When it first appeared, nobody expected Television news to become a threat to the ever-popular daily newspaper. Television news started out as dry and boring – an old man with a cigarette reading the news to you. Kind of like your father sitting at the head of the table and reading the newspaper to the family after dinner. This image of television news changed suddenly, and without warning.

Television news rose so quickly to dominate all the news mediums because it was the most entertaining. The television producers took the most exciting bits of news, simplified it as much as possible, shortened the story into a fifteen to thirty second sound/video byte and vomited it up onto the screen. People liked the easy-to-understand, no-questions-asked format of news. To make things easier for the audience, the pictures the news producer chooses tell the story themselves; so if the viewer were to turn off the sound, they would still understand the story! The removal of words is the ultimate in the “dumbing” down of news – with television, people do not have to use their minds any longer. They were tired of wading through columns and columns of print, with television, they got a clear, sharp, exciting, moving picture. Not only is the picture moving, but it may be happening right now! The lure of instantaneous news is something newspapers cannot compete with. It used to be that the newspaper would release up to five different editions a day to keep updated with the news, now that television is here, people can leave their TVs on all day and watch the updated news as it happens. There is no need to take the story to the press, to print it, to distribute it, this is all done instantly over the airwaves through a dashing news anchor reading from a teleprompter. The people who bring you the news become celebrities. They must be appealing, friendly, attractive, and trust-worthy. The person who recites the news is not the only person who must be a celebrity, but also, the people being reported on. If there is a conflict between two countries they need the two individual leaders to square off against each other. The more conflict and/or drama, the better it is for the television. A good example of this which is happening currently is the “Bush versus Saddam” story being pushed on all networks. Conflict and drama will always be a top story, sensationalism sells. As with CTV news, “If it bleeds, it leads!”

How did newspaper organizations respond to this new brand of news? In the article “The decline of the daily newspaper” by Gillian Steward, the author illustrates what Canada’s biggest newspaper corporation’s response was. Southam Newspapers owned 27 percent of the dailies in the years around 1980. Their next largest competitor was Thomson Newspapers, with 21 percent of the Canadian market. In the next ten years, all the newspaper companies would begin experiencing a sharp decline of interest in their newspapers. They would start losing money, and according to Gillian Steward’s account, they had no idea why. They spent countless dollars on finding out why readers were unsubscribing to their papers, and why they were not attracting new readers. The answers they received were as follows;

Newspapers are boring and stale. Newspapers don’t tell me enough about what I want to know. Newspapers are full of articles about boards and councils and officials and spokesmen, but they have little to do with real people and their problems, their hopes and dreams. I don’t have time to read a newspaper – I’m too busy.
(p. 281, G. Steward, 1996)

The newspapers (Gillian’s at least) responded by accepting these critiques with open arms. They too were tired of reporting on councils and board meetings. The added color, made stories shorter, and easier to digest, and tried to make the paper look a lot slicker. Just as The Province is doing in Vancouver, adding an almost full page picture on the cover, which is usually a video capture from film and not a picture taken with a professional camera.

In essence, newspapers everywhere started to become more like television. Instead of breaking away from television, trying to be different than television to attract an audience, they tried to steal back the audience that television took from them (the newspapers). The readers who now did not read the paper, but instead watched the T.V. for news would somehow be enticed by a newspaper that looked like television news. Many papers, like The Province switched to a tabloid format, and were purposefully aimed at entertaining, not informing. The news paper used to be a source of controversy, it used to be a formula for asking significant questions, and raising relevant issues. In essence, it used to act as a public service for the community, to let them know the truth about how things are happening in the real world. What happened to this need for controversy? If television attracts readers with entertainment, and papers switch their format in hopes to entertain, where will we get our real news? What has happened to social conscience? Papers do not need to be entertaining to be the system of “checks and balances” on our society. All the people who want a paper for those reasons have no where to turn anymore. The T.V. is filled with “junk food journalism” (p 197, A. Osler, 1993), and to compete with television the papers have emulated this “junk food journalism”! In essence the newspapers have abandoned the loyal readers that have actually kept their subscriptions in search of readers who have abandoned the newspaper. Obviously the readers who kept their subscriptions were happy with the way the newspaper was presented and had no wish for change. It cannot be argued that the newspapers were losing too much money either because whenever their readerships went down, it was by (at the most) 13 percent. There is still the other 87 percent of the readership who kept their subscriptions. The newspaper companies did not think of them, they just jumped on the bandwagon of “junk food journalism” to try to regain that 13 percent.

Yet no matter how hard they tried, they could not recover their former subscription numbers. The television and the newspaper are two separate mediums and should be kept that way. The Province should not even be called a “news”paper, they should rename it something more accurate, maybe “Daily Gossip” or “Celebrity Watcher”. In today’s society, newspapers will never again hold the prominence they once did midway through the twentieth century. The common fold of people will always hunger after the quick news byte, seduced by flashy pictures and a smooth voice. If papers want to gain respect and loyalty again, they should be there for the community, like Gillian Steward says so many times in her article. They should report hard-hitting news, issues close to home, perform a public service for the community they are based in, which is something television could never compete with. Television has to be slick, it cannot diverge from accepted societal views. The newspaper has the freedom to do this, everyone has a right to a point of view, and everyone’s point of view should be accessible. Only the newspaper has the ability to make this right easily available.

