Advice From Sparky

     This Poetry Writing homework was written on the close of an awful day, and I was missing my dog Sunny. So I read Wilson Rawls' Where the Red Fern Grows, and that helped. This poem was written to a master from his loyal now-dead scruffy beagle Sparky. The name came from recently reading a biography of Charles Schulz, and the brightish tone in the last stanza was probably influenced by studying a lot of Edgar Guest.

Yeah, I’m not here any longer,

but you just found this letter

and I never chewed up much

poetry as a pup, so I reckon

I can try it now.

If I did my job right, you’re stronger

now than you were then, better

able to handle stress and such.

Sure, you still freak out for a second

when things leave you going “…Wow,”

but doesn’t everyone? Don’t squander

these moments you live, be a go-getter

and make sure to give a “Hang in there” touch

to those pals in need. A new chapter of life beckons.

Chase it, like I do my tail. I am a dog, anyhow.

A Month of Small-Town News to Gossip About

     This was one of my favorite practice poems for Poetry Writing homework. I was kind of aiming at a Garth Brooks-like story in tone with this villanelle, which I think I came close to. I wrote it based on a list of randomly-generated words: "Mandolins, Garth Brooks, basketball, rectangles, waffles, the Fourth of July and grief." It was written near midnight; thus joining the hypothetical poetry collection "2 AM Poems" the class joked about(since most of the homework was done at the last second).
     I don't like this title, if I revise this one I'll change it, but it started out without any title, and there would be at least a full month of gossip generated in this town.

It was right about the Fourth of July,

that night where Garth Brooks came to the nearby town,

when Chloe’s best friend died…

Our basketball town gathered to cry

at the funeral of one of our own;

It was right about Fourth of July.

With the condolences said, the rumors spread like

waffle syrup artificially dyed brown

when Chloe’s best friend died.

Casey’s mandolin left – his hands, strong and spry

wouldn’t play to celebrate graduation.

It was right about the Fourth of July

That wreck was discovered out by the junior high,

causing the sheriff and law to frown 

when Chloe’s best friend died.

They say he was callin’ Baton Rouge; she was never charged with a crime

while the thunder rolled and farmers’ wheat drowned.

It was right about the Fourth of July

when Chloe’s best friend died…

The Importance of Food and Mealtime in Stories

     This was an essay for American Lit, I was going to base it on the use of weaving faith and superstition throughout the plotline of several novels, but realized at the last minute that there was no way I could do that effectively. So at the last minute I changed the topic to the use of food and mealtimes throughout novels, which Dr. Mackie said was a really good topic, but the essay needed a lot of work. I knew that, but a poorly-written essay is better than one turned in past deadline. It got a 79, which is higher than I would have given it, but that just barely kept me from getting an A in that class(I had an average of 88.9). Oh, well.

     In literature, often overlooked are minor details of daily living, if they are not relevant to the plot in some way. One of these aspects is mealtime; though the presence of food in general often serves as the setting for an important scene and/or emotional turnaround, or where important background exposition is revealed. I will try to showcase how food and mealtimes are important in novels.

     Through her novels, mostly situated within the small Appalachian village of Mitford, North Carolina, Jan Karon writes in a very down-to-earth, everyday manner. Characters do laundry and go grocery shopping and work through chores on Saturday; they work crossword puzzles and pray and read the local newspaper. Most of all, they eat. And many cook. In her anthology collection/scrapbook The Mitford Bedside Companion, Karon responds to numerous reader fan mail commenting on all the food in the books(which includes everything from apples, buttermilk biscuits, and Sara Lee pies to bouillabaisse, gizzards and lethal orange marmalade cake). She says on page 49,

“Why is there so much food in the Mitford books? First, food is a great way of communicating. When I write about Dooley loving fried baloney sandwiches, you can connect with that. When I write about Puny baking cornbread and Louella frying chicken, most of you can relate to that. Food is something we can all understand; it’s a common language.”

