GOW Action Project

I decided that I was going to try to contact the President of the United States for my action project. Of course, I realized from the start that this whole ordeal would not be very easy, but I wanted to tackle it anyways. Basically, I want to know why the American government is viewed with such a negative connotation and the government doesn’t seem to do anything to try and change this. All that I ever seem to see or hear about when I talk to people about government is negative comments. You hear about scandal all of the time. Whether it is at a local level or at a national level, it always seems to be happening. You go to any communications website and you see government conspiracy theories, or you turn on the news and hear about some crooked government official. My frustration with the current circumstances has grown and grown the more time I’ve spent thinking about it. The fact that you hear so much bad about the government is startling. What is even more surprising, though, is just how little good you ever hear being spoken about our officials, and we’re the ones who elect them! I guess it was in these two simple facts, that there seems to be so many negatives and so few positives surrounding out government that my questioned stemmed from. Why doesn’t the government do something to fix itself and instill some sort of confidence back in its people? Why does it allow people to go around thinking that everyone is that bad? Are they really that bad after all? These are the things that I wanted answers to.

Well, after several attempts at contacting the United States Government, I have been pretty fruitless. Few things in life frustrate me as much as when you try to get answers and cannot find them. Thus this project has become one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever done for a school project in my life. I naturally began my quest by typing into Google, “how to contact the president of the United States.” Quickly I stumbled upon a link to this wikihow website, http://www.wikihow.com/Contact-the-President-of-the-United-States.

The first suggestion is to try via the government website. http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments While this might result in some sort of a response to your email, my problem was that you are given a maximum of 2500 characters to pose your questions and comments. If I was simply going to ask the question then I would have happily used this access. However, I realized that if my attempts are just like everyone else’s, then there is no way that President Obama would ever see the questions I had to ask. Instead I was informed that I was most likely to receive just a generic email back that answered no questions. Thus, I decided to try an email. The wikihow website suggested president@whitehouse.gov to contact the president and I also found in more research that this was the correct email to send these types of things to. So I spent over an hour typing what I think was a very well-phrased email that explained who I was, what I was doing, and why I was upset. I tried to veer away from the standard complaints about government and I think it sounded very genuine. I sent this email on Tuesday. I still have not gotten back any response- generic or personalized. This has been RIDICULOUSLY frustrating. I tried a follow-up email Thursday that said basically the same things. Again, I have received no response. According to the government website, “President Obama is committed to creating the most open and accessible administration in American history.” While I admire this noble effort, I feel like it is not being done very well. Lastly, of course, I tried to call. My website (which has had reliable information thus far) gave me a few numbers to try. I have tried to call each number several times, following WAY too many guidelines (“Press 3 if you want to…”)! None of them got me someone who was able to help me.

So, in conclusion, I guess that I was unsuccessful in contacting the President. (This is not to say that I won’t continue trying now that I’ve got myself going.) I think, though, that I do understand why we were assigned this project. I remember back in the beginning of the GOW when Mr. Currin talked to us all about how you may often find yourself in a situation in life when talking to someone lower in a company cannot help you solve whatever problem you’re having. I think he used the example of having problems with an electronic product and when you call you are told that the person cannot help you because they have no authority. Then there always seems to be this chain of people you have to talk to and talk to before you finally reach someone who you can talk to that understand what your situation is and can help you. The problem arises when you just can’t seem to get through the tangle of people on the way to your answer. This is just like the situation that the farmers are in GOW.

Why is this guy destroying my house? He’s doing it because of a guy at the bank. Why is that guy doing it? He’s doing it because of orders from one guy who got orders from another who got orders from another. Well who gave the first orders? Oh, someone in the East gave the orders to the bank.

You never seem to be able to find the guy in charge that can help you. I think this action project demonstrated this as well as the importance of communication. It was really frustrating.

Essay Summary: "The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin's Fantasy of Desire" by Sandra Gilbert

Fairly recently, Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" has begun to have been analyzed more in depth as a quality piece of literature. As it gains more respect, more and more people look at it from different angles. Sandra Gilbert analyzes the book in her essay "The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin's Fantasy of Desire." Gilbert believes that, despite the book's surface of realism, Chopin was really writing more of a fantasy story focused on desire, longing, and love. She calls The Awakening a "distinctly feminist fantasy of the second coming of Aphrodite.

Gilbert uses many viable points about the text in supporting her theory. She refers heavily throughout the essay to the scene in the novel where Edna has her dinner party. This seems like a scene that would be easy to overlook among all of the others, but Gilbert says that the scene is important. She points to several details including the dazzling decorations, fancy drinks, and Edna's own appearance. She goes on to point out how the scene is one of the "longest sustained episodes in the novel." This, along with references to the goddess Venus (another name for Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation), suggest a perhaps subconsciously written underlying fantasy of yearning and desire. Gilbert points out how the romantic transfiguration becomes a fantasy through its uses of and references to such events as this dinner. She points to the short length of the chapters, its use of the same image multiple times, and the "air of moral indeterminacy" as all parts of a shadowy fantasy. These, along with other details she continues to point add much support to her theory of a "second coming of Aphrodite."

Gilbert had what I considered to be a tough argument to prove. The way in which The Awakening is written is so very realistic that it is hard to imagine it as something of a fantasy.However, Gilbert did an excellent job in supporting her ideas. Her thoughts throughout the article were well-organized and easy to follow. My one criticism for this essay is that it was rather repetitious which made it rather lengthy and hard to get through the whole thing.

After completing the essay, I would have to agree with Gilbert's theory on the story. Her points all seem very valid and certainly created a new way for me to examine the literature. What I particularly liked, and also agree with, was how Gilbert pointed out that she does not mean to be discrediting of other literary analyses. There are many other great analyses out there that may in fact work with this theory. This really really made me want to agree with Gilbert and it soon happened!

