Womens Lit Reflection

Seeing this class on the course list choices made me happy. Finally a course I sort of felt like I already knew something about it. Including of course, my obvious female perspective because I am a girl. I liked the people in my class. I already knew some of them and they are all nice. My biggest fear was having a teacher who was hard to talk to. That was soon demolished once I met Ms. Tally.
This being a new class, Ms Tally was always asking us if we liked how she was doing things as a teacher. That was nice. I liked being able to say my true opinion although I rarely had anything to change because she gave us a fair amount of work. It was easily feasible as long as you read the books. I loved the book selection! With the exception of the Handmaid’s Tale, which I thought was quite boring. I felt like the plotline was a good start to the class but in comparison with reactions to the other books it just seems dull. I didn’t take as much from it as I did with the other books. The biggest lesson I learned in this class, is something that my dad has been telling me ever things I was little. I just didn’t listen until I had the opportunity to experience it firsthand. “Always be diplomatic.” My dad would say. It wasn’t until this class that I truly understood what being ‘diplomatic’ is. Basically, when you put your opinion out there to the public, you’d better make sure you have evidence.
One of the scariest things to me about this course was that a LOT of it had to do with time management. Well, that’s good and all. I know that’s what life is really about and I’m glad I’ve gotten better at it. I find it easier to write once I’ve talked out my thoughts to someone around me. That’s why these blogs were so hard for me to do in the beginning. Since I wasn’t entirely sure what to say. Now I just let my words flow out from the tips of my fingers and onto the computer screen. I write just like it’s my voice speaking. That’s what I love about this class. It captures your personality.
My opinion about women has pretty much stayed the same. I never thought women to be completely inferior or completely superior to men. I just thought they needed help at times from troubles with our society. I’ve learned that men do too. The whole world, men and women need to change in so many ways. They need to broaden their perspectives, and subject themselves to empathy. No matter what time, place, or status, women have similar experiences that overlap one way or another. In this way, we can relate to one another and get along better.

In The Style of Mrs Dalloway: Stream of Consciousness

“The air was in the early morning; like a flap of a wave…” (1).

South Africa
My favorite part of rain is the moments after. I see the rainbow so clearly from across the mountains and the wide open plain. All of them are still asleep, I’m the first of my group to wake up and fill the teapot.

London
I barely slept last night. It’s been two days since my daughter has left for her trip. Two days! I haven’t slept at all. Damn her school. How could they allow children to go to the wild? There’s nothing special about that. Call going to Primark at noon wild. Not going to some random grassy plain in Africa with lions. Those kids won’t come back. My daughter seems to think that by watching Discovery Channel she can survive on her own. That’s what the college experience is about isn’t it? She’s still my baby girl. It’s hot. I should open a window.

South Africa
I breathe in the clean air and it fills my lungs. I try to compare the smell to something I’ve experienced before, but nothing comes to mind. Yes, nothing. It smells like nothing. It doesn’t smell like perfume. It doesn’t smell like pollution. It doesn’t smell like food…yet. I’m confused. I thought everything had a smell. Is my nose blocked? No…I can breathe perfectly well. Look at me, I can breathe!

London
Ah fresh air. Who turns on a siren at 9am? It’s no time for loud noises. But that’s London eh. Where is that iPhone of mine? I hate iPhones. I never wanted one. But everyone says it’s the latest fashion. Everyone has one. I’ll send Amna a message. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll send her a message! Dear Amna…no no no. Dearest Amna. No. My dearest daughter Amna. I miss you and I hope you are doing well. Do not loose that pocket-knife of your fathers. You know how much he loves it…

South Africa
Bzzzt. Shit! What was that? Ohhh it was my phone! Crap. I’m not supposed to have it turned on out here. Cool! I can get reception! I should check if Noor is on MSN. I miss her! A text! From Noor? Oh just from my mom. Aww. She’s so sweet! I miss her too. Wow. I really do. I mean I barely even hugged her goodbye because I was checking if I brought dad’s pocket-knife. Umm wait. Where is it? Oh no! I must have left it by the fire at the last camp-site! We can’t go back there now can we? No… the guide just told me no way. He laughed. She’s going to kill me. I’ll just tell her a monkey stole it.

