My Final Essay: Edgar Rice Burroughs

I've submitted my final essay and, after my peer responses next week, I'll be done with the class. So, I'll have some final reflections when that is done... but for now, I am very glad to have ended up with my seven little essays about mirrors. Pretty nifty. Now if only I could figure out how to get myself to Wonderland, or to Mars - either one will do!

I've published the essay over at my writing portfolio: Edgar Rice Burroughs: An Uncanny Death.

(image source)

Invisible Man: Memento Mori; Memento Videri

For the first time so far, I actually ENJOYED writing the perfunctory 320-worrd essay for class this week. In part, this was because Invisible Man was a wild book to read, full of surprises, hilarious and horrifying at the same time - and I had never read it before! Most of all, though, it was because I invented a new Latin proverb to go with the essay... Memento videri ... :-)

I've published the essay over at my writing portfolio: The Invisible Man: Memento Mori; Memento Videri.

(image source)

The Oval Portrait 2012

As a reward for having dutifully written four analytical essays, I chose to do something creative for the fifth submission. I was very pleased that I was able to include the images! The WYSIWYG editor for the submissions form box does not have an "insert image" link, but it does let you enter HTML - and sure enough, it let me type in the img tags. So, the images are included, too!

I had so much fun doing this - so much more fun than I would have had writing an essay. I first became acquainted with "The Oval Portrait" because there is a chapter dedicated to Poe's story in The Portrait of the Lover, a wonderful book written by Maurizio Bettini (Italian classicist and author of so many fascinating books and articles), which I translated into English back when I was in graduate school (the Italian title is Il ritratto dell'amante). The book is a collection of folklore and legends related to "the portrait of the lover" and the way that lovers and their images both complete one another but can also compete with one another. Highly recommended!

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"I don't know, Paul. The ultrasound, it's kind of ... blurry."

"No, Linda, really - it's the perfect Twitter avatar."

"But she's not even born yet."

"She's coming; I can feel it," Linda screamed as she reached for her husband's hand, but Paul had his hands full with the video camera.

"Look this way, honey! Perfect! I'm using the MiFi to stream the video live. Smile, honey!"

Linda screamed again. And the baby was born. Paul rushed home to edit the video and upload it to YouTube. By the time Linda and the baby came home, the video had over four million hits.

Everyone said Baby Girl was of the rarest beauty, not a happier baby in the world. But her dad... well, no one really knew what to think. Over ten thousand pictures at Flickr, all those videos at the Baby Girl YouTube channel...

"Paul, honey, don't you think that's enough?" Linda was starting to get worried.

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The baby was crying, "Waah! Waah" Linda turned to Paul and said, "I told you the light from the webcam was making her upset. We don't need a webcam in the nursery."

But Paul didn't hear anything, not the baby crying, not his wife's words. He was busy tweeting from his iPhone.

"Paul, oh my god, come here, Paul! Something's wrong with the baby!"

"Just a second!" Paul shouted back from his home office. "Just a second... I just need to update her Facebook status. Wow, this Timeline thing is great." He went running into the nursery, carrying his iPad. "This Timeline is Life itself!"

Then he saw Linda, weeping over their dead child.

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Note: In Poe's "The Oval Portrait," the artist drains his wife's life by painting her portrait. This cyberdad drains the life from his baby as he creates her Facebook Timeline.

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Works Cited.
Poe, Edgar Allan (1842). "The Oval Portrait."

Images:
Anon. "Cute Angel Baby" image. Pictures88.com.
Pullara, Sam. Fetus sonogram. Wikipedia.
Surfraser. Live Childbirth video at YouTube.

My Essay Portfolio: Our MIrror Selves

I've mentioned before that I think it would be so much better for people to have a writing portfolio, rather than just a disjointed series of essays. Even if the essays are not on related topics, putting them into a portfolio is a still a good idea - plus, it would encourage people to REVISE their essays after getting the feedback (what's the point of feedback really, unless you are committed to doing some revision...?).

So, thanks to the power of Google Sites, I have created a portfolio website for my essays in this class. My students use Google Sites to create their project portfolios in my class, so it felt good to go through the same process they do in building my little website today. If you would like information on getting started with Google Sites, a free web publishing service offered by Google, here are the instructions I share with my students: Google Sites Tips.

