Wk 5 - Freudian, Feminist, or LGBT Essay Literature & Language Essay

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Wk 5 - Freudian, Feminist, or LGBT Essay 
Analyze a work of literature using a critical literary approach. This approach will help you find meaning in the literary work. 
Write a 700- to 1,050-word essay analyzing a selected work of literature from the section in Text and Contexts Chapter 7 entitled "Practicing Psychological Criticism" (pp. 213-217) or Text and Contexts Chapter 8 entitled "Practicing Feminist, Postfeminist, and Queer Theory Criticism" (pp. 244-250). (Both Chapter 7 & 8 are below; however, I have chosen the following piece.  Also, I have added the week 5 course readings as well for your other two source requirement) 
Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?
William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
5Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
10Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
(1609)
o Interpret the theme(s) of the work through a Freudian, Feminist, or LGBT lens.
o Use examples (quotes & specific details) from the selected work to demonstrate what you have determined to be the theme of the work.
o Use at least two academic or peer-reviewed secondary sources to help you define your chosen theory and demonstrate how the theory brings the reader closer to the meaning of the work. (i.e course textbook, course materials, UOP Library e-books or database articles).
Organize your paper using a traditional essay format with a clear introductory paragraph, body paragraphs based on discussion points, and a conclusion paragraph.
Practicing Psychological Criticism
Freud’s theories, as numerous critics have observed, take the male sex as the norm. How does the Oedipus complex apply to young girls? Their first physical pleasure is also contact with the mother; do little girls wish to sleep with their mothers and kill their fathers? If not, why not? Freud was himself mystified by the problem of applying his theories to women, the “dark continent” as he once called them, but he did try to explain how girls passed through the Oedipus complex. Instead of “castration anxiety,” which causes the little boy to submit to reality and his father, turning his desires elsewhere, the little girl perceives that she is already “castrated.” Is there then no reason that the little girl should turn her affections from her mother? Freud’s solution was the notorious concept of “penis envy”—an idea that continues even today to drive people up the wall. The little girl turns to her father, Freud said, because she realizes that her mother also has been “castrated.” This envy is hardly as powerful as the fear of castration, it would seem, and Freud did believe that the superego of women was not as powerfully formed as that of men and that women consequently had weaker ideas of justice and authority. The complementary idea of womb envy apparently did not occur to Freud, but it seems equally if not more plausible.
If this all seems too bizarre, let me briefly suggest once more why I’m bringing this up here. Freud’s thinking is the foundation of psychological criticism, and the Oedipus complex is central to Freud. Freud’s struggles to make this complex work for little girls resulted in his concept of penis envy—a concept that can be interestingly tested, I think, with the following poem and accompanying questions. After Dickinson’s poem, you’ll find two other poems with questions to guide you in practicing psychological criticism, plus an invitation to practice on your own psychology.
A Narrow Fellow in the Grass
Emily Dickinson
A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him,—did you not,
His notice sudden is.
5The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.
He likes a boggy acre.
10A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,
Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the Sun, —
15When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.
Several of nature’s people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
20Of cordiality;
But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.
(1866)
Questions
1. This poem was one of the few poems published while Dickinson was alive. It appeared under the title “The Snake,” which was not Dickinson’s title, but the addition of an editor. Dickinson, in fact, rarely gave titles to her poems. How does adding that title affect a reader’s experience of this poem?
2. Which words in the poem seem odd in the context of a snake?
3. From a Freudian perspective, paraphrase the poem; that is, narrate what happens.
4. Dickinson’s handwritten versions of this poem say “boy” instead of “child” in line 11. What difference does this alternative make? Why might an editor change “boy” to “child”?
5. What might “zero at the bone” mean? What fear or desire might be expressed by this phrase?
6. Dickinson’s manuscript versions of her poems (two copies of this poem exist) famously do not follow the normal conventions of punctuation, using dashes where readers would usually expect a comma, semicolon, or period. The dashes vary in size, with some appearing almost to be dots. This poem, for instance, ends with a dash in Dickinson’s handwritten version. Should editors print whatever a writer left behind, or should they correct what appear to be distracting errors or eccentricities?
7. Why would Dickinson write almost 1,800 poems and publish none of them (although at least ten were made public in her lifetime)? Might her use of dashes instead of conventional punctuation be somehow related to this production-versus-publication paradox?
