Names and Creation

I'm sitting in a bustling urgent care facility, fighting back nodding off to sleep while reading Frankenstein as I watch three kids coloring a Christmas tree, Santa, and Rudolph, respectively. Then one, talking about his baby sister who will soon be born, pops the question. Or questions. "Where do babies come from? Who makes them? Toys R Us?" 

I'm a teacher's assistant at Korean school, so I see a whole classroom of inquisitive--often to the point of being annoying--three-year-olds each weekend. Recently, I've been using my AP Lit and AP Psych knowledge to, yes, psychoanalyze these innocent three-year-olds. I've noticed that they always want everything to have a name. Even if they don't know what a crayon is made of, they want to know what that exact shade of red-orange that's not really red-orange is called. 

It's not only young children who do that. When we eat something new, the first thing we usually ask is, "What is it called?" rather than "Are there almonds or pecans in the filling of this cookie?" And even then, we want to know the name of the exact nut used. 

There's a certain almost magical quality in a name, defined as a word or set of words by which a person, place, animal, or thing is known, addressed, or referred to. We have the ability to be able to tune out everything else and hear our name being called in a noisy crowd. We literally name everything--from appliances to foods to works of art; even "Untitled" is essentially a name.

And yet, despite this almighty importance that names hold, Frankenstein's creature has no name. What provoked me however, was not only this lack of name, but also whether or not this creature had an identity. Though an identity is comprised of many aspects, a name is arguably most important. When I introduce myself, I don't say, "Hi, I obsess over Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky symphonies, I don't eat to live but live to eat, I seem pretty organized but I'm probably the messiest person you will ever meet, and did I mention I'm a half-OCD perfectionist?" I say, "Hi, my name is Stephanie." It is understood that my name is enough to reveal a part of my identity. But Frankenstein's creature is, essentially, nameless. Being named "human" or "person" would not really be considered a name, and though Frankenstein calls his creation "creature," that cannot count as a name. So the creature has no name; does it have an identity? Why does the creature have urges to kill? Is that part of its identity?

While the creature killing Frankenstein's younger brother William was ironic in its own sense, I felt that the creature's murderous tendencies were a part in his search for an identity--his identity. What makes this horror story so scary and chilling is not in the creature itself; what makes the creature, something who has risen from the dead and is not necessarily scarier than, for example, a zombie or a vampire. What makes Frankenstein's nameless creation is that we as readers don't yet know its identity. Mystery is always scarier than the known. 

Man's Condition: Fate?

Poor Grendel's had an accident. So may you all.
Grendel's last words. And like many last words, last phrases, last breaths, it is confusing. Meaningful, true, but almost indiscernible. What exactly is he saying? Is it a curse? A blessing? I'm still not sure. But I think it has something to do with fate.
Even before he knew what his fate was, Grendel had been desperately trying to change it. He tried speaking with the men, calling "Mercy! Peace! Friend!" to them, trying to alter his inadvertent downfall, his inadvertent transformation into monstrosity. As Grendel died, he was telling us that we can't change fate; it's larger than our lives and our world.
The scenes of Grendel throwing stones at the ram reminded me of Sisyphus, the Greek king punished to rolling a stone up a hill...only to have it come back down. No matter that he could control how quickly he pushed the stone up, or when he did so; it would fall back down anyways. Fate happens, whether we like it or not.
And we don't like it. We spend our whole lives tempting fate. From our first sounds to our first steps, our first words to our first books, from first grade to first job, we change our lives, bit by bit. If we really accepted fate--and, like it or not, everyone's ultimate fate is death--we would just sit there after birth, not crying for food, not taking in our surroundings. In fact, the world's billions of people would not have been born.
Grendel once thought that he alone could change his fate. And then, he gave in to his fate. Dazed and angered by what the dragon had told him--the truth--he wanted to change his fate, to resist, but ended up submitting wholly to his monstrous future. Whatever the dragon had told him, Grendel had not been a monster up to that point; though his identity had been unclear, he had not been what the dragon had foretold his fate to be: man's condition. Man's evil. Man's fate.
In the end, it was Grendel who made his own fate his fate. He became the monster, the evil one, man's condition; he followed and became what he didn't want to follow and didn't want to become. Such was the power that the truth had on him. Such was his mistake. Accident.
I feel like Grendel was warning us. For, the more I think about it, the more I think of Grendel as a human. Perhaps a more disfigured human with a different appetite, but essentially, he is man. Man in that his purpose in life is to find the truth. Both man and Grendel ask the same question: why? Why are we here, now? For what purpose? Who am I? I first thought that man's inability to understand Grendel symbolized his distance from mankind, his inability to ever come to similar terms with man. But Unferth understood him. And doesn't man speak a countless number of languages? If all the world's people were made to have conversation, not many would understand each other.
Like Grendel, I try to change my fate. A short, not-as-smart-as-others-believe, mediocre, Asian girl. What can I accomplish in life? My fate--not withstanding my death--is probably to sit around watching Korean dramas and open up a tofu restaurant. But I refuse to accept that fate. I make goals--often too high--and become disappointed easily. At times I study hard, at others, all I want to do is play. I'm short, but I don't lie about my height or wear heels. I accept my fate when I'm feeling down, I challenge my fate to a duel when I'm feeling particularly hopeful. I too ask, who am I? Why am I here? I too search for the truth. It would be a good idea to heed Grendel's advice. Or should I run away from his curse?

