I can carefully review and provide thoughtful feedback on another person's writing.
I can discuss a crazy scene in a movie and then watch the less crazy parts of the movie.
HW: Nothing due on Monday, but your next-to-final draft is due Tuesday, October 7.
Activity 1: Peer Reviews...Let's focus on big picture for this first peer review.
Activity 2: Talk about the opening scene - see commentary by Ebert.
Finish writing yesterday's journal, particularly the last part - Do you think it would be possible for this to happen in modern society? - which I suspect you had little time to reflect on or write about yesterday. The prompt in it's entirety can be found below:
Why do you think the Salem witch trials have not been forgotten? What makes them interesting to people today? Do you think it would be possible for this to happen in modern society? Explain your answers.
Beloved: Exploring Independence and Love
In the literary narration of American history, Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved stands out. The book is an intimate look at the emotional scars left behind by slavery, and Morrison evokes and closely examines the myriad of emotions—strong, basic, and natural—that her characters experience. In one poignant passage from Beloved, Morrison explores the definition of freedom and slavery in terms of independence and love.
Early in the passage, Sethe explains to Paul D the wonder of independence that she found in her escape from slavery. Before she speaks of the “miracle” of her escape, Sethe “cover[s] the lower half of her face with her palms” in a gesture of wonder and reverence. That same reverential tone carries into her actual narrative. Speaking in short, cut-off sentences, Sethe ponders the wonder of her escape and her own self-sufficiency in lines five through ten. She marvels that the escape “came off right, like it was supposed to,” all through “Me using my own head.” The entire passage is in an active voice, further highlighting Sethe’s newfound independence. Also, many of the sentences begin with “I,” reinforcing the passage’s focus on independence and self-sufficiency. Morrison emphasizes Sethe’s realization of self-sufficiency in order to underscore the most basic importance of that aspect of humanity. Independence and free will is the defining element of the individual. Without that independence to make decisions, the individual loses his or her identity to whatever or whoever else is making those decisions instead. Sethe’s wonder at having achieved such a basic right draws the reader into an exploration of self-reliance and humanity, which ultimately serves to support the theme of dehumanization central to Beloved.
Another powerful theme of the passage is the exploration of how independence relates to love. Both Sethe and Paul D agree that slavery denied them the right to love others through the denial of independence. Freedom was “to get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire.” Sethe says that she could never “love [her children] proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love.” As a slave, denied the right even to her own body, Sethe would not be allowed even the slightest stake of ownership that love implies. Morrison has Sethe describe this freedom to love as “a kind of selfishness,” which would under other circumstances have a negative connotation. “Selfishness” implies the exclusion of the consideration of others from a person’s mind. In Sethe’s case, selfishness takes on a new, positive meaning; it means “ownership of oneself.” A second reason that Sethe could not afford to love her children was the danger of becoming too emotionally invested in them. She had no control over their futures, and the horrors of having them sold, abused, or killed, would be too great to bear. As Paul D says: “So you protected yourself and loved small. [. . .] Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn’t do. A woman, a child, a brother—a big love like that would split you wide open.” Morrison chooses grass blades and insects, the smallest, most insignificant things, to demonstrate the level to which the slaves were reduced. More interesting, however, is to note Paul’s negative use of the word “wide.” Earlier in the passage, Sethe rejoiced in the wideness of her love: “I was big [. . .] and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. I was that wide.” While Sethe rejoices in the new world opened up to her in freedom, Paul is still trapped by fear of opening himself to such deep emotions and the potential loss of that which he loves. Morrison’s use of “wide” is a subtle way to highlight these conflicting views, which reinforce the novel’s main purpose by demonstrating the emotional scars of slavery.
Morrison’s exploration of the intertwining of love, independence, and freedom is central to the seminal work that is Beloved. She takes on these complex, abstract concepts and wrestles with them within the framework of the African American experience, with dramatic and touching results.
All your high school English class memories of Arthur Miller's The Crucible won't prepare you for the scene that opens Nicholas Hytner's joltingly powerful new movie version. In 1692, a group of teenage girls gather in the woods of Salem, Mass., to conduct an unholy ritual. In the predawn twilight, they writhe, dance, and bare their breasts in the dusky mist. One of them, Abigail Williams (Winona Ryder), goes further still — she lets down her flowing dark hair and drinks animal blood, a witchcraft charm to destroy the wife of the man she loves. In The Crucible, which was first performed in 1953, Arthur Miller applies the torch of melodrama to the history of the Salem witch trials, a case of ''justice'' gone hysterical, and the hysteria of this Black Mass prologue is all too real. The reason you won't remember it is that it's not in the original play: Miller, who has retooled his work for the screen, added the sequence to make visible what was left to our imaginations before. Such literal-mindedness usually takes away more than it adds. In this case, however, it sets a mood of eroticized fear and delirium that reverberates throughout the movie.
Hytner, who directed 1994's The Madness of King George (also adapted from the stage), has done something startling with Miller's stately popular classic: He has made it pulsate with dramatic energy. And what a play it is — the definition of rock-solid middlebrow excitement. The devil may not be alive in Salem, but, as the movie makes clear, he lives — zestfully — in the minds of these young girls. They want to conjure the forbidden, to experience the sensuality and madness driven underground by a frigid, repressed society,
The first scene in “The Crucible” strikes the first wrong note. We are in Salem, Mass., in 1692. By the light of a full moon, a minister happens upon a group of adolescent girls, naked, dancing in the forest around a boiling pot of witches' brew. In all the troubled history of Salem, was there ever an event like this? How did the young girls, so carefully protected, slip from their homes? How did they come to be so uninhibited, in a Puritan society, that they could dance naked together? In a movie that will be about false accusations of witchcraft, this is an ominous beginning; if it looks like witchcraft, sounds like witchcraft and smells like witchcraft, then can it possibly be an innocent frolic of high-spirited young teenagers? This scene was offstage, wisely, in the original 1952 stage production of Arthur Miller's “The Crucible.” To show it in this new film version is a mistake, because the play is not about literal misbehavior but about imagined transgressions; what one imagines a witch does is infinitely more stimulating and troubling than this child's play.
Roger Ebert
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