2 In One

Today we finished watching The Hours and reading Mrs. Dalloway. I thought that The Hours put up an interesting twist to Mrs. Dalloway and connected major themes. In The Hours, Meryl Streep is Clarissa Von who has characteristics of the Mrs. Dalloway character in Mrs. Dalloway. She is homosexual and has a partner, just like Mrs. Dalloway did. However, unlike the book, she remains close with her ex-husband. Richard. In the book although they remain close, their relationship did not seem as stable as it did in the movie. Clarissa Von has to deal with suicide, just like Mrs. Dalloway did. That is because she watched Richard commit suicide by falling out of a building.
I like the twist that Richard turned out to be the character of Laura’s son from the 50’s. Laura also dealt with suicide because she almost overdosed on pills, but we found out that the reason she didn’t go through with it was because she was pregnant with her second child. She says, “I can’t.” Just like how in the book says, “One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering…” (78). Laura ends up reasoning with herself that the reason why she cannot commit suicide is because she doesn’t want to harm a new born. I find this ironic because we find out that she left her family after her second child was born. Her husband dies of brain cancer and both her children end up committing suicide. So, just like in the book, she brings her children into suffering. When Laura comes to Richard’s funeral, she says to Clarissa Von,” Abandoning your children is the worst thing a mother can do.” Laura also said that nobody would ever understand or forgive her for it.
I think lack of choice is a big theme in not only the novel Mrs. Dalloway, but also in a lot of literature that women write. I have learned that women do a lot of things for other people rather than themselves. Nicole Kidman who plays Virginia Woolf in The Hours says, “I am the only one that can understand my suffering. I had my life taken away from me and I cannot live a life that I don’t want to live.” I think her message is important because even though it is sad to think that she would not want to live her life, and ended up drowning herself, she did what she wanted to do. She didn’t let Leonard, who I think is her husband control her any longer. When Leonard asked her why someone has to die in her book she responded with, “Someone has to die so that the others can appreciate life.” Leonard didn’t understand that. I find it interesting that she said that because maybe that means that she didn’t think Leonard appreciated life since she killed herself. I think that maybe it would have been better if the movie followed through on Leonard’s reaction after her death and if he changed his way of living.
Another aspect of the film and movie was regrets. Laura, Richard’s mother said, “It would be easy to have regrets, but what does it mean? How can you have regrets when you had no choice?” I still think that she had a choice. How awful it must have felt to go to her son’s funeral and know that he wrote about her in his book. He hated her for leaving him. The movie didn’t go into his sister and how she killed herself, which I think, is for the best because then it would have been confusing. Another example of having to deal with regrets happens when Richard was about to kill himself. He says to Clarissa Von that she and him couldn’t have been happier together and she should not blame herself for that. I felt like he had no regrets about how their relationship turned out. Laura mentions that she and Richard didn’t keep in touch often. So maybe he has regrets about the lack of relationship with his mother, but that isn’t clear.
The ending of the film shed a new light on suicide for me. In a weird way maybe Virginia Woolf was right when she said that someone has to die so that others can appreciate life. After I watched the film, it wasn’t that I immediately appreciated my life more, but I understood why someone could feel suicidal. Sometimes suicide isn’t always completely selfish like a lot of people think. When it comes to Laura though, I was surprised that she hadn’t killed herself before Richard did. It didn’t seem like she was doing a lot of things in her life at the moment, but she looked happy. I still think that leaving her husband and kids was selfish. Her home life in the 1950’s seemed perfect; she had a smiley husband and a cute son. Everyone was happy. Yet, it only seemed that way on the surface. The audience could tell that she had a lot of problems from stress and dark thoughts.
I’m glad that we watched the movie because it really put the plot of Mrs. Dalloway into perspective. Although The Hours was a combination of Virginia Woolf’s novels, but the single day plotline stayed the same. It helped me because it compressed the time span of the novel and made it more manageable for me to understand. I liked how there were parallels in the shots that captured each of the time periods. For example, when Virginia, Laura, and Clarissa would wake up in the morning, I could see a unifying quality in their actions. They would wash their face, cut the flowers, and put them down in a vase. Even though they had different lives, they shared similar experiences.