Perhaps man's condition is not Grendel, but fate.

Truth in Perception Part 1

I've barely made a dent (okay, well maybe more like a quarter) in Poisonwood Bible, yet some of the images have struck me so hard. So far, it has been an interesting read, not only because of Barbara Kingsolver's beautiful writing, but also because I've been comparing the Price family to the Anglo-Saxons in Grendel. But more about Grendel later.
I adore Kingsolver's method of telling the Price family story, through each of the female members of the family. She gives the girls of the family the power of storytelling and shows us, through first person narrative, the personality of each family member. I can better understand Orleanna's discomfort and hard efforts to adapt to African life, Leah's almost sycophantic actions toward her father and desires to be the "good kid" of the family, Ruth May's immature simplicity, Rachel's unwillingness to accept the African lifestyle, and Adah's near-depressing passive observational tendencies. The switch from viewpoint to viewpoint--with some accounts of certain stories overlapping, helps to intertwine each character's story together to create a larger picture of the Price family's accommodation to African life and missionary work. In short, it makes for an interesting read. But without a doubt, this novel has literary merit; it is not one of those fast-read adventure novels, where a family encounters savages and has to learn to fight them off--partly because of Kingsolver's poetic writing (I still am unsure as to what the poisonwood tree symbolizes, but I think I'm nearing understanding) and partially because of how she describes the two clashing cultures. Leah Price points out that a large, buff African man is wearing what would be considered a lady's sweater in America. However, in Africa, if a man is wearing it, is it still a lady's sweater? Although the Price girls watch in horror as Mama Tataba brings just-killed chickens into the house to cook for them, are her actions really vulgar and uncivilized? If she is African, should she be subject to the standards of American society? Kingsolver's writing emphasizes a certain tension between the Price family, who have come to convert the Africans to Christianity, to "know the Lord Almighty," and the Africans, who simply want to live their own way of life. What makes the novel so interesting is that though the Price family view the Africans as uncivilized and vulgar, I can see that the Africans have their own organized society. They don't need the Western ideas--or even God--to live their own simple existence. Though Orleanna and the girls balk at the market being every fifth day instead of a certain day of the week, it is obvious that the Africans have their own way of living, and their method of organization is simply different from that of the Americans. They in turn balk at the Price family when the Reverend cuts down the poisonwood tree--doesn't he know that he will get a rash?
Like the Africans, Grendel is very misunderstood. Through Beowulf, he was portrayed as a rash, unthinking monster, a villain. But as we see in Grendel, it's all about perception. Who's really the monster here: Grendel or the Anglo-Saxons? To be continued...

Who I Am

I am always inclined to leave hard-to-answer blogs until the very last minute, these philosophical questions that really have no answer. Who am I? The thing is, I have two answers. I could give you the technical answer: I am a female, more specifically a teenage girl. I am Asian, and I absolutely love to eat. I'm exactly five feet tall, exactly the height at which none of my jeans ever fit me right.
But I have another answer, for I am not a demographic, not a number, not a word. I'm a person, a being, me. When I think of myself, I don't think: Stephanie Chang, AP Lit Student, Korean, 17 years old. Or college applicant: GPA not perfect, but love of learning pretty evident. I think of...well, me.
I'm an optimist.
I find my greatest successes in failure. I may never be able to play guitar while singing; I may never be able to understand Calculus.
I'm a cliche.
I'm that Korean girl who listens to Kpop by day and Shostakovitch and Dvorak by night.
I'm a nerd.
I've read Harry Potter and All the King's Men--and loved them both.
I'm a dreamer.
The girl with high hopes and dreams I will probably never reach: cure cancer. Eradicate AIDS. Invent a car that runs on fat. Train a pack mule to follow me around, carrying my things.
I'm an oxymoron.
I can confidently belt out a song in choir without a problem but begin hyperventilating when I think about college admissions.
I am everything, and yet I am nothing. I was put here on earth by my Lord, my God, to love, to learn, to change the world in some way. I am His special child, a blessing. And yet there are so many other children like me; I am not special. There's no saying that what I do in my lifetime, what I do in this world will make a difference in the end. Perhaps I will live and die away, fading into nothingness, having changed nothing for better or worse.

