Throughout the tour and while discussing North and South in class today, I couldn’t help but compare it to other Victorian novels (specifically the ones from class last semester). When reading Dickens and Hardy, it was very apparent to me that the novels contained a lot of critical social commentary. However, when reading some of the women authors I felt that some of the social commentary was a little more subtle. The novels we read by both the Bronte sisters as well as Eliot definitely contained a lot of social commentary, but it seemed to blend more seamlessly into the story, and perhaps required a closer reading to see. With Gaskell as well as Dickens and Hardy, the approach seems at times more direct, as characters talk openly about the social concerns the novels focus on, and are thus more apparent. I’m curious if other women authors in the Victorian period were as direct as Gaskell was in the novel once she got readers hooked with the marraige plot. The differences between how men and women wrote are very interesting, and it does seem to me that Gaskell was a little more straightforward in her criticism. I’m curious if she received any criticism herself for that, and am curious in general about what was said about her work when it was published.
Monthly Archives: March 2015
Margret as a Masculine and Feminine Character
Margret is a very interesting heroine in the sense that she has both stereotypical feminine and masculine traits about her, well, at least in the context of the modern time period. I talked a little in class today about feminine side, but here I want to talk about her more masculine qualities.
I went back and I looked at my notes and highlights and I noticed that Margret had a lot more authority and “power” then her mother. I have many examples
1. she knew about her father’s lack of beliefs before her mother, and her father entusted her to tell her mother about the move to the city and about his questioning
2. Margret arranged for her mother and Dixon to stay on an island (I believe it was an island) until they were fully situated in the city
3. She took a hit for Mr. Thorton and basically played the role of the “knight come to the aid of the damsel in distress” and even one of the protestor’s pointed that out and demasulated Mr. Thorton
4. When her mother died, she didn’t cry because she had to be strong for her father and brother. By today’s standards one would her a young boy as the one that would have to be strong in that event. However, I understand that this is a different time period and the woman was really the domestic “Angel in the House”, so I would like to talk about that moment for a bit, if possible.
In general, I feel like Margret’s father trusted his daughter with a lot more “masculine” responsibilities, in terms of the authority that she had, even over her own mother.
Day 2 – North and South and Dark Victorian London
Although the material of North and South is not primarily set in London, but in the fictional town of Milton, these two towns hold many similarities. Our tour guide of the Darkest Victorian London Walking Tour led us to Southwark, one of the poorest areas of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Even though these areas have slightly alterred physically over the past century, it is easy to imagine what the poor of London actually went through with the tour guide’s knowledge of what to look for. For example, the yellow Victorian brick seen all over Southwark; this brick was extremely cheap to use to build homes and other structures. What reminded me most of North and South were the homes built in order to house the brewery’s employees. Although the brewery supplied these convenient homes – they were right across the street – the employees were restricted in many ways. The brewery would send people to check to make sure the employees were in bed at a specific time in order to ensure that they would be punctual to work. Their managers would sometimes pay them, not in cash, but in vouchers to specific stores. Workers lost many freedoms during the industial period for they were seen as hands and not humans.
Day 2: North and South
It has been interesting so far, especially in today’s tour, to see the stark differences in buildings for the different parts of the city. Today’s walk through the lower class areas helped me understand the contrasting lifestyles presented in North and South. It was even more powerful to be able to stand outside of a building that today has been renovated as a shop or a single family home and hear how people used to live 10 or more to a room. If anything after today’s tour I felt a little like the novel undersold the living conditions. While the workers are described as poor and living in small rooms, I never felt like they were as poor of conditions as we saw and heard about today. Higgins and his daughters’ home seemed to be livable for them. Perhaps the conditions were not as crowded further north. At any rate, seeing the area and hearing the vivid descriptions had so much impact on my reading, more than my imagination could provide for sure.
Day 1: Brick Lane
I thought one of the most interesting issues to come out of today’s discussion was the questions of authenticity and stereotyping, especially from within the Bengali community. Like I said this morning, it never really occurred to me that the novel might be criticized as relying too much on stereotypes. I felt like Ali’s descriptions of the culture helped me connect with the story. I wonder how much of her characterization was deliberately crafted to appeal to a western audience and how much came from her experiences and research. The lengthy acknolwgements text at the end of the novel gave me a sense that the novel had authencity, but Dr. McLeod explained how Ali did not have the lower-class immigrant experience, so it is a legitimate question.
I wonder where the line between describing a culture for outsiders and stereotyping falls, or if there even is a difference at the end of the day. I feel like any description of a culture must trip over stereotypes at some point, but at the same time reaching across cultural boundaries is important, especially to postcolonial writers like Ali.
As a sidebar, I wanted to add how much I appreciated the lovely descriptions of food in the novel and how just smelling the restaurants of Brick Lane was powerful to me. Smell is obviously a powerful emotion, and while reading I felt almost as if I could smell the food at times. Cuisine is so much a part of a culture, and I think Ali does a fantastic job of using descriptions of food to connect the readers to the culture of the novel. Now part of me wonders if the criticisms of stereotyping extends to the use of food or is that is given a pass.
Brick Lane: The Chaotic Climax
In what I like to call the chaotic climax in Ali’s Brick Lane, Nazneen visits her friend Razia to talk about her expected departure back to Bangladesh.
“There were three more days to go. Three more days to take action, if any action was to be taken. Chanu had bought more suitcases. The girls and Nazneen gathered around them as at a graveside. The knocking grew louder. It became a pounding. Razia got up. She rubbed her arthritic knees. Approaching the door, she walked against an unseen drag, as if wading in chest-high water. Nazneen felt the bubble expand. Her collarbone would snap. She breathed carefully”(356).