Meanwhile, here is a link to my new website: Coursera Portfolio: Our Mirror Selves.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

As I've mentioned previously, I was hoping to find a common theme to use to make my mini-essays for the class into a coherent piece of writing, using each essay to explore the theme from a different angle. With the first week and the Brothers Grimm, I was really taken by the proof-tokens in Cinderella and The Robber Bridegroom, so I wrote my essay about that, thinking that I would like a "proofs of identity" as my general theme. It's a topic that is of long-standing interest for me and one that I could feel confident I would find cropping up in every book for the class; basically, it's a social and literary conundrum that crops up everywhere. Over the past few weeks, though, I've been zooming in on something more specific: the use of the mirror as a proof of identity, as well as the mirror as a deception and the mirror as a gateway. Literal mirrors, and metaphorical mirrors. Once I realized that I would be going in this direction, my Grimm essay really did not fit properly, so I decided to write a new Grimm essay today, one that will fit more nicely into the evolving collection of essays. So, here is that new essay:

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

The Crane edition of Grimm contains only two stories about mirrors, but they are a perfect pair that illustrate the mirror's opposite functions: the reflecting mirror whose images appear real but are not, and the scrying mirror that instead reveals otherwise invisible truths.

In The Little Farmer, the mirror is deceptive, presenting an image that is alluring but unreal. The result in this story is fatal: the Little Farmer tricks the other farmers into drowning themselves by telling them they can gather up a herd of sheep from the bottom of the lake - sheep that were only clouds reflected in the mirror of the water.

In Snow-White, on the other hand, the mirror is a source of truth. This mirror does not just reflect the surface of things; instead, it is a "magic looking-glass," a device for scrying the truth. The evil queen knows that "the looking-glass spoke the truth," and so it did, giving the queen all the information she needed to monitor Snow-White at a distance. Things end badly for the queen, but it is not because she was fooled by an illusion in the mirror; instead, she was undone by Snow-White's own good luck.

In another Grimm story (not included in Crane), there is a truth-telling mirror in the possession of a good princess, rather than a wicked queen. The heroine of the The Crystal Ball has been cursed with an ugly appearance, but she has a truth-telling mirror that reveals her inner beauty, as she explains to the story's hero: "That thou mayst know what I am like, look in the mirror; it does not let itself be misled: it will show thee my image as it is in truth."

So, there are mirrors that lie, as well as mirrors that tell the truth. As for mirrors that provide a portal into another world, we must wait for Alice and her looking-glass to show us the way!

Works Cited:

Crane, Lucy (translator). Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm, with illustrations by Walter Crane (1886). The illustrations on this page also come from this book. Online edition at Project Gutenberg.

Hunt, Margaret (translator). Household Tales (1884). Online edition at Sur La Lune Fairy Tales.

Reading is Fundamental

When I read Shelley's Frankenstein (I had never read it before!), I knew instantly that I wanted to write about the monster discovering those books in the woods. So, I've written my essay (see below), and the mirror theme is definitely taking hold here; I've had mirrors in my last three essays. Since I would really like for there to be a theme that brings all my essays together, just to give the writing project for this class a more coherent purpose, I think I am going to go back and write another Grimm essay. From the start of the semester, I knew I wanted to do identity in some sense - but now I have really zoomed in on the idea of mirrors, doubles, emblems, etc. So, here is my Frankenstein essay and this weekend I'll poke around in the Brothers Grimm to do a mirror essay for that entry also just to try to give the writing a real sense of continuity.

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Reading is Fundamental

"I am self-educated," writes Captain Robert Walton, "and read nothing but [my] Uncle Thomas' books of voyages." He did not choose these books; his Uncle Thomas' library contained no others. Yet in a cruel twist of fate, young Robert was forbidden a sailor's life by his father's dying wish. Even so, Walton went to sea on a voyage foretold in the books of his youth.

Young Victor likewise was enamored of books - specifically, books of alchemy - although his father was dismayed by this choice ("Do not waste your time" he told Victor). The Ingolstadt professors were also appalled (Krempe told him that "every instant that you have wasted on those books is utterly and entirely lost"). Yet the forbidden mysteries tugged at Victor, despite the warnings of his father and professors, and thus he made his monster, pursuing a mad science of transmutation.

And what of the monster's reading habits? He too was shaped by the books of his youth, having found three books in the woods as if by fate: Goethe's Werther, Plutarch's Lives and Milton's Paradise Lost. While the monster is moved by Goethe and Plutarch, he calls Satan "the fitter emblem of my condition" because he too felt "the bitter gall of envy" just as Satan did when he looked upon man, that godly creation.

