On Recognizing Beauty
Patricia Kelly, Simon Fraser University.
download this essay: Kelly_Beauty
“Beauty always takes place in the particular, and if there are no particulars, the chance of seeing it go down.” Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just
What woman hasn’t felt the attention of a man? Women live with the effects of the subtle and direct gaze nearly everyday of their life. In the three Matisse Stories, A.S. Byatt writes of five intelligent, talented women – Susannah, Gerda, Peggy, Debbie, and Mrs. Brown – and the different ways they each live with the attention and gaze of men.
Susannah is a woman much like myself. She has reached or surpassed a mid-point in her life; she has each day of her existence been presented with the opportunity to struggle with the hazy and shadowy inner thoughts that could propel her into action. As an aging woman, she is quite used to the gaze, the attention of men and of women: starting with her own parents, her extended family – aunts and uncles, grandparents, too. Teachers would see her and decide in their own mind just how much attention she deserved and what behaviour would be rewarded. But Susannah would grow up to be a woman comfortable with herself, and for decades comfortable without the rituals of the beauty salon. As she grew through her twenties and thirties, men would pass judgment on her every feature. Attention is not always desired, but the gaze would not likely cause any damage to her. Susannah does not require the expert services of a stylist until the changes in her outward appearance become obvious.
A Bittersweet Confession
It is my misfortune to be the type of person who too often sees the dark cloud behind the silver lining,
who frowns at the half-empty glass, and who broods on the rising ocean rather than enjoying the waves. That said, there is a major part of my life which I have been blessed to enjoy for over seventeen years, and that is my marriage to a wonderful partner.
Not everyone is so fortunate. The parting of ways between lovers is so common-place that many regard the institution of marriage, or at least that part of it that insists on “till death do us part,” as an anachronism, something we’ve carried in our social baggage since the days of a religion-dominated culture.
When two people realize that there has been a tectonic shift in their relationship, either through growth or infidelity or the strain of economic hardship, we call the marriage a failure. When honesty, compassion, devotion, shared goals and love are dulled by mistrust, selfishness and greed, the lawyers get involved, and things get messy fast.
Conversations
Van Velde. 1936-41. Collection Samuel Beckett.
One of the joys of the Graduate Liberal Studies program is “discovering” connections between seemingly disparate people and their works. Of course this is the purpose, the raison d’etre, of interdisplinary courses, but it still comes as a pleasant surprise to locate parallels where perhaps one hadn’t imagined finding them. Such is the case with an essay (and its more compact cousin, a journal article) I’m writing now, comparing John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who didn’t want to belong to any club.
A curious book arrived in the mail several weeks ago: Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, by Charles Juliet (Dalkey Archive, 2009). I am embarrassed to admit that I have yet to read Samuel Beckett’s novels, although the trilogy comprising Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable sits on my bookshelf; I have, however, read and seen performed Waiting for Godot and, recently, listened to an excellent audio version. But who the heck is Bram van Velde? Read more…
Jane Austen’s Minimalist Art: The Power of Objects in Mansfield Park
Renée L. Haggart, Simon Fraser University
Jane Austen has been both praised and criticized for more than a century over the manner and sparseness of visual description which characterize her novels. While Austen is highly interested in discussing the value of material objects, this is not at all the same as actually describing objects themselves. If such paucity of detail seems counterintuitive to the way in which Austen was known to have described her own work, as the “little bit of ivory” worked with “so fine a brush,” [1] it could be argued that it is due in part to a misinterpretation of this quote. Rather than a painstaking exploration of any one aspect of the minutiae of the material world, the “little bit of ivory” that Austen describes could instead refer to the narrow scope of the private domestic world which is the exclusive subject of her work. When physical objects do make their occasional appearances and are described in any detail in an Austen novel, however, it is to significant effect. Mansfield Park stands out strikingly as a fine example, and will be discussed below in detail as a testament to Austen’s awareness of the power of objects, and her skill in using minimal description for maximum effect, what Nancy Armstrong calls the “clean line of Austen’s Minimalist art. “ [2] Read more…
Moral Responsibility in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Angie Allard, Simon Fraser University
download this essay as a pdf file: Allard_Frankenstein
Jay Hirabayashi, Kokoro Dance. Photo by Peter Eastwood
American philosopher Martha Nussbaum believes that everyone has the capacity for evil and that it is more closely connected with circumstance than with any innate human quality. In Upheavals of Thought she writes,
… in reality it seems likely that all humans are capable of evil, and that many if not most of the hideous evil doers are warped by circumstance, both social and personal, that play a large and sometimes decisive role in explaining the evil that they do (452).
Nussbaum’s argument is supported by empirical research. In his discussion on understanding evil acts, Paul Formosa cites Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments in which students, when told to do so by the researchers, continued to apply shocks to recipients even when they were unresponsive. For Formosa, these experiments were an example of an evil-encouraging situation, one that increases the likelihood of performing an evil act. He explains that individuals always act within a particular situation that, in many cases, allows or even encourages their evil behaviour (Formosa 10). Read more…
