Susan B. Anthony: “Guilty? Yes, no matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; but oh! Thrice guilty is he who, for selfish gratification, heedless of her prayers, indifferent to her fate, drove her to the desperation which impels her to the crime.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton: “When we consider that women have been treated as property it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.”
Victoria Woodhull: “Every woman knows that if she were free, she would never bear an unwished-for child, nor think of murdering one before its birth.”
Archive | May 2004
Authors’ Birthdays This Week
May 9:
Eleanor Estes: The Hundred Dresses is a wonderful chilldren’s book about prejudice and cruelty and repentance and how sometimes we repent but are unable to repair the damage we have done. It turns out Eleanor Estes was a children’s librarian. I like librarians.
Sir J.M. Barrie (1860-1937): Peter Pan is fun, but I really enjoyed The Little Minister when I read it many years ago. It’s the romantic story of a new minister in a a small village who falls in love with an elusive gypsy girl.
May 12:
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882): I will never forget watching a film in some literature class with Oliver Reed as Rossetti. He played a dark and tortured poetic genius, misunderstood, of course. I’d love to see the film again to see if it’s as memorable as I remember. Anyway, Rossetti was a Victorian, Pre Raphaelite poet and artist.
Try Edward Lear, for poetry that’s a little lighter than that of Rossetti. My personal favorite is The Pobble Who Had No Toes. It’s a fact the whole world knows,/That Pobbles are happier without their toes.
May 13
Daphne Du Maurier: I already jumped the gun and wrote about her here.
May 14
Hall Caine (1853-1941): I never heard of him, but according to VictorianWeb , he was a novelist and a protege of . . . Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Dante Alighieri: Last, but not least, I found this date for Dante’s birth in some source, however, this Dante website says that he “was born in Florence in May or June 1265.” Since it fits with what has become the theme of this post, we’ll use this date.
American Scandals
Here are a few interesting bits of gossip I learned from reading the book A Treasury of Great American Scandals. At least, Eldest Daughter says it’s gossip; I say it’s only gossip if they’re still alive.
*John Adams called Benjamin Franklin “that Old Conjurer,” and the two men cordially hated one another. Of course, most people got tired of John Adams after a while–except for Abigail.
*Andrew Jackson was an ardent duelist. He once was shot through the chest in a duel, and then, bleeding profusely, he calmly took aim, fired, and shot the other guy dead. The bullet remained lodged near Jackson’s heart for the rest of his life.
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Prisoner abuse
David Brooks:
Whose bright idea was it to keep Saddam’s gulag open as a U.S. prison, anyway?
Senator John McCain:
I have seen a lot of people die. I’ve seen a lot of terrible things in my life. But to see it done by Americans to human beings is what’s so appalling. It’s so outrageous, I can’t describe it.
Spc. Joe Roche:
I’m at a place right now where there are thousands of U.S. soldiers. I went to breakfast and dinner at the KBR dining hall here. It is huge, hundreds of soldiers gathered to eat. Around us are large-screen tvs, and yes, the news was mostly about the prison abuse. Everyone is so angry. I mean, angry! It is as if those soldiers hurt us more than the enemies here in Iraq have. I don’t think that if that RPG last week had hit and killed us in my hummwv, there would have been any of the damage done to our cause here that those soldiers have done.
Charles Krauthammer:
The pictures of American women soldiers mocking, humiliating and dominating naked and abused Arab men. One could not have designed a more symbolic representation of the Islamist warning about where Western freedom ultimately leads than Thursday’s Washington Post photo of a uniformed American woman holding a naked Arab man on a leash.
Me:
Those who did these things and those who allowed them to happen should be punished. They should also be educated to know that what they did will probably cause the deaths and torture and the humiliation of many other American soldiers and and Middle Easterners and will most likely prolong the hatred and violence indefinitely. All because they wanted “to have some fun.”
Vast Wasteland?
I’ve been thinking about television series and their endings and their popularity I heard, just barely, that the TV series Friends had its final episode last week. Fortunately, snob that I am, I never saw Friends. Nor did I ever view an entire episode of Seinfeld nor (shudder) Sex and the City nor American Idol nor Oprah nor Survivor nor, to go back in time, Dallas. When all my friends were wondering “Who shot J.R.,” I was wondering “Who is J.R.?” I satisfied my curosity by asking someone, but I still don’t know who shot him. I do try to keep up with what’s going on in the TV world for the sake of “relating to the culture,” but I’ll admit to being mystified by the popularity of most of what is offered on network TV. Three of the shows I mentioned above, as I understand it, were about the sexual escapades of twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings in NYC or maybe Philadelphia. Anyway they’re all somewhere up North where I suppose that sort of thing is entertaining. I’m even interested in foreign and exotic cultures, but this one just seems tawdry and rather boring.
Another three of the programs entertain by embarrassing people–except I heard that Oprah foreswore that sort of programming a few years ago. I’m not the least bit interested in watching “reality television” which is not so much real as it is unreal and totally alien to anything I see or hear about in my community.
This is not a “what is the world coming to” sort of post as much as it is a “what am I coming to” musing. Popular culture and I seem to have parted company about 15 to 20 years ago, and I’m not sure we’ll ever come together again. The last popular TV show I remember watching regularly was The Cosby Show.
Sienkiewicz and Kierkegaard
Today is the birthday of Henry Sienkiewicz, author of Quo Vadis?, Catholic Polish novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905. One of my students is assigned to read Quo Vadis? this month; I think I’ll try to re-read it myself and see how I like it. I read it long, long ago but don’t remember it too well.
It’s also the birthday of Soren Kierkegaard, who, as far as I can tell, was a mess–but interesting.
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
Soren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855), “The Sickness Unto Death”
Another quote: Boredom is the root of all evil – the despairing refusal to be oneself.
Edith Wharton and House of Mirth
I finished reading The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. I’m still trying to figure out what the title means. If you know, don’t tell me. I’d like to figure it out myself.
I found this information about Edith Wharton:
She did not go to school, but educated herself by reading in her father’s “gentleman’s library,” and was given lessons by a governess
Another homeschooled genius.
I liked the book very much although it was sad. I was reminded of a professor I had in college who said something to the effect that every time he read Romeo and Juliet he hoped against hope that somehow the story would turn out differently, that Romeo would arrive at the right time or that Juliet would wake up just a little sooner. In The House of Mirth, the main character, Lily Bart, is always just a little too late or a little too trusting or a little too scrupulous or a little too unsure of herself. She’s trapped in a society that pushes her toward a materialistic and loveless marriage of convenience, and she tries to fight against the pressure. However, she never fights hard enough or soon enough, and of course, it’s obvious from the beginning that the novel must end in tragedy. Romeo and Juliet, Lily and Selden, neither couple can live happily ever after. At least, Juliet knows she wants Romeo. They’re just “star-crossed lovers.” Lily Bart knows how to get what she wants; unfortunately, she never does figure out exactly what it is she wants. May we, unlike Lily, figure out what is really important in life before it’s too late.