Paradise Lost is only an emblem, of course; a worse reading experience yet awaits the monster. When he discovers Victor's journal, the monster gazes into a mirror; the journal is about his own self, a "description of my odious and loathsome person." Both Captain Walton and Victor were tempted by the books that they read and so endured paternal rebuke, but the monster was utterly damned by a book written in his father's own hand. Shelley's poor monster might have been better off as Boris Karloff in the 1931 Frankenstein film whose defective brain spared him such bookish suffering.

(The Monster Gazes into a Pool, Lynd Ward: web source)

Self-Reflection: Dracula Essay

I guess this will be my usual routine for the next seven weeks: since the essay-writing is my least favorite part of this course, I will just pound out the essay on Friday night or Saturday morning just to get it over with. Then I can get on with the task of reading, researching and learning things about these marvelous books! I've always found the folklore of mirrors to be something really fascinating. So here is my dutiful essay about mirrors in Dracula, and after posting this I will give myself the treat of prowling around in some old folklore books at Google Books to see what other nifty things I can find about mirrors in folklore. :-)

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Self-Reflection

In Through the Looking Glass, Alice became her own mirror self. Count Dracula, however, has no mirror self. Early on, Harker notes the lack of mirrors in the Count's home; later, he sees that the Count casts no reflection in his shaving mirror. The Count understands the danger posed by the mirror's revelation. He grabs the mirror and smashes it, calling it a "foul bauble of man's vanity." But do we look in the mirror only out of vanity? No, for Lucy has looked in the mirror to learn how to read herself, as she writes to Mina, "Do you ever try to read your own face? I do, and I can tell you it is not a bad study." Poor Mina will have her own mirror crisis; looking into a mirror, she sees the foul "red mark" on her forehead and "knew that [she] was still unclean." The Count, however, can never know himself in this way; he cannot read his own face because he can never see it reflected back to himself: he can't see himself as others see him.

Just as Stoker denies the Count a mirror image, he denies him a place in the documents that mirror for us the events of the novel. We have the words of the Count recorded by others, but the Count is never reflected in the mirror of a diary. This absence makes the Count strange to us, and also strange to himself. That makes me wonder what would have happened if Seward had tried to record the Count on the phonograph. I imagine that just as the Count's face cannot be seen in a mirror, his voice could not be recorded by a machine. Just a guess, though: what a fascinating experiment that would have been for Seward and Van Helsing to conduct in the name of vampire science!

Laughing and Grief: My Alice Essay

Before going to bed last night, I decided to finish my essay for this week. Writing the essay is without a doubt my very least favorite part of the class (more on that in a separate post), so I just set a timer for 15 minutes, pretended it was a pop quiz in class, and wrote the thing. I had already decided last week that to try to make the essays more palatable, I was going to write on the same theme every week, giving myself some sense of continuity, even if the class is not doing anything to promote continuity (more on that in a separate post also)... and the theme I chose is IDENTITY. Reading the Alice books (which I LOVE), I was not surprised to see that there are wonderful "identity crises" in each and every chapter of both books, and it really helped me to focus my reading to keep an eye out for those moments. As for turning it into a 300-word essay, I say: meh. But that's what I say about essay-writing in general, and nothing in the class has changed my mind about that. Anyway, I've pasted in my essay below.

I've also pasted in below my randomizing script that displays 100+ illustrations by John Tenniel with accompanying quotes from the books... now that was something I enjoyed! It took me around a couple hours to make the script (harvest images, put into an HTML table, add the quotes), and I would call that time well spent (while the 15 minutes spent on the essay is time I would have rather spent reading other people's blogs or prowling the discussion boards). With 100 images popping up at random, it's not likely that you'll see the same image twice in succession - and if you do, that would be such a mightily random event that you are free to accord it supernatural importance, ha ha. There's a "more" link after each quote which will take you to a page where you can get a 200-pixel wide or 400-pixel wide script that you can add to your own blog or webpage if you want. As you can see if you look over to the right, I've put the 200-pixel version into the sidebar of this blog so that Alice is now with me whenever I am doing work for the class; I like the idea that she and all her Wonderland and Looking-Glass friends can provide a sort of blessing over the course that way. I built the script using RotateContent.com, a tool that one of my students and I constructed years ago. The student is quite the genius fellow and he very wisely chose javascript, which is still going strong in the world of dynamic online content all these years later. Someday I need to learn how to write my own javascripts, but for now, I love using RotateContent.com to create date-based or random widgets whenever I have a couple of hours to spare. I feel like I get a big return on that investment of time, far more so than for any essay. Enjoy! :-)