O to Be a Dragon
Marianne Moore
If I, like Solomon, …
could have my wish—
my wish … O to be a dragon,
a symbol of the power of Heaven—of silkworm
5size or immense; at times invisible.
Felicitous phenomenon.
(1951)
Questions
1. Can this poem be related to Dickinson’s “Narrow Fellow” poem?
2. In what way does a psychological perspective alter your reaction to this poem?
Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
5Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
10Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
15Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
20Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
25Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world
Ah, love, let us be true
30To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
35And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
(1867)
Question
Nancy Chodorow (in, for example, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory) notes that girls are able to identify with the adult they spend the most time with; but boys, who cannot identify with the mother, must separate and withdraw themselves from the mother. Thus girls, according to Chodorow, feel more connected to the world and to their caregiver. Girls typically engage in cooperative play, while boys typically engage in competitive play, Chodorow says. Girls think in terms of relationships, and boys think in terms of rules and rights. Girls cultivate intimacy; boys may find it uncomfortable.
1. How might Chodorow’s work be related to “Dover Beach”?
Your Dream Here
Keep a pen and paper beside your bed (and a flashlight if you share a bed or bedroom), and see if you can capture one of your dreams. If you wake and remember a dream, write it down immediately. It’s striking how quickly dreams recede. If you’re unable to remember any of your dreams (and everyone does dream), then see if you can “borrow” a dream from a friend. Using your dreams as your text, see if you can interpret them using Freud’s ideas. If dreams are the symbolic fulfillments of desires that cannot in reality be fulfilled, as Freud asserted, what desires are you disguising? For fun, you may want to invent a dream to interpret, and then see if your readers can tell whether your dream is real or manufactured.
Practicing Feminist, Postfeminist, and Queer Theory Criticism
I hope at this point you have some idea of the way these approaches can make writing about literature more interesting and revealing. More important, I hope you can see how doing this kind of criticism involves you in an important exploration of our culture and your own principles. After this political criticism, it is especially difficult to say that the study of literature has no real relation to our lives. Literature is a particularly revealing and influential part of the myriad of culture that surrounds and shapes (with or without our compliance or resistance) you and me. Literary criticism can help us see that and perhaps do something about it.As I’ve suggested above, feminist criticism can be applied (at least in theory) to any work—including not just “great” novels or poems or plays, but also television shows, movies, detective stories, science fiction, advertisements, greeting card verse, bumper stickers, whatever. To get you started, I’ve provided below two well-known poems, a short story, and some comments on a movie director that I hope will stimulate your thinking.
Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?
William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
5Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
10Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
(1609)Questions1. The poem aims to be flattering, it seems clear, but what is the basis of its flattery? That is, what does the speaker value?
2. It is usually assumed that this poem is addressed to a woman. Is there any support for this supposition in the poem itself? 
What is the sex of the speaker of the poem? Do these questions alter your perception of the poem or open up alternative readings?3. If the loved one is a woman, how does this poem reinforce conventional ideas about aging and beauty? How is a person not like a summer’s day?
4. How comforting would the final couplet be to the person addressed? What is the source of the loved one’s immortality? Who has the power? How does the poem reinforce this power?
My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun
Emily Dickinson
My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
In Corners—till a Day
The Owner passed—identified—
And carried Me away—
5And now We roam in Sovreign Woods—
And now We hunt the Doe—
And every time I speak for Him—
The Mountains straight reply—And do I smile, such cordial light
10Opon the Valley glow—
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through—
Upon
And when at Night—Our good Day done—
I guard My Master’s Head—
15‘Tis better than the Eider Duck’s
Deep Pillow—to have shared—
To foe of His—I’m deadly foe—
None stir the second time—
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye—
20Or an emphatic Thumb—
Though I than He—may longer live
He longer must—than I—
For I have but the power to kill,
Without—the power to die—
(1863)
Questions
1. What is “Vesuvian”? (You’ll find a dictionary helpful.) What is an “Eider Duck”? What is the “Yellow Eye”? What do you think the “emphatic Thumb” might be?
2. Assuming the speaker is female, what is the significance of comparing her life to a loaded gun? How does she view herself? Does the speaker have any autonomy or independence?