Mrs Dalloway Walk

Today’s walk around Westminster really helped me shape the book up more in my mind. I think it must have been just going to Dean’s Yard, which is where Mrs Dalloway lived. Also going to Bond Street and seeing where the flower shop Mulberry’s was. It reminded me that the book takes place in a single day and that it would only take me a couple hours to go to the places she did. First we went to Westminister bridge and we saw the Royal Abbey. We heard the Big Ben ring and just like Woolf describes, it brought a calming sensation to me. Walking through St. James park and seeing the ducks, made me think of the walk hat Mrs. Dalloway took. I’m not sure what season this book takes place in, but it could be spring. It also rained during our walk and it made me think of the symbolism in the book, such as the airplane in the sky, connecting everyone that was looking at it. Everyone on the street we were at felt the same rain we did. So even though we don’t know what that person was going through or how their day is, we both felt the same wet rain.
That in a sense is nice to think about, because one could easily connect the whole world just through scenarios like this. It would create more empathy and you would be able to know how someone else feels. Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa, and Clarissa Dalloway are all the same person, and yet have different elements to them. When a person like Hugh asks how Clarissa is today, I know that he has a certain relationship with her to be able to call her that. When Mrs Dalloway goes into the flower shop, she is greeted by Clarissa Dalloway. I, myself act differently depending on where I am, and who I’m with. For example, with my family they might call me by my nickname Amoon instead of Amna. At school different teachers pronounce my name differently:
Imna
Omina
Emna
Amnah

I thought of this during our walk because it connected me to London in the same ways that it connected the people in this novel walking through London.

"Don't Pretty Up My Vagina"

Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, goes far beyond contributing to stopping violence against women. In the chapter, “My Angry Vagina” the interviewee, speaks of what her vagina ‘wants’ and ‘needs’. The lady says, “It smells good already. Not like rose petals. Don’t try to decorate it” (70). I think this is important because it touches with the points made in Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, in that nature is nature and women don’t need to be trying to impress anyone. “That’s what they’re doing–trying to clean it up, make it smell like bathroom spray or a garden” (70). I understand that this is an important lesson to teach because it’s true that our society should keep natural things natural. Instead of trying to change it into something aesthetically pleasing.
However, this chapter’s message gets lost because of certain disgusting parts. She talks about underwear such as thongs and how sometimes it gets uncomfortable to wear. For example she says it, “moves around all the time, gets stuck in the back of your vagina, real crusty butt” (72). The issue of this chapter is somewhat clear, that we put ourselves through discomfort for someone else’s pleasure. This description of the thong sounds very unsexy which I think is exactly what Ensler wants us to think, but you also just end up being grossed out instead of focusing on the issue. Especially if after saying that, she continues to put disgusting images in the reader’s mind. She says, “women would be coming all day long, coming in the supermarket, coming on the subway, happy vaginas” (72). I could not read this with a straight face, by the end of it I was laughing, but I could not look at other women the same way again.
I found it weirdly interesting how she personifies the vagina. She starts by bringing up birth, which is an important event for a vagina. Yet, she then talks about the other things that it wants. She says, “it wants to travel…read…sex…chocolate” (73). It just seems that this has lost the plot. I just think that she took it too far and I got confused by what point she was trying to make by the end of it. I feel that if she went beyond just underwear that woman wear then I would have been able to relate it to other things. Since she didn’t, I as the reader am just confused.

