Sociology vs Literature

A close reading of Henry Lefebvre and Truman Capote

In his essay ‘The Everyday and Everydayness’, Lefebvre argues that in the modern era (i.e. through modernity) our relationship to objects has become instrumental “functional” and materialistic. Through a close reading of  Truman Capote's short story ‘A Christmas Memory’, I would like to discuss how Capote’s work challenges Lefebvre’s assessment of our relationship to objects and things in the modern era. 

Truman Capote’s short story A Christmas Memory, challenges Henri Lefebvre’s argument that in the contemporary age, human relationships to objects are bounded by functionality. A Christmas Memory depicts a young narrator named Buddy and his older cousin celebrating Christmas through a variety of activities, such as baking fruitcakes, making a Christmas tree, and offering gifts. As a literary piece, it represents a rather different interpretation of human relationship to objects because other human traits such as emotion, happiness, passion, and spirituality are demonstrated throughout the story, which affects the characters’ relationship to objects not to be merely functional. Thus, the story challenges the assessment made under the paradigm of social science by Lefebvre. 

In his essay The Everyday and Everydayness, Lefebvre states that before the modern era “living presented a prodigious diversity” (7) because it was connected to some various systems of belief, so objects “possessed a symbolic value linking them to meaning” (8). He argues that the rationality in modern time has not only destroyed that historical diversity but transformed the everyday into a hidden product that “imposes its monotony” (10).  Therefore, in the view of Lefebvre, the everyday is “a set of functions which connect and join together systems that might appear to be distinct” (9). Lefebvre explains his definition that through “forms, functions, and structures,” (9) the everyday has established the “controlled consumerism” (9), upon which, in the modern era, our relationship to objects has become functional. 

Unlike Lefebvre’s argument about the functional relation, Capote in his story, suggests that our relationship to objects is not entirely materialistic and instrumental. In A Christmas Memory, the characters invest their happiness and emotions in the objects they send as gifts to other people as well as the exchange between themselves. The seven-year-old protagonist and his much older cousin bake thirty fruitcakes to send as gifts to the other people. The decision which is made by the elder cousin is fully enriched with sentiment because she announces it with a strong emotion: “"Oh my," she exclaims, […] "it's fruitcake weather!"” (148). This wildly enthusiastic and exciting scene at the outset of the story, with the emphatic significance on countryside cyclical time rather than standard linear clock time, implies that the subsequent performances throughout the story, to a large extent, disregard rationality. The story illustrates that the characters’ relationship to the objects affected by the sentiment rather than materialistic views. While materialism may also be considered a human quality, the objects convey a value which is not materialistic but emotional. In the scene following exchanging gifts with each other, the woman says “her favourite gift is the kite” (159), made by her little cousin. The relationship to the cakes and kites are not limited to their function as a food to be eaten or as a toy to be played with; rather they convey the qualities of gentleness, kindness, esteem, and admiration. The values attached to these gifts underpin a broader relationship to objects upon which the story challenges the merely functional relationship emphasised by Lefebvre. 

A Christmas Memory shows that our relationship to objects is not completely mundane but also spiritual and extra-terrestrial. Capote employs the metaphor of the kites which symbolises the death of the old cousin “loose like a kite” (161). To present ideas of human loss, the author employs symbolism and explores that language qualities constitutes a platform upon which our relationship to objects manifest supernatural conception. The two cousins used to fly kites on every Christmas Day while they were still together. Following their separation, in the scene where the boy is far away in a military school, he became aware of his cousin’s death as he sees in the sky “a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven” (161). According to Fahy, the kites are the “images for childhood and innocence” (153). The kites emerge to the young cousin, upon which Capote symbolise the virtue of the woman, and depicts her passing away as an extraordinary moment through employing the very ordinary relationship to an object which is the kite. Furthermore, the story repeatedly mentions the ‘Baptist window’ to articulate the idea that in the modern era our relationship to such a religious object has not come to an end. The narrator observes that his old cousin retains a strong sense of relationship to that particular religious object. The older cousin clearly states her desire to witness the Rise of Jesus Christ: "when he came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through” (160).  Although a religious association to an object is, in fact, a historical value but the author situates that ancient background into a contemporary context. Consequently, for the elder cousin, her religious belief and the elegance of the colourful glasses exposed to sunlight are equally involved in her relationship to the Baptist window. The story emphasises that spirituality is an integral element which is effective on our relationship to objects and in this way challenges Lefebvre’s materialistic argument regarding our relationship to objects.