Order versus Chaos in The Double Hook
David Koppe
Canadian Literature
Caroline Harvey
October 1, 2002

If we had a child, she said, you’d care enough to complain. Your mother hated me and you pity me. Where can a woman lift herself on two such ropes. One pulling her down. The other simply holding her suspended.

That is my favourite quote.

What is The Double Hook? It is trying to hook the glory for ones self, but hooking darkness along with it. One who hooks the glory is hooked by the fear hidden within. The darkness catches us unawares, and we who think we are reaching for the glory are actually reaching for the darkness as well, and in so doing, get double what we expect. Throwing our line only once, but hooking also the barb within the glory, getting caught on The Double Hook. The contrasts and their messages about society are what will be focused on in this paper because they are so overwhelming in this novel.

Each character is chasing his or her own glory – but catching the darkness at the same time. These opposites create one of many paradoxes in this book. The dark and the light, the dryness and the rains, the sky and the clouds, the reality and the surreal, the ugliness of it all, and the beauty of it all – death and life. Each contrast is part of a balance and interconnected. The darkness, ugliness and death obviously fit together, and though they all cause pain, they are necessary for the light, beauty and life to exist. As we know, everything requires balance. It took me three readings to recognize these balances.

Through my first reading I saw only the dark side of the balance. I saw the starkness of the country, and the darkness in the character’s actions and words. I saw these actions as the realities in life – the realities we are forced to face in all our lives. These realities are shown to us against a background so surreal that this setting seems like it could only exist within one’s own imagination, but at the same time it could be a location anywhere in the world. Within the setting exists this duality – the reality of the actions and the unreality of the community. These actions include a teen pregnancy, a controlling mother and a suicide, these are all real – life situations which most of us have probably already encountered, and if not, most likely will in the future. These real-life issues give the book a feeling of severity. If, after my first reading I had put down this book, and never picked it up again, I would have been left with a bleak outlook on “revolutionary” Canadian writing. I might have thought to myself, ‘To be international, one must be depressing’. Rather than let this happen, I read the book a second time.

The second time through I saw the book in a whole new way. I saw the lighter side to the book; the beauty that offsets the starkness. I saw the balance to the darkness. I saw the beauty of the country, the hope of a newborn baby, the complete turning around of one man’s life, and the growth of a small community. As was said in one of the presentations, ‘this book begins with a death, and ends with a birth’. At the same time, when thinking about the newborn’s new life, we are given a despondent feeling about his future. This duality did not show itself to me until I read the book a third and final time.

The third time through the book, I saw both sides together, the light and the darkness, co-existing in harmony. Not only co-existing, but supporting each other, without one, the other could not exist! Without the darkness in James’ thoughts of suicide, his growing, and becoming a new man would never have happened. Without the chain of events that started with James killing his mother, who knows what kind of community the baby would have been born into. A community of silence and isolation would have still existed. Instead everything was blown out into the open, light was shed on everything that happened. The community went from being closed, silent and secretive to open, vocal and caring. The light and darkness in The Double Hook can be seen as the forces of order and chaos.

We all know that in this world, people live their lives a variety of ways. Many of us consider our lives to be chaotic, and every once in a while we meet someone who has everything together, does everything right and has a post-it note sticky for seemingly every obscure event he or she can think of. In The Double Hook there are these two camps of people as well. Those who stand for order, and in some ways try to enforce it, and those who live by chaos. During one of our classes, Caroline Harvey pointed out an “extremely revolutionary” statement within the book.

"Lenchen will suffer like the rest of us, the Widow said.
She’s done wrong.
Right and wrong don’t make much difference, Ara said. We don’t choose what we will suffer. We can’t even see how suffering will come."
p. 105 (Emphasis Added)

That statement by Ara is one of the messages this book is sending to people. This book was published in 1959; a message like that, in a time like then, was surely revolutionary. So revolutionary in fact, that it was most likely completely ignored. This book was way ahead of its time. Saying “Right and wrong don’t make much difference”, clearly puts emphasis on the significance of chaos.

There are characters in The Double Hook who live their lives by order, and others who live their lives by chaos. Personally, I believe that my own life is led by chaos. My father constantly tells me that I need discipline in my life, that I should have regimented schedule by which I should order my life. He even uses the exact words “David, a person needs order in their life, you can’t constantly live in confusion”. I know that Sheila Watson would disagree. Let us take a close look at how chaos and order are seen in each of her characters’ lives.

Starting with the Old Lady, the mother of James, Greta and William. We do not know much about her, except that she was old, and always trying to bring things to light. That she was constantly “looking” for something.

"I’ve seen Ma standing with the lamp by the fence, she said. Holding it up in broad daylight. … Holding the lamp and looking where there’s nothing to be found. Nothing but dust. No person’s got a right to keep looking. To keep looking and blackening lamp globes for others to clean."
p. 22

During class we have discussed this metaphor at length, and the understanding I took away from it was that she was constantly trying to know things. She wanted to bring the information “to light”. She was controlling, and wanted to know everything that went on in her community. She was on the side of order, always keeping tabs on people, and not letting them go free. She wanted things done her way, and made sure her children heeded her, sometimes even spying on them.

