, what they were hunting for, and so on. Just the most basic facts as the story presents them (or implies what they are).

[5] Conscious discussion

When you begin your conscious discussion, I think it is a good idea to restate a version of your translation to signify you are moving from the summary mode of the summary to the analytical mode of the discussion. This should include both the textual word in quotation marks and the word “conscious.” “So when Joy is said to have ‘achieved’ blindness, this suggests her conscious intention to block Mrs. Freeman out of her life.” These quotation marks are not plagiarism quotation marks, but rather bull's-eye quotation marks which show what the word we are talking about is. Given this, we need not be scrupulous about what form of the word we happen to be using which is put in quotation marks--"love," "loving," "loved" and so on should all be put in quotation marks. This helps you and me keep track of what you're trying to do and this also keeps you on track in pursuing the goal you should be pursuing, namely exploring the meaning of the textual word you have chosen.

There is, when you are choosing a textual word, the possibility that the character is not saying what he means. In "The Veldt," when Peter says, "There's no Africa in the nursery," he is obviously lying about that so this is his public meaning. In "The Lame Shall Enter First," when Rufus says, "You don't smash up things when you have everything you want," it is not clear whether he really means this or not. The situation when the character does not mean what he or she is saying leads us to use what I call the public/private approach. Peter’s public meaning is straightforward: “You are wrong; there is not Africa in the nursery.” You should discuss this meaning, as Peter means it, first, simply describing what he means. This will frequently not be very long or very interesting. However, then you will say what he means privately. A private meaning is what a character means but does not say publicly. It is rare that we use the public/private distinction. Always assume that this IS NOT THE CASE. If it turns out the character does not mean what he or she says, we can proceed to the public/private option. Also remember, that the public/private option, is a division of the conscious discussion. You will not have both a public/private discussion and a conscious discussion; the one substitutes for the other.

[5a] In your conscious discussion, you should begin with as intensive a description as you can of the situation as it exists in the text. You can see what this is in the writing sample, beginning at the bottom of page 2 to the top of page 4. How long any given description will vary, but my general instructions are to say as much as you can say about any topic that presents itself to you. This is contrary to the rule you have probably been taught which is to be as brief and concise as you can be. FORGET ABOUT THAT. In your conscious and subconscious discussions you should periodically use your textual word, putting it in quotation marks. This should not be every sentence, and not every other sentence, but periodically, so that I know and you know and I know that you know what you are doing. What you should be doing is to describe as fully as possible what your word means in the text in which it is found in the text.

[5b] Once you have described the situation as fully as you can, you may fill in with whatever historical data, so to speak, that you feel is relevant. It will frequently be the case that you will not know precisely what these facts are, but you will have already speculated about the psychological and emotional aspects of the character in your description of the textual situation. This will be going a bit further, even to the extent at times of simply hypothesizing what you think happened even though you cannot prove it. But as Martin Luther said, “Sin boldly.” We will, of course, talk about what is reasonable in our conferences so that you will not be venturing out onto the ice alone.

[6] Subconscious discussion

As with the beginning of your conscious discussion, you should mark the beginning of your subconscious discussion with another version of the translation, using “subconscious,” the textual word, and whatever issue you think the word suggests at the subconscious level. “Subconsciously, when Joy ‘achieved’ her blindness, this points to the sadness and feeling of loss that she tries to cover up with her anger.” The subconscious feelings are those feelings that influence our behavior without our knowing it. You have a lot more freedom here than in the conscious discussion because there will not be any explicit evidence as to what these feelings are, but they should, of course, make sense relative to what you said the conscious feelings are. The same directives concerning saying as much as you can say and using the textual word periodically in your discussions apply here as well.

[7] The text’s view

The text’s view is a concept I have developed to ask about what the dominant values of a text are. We will ask many times whether what a character says or does is good or bad for the text. The text’s view is what is being asked about in asking whether an idea or an action is good or bad. There is definitive answer to this question although killing somebody is mostly going to be bad, and helping somebody is mostly going to be good. However, most situations in the texts we are going to be reading are more complicated than this. When you begin the text’s view section, you should begin it in a comparable way to how you began the conscious and subconscious discussions. “In the text’s view when Joy ‘achieves’ blindness, this is both good and bad.” In many, but not all instances, there will be both good and bad aspects to the word you have been analyzing. The way to carry out your discussion of the text’s view is to begin “’It is good in that…,” and then describe in what way it is good. Then you will say “It is bad in that…,” and then describe in what way it is bad. Then you will need to choose whether it is overall good or bad. Do not say it is equally good and bad. Choose. It does not have to be 100-0; it can be 51-49. If you don’t like what you have said, say the other thing.

A couple of issues regarding the text’s view. First, it is the “text’s” view, not the “text” view. Second, the text’s view does not concern simply what happened. “It is the text’s view that X was angry.” The text’s view concerns whether the person’s being angry was good or bad, as is the case with Joy in our writing sample.

Paper Assignment #2 A Streetcar Named Desire

Write a paper on either Blanche, Stanley, or Stella. Use 1-3 passages to show what you think are the main aspects of the character.

There will be a research component of this paper that will be graded separately. I will hand out an essay on Streetcar entitled “Drama of Intimacy and Tragedy of Incomprehension: A Streetcar Named Desire Reconsidered” by Bert Cardullo. I will also give you a sheet of forty-four study questions on the Cardullo essay. We will discuss the essay in class for two days. You will then choose between one and three questions to respond to based on your understanding of Streetcar. Your purpose will be to assess the reasonableness of the points Cardullo is making relative to the play. In writing this 1000-word response, you will begin by simply putting down the first question, and then making an argument as to whether you think the point he is making accords with your understanding of the play. You may quote the text in making your points, but be sure that when you quote the text, you explain why you think the quoted passage supports your argument concerning the validity of Cardullo’s argument.

Otherwise, the second paper will be written along exactly the same lines as the first.

The paper will be due December 13.