Saturday, December 10, 2011
Chapter 9 Response
Chapter 8 Response
Chapter 7 Response
Chapter 6 Response
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Story of an Hour Sequel
Moments in a Story
Brently Mallard sat in a pew of New Orleans’ St. Louis Cathedral replaying the whole conversation in his head.
“Your wife must have loved you very much, Mr. Mallard,” the doctor told him. “I apologize for your loss.”
Brently said nothing. He simply sat in the uncomfortable parlor chair and stared at his hands in wonder. In a way, he found it almost funny that he should be sitting here dry-eyed and completely alive when Louise was dead of a fit of emotion. He didn’t think he would ever be able to put the sight of her glossy, wide eyes and hysterically grinning mouth from his mind.
“Thank you, Dr. Williams. If you don’t mind, I’d like to begin making some arrangements immediately, “ he told the kindly old man in front of him.
“Of course, Mr. Mallard. I’ll see myself out,” and he was alone.
There had been something wrong. Something had not connected. He kept coming back to “Your wife must have loved you very much.” He could not reconcile it with the grotesque, laughing expression on his usually somber and pallid wife.
“Did you hear about Louise Mallard?” he heard in hushed tones behind him. He strained to listen.
“Oh yes, poor thing. She always was a sickly, queer sort of girl though. Frankly, I didn’t think she had it in her to go the way she did. You know, for Brently and all.”
“Yes, it’s really quite romantic in a tragic sort of way!” Brently’s jaw set.
He made the sign of the cross across his heart and confidently rose. He heard a short gasp from one of the women. He gave her a little bow of respect before striding to the door. Above, the intricate portraits of gods and saints watched him like jail keepers. Louise had always loved them and often spent what seemed like hours staring at them. “They come to life,” she would say.
Brently loved Louise. He always would. He remembered the day he first saw her at a grand ball for Mardi Gras.
The other girls, quintessential Louisiana belles, flirted with him and doused him with praise. Even the ball’s queen left her king’s side for a dance with him. Beautiful girls with coquettish smiles and colorful dresses surrounded him. There was no denying that Brently Mallard had been an eligible bachelor in his youth: handsome, intelligent, charming, and from an old French family.
By chance, looking for some extra bourbon, he stumbled into the host’s library where he started to see a startled girl in a beige silk dress pouring over a book.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you,” he said.
“It’s quite alright,” she breathed lightly.
“Are you alright?”
“Yes,” she said with some force, “I’ll be fine. Let me catch my breath a moment.”
He took that moment to look her over. Her skin was very pale. She looked almost like a ghost. But her hair was dark and soft, piled up fashionably on her head.
“What are you reading?” he asked.
“The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James,” she told him with more enthusiasm. “I’ve always wanted to go to Europe.”
“And you’ll need someone to protect you from all the men there to seek your fortune and connections,” he told her cheekily.
Her smile widened. “You’ve read it!”
“Indeed.”
So she invited him to sit with her to discuss the genius of Henry James.
Over the next few weeks, she beguiled Brently. She was not at all girlish or even particularly beautiful, but she was intelligent, striking, and direct.
But he had long lost hope of wedding her. When she saw him in the room she would give him a small smile, but he knew she was not nearly as enamored of him as he was of her. He thought of her every moment and she always looked a little surprised to see him.
Their proposal was a strange affair.
“Ms. Blanchard,” he began.
“Louise.”
“Louise,” he continued. “I know that you may not be as taken with me as I am with you, but believe me when I tell you that I love you very much with my whole heart.”
“Brently—.”
“Please, let me finish. I would simply like for you to consider marriage to me. You don’t have to say today or even tomorrow—.”
“Brently! I can’t marry you. Today or tomorrow or ever,” she said firmly. Her eyes shone with tears.
“Why?” he demanded.
“I’m very ill, Brently. Very ill,” she choked.
Immediately his heart sank. “Louise, darling, tell me. Is it very serious?”
“It’s a problem of the heart. Perhaps I’ll live, perhaps I won’t.”
His heart lifted a bit and he responded to her. “Marry me. I’ll take care of you. I’ll make sure that you don’t get too excited and I—I’ll care for you. “
“Brently, I think it might be better if I just didn’t marry. You deserve the kind of girl who likes to go to parties and dress in fine clothes.”
“I’ll take you to Europe. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go,” he begged.
“I don’t know. I suppose I might like to live alone for a while, perhaps help the less fortunate or study the piano more than I have.”
“I want to marry you. Don’t try to make me feel as though I shouldn’t want to. I love you.”
She sighed. “Alright, Brently. I’ll marry you if I live to see our wedding day.”
Brently had taken care of her. Every single day. He was forever at her side. The one day he had left to take care of some business up north she had passed. He couldn’t stand it.
She had become a shadow of herself as her illness progressed and he kept her under his watch more and more. She no longer laughed as readily or had a witty comment at hand to lash at him towards the end. Her smiles became smaller and smaller.
Perhaps, Louise could have lived perfectly well all alone, but Brently was nothing without Louise.
