Comments on the paper.....

Amy Hatch has some interesting points about feminism. She is using a variety of texts we have read in class. I think the use of The White Heron is a great pick for the topic she has chosen it could be applicable for a few different arguments about women.

Heather is linking Regionalism, Realism, and Transcendentalism and linking them all to Fuller’s text. Her main point seems to be about the growth women shared in these different genres.

Kristi talked about some of the texts we have read and how the character’s faults or influences lead them to away from society’s standards or constraints. This seems like an interesting subject for a paper and the use of Dorian Gray as well as Daisy Miller could both work well for this paper.

Meredith is using the American Scholar to link together transcendentalism with local color. I think this is a very original idea because the rest of the class didn’t bring up local color at all.

Michael is going to discuss the Gothic and Dark Romanticism. He has a lot of issues he is going to cover. The most interesting aspect I found was how he wants to discuss the way these texts would be written had these genres never existed.

Janel is linking Emerson’s Circles with Transcendentalism as well as Dark Romanticism. She is showing how all of these challenged people to look inward to their own faults. I think this is a great idea for the final paper. I would have never thought to link Emerson’s Circles with Dark Romanticism at all, but I do see the possibilities in doing so.

Deb wants to write about the civil war era and I think that this is also another very original idea. I would have to agree that the war did influence the majority of the texts written during the time period.

Caitlyn is writing about British society versus American society and the use of local color and regionalism. I think this is a great topic because in comparing and contrasting British and American local color it could be a very interesting paper.

Zola and Wilde

In Zola’s The Experimental Novel he discusses the characters in a novel as being observed as if they were an experiment. When Zola writes, “The novelist starts out in search of truth,” he is seeking to create something real or something naturalistic. He states, “The novelist is equally an observer and an experimentalist. The observer in him gives the facts as he observed them,” or in other words the novelist writes down what he observes the characters doing, where they live, where they came from, and or anything else the novelist can observe. Zola then writes about the experimental part of the novel, “Then the experimentalist appears and introduces an experiment, that is to say, sets his characters going in a certain story so as to show that the succession of facts will be such as the requirements of the determinism of the phenomena under examination call for.”

In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray I would argue that this experiment that Zola writes about starts for Dorian’s character in chapter two. The experiment would be the obvious: what would happen to a man who had no consequences for his actions. I see the experiment start to form when Lord Henry gives his seductive speech. He says, “We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. . . . Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.”

The whole idea that not doing something impulsive will eventually poison your mind is very convincing coming from Lord Henry. He discusses this sort of impulse that if you deny that ignored impulse will eat away at your brain. Eventually Dorian is to act on his impulses and to derive pleasure from the bad things he causes to happen; the same impulse that would poison his own brain if ignored will poison the people around him when he acts upon it.

When Zola writes, “The social circulus is identical with the vital circulus; in society, as in human beings, a solidarity exists which unites the different members and the different organisms in such a way that if one organ becomes rotten many others are tainted and a very complicated disease results. Hence, in our novels when we experiment on a dangerous wound which poisons society, we proceed in the same way as the experimentalist doctor; we try to find the simple initial cause in order to reach the complex causes of which the action is a result.”

What Zola says is in a way discussing an experiment like that of Dorian Gray. The bad events in the text like Basil and Sybil’s deaths were just like the rotting fruit Zola discusses in his text. The evil Dorian turned into spread onto the other characters like sick rotting fruit. I would argue that Oscar Wilde’s story is a solid representation of the experimental novel. Dorian’s ability to survive without consequences was the experiment and the outcomes weren’t so good.

My New Proposal

I have significantly changed my proposal. Instead of simply comparing the two genres of the Gothic and Romanticism I would now like to focus on the aspects of feminism that are related in the two. I want to analyze how women were portrayed in the texts of these two separate genres in similar ways. I will discuss how these women are seen as “the victim” in both the Gothic genre as well as in Romanticism. The Books I will be using from our class are Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter and Edgar Allen Poe’s Ligeia from the Gothic readings and Byron’s The Giaour from our readings in Romanticism. I have also found some interesting sources I will be using for this paper and I have posted those below.


Gamer, Michael. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation. Cambridge University Press. 2000. Print.

“This is the first full-length study to examine the links between high Romantic literature and what has often been thought of as a merely popular genre--the Gothic. Michael Gamer analyzes how and why Romantic writers drew on Gothic conventions while, at the same time, denying their influence in order to claim critical respectability. He shows how the reception of Gothic literature played a fundamental role in the development of Romanticism as an ideology, tracing the politics of reading, writing and reception at the end of the eighteenth century.”


Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Feminism. Camden House Press. 1998. Print.

“A new look at the Gothic novel that advances current debates on feminism.As British women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to define how they experienced their eras social and economic upheaval, they helped popularize a new style of bourgeois female sensibility. Hoeveler argues that a female-created literary ideology, now known as "victim feminism", arose as the Gothic novel helped create a new social role of professional victim for women adjusting to the new bourgeois order. These novels were thinly disguised efforts at propagandizing a new form of conduct for women, teaching that "professional femininity" -- a cultivated pose of wise passiveness and controlled emotions -- best,prepared them for social survival.Gothic Feminism takes a neo-feminist approach to these women's writings, treating them not as sacred texts but as thesis-driven works that attempted to instruct women in a series of strategic poses. It offers both a new understanding of the genre and a wholly new interpretation of feminism as a literary ideology.”


Ellison, Julie. Delicate Subjects:Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding. Cornell University Press. 1990. Print.

“Addresses the interrelated issues of the history of anxieties about rational violence and the significance of the feminine in romantic literature and fiction.”
Smith, Allan Lloyd. American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction. Continuum International Publishing Group. 2004. Print
“Following the structure of other titles in the Continuum Introductions to Literary Genres series, American Gothic Fiction includes: A broad definition of the genre and its essential elements. A timeline of developments within the genre. Critical concerns to bear in mind while reading in the genre. Detailed readings of a range of widely taught texts. In-depth analysis of major themes and issues. Signposts for further study within the genre. A summary of the most important criticism in the field. A glossary of terms.”


Fay, Elizabeth A. A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism. Blackwell Publishers. 1998. Print.

“Elizabeth Fay's invaluable book addresses the reader in an immediate and direct manner to provide an unequaled introduction to the issues most important for feminist analyses of Romantic literature. In her opening chapter, Fay offers detailed definitions and a historicized grounding that gives a thorough account of feminist theory's involvement in Romantic studies and provides a rigorous methodology for students to follow, concluding with a highly instructive case study on Jane Austen. Subsequent chapters deal with women and revolutionary politics, the Gothic genre and domestic politics, women and thought, and women and identity, which covers visuality in Romantic texts. Further reading is listed at the end to each chapter. The book includes key illustrations and a comprehensive bibliography.”

THE FINAL PAPER

For my project I would like to compare the aspects of Dark Romanticism and the Gothic. I will be using either Poe’s Ligeia or Berenice (perhaps both) as well as one or two of his poems. Those of which I am still a little undecided. I also want to use Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter even though we didn’t read it for Dark Romanticism week I still think it fits in with the theme and last but not least I will use Brown’s Edgar Huntly to help argue that the aspects of both the Gothic and Dark Romanticism are overlapping. In a way you can’t have one without the other. They are so entwined that I wonder why it is they are even considered to be two separate themes. I would like to argue with the help of these texts that the Gothic and Dark Romanticism are one in the same and that it is impossible to have one without the other. If this seems too easy and lame feel free to let me know.

Daisy Daisy Daisy

Daisy Miller is a book about a girl who is unaware of how her actions are seen by others. The study of Daisy is to me simply that. I don’t think it necessarily stereotypes American girls although who’s to stop someone who reads it from thinking all American girls are not like Daisy?
Howells says, “She is one of the young American persons who amaze and confound European society, and give a strange reputation to American girls.” This is very true in the story. The other ladies don’t know what to make of her. She doesn’t seem to care at all about her reputation and it almost appears as if she is oblivious to the fact that people are talking about her so negatively.
In the text Mrs. Walker tries to interfere and tries to convince Daisy to get in the carriage and go home, “You are old enough to be more reasonable. You are old enough, dear Miss Miller, to be talked about.” To this Daisy’s innocence is shown with a reply, “Talked about? What do you mean?” But then before she gets into the carriage it appears Daisy isn’t as naïve as she presents herself to be by saying, “I don’t think I want to know what you mean, I don’t think I should like it.”
Howells would appear to be dead on when it comes to Daisy in this sense. Daisy has “amazed and confounded” Mrs. Walker. People were starting to talk negatively about the American girl Daisy. I’m not too sure of just how “innocent” Daisy was. She obviously knows that there is something negative about the gossip going on around her or else she would have simply gotten into Mrs. Walker’s carriage. She would have set herself up for a moral lecture she would have been completely shocked by, but she doesn’t because she thinks she would not like what she would hear from Mrs. Walker. She wants to keep having her fun whether it is innocent or not. Daisy thinks she shouldn’t have to change her ways simply because she is visiting another country.
When Howells says, “If an American writer proposes to show the American woman to the world, he should select the best, and not the worst.” The real argument then might be whether or not Daisy does in fact represent American women or whether or not Daisy was as “innocent” as the men around her thought she was. I don’t feel as if Daisy was completely innocent, but I don’t think she necessarily did anything that was wrong. Sure she was out late with boys, but it’s not as if she was doing mind altering drugs behind a bar somewhere in the middle of the night. Does this represent American women? Sure it probably represents some of them…

Sylvia's Heron

Jewett’s “A White Heron” can be seen as a coming of age story of a girl who will choose a more uncommon path. Most girls in Sylvia’s position would have taken the money, but Sylvia inevitably chooses nature over money or “physical things” in general. She also in a way chooses not to sell herself by showing the hunter where the bird lives. The fact that all the characters in the story are female until the outsider or the “man” comes into the plot is crucial. This could bring an entirely different meaning to the story.

Women didn’t have a lot of choices back in the day (obviously). Girls were expected to marry and money was one of the most important factors in picking a husband. This could also be seen as a woman having to “sell” herself to a man. The essay “The Shape of Violence in Jewett’s “A White Heron”, by Elizabeth Ammons elaborates on this idea in relation to “A White Heron” :

“Sylvia chooses not to pass over into the world of adult female sexuality as it is defined by the culture. The nine-year-old child, a girl about to enter puberty, refuses to enter into the transaction that everyone - the hunter, her grandmother - expects her to make. "A White Heron" says that heterosexuality requires the female to offer up body itself as prey. All Sylvia has to do is offer up the body of the bird - a free, beautiful creature like herself - to the hunter and she will receive in return money, social approval, and the affection of a man. Clearly the heron in this story symbolizes the heroine, and the exchange Sylvia is expected to make at the age of nine, with her heart set throbbing by the handsome young man, is the transition from childhood to the threshold of womanhood, the wrench from little girl identification with the mother (in this case the maternal earth itself) to big girl identification with a man. Sylvia is expected to offer her freedom, her true nature, indeed life itself to a predator, who will pierce, stuff, and then own and admire the beautiful corpse.” (Ammon p.5)


If the Heron in the story represented Sylvia then this girl was simply making her first responsible choice not only about nature, but about herself. She wasn’t going to sell herself out for the approval or acceptance of the stranger. Sylvia made a choice not to be bought.

Elizabeth Ammon’s essay on Jewett’s “A White Heron” also elaborates on the whole fairytale aspect of the story. Ammon says, “Jewett sets the stage perfectly for the rescuing prince to appear. And he does.” The “rescuing prince” or the hunter in this case appears, but the ending is not that of a usual fairytale. Sylvia doesn’t get rescued, but quite oppositely tells the man she doesn’t need to be rescued. She doesn’t want his money and she doesn’t want to give away her bird or herself no matter the cost.

There however, is a lot more in Elizabeth Ammon’s essay that I did not quote or even mention. Ammon argues, “that "A White Heron" is a story about resistance to heterosexuality; that the form Jewett adopts to express her idea is, quite appropriately, the fairy tale; and that despite her protests to the contrary Jewett shows in this fiction her ability to create conventional "plot" - that is, to use inherited masculine narrative shape - when she needs to.” The link to this essay is posted below if anyone is interested.

http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2615&context=cq

The Artist's Van

“Fenton’s pictures from the Crimea thus operate under technological and ideological constraints. The War Office forbade the photography of dead bodies, and in order for Agnew (and Fenton) to make a commercial success out of the sale of the photographs, the images produced had to be appealing. Although the wet collodion process on glass was a huge improvement over earlier technologies, it still required exposures of  to  seconds depending on the lighting. The glass plates used for negatives had to be coated with the collodion and used almost immediately before it dried and, in the extreme heat of the Crimean summer, this posed an especial problem.” (Houston)

There is speculation as to why Fenton stayed clear of painting a negative picture of the war. It could have been because the environmental conditions and the photographic techniques didn’t work well together or it could have been for political reasons. The argument of Fenton’s photography being somewhat “mild” could be made either way. Fenton had the support of the Royal family and the British government backing him and they most likely did influence his photography. He was forbidden to photograph dead bodies by the War Office and that seems to limit any photos to be taken on the battlefield. So what was Fenton really supposed to do? He wasn’t allowed to take pictures of dead guys and the people who sent him there didn’t want photos that would paint the war in a “negative” light. I believe Fenton was trying to do the best job he could under the conditions and restrictions that pressed down upon him. Even if he had tried to do “live” action photography of soldiers in battle the movement would have been a picture of blurs against a landscape.

I chose Roger Fenton’s photo of The artist's van because it depicts the conditions of his photography. He converted a wine merchant’s van into a mobile dark room. The heat of the Crimean summer made it difficult to take pictures. There wasn’t an extreme amount of time to take pictures wherever or whenever he wanted because of the photography process. I believe that this had a greater influence on his photos more than anything else.

The Mermaid and Her Jeans

Levi’s ad campaign: A Provocation, A Challenge, and An Invitation. I suppose one could say Whitman was provoked into accepting an invitation for a challenge when he wrote Leaves of Grass, but other than that I don’t really see the connection to Levi’s jeans. I own a few pairs of Levi’s and it wasn’t because they exploited Whitman’s work. I think Levi’s campaign is a little distorted to say the least. Whitman may have written Leaves of Grass as an answer to Emerson’s The Poet, but it wasn’t an advertisement for poetry. Whitman did not spend a huge amount of his life writing poems because he loved Levi’s.
I’m not saying I didn’t like the advertisements. I thought they were kind of cool. They were inspiring, but in a “I want to run through a field and light off fireworks” kind of way not in a “I need Levi’s jeans” kind of way. It doesn’t really bother me that they used Whitman. I think a lot of people who knew nothing about him previously will unknowingly know something about him after seeing the ad.
As for advertisers playing the cultural roles that poets played in earlier eras…… unh? What? Who said this? Really? Am I crazy? Is there a hidden vault somewhere containing poems written by America’s greatest poets that are all about buying fashionable merchandise? Although there are few left in the world today, there ARE still people who read actual books instead of magazines, poems instead of tabloids, and don’t find cable television a necessity for everyday life.
However, I am in no way saying that advertisers can’t be poetic. Take the mermaid picture for example. A legless mermaid with a pair of jeans… how tragic.

Perfection in Imperfection

“I believe it is a result of the experience of all artists, that it is the easiest thing in the world to give a certain degree of depth and transparency to water; but that it is next thing to impossible, to give a full impression of surface. If no reflection be given—a ripple being supposed—the water looks like lead: if reflection be given, it in nine cases out of ten looks morbidly clear and deep, so that we always go down into it, even when the artist most wishes us to glide over it.” Chapter III of Water, As Painter by Turner


This piece captures the surface of water so accurately it is almost as if I am there instead of looking at a painting. I don’t feel the water is “morbidly clear and deep”, but it does allow the viewer’s eyes to glide over it. I think the landscape surrounding the water and the clouds in the sky all help even this out and sort of draw the viewer’s attention to the center of the painting.

“We invariably, under ordinary circumstances, use the surface focus; and, in consequence, receive nothing more than a vague and confused impression of the reflected colors and lines, however clearly, calmly, and vigorously all may be defined underneath, if we choose to look for them. We do not look for them, but glide along over the surface, catching only playing light and capricious color for evidence of reflection, except where we come to images of objects close to the surface, which the surface focus is of course adapted to receive; and these we see clearly, as of the weeds on the shore, or of sticks rising out of the water, etc.”

I think this painting shows exactly what was written in this section. When looking at reflections in water directly it is as if you are almost staring at the tree or the sky itself. Especially if the water is calm it acts as a mirror of some sorts. However, if you choose not to focus on the water directly and put your sights on some point behind it like in this painting in which the artist draws the view to the center point of the landscape where the sky and earth meet, then your eyes don’t capture the reflection of the water in its entirety. The reflections in the water become obscured.

“We cannot tell when we look at them and for them, what they mean. They have all character, and are evidently reflections of something definite and determined; but yet they are all uncertain and inexplicable; playing color and palpitating shade, which, though we recognize in an instant for images of something, and feel that the water is bright, and lovely, and calm, we cannot penetrate nor interpret: we are not allowed to go down to them, and we repose, as we should in nature, upon the lustre of the level surface. It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art here, as in all other cases, consists.”

The whole concept of “saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly” creates this “perfection of art” that is really honest. The painting above along with these statements shows how heavily the artists and the school were influenced by Romanticism. The perfection of the painting is so intense it looks almost like a picture taken with a camera and shows the artist was trying to simply paint the “truth” and what was right in front of them at the time. The whole idea of these imperfect reflections amongst the “perfect” background is so real and honest. It makes the painting something that is both beautiful and simple all at once.

A Simple Piece of Crape

“Such was the effect of this simple piece of crape, that more than one woman of delicate nerves was forced to leave the meeting-house. Yet perhaps the pale-faced congregation was almost as fearful a sight to the minister, as his black veil to them.”
I enjoyed the idea that by simply wearing a veil the minister stirred up all these different emotions from his neighbors. He made the veil into a great mystery and from reading the story it was obviously not his intention to cause a scene or simply cause drama. He was openly doing what everyone else was doing more privately. He was “masking his sins” so to speak. Simply looking within yourself, especially into that dark part of yourself that you hide from the world has a tremendous amount to do with dark romanticism. I think that the people were so disturbed by this because it suddenly made sin visible whereas before it was tucked away in the back of your mind.

Another aspect of dark romanticism that I noticed was (obviously) death. The scenery alone screams dark romanticism when death is considered. When Hawthorne writes, “Nearly all his parishioners, who were of mature age when he was settled, had been borne away by many a funeral: he had one congregation in the church, and a more crowded one in the churchyard; and having wrought so late into the evening, and done his work so well, it was now good Father Hooper's turn to rest.” I can’t help, but picture an enormous crowded graveyard.

I heard from my poetry class that Edgar Allen Poe had said the best subject to write about was the death of a beautiful woman. I read online that when Poe read this story he believed that the veil was worn after the death of the woman in the beginning because the minister secretly had an affair with her; hence the whole vision of them walking hand in hand. Although I’m not too sure if I agree with this or not it does put a darker twist on the story.

I know that if Julie came to class suddenly wearing a veil for the rest of the semester, I might be a little freaked out. I would want to know why. It would bother me immensely.

Circles

I’m going to agree with the thought that this epigraph comments or elucidates the meaning of the text. The idea that Nature centres into balls is cohesive to Emerson’s entire text, it isn’t simply describing the title. Not only is nature made up of these spheres or “circles” as the title describes, but man thinking is also made up this way. The idea that man as well as nature has this outward circling, ripple effect is described in the text. Every thought for which a man takes action has a reaction or another sphere just as nature has several indefinable spheres. “The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles and that without end the extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul.”
The next line discusses her proud ephemerals or nature’s short lived organisms. I believe this is describing the part of the text where he basically says nothing is permanent. “There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.”
Fast to surface and outside scan the profile of the sphere. Knew they what that signified. With every action we are causing unpredictable outcomes. Nature and men are creating new beginnings (A new genesis were here). It is implying what comes from the end of the text, “The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle.” A new genesis is his way of saying to draw a new circle. The epigraph is describing what is to come from the text. It is giving little hints to what the text actually means.

ROMANTICISM

When it comes to the subject of Romanticism I am somewhat lost and confused. I however, don’t see myself being in the Neoclassicism group had I been born in this time, but not really in to the Romanticism movement either. I will try my hardest to analyze the poem assigned as if I had every idea of what the Romantics were trying to convey through their poetry.
“Literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form,” is an easy enough way to grasp the concept of Romanticism and Floating Island by Dorothy Wordsworth does depict nature and emotion in such a way. Take this particular stanza for example:

Once did I see a slip of earth,
By throbbing waves long undermined,
Loosed from its hold; -- how no one knew
But all might see it float, obedient to the wind.

The poet describes the island as a “slip of earth” that was undermined by “throbbing waves”. The words are full of imagination and emotion. The idea of the waves throbbing conveys a certain emotion to the reader. The idea of the wave throbbing almost makes them seem alive. The word choice gives the waves a pulse of some sort. It is a fascinating idea to consider these “living”, pulsing waves “loosed from its hold” the piece or “slip” of earth and now the poor little island is at the mercy of the wind or at least “obedient to the wind”. Now someone who would describe an island through the use of scientific rationalization might not write a poem that would bring rise to the same emotions as Wordsworth’s poem. Instead of “slip of earth” they may simply substitute “island” and that wouldn’t be very imaginative at all. “Slip of earth” makes the island seem delicate and fragile. If you said “Once did I see an island surrounded by waves gashing in the wind, the same waves that tore it away from its continent and the wind slowly eroded it.” The reader doesn’t feel connected to the island at all in the poem. In phrasing the poem the way Wordsworth phrased it the reader almost feels like the island has emotion. The reader can make an emotional connection with the island.

Towards the end of the poem it talks about the island sinking and disappearing under the waves. The poem again makes the island seem as if it had been alive by comparing this scene to its death.

Without an object, hope, or fear,
Thither your eyes may turn -- the Isle is passed away.

Edgar Huntly

Brown’s use of describing the sensations and thoughts that Edgar Huntly is experiencing can be used to describe the scenery in the majority of the text so for me it was hard to pick one specific point in the novel. Page 154 however, did stick out to me because I am slightly claustrophobic and if this ever happened to me I would totally freak out. The last paragraph really grasps how the wilderness is a threat without actually depicting the scenery in detail. I of course understood he was trapped in a cave of some sort, but the reader knows more about Edgar’s delusions and fears than the cave itself. “I existed as it were in a wakeful dream. With nothing to correct my erroneous perceptions, the images of the past occurred in capricious combinations, and vivid hues.” He entertains the idea that some tyrant had thrust him into a dungeon. I know he is in the cave in the wilderness, but the thought of the dungeon after the previous statement makes the place seem cold and dark and eerie. At the top of page 155 he then mentions the thought of having been buried alive. You can really sense how frightening and lonely the cave is from this idea and the reader begins to wonder as Edgar does himself, that he might be left there to die. I believe an author oriented toward the picturesque might not have captured the fear or the terror Edgar experiences at that moment. The author would be more about the caves stone walls, the color of the ground, or describing the darkness in a more literal sense rather than describing as Brown did. Further down the same page it reads, “There is no standard by which time can be measured, but the succession of our thoughts, and the changes that take place in the external world.” From this sentence alone I feel like the cave is deep and dark and cut off from the world. I felt a tremendous sense of isolation from this piece in the reading than if I had read something along the lines of, “the cave walls were impossible to measure in height and all was very dark.” I would argue that the book would have lost a lot of its intensity had it been written in a more picturesque way. I think describing the character’s reaction towards the environment allows the reader to feel what the character is feeling and fear what the character fears whereas if it had been described in a more visual sort of way I might have thought Edgar was a wimp and should just crawl out of the stupid cave.

Eng 372 Horror and Terror

The difference between terror and horror seems to be a fine line. If terror is considered to be a feeling of dread and is related to being anxious or fearful, whereas horror if a feeling of revulsion after something has occurred one might say that terror comes first and depending on the outcome horror could be one of the results. I am in no way saying that you cannot have one without the other.

For example you could say this picture of Britney Spears is a look or a reaction to terror. She seems very anxious and fearful that the dangerous flying object in the air might hit her in the dome piece at any second. If the ball does or does not make impact and she is not injured she might experience an outcome like we discussed in class. She would take a look around at the beautiful pool scene that surrounds her and feel peace. She might appreciate her vacation more than ever before. However, if the seemingly innocent beach ball contains a hidden grenade and the end result is Britney staring into a pool now filled with blood wondering where her legs have gone; that would most likely be considered horror.

Another example I wanted to share is from The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I think this novel shows the aspects of terror as well as horror in a detailed fashion. Throughout the entire story a father and son are living in a postapocalyptic world hiding from cannibals. They are truly in a state of terror through the entire book. There is always a sense of impending doom. They are anxious, alert, and terrified at all times. There is one particular part in the book that stood out as a feeling of horror rather than terror. The father finds a seemingly abandoned house and searches it to find a group of people who have been hoarded away into a cellar. When the realization comes to him that these people have been captured to eat he is disgusted and flees. At that moment in his journey he is horrified opposed to the general feeling of terror he had been experiencing throughout the story previously.

Introducing Myself To The Class!

Hello Everyone. My name is Sara Ehlers and this is my first semester at WSU. I'm a pretty shy person until you get to know me. I am very artistic. I've always painted, sketched, and wrote. Music is very important to me and is something I don't think I could live without. I listen to music (loudly) when I'm doing just about anything. I can't cook at all and I am cursed when it comes to anything to do with automobiles. You really don't want me driving your cars or else they will probably break down the next day then explode.