This poem, “Spontaneous Me”, written by Walt Whitman describes the
beauty of both nature and the human body. By writing this poem, he most
probably wanted to show the connection between these two. When reading it, a
person can see that the entire poem is a connection between love, sexual
passion and the human body. Why does he do so? By analyzing the poem I
realized he believes that the real poem is inside the man himself, and
everything around us is part of poetry, which when connected; make an
excellent poetry, full of imagination and life!
The structure of the poem says it all! He uses anaphora, using mostly
“the” to make some sort of connection between the lines, to enable the
creation of large audio and visual images and give rhythm and tonality to the
text. Each line has separate ideas and images, but they are all tied together
by common beginnings. By doing so, he has managed to connect all the
different lines and the ideas and make them parts of a theme. In this poem,
Whitman has used free verses, which has helped him sound the poem like an
ongoing story, which is infinite and has no particular end.
When reading, you can see that the poem includes lots of non-poetic
things; being animals or plants/parts of nature, and resembling them to the
human being, thus, making them poetic and full of life. In the above mentioned
passage, he compares man to a hairy wild-bee that gripes the full-grown
lady-flower, curves upon her with amorous firm legs. Every single image in
this line is sexual and natural. In my opinion, it describes the process of
the sexual intercourse in humans. “Love-thoughts, love-juice, love-odor,
love-yielding, love-climbers…”, as you can see, Whitman has repeatedly used
the word “love”, to emphasize a sexual connection with different things, and
to show the connection between love and sex. The main idea of the poem is shown in the first line:
Spontaneous me, Nature. He has done so to show from the beginning that the
free, uninhibited sexual passion within man is indeed natural. Whitman points
out two aspects of nature. The human aspect, which is shown in “the arm of my
friend hanging idly over my shoulder” and in “two sleepers at night lying
close together as they sleep”. The non-human aspect is represented in the
“hillside whiten’d with blossoms”, “the hairy wild-bee”, “the wet of woods”,
and “dead leaf”. Whitman includes all the senses of man, being emotional or
touchable, however he emphasizes mostly on the sense of touch.
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Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Spontaneous Me :Walt Whitman (Explication)
Men VS. Women: Better or Equal? (Portable Concept)
The world we live in is mainly controlled by men. Women who can step up
and be better than the men around them are usually blocked out and not given a
chance. This whole process can be seen in the movie I’m going to relate my
portable concept to. “She’s the man” is a movie that talks about a girl named
Viola Hastings, who loves to play soccer, and wishes to pursue her dream of
being a recognized player. However, things turn out wrong when the girls’
soccer team shuts down, and the boys’ coach refuses to let them tryout to join
their team. Viola, who has a brother named Sebastian, grabs the opportunity of
fulfilling her dream after realizing her brother is going to skip school for 3
weeks, and comes up with the idea of dressing up like him and being in his
place. After a few days in school as Sebastian, she makes the boys soccer team!
After this movie came to my mind, I connected it with the ideas of two
of the authors we’ve read in class so far. One is Erving Goffman and the
second; Deborah Tannen.
Goffman, in his book “Presentation of Self” discusses how people tend to
act like people they really aren’t in order to get where they want and fulfill
their needs. According to him, humans are active and knowledgeable, who devise
their own conduct, guide and control how others see them and are different in
social settings than alone (Marshall,
2013). In other
words, humans are “actors.”
When
we relate this idea to what Viola has done in the above mentioned movie, we
realize that she actually disguised herself as someone else, which in this case
is her older brother, in Goffman’s words, she “put on a mask” to get to her dream!
First, to be able to play soccer and
second, to be able to show everyone, especially her school coach and soccer
players that she is good enough to play on the men’s team. Having done all this,
she’s in fact controlling how others are seeing her. She’s acting like a boy
around people, and getting back to who she really is; a girl, when she’s alone.
This implies that she’s acting differently in social settings than when she’s
all alone.
Deborah Tannen, in her book “The Power of Talk”, has discussed that boys
are rewarded to talk up achievement, whereas, girls are rewarded if they play
down their achievements. (Tannen,
1995) This means,
women are considered women if they don’t step up and try to be better than men.
However, men are considered men if they step up and be better than women.
Viola, having been put down, and rejected in the men’s soccer team, because
of being a female, shows us exactly what Tannen has written. I actually remember a quote from the movie,
in which the coach of the boys’ soccer team tells Viola and her fellow
teammates that girls aren’t as fast, strong and athletic enough as boys, and
that “Girl’s can’t beat boys. It’s as simple as that” ("She's the man," 2010). This scene
proves us that the point Tannen is trying to show us is true, and we may not
realize it until we seriously think about it.