A Christmas Memory challenges Lefebvre’s idea of homogeneity.  The story states that things are utterly distinctive and subsequently suggests the possibility of a various relationship to objects. On the contrary, Lefebvre in his essay notes that in the modern era, everyday life has become more homogenous because rationality and its materialistic implications have directed the overall systems of everyday life toward sameness, “[t]oday we see a worldwide tendency to uniformity,” (7). Lefebvre explains it further and asserts that this uniformity is being imposed through a “fatuousness”, and an “only apparent diversity” (8). In contrast, there is a strong indication in Capote’s story that suggests every individual object is essentially unique: In the scene where transferring the Christmas tree to their home, a woman offers them a price for the tree, saying you can cut another tree in the forest, but the response of the elder cousin not only signifies the uniqueness of that particular tree but it also implies the infinite distinctiveness to all other objects. She says “[t]here's never two of anything," (157). Additionally, the story examines a range of dissimilar usage of the same object. The buggy is used in various ways and for different purposes as a baby carriage, flowers mover, a “truck for hauling firewood”, and as a “warm bed for Queenie [dog]” (149). These instances signify a long lasting relationship with the objects regardless of its particular designation to have specific purpose and functioning. One way or another, the story contradicts Lefebvre’s idea of uniformity and suggests that distinctiveness requires a variety of relationships to objects.

Human qualities such as emotion, happiness, and spirituality are considered by Capote to be effective for shaping our relationship to objects.  The story suggests that objects are not entirely standardised and the same, but utterly distinctive, and things are not fully mundane but partly spiritual. Therefore, Capote’s short story outlines different ways of relationship to objects and challenges Lefebvre’s argument that in the modern era, our relationship to objects has become functional.

References

Capote, Truman. A Christmas Memory. New York: Random House, 1963. 148-161. Print.

Fahy, Thomas. Understanding Truman Capote. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uwsau/detail.action?docID=20548 53.

Lefebvre, Henri, and Christine Levich. "The Everyday and Everydayness." Yale French Studies (1987): 7-11. Web.

“A Note on the Freudian Reading of "The Turn of the Screw"

Description

“A Note on the Freudian Reading of "The Turn of the Screw"” is an essay which was initially published in the Journal of American Literature in 1957. American Literature is a quarterly journal published by Duke University Press in Durham, North Carolina. The essay was written by the American academic writer John Silver. Published in that peer-reviewed journal, Silver’s essay has been recommended by various scholars and writers. The theoretical approach of this essay is to outline some clues which suggest the governess’s prior information about Quint and Jessel. The essay contributes to Wilson’s interpretation that posits there is no ghost in James’s novella but the hallucinations of the governess.

Summary

Silver begins his essay by emphasising on the reality of “controversy” (p. 207) over the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw but clarifies that between the opposed ideas of existing and non-existing of the ghosts in the story, his essay stands to support Edmond Wilson’s interpretation. Based on the Freudian reading of governess’s hallucination, Wilson had argued that the ghosts existed only as figments of the imagination of governess. However, Silver mentions the problem of Freudian reading in Wilson’s argument, that if the ghosts are governess's hallucination, how then Mrs. Grose identified Quint’s feature from the governess’s description of the first apparition (p. 209). Silver argues that there are inklings which incorporated by James into the story to make the appearance of the ghosts possible in the normal ways.

The author points out James’s “carefully dropped […] hints” (p. 210) in the novella which show that the governess had acquainted some previous information about Quint’s feature. Firstly, the conversation between the governess and Mrs. Grose gives “an ambiguous reference to a man who liked […] governesses to be "young and pretty"” (p. 210), which gives a clue to the governess that there should be a man other than the master. Furthermore, Silver outlines other hints such as the closeness of the village “allowing convenience intercourse” (p. 109) so the governess might have been there and acquired information about Quint. Lastly, Silver notes that governess explains the death of the Quint despite has not heard from Ms. Grose. The essay concludes that governess has “skilfully cloak her knowledge” to make us believe in ghost the same as Mrs. Grose. 
  

Evaluation

The essay has a convincing position that James has provided the governess to “skilfully cloak her knowledge” (p. 211) in order to create ambiguity.  Therefore, according to Silver, the story is intrinsically placed on ambiguity and through this way the essay shows a high relevance to the topic.  The essay establishes some reasonable arguments about the hints that show the governess might find out about Quint and Jessel through her interactions with Mrs. Grose and the neighbouring village (p. 211). Arguing about the possibilities that the governess may obtain information is an original response to the original text.  According to the essay, ambiguity is not bounded to merely the ghosts but through James’s techniques which has created governess to steer Mrs. Grose and readers to believe the ghosts.  

