For my final Blog post I wanted to consider the livable world, and what that has meant to each of the characters from our semester. The Left Hand of Darkness gives us an opportunity for considering this topic in the character of Genly. Genly's livable world seems to have shifted the more time he spends on Winter and with asexual "people". In the beginning, he struggled to fit his existing notions of sexuality and gender roles onto the people of Winter. Yet at the end of the novel, when looking on the faces of the companions he left behind, he thinks they look alien. The women are too feminine and the men more masculine than he is prepared for. This change in perception has also caused a change in what he can live with, and I think it would be very hard for us to imagine that Genly will ever leave Winter again. The "normal" conventions of man and woman are strange for him now, and understanding humans as people is the only lens he can use to view the world.
But by looking at just the change in his livable world and not the circumstances that created it, we can see connections between him and many of the other characters that we have explored. In this regard, I see an amazing similarity between the characters of Genly, Edna, and Yank. In the beginning of each respective story all three exist within a space that protects their livable world. For Yank this is the boiler room of the ship, for Edna the pleasant lifestyle of the New Orleans elite, and Genly living in a traditional gender setting. This life is disrupted by something or someone changing how they view the world; Mildred for Yank, Robert for Edna, and Winter for Genly. After this change happens, they each can no longer see their old life as fulfilling, and try desperately to adapt to the change each has experienced. Only Genly is successful in this endeavor as Edna drowns herself being unable to find happiness, and Yank is killed by a gorilla because he does not really understand anything except that boiler room. All three make attempts at changing after the disruption, but actually being able to do so seems nearly impossible.
There is also a connection between characters who simply do not fit in with the world around them, and attempt to create their own pocket of a "livable world". The characters of Daisy and Miss Brill are great examples of this notion. Miss Brill lives within her own fantasy where she considers the park as a stage of actors, all equally important to the overall production. This pocket of imagination that she creates for herself gives her a sense of belonging and importance, that the real world does not acknowledge. Daisy does not rely on imagination, but instead ignores the social conventions of the world around her and lives a promiscuous lifestyle looked down on by the rest of the elite. She does not care what is proper and correct, and exists within her own bubble of ignoring rumors, gossip, and proper interactions. Both of these characters have their world's shattered, and it seems do not even attempt to change along with it. Miss Brill hears a young couple discussing her unimportance, and Daisy is killed of fever. Here we see that escaping the real world into a livable space of your own does not always have positive results.
There are no real discussion questions, but what do you guys think of my connections between the characters? Did I group them according to how you would? Did I forget a character that belongs, or group someone who doesn't? Whatdayathink?
Looking back at all of the texts read this semester, it seems to me that the livable world becomes problematic when some of the main characters, like the ones mentioned above, lose something they value very much. This loss is sometimes direct, but sometimes indirect as well, and it plays out in a variety of manners. Caleb loses Emma, but not in the same way that Winterbourne loses Daisy, for example.
ReplyDeleteThe various titles of these texts also intrigue me as well, especially the one we finished discussing recently. "The Left Hand of Darkness", as raised in class, can be an ambiguous title: there is certainly a genitive in the title, indicated by the word 'of'. It is not clear however, what kind of genitive this is. Is the title a partitive genitive? (That is, does the genitive express itself, like when someone says 'the city of Cincinnati'? Is the Left Hand one and the same with Darkness?) Is the title a possessive genitive? (Is Darkness a being, and does it own or possess a Left Hand?) Titles of texts, in my opinion, have the power to make or break a text in its entirety, and the comprehension of a mysterious title, in and of itself, may make the text seem all the more significant.
-Brandon Gerlinger
You're both extremely correct. Loss has played a huge part in what we have discussed this semester. It seems as if we have to lose something, whether it be a person or a livable space, before we can start to really live, as if we have to keep moving on, keep reaching for a higher goal. I think the characters in the texts kept dying because they gave up on those higher goals, like Caleb, who could not see a life without Emma, Emma who could not see her life without Caleb wanting her, Daisy who could not shake her old ways, Estroven who could not see another way for Genly to be safe, Edna who could not imagine another life for herself, etc. Every person who ended up dying could not find another goal to strive for. They could not recognize their importance, and could not find a purpose for their lives, leading to their deaths.
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