Statistics in The Beauty Myth

Naomi Wolf mentions a lot of statistics in her chapter ‘Sex’. This chapter is about how people perceive it and people’s views on it. In this specific section, she talks about how sex is portrayed in younger people. She uses MTV as an example. She says, “It seems that exposure to chic violence and objectifying sexual imagery has already harmed the young” (162). She goes on to discuss that it is not only pornography and magazines that have a negative effect on children, but even material in music videos and songs. She names The Rolling Stones who she says are seen as ‘male heroes’ and yet they say lines like, “I’ll stick my knife down your throat” (164). Not only that, but also in videos women are shown in chains or fishnet stockings and choked to death. She mentions that these images have become so normal that they don’t really shock anyone anymore. I wish she had mentioned other countries in the world rather than just the U.S. because many people in other countries would be shocked to see images like these. It is true that most world countries import U.S. T.V so maybe over time that ideology of shock will spread. I personally know teenagers my age and adults that criticize the U.S. and even U.K for airing violent programs.
According to Naomi Wolf, there are lots of statistics that support that sexual violence is highly influenced on what men consider tobe violent. For example she cites a study of college graduates and finds that, “Some women look like they are just asking to be raped. 83.5% and it would be exciting to use force to subdue a woman. 61.7%” (165). These statistics upset me because well firstly they are horrid to think about. 62% is well over half of the entire population of those schools and I get scared to think that I will be soon going to a university too. Although my university is not in the U.S. people are highly influenced by the same programs as Americans are. So who’s to say that they won’t turn out like them?
Most shocking was Wolf’s statement that, “Cultural representation of glamorized degradation has created a situation among the young in which boys rape and girls get raped as a normal course of events” (167). I think that this is so true and sad. At the same time, there are even more differences in gender because of how we react to a boy getting raped as opposed to a woman getting raped. I think that reaction is now global and not simply in the U.S.

Mrs Dalloway First Impressions

Since the beginning of the year we were warned about how difficult Mrs Dalloway by Virgina Woolf was going to be. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the plot or because of the writing, but now I know it’s both. Straight from the beginning the setting was clearly placed in London, and the character of Mrs Dalloway was introduced. The first line of the first chapter says, “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” (1). A couple sentences later it says, “And then thought Clarissa Dalloway…” (1). Woolf continuously switches names from Clarissa to Clarissa Dalloway to Mrs Dalloway. There seems to be no pattern yet, but maybe that will become clearer as I read on. It might be that when she is in a certain place or doing something in particular then she would have to be called a particular name.
Something I found interesting how Woolf literally wrote her words in a train of thought, as in sometimes completed and sometimes not. For example, Clarissa says, “For it was the middle of June. The War was over…John, her favourite killed; but it was over; thank Heaven–over. It was June. The King and Queen were at the Palace” (2). I had to read that sentence twice or three times just to understand it. She keeps jumping around thoughts and mentioning different people so that I don’t really know whom I should be paying attention to. Will there ever be just one main character?
This takes place after WWI, maybe this is a sign of how it affected the people. For example, Septimus Warren Smith was in WWI and when he got back started to talk to himself and get stressed out easily. His wife, Lucrezia is frustrated because the doctors say there is nothing wrong with him, but she heard him say, “I will kill myself” (12). I don’t blame her for being upset. It’s sad that the doctors didn’t know what Post-traumatic stress disorder was. There are so many different characters introduced to the readers within the first 20 pages. It’s hard to follow who’s who, but also difficult that they don’t interact with each other and there is very little dialog. It seems like there’s a person thinking per paragraph, for example the bottom of page 21, Maisie Johnson is thinking and then it moves to Mrs. Dempster thinking about Maisie Johnson. I feel that this is most likely a reflection on society at the time, because people were confused about the war and violence that had happened.
I sincerely hope that I get used to this book quickly and can understand what I read within the first time of reading it. I hope that I learn to love Woolf’s writing style and maybe pick up a few traits for myself.