Striking Observations from the Wife of Bath's Tale

From Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales:

• The Wife of Bath shows us that women of the Middle Ages could actually be a force to be reckoned with--not just a pretty face, a passive housewife, or a damsel in distress.

• I've actually met women in my own life just like the wife of Bath. They were confident, self-centered, and talkative, yet interesting and alluring.

Once again, The Canterbury Tales shows us that history changes the world but human nature stays the same. In the 21st century we still have the same jealousies, sympathies, personalities, and social ordering. The setting is different of course. Now we have the Internet, air conditioning, and auto-tune, for example, but human nature is the same.

Reference:
Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales. ca. 1390. Trans. Burton Raffel. Modern Library. 2008.

The Man of Law's Tale & Social Security

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales  600 years ago, and some of his sources were already centuries old, but what makes Chaucer's tales so amazing today is how relevant they are to life as we know it. "The Man of Law's Tale" is just another amazing example.

This tale begins by describing rich merchants and how they can afford to make mistakes and lose money. Unlike the rest of us, when the rich lose money, they're still rich.

But the main theme of this tale seems to be that God will take care of those who persevere and keep their faith. What I don't get is why some random person, like Constance in this case, has to go through such horrendous testing to prove it. Jesus refused to be tested by the devil, but God put lots of people through tests throughout the Old Testament. People and loved ones were killed, exiled, or tortured, but in the end someone or another was saved because of his or her faith. I imagine Judaism and Islam, sharing roots with Christianity, have similar stories (maybe even the same stories).

The Greeks had similar stories, too. Their gods toyed with mortals, giving them certain gifts or besetting them with various challenges. It was a kind of game to them as they worked through various alliances and rivalries among themselves, but it was a lot of suffering and hardship for the mortals caught up in their games.

In the same way, rich people and nobles play with common people. In this tale, Constance was sent off to marry the Sultan of Syria, irregardless of her own feelings, but mainly to improve political ties for Rome and the Vatican. 

Note: You'd think Constance, the Emperor's daughter, would be a noble, too, but as in the "Knight's Tale", women here are given lower status, so she was more like a subject than a noble.

The powers that be might win or lose in their games, but in the end they're hardly affected. Their subjects, however, go through all kinds of hardships and suffering--often unbeknownst to the superiors that put them through it all.

I'm reminded of the movie Trading Places--all the troubles and life-changing events the characters went through were caused by just a simple bet between a couple of old rich guys for their amusement.

And I'm reminded of George W. Bush arguing to privatize Social Security. Part of his argument was that people need to be allowed to make risks in their investments so they can outperform Social Security. One problem, though, is that most people can't afford risks! When a rich person makes a bad investment, he can still be rich. But when a poor person makes a bad investment, he can lose everything.

Another problem, of course, is the mathematical impossibility of everybody outperforming everybody else!

When people lose their money, it's not as if it vanished. Someone else got it. Public schools don't teach economics--so the public is set up to fail. We cannot allow privatization of Social Security until public schools teach 12 years of economics and finance. Otherwise an influential minority (the rich) is going to outperform the under-educated majority (the public) and take all the money for themselves.

So what's so amazing about The Canterbury Tales is, even though they rode horses back then and didn't have electricity or the printing press or just about everything we depend upon everyday, they still faced the same human issues we face today. People still endure hardships and manipulation ... and life still goes on. "The Man of Law's Tale" is just as relevant today as it was 600 years ago.

References:
Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales. ca. 1390. Trans. Burton Raffel. Modern Library. 2008.
Trading Places. Dir. John Landis. Perf. Dan Ackroyd, Eddie Murphy, and Jamie Lee Curtis. Paramount, 1983. Film.

Fahrenheit 451 and 1984

The frightening thing about George Orwell's 1984 is how extreme it is, but the frightening thing about Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is how possible it is!

In 1984, the party forcefully took control of the population and forcefully kept it. Orwell apparently had Russia in mind when he wrote the book, but today, North Korea is the only example of such a dystopia. The rest have moved away from communist totalitarianism and I don't know how much longer North Korea will last.
  
In contrast, the people of 451 were not forced into dystopia. The did it to themselves. Over time they gave up literature, critical thinking, and everything else that might cause complicated or unhappy thoughts. To mindlessly occupy themselves they turned towards mass culture, spectator sports, superficial dramas, and thrill seeking. Once they gave up thinking for themselves they allowed themselves to be manipulated by their government. Schools began teaching kids at successively earlier ages to fall in line with everybody else, filling their heads with useless facts to occupy their brains, and promoting sports and thrill seeking to keep them too busy and too tired for original thinking. Anyone who was different was quickly ostracized--killed if necessary. People's minds became so shallow that life as we know it became meaningless, and it was only in rare, undistracted moments, that someone might notice how empty their lives were.