"[Greta:] You’ve got your own house, Ara. You don’t have to see lamps in the night and hear feet walking on the stairs and have people coming in on you when they should be in their beds."
p.32

Here is where I sense a hint of incest between Greta and James. This passage may infer that Greta is doing something she should not be doing, or something she’s ashamed of, or maybe she just wants her privacy. In any case we see through this passage how controlling her mother can be.

Kip’s situation is very similar to the old lady’s. He is constantly looking around, always “seeing” things. He is another character who always wants to bring things to “light”. He is a lot like the old lady in the way that he always has an ear on your door, and an eye on your keyhole. Kip is a gatherer and spreader of information – he wants everyone in town to share what they know and to be open about it. He follows order, he is on the side of the “light”.

"Kip was standing on the doorstep, peering into the darkness of the room. Light flowed round him from outside. The sun was shining again low in the sky. The mist rose in wisps from the mud of the dooryard and steamed off the two horses standing there."
p.36 (Emphasis Added)

The symbolism here is quite clear. Watson dedicates a whole paragraph to describe Kip standing in the doorway surrounded by light. As an author, Watson is sparse with words, to dedicate a paragraph to this image is quite a sign indeed. To gather and spread information, to be open with secrets and to have the community come together and help each other were Kip’s goals. These all stand for the goals of “order”.

Greta is much like Kip, except that she wants to spread information, but does not. She silences herself, in her final act of the destruction of the home she grew up in. She holds the knowledge, she knows what is going on in the town because she is her mother’s daughter. When her mother dies, she becomes the head of the household (sitting in her mother’s chair), and also the holder of information.

"He might be riding round the country in a truck. Stopping and talking to women in the road. He might be leaning over the counter buying thread for somebody. He might be playing the fiddle while the pains was on me. He might be meeting the Widow’s girl down in the creek bottom. He might be laying her down in the leaves. …
Angel got up and reached for the lamp.
Leave it down, Greta said. I light the lamps in this house now."
p. 28

Greta keeps the house in order, she takes care of her mother, and she holds all the information. She is just as orderly as her mother. Greta is another character who stands for the “light” and “order”.

Heinrich’s story in The Double Hook, seems to be a “coming of age” one. In the beginning of the book he is referred to as “boy”, and we do not learn his name until halfway through the novel. As the story progresses, he is finally referred to as a man. These are the experiences he lives through on his journey into manhood. He also stands for the “light” and order. He wants to bring things into the open; he directly confronts James (during the rainstorm in the beginning) about what happened between him and Lenchen. He wants Lenchen to live a normal life, he wants her to come back home, he wishes he could have given her some advice so that she would have stayed (a hint there telling us that Lenchen just might be a lot younger than we assume).

"I should have been able to tell Lenchen something, he said. I should have been able to tell her what to do."
p. 70

William and Ara also stand for order. They live a comfortable life, in their own house getting by on William’s government wage. Everything in their life together is generic and clean. People talk about them, but they do not talk about anyone. They are just trying to happily live out their lives in a community that’s getting turned upside down.

Theophil also stands for order because he does not do anything. He just lives out his life like a normal person, completely oblivious to those around him. He does not feel any strong emotions and does not really care about anything. He revels in ignorance. God is also on the side of order and light. God’s presence in this book is very small, but He is called upon repeatedly by the Widow Wagner. In many ways God is mocked in this novel, just as the accepted ethics and values of the day were mocked in The Double Hook. In the 50s, order was the way to live, so what happened to the characters of chaos?

Which characters did I leave out? They are the characters that follow the path of chaos. They are: James, Angel, Felix, Lenchen, Widow Wagner and Coyote. James life is chaotic for obvious reasons. He gets a girl pregnant, kills his mother, loses his life savings, almost commits suicide and ends up building a new house. Angel cannot settle anywhere, and has “burned and spilled enough oil to light up the whole country” (p. 22). She lives a confused life, with multiple children who she does not know how to feed. Felix “can’t do anything but fiddle” (p. 112) and ends up being the nexus of the community by the end of the novel. He spouts Latin phrases which he does not understand (more mockery of God), and cannot deal with people. When he sees Lenchen in his kitchen for the first time, he relates her to a stray dog. The Widow Wagner also leads a chaotic life, and cannot face it. She has plenty of shame, because she was married to her cousin, who has died, and left her as a single mother to raise her two children. I doubt single mothers were too common in the 50s. Her daughter is pregnant and she has no idea how to deal with it because of social “norms”. She is floundering, constantly calling upon God to help her. Coyote is obviously chaotic, playing tricks on everyone and turning the world upside-down.