Reference

Silver, John. “A Note on the Freudian Reading of "The Turn of the Screw".” In American Literature 29, no. 2 (1957): 207-211. Accessed September 5, 2017. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.uws.edu.au/stable/2922108.  

“The Ambiguity of Henry James.”

in The Turn of the Screw

Description

“The Ambiguity of Henry James” is an excerpt of a longer critical review about the literary works of Henry James. It was written by Edmond Wilson under the same title and first published in Hound & Horn Magazine in 1934 at Harvard University. Wilson then revised the essay and it was republished with other papers in a collection of his essays, titled The Triple Thinkers in 1948. The copyright of the work was renewed in 1975 by Elena Wilson, but in 1999 its copyright was reserved to W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. This excerpt is published along with Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw in the second edition of Norton Critical Edition book which is edited by Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren.

Summary
In this excerpt, Wilson begins to claim that in The Turn of the Screw, there is no sign that the ghost has been observed by any other character except the Governess. Wilson suggests a Freudian reading of The Turn of the Screw. Therefore, the writer mentions three facts in the story: the little girl is playing with the small stick to penetrate into a hole, the male ghost initially appears on the top of a tower, and the female ghost firstly appears inside a lake. The writer posits that “the ghosts are hallucinations of the governess” (p. 171), and that her insistence on her own delusions not only causes the two kids to dislike her but it also leads Miles to be killed by her; “[s]he has literally frightened him to death” (p. 172).Wilson writes that the governess has a disturbed personality. It is stated that she cannot acknowledge “her sexual impulses” (p. 172); this shows that The Turn of the Screw is not a ghost story but “a study in morbid psychology” (p. 172). Wilson argues that only through this way of reading we can observe a consistency among Henry James’s literary works around his acquainted theme of “frustrated Anglo-Saxon spinster” (p. 173). Wilson admits that even if the vagueness in relations to governess’s hallucination was sorted out, the ambiguity of the text will still remain.

Evaluation
Wilson’s essay is profoundly significant and original in delivering a completely new reading of The Turn of the Screw, in which the governess is revealed to have a disturbance originated from her sexual repression. Before Wilson’s interpretation, the story was mostly considered as a gothic work by earlier readers but the essay posits that the ambiguity of the story is not bounded to its gothic qualities, and through this way it is relevant to the topic. Wilson’s analysis of The Turn of the Screw is well founded on the symbols in the story such as the tower and the lake as opposite sexual signs. Wilson applies a Freudian reading upon which the male ghost appears on a tower and the female in a lake is being interpreted as the governess’s sexual repression in her imagination of the ghosts. However, Wilson’s admittance that “the ambiguity will still remain” (p. 173) is an original response to the text because he suggests that his breakthrough will further perpetuate the ambiguity in The Turn of the Screw. 

Reference
Wilson, Edmund. “The Ambiguity of Henry James.” In The Turn of the Screw: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, edited by Esch, Deborah. Warren, Jonathan, 170-173. 2^nd ed. New York: Norton Critical Edition. 1999.

“Ghostly Ambiguity: Presuppositional Constructions in "The Turn of the Screw"

Description

The “Ghostly Ambiguity: Presuppositional Constructions in The Turn of the Screw” is an essay and it was written by two American literary critics: Helen Aristar Dry and Susan Kucinkas. This essay was initially published in 1991 in the 25^th issue of the academic journal of Style. The Journal of Style which mostly addresses questions of style, and publishes critiques in language, literature, and humanities belongs to the Penn State University, Pennsylvania, United States. The essay features “presuppositional constructions” (p. 73) as the quality of language to discuss the ghostly ambiguity in The Turn of the Screw. 

Summary

Dry and Kucinkas’s essay begins by making the position that narration in The Turn of the Screw is not only working to show the mod but it tends to be a subject itself. The writers mention the emphatic ambiguity highlighted by various critiques. The essay suggests that, in order to resolve the text ambiguity, “it's grounding in human sign systems” (p. 72) need to be examined. For that purpose, the authors underline the importance of language related to other behaviours and emphasise that the capability and validity of the governess as the narrator should be measured not only by the presented information but also through “the eccentricity of the discourse raises metalinguistic questions” (p. 72). The authors argue that the narration happens through “presuppositional constructions [which] introduce information into a discourse "as though" it were already known” (p. 74), therefore, underpins a “mutual assumption” (p. 73), between the narrator and the reader. 