3. What is implied about the relationship of men to women? Who has the power? What kind of power?
4. What is the source of the speaker’s pleasure, do you think?
5. How would the poem change if the speaker were assumed to be male? How would the central metaphor, for instance, be affected?
6. How does the final stanza reinforce conventional or archaic ideas about women and their relationship to men?
7. Does the speaker have any autonomy or independence?
Say Yes
Tobias Wolff
They were doing the dishes, his wife washing while he dried. He’d washed the night before. Unlike most men he knew, he really pitched in on the housework. A few months earlier he’d overheard a friend of his wife’s congratulate her on having such a considerate husband, and he thought, I try. Helping out with the dishes was a way he had of showing how considerate he was.They talked about different things and somehow got on the subject of whether white people should marry black people. He said that all things considered, he thought it was a bad idea.
“Why?” she asked.
Sometimes his wife got this look where she pinched her brows together and bit her lower lip and stared down at something. When he saw her like this he knew he should keep his mouth shut, but he never did. Actually it made him talk more. She had that look now.“Why?” she asked again, and stood there with her hand inside a bowl, not washing it but just holding it above the water.“Listen,” he said, “I went to school with blacks, and I’ve worked with blacks and lived on the same street with blacks, and we’ve always gotten along just fine. I don’t need you coming along now and implying that I’m a racist.”
“I didn’t imply anything,” she said, and began washing the bowl again, turning it around in her hand as though she were shaping it. “I just don’t see what’s wrong with a white person marrying a black person, that’s all.”
“They don’t come from the same culture as we do. Listen to them sometime—they even have their own language. That’s okay with me, I like hearing them talk”—he did; for some reason it always made him feel happy—“but it’s different. A person from their culture and a person from our culture could never really know each other.”
“Like you know me?” his wife asked.
“Yes. Like I know you.”
“But if they love each other,” she said. She was washing faster now, not looking at him.Oh boy, he thought. He said, “Don’t take my word for it. Look at the statistics. Most of those marriages break up.”“Statistics.” She was piling dishes on the drainboard at a terrific rate, just swiping at them with the cloth. Many of them were greasy, and there were flecks of food between the tines of the forks. “All right,” she said, “what about foreigners? I suppose you think the same thing about two foreigners getting married.”“Yes,” he said, “as a matter of fact I do. How can you understand someone who comes from a completely different background?”“Different,” said his wife. “Not the same, like us.”“Yes, different,” he snapped, angry with her for resorting to this trick of repeating his words so that they sounded crass, or hypocritical. “These are dirty,” he said, and dumped all the silverware back into the sink.The water had gone flat and gray. She stared down at it, her lips pressed tight together, then plunged her hands under the surface. “Oh!” she cried, and jumped back. She took her right hand by the wrist and held it up. Her thumb was bleeding.“Ann, don’t move,” he said. “Stay right there.” He ran upstairs to the bathroom and rummaged in the medicine chest for alcohol, cotton, and a Band-Aid. When he came back down she was leaning against the refrigerator with her eyes closed, still holding her hand. He took the hand and dabbed at her thumb with the cotton. The bleeding had stopped. He squeezed it to see how deep the wound was and a single drop of blood welled up, trembling and bright, and fell to the floor. Over the thumb she stared at him accusingly. “It’s shallow,” he said. “Tomorrow you won’t even know it’s there.” He hoped that she appreciated how quickly he had come to her aid. He’d acted out of concern for her, with no thought of getting anything in return, but now the thought occurred to him that it would be a nice gesture on her part not to start up that conversation again, as he was tired of it. “I’ll finish up here,” he said. “You go and relax.”“That’s okay,” she said. “I’ll dry.”He began to wash the silverware again, giving a lot of attention to the forks.“So,” she said, “you wouldn’t have married me if I’d been black.”“For Christ’s sake, Ann!”“Well, that’s what you said, didn’t you?”“No, I did not. The whole question is ridiculous. If you had been black we probably wouldn’t even have met. You would have had your friends and I would have had mine. The only black girl I ever really knew was my partner in the debating club, and I was already going out with you by then.”“But if we had met, and I’d been black?”“Then you probably would have been going out with a black guy.” He picked up the rinsing nozzle and sprayed the silverware. The water was so hot that the metal darkened to pale blue, then turned silver again.