(no subject)

[labellementeuse]

And when I say "last possible minute", I mean "I have Tuesdays off and it's 3:38pm and I haven't cracked a book yet." Yeah, I think I'll skip choir tonight.

I do, however, have a whole page and a bit of planning I did in class a couple of weeks ago, which is a big first for me!

The essay's on Wordsworth. Well, romantic poets, but I'm doing Wordsworth; probably "Lines written above Tintern Abbey" and "Nutting", and I'm going to focus on Wordsworth's persistent female anthropomorphising of Nature and how it affects his works. The question in question is "Does romantic poetry accurately represent the non-human world, or does it drastically misrepresent it? Support your argument with an analysis of two poems." and my point is that Wordsworth strives to accurately represent the non-human world but ultimately fails to do so because he's unable to escape his predeveloped associations with Nature. I mean, the idea of a female, nourishing mother Nature is pervasive, almost impossible to avoid, and I think that's hugely significant because while he strives to present nature as something beautiful, he really -certainly in the poems I'm looking at - seems to look at nature as something to feed off. Which I associate with his feminising of it, like during Tintern Abbey he writes about how when he's away from the country, in the city, his memories of the country sustain him... there's all sorts of stuff that I find interesting about it.

I'm actually glad that I'm okay to write from a feminist perspective on these texts. It's something I really enjoy, criticising texts from that perspective - I think because it's somewhere I'm very comfortable standing. I wrote an essay on Othello last year which involved an examination of his position as a black man, as culturally other, and although I liked the essay it was much more difficult to write than another essay for the same class that I wrote about women's stories in Dream; because I'm pakeha. It was probably better for me, though. But I'm glad with this essay, because the class is supposed to be on the environment and how it features and we haven't really looked at gender issues, and he;s said several times that criticism of the *social context* of the poems is not really what he's looking for, but I went in to talk it over with him and he said it would be fine. So. Yay?

I suspect I'll edit this a lot once I actually start writing, or, well, I'll start by re-reading the poems. :P

ETA: STARTED! Go me.

        I came to one dear nook
Unvisited, where not a broken bough
Drooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign
Of devastation, but the hazels rose
Tall and erect, with milk-white clusters hung,
A virgin scene!

[snip]

        Then up I rose,
And dragged to earth bpth branch and bough, with crash
And merciless ravage; and the shady nook
Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower,
Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up
Their quiet being;

-From "Nutting", Wm. Wordsworth. Emphasis mine.

Oh, William. Subtle. We discussed in class the radical interpretation of this poem as being purely a metaphor for rape of an actual woman, and personally I think that maybe goes a little bit far, but boy can I see how you could buy it. And it's almost impossible not to read this as some kind of *metaphorical* rape, certainly from an environmentalist's perspective and even from the poet's own, as he describes in the last two stanzas. It's just startling how vivid the sexual imagery is. And it really supports my thesis, I think, because he turns this perfect spot into a vessel for his own wants or needs, and so he loses his ability to see it *for itself*, for Nature; even when he first sees it and takes pleasure in its, um, unspoilt beauty, if you will, he still uses this very sexual imagery and of course it's mostly beautiful for its potential to be used by him (he's nutting, obviously. This is describing a time in his youth.) Anyway, my point, there's no unvarnished accurate appreciation of nature/Nature/environment here.

To Tintern Abbey! Which is a flipping huge poem; god, they just didn't know when to shut *up*, did they?

Hey, hey, opinions, anyone who's reading this: "bower": vocabulary designed to evoke the female, or not? I'm thinking of perfumed bowers, here. Do men have bowers?



ETA 2: OH YEAH, I have an argument!

"Does romantic poetry accurately represent the non-human world, or does it drastically misrepresent it? Support your argument with an analysis of two poems."

"The nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart": Nature as female in the poetry of William Wordsworth.

Although Wordsworth strives to faithfully describe the environment that surrounds him, his poems betray an inability to escape preconceived notions of nature as female, ultimately leading to distortions in his depictions of the non-human world. By exploring the language of "Nutting" and "Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey", it can be seen that Wordsworth's formulation of nature as female leads inexorably to descriptions of an environment that exists only in response to the poet's needs and desires; and environment, even, which Wordsworth appears to feed on, both literally in the case of "Nutting" and metaphorically in the case of "Tintern Abbey."

Okay, that's not a thesis, that's a title and the first two sentences of my introduction. Woo woo? Actually, gah, it doesn't quite say what I want it to say, it doesn't quite answer the question, so we'll see, it might change.

He gave out a whole bunch of essay advice, some of which was great, and some of which was kind of blah. But what really struck me was, he said only draft a provisional introduction and come back and do it again after you've finished. I do usually revise my introduction a bit, mostly because I end up leaving stuff out (I'm... talky) but, gah, I can't write *anything* until I have a really good introduction. Man.