Having made the relevant connections, I conclude that we’re not who we
really are in social settings, due to the fact that people won’t accept others
if they show their true identity. This point is true especially in women’s
case, because as we see above, the female sex is always put down while trying
to show a point and be better or equal to men/boys.
References
·
Tannen, D. (1995). The
power of talk.
·
Goffman, E. presentation
of self.
·
Marshall, D. (2013). Goffman and the interaction order [Web]. Retrieved from
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSgYjyfF19w
·
Baehr, T. (n.d.). She's
the man. Retrieved from http://www.cbn.com/entertainment/screen/movieguide_ShesTheMan.aspx
Great Expectations (Reading Between The Lines)
Great Expectations; a movie that revolves
around the main character Pip, who was an orphan raised by his sister and her
husband, and was eventually going to be a blacksmith, and Estella (the girl he
fell in love with) who was an orphan too, adopted by Miss Havisham and being
raised as a lady. The original story on which this movie is based on was
written during an era in which women’s rights were being stepped on and they
were suffering because of that. Evidently, Miss Havisham was one of those women
and she wasn’t willing to fold her hands, forget about it and do nothing. During
the first few minutes of the movie we hear Miss Havisham (Estella’s adoptive
mother) utter the following words “Well, you can break his heart.” By hearing
these words, and seeing her in a thorn, old bridal gown, we immediately come to
the conclusion that her heart was once broken, and she daily lives with that
hurt and has the urge for revenge in her heart, which she wants to get through
Estella. Usually implicit meanings are hard to see and understand, but in this
movie, the body language along with the conversation, brings the implicit
meaning to the surface and shows what exactly is going on. By this scene, we somehow get a head start on
the future scenes of the movie and know what potentially is going to happen.
It’s
usually known that boys are stronger and have a higher self-esteem than girls.
As Martin and Gentry have mentioned in their “Stuck in the Model Trap” passage,
during adolescence, girls’ self-esteem goes down, whereas that of the boys goes
up, because all girls think of are ways to improve their look and be as
skinnier as possible, whereas boys don’t have that issue. Here, in this movie,
the situation is totally the opposite than that of what usually is the
case. Why is it so? Most probably,
because Estella, was already beautiful and had nothing to worry about and she
was grown up in an environment where she was forced to be strong and have a
higher self-esteem than boys, taking into consideration the situation Miss
Havisham has been in years ago. If Estella has a high self-esteem, than why
does Pip suffer from low self-esteem? Taking into consideration that Pip comes from
a poor family, he had no idea about the world that existed outside his house
and the lands surrounding it. Thus, when he found himself in a huge mansion,
with high class citizens, he felt unworthy. Therefore, Martin and Gentry’s
point of view is not necessarily true and somehow stereotypic, because as we
can see, the environment a person has lived and grown up in determines the
personality of a person.
What
came to my mind other than Martin and Gentry’s idea is that of Deborah Tannen.
In her book; “The Power of Talk” she talks about how women exercise authority
indirectly, and that girls are the ones who build reports/relations. In the above mentioned scene, we realize that
Miss Havisham, along with Estella (by influencing on her), somehow try to be in
control over Pip. Tannen’s point of view is totally correct, however, such acts
are usually implicit, because if you don’t know the past of the people involved
in the act, you won’t know what’s on their mind and what they may be capable
of.
According
to Austin, there are two types of acts; performances and performatives. In this
scene, we don’t see much performance; however the presence of a performative is
crystal clear. Austin thinks that designated people (in this case Miss
Havisham) achieve performatives, because they are linked to the situation. In
the mentioned scene, Miss Havisham was the perfect candidate to effect Estella
with her words (performatives), due to the fact that she was in a been there
felt that situation. She had experienced love and loss, and she knew exactly
what to say and how to act in order to somehow brainwash Estella and get
revenge through her. The word
“Performatives” here stands for words that do things. Sometimes words have more
effect on our daily lives than we can ever imagine. For instance, in Great
Expectations, “Well, you can break his heart.” Says it all and puts everything
on the table.
After
getting deep in the scene, reading between the lines and connecting the
conversation with three of the thinkers, I understood much more than I
originally knew when I first started writing this essay. I came to the
conclusion that oral communication, body language and settings, if not
connected, can’t communicate implicit meanings. Plus, I realized that implicit
meaning have much more effect, and are more important than explicit ones,
because that’s where the true story and the true events occur. Thus, by
combining these three thinkers, we get the ultimate effect the writer/director
is seeking to transfer to the viewers.
References
·
Austin. Lecture
II.
·
Tannen, D. (1995). The
power of talk.
·
Martin & Gentry. Stuck
in the model trap.
Dickens, C. (Writer) (2013). Great expectations [DVD]. Available from http://www.megashare.info/watch-great-expectations-online-TmpJNE9BPT0
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