     A little farther down the same page Karon explains that besides that, she had left a successful advertising job to launch her writing career, and the reason the first book was filled with food references was “largely because my cupboards were bare, and I was writing hungry.”

      When hungry, it can be difficult to think properly, which can lead to poor decision making. The most obvious example of this is the biblical story where Esau traded his birthright to his younger brother Jacob as payment for a bowl of lentil stew (Genesis 25:29-34). Drinking alcoholic beverages throughout history has been seen as a social pastime, depicted in many literature and films. The impending decision about Jig getting an abortion in Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” is discussed over beers, while she proclaims that everything in life tastes like licorice. “Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.” Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises is filled with characters who exist in an alcohol-induced fog of addiction, living out Jig’s thought that “That’s all we do, isn’t it – look at things and try new drinks?” The characters of Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey Into Night would probably agree; as Mary says of addictions in Act Three, “It kills the pain. You go back until at last you’re beyond its reach.”

     Though not using drink as a means of escape, Nick Carroway of The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is perhaps running away from the memories of that New York summer by locking the experience into printed form. Jay Gatsby built up his ridiculous façade to disguise his anguish over Daisy’s marriage to Tom, but the hullabaloo camouflaged well the fact that “he was just the proprietor of an elaborate road-house next door” (64). Gatsby uses mealtime and alcohol memorably; most of the first chapter introduces us to the main characters through an extremely uncomfortable dinner party (6-17). The second chapter is primarily concerned with the bizarre evening at Tom and Myrtle’s trysting place, which Nick cannot remember too well due to being drunk most of the night (24-37). It is over a meal at a fancy New York restaurant where the shadowy side of Gatsby’s business dealings is briefly revealed to the reader (69-73). Everyone is partially drunk that day in August when Myrtle Wilson is run over (114-141), and then in the aftermath that night Tom and Daisy “conspire together”, in Nick’s words, over cold fried chicken and ale (145).    

     But more often the sensory experience of consuming certain foods lends itself well to forming associations with experiences involving that food; which is what John Tobias’ poem with the extremely long title “Reflections on the Gift of a Watermelon Pickle Received From a Friend Called Felicity” is about. As Tobias says:

“…The summer which maybe never was

Has been captured and preserved.

And when we unscrew the lid

And slice off a piece

And let it linger on our tongue

Unicorns become possible again.”

     Watermelons ruled that summer when “the purpose of knees was to be skinned”; according to the poem, and E.B. White picks up on this theme quite a bit in Charlotte’s Web, from the opening chapter describing the momentous breakfast one spring morning in the Arable kitchen (7-13) to the listing of all the edible things summer brings (50-51) to the old sheep’s recitation of the paradise of food Templeton will find at the county fair (130-131). Listing all the places food drives the story forward would be citing almost the entire book.

In another novel written for juvenile readers, S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, it’s while Ponyboy and Cherry are getting popcorn and Cokes at the movie theater where they discuss the differences and similarities between the Greasers and the Socs, exposing each to the view that those “on the wrong side of the tracks” might not be so terrible after all (38-43). Coca-Cola realized that trendy music could help marketers target the young demographic which Ponyboy, Cherry and Hinton all fell into, using widespread TV and radio advertisements starring the likes of Ray Charles, Libby H. O’Connell writes in her history of The American Plate (238). And while popcorn had a long tradition of being an American snack food, O’Connell states that its’ big break came from the invention of the electric corn popper in 1925, which was soon picked up widely by movie theaters, providing an affordable draw during the Great Depression and then providing servicemen a taste of home on military bases during World War II (261).

     Besides providing sustaining energy, meals can also be, in the formal definition of UCLA scholars Elinor Ochs and Merov Shohet in their journal article “The Cultural Structuring of Mealtime Socialization”, “cultural sites where members of different generations and genders come to learn, reinforce, undermine, or transform each other’s ways of acting, thinking and feeling in the world.”