How does Watson treat the chaotic characters in relation to the ones who follow order? The Old Lady is murdered, William and Ara cannot bear children, Greta commits suicide, Kip is blinded and has his face mutilated, Heinrich loses any innocence he once had, and Theophil loses Angel. On the other hand, the results the chaotic characters experience are much different. James has a baby and a new house, while all his secrets are buried and his past is forgotten. Greta kills his secrets with herself, and burns the house down so that James does not even have to look at it anymore. Angel is able to move from Theophil to Felix without much problems, Felix gets Angel back, something he longs for throughout the book, Lenchen has a child and is re-united with her mother and James, and the Widow finally admits what is happening in front of her, and decides to forgive her daughter and help her.

The message that I am drawing out in this paper would have been unacceptable to anyone living in Canada during the 1950s. Sheila Watson, in writing this book, went completely against all social norms. She directly tackled the issue of teen pregnancy, which was, in the 50s, not even an issue. People acted as the Widow Wagner, pretending it did not happen. Watson recognized that ignoring a pregnant girl was not going to make that baby disappear. Watson was trying to open people’s eyes to the realities of the lives they live. She was trying to tell them that you cannot live life with your eyes closed. That you can achieve reconciliation with your family, no matter how big the problem. She was ignored; ignored that is, until the cultural revolution of the 1960s. When her ideas started to make sense. It took ten years for society to catch up to her ideas. Not only was society forced to grapple with the issues in this book, they were also forced to see the book as Canadian Literature.

As a writer in the 1950s, Sheila Watson has done a superb job of breaking the mould of Canadian Literature stereotypes. She has written a book which deals with issues and ideas way ahead of its time. It is not regional; the community could have existed anywhere. And it is proudly Canadian. She deserves to have her book in the canon of Canadian Literature, because she was right. You can live your life in chaos and still survive (i.e. David Koppe), you can deal with problems even when all of society is against you, and you can write a book set in Canada with international appeal.

Pax vobiscum.

When reading the Faerie Queene for the first time; you begin to realize something. Many of the female characters are just as tough as the male characters. Seeing this in Renaissance/Tudor poetry is quite shocking. From past experience, I have always had the impression that Renaissance men saw women as demonic. Well, maybe not demonic, but temptresses leading you down the path straight to hell. Men saw themselves as superior to women, and blamed the cause of all their problems on women. I have always seen this as cowardly and wrong. I have a lot of respect for women and what they can do for their families. They deserve a lot more respect than they were getting, because even at “the beginning of the seventeenth century authors debated whether women were in league with the devil and whether they could beat their wives, and produced tracts on a range of sexually provocative topics.” (pg. 12, Wilcox) This quote just about says it all – women were treated as property! This was a very bad situation for women, but luckily for them, people like Juan Luis Vives, Roger Ascham, Thomas Elyot, John Aylmer, Henricus Cornelius, Thomas More, and Edmund Spenser started writing their own opinions down. These authors were all influential in changing the contemporary Renaissance beliefs and opinions about women. Of course the largest influence on woman-kind in Tudor England was Queen Elizabeth, to whom the Faerie Queene is dedicated. Elizabeth is probably one of the main reasons Spenser wrote the Faerie Queene in the first place. It is a refreshing breath of air to see a story that has as many, or more female heroines as male heroes. How does Spenser treat the women in the Faerie Queene; does he still hold the old prejudices, is he a feminist, how does he really see women? Elizabeth probably changed a lot of people’s opinions about women at that time – Spenser included. How drastically did his view change? Let us find out.

Queen Elizabeth is the warrior queen we all know from the Spanish Armada. She, dressed in full armor, rallied the troops, and valiantly pushed back the Spanish against all odds. On a side note, Spenser’s life was completely dominated by Elizabeth’s. The first Elizabeth he encounters is his mother, Elizabeth Spenser, “with whom in the beautiful Prothalamion he perhaps identifies London as his ‘Lifes first native sourse’ (129), associating the place of his origin with the person who originated him.” (pg. 37, Davies). He had a sister named Elizabeth, and then later in life his wife, Elizabeth Boyle. She was the inspiration for Epithalamion which we read early in the semester. The main Elizabeth, to whom the Faerie Queene is dedicated is Queen Elizabeth I. She dominated all of English lifestyle when she was in power. She changed the way the English thought about women; changed the way the monarchy worked. She manipulated the system through her whole life – and was a successful leader.

Elizabeth put the female warrior into fashion – Spenser made it pop culture. There are so many warrior women in the Faerie Queene that it is hard to keep count. Even though the female knights are heroines – good characters, Spenser still seems to hold some longstanding prejudices against them. All through the poem Spenser seems to hint at several generalizations about women. In book III the “female vice tends to be casually represented as generic to the sex”. (pg. 135, Hackett). Some of the examples Hackett gives includes the false Florimell rolling her eyes “like a womans” (III.viii.7), Hellenore practicing “womans subtiltyes” (III.ix.7), and even Glauce, a good character, “dissembled womanish guyle” (III.iii.17). These remarks are very informal – almost instinctive. “Womanish fine forgery”(II.xii.28) is a concern that runs throughout the poem. They seem to be very innocent, but reveal the prejudices inside the author.

