Tag Archives: history

Wife is (Extra)Ordinary

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I found the idea that history and literature could experience a sort of role-reversal when reading the chapter on New Historicism.  Stating that the historical event became a social text while the literary text serves as the social event was a little confusing at first, but then started to make sense once we discussed what this means in class.  Professor Seaman stated that our reading suggests that even as an event happens, it doesn’t occur in a historical sense but in a literary one.  Looking at a work of literature from this standpoint, then, one can gather a sense of the event or people it depicts rather than of the historical facts themselves.

In regards to Chaucer, it was really intriguing to see Patterson’s perspective on his intentions and his depiction of the Wife herself.  The idea that she represents an ideal of the time seems to insinuate that he was simply reproducing the conventions of his time period in that people accepted this stereotype.  Thinking of Chaucer as consciously attempting to write in the form of literary representation true to the tradition makes me wonder what else he may have meant by his description of his characters.  Making the Wife’s story center on marriage because that is how she is represented as a subject of literary attention also seems interesting.  If she had been presented as an artisan, her story would have had a different significance at the time and would have elevated her skill level for the readers.  However, the fact that she is defined by her social position makes her seem more ordinary, and in doing so she becomes important historically as signifying a simple character of the time period.  In my opinion, Chaucer seemed to acknowledge that in preserving this cultural norm of his time he could create an ideal true to his era while at the same time keeping her in the social constrictions that would have been in place.  The benefit of this today is that we get a sense of the role of women—even though she is unusually happy and content with her life through her good (and bad) marriages—that would have been ordinary at the time yet are culturally telling for a retrospective standpoint.

Certainly.

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Thinking back on this past week, we have taken a deep look into the way that we see the world.  It is always refreshing to challenge one’s bases a little, as I find personally that shifting of the ground helps better seat the idea.  History as something soft takes my mind back to two separate things.

I remember one of my older brothers in his college days when we argued about “certainty.”  I, the high school freshman who thought himself a brilliant individual whose arguments were utterly impervious to any attack, was challenging his statement that absolutely nothing was certain.  And time after time, example after example, in one way or another, he always defeated them, pointing out how in one way or another, nothing was.  Not history, not our beliefs, as somewhere, somehow, these things (in the realm of an argument of course) could all be delegated to the world of the metaphysical and like the deity in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, could disappear in a puff of logic.  In retrospect, I should have insisted that the pain he felt was certain, and followed it with a lobbed book to the back of his head.  Brotherly love is the greatest!

In my view of history, especially in the area of our discussion today, I think that it is important to note that thinking shifts all the time, and I like to think about it like a pendulum, one extreme to the other, with each passing stroke it becoming more moderate, more centered, more focused, in most ways better, but never quite exact, never quite certain.  It is a nice thing to wrestle with issues at the end of the day.  That there are things big and important enough that they cannot simply be settled by day’s end.

I guess when it comes to my view of history and certainty, I compare it to an object completely invisible, but having mass and taking up space.  One could do many things to it, like splashing paint to see its shape, or weighing it to see how heavy it is.  You could determine its temperature, probably its chemical composition, all sorts of things, but never truly see it with your own eyes, and as such never be completely sure or certain of how it looks.  I think this analogy applies to history in the sense that every time we discuss it, research it, see a piece of it, contextualize it, compare it to other things, etc, we get a little closer to understanding the event better.  But there is always the understanding that its true existence will forever remain a mystery to us all.

History isn’t written by the victors. It isn’t written by anyone.

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In class on Wednesday, the distinction between history and historiography was brought up. This was a really interesting part of our discussion for me personally, mostly because my idea of “history” has always been the written out chapters in textbooks, the stories told by others, and the memorization of dates, names, and events. The topic of historiography versus history made me think about history as more of an abstract idea, a concept of the past and it’s purpose. This realization led to me thinking of historiography, the ‘writing down of history,’ or the choosing of what is important and noteworthy, as our way of applying history to our lives. Lately in class, we have been discussing how the media (television shows, magazines, etc.) are designed to give us what we want to see, read, and hear. Well, I think this is largely what every social and cultural construct is designed to do. This is what literature can do, and this is what history seems to be able to do as well. The difference is that written works from the past can be revisited, and we can determine from them what must have been important or new at a given time. It is argued that these works cannot capture history fully, because they were written by biased individuals who had opinions about what was important, and because these individuals cannot have possibly included everything in their work. I agree, I think that this history cannot in fact be written down, because it is abstract. We cannot make something abstract become concrete, simply because not all nouns represent something physical. How could a person paint a picture of love? They could paint their idea of love in the form of two people embracing, or of a mother holding her child. But at the end of the day neither of these things epitomize love. This is why historiography, and what we generally think of when we hear ‘history,’ is an art of its own, and it should be appreciated as such. When a work of art is critiqued, the critic may say ‘I think that the artist should have incorporated this’ or ‘I think that the piece lacks that,’ in an effort to improve or expand a work, to help it become more complete. This is how written accounts of history should be viewed and discussed, not with cynicism or even with mere doubt, but with concern for the validity and verisimilitude of it.