The first time I read 451 it was just an adventure story with some scattered boring parts. It was about a guy trying to escape a corrupt system. It could have been Harrison Ford in The Fugitive or Will Smith in Enemy of the State or any number of Hollywood escape/action/adventure stories.

The second time I read it, however, I noticed the "boring" parts actually contained some interesting commentary, very relevant to today, which was rather prophetic of Ray Bradbury, who wrote it back in 1950.

By the 3rd time I read it, I finally realized I had it all backwards. The "boring" parts were the meaningful and cerebral parts of the real story, and they were occasionally interrupted by action sequences!

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury predicted political correctness, a dominating sports culture, our obsession with TV dramas and so-called reality shows, and constantly listening to music through ear-buds. He predicted these things will occupy our minds with superficial thoughts and move us, as a population, away from reading and critical thinking. These are very realistic things that are happening today! We're not all the way there yet, but we do seem to be going in that direction. Let's add to these our recent trends of federalizing education, promoting test scores over substance, and so-called social media, viral videos, and video games, which are all done in isolation without real interpersonal contact.

The book also includes an interesting interview at the end where Bradbury says he believes we're not really headed into dystopia ourselves, which is reassuring--but only as long as our schools continue to teach reading and writing at an early age. As long as people can read and write, they can think for themselves, and we're safe from Fahrenheit 451.

But what if some day we do let this happen? We'll enter a new Dark Age, and some day, maybe 2 or 3 centuries later, we'll come out of it. And that won't be the first time, will it?

References
Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451. 50th Anniversary Edition. 1953,1979,1981,1982. Del Rey.
George Orwell. 1984: a novel. Signet. 1949,1990.

Did Dracula Save Jonathan Harker?

In Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), it seems to me that Dracula treated Jonathan Harker special... He did not victimize him, he protected him from harm, and then let him get away. In the end, of course, it was Harker that destroyed him.

Obviously Dracula clung to his undeadness (is there a better word for that?), but as he was destroyed, he showed an expression of relief as his soul was finally freed from the vampire's curse. (Only Mina noticed it) It's kind of like death in general. If the afterlife is so wonderful, why do we cling to the present life?

I doubt Dracula planned ahead so that Harker could be the one to free him. Dracula was a selfish exploiter. While undead he needed Harker to help him buy property in London and learn how to fit in with the English population. Dracula obviously intended to fit in unnoticed and exploit victims from the unsuspecting population.

But why did he let Harker go when he was finished with him? Was he in a hurry to get to London? Was he so selfish that he didn't care to provide for the 3 sister vampires (or brides or whoever they were--the book wasn't clear on that)?

The short story Dracula's Guest was supposedly the deleted first chapter of the book. In it Dracula protects Harker from wolves and other evils after he gets lost in the woods on his way to the castle. Obviously Dracula needed Harker to arrive and bring the deed and teach him about life in England, but again, why did he let Harker get away? Especially after he hit him with a shovel?

I guess Dracula was just in a hurry to get to England and assumed Harker would just die in the wilderness. (Villians always assume that of the heroes, don't they?) But Harker got away, joined Van Helsing, and eventually destroyed Dracula.


Reference:
Bram Stoker. Dracula [Kindle Edition]. 1897.

This Side of Paradise (1920)

This Side of Paradise (1920) was Fitzgerald's first novel. He took the title from "Tiare Tahiti", a romantic poem by Rupert Brooke. I had never heard of him before, but apparently he was an influential poet at the time. He's mentioned several times throughout the book and apparently helped pave the way towards the sexual liberation of the Roaring Twenties.

Note: "Tiare Tahiti" is about a romantic encounter Brooke had with a native girl in Tahiti. He later left her but found fame writing about sexual liberation. As a father of 2 daughters, it seems to me sexual liberation excites women more than men but also leaves them with more of the consequences!

Anyway, This Side of Paradise concerns the initiation of a young Amory Blaine into adulthood. The first 8 chapters cover his growth from a teenager through college. His background is so much like Fitzgerald's that it's obvious the novel is mostly autobiographical--which makes it very real. The things that Amory goes through are much the same as Fitzgerald went through and very much the same as every young man--and many young women, too, I'm sure--go though in their lives. Most people keep those things private, but Fitzgerald found the courage to share them with the world. And that brought him his first commercial success.