In this era, women were all thought of as temptresses – there was no such thing as rape. If a woman was raped, it was usually her fault. Women were forced to be chaste and desirable at the same time. A beautiful virtuous woman posed quite a problem for men who desired her – they loved her for her virtue, yet to have her, they would have to stain that virtue. Perfect virtue is created by Spenser through many female and male characters in the Faerie Queene. The female characters all (in a small way) represent a portion of Queen Elizabeth. Una, Britomart, Belpheobe, Amoret, and Florimell, all play the virtue “game” perfectly. The Red Crosse Knight, Guyon and Arthur are all deceived by evil women who are trying to tempt them down the path of sin, and therefore hell. The temptations these men experience are the commonly generalized beliefs about women at that time. There is no such thing as rape, and these women, (i.e. Duessa, the women of the Bowre of Bliss) are the personification of women who get raped. That is, the personification of rape victims, according to the men who pass judgement on them. Men at this time thought that women really acted like this, and in so doing, tempted men into raping them. So in the evil women of the story, Spenser still includes the stereotypes of the “evil” type of woman – the one who tempts men down the path of sin. To counter these women, Spenser has included good women also.

The two main good women are Una and Britomart. Una is good because she is the perfect picture of chastity. She wears modest clothes, is amazingly beautiful, and acts perfectly ladylike. Another common renaissance belief was that a person’s outer beauty reflected their inner beauty. The more beautiful a person you were, the more beautiful a soul you had. It seems that Spenser values chaste love/desire the most. Una is in love with the Red Crosse Knight, and will let nothing deflect her from her goal. She is completely dedicated to Red Crosse Knight and loves him with all her heart. She will never give up searching for him, and through all her adventures, defends her chastity with all her might so that she might still be worthy for Red Crosse Knight when she finally finds him. Britomart is the same – she dreams of the man she will fall in love with. She finds out that she is destined to fall in love with a knight named Arthegall. She does not know anything about him, but as she hears more about him, she really does fall in love with him. Her ultimate goal in life is finding him and committing herself to him. She will not stray from that goal, and does all she can to reach it.

Did I mention that she is a female knight? Her armour represents her virtue – it represents her virtue because her virtue is her chastity. The armour represents the defences she puts up to protect her chastity – if that armour were ever broken, she would lose her honour. A female knight would probably seem quite strange to Renaissance readers of the time, but “Britomart has taken arms in the cause of love, continuing the romance tradition of the martial maiden whose potential freakishness is excused by her pursuit of a destiny of wifehood and marriage.” (p.134, Hackett). Spenser raises Britomart as a role-model for all women – he is not saying that they arm themselves and go to battle – he is saying that they must arm themselves to defend their chastity. Not literally arm themselves, but defend their chastity as if they were armed.
A female’s honour is displayed by her appearance on the outside. Una is beautiful, and has modest clothing. Britomart is beautiful and is fully armoured. Florimell is the most beautiful woman in the story.

She is strictly pure of heart, and in love with Marinell. She defends her chastity to the death. Even when she is about to die, all she thinks about is defending her chastity and staying worthy for Marinell. She even resists becoming a Goddess, offered to her through the wooing of the Sea God Proteus. All the beautiful women are 100% virtuous. There are some beautiful women who do not belong though. Take for example Duessa. Duessa is the personification of duplicity. She deceives poor Red Crosse Knight, and he struggles through nothing but hardship. He is very easily fooled by her because she is so beautiful – and as mentioned above – if you are beautiful, then you must be good right? Wrong – poor Red Crosse Knight thinks he is rescuing Duessa, but really she is capturing him. Appearances mean a lot in this poem, especially the appearance of the female genetalia. It seems that Spenser puts extra emphasis on the female genetalia when describing Duessa after she is disrobed. Duessa being bald, covered in scabby disease, and having rotten gums and “sowre breath” is bad enough; but Spenser save the best for last. I think he stresses the “dried dugs, like bladders lacking wind, / hong downe, and filthy matter from them weld” (I.viii.47) to multiply the horror of the picture. This is the most disgusting woman to ever walk the earth – and usually when you describe disgusting, you do not describe the breasts. The breasts are the most worshipped (by men) part of the woman’s body – showing them like this creates a horrible picture in one’s mind.

It is not only Duessa that is described like this, but also Errour. Now, Errour is pretty straightforward, half serpent, half woman – she is obviously evil. Yet there is still an aspect of duplicity there – in that Errour has the face of a woman. When we first see Errour she is feeding her young with her poisonous breasts. Errour might be half serpent, but the other half, is still woman. It is as if the woman part is in front – she has a woman’s face – to hide the serpent part. Of course Red Crosse Knight easily vanquishes her and he and Una can move on.

Other feminine crimes include sexual crimes. These women are not deceitful – they just take what they want and use it. There is the Giantess Argante who is having an incestuous relationship with her brother. She searches for young males which she can capture and force sex upon. This is not the worst a woman can do because in Renaissance times, it was common knowledge that there were women like this. (Yeah right). It was women like this who were the rape victims. There is also the story of Paridell and Hellenore. Hellenore is flirtatious, and tests her husband by making him choose between his riches and his wife – he of course chooses riches (because women are all spawn of the devil) and his wife runs off with some of his riches and a man named Paridell. Malbecco loses his castle to a fire purposely started by Hellenore (as part of the test). While Malbecco is saving his treasures, Paridell steals the riches from Hellenore, and runs off, leaving her in the wilderness. Hellenore is picked up by a community of Satyres and used as their communal sex partner. Malbecco uses what remains of his treasure to hire two mercenaries to go find Hellenore, and they run off with his money. Malbecco, left with nothing, finally finds his wife, but cannot get her to leave the village of Satyres. Left with nothing, he tries to kill himself, failing at even that, he resigns himself to living as a hermit.