     That transformation of acting and thinking which can occur over shared meals is part of what makes Celie’s and Squeak’s revolt during a family meal even more shocking in Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple (198-204). Harmony is just somewhat expected during mealtimes, and so it’s doubly astonishing when that social civility is snapped. At the book’s close, a barbecue is one of the staples of the family reunion, thus reestablishing the sometime-frayed communication channels between former partners, extended family and parents and children (287-288).

     In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, the girls’ Christmas is made immeasurably brighter by Mr. Edwards’ visit bearing gifts from Santa Claus for Mary and Laura. These presents include a tin cup, a peppermint stick, a cake made of white sugar and a penny for each of them. And for the whole family, there are sweet potatoes to go with the Christmas turkey (248-252). Moving ahead about six years and changing the scenery from the Kansas prairie to the South Dakota prairie, the Ingalls’ Christmas with their friends the Boasts is brightened by the meal of roasted rabbit, dried apple pie and popcorn (198-200).

     And sometimes the conversation over meals can reveal insights or revelations which would have no other outlet. In a place as ultra-conservative as Philip Gulley’s Harmony, Indiana – which is anything but harmonious – the conversation in the Coffee Cup restaurant during a slow winter month revolves around the first bikini ever sold at the Five and Dime (Life Goes On 193-194). The townspeople can be unlovable curmudgeons who hate everything to the point where the best thing anyone can say at the funeral is “He did like Cheetos” (Signs and Wonders 146). But it in this town, over a piece of terrible-tasting leftover pot roast, that a father accepts that his son is gay (Signs 185-186). 

     Going back to Karon’s North Carolina in her first book, At Home in Mitford, the town’s favorite clergymember Father Tim Kavanagh meets his pretty next-door neighbor Cynthia Coppersmith the children’s book author/illustrator when she knocks on his door in a rainstorm to borrow a cup of sugar for a cake; they end up devouring a rack of barbecued ribs he had just made (At Home 142-144). From that first interaction, a friendship blossoms which eventually leads to their marriage. There are times when the strain of preaching gets to be too much, so those are where Father Tim can take a break and go visit the cabin of his friend Homeless Hobbes for encouragement and a bowl of stew in equal measure (At Home 236-240).

Edgar Guest begins his poem “The Perfect Dinner Table” by pointing out that the tablecloth is slightly dirty from little hands, the food is not fancy, and it is only him, his wife and their children at the table (Book of Virtues 241-242). The next two stanzas describe the excited chattering of the kids describing their day and the minor impolitenesses of putting elbows on the table or talking with one’s mouth full. It is a perfect example of the domestic focus and warm tone which so often comes through in Guest’s poetry. But the final stanza closes it out thusly:

“At many a table I have been

Where wealth and luxury were seen,

And I have dined in halls of pride

Where all the guests were dignified;

But when it comes to pleasure rare

The perfect dinner table’s where

No stranger’s face is ever known;

The dinner hour we spend alone,

When little girl and little lad

Run riot telling things to Dad.”

     That is idealistic, but if your dreams are not slightly out of reach, what would be the point of aiming at them? Most dinnertimes do not follow such a placid, well-trodden path – there will of course be battles over finishing the peas or corn - but that makes the times when it does happen shine brighter. Throughout this essay I tried to showcase instances of the ordinary routine affecting the extraordinary events of plotting; this does not the quality of a Red Lobster meal, instead seeming more of a Hamburger Helper type of paper. 

Works Cited

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.

Guest, Edgar. “The Perfect Dinner Table”. 1916. The Book of Virtues. Ed. William J. Bennett. New York: Touchstone, 1993. Print.

Gulley, Philip. Life Goes On. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004. Print.

-----------------. Signs and Wonders. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003. Print.

Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants”. 1927. PDF file, Massey University. Web. 11 November 2015.

Hinton, S.E. The Outsiders. 1967. New York: Viking, 2007. Print.