The essay argues based on the foundation of presuppositional constructions and its implication of extracting “the "brand-new" information” (p. 77). The essay separates a passage of the story into several parentheses and shows that each of them outlines an “external action” (p. 78). For instance, the authors point out the sentence of ‘what arrested me’ from the story and argue that this expression functions as a “cleft sentence” (p. 79), in the way that it leads the reader to assume that the narrator is arrested by something, and the reader only needs to find out what that arrester is. Therefore, the information given through such sentence not only moves the plot forward but also provides an “assertion” (p. 80) about the governess's inner life. The essay concludes that presuppositional constructions in this story lead an equivocal situation of ambiguity through either depicting “the ghosts as assumed, not asserted” (p. 83) or by applying the eccentricities in the process of cooperation between teller and hearer. 

Evaluation
The analysis made by Dry and Kucinkas is important as it goes beyond the conventional discussions of the ambiguity in The Turn of the Screw, which mostly emphasised either the real existence of ghosts or merely considered it as a figment of the governess. This essay has responded to the primary text through disclosing the exploitation of linguistic resources and finds out that the “ambiguity derives from a feature of James’s syntax” (p. 83). The essay is relevant to the topic as it argues that the presuppositional constructions lead to depict the governess's inner life through a system of indirect discourse and thus cause ambiguity. 

Reference 
Dry, Helen Aristar., and Susan Kucinkas. “Ghostly Ambiguity: Presuppositional Constructions in "The Turn of the Screw".” In Style25, no. 1 (1991): 71-88. Accessed September 5, 2017. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.uws.edu.au/stable/42945884. 

Annotated Bibliography

“Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction”

Meyer’s overarching claim is that the novel Wuthering Heights criticises the British imperialism. She highlights the oppressive aspects of British society in the nineteenth-century observed by Emily Bronte, and that her novel suggests the retaliation of those who have been oppressed. Meyer argues that Bronte delightedly releases Heathcliff's potentials of confrontation, which gradually turn the previous oppressed as the new oppressor and through this depicts reverse colonization.

The article highlights racial differences in relation to the slave trade and ownership. In the early incident when Heathcliff and Catherine were caught in Thrushcross Grange the Lintons treat Heathcliff as the acquisition of Mr. Earnshaw. Meyer argues that the Lintons are egotistical towards Heathcliff but meanwhile, find him fearful because of his dark skin. Meyer notes that this “reductive and predictive reading of physiognomy,” (p.100), by the British to govern ‘dark races’ is being satirized by Bronte.

By mentioning the other critics who noted Wuthering Heights as having “threatening power” (p. 101), Meyer highlights that the unbearable cruelty of British society not only led to revolt, but it also provoked those subjugated to practice the same oppressive approaches of capitalism.  

The author confirms that economic injustice is an essential issue to the novel, nevertheless, she posits that under the British imperialism the economic injustice is imposed on the "dark races" rather than on the class system. The author justifies that Heathcliff never tried to make an alliance with the other working people and his progress from a state of extreme poverty to one of great wealth emphasises “the values of capitalism”, (p.102).  

The author claims that according to Wuthering Heights not only dark races but the white women are also subject to the cruelty of British imperialism.  Meyer states that Heathcliff and Catherine are being deprived in many ways. The oppressive mainstream society marginalises Heathcliff, causing him to have an incomplete identity as he has no surname. Likewise, Catherine is alienated and suffers from an unstable identity as she gets different surnames in Wuthering Heights and in Thrushcross Grange.

Mentioning the historical subjugations enforced by British imperialism on China and India, Meyer argues that Nelly’s earlier imagination about Heathcliff’s parentage of a Chinese emperor and an Indian queen is a restoration of history.  This imaginary scene implies that oppression may lead those subjugated countries to unite together and turn to retaliate the oppressive British. Furthermore, the assumption that Heathcliff having been in the army is associating with another colonial uprising in North America because his absence coincides with the Revolutionary War. As the “political anxieties about loss of empire”, (p.115) was one of the major issues of the time, Meyer argues that Bronte subtly connects Heathcliff to various rebellions around the world against the British imperialism. 

Meyer argues that Wuthering Heights is not an impressively feminist novel, and neither does it merely narrate women’s disempowerment under British imperialism. She finally asserts that this the novel is an instance of “complex transformations of the metaphor linking gender and race,” (p.125), in the literary work of British female writers in the nineteenth century.

Reference

Meyer, Susan. “‘Your Father was Emperor of China, and Your Mother an Indian Queen’: Reverse Imperialism in Wuthering Heights.” In Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction, 96–125. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.