Hello my lovelies!!!
I am SO terribly sad that today was the last day we will EVER be in class together again. . . The magic we created within the walls of. . . what was the classroom number again??
But Oh, the magic. That's what we will all remember and take with us- the JOYS of Global Literature and the English Language! We shall be eternally grateful for the knowledge and sanctity of what was said in room. . . . that room. The talk of Capitalism, Colonialism, crazy drugged out people, sex diaries, and Globalism. Could we really have sucked out any more sweet nectar from the core of English 373?
Ok, so my abstract is pretty much what I spoke about in class, I hope I'm doing it right. I can correct it immediately on your word, Julie, so just let me know. :)
Concerning the texts The Mimic Men and Wide Sargasso Sea, my psychoanalytic argument (thanks to Julie, Tanner, and Amy for reminding me of an obvious thing I should have noticed had I REALLY been paying attention to the week on literary criticisms in 302, haha :)) is:
"The alienation that Antoinette and Ralph both experience in their childhood contributes to their continual search for identity for the remainder of their adult lives."
Ralph definitely has some rough childhood experiences that lead him to become reclusive starting in his early years. Cecil bullies him, and on top of that inferiority, he suffers from extreme embarrassment in front of his class. His schoolmates laugh at him when he doesn't think of "wife" when participating in a word association exercise, and this happens again with the letter he had to read aloud to the class concerning his future employment. It is because of this feeling of being on the outside that Ralph begins to live it like it was normal. He accommodates to what his classmates assume, and therefore becomes a "Mimic Man." He changes his name at school, and later on his ability to have healthy relationships with women is effected. He can't make his marriage work, and he has a prostitution problem. He learns to separate his emotions from who he really is. Brian Allen for the journal of Childhood Maltreatment states that "psychological rejection and degradation may also contribute to [. . .] problematic and unstable interpersonal relations" (311). Ralph is a basket case when it comes to thinking of intimacy, as he even expresses, "Intimacy: the word holds the horror" (30). He definitely has issues in dealing with relationships and his feelings that his identity have been lost.
In Antoinette's case, she does in fact receive a lot of abuse at the hands of the children who live on the island, and feels like an outsider. However, it is most evident that her primary source of rejection and alienation was from her mother, and that is what, in the end, seals her fate. So many times she was on the short end of the stick when it came to parenting- not only did her mother not care about her (which is bad enough in itself), but her mother favored her brother. Granted, he had health problems, but Antoinette was still aware enough as a kid to see that she wasn't wanted. She even says to Rochester later, "Between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why I was ever born at all" (61). Wow.Antoinette is pretty stuck in a big, muddy pit if she knows where she was born and who her family is and yet still searches to find her identity. In a cool article I found, Laura Choate and Annemieke Hensen stated "psychological maltreatment has been linked to a range of long term mental health difficulties. For example, a history of psychological maltreatment has been associated with general psychological distress, diminished self esteem, interpersonal shame, emotional inhibition (including suppressed/withheld thoughts, avoidant coping styles and ambivalence regarding emotional expression)" (119). Antoinette has a lot of all that going on, and the fact that her own mother had mental health problems does not give us a lot of hope for her.
I know this is longer than a normal abstract, but I'd rather bore you to death with too much rather than leave you confused with too little.
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