This story seems a bit on the comical side, if it were not for the nasty part about Hellenore becoming the Satyr’s communal wife. It warns against several things – like choosing the right wife. Or choosing your wife over your riches. It was not Malbecco’s fault that Hellenore was so flirtatious. Malbecco was a victim here to a woman’s deceit. Spenser may be trying to show us how the deceitfulness of a woman can be the downfall of an entire lifetime. Not only does she push Malbecco to suicide, she is punished herself. Malbecco suffers the loss of everything because of his wife’s lack of virtue. She also loses everything because of her lack of virtue – the moral here is – stay virtuous!! Some may say that Malbecco was greedy and should not have tried to save his possessions, so it was partially his fault as well. I disagree, because if Malbecco had not saved his wealth, he would not have been able to hire those two mercenaries. If he had not hired them, and just ran after Hellenore right away, he would have probably been killed by Paridell. As it was, he made the right decision, but still lost everything.

Even though Spenser shows many examples of bad women, he does not think that all women are bad. Many men in that time were of the opinion that all women were demons, or should I say demonesses. Spenser does have an automatic, kind of, reflex, that spouts generalizations about women every once in a while. (As I have explained earlier.) But overall, he does not think that they are all bad, as “in exposing the promiscuous Malecasta he denies any intention to ‘blot the bounty of all womankind’ she is merely ‘one wanton dame’ ‘amongst thousands’ (III.i.40)(p.135, Hackett). He defends himself against any criticism that would accuse him of trying to give women a bad name. Why would he want to do that? In the Tudor era it was natural for men to generalize and stereotype on the female race as a whole. If a man made a stereotypical statement about womankind, people just laughed at it – took it as truth. Here Spenser shows a woman who fits the stereotype, but does his best to explain that this is not representative of all women. His feelings towards women seem to be sympathetic – he understands how badly they are discriminated against, and is set to do something about it.

The women in the Faerie Queene are good wives, yes – but they are not the common type of good wives. They are chasing their husbands; usually it is the other way around, as in Spenser’s case – the man chases the woman. (As we read in Epithalamion). These women are chasing their true loves – trying to find them, and be good wives for them. They are not being forced into marriage, so when entering the marriage they do not become ownership of the husband. They are a partnership – a new kind of marriage.

The Faerie Queene speaks against the ethos of love-conquest in which woman is taken as a possession. It should not be attempted and it cannot be done. In Book V, at Isis Church, Britomart’s dream in which she stands on the symbol of Osirian patriarchal law (the crocodile) signifies the transcendence of male by female law. (vii.3-24).
Pg. 43, Davies.

As Davies illustrates here – there is a lot more female equality in Spenser’s world.

I think Spenser is of the opinion that if there is more female influence on the world, it would be a better place. Davies also points out that “there is no suffering creature in the Faerie Queene for which Spenser fails to show pity.” (pg. 63, Davies). Spenser always shows compassion to any suffering happening in his story – even if the sufferer deserves every bit of what is happening to them. “This is the feminine ethos.” (pg. 63, Davies). Spenser believes in the feminine ethos, and implements it into his fairy tail to show how much better it is than the male ethos. In many parts of the Faerie Queene “Man the rapist is placed as an emblem of fallen humanity against the woman victim whose nature images the divine.” (pg. 72, Davies). The woman saves the day with her wit and beauty! The man must resort to brute force. Spenser has many ingrained prejudices against women, and is fighting against them as hard as he can. Sometimes he will let some generalizations slip, but he is trying his hardest to show the world what women are “really” made of. Many humanists at this time started to realize that “women had the ability to learn; it was simply a question of what they would do with such learning and whether it might interfere with their more important responsibilities as wives and mothers.”(pg. 11, Wilcox). People started to share the opinion of Spenser that women were much smarter than given credit for.

Spenser took this a step further in the Faerie Queen, at the beginning of Book III. Here Spenser accuses the men who write history of defacing women’s bravery. That men have been suppressing women’s achievements, and women are superior to men in deeds of bravery. He goes on to claim that because men found that women were braver than men, they devised narrow laws, fearing that their authority was at stake, to curb women’s liberty. In stanza 5 of Book iii, canto ii, Spenser continues his tirade against men saying that, since women were deprived of their weapons for battle, they turned to statecraft – politics. In this they excelled men also. All through history it has been men trying to suppress female supremacy. (Lecture, Dr. Bose). Was Spenser an early feminist? Maybe not right away, but slowly he was turned towards feminism.

What turned him towards seeing women in this light? Personally, I think it is Queen Elizabeth. She had a profound effect on everyone in England at the time of her reign. She turned the norms upside down and completely went against all precedent. She had a great propaganda campaign that let everybody to believe that she was the “virgin queen”. She wrapped the whole of England around her little finger – Spenser included. Why else would he dedicate this entire poem to her? She was the militant queen, the virgin queen, the virtuous queen and the political queen. She did everything right – and was rewarded with many long years of power.