"The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin's Fantasy of Desire" by Sandra Gilbert was a really interesting essay which took a new look at The Awakening by Kate Chopin. What I liked most about it was that Gilbert's ideas were different from most others. I know that I never would have thought of the connections made in this essay, so I have the utmost interest in the new angles of analysis taken by Gilbert.

Response to The Yellow Wallpaper

“The Yellow Wallpaper” was a very strange story. I won’t lie. It kind of creeped me out. It was in its creepiness, though, that I actually became somewhat fascinated.  Seeing the way that this woman was repressed naturally made me sympathize with her. I figured that things would start to get to her being alone in a room for so long, but I had no idea to what extent her problems would grow. The room’s yellow wallpaper is an interesting sort of metaphor. The wallpaper shows what it going on in the woman’s life. She is caged up, unable to escape from her room, her mind’s prison, and express who she is. She watches as the woman in the wallpaper becomes progressively more restless and itches more and more to try and get out. I wonder if she didn’t see her own shadow doing some of the creeping she described. Things got rather creepy when it appeared that the woman in the wallpaper had escaped and started leaving evidence around the house. I was kind of disturbed, unsure what to think of it. After all, if there was a real wallpaper woman then the story would take a whole new twist. I resolved to think that the wallpaper woman was the main character, which is what she resolves herself to be in the end as well. I find it interesting to see how oblivious her husband is to her problems the entire time. I would think that a physician would have some observation skills and see her problem worsening. Besides, the man barely spent any time with the woman and thought he knew her entire life. I don’t understand how one gets under the impression that they can learn everything about a person from only a few encounters. I find it just fascinating in the end, when the main character truly takes on the persona of the woman in the wallpaper and almost loses her human functions. It scares me to think that things like this can really happen. 

Essay Summary: "Edith Wharton's Dream of Incest: Ethan Frome" by Ferda Asya

Since Edith Wharton wrote the novella, Ethan Frome, there have been thousands of people reading it with thousands of different opinions on the characters, their development (or lack thereof), and how they got down on the page. In her essay, "Edith Wharton's Dream of Incest: Ethan Frome," Ferda Asya analyzes the work as a glimpse into the author's own personal life.

The author believes that Edith's Wharton had an incestuous love for her father which came out in her novella. Asya points to Wharton's childhood as evidence of her attraction to her father. Based on autobiographical information from the Wharton, it can be concluded that Wharton loved her father, while she feared her mother. In her upbringing, she was only taught to speak and feel what the family deemed appropriate and therefore never spoke her true feelings. Asya believes that these conditions resulted in her feeling an incestuous love for her father that resulted in unconscious feelings of guilt.

Asya goes on to say that her guilty feelings about how she felt for her father come out in the story of Ethan Frome in the incestuous relationships between the characters, particularly Ethan and Mattie. During her life, Wharton was married for a short time. She also was having an extramarital affair with another man who she was attracted to. In this way, Asya points out, Ethan Frome became Edith Wharton. In her first draft of the novella, Asaya says Wharton had included less physical attraction between Ethan and Mattie. However, when Wharton was alone while her husband was away, and even more so afterwords, she had an even greater longing for her father. It was after this that she added further physical/sexual attraction between the characters. Wharton, though, still had a guilty conscious over her longings. This is what drove her to add in the tragic accident and ending of the story. Asya says that she felt that y punishing the characters of Ethan and Mattie, she was punishing herself subconsciously. Overall, the Asya points out that her incestuous longing for her father is what provided the most influence on the novella. 

This seems to be a very valid argument that Asya writes about. It makes total sense to me that Wharton would have had guilty feelings over her longings for her father due to the way she grew up. I wouldn’t be surprised if those longings were a result of her childhood as well. Asya does an excellent job of organizing her points and I agree with her interpretation. It is very interesting how the novella progressed between drafts 1 and 2. What I would have liked to know is how much contact, if any, that Wharton had with her father after her childhood. Whatever the case, Ferda Asya’s “Edith Wharton's Dream of Incest: Ethan Frome” was a fantastic, well thought out article that shed new light on my understanding of the article.

Turtles

I like turtles....

Sonnet 146 Reflection

This sonnet is very strange because it doesn’t seem to be addressed to anyone, but in fact is more of a self-examination by Shakespeare. It’s really him looking at himself as two separate identities, a body and a soul. He questions what I believe to be his moralities in regards to the world. He asks himself whether or not is really worth going to try to get fancy things to wear and great food to eat when it in fact does not feed the soul. He then almost contradicts himself by saying that, for him, it may actually be just what does feed his soul and make him happy. He is a rather confusing man. I was particularly intrigued by the couplet at the end. He is pretty much saying that it is possible to end death through death’s destruction by starving your body. By this I think he means that ou can live forever eternally by tending to your soul.

Sonnet 130 Reflection

This is a rather amusing sonnet to me. It takes the form of an Italian sonnet in many ways, but is quite opposite in many ways. The sonnet does compare the subject to many different objects, but in a negative way. Shakespeare basically says that all of the objects are more beautiful and/or attractive than the woman. He makes quite a stab for the time by saying how dark her complexion is which is looked down upon at this time. Yet at the end Shakespeare manages to bring it all back and say that despite all of this, Shakespeare loves her anyways. I have to wonder how the dark lady would have responded to such a unique way of complimenting and insulting her at the same time. Shakespeare is blatantly honest with all of his comparisons and has a very funny way of showing his love for the dark lady. If I were the dark lady reading this then I certainly would have enjoyed it.