Karon, Jan. At Home in Mitford. New York: Penguin, 1994. Print.

---------------. The Mitford Bedside Companion. Ed. Brenda Furman. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.

Ochs, Elinor and Merov Shohet. “The Cultural Structuring of Mealtime Socialization”. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development. Wiley Periodicals. Spring 2006. Web. 11 November 2015.

O’Connell, Libby H. The American Plate: A Culinary History in 100 Bites. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2014. Print.

O’Neill, Eugene. Long Day’s Journey Into Night. 1956. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. D. Ed. Nina Bayim and Robert S. Levine. 402-480. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2012. Print.

Tobias, John. “Reflections on the Gift of a Watermelon Pickle Received From a Friend Called Felicity”. 1963. PDF file, University of Florida. Web. 11 November 2015.

White, E.B. Charlotte’s Web. 1952. New York: Dell Publishing, 1972. Print.

Wilder, Laura Ingalls. By the Shores of Silver Lake. 1939. New York: Scholastic, 1953. Print.

-------------------------. Little House on the Prairie.1935. New York: Scholastic, 1953. Print.

Fantasy, "Ocean" and Neil Gaiman

     The fourth major essay for Dr. Dial-Driver's Lit Traditions course at Rogers State University. It was the highest-scoring of the four at a 91; and considering that I didn't know what a literary analysis looked like when the course started, I'll take that.

     Neil Gaiman says in the acknowledgements of his novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane that it was intended to be merely a short story, but that it just kept growing until it was a novel-length project. This happens sometimes, for as Stephen King states in his memoir On Writing, “The writer who is serious and committed is incapable of sixing up story material the way an investor might size up various stock offerings” (159). Readers are not particularly drawn to books in order to analyze how they are crafted structurally; instead they want to experience a good story (King 160). Ocean is a little bizarre, and certainly different than most novels on bookshelves, but overall can be reckoned a worthwhile read.

     To begin with, this is a fantasy novel which is marketed at children. (Apparently I was wrong on this point, but I've never been very good at defining target audiences.) To be fantasy is to inhabit a “Perilous Realm” which “cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible”, as J.R.R. Tolkien said in his essay “On Fairy Stories”. The world of Ocean can be felt easily, but trying to define it in concrete terms is impossible. While writing it, Gaiman was plagued by a nagging question, which became the title of an article he wrote for Horn Book Magazine: “What the [Very Bad Swearword] Is a Children’s Book Anyway?” As Gaiman describes the then-work-in-progress, “It has magic in it. It has a Sense of Wonder in it, and strangeness. It’s a book about the incomprehensibility of the adult world.” Very much autobiographical, the book was written to try to explain to his wife what his childhood had been like.  As King says, because readers love reading about ordinary people working, “God knows why, but they do” (On Writing 161), perhaps that is why the Narrator of Ocean lives so deeply in books: “Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I know about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and advisors” (77). Gaiman is an author, so therefore he is writing about his own work here. Good authors, as Tolkien pointed out, “create worlds in which your mind can enter.” These Secondary Worlds are soap bubbles; as they disappear the moment disbelief enters the scene. As long as we are inside the soap bubble, all the rules of the tale’s reality are true. 

In “On Fairy Stories” Tolkien wrote that “the trouble with the real folk of Faerie is that they do not always look like what they are; and they put on the pride and beauty that we would fain wear ourselves. At least part of the magic that they weird for the good or evil of man is power to play on the desires of his body and his heart.” Once the opal miner commits suicide, nothing is quite how it appears. Ursula Monkton quickly ensnares the narrator’s father and his little sister; and a tent-creature or worm-thing is certainly not they thought they saw when she was hired as governess.  The Hempstocks are just “good country people”, their neighbors would say – and they are good, befriending and protecting the Narrator throughout the story. They are odd, though. Lettie especially is an enigma; at face value she is eleven, but it is implied that she has been eleven for a very, very long time. Her ocean is mystifying, as is almost everything else related to the Hempstocks. What exactly happened at the end by the pond is hidden by the tricks of memory and the distance of forty years’ clutter, but it is possible that Lettie sacrificed herself for our Narrator; coming as close to dying as is possible for those of her kind.