“Let’s say I wasn’t,” she said. “Let’s say I am black and unattached and we meet and fall in love.”He glanced over at her. She was watching him and her eyes were bright. “Look,” he said, taking a reasonable tone, “this is stupid. If you were black you wouldn’t be you.” As he said this he realized it was absolutely true. There was no possible way of arguing with the fact that she would not be herself if she were black. So he said it again: “If you were black you wouldn’t be you.”“I know,” she said, “but let’s just say.”He took a deep breath. He had won the argument but he still felt cornered. “Say what?” he asked.“That I’m black, but still me, and we fall in love. Will you marry me?”He thought about it.“Well?” she said, and stepped close to him. Her eyes were even brighter. “Will you marry me?”“I’m thinking,” he said.“You won’t, I can tell. You’re going to say no.”“Let’s not move too fast on this,” he said. “There are lots of things to consider. We don’t want to do something we would regret for the rest of our lives.”“No more considering. Yes or no.”“Since you put it that way—”“Yes or no.”“Jesus, Ann. All right. No.”She said, “Thank you,” and walked from the kitchen into the living room. A moment later he heard her turning the pages of a magazine. He knew that she was too angry to be actually reading it, but she didn’t snap through the pages the way he would have done. She turned them slowly, as if she were studying every word. She was demonstrating her indifference to him, and it had the effect he knew she wanted it to have. It hurt him.He had no choice but to demonstrate his indifference to her. Quietly, thoroughly, he washed the rest of the dishes. Then he dried them and put them away. He wiped the counters and the stove and scoured the linoleum where the drop of blood had fallen. While he was at it, he decided, he might as well mop the whole floor. When he was done the kitchen looked new, the way it looked when they were first shown the house, before they had ever lived here.He picked up the garbage pail and went outside. The night was clear and he could see a few stars to the west, where the lights of the town didn’t blur them out. On El Camino the traffic was steady and light, peaceful as a river. He felt ashamed that he had let his wife get him into a fight. In another thirty years or so they would both be dead. What would all that stuff matter then? He thought of the years they had spent together, and how close they were, and how well they knew each other, and his throat tightened so that he could hardly breathe. His face and neck began to tingle. Warmth flooded his chest. He stood there for a while, enjoying these sensations, then picked up the pail and went out the back gate.The two mutts from down the street had pulled over the garbage can again. One of them was rolling around on his back and the other had something in her mouth. Growling, she tossed it into the air, leaped up and caught it, growled again and whipped her head from side to side. When they saw him coming they trotted away with short, mincing steps. Normally he would heave rocks at them, but this time he let them go.The house was dark when he came back inside. She was in the bathroom. He stood outside the door and called her name. He heard bottles clinking, but she didn’t answer him. “Ann, I’m really sorry,” he said. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”“How?” she asked.He wasn’t expecting this. But from a sound in her voice, a level and definite note that was strange to him, he knew that he had to come up with the right answer. He leaned against the door. “I’ll marry you,” he whispered.“We’ll see,” she said. “Go on to bed. I’ll be out in a minute.”He undressed and got under the covers. Finally he heard the bathroom door open and close.“Turn off the light,” she said from the hallway.“What?”“Turn off the light.”He reached over and pulled the chain on the bedside lamp. The room went dark. “All right,” he said. He lay there, but nothing happened. “All right,” he said again. Then he heard a movement across the room. He sat up, but he couldn’t see a thing. The room was silent. His heart pounded the way it had on their first night together, the way it still did when he woke at a noise in the darkness and waited to hear it again—the sound of someone moving through the house, a stranger.(1985)Questions1. Explain the story’s last sentence. Why does it end with the word “stranger”?2. Why does Ann pursue this question? Did the husband come up with the right answer? Explain. Why does Ann ask her husband to turn off the light?3. Is the husband a sexist? A racist? How would you describe him? How does Wolff want us to see him? How might this story affect a reader opposed to interracial marriage?4. How do the small details of washing the dishes contribute to the story? Consider, for instance, the still-greasy dishes, the color of the washing water, the injury to Ann. Consider especially the husband’s decision to mop, and the way he describes the floor.Gender in the MoviesHoward Hawks was a successful American filmmaker whose later works included Sergeant York (1941), The Big Sleep (1946), Red River (1948), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and Rio Bravo (1959). According to Peter Wollen, a British