The Phantom Time Theory

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I recently came a across an article about a group that believes we’ve managed to make up 300 years of history between the years 600-900 A.D.. They say this happened because Otto II wanted to have his ruling in the auspicious year of 1000.

So why does this matter? When I brought this up in class, Dr. Seaman noted that it wouldn’t change anything. It’s not like three hundred years would be ripped away from us, because it never existed. It would mean moving our calendars back to 1712 on the new year rather than moving forward 2012. At first, I agreed, it really would mean nothing. These are just numbers after all, not real definitions of anything. Even Theory Toolbox notes that time is just a social construction rather than a part of nature.

But that’s just the problem: it’s a social construction. The same article also talked about when England switched to the Gregorian calender in the 1700s they technically lost 11 days and people, believing that this had been stolen from their lives, rioted over it. We are so attached to our perception of time, that to lose 11 days seemed horrific. Imagine if the world was suddenly told we had lost 300 years. True, it’s not an actual lost, just an adjustment, but time is so intricately tied to our sense of being that we can’t see it as just a number anymore.

This also brings up the question of what to do with the apparent history that exists in that time frame. It could be that, over time, occurrences that previously had no set year were put there and that, over the course of hundreds of years, we have just accepted what were originally guesses as truth. This reinforces Theory Toolbox‘s stance that history is never completely subjective or true. If this theory of ‘phantom time’ is to be believed, we would essentially be accusing Otto II of making up history. So often we see this idea that history is written by the victors, and, as the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto II certainly was a victor. However, I still wonder at how he would have grappled with the knowledge that he was moving the calender three hundred years. Just as those in England in the 1700s had trouble with 11 days, I believe Otto II would certainly have found it hard to wrap his mind around 300 years, even if the measurement of time back then was, at best, guesswork.

Here’s the link to the article if you’d like to read it: http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/transcript/do-we-live-in-the-18th-century/

lengthy thoughts on history

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In the chapter we read on history, there were numerous examples and explanations for something I had previously considered as simple events in the past.  The method they seemed to promote came across as very scientific to me, stating that “historical meaning is produced rather than dispassionately uncovered or rendered visible” (Nealon 111).  This statement seems to indicate that all the events and consequences are there: what is important isn’t interpreting or giving personal meaning to one event, but instead putting the pieces together to learn about the past and how it could affect the future.  The task at hand, therefore, is to try and figure out how something in history has meaning for today—or even for that period—through the responses to a particular event.

The examples they give of the Holocaust was really helpful to my understanding of the concepts they set out to illustrate.  Indicating that it in itself “doesn’t contain meaning” but that what it sparked by way of change is where its true significance lies shows their idea perfectly (112).  The idea that this history is always being changed and molded into different shapes made sense, as well.  One clear example that comes to mind is our understanding of Christopher Columbus.  While in kindergarten, I learned that he had discovered the land I now call home.  Growing a little older, I found out that this country was actually named after Amerigo Vespucci, not Columbus—which seemed a little odd to me.  Why wouldn’t they name America after this great hero?  Growing older still, it came to light that Columbus wasn’t actually the great man I had been taught; instead, he enslaved the natives in his greed for gold.  My shifting view of this event in history in particular seems to portray what they are talking about.  Though my perspective shifted, giving it different meaning, this isn’t what is important about his discovery of America and who it was named after or why.  What can be taken from this event is the effect it had on the Native Americans, international trade, and political boundaries.  From this event, for the present we can learn that conquering nations and enslaving their peoples probably will lead to mass genocide and war; therefore, today we are more likely to aid developing countries.  The US’s shift from complete domination of a peoples to preforming as a role model and benefactor for smaller countries emerging from colonialism shows that, while not a result only of Columbus’ experience, this event in history had traceable affects coupled with other similar events by which the present generation has evolved a new strategy for dealing with more primitive cultures.