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Laughing and Grief

One thing that makes Alice a "curious child" is that she likes to pretend to be two people. Someone who would "box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself" is ideally suited for the weird games of Wonderland and the land beyond the Looking-Glass, where our mirror selves have lives of their own, multiplying identity into ever-expanding realms of absurdity and uncertainty. Alice habitually questions her own identity, but playfully, as if her identity crisis were a game: "Who in the world am I? Ah, THAT'S the great puzzle!" she thinks to herself, just before she bursts into tears because she is "so VERY tired of being all alone here!" Playfulness is one aspect of Alice's identity crisis; loneliness and tears are the flipside of the puzzles and the games.

At its most extreme, Alice must question not just her identity but her own reality when Tweedledee and Tweedledum torment the poor girl by telling her that she is only something that the Red King is dreaming. Alice bursts into tears, crying, "I AM real!" Tweedledum, however, persists, telling Alice that even her tears are not real. Yet Alice is "half-laughing through her tears." Good for Alice: faced with a crisis of identity, or of reality itself, you might laugh, or cry, or both - just as Alice does. When Alice returns to the world of Dinah and the kittens (her reality, a fiction for us), she is still pondering the king and his dream. "Let's consider," she says playfully to the kitten, "who it was that dreamed it all." Wonderful Alice: lonely though she may be, she is never alone. If it turns out that we too are lonely characters in someone else's dream, let's hope we might cry and then laugh about it as easily as Alice does.

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Week 1: Grimm Story Retold - The Robber Bridegroom

As I mentioned in a previous post, writing essays is not my favorite thing to do... but I love to make up stories. In the classes I teach, the students write their own versions of traditional myths and legends and I enjoy their stories so much (here are some past projects). For this class, I am going to make my own stories (provided I can find the time!), just as my students do - and I have given myself 1000 words as a maximum limit, the same as the limit for the stories in my own classes. For Grimm, I knew I wanted to do my own version of The Robber Bridegroom (here are my thoughts on that story), telling something about the backstory of that mysterious old woman. Who is she exactly? I think my answer to that question does not contradict what the Brothers Grimm tell us in their story... but it may also come as a surprise! Here is my story:

The woman had waited a very long time, not sure if the day would ever come… but it had. She heard the bird croaking its useless warning - "Turn back, turn back, thou pretty bride" - and when she climbed up the cellar stairs and saw the visitor in the doorway, illuminated by the light of the setting sun, she knew: it was her own daughter, now fully grown. The robber had taunted her for years with this threat: "If you don't serve me well, wench, I will go have my way with your daughter. She must be getting all grown up by now," he would say. The woman had been a servant - no, a slave - to this band of robbers ever since that day, long ago, when they had abducted her from the cow pasture. She had told her husband to watch the baby when she went to fetch the cow home, and that was the last time she had seen them. The years had passed, and the chief of the robbers had never ceased making threats about her daughter - and oh, how many times had she regretted ever having let the truth slip from her lips, that fatal mistake she had made when they dragged her away and she had begged the robbers to let her go home to her husband and her poor little girl.

But now, she saw that little girl, all grown up, standing on the threshold. So many thoughts and feelings welled up inside her, but she kept calm and betrayed no emotion on her face. Most of all, she fought down the panic and despair at her own bad luck: if it were morning or even afternoon, they could have made their escape, but it was sundown, and the robbers would already be on their way home, carrying their latest victim with them along the path of ashes, the only safe way to reach the house through the darkness of the woods. Yes, it was too late to just make a break for it. They would have to wait until the robbers were asleep before running away, and there was not even enough time to tell this poor girl what was happening. "Listen to me, girl," she said urgently. "This is a den of robbers. You thought you would find your husband here, but you will find only your death unless you do exactly as I tell you. When the robbers finally go to sleep tonight, you and I will run away together but now you must hide behind this cask" - she was already rushing the girl down the stairs to the cellar - "and not make a sound no matter what you see, no matter what you hear. Do you understand? Not a sound."

And just as she uttered these last words, the robbers came bursting through the door, laughing and shouting, as they made their way down into the cellar for their grisly night's work. The less said about that, the better. They had brought home another girl, she was a red-head this time the woman noticed, but it was better not to notice. They killed the poor girl and cut her up and then started making a fuss about where her ring finger had gone. The woman was sure one of the robbers had pocketed the ring finger and the ring upon it; no matter, the main thing was just to get them to leave off arguing and sit down to supper. Finally she got them to come to the table and eat… and before she poured the wine, she put a sleeping draught into it, making sure the murderers would sleep even more deeply than usual.