Snow Sequel
Mallika Dhaliwal
The Snow
Zoe Tremaine had turned twenty-three the year she saw The Bells of Saint Mary’s in a dimly lit New York City cinema on Christmas Day. She was two years out of Barnard and hopeful, as many young women her age were, for her dashing, uniformed soldier to return home to her safely.
John Warren was a young Columbia pre-law student and she an idealistic undergraduate who wore flannel and trousers and smoked things that were not cigarettes. Some of the other girls politely referred to her as a Bohemian and most of the boys tried things with her that she would never repeat, but she remained the same. She took trips to Harlem to listen to jazz and dance the lindy hop with boys who spoke in rhythm and were alternatively hedonistic and acetic.
John was none of these things and that was probably why she’d liked him so much, she supposed. He was kind and soft-spoken and he never raised his voice at her or laid a hand on her. He blushed when she used an obscene word and smiled when she laughed. He was less a man than any man she’d ever met, not at all threatening or dominating. In fact, he always deferred to her.
But the qualities of John that she so admired were exactly the ones that got him killed. The New York skyline glowed gray that day. She thought it was unusual to have gone so many days without snow in the beginning of winter. She thought little of what a marriage or a future had meant to her. Of course, she was sad for John, but she was relieved to not have to break his heart. She wasn’t the same girl anymore. She didn’t care as much for adventures uptown or for the artistic disillusionment of her Beat friends. Zoe was tired. And perhaps Zoe didn’t want to live the rest of her life in the shadow of a man like her mother did. She’d ever able to protect herself whether he lived or died. She doubted she’d ever find a man as soft as John and she couldn’t afford one as hard as her stepfather.
So Zoe sat on a bench in Central Park and thought about what she would do going forward. Perhaps she could become a schoolteacher or a nurse, something respectable enough for an unmarried woman. Then she heard Ingrid Bergman’s voice in her head, “You must be strong!” She wondered if she could be that strong. To give her body and her heart to God and never regret it for a single day. She recalled her college-level literature class in which she studied Hamlet. He told his Ophelia, “Get the to a nunnery!” to protect her or insult her. The nun’s would protect her even though she had a sinner’s soul. She could devote her life to good, to children, to God in Heaven. Perhaps, somewhere along the way she would be saved herself.
And then the grey clouds finally burst and snow fell upon her like holy water.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Character Analysis: Dave LaJoy
Dave LaJoy is possibly the most complex, intriguing character in When the Killing’s Done. His entire life, from his name to his actions, is completely contradictory. LaJoy, in spite of his surname, is a man who lives a rather joyless life. He is a rude, intimidating man who owns a chain of electronic stores, a BMW, a large house in Montecito, and a yacht.
Despite his activism on the part of animals, LaJoy holds very little regard for human life and is extremely self-centered. When he attacks Alma at her press conference about the eradication of rats from Anacapa, he ignores the impact on the rats on the native and endangered species on the island. After the incident, LaJoy is most disturbed at the fact that an article written about the incident does not mention him or the FPA by name.
However, LaJoy, like his lover Anise, has some redeeming qualities. He, in a rather stereotypical fashion, converts to animal rights fanaticism because he, when reading a pamphlet about slaughterhouses, recognizes in all too vivid detail the horrific violence that ended in his hamburger. Prior to this conversion, he engaged in a short relationship with Alma, which led to his rejection of all things, scientific or otherwise, that lead to the killing of animals.
In many ways, Alma and Dave are similar. They are both passionate about the environment in their own minds, extreme in their tactics, and flawed in their logic. They embody in their inherent hypocrisy the folk music-loving, Prius-driving, super-elite pseudo-activists rampant in modern society. Both have deluded themselves into believing that they are fighting to protect the helpless instead of furthering their own interests and garnering attention for themselves. In many ways, it is impossible to understand Dave without understanding Alma because they are foils of each other.
Yet Alma has many advantages over Dave, including the support of her Park Service boyfriend, Tim Sickafoose and the protection of the government, law, and academia. Dave, a romantic ruled by his fiery temper, is forced by the nature of his work to rely on flimsy donations, personal wealth, and morally ambiguous campaigns to see his work done.
In many ways, Dave LaJoy is the modern embodiment of the tyrant of 19th century Gothic romantic novels. He is a slave to his rage, manipulates a beleaguered woman (in this case, Anise) to his advantage, and toys with the laws of nature and society. Dave LaJoy is an archetype, he remains static throughout the entire novel, and, though he speaks the words of the title during his protest, he is not the protagonist. However, it is difficult to call him the antagonist for his enemy is as unlikeable as he is.
Perhaps the purpose of LaJoy is to depict the failure of American idealism, to show how a man with nothing to lose takes up a cause of which he knows precious little. Perhaps LaJoy is simply a man who does not understand or acknowledge his place in the world just like the rats and native species. LaJoy does pose vital questions to the debate of who holds the power of deciding who lives and who dies, for to him it is not the scientists and chemical companies, but the average, spiritual man.