3 AM

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This seems like an appropriate time to write this week’s blog post on time/space and history– I guess I fell asleep at a weirdly early hour and ended up waking up at 3 AM. It feels kind of wrong to be hanging around, doing things, having coherent thoughts at 3 in the morning without the lingering guilt from staying up until 3 intentionally or the utter dread of waking up at 3 to catch a flight or something. I’m up right now, and I am not tired, and I will not be tired tomorrow, and soon I will tire and sleep again but there will still have been this odd little bubble of awake at this usually very asleep time. The understanding of 3 AM is a human name for an event during which one should be in bed and dreaming. I play along with that normally because it helps me function in society, but there is nothing inherently bed-y or dreaming-y about 3 in the morning so of course it is just as weird for me to wake up at 9 AM as 3 AM. The perception of higher weirdness is a human construction.

History was on my mind as well this week as I finished reading a biography of Jack Kerouac. He’s an interesting man because he very violently became a product of his surroundings. All people are such products, but I find myself feeling that there is more to Jack’s subjectivity. And, as this particularly biography addressed a few times, there are differences in the “factual” history of his life. He lived from the twenties to the sixties, and he wrote slews of journals documenting almost every day of his life, but still we cannot be sure what exactly happened. It seems miraculous, then, that we could ever trust world history to be unaltered truth when such a perfect candidate for accurate remembering has proven to be so mystifying. It brings me back to my favourite notion of the week– that just as we do not, cannot, fully experience and understand the present, we cannot, and do not, fully experience and understand the past.

Man, Myth, or something inbetween…

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It is interesting to be looking at the biography of a man that we, in truth know little to nothing concrete about. Chaucer, like everyone, is a man most decidedly of his times however and much can be pulled from what we know about the everyday life of people living during that time period. Much of what we read this week seemed to be giving us a flash course in the major events that shaped the lives of the Englishmen of Chaucer’s day and how these might be used to understand the context in which the Wife of Bath was written.

Events like the Black Death and the people’s uprising that, seem to play important roles in the story. What I find interesting though is that the book also seems to draw a lot of inferences about Chaucer from what he writes in the Canterbury Tales. Scholars take the description of Chaucer in the Prologue of the Tales and use it to try and approximate a picture, even going so far as to say that it is a correct rendering based on a “portrait” of Chaucer that was included in a particular manuscript of the Tales. A picture which, at least to me seems like it was likely just done based on the character of Chaucer in the Tales and may or may not have any bearing on what the real life Chaucer looked like. It is interesting to see how little we really know about one of the most highly regarded writers in the tradition of the English language.

Response to Dobie

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“In the classroom, history and biography are certainly alive and well, often serving as the basis of lectures and writing assignments–even providing the organizing principle of many survey courses.  Part of their appeal for teachers and students is that they furnish background against which a text can be more readily understood” (Dobie 19).  This quotation from the text struck me as completely related to our class discussion earlier this week.  Professor Seaman asked a question pertaining to how Dobie’s methods are beneficial or detrimental to teachers and students in her first review of the week, so I found it quite fitting to utilize this quotation.

I agree with Dobie completely in the fact that some sort of background information is necessary to fully understand a text or work of literature.  Though there is some discussion about taking a text for what it’s worth without giving attention to the historical or cultural events, I believe that these elements are, in fact, crucial to the complete knowledge and comprehension of a piece of literature.  Therefore, in the classroom environment, both students and teacher alike benefit from learning historical and biographical information.  In my Romanticism class, we always go over the lives and historical elements from each individual poet; consequently, I am more able to understand where he/she is coming from as well as see certain underlying meanings that might not have presented themselves previously.  Without reading a little background information, I would especially have been lost in a poem titled “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven”.  My point is, learning about the historical, cultural, and personal elements that go into a work of literature is crucial for complete comprehension.  Teachers benefit from this knowledge because thier students are more informed and can provide a better class discussion–not to mention they are most likely more attentive in class if a particular author’s background was interesting.  Students mainly benefit from seeing a certain perspective on a story, poem, etc., not to mention they are more included in the structure of the class.