film critic, Hawks portrayed men as the “prey” of women: “Women are admitted to the male group only after much disquiet, and a long ritual courtship, phased round the offering, lighting, and exchange of cigarettes, during which they prove themselves worthy of entry” (86). Is Wollen correct? Watch some of Hawks’ work and see if men are depicted as the prey of women, and if there is a cigarette ritual allowing women to bond with men. Another idea: Compare the portrayal of women and men in a Hawks movie to their depiction in a current movie. Are there gender-based rituals displayed in contemporary films?Useful Terms for Political Criticism• Canon: The group of works that are usually reprinted, read, assigned, written about, and taken most seriously. Feminist criticism has been particularly effective in arguing that some works are included and others ignored on largely political grounds. Historically, women as a rule have had few opportunities to write; and when they have somehow managed to produce works of merit, these often have not been appreciated or understood (some women writers have adopted male pseudonyms in order to get a fair reading). Critics have similarly pressed to open the canon to African American, American Indian, and other neglected writers.• Constructed: This term is particularly powerful because it reminds us that any representation of a particular ethnic or racial or sexual group is something that is made up. It is not inevitable, nor does it fully (or even partially) depict reality. Our notions, in other words, of women, or African Americans, or American Indians, or gay men, or any other segment of society are just that: our notions.• Double-voiced: A member of an oppressed group, attempting to speak to and through the dominant culture, faces a tricky situation: how to speak one’s mind without being silenced. One strategy is to write with two voices, saying what can be taken on the surface in a nonthreatening way, and on a deeper level in a subversive or challenging way.• Exclusion: What we value as great literature depends on what values we bring to our reading. Since white European males have dominated the worlds of publishing and criticism, it is not surprising that white European males have dominated the canon of literature. Some works may have been excluded from study because of the status of their authors; others may have been excluded because their virtues are not appreciated by established literary values.• Gender: “Gender” refers to the cultural aspects of sexuality. In other words, gender includes not just biological factors, but also psychological and social factors as well. We are still trying to discover just how much of “maleness” and “femaleness” can be attributed to biology, and how much to other factors. It seems clear that gender is not entirely constructed by cultural influences, that there are some differences between the sexes (surprise!). But the wide range of variation within “male” and “female” makes it difficult to say definitively what those differences always are, and thus how “gender” (the construction of male and female) relates to “sex” (the biological status).• Marxist: Because Karl Marx considered issues of economy and class to be fundamental, shaping everything, literary criticism that focuses on economy and class is often termed “Marxist,” even when the critic does not embrace the same principles as Marx. This way of reading, attaching primary importance to the material sources of a work in class and money, is also sometimes called “materialist,” especially when the physical conditions and circumstances are the focus.• Materialist: See Marxist.• Patriarchy: Literally, “father-ruled,” the term points to the superior status of men within a culture. The opposite term, “matriarchy,” refers to a culture in which women are superior.• Sex: See Gender.• Sexist: Assuming that someone has certain characteristics because of his or her sex is sexist. Usually, the term is used to describe pejorative characterizations of women as a group, or of individual women as representative types of that group.✔ Checklist for Political Criticism1. Consider how the writer’s sex, race, class, or other identity has influenced the work.2. Look for stereotypes based on sex, gender, race, class, or other convention.3. Imagine how the work might be read differently by a reader of a particular sex, class, race, or other identity.
LIT/375: Literary Theory and CriticismPerspectives (It''s All in the Way You Look at Things)• Barry, P. (2002). Chapter 5: Psychoanalytic criticism. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary & Cultural Theory, 96-120.• Barry, P. (2002). Chapter 6: Feminist criticism. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary & Cultural Theory, 121-138.• Barry, P. (2002). Chapter 7: Lesbian/gay criticism. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary & Cultural Theory, 139-155.• Zipes, J., (1979). On the use and abuse of folk and fairy tales with children: Bruno Bettelheim's moralistic magic wand. Contemporary Literary Criticism, 160-182.Publications• Encyclopedia of Postmodernism• Feminisms REDUX: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism