Nick's Class Summary

Class Summary 02/03/11

After we were all rewarded with a fabulous quiz, Dr. Foss began class by trying to rectify confusion surrounding the posting of word documents on the class wiki space. It was during this discussion that Foss spotted what appeared to be a bee out of the corner of his eye and jumped into action to defend against the creature. However, when he turned it had fled from his fury. Before the class turned to the focus of the day, Victorian Ladies and Gentlemen, we reviewed a series of Quotes from last classes focus, Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” which highlighted the important themes of the text. For the rest of the period the class was split into groups for the lightning round where each group analyzed a different set of poems and then passed there notes to the next group to analyze. In my group a picture of a male dominated society in which females were dependent on men both financially and for happiness was shown through the collection of poetry. The theme of female dependence on the male for happiness could particularly be seen paralleled in Felicia Hemans’ “To a Wandering Female Singer” and Tennyson’s “Mariana.”

The first poems my group examined were Tennyson’s “Mariana” and Browning’s "Porphyria's Lover." The first thing noted about “Mariana” was the repeating lines at the end of each stanza, “I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!” Group members saw these lines as a statement of the weakness of the woman in the poem. She cannot take her situation into her own hands and is dependent on death and in the case of the last repetition of the lines, “I am aweary, aweary, Oh God, That I were dead!” god. The conversation then turned to the cause of Mariana’s suffering. One member pointed out that through much of the poem she seems to turn everywhere, but herself for her suffering. She speaks of the night being “dreary” and the “glooming flats (20).” Even when the sun rises she proclaims that “‘the day is dreary (32).”  Everything around her is “dreary” or foreboding; never does she act as if she has some control over her feelings or fate. It is not until line 81, near the close of the poem, when she at last proclaims “I am very dreary,” perhaps finally admitting that she has some control over herself. However, some group members proposed that despite how pathetic this woman is it is not her fault. Society is so constrictive of woman that she had no choice but to stake her happiness on the whims of a man. As the group shifted focus to Browning’s work the thing that immediately jumped out was the imagery of Prophyria kneeling at the hearth, “And kneeled and made the cheerless grate blaze up (8).” “ That position of the subservient homemaker seems to demonstrate the male view of the ideal woman at the time. After he discovers she worships him, he makes his greatest compliment to her, calling her “Perfectly pure and good. . . (37).” It is at this moment that he chooses to strangle Porphyria. Our group saw this as the man showing his greatest desire in a relationship: to have control. The man will never have more control then he does at that moment and she will never worship him more than she does at that moment, so in his desire to preserve that moment of power he kills her so as not to lose it. The group concluded that the poem was showing that in the time women were only an ideal to men and if ever a crack showed they became less and less worthwhile.

It was at this time that the groups each switched to a new focus and my group now turned to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “George Sand” poems. The two poems form a pair in which George Sand is described almost as a man in the first, but in the second she is still described as a great woman. The end goal of all of this seems to be apparent in the last two lines of “To George Sand: A recognition,” “Till God unsex thee on the heavenly shore where unincarnate spirits purely aspire!” The poems seem to form an argument for equality of the sexes and that which was associated with womanliness at the time does not make a woman: “and break away the gauds and armlets worn by weaker women in captivity (3-4).”  Turning their attention to A Mans Requirement the group seemed to generally agree that the overall purpose of the poem was to criticize men’s lack of commitment to relationships and the double standard of the society for women in the same regard. The line particularly noted in the argument was where it says, “I will love thee- half a year- as a man is able (43-44).”

In the last lightning round our group looked at “Women and Fame” and “To a Wandering Female Singer” both by Felicia Hemans. The question on group members minds when looking at “Women and Fame” was if fame was achievable by women in the Victorian time period? For most in the group the answer appeared to be no. In lines 10 and 11 when Hemans writes “Heroes have smiled in death: give me from some kind hand a flower. . .” it seems to be a very masculine portrayal of fame, from the word choice of “heroes,” to the act of handing the hero a flower. The group also speculated that while it may be possible for a woman to find fame, if they do, it will be one of judgement and infamy, “A hollow sound is in thy song, a mockery in thine eye (19-20).” When the group moved to the last poem of the day “To a Wandering Female Singer,” we saw many parallels between it and Tennyson’s “Mariana.”  The group compared the end of the poem to that of “Mariana” in how both show a woman’s suffering and misery at the hands of love, “Oh! thou hast loved and suffer’d much - I know it by thy song (19-20)!” This same suffering is shown earlier in the poem when Hemans says “though has suffer’d all that woman’s breast may bear (7-8).”  Using “woman’s breast” to represent the source of femininity, Hemans again shows a woman’s mental well being is dependent upon love. The footnote of the poem shows this similarity to Mariana as well. The footnote in Mariana states that it is about a woman abandoned by her intended and in Hemans’ play it states that it too is about an “abandoned woman, dying for love.”

With the class coming to an end Foss pulled the us back together to try and come to a conclusion. While the poems discussed carried a wide range of topics dealing with the Women and Gentlemen of the time, several key issues arose multiple times throughout our discussions. In “Porpheria’s lover” one sees the inhuman expectations placed upon women by men as well as the necessity for control. This control can be seen extending to the lack of fame afforded to women, as well as the dependency on their male counterparts woman must contend with which is displayed in “To a Wandering Female Singer” and “Mariana.” These connections through the text helped to give a deeper understanding of the gender divide still in place in the Victorian era and will surely be useful to remember as the class goes forward.