The movie Revolutionary Road and the critique of Everyday Life

Henry Lefebvre argues that the everyday “weighs more heavily” on women “Everyday and Everydayness” p.10. This short essay explores Lefebvre’s contention through an analysis of the movie Revolutionary Road directed by Sam Mendes.

Henri Lefebvre’s Critiques of Everyday Life was published decades before the emergence of contemporary global phenomena such as modern television and communications. The consequences of these phenomena affect the everyday life. The philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard’s contention the Evil Demon of Images (1987) questions the effects of media. Reviewing the movie Revolutionary Road (2008), this essay posits that, regardless of gender, the everyday weighs more heavily on the groups of people who either: affected by media in shaping their lives, developed higher sensibility, and achieved a great extent of wisdom. Furthermore, the set of functions which constitute the everyday life evolves throughout the time, therefore, Lefebvre’s contention that the everyday weighs more heavily on women can be challenged. 

The movie Revolutionary Road depicts the life of Wheelers during the 1950s. Frank and April, an American couple, have an ordinary life in the suburbs but desire to be extraordinary. April contends that “our whole existence here is based on the great promise that we are special and superior […] but we are not” (Revolutionary Road 29:11). The young family has some very idealistic expectations of their life. April convince her husband about an idealistic decision to leave the suburban life for Paris but her third pregnancy ruins their decision. Following a series of tensions between the couple, April anxiously comments upon her second delivery that “we had another child to prove the first one was not a mistake” (Revolutionary Road 1:04:43).  While contemplating the visionary life in Paris, April gradually becomes constrained by the reality of her everyday life. The concomitant result of insisting extraordinary in a suburban life leads April’s to anxiety rather than merely her gender. 

Revolutionary Road indicates that women are more likely to experience the subjugation in their routine of daily life. Firstly, April is subordinated to her husband because she affirms masculine superiority as she says to Frank that “you are the most beautiful and wonderful thing in the world. You are a man” (Revolutionary Road 30:35).  Secondly, April pays the highest price in tackling the routine of everyday life as she kills herself by undertaking the abortion. On the one hand, the very basic interpretation of these instances represents that the movie supports Lefebvre’s argument that the everyday “weighs more heavily” on women. On the other hand, under a postmodern analysis, the movie itself is a “simulation of reality” (Baudrillard 167). In the age of image and communications, our life is deeply affected by these simulations.  Furthermore, in our era, according to Bauman the “global fear in the liquid modern world” (97) is a worldwide phenomenon which has saturated the everyday life. Therefore, the everyday in the 21^st century differs to a large extent with what it was in the mid 20^th century. In the contemporary age, the everyday weighs more heavily on those who further contemplate the effects of images through media. Regardless of being a man or a woman, the more one perceives reality through those “simulations” the heavier everyday life would be.  

The everyday life has occupied the attention of some scholars in different ages from various perspectives. Rita Felski observes it preferably “as a way of experiencing the world than a circumscribed set of activities within the world” (95). The avoidance of restricting the everyday to some specific set of activities implies that it is intrinsically variable based on the individual lived experiences which are bounded to specific time and place. In this way, Revolutionary Road represents that Paris as a specific place can be perceived very differently by April and neighbouring man Shep. The movie signifies that the individual experience and imagination are never the same.  In the scene in which Frank and April excitedly disclose their decision to leave for Paris, Frank asks Shep to describe Paris as he has been there before. Although Shep replays: “Yeah, it is a great city” (Revolutionary Road 38:22) he seems shocked at hearing Wheeler’s decision, so he only responds to Frank that way and his tone and body language show that he does not mean it seriously.  On the other hand, April explains the best things about Paris.  She says about the low cost of living and that there are some high demands for an ordinary profession such as secretary and exaggerates the good salaries in, “NATO and ECA and those places” (Revolutionary Road 39:25). Prior to this, the movie shows April opens a small wooden case and watches a few pictures. The biggest picture shows Frank in Paris. Frank asks April if she has been there before and April answers, “I have never really been anywhere” (Revolutionary Road 22:43). Despite the fact that April never been in Paris, she is being exposed to information about that city through the silvery images of the 1950s, and also through her socialisation and hearing the accounts of those who have been there before such as her husband and Shep. For April, the reality of Paris “is produced from miniaturized units” (Baudrillard 167) and not through an actual and individual experience of herself. April’s vision of Paris is affected by the elusive duplicated models of reality which Baudrillard states as “hyperreal” (167). In the modern era, the everyday is constituted by our very personal imagination which is affected by the burden of information we receive. In this way, April is being impacted by information which turns her imagination about the future to be unrealistic. Therefore, the everyday weighs on her, to a large extent, because of the influx of information and the particular way she perceives her surrounding world. 

The everyday weighs more on those who have developed a higher quality of human sensibility and envisage the everyday in an emotional way. As a very human trait, the emotion and its effects are not limited to women. Various approaches such as feminism have traced back the emotional effects in relation to the everyday, into history.  For instance, under the paradigm of feminism, Felski’s reading of the everyday in relation to emotions notes that “everyday life has long been subject to intense and conflicting emotional investments” (94). There has been a long history of objecting to the association of femininity with irrationality. For instance, one of the pioneering feminists profoundly contends that masculine domination and patriarchy “enslave women by cramping their understanding and sharpening their sense” (Wollstonecraft 40). Considering the timeworn and emphatic fact of women’s subjugation, the idea that the everyday weighs more on women seems to be the concomitant result of that historical domination of masculinity and patriarchy rather than the involvement of very human trait such as emotion. 

In the Revolutionary Road, it is vividly illustrated that the one who bears the heaviest weight of the everyday is a man. Johan says, “I had 37 electric shocks […] it supposed to jolt out the emotional problems just jolted out the mathematics” (Revolutionary Road 49:58). John has acquired a higher extent of sensibility, so he feels more pressures of the everyday life. Therefore, the movie provides a different interpretation upon which the narration does not comply with Lefebvre’s argument that everyday weighs more heavily on women.  

The movie Revolutionary Road shows that the heaviness of the everyday has a direct relation to the degree of knowledge and wisdom by which one conceives the everyday.  In other words, despite Lefebvre’s argument that the everyday “weighs more heavily” on women, the movie Revolutionary Road shows that it weighs more heavily on anyone who achieves a deeper understanding of the everyday life. According to Lefebvre, neither language and discourse, nor politics can be the source of reference, but the everyday is the “established and consolidated, sole surviving common sense referent and point of reference” (9). It means thinking about the everyday, we contemplate a concept through reference to itself. Therefore, we practice the very cyclical nature of contemplation and that means the deeper we perceive the everyday life the more we become subject to it and it has nothing to do with being a man or a woman. 

In Revolutionary Road, John is the most educated person as his mother says, “he has a PhD in mathematics. I suppose you could say he is an intellectual” (Revolutionary Road 18:15). In the scene where John starts laughing at Frank and April and ridicules their decision to leave for Paris by saying “the nice young Wheelers are taking off” (Revolutionary Road 49:07), Frank asks John to walk with them outside and get fresh air. In the walking, John again asks what they are running away from and Frank answers with a big hesitation that “we are running from the hopeless emptiness of the whole life here” (Revolutionary Road 50:38). John for the first time seems happy as he hears that answer and replies, “now you have said it […] it takes the real guts to see the hopelessness” (Revolutionary Road 50:48).  Despite suffering from a mental illness, John exhibits a type of wisdom which is not seen by other people in the movie. His aphoristic sentences are the rare persuasions that the Wheelers had ever received. However, Johan himself experiences deeper anxiety as he admits that “plenty of people are on to the emptiness” (Revolutionary Road 50:52). Therefore, unlike Lefebvre’s argument, the movie represents that the everyday weighs more heavily on those who have reached to a higher extent of wisdom and accumulated a deeper understanding of the everyday life. 

References

Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulations.” Selected Writings. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. 166-184. Print.

Bauman, Zygmunt. “Terrors of the Global.” Liquid Fear. Polity Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, 96-128. Retrieved on 28/09/2017.  http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uwsau/detail.action?docID=1174283. 

Felski, Rita. “Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture.” The Invention of Everyday Life. New York: New York University Press, 2000. 77-98. Print.

Lefebvre, Henri, and Christine Levich. “The Everyday and Everydayness.” Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 7–11. Print.

Revolutionary Road. Sam Mendes. Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Michael Shannon, Kathryn Hahn, David Harbour, Kathy Bates, Ty Simpkins. DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Vantage, 2008. Movie.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. Andrews UK, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/UWSAU/detail.action?docID=977729.

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.