ETA3: okay okay the rest of my blether is going to go below a cut and y'all won't have to see it but this is *fascinating*. Wordsworth published (and, according to Wiki anyway, wrote) Tintern Abbey in 1798. Here he describes the natural world as "The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse/The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul/Of all my moral being." He also wrote that

...Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us...

Now, in the same year Immanuel Kant published his "Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View", where he writes: "Nature made women mature early and had them demand gentle and polite treatment from men, so that … [men] would find themselves brought, if not quite to morality itself, then at least to that which cloaks it, moral behaviour, which is the preparation and introduction to morality." The "beautiful understanding" or finer feelings that women (supposedly) have (Kant was very into finer feelings, "the beautiful and the sublime") actually leads men on to higher moral feeling.

The similarities are fascinating. I mean, Kant was publishing in German and although he was a pretty influential philosopher, even during his lifetime, I have no idea whether Wordsworth would have read his work. But whether he did or not, the similarities are striking: Wordsworth writes that nature leads men on to higher feelings and gives them a moral compass; Kant thinks women do the same thing. It's just so interesting.

*geeks out*


Introduction: all done! 141 words.

Son of ETA: *whimpers* 246 words ESSAY WHY DO YOU DEFY ME. 246 *boring* words, too. Fuuuuuuuuuck.

ETA: I wasn't getting anything done last night, so I went to bed, and now I have 392 words and a sentence that goes like this:

"Having admired the unspoiled natural beauty, the poet, rather than leave it for anyone else to see, destroys it. "

TOO MANY COMMAS STOP HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW TO WRITE STOP SEND HELP STOP OR AN EXTENSION STOP

Bastard child of Son of ETA and Edit: 678, much better, words! Woo! Also, too many semi-colons, but BETTER THAN COMMAS, I say.

HAHA 1143 words! Dude, I'm going to break word limit again, I can feel it (or, well, it is 1500-2000. I can probably keep it under 2000... lessee, if I go straight to the final passage now and then a conclusion...)

What do y'all think of putting in the bit about Kant in a footnote? I really want to mention it because it feels really significant to me, but it would probably be out of place in the body of the essay.

Comments

[amarynth.livejournal.com]

Myself, I usually left the introduction until last. It was hard to do, though - when you're up against a wordcount, the introduction offers a very attractive ratio of effort/words written. But if your essay's any good (as I'm sure it will be) you'll need to rewrite the introduction anyway.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

I'll edit it a little bit, but actually I find that I don't change it all that much. I think it's because I usually do fairly extensive planning before I start writing - I mean, I've been working for two hours and I only just powered up Word, but I have half a dozen sheets of paper with planning notes all over them plus of course the poems are scrawled all over... anyway, I know I'm a bit different from others but I *hate* leaving the intro til last.

[amarynth.livejournal.com]

Ah, my method was always to start when I started Word. I've never worked well with pen and paper. If I'd been born 30 years earlier I'd probably be digging up roads (instead of the white collar equivalent of digging up roads).

[blademistress.livejournal.com]

I thought you might like an example of "someone worse off than you". Here are my questions that I have to answer, for your mocking pleasure.

Discuss the view that Cabinet is the engine room of policy making.

Consider Weller’s Six major roles of Cabinet:

Six major roles of Cabinet:

1. Cabinet as a clearing house: ratification of work done by committees
2. Cabinet as a forum for information exchange
3. Cabinet as arbiter – resolves tensions that arise over resources and priorities
4. Cabinet as political decision maker – assessing electoral consequences of policy options
5. Cabinet as coordinator – of policies which involve input from several departments
6. Cabinet as guardian of the strategy – going beyond the departmental view to a broader “whole of government” view of direction of policy.

(Weller, 1990 cited in Bridgman and Davis, 1998: 10).

Can Parliament ever exercise a role in policy making against the wishes of the executive?

And because that's too easy, they decided to make sure all the readings related to none of these questions at all. *facedesk*

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Augh, god. My sympathies! I especially love the way you have to, like, translate the questions first.

*whines* Why is education such hard work?

The best thing by far about this essay is that he told us he didn't want any outside reading. :P

[amarynth.livejournal.com]

Sounds pretty interesting to me! I recommend Elizabeth McLay's work on the role of Cabinet, although I forget the titles of any of her books.

[chattycheese.livejournal.com]

I've not heard of a man having a bower. That word usually evokes an image of semi-dark, perfumed, mysterious spaces done in red and purple, with artfully draped fabric. (My imagination is strrrange.)

But omg Wordsworth yay! We had to write brutal essays on the romantics (well, as brutal as you can get with 15-year-olds) a few years back, but I always liked Coleridge a bit more. Something about the fact that, if at a complete loss for an argument, I could blame it on him being a stoner.