The Faerie Queene is a tribute to Queen Elizabeth’s power and intelligence. Spenser obviously admired her and gained a lot of respect for the entire female race through reverence to his queen. Any person in power as long as Elizabeth was could have a huge effect on people. Spenser may have been raised in a male dominated world, but he lived under a female ruler. His opinions and thoughts were shaped by the woman he respected the most. If Elizabeth had this much effect on one man – imagine the effect upon all the women!? Many men and women were probably transformed (over the course of Elizabeth’s reign) to feminists. Elizabeth shaped more than England’s political history – she shaped people’s minds.

Bibliography

Davies, Stevie. The Idea of Woman in Renaissance Literature: The Feminine Reclaimed. Great Britain, The Harvester Press Ltd. ©1986 Stevie Davies.

Hackett, Helen. Women and Romance fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge, UK. Cambridge University Press. ©2000 Helen Hackett

Editor: Wilcox, Helen. Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700.Cambridge, UK. Cambridge University Press. ©1996 Cambridge University Press.

Hello. This is my first essay post on this blog. This blog is strictly for my essays and commentary about them. If you like it and want to use it; ask for my permission. Enjoy the essay I just finished for English 377: Sonnets, taught by Carl Lynden Peters at Simon Fraser University. I hope you enjoy my take on modern art, as I see it.

This is not an essay. The de-definition of art seems to be the only way to create new art. The more an artist re-defines and de-defines art, the fresher the piece is. This paper will be a culmination of what I have learned through this semester in English 377; Sonnets. This semester, I have not done as much learning as I have done experiencing. English 377 is unlike any class I have ever taken, and the experience was very interesting. What I have realized near the end of the class is that this English course was more a review of all modern art, than just focusing on Barrigan or Shakespeare. For two short months I had the opportunity to look into the world of modern art, through the eyes of someone who really appreciates it. It was great to finally get an inkling of what modern art is really about. I do not know if I have the right idea or not, but if I have listened correctly through the semester, I can assume that having the “right” idea is not always what we should aim for. I am hoping that this essay will express what I feel modern art is “about”. I will admit, that I am very skeptical about many of the things we went over in class, but at the same time I am very interested in them. With my limited study in the area of modern art, I have come to one major conclusion. For art to be art, it constantly must change. Traditional art was considered art, because it was ground-breaking, and so it must be with all art. How can art be ground-breaking if it has all been done before? This is why art must be constantly re-defined and de-defined. Art used to be something specific, now it can be anything. This is not an essay. This is a sonnet.

I constantly find myself asking – “What is art?” I realize that this is a reflex I have to try and define art. To try and fit art into a box and observe it from a distance. Defining art is giving it borders, confining it into a definition. If something does not fit the definition then, should it still be considered an “it”? I have slowly come to realize that when one defines something, one is assuming that something is a thing. Why must art be a thing? We speak of art as if it is something that we can touch, see, break, or create. Must art be something? Cannot art be the absence of something, as with Duchamp’s “Erased Dekooning”? This, I have learned, is the de-definition of art. If we de-define art, take away from the definition, we take away its confines. By de-defining art, we are making art more. “Sometimes more is less”. What modern artists are trying to do is different than what traditionals did. Traditionals saw art as something you could package up into a little box and know every detail about. The more confined a work of art was, the better it was. The more boundaries it had, the easier to interpret and so on. Traditional art, though, is still art.

What I found the most distasteful was the extremely non-chalant way traditional art was dismissed as almost non-art. While I am not one hundred percent sure, I think I saw some disrespect in the way the class treated traditional art. Maybe I am wrong, but I sensed a sharp dislike for, or at least lack of appreciation, traditional forms of art. On a personal note, I will never get over how you compared Pieta to a man sitting in an art gallery with a dead hare and his face painted in gold leaf. How the two can be similar is beyond me, and I will always consider Pieta to be one of the greatest works of art of all time. Not something to compare a man with a dead hare to. (I am sorry.) This sort of gave me the impression that you cannot enjoy modern art, unless you dislike traditional art. I know this cannot be true, because I enjoy both very much! There seems to be a war going on between the traditionals and the modernists. The traditionals call modern art “garbage” and the modernists call traditional art “limited”, or a string of other comments that imply a smaller scope. I am tempted to say something predictable like “why can’t we all just get along”, but I think I will try to explain it like this. When we are growing up, most of us have parents who do not appreciate modern art at all. They call it “crap”, and “garbage” etc, etc. When we develop a liking to the art that was called “crap” and “garbage” all through our early lives, it creates a negative struggle within ourselves. Almost like an inferiority complex, where we have to constantly defend ourselves so that we can legitimize our love for modern art. One of the ways modern art (seems to) defend itself is by re-defining traditional art. Ted Barrigan’s The Sonnets is a good example of this. They obviously do not follow the sonnet form, but with the de/re-definition of art, they can be accepted as sonnets. Artists like Monet and Picasso redefined the way people look at painting. The only way modern art can survive is if it keeps trying to out-scope traditional art. Modern art is art without a center, art without boundaries. The more de-centralized, the grander the scope, the bigger the art. Some artists take this a bit out of hand, and it is up to the critics to decide which ones do, and which ones are on to something.