     Ursula Monkton, or the creature calling herself by that name, is eventually defeated, and the hunger birds are driven away, much to the cheers of the audience. This constant fight between good and evil, black and white, light and dark has been going on as long as there have been humans, going back to the Garden of Eden. We are rooting for the Narrator to survive these trials, even though if we step outside the tale for a second we realize that of course he must have gotten through if he’s telling us this story forty years later. Paul Asay says in his book Burning Bush 2.0: “We want the good guys to survive and the bad guys to get their due. That’s Storytelling 101” (68). This could be why we still say someone has an Achilles heel or posesses the Midas touch, and why we study tragedies like Oedipus and Medea in courses like this one. For as the Narrator tells us: “I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were” (53). Asay continues: “There are echoes of a universal right and wrong here –and the belief that the universe itself will punish wrongdoers.” (Bush 68).

     Gaiman’s description is very vivid and cinematic, and his narration flows like dialogue, which “either moves the story along or reveals information about the character,” as screenwriter Syd Field wrote in The Screenwriter’s Problem Solver (183). The details he points out to us often accomplish both tasks. We never learn the Narrator’s name, but because Gaiman is able, to quote Field again, to “feel comfortable in his [character’s] skin, the dialogue [is] individual and appropriate,” capturing the character of that character (183). We feel with him the terror and revulsion of the adults’ way of looking at things, their conventional way of skipping to the boring, nonessential tasks. Adults have stories that never make sense to a child’s mind; “They made me feel like there were secrets, masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood. Why didn’t adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?” the Narrator wonders on page 53. Gaiman the author might have answered his creation’s question in “What the [Swearword]…” where he points out that adults often look for logical, well-thought-out answers. Authors, and stories, are not very good at giving those appropriate answers. They are very good, however, at giving answers which may be “unreliable, personal, anecdotal and highly imaginative. These things can be drawbacks.” Towards the end of the article, Gaiman admits to the reader what he knew all along: “You do not come to authors for answers. You come to us for questions. We’re really good at questions.” The reader is left to puzzle out answers to many of the questions Ocean raises on his or her own, which is part of the reader-writer contract, because, like Tolkien said, “Fairy stories [are] plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability.” This could be why the concept of fanfiction is so popular, giving a second or third (or sixteenth) chance at getting that favorite couple from that one TV show back together again.

     “A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change,” the Narrator concludes on page 170. But it should be remembered that the reader is one of the people on the journey that the plot takes, and so perhaps that is Gaiman the author speaking there. Words have power, and stories can changes lives. If the reader is changed – inspired to encourage others, made more courageous, makes up or changes their ideas on an issue – then the story matters.  

Works Cited

Asay, Paul. Burning Bush 2.0: How Pop Culture Replaced the Prophet. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2015. Print.

Field, Syd. The Screenwriter’s Problem Solver: How to Recognize, Identify, and Define Screenwriting Problems. New York: Dell, 1998. Print.

Gaiman, Neil. The Ocean at the End of the Lane. New York: William Morrow, 2013. Print.

-----------------. “What the [Very Bad Swearword] Is a Children’s Book Anyway?” Horn Book Magazine 88.6 (2012) 10-22. Professional Development Collection. Web. 5 November 2015.

King, Stephen. On Writing. New York: Scribner, 2000. Print.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy Stories”. 1947. University of California – San Diego. PDF file. 5 November 2015. 

Relative Yuletide

      The workshopped villanelle for Dr. Mackie's Poetry Writing course. Most of the discussion that followed was trading stories of Christmas traditions, but most people enjoyed this poem.