In the end, I am like Grendel.
I knew there was a reason I didn't like Beowulf (the man, not the poem). It's because I'm the monster.
I hope that I don't physically resemble Grendel, the hairy man-eater who shakes his fists at the sky. But I resemble him in mind. We are both confused, both searching for the truth, the meaning of our lives. I guess I would be half relativist, half determinist. Sure, I have my own morals, my own personal truths and beliefs, but I am under the impression that not everyone has to believe what I believe, not everyone must believe in my God. If someone has a rationale for what he is doing, a meaning behind the way he lives life, I am prone to question but not condemn. I believe that everything has a purpose; whether or not someone or something fulfills that purpose is a totally different story.

I don't know who I am, what my purpose is, why I do what I do. All I am sure of is that I am here right now, I exist, to live. To enjoy life. And figure myself out.

Beowulf: Fake or Fiction?

While I was reading this epic poem, this revered and historical journey, I couldn't help but feel that Beowulf just wasn't real. Maybe it's because I'm not an Anglo-Saxon myself, and I never will be, but I just cannot imagine someone having that much bravery; that much loyalty to his king. Beowulf's descriptions of King Hygelac are almost as if he is describing the Almighty God or some other superior being. It just seems so...fake. Unnatural. I must say, the monsters certainly did not make the story any more believable in my eyes. When Grendel is mentioned to be "loping" towards Heorot, I can't help but imagine this scaly, green (I'm not sure why, but maybe because he lives in the swamps, I imagine him to be green and covered in nasty goo) creature, somewhat hunched over with uneven arms and legs, galloping towards the glittering hall of unity. It just doesn't seem real to me.
Sure, I admit that this poem was written for entertainment, and fantasy is allowed, but shouldn't the main character at least have more real human-like characteristics? I don't know that many people who would willingly take on a vicious monster with his bare hands, or dive underwater to kill a monster, and come up with another monster's head. Beowulf doesn't seem to be a real person, or even a hero; rather, he seems to be the ideal warrior, the legendary man that every little boy wants to grow up to be and every little girl wants to grow up and marry. He is too brave, too sure of himself, too much of an archetype of Anglo-Saxon society for him to be believable to me. Perhaps it is that I am not quite getting the grasp of what an epic hero is.
On the other side, I have found some more human-like and less god-like characteristics about Beowulf, especially as he gets older. He seems to have finally learned that he is not as strong as he once was, and brings his thanes with him. He understands he needs weapons in battle. He is ready to truly face death. However, I can't quite say this is a coming of age story, because Beowulf never really reaches that mature level of understanding that comes from a coming of age. He is not like the young girl who climbed the tree and saw the vast ocean in front of her. He is not like Edna, who finally sees the futility of her rebellion against society. I guess what I'm trying to say is there is no epiphany, no AH-HA moment. And I guess that's what made Beowulf so unreal to me. My belief is that in life (and in literature), almost all characters have that one moment of discomfort, of that feeling that something isn't right, and they move towards a goal: fixing that discomfort, whatever it may be. Maybe I'm missing something here, but Beowulf just seems...too epic to be real.

Marge Piercy's poem "A Work of Artifice" fascinates me. Writing about taking care of a bonsai tree, she seems to be writing about the plight of woman instead. Bonsai trees are a form of Japanese art. The purposes? Contemplation and ingenuity for the grower. Rather than growing gardens of bonsai trees, bonsai growers focus on developing one tree that mimics a full sized tree. In reading the poem, I felt that the bonsai tree was the woman, the gardener the man. Trapped by the confines of the concepts of beauty, women are bonsai trees, cultivated and controlled by men.