Artists and writers are constantly pushing the boundaries of what people consider art. Modern art is constantly being re/de-defined. It is changing, and every artist dreams of changing art forever. It is the artist that changes the nature of art, but the critic is the one who legitimizes it. Critics re/de-define art in a much more literal sense than artists do. Artists just create, let their minds go free; be geniuses. The critics are the thinkers; the ones who find meaning in the piece. It is the critics who declare a work a masterpiece or garbage. If a critic declares a kind of sculpture, of which we have never seen before, a masterpiece, a “revolutionary” piece in the art of sculpture; well then that makes it revolutionary does it not? It is not the artist who created this, thinking it will be revolutionary, it is the critic who declared it revolutionary. It takes more than one critic to change the nature of art, but it is the critics who do it.

What an artist thinks is actually very important when considering a piece. What the mind behind the work thinks about the work, and even about the world, can really affect how the art is perceived. The art has become an extension of the artist. The artist’s job has always been representing the world through a different perspective. The way they see that different perspective in the first place, is the artist’s genius. It is the critic’s job to interpret that perspective, and open it up for the public. The artist’s genius is not genius until someone realizes it. For the artist to create something of genius proportions, it must be something never seen before. Or something seen before but done in a completely different way. Modern art critics must sometimes be just as creative as the artists when writing their reviews. That is not to say that the artist has nothing to do with weather his art becomes famous or not. Artists can declare themselves genius’ and most of them do.

Artists that declare themselves genius’ are usually overlooked, or very good. Barrigan, for instance, did not declare himself a genius, yet his work is extremely respected. Shakespeare never declared himself a genius either, and yet his writings have survived an amazing amount of time. The focus of this course was Barrigan and Shakespeare, yet we did not read too much of either. We were shown how the ends of Shakespeare’s lines were (sort of) predictable, and how Barrigan’s poetry was “outside the box”. Barrigan used Shakespeare’s style of writing consecutive sonnets, and did it himself. Except he did everything different than Shakespeare, (otherwise it would not be art, no?). He did not follow rules of poetic devices, his sonnets were all over the place. His sonnets were not coherent, they were more for him than the reader. Yet reading Barrigan’s sonnets gives you a view into the author’s mind unlike any you would ever get from reading Shakespeare’s sonnets. Shakespeare’s genius was in form and word crafting, Barrigan’s genius is being able to express the inside of his head on paper. Reading Barrigan we are given a tour of his thoughts; he includes us in his community of life. He mixes his idols, mentors and everyday friends all together.

In a way, Barrigan’s modern art is his everyday life. He shows us what it is like to be human, except we read it on the page. Maybe not what it is like to be human, but what it is like to be a human, and an artist at the same time. He is not greater than life – he is not some super-human genius – he is just like us, and his art shows us that. His poetry is an extension of himself. Back in the beginning of the semester, I remember you, Carl, telling us how easy it was to think of things to say. You would plan them all out in your head, and they would be clear and orderly. I find it is the same with me, and I am sure with everyone. We all can create in our minds beautifully, but as soon as we want to express our creation, something goes wrong. Chaos takes over when we try to express what we are thinking on the page, canvas or in sound. Things just do not go right, and everything comes out in a mixed up jumble, nothing like it seemed in your head. This is something Barrigan does very well. Not letting it out in a jumble, but letting it out in orderly chaos; if that is possible (and it is if you take a close look at The Sonnets). Barrigan clearly creates in his head, he thinks about everything that is happening, thinks about his life, dinner that night, and the poem he is planning on writing. He thinks about grand things like the universe and quantum physics, and about where the beans in the coffee he is drinking are from. Every detail he takes into his mind, and lets it all out onto the paper. Except, it is not a mixed-up chaotic jumble on the paper, it is an orderly, clearly stated poem. Chaos exists, but not in the same way chaos exists when we try to express ourselves. His chaos is orderly, his chaos is the same chaos inside his head. The chaos we experience is of a different kind, it is created by the transition from thought to paper. Barrigan can make this transition perfectly, so his mind is set on the paper clearly, for everyone to see. If everyone could express themselves that way, there would be no need for Jerry Springer (heh).

Barrigan’s though process is laid out on the page for us; writing like you think – done. What is next? Shakespeare proved to us that even within strict rules/boundaries you can still create beautiful sentences and words. That even with a multitude of rules and restrictions, you can still let your imagination wander freely. Shakespeare did it, now there is no need to do it again. Just like Galileo proved that the earth moves around the sun, there is no need to re-iterate it – it is fact. Barrigan has come and shown us that, yes, stream of consciousness can make sense. Yes, we can lay our thoughts on paper for all to see without chaos ruining them in the transition from mind to pen. Yes – it is possible, and has been done. What is next? What will artists strive to prove to us next? Maybe I am a bit of an aspiring artist myself. As I said earlier; this is not an essay, this is a sonnet.