Gather ‘round the Christmas tree

while we swap stories and sing carols;

it’s life as we celebrate the Nativity.

It could be the season, or maybe just Kerri,

but holiday fun is arguing with Sheryl

as we gather ‘round the Christmas tree.

Baking pies and those famous Mueller Cookies,

Tim’s feeding that barn kitten – (probably feral?)

It’s life as we celebrate the Nativity

Grandma clipping coupons with Hailey,

catclaws putting ornaments in peril

As we gather ‘round the Christmas tree.

While the rest of us watch Jimmy Stewart on TV

the boys hang out at the burn barrel;

It’s life as we celebrate the Nativity.

Matt updates us on his master’s degree,

“…Don we now our gay apparel…”

Gather ‘round the Christmas tree

as we celebrate the Nativity.

Puck is a Help, Not a Hindrance, in "Midsummer Night"

     The second essay for Dr. Ford's Shakespeare class at Rogers State University; I enlisted the help of my friend and sometimes writing partner Ashland for proofreading. She pointed out that it wasn't all that helpful if the reader wasn't familiar with A Midsummer Night's Dream. But the instructions were a character sketch, so that's why it's written the way it is. 

     In William Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the character of Robin Goodfellow, also known as Puck, is somewhat of a wild card among the fairies of the woods. But while his antics might perhaps be mischievous at times, overall he is a positive force.

     As an audience, we first meet him at the beginning of the second act, after the pairs of lovers run into the forest, and the tradesmen rehearse their play. His primary job is to be a servant of Oberon, and so one of his first speeches is exposition about the conflict between Oberon and Titania over the Indian changeling (II.1.18-31). We first learn of his rakish reputation from the anonymous fairy’s reply, “Are you not he that frights the maidens of the villagery?” (II.1.34-35). In addition to this, he spoils beer and milk, misleads travelers and greatly enjoys scaring unsuspecting people (II.1.36-39). Following a spat between the royal couple of faeriedom, Oberon sends Puck on an errand to retrieve a love potion: “Fetch me this herb, and be thou here again ere the leviathan can swim a league” (II.1.173-74). Demetrius and Helena have a spat of their own while Puck is on his errand, leading to romantic-hearted Oberon’s command to use it on Demetrius. Puck executes this duty well – in all except that he had the wrong patient: “Weeds of Athens he doth wear; this is he(my master said) despised the Athenian maid” (II.2.71-73).

     Lysander, by unhappy chance, spies Helena first on awaking instead of Hermia, and so they verbally spar for a while, mortifying Helena. But Puck, unimpressed with the rehearsal of “The Most Lamentable Comedy of Pyramus and Thisby”, and also possibly wanting to reward himself for obeying Oberon so precisely, sets an ass’s head on Bottom’s shoulders, for as he says, “I’ll be an auditor, an actor too perhaps, if I see cause” (III.1.74-75). This is harmless fun, really; but from a certain point of view would be hysterical. Further on in the third act’s first scene, Titania also having partaken the love-potion eyedrops, she falls instantly for Bottom, much to his confusion and her (later) humiliation. Puck gleefully reports all this to his master, only to find his mistake: “This is the woman; but this is not the man” (III.1.42). On watching Hermia rebuff Demetrius’s advances, Puck comments happily, “Shall we their fond pageant see? Lord, what fools these mortals be!” (III.1.114-15) He has a point here: Lovers’ quarrels are amusing from a distance, because love is very foolish and makes you do stupid things. After a further battle of wits between all four of the human lovers, Puck defends himself as best he can: “Believe me, king of shadows, I mistook. Did not you tell me I should know the man by the Athenian garments he had on? And so far blameless proves my enterprise that I have ‘nointed an Athenian’s eyes; and so far am I glad it so did sort, as this their jangling I esteem a sport” (III.2.347-53). He then misleads Lysander and Demetrius in opposite directions lest they harm each other; and then upon reuniting everyone, applies the reversal charm to Lysander, restoring the proper order of things: “Jack shall have Jill, naught shall go ill; the man shall have his mate again, and all shall be well” (III.2.461-63).  Similarly, in the first scene of act four, Robin Goodfellow removes the ass’s head from Bottom at line 83: “Now when thou wak’st, with thine own fool’s eyes peep,” while at the same time Oberon is undoing the charm on Titania. So all ends well; well before the play ought to conclude. In order to fill that time, we get to see the mechanicals’ performance, snickering along with the royal audience at the players’ ineptitude.

