Final essay questions

Due: Friday, Dec. 12 at 4 p.m.

Choose one of the following questions and write a 5-7 page paper. You may write on Moby-Dick, Washington Square, Pudd’nhead Wilson, or The Awakening. You should feel free to devise your own topic, as long as you run it by me first. Because some of these topics were ones we touched on in class, be sure to include evidence other than/in addition to those passages we discussed together.

1. Track and analyze an element of Melville’s religious imagery in Moby-Dick. You might focus on a single character’s spiritual development over time (Ahab, Queequeg, Starbuck); a singe set of religious images (such as the Jonah story or resurrection images); or compare scenes of worship, literal or figurative.

2. Analyze an example of “passive action” in either The Awakening or Washington Square. What kind of action, for example, is Catherine’s refusal to decide or Edna’s drifting out to sea? How do those central “events” fit with larger questions of agency in the novels?

3. Discuss an example of an “awakening” in one of the four novels. Prime examples would be the revelations experienced by Captain Ahab, Catherine Sloper, Tom Driscoll, or Edna Pontellier, but you may choose a secondary character as well. What do these characters awake from? The awakenings do not necessarily turn out well for the characters in a conventional sense; why not? If you choose this essay be sure not to focus on plot summary but to make a particular argument about the nature of the awakening.

4. Analyze financial imagery in Washington Square. How do issues of actual finances (inheritance, fortune-hunting) relate to the various images of investment, gambling, and profit?

5. Analyze the role of internationalism in any of the four novels. Moby-Dick, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and The Awakening all focus not just on racial or ethnic difference, but on national difference. How do these authors use characters from other nations (or, in the case of Chopin’s Creoles, “foreigners” who live within U.S. national borders and American culture)? What does it mean to be “American” in the face of other languages, cultures, and national ideals?

6. Washington Square is a novel with a resolutely constrained setting, except for Catherine’s year-long journey to Europe with her father. Analyze James’s use of setting, and the ways that the characters themselves use physical setting, from an alpine peak to a public park to a parlor, strategically.

7. Roxy’s baby-switching and Tom’s subsequent adoption seem raise questions not only about race, but kinship in Pudd’nhead Wilson. What does it mean to be a parent or a son in this novel? Does Twin privilege biological definitions of kinship, or does he define kinship in another way? How do the characters themselves define their family relationships?

8. Many of the characters in Washington Square imagine themselves as literary characters or as participating in a literary plot; why? How do characters’ literary imaginations affect their actions in the novel? What is it like to be a character? If one imagines oneself or one’s companions as characters, what are the implications for larger ideas of personhood?

9. Examine ideas of childhood, children and childbearing in The Awakening. Edna Pontellier’s children seem to be an afterthought, while Mme. Ratignole’s children and pregnancy seem largely to provide symbolic definition of her own idealized womanhood. What role do these marginalized children play? What is the relationship between actual children and the various symbolic images of childhood and rebirth in the novel?

James, The Art of Fiction

For Tuesday's class: please read this essay, linked below. Print it out to bring to class.

Henry James, "The Art of Fiction" (1884).

Moby-Dick close reading assignment

This assignment is due Friday, November 14 at 4 p.m.

Please write a 2-page close reading on one of the following passages from Moby-Dick. If you prefer, you may choose your own passage; if you go this route, please include a printout of the passage with your paper.

In your close reading, focus on Melville's choice of specific words, images, and metaphors. Look up vocabulary and allusions that you're not certain of. Although your primary task is to examine and analyze this passage in detail, you should give some sense of the context of this passage in the larger novel, and connect the themes of this passage to the larger set of themes that we have discussed in class. Before you begin, you should go back and re-read the chapter surrounding your passage. You do not need to include a traditional introduction and conclusion for this paper.

1) Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane* was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-colored squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade -- owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times -- this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me. (Chapter 4, pp. 36-37)
*Counterpane: a bedspread

2) But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous -- why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows -- a colorless, all- color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues -- every stately or lovely emblazoning -- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge -- pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino Whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt? (chapter 42; p. 165)

3) It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert. 'Speak, thou vast and venerable head,' muttered Ahab, 'which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest.
That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed -- while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!' (Chapter 70, p. 249)

4) Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion -- most seen here at the equator -- denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.

Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven.

Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged creatures that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how oblivious were ye of old Ahab's close-coiled woe! But so have I seen little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.

Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side, and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel -- forbidding -- now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop. (Chapter 123; p. 405)