The "attractive pot" the author refers to symbolizes woman's outer shell. Her jewelry. Her clothes. Her hair. Though a woman may be beautiful, if her pot, her outer shell, is shabby, she too seems shabby. The bonsai tree, the author writes, "could have grown eighty feet tall on the side of a mountain till split by lightning." The bonsai had so much potential to become something great. Something huge. Something massive. In acquiring large size, the tree would have gained power, respect. The tree could have done great things; shaded an old man hiking up a mountain, housed a nest of birds. "But a gardener carefully pruned it." Suddenly, the tree's potential future crumbles. There is no hope for this tree, no hope for greatness. It's future? To be pruned by a gardener. If the tree is woman, the gardener must be man. Woman's fate is to be controlled by man. To be pruned, changed, morphed, into whatever the man wants her to. Like a tree, she is helpless to the man's pruning, cutting, chopping. She is dependent on the man for water, food, nourishment. The tree is only nine inches high. The gardener has pruned it well; it has lost its potential to be great, to be large. What could have been an eighty foot tall tree has now been confined, compressed into a meager nine inches. No wonder woman feels suffocated. The gardener convinces the tree that her situation now is better than what it would have been. He croons, "It is your nature/ to be small and cozy,/ domestic and weak,/ how lucky, little tree,/ to have a pot to grow in." The relationship between the tree and the gardener seems like that of a marriage. Dependent on each other, promised to each other, the man and the woman are tied together. There is no escape. The man convinces the woman she is lucky to be his wife, lucky to have a home, lucky to be a woman, to be subordinate to man. It is woman's nature, man says, to be subordinate to man. For the man to be the gardener, the woman the bonsai tree. Man knows that he must establish his power early. Piercy writes, "one must begin very early to dwarf their growth: the bound feet, the crippled brain, the hair in curlers" to describe man's power over woman. Her feet are bound, leaving her unable to walk properly, unable to escape. Her brain is crippled, derived of knowledge, derived of truth. She cannot think for herself. Her hair is in curlers; she is trapped by the confines of beauty, shackled to the person she must portray.

Woman is a bonsai tree, cultivated by man.

Death...by Birth?

I still cannot decide. Did Edna die at the end of The Awakening? Or did she simply walk into a better, freer life? The "seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting" voice of the sea calls to Edna, urging her to jump in. Because of all of this sea imagery, I am currently leaning more towards the belief that Edna died. However, I don't necessarily believe that she committed suicide. Rather, I feel like she let herself die. She let herself drown. "Her arms and legs were growing tired," Chopin writes, then goes back to narrating Edna's thoughts. Never does she even mention Edna fighting back against this weariness; instead, by thinking of all of the "failures" in Edna's life, all the incidents and people who have given her trouble, she only weighs herself down more, almost as if she is preparing to let herself drown, let the water rush over her head and push her to the bottom of the ocean.
We have talked frequently of how Edna is regressing into childhood. If she is regressing, her death must then, paradoxically, be her birth. The sea and bathing motifs are prevalent throughout the novel, and I found it convincing that a mother's womb is filled with--not exactly water--but fluid, nonetheless. Liquid. Perhaps the sea is Edna's mother, and she is experiencing birth once more. Or perhaps she was never born. I pull out my hair thinking of theories; there are so many! Chopin even alludes to Edna's death-birth when she describes Edna's naked form as a "new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known." It is interesting, however, that the word is "familiar," yet Edna, this "new-born creature," had never known it. Perhaps this was Edna's grand awakening. Perhaps Edna's awakening did not regard her place in society, nor did it regard her role as a wife, or even a woman or mother. Perhaps Edna's awakening was that she could never escape her roles, that the only way out was truly death.
On another note, if Edna's death is her birth, I found it interesting that she is awakening to birth. Sleep is an important motif throughout the novel, and I have been wondering whether sleep is really necessary for Edna to awaken. Sure, for most people, awakening only occurs after sleep, but I often felt that Edna slept for the purpose of awakening. She comments to Doctor Mandelet, "perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life." Though Edna realizes that her awakening(s) often giver her more emotional turmoil, she is willing to sacrifice this turmoil for a chance to better understand her world.
After this lengthy discussion, I still cannot firmly state that Edna died. Her wandering into the ocean could just have been another of her periods of sleep and turmoil, and she may finally awaken and go on with her life. Get her act together.
The last chapter can certainly be read both ways, and perhaps Kate Chopin intended it to be so. Maybe, in her view, both are one and the same.