     But then there is that epilogue which Puck delivers, which follows right on the heels of the “proper” close of the play. In this epilogue, Puck beings by saying “If we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended – that you have but slumbered here while these visions did appear” (V.1.415-18). Given the noble response of Theseus to the play-within-the-play on V.1.210-11, “The best of this kind are bust shadows, and the worst no worse if imagination amend them,” it would seem that this is a reference to the actors of “Pryamus and Thisby”. But it could also apply to the sprites themselves; as the faeries throughout history, especially in Elizabethan times, were viewed with a mixture of appreciation and distrust for their temperamental practical jokes like the audience has just witnessed. So what he means by “shadows” is unclear; but he is polite regardless of who the apology is for. This apology continues in lines 421-26: “Gentles, do not reprehend. If you pardon, we will mend. And as I am an honest Puck, if we have unearned luck now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue, we will make amends ere long.”

     Throughout the script Puck is a cheerful and merry presence, who is situated as to being in placed as an audiencial stand-in as – principally – an observer of the misunderstandings and disputes which arise. Puck also delivers highly quotable zingers such as “Lord, what fools these mortals be!.”; the ability to be snarky delivered with dry humor is a highly-prized skillset for characters to possess. He is prompt to fulfill the commands of his master to the utmost of his ability; tries not to play favorites in the changeling quarrel, and once he realized his error in mistaking Lysander for Demetrius, does all he can to rectify the situation. Indeed, after Theseus and Hippolyta’s marriage is blessed and both couples are back together again, he apologizes if the actions depicted offended anyone.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 1595? Ed. Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. 258-284. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Print. 

Language of Manipulation in Euridipes' "Medea"

      Third essay for Dr. Dial-Driver's Lit Traditions course at Rogers State University.

     Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. This is the type of phrase that has passed into public domain, more or less, and no one knows exactly where it originated. But whoever that was who coined the phrase, he might have been thinking about the character of Medea, the namesake and dominating force of one of Greek playwright Euridipes’ most well-known works. In her article for The American Journal of Philology, Melissa Mueller states that “Medea is a character that is adept at speaking many languages”. I will try to emphasize the importance of Medea’s use of persuasion and manipulation which brings about her revenge.

            To begin, some backstory is necessary, courtesy of the Medea preface in Penguin’s collection of Greek Tragedy: In the land of Thessaly, Pelias overthrew his brother Aeson to assume the kingship of the city of Iolchus, although mercifully sparing his brother’s life. Aeson’s son Jason is sent away for schooling from a centaur, returning to Thessaly some years later. An oracle had spoken to Pelias in the meantime, warning him to beware of a man wearing only one sandal. Jason lost a sandal while helping an elderly woman cross a river on his way to Iolchus, which was how Pelias knew that his nephew had returned; he volunteered to abdicate the throne, but only if Jason sucessfully gathered the Golden Fleece. So he sailed with the Argonauts, had many adventures, and eventually met a young princess/witch named Medea in the land of Colchis who fell in love with Jason and helped him retrieve the Golden Fleece. On returning to Iolchus, Medea’s sorcery tricked Pelias’s daughters into murdering their father via a faked rejuvenation potion Because of this element of foul play, the couple was banished and took up residence in Corinth with their two young sons (131-33).