She then rushed to the cask and found her daughter curled up there, shivering with fear and horror. She patted the girl gently on the shoulder but dared not make any sound, and pulled her along up the stairs and out of the house. As they stood there in the moonlight, the woman saw an amazing sight: the path was illuminated by a gentle green glow, something the woman had never seen before. The girl gasped and smiled a tiny smile. "It's the peas and lentils," she said. "I scattered them as I came here and look, they have sprouted! It's beautiful, isn't it?" As the girl turned to look the woman in the face, she saw that the woman was crying. Being a tender-hearted girl, she tried to embrace the woman and comfort her, but the woman pushed her away and said, "No time for that now, no time. We must run for our lives!"

And so they ran and ran along the path through the woods that glowed in the moonlight. The woman thought with every step: what would she say? what would she do? Was this a dream? Had it all been a dream? Was this really her daughter here beside her? "Morning will tell," she thought to herself. "I will see what the morning brings."

And so, just at dawn, they reached the mill stream and the woman saw the familiar house. She fell to her knees, exhausted and weeping. The girl was concerned, and bent down … and at last the woman embraced her and sobbed, "My daughter, my daughter." And the miller came running out from the house, worried sick about where his daughter had been all night - and there she was, his daughter… and his wife. They wept, they laughed, and wept again. And when they could weep and laugh no more, they went into the house and recounted all that had happened. Then, to the horror and surprise of her mother and father, the girl reached into her pocked and pulled out the finger of the dead girl, with the golden ring upon it. "Don't worry, my dear mother and father. We will destroy this robber, we will destroy him forever."

To find out how that happened, you will need to read the old story for yourself.



Image source: Dark woods by Mathias Erhart at Flickr.

Week 1: Grimm Essay - The Golden Token of Proof

Since I had gotten all excited about maybe writing a short story for the assignment, I was definitely bummed that the assignment states very explicity, "write an essay..." - oh well! Since I am not a big fan of essay-writing, I decided just to get it out of the way. I did like the challenge of getting it down to under 320 words; for sure my little essay improved as a result of that (see below). I'm fascinated by questions of identity, proof of identity, doubles, disguises, etc. So I figured I would write an "identity" essay for each of these essay assignments. People reading them won't see the interplay and development of ideas from essay to essay, but it will make it more meaningful for me - and the theme of identity is ALL OVER THE PLACE in the books we are reading for this class. Plus, that will give me a focus for my reading too, looking for identity motifs.

And now that this not-so-fun task is out of the way, I can spend some more time enjoying the Brothers Grimm and go ahead and write my story just to satisfy myself. For example, I really REALLY enjoyed myself telling my own version of the Robber Bridegroom! Meanwhile, I'm curious what this whole peer response thing will be like. These little essays are so short, I would actually be glad (and curious) to read more than just four of them! :-)

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Proof: how do you prove who you are, or prove what you saw? In the world of Grimm, you might need a golden proof token, magical or realistic; both kinds of tokens are powerful. For a magical token, consider the golden slipper which allows the prince to recognize his Aschenputtel. The slipper is not just the right size (plenty of women could have the same shoe size as our heroine); instead, the shoe mysteriously bestows identity on Cinderella, making her recognizable to the prince. The prince did not know her at first, but after she puts on the slipper, "the prince looked in her face, he knew again the beautiful maiden that had danced with him, and he cried, 'This is the right bride!'" It makes sense that in a story filled with magic, the identity token would have a magical quality; this is not your usual shoe. In a more realistic story, "The Robber Bridegroom," we find instead a realistic (and gruesome) golden token. The nameless heroine can dramatically prove that the story she has told is not a dream at all but the real truth because she possesses the real finger of the murdered woman, a finger bearing a golden ring. This golden token allows the wedding party to recognize the robber bridegroom for what he truly is - a murderer: "The robber, who during the story had grown deadly white, sprang up, and would have escaped, but the folks held him fast, and delivered him up to justice." In both fairy tales, justice is done, thanks to the proof provided by the magical token of a golden shoe or the horrifying but realistic token of a golden ring on a dead woman's finger. So, the next time you show your driver's license to a TSA agent, just be glad you don't have to meet the Grimm gold standard to prove who you are!

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