* Sorry, my GSU email wasn’t working for me and I didn’t see the email saying that we had to do a blog post.

I hope this is okay that I do mine late

I learned so much in London that I could never have learned in a classroom environment. To be honest, my expectation was that London would be a city with a pretty homogeneous. I was shocked when I found all kind of different people in the city. I ended up speaking more Vietnamese and French then I ever thought I would.

As far as the books are concerned, I loved seeing Brick Lane in real life after reading the novel. The experience of being in Brick Lane and eating some of the curries and sweets that Nazneen described brought the book and all it’s rich descriptions of food a new life. I had greater understanding of all the details in the novel and the roads that Nazneen walked through. On the tour, I also liked some of the history we learned about Brick Lane. I would have never guessed that it was once the home to a Jewish population and all the signs were once written in Yiddish. The history that was given added a three dimensional understanding for me.

What I learned about women writers in Britian is that their writing is complex and can encompass many fields of discipline. For my paper in another one of your classes, I am writing about Feminism and the intersectionality of the field. With Brick Lane, Nazneen’s experience as a woman was different than Margret’s experience because of Nazneen’s race and ethnicity. Margret’s experience was different than Betty’s because of class differences. Seeing all the different parts of London like Brick Lane and the “Darkest Part of London” tour helped me see the different in landscape and better understand the differences in the experiences of these women characters  and the women authors.

Professor, I goof up and submitted the wrong story review for the blog so I am going to blog about Kor tonight since I blogged about Cambolia last time. I had written them out but I accidently copied and pasted the wrong one from my computer

for the mysterious Kor I feel that this story has influenced a lot of popular works and especially young adult novels, because I have read in my own personal lecture time so many books with the concept of a terrible situation (not always war, but some negative force) and the characters making an imaginary world to cope with the horrors they face. I talked about Pan’s Labyrinth in our group meeting, etc. I’m sure that this story is not the first of its kind to have this theme, but it’s definatley the most overt that I have seen before a certain time.

Now, what I found very surreal was the concept of the moon how it took on its own life. The moon is so stereotypical as a force that is pure, lovely, Devine, etc. I have never read a story where the moon was a force to be feared and dreaded/controlling. During the Blitz tour that we took we learned that the enemy planes would boom Britain at night time in the cover of the darkness. However, the full moon and its light was scary because that would mean the enemy would have b.etter sight and a heighten ability to harm more people. That bit of history really brought the story to light for me

1. I loved the establishment of the other in Fatou as the “other”. She is the one who can’t use the nice warm pool and all the nice facilities that the rich guest can use. She has the use the trashy beach, with all the pollution. In general I liked the establishment of the theme and how the theme carried on

2. However, I am a bit confused about the point of view shift. Because in the beginning we started with an indirect third person then there was a shift to a very intimate first person. I’m a bit disappointed that we won’t meet tomorrow because I would like to hear everyone’s thoughts on that

To be frank, I wasn’t really interested in the almshouse that we saw when we were there. I just never really cared for old furniture. However, it wasn’t until I got home and thought about it and re examined the almshouse with north and south that I gained a bit more of an appreciation  for it. I instantly thought of Betty and her father and thought to myself “they most likely own a chair that they had to cut the legs off slowly to save money, just like the chair in the almshouse.”  Or something along those lines. Then I thought back to the protest, and the call for social justice in terms of the workers rights being violated. The living conditions really showed the standard of living at the time was so dreadful for the poor I got a bit more insight on the style of living in North and South.

Also, I was curious about one of the paintings in the the lecture room that we saw. I noticed that one of the paintings was of a woman who was sitting a bit solem and grey surrounded by bright colors and laughing children and other bright things, but she was hunched over and looked withdrawn. I wondered to myself as I was reviewing my pictures if this painting was of Woolf. Because I beilive it was Katy who said that Woolfs sister was the artist

I 100% agree with you about the style of the novel. However, for me the stream of consciousness was a huge turn off when I first read the book. I agree, one of the biggest turn offs about this book for me was that I had a really hard time telling who was talking to the point that I had to (shamefully) sparknote a bit in the beginning.

However, after today on the walking tour I found a new appreciation of the writing style because I found her personal life history very closely related to Septimus’s life. Septimus suicide planned like her suicide, but Woolf’s suicide was very much rehearsed down to a “T”. I feel like the stream of consciousness style of writing allowed me almost a bit into her mind and what she was feeling. Because with Septimus, I could see his entire intimate thought process laid out, and I could see how he saw the world and what elements (evil of man, etc.) drove him to his madness.

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.

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.