      After living there apparently for some time, Jason has determined to wed the princess of Corinth in order to raise his future descendants’ standing within the city, as he reasons in lines 913-17. This greatly angers Medea; and so she sets out to break his heart. And since she is an extremely persuasive woman, as well as ruthless, this is an extremely frightening spectacle. She gives a long speech from lines 222-62 on Jason’s cruelties and laments the state of women in Greek society, which Mueller describes as “presenting herself as a woman like any other, but with fewer resources” (471). The Chorus, representing the women of the city, loyally declares in lines 412-13 that “deceit is men’s device now, men’s oaths are gods’ dishonor.” Writing about two thousand years later, William Shakespeare says much the same thing in Balthasar’s song in Much Ado About Nothing, as “Men were deceivers ever/One foot in sea, and one on shore/To one thing constant never” (II.3.61-63).  Creon banishes Medea from Corinth because he is afraid of her (287-91), and she responds by playing up the fact that she is a woman – and furthermore, a woman without male protection – and so would be considered helpless (304-08). In his Classical Philology article, Brad Levett comments that this “is a characteristic that aligns well with Greek assumptions concerning the deceptive nature of women” (54). And since the average Athenian was expected to be persuaded when it was beneficial or likely right (Levett 57), Aegeus agrees to safeguard Medea in Athens if she provides him with children (712-22). So in this exchange she adopts a businesslike, masculine attitude in order to gain a sanctuary. In lines 868-93, Medea gives a long monologue to Jason seeming to apologize for her earlier furious behavior, but this manipulative speech really just sets up her devious gift-giving to Creon’s daughter.01

As Simon Goldhill notes in his introduction to Penguin’s Greek Tragedy, “every scene in the play involves Medea persuading someone” (xxvii). Shakespeare’s Much Ado prominently features Beatrice, another talkative female caught in a societal situation she cannot remedy.  She rails at men’s reluctance to avenge the honor of women under their charge, ending with “I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving” (IV.1.320-21). Unlike Beatrice’s wish that Claudio die, Medea prefers that Jason should live, in order that his heart may be ripped out of his chest as he suffers humiliations galore, to paraphrase Rob Reiner’s movie The Princess Bride. Goldhill says that Medea “is female but speaks and acts as a man, indeed like a hero, an Achilles wholly committed to honor and revenge” (xxviii). Because these murders occur indirectly, that adds exponentially to Jason’s grief, as he will be forever tormented by what-ifs and brooding over what might have been done differently.

      One of her final lines is comes at line 1363, where she says “My pain is a fair price to wipe away your smile”. The line from “understandable vengeance” to “inhuman monstrosity” has obviously been crossed somewhere along the line, which is unsettling. Goldhill writes that her “bizarre and extreme feminine character” make her a problem for every character she meets, and also for audience to deal with (xxviii). Maybe what she represents - besides the obvious example of taking a concept way farther than recommended – is to serve a warning against trusting the motives of others at face value, or even simply the fact that life is unexpected. The Chorus closes with “Many the fates which Zeus in Olympus dispenses; many matters the gods bring to surprising ends. The things we thought would happen do not happen; the unforeseen the gods make possible, and such is the conclusion of this story” (1415-19).         

Works Cited

Euridipes. Medea. 431 B.C. Trans. Philip Vellacott. 137-182. Greek Tragedy. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Print.

Goldhill, Simon. “Introduction”. Greek Tragedy. xiii-xxxiii. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Print.

Levett, Brad. “Verbal Autonomy and Verbal Restraint in Euripides’ Medea.” Classical Philology 105.1 (Jan 2010): 54-68. JSTOR. Web. 21 October 2015.

Mueller, Melissa. “The Language of Reciprocity in Euridipes’ Medea.” The American Journal of Philology 122.4 (Winter 2001): 471-504. JSTOR. Web. 21 October 2015.

“Preface to Medea.” Greek Tragedy. 131-135. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Much Ado About Nothing. 1599? William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Ed. Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller. 371-400. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. Print.