This quotation stands out to me, because both characters are experiencing two completely different situations, but they are experiencing it together. Nazneen is having anxiety about finally having to tell Chanu she will not be leaving London. In comparison, Razia is dealing with her issue head on by locking her heroin addict son in his bedroom to kick the habit. To me, Razia is a role model and sort of foreshadow to Nazneen because she deals with the struggles that come in her life with courage.
This dramatic part in the book is important because it parallels the two characters’ situations and ties it together to make a climax in the next chapter. I believe after Nazneen sees Razia struggle with her son, and then experiences her own with Shahanna, she finally builds the courage to tell Chanu the trip to Bangladesh will never happen.
Brick lane, Day 1, Cashwell
Brick Lane was by far my favorite novel that we read for this class. I cannot wait to go back for some authentic Bangladeshi food, especially after reading Brick Lane because the descriptions made my mouth water. Speaking of food, I love how Ali uses food as a device in the novel to express the emotional complexity of Nazneen and also how she uses food as power. Nazneen knew that Chanu hated it when she would eat very little at dinner, and so she would wait until he was asleep to eat just to annoy him, among other things like neglecting chores or putting too much hot spices in his lunches. Also, and this is just my interpretation, but I think that during the day, she was often weighed down by everything she couldn’t control. There were many times when her mind would wander and she would snap out of it like one would wake up from a dream, and then she would just move on to the next chore without coming to any resolution. So, during the day, all the stress would build and build, and when she would lie down at night, they would invade her consciousness and she couldn’t sleep. So, she would get out the leftovers and eat until the comfort of food calmed her. I also like the detail about how she stands up to eat. Personally, I usually eat standing up if I’m homes alone because sitting down at a table just reinforces the fact that I’m eating alone, and I don’t enjoy my meal as much. Nazneen feels alone in the novel because her lack of real relationships, and I think mealtime is just an emotional thing for her, and she uses it to feel like she has control over something. I was very excited to go to Brick Lane, but I NEED to go back and really experience it because I really did fall in love with the novel and want to see more of Bangladeshi culture in London.
Day 1 – Brick Lane
Hasina’s friend in the hospital says, “These secret things will kill us. Do you have any secret? You want to tell to me? I keep it safe for you!” (Ali 303). This quote is pivotal to the novel as a whole for many of the characters keep their inner emotions and thoughts private. Nasneen at this point in the novel is having an affair with Karim, wondering whether or not anyone – especially her husband – knows about her secret double-life with Karim. Chanu throughout throughout the novel wants to be seen as a strong, intellectual man that has made his wealth by moving to London. Amma, Nasneen and Hasina’s mother, is renowned as a saint in their village, yet she struggles with some unvoiced secret, which she silences by her death. Amma’s end highlights Hasina’s friend’s statement that death is the penalty for not sharing the inner self. I think Amma’s character is quite interesting, so if anyone has anything they would like to add or discuss, please do!
Seeing Culture In Action
So something I found really interesting today was obviously being able to see the setting of a British novel in person (something that as a writer in Atlanta, Georgia I had never been able to say before about British literature). More specially, I found being able to see/smell/taste the spices that Nanzeen mentions in Brick Lane in person was really interesting. After the East end walking tour some of the group went to a curry house for dinner where we had a really interesting discussion about the different spices used in the dishes. I think it was interesting because as someone that has always lived in the South East of the United States I didn’t have much experience with spices like saffron outside of something like premade yellow rice. However, we read about all these amazing spices that take so much care to prepare for a meal that actually being able to see and eat and identify made me really appreciate and understand why one would go through all the trouble of preparing the different spices-because the dishes they turn into are amazing!
Theme: Brick Lane and First Wave Feminism (Education)
In Brick Lane, there were two really large themes that stuck out to me more then any other–I was very interested in the theme of First Wave Feminism (in terms of women’s education) and a culture of assimilation.
First Wave Feminism- One of my favorite quotes is “Knowledge is a mirror and for the first time in my life I was allowed to see who I was and who I might become.” (Cloud Atlas David Mitchell). Knowledge in many regrades is a form of power. Because for Nazneen, for the greater half of the first novel, she could not speak English, but her husband could. Even in Chanu’s first dead end job, he still had the power as someone who spoke English and knew about English text to even get a job. Nazneen was stuck in the house, and she was desperate for knowledge, she wanted to go to school to learn, but there was always an “excuse” for her to stay at home and fulfill some other “womanly duty”. Chanu at first would say that she wouldn’t have to go out because he would just get her whatever, or when she had her first child, she was suppose to be taking care of him. etc. etc. etc. There is a power in being educated, a power that she didn’t have, and that severely crippled her. She wasn’t really allowed to see “who see might become” because of her position.
As the reader, I could tell that she wanted more then anything to learn English. she held onto the word “ice skating” for the longest time, and she wanted to know more. I’m going to briefly talk about the tattooed woman and her role, because Nazneen really wanted to talk to her so badly. For me the tattooed woman represented an idea of freedom or at least the allure of something different. She was a mysterious woman who would sit at her apartment and smoke. She was different from Nazneen in every which way, but Nazneen had an almost obsession-like attitude of wanting to talk to the tattooed women. I saw that as another desire for education to have the ability to talk to that very “different Western woman”
Now again, I have Professor Mcleod for another class and we talked about the position of privilege of Feminism in the West. I don’t to sound ethnocentric, but because of my sociological environment I feel that a woman shouldn’t have to ask her husband/brother/male-person where she can and can’t go. However, those are ideals from a Western Culture and a Western Feminism.