So what did Amory go through? Well compared to Fitzgerald's other novels and short stories, This Side of Paradise, except for some of the romantic parts, seems a bit abstract and tends to ramble. Towards the end, you realize this is very lifelike, because all those abstract and rambling sections are what's going on in Amory's mind. He's trying to figure out his status relative to his peers, which groups or clubs to join, who to be seen with, who he can use, etc. Friends, acquaintances, and lovers come and go. Some people turn out to be the opposite he expected. For a while he joins sports just to get the hero worship he sees athletes enjoying.

Amory eventually reaches a conclusion about himself. The final chapter begins with the climax, ironically at the lowest point in his life. He's on a bank of the Hudson River, friendless, moneyless, godless, and wondering what he's doing with his life, when suddenly he starts walking across New Jersey! During that walk he has flashbacks, meets an old friend's father, gathers his thoughts and emotions, and finally realizes he knows himself.

This story is so much like the stories from the 70's, my teen years, where people set off to find themselves. They're basically the same story.

I have to admit, though, as a literal-minded type, I never quite understood what they meant by finding themselves. Thinking about it now, I suppose it's finding a purpose in life, finding a role or a niche wherein one feels they can do something meaningful and constructive. Amory didn't know he was looking for himself in the first 8 chapters, but that's what he found at the end.

This Side of Paradise comes to an abrupt but hopeful end. Frankly that was a relief since so many stories end tragically, but this is an initiation story. They're supposed to end hopeful, right?

References:
F. Scott Fitzgerald. This Side of Paradise. Scribner's. 1920.
Rupert Brooke. "Tiare Tahiti". 1914. "Tiare Tahiti by Rupert Brooke". About.com European History. web 2012.
"Rupert Brooke". Wikipedia. web 2012.

Fitzgerald Novels (1920-1925)

This Side of Paradise (1920) was Fitzgerald's first novel. For him it was both a commercial success and a personal achievement: Not only did it give him recognition as an author, but it was enough to get Zelda to believe in him and marry him. To me, however, much of the story is rambling and abstract and the plot is mostly devoid of action. Assuming it's autobiographical though, it is remarkable that he had so many of the same experiences and private thoughts I had growing up. While I didn't share my thoughts with the rest of the world, but if he and I had so much in common 50 years apart, maybe a lot of other people do, too, and that's what makes this book so interesting.

The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) is much longer and rambles more, but the plot has more action and the rambling sections are very descriptive of the 1920's lifestyle. In fact I got so involved with the lifestyle, that, at times, I forgot I was reading a story. What's striking about the lifestyle and the characters are that human nature then was the same as it is today! History changes the world, but our lifestyles only change on the surface. Human nature remains the same. It's notable that Twain, Chaucer, Boccaccio, and even the Bible all show us the same thing: human nature is timeless.

The Great Gatsby (1925) is renowned as Fitzgerald's greatest novel and may in fact be the Great American Novel. It is incredibly succinct. Every sentence is meaningful, descriptive, and actively contributes to the plot. It's obvious he consciously incorporated symbols and metaphors throughout and he addresses many subjects Americans can relate to: dreams, ambition, success, failure, and disillusionment. It packs a lot of substance into a small space, it's easy to read and understand, and, as a bonus, is also very descriptive of the lifestyle of the Roaring Twenties.

Tender is the Night (1934) Many people say this is actually Fitzgerald's greatest novel. I haven't read it yet, but it's on my list.

References:
F. Scott Fitzgerald. This Side of Paradise. Scribner's. 1920.
F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Beautiful and the Damned. Scribner. 1922.
F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. Scribner. 1925.
F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tender is the Night. Charles Scribner's Sons. 1934.

One more Dracula theme: Feminism

I've stated before the 3 major themes of Bram Stoker's Dracula are:

1. Exploitation
2. Knowledge & Beliefs (or science vs. superstition)
   
3. God's will be done

Feminism is a 4th theme, but it's not as clearly defined (at least to me). This theme appears mainly in Mina's and Van Helsing's journals, but also in the other men's journals, but to a lessor extent.

On one hand, the men try to protect the women--supposedly the weaker sex--from physical harm and emotional distress. On the other hand, Mina's reasoning and organizational skills prove invaluable and superior to the men's. When they leave her out of their work, for what they believe is for her own safety, they lose their way and immediately realize they need her back.

Aside from that, Mina frequently mentions her frustration at living in the men's world. It is, after all, the Victorian era and men's and women's places are well defined and distinct. Mina obviously senses some overlap and discrimination. Though she may be a typical woman, she's not the stereotypical weak and helpless female.

I'm not sure if Bram Stoker was actually promoting women's rights or if he was just pointing out some inconsistencies. Nor am I sure how this theme fits in with the more obvious themes. Suffice it to say, feminism is another theme of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897).

Reference:
Bram Stoker. Dracula [Kindle Edition]. 1897.