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I enjoyed reading "Goblin Market," and liked the intense sensory imagery throughout the poem that shone through lines like "bloom-down-cheek'd peaches" (9) and "a rock of blue-vein'd stone" (410). I was disturbed by the eroticism some people since the time of the poem's publishing have read into it, which I saw purely as an expression of sisterly love and sacrifice, and the dichotomy between restraint and temptation. I did not interpret it as homosexual or incestual in any way until I read other interpretations, which make me uncomfortable with the poem as I much prefer my own interpretation. Because this was my leadership module, I also looked into adaptations of the poem and its presence in modern culture, and found a 2017 performance by a New Zealand circus that turns the poem into an acrobatics and dance show. This demonstrates how a 19th century work can be relevant today, and how works of art can transition genres, which I loved.

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The Goblin Market - Centaur Theatre Montreal 2017 - The Dust Palace

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This was my favorite reading of the class so far. I love Greek mythology and have read the condensed/adapted version of Euripides' story in works like Percy Jackson, but had never taken the time to read the original myth, and now having done so, I loved it. Though I can't approve of all the horrifying actions Medea takes (especially killing her children, an inexcusable choice), I find her character incredibly fascinating because of the rage and passion she uses in search of her own form of justice. She is a master of manipulation and utilizes her position as a woman left behind by her husband to exact the revenge she desires on her husband, the future wife, and the king, therefore also hurting the kingdom from which she is now exiled. Though she sacrifices all remnants of her former life, she escapes being the victim and transforms her narrative, which I found (in a very odd way) almost inspiring.

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Though I struggled with the older language of the story, I did like the idea of a woman even in that time period taking control of her own body and planning this elaborate scheme to trick a man. Beauplaisir's actions of leaving a woman once he became "bored" of her are shameful but not completely surprising or unique, and so I liked that Fantomina turned things around and became the constant object of his desire in different forms and roles: a prostitute, a maid, a widow, and finally a masked, intriguing woman. Though she does negatively take advantage of Beauplaisir, it is interesting how she gets the attention and sex that she wants even in a time where women are not supposed to have desire or obtain sexual or societal liberation, and uses a man's accepted sexual cravings against him. However, I was disappointed with the ending, as Fantomina being sent off to a French monastery does not seem like a satisfying conclusion to the clever life she had and fascinating story that Haywood tells.

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From the first nine chapters of "Mary Barton," the theme that stands out the most to me is the idea of "class alienation", as Gaskell refers to it in the novel. Mr. Barton sees the major divide between the lives of the wealth and the poor and how this affects their happiness, health, and stability. He even goes to London to bring up the conditions for the working class, but is apparently refused to listen to in favor of maintaining the existing status quo. Rich people can ignore the problems in the world related to economic inequality, but lower class people like Mr. Barton and those he associates with do not have such a luxury. I am curious to see where this thread of criticizing the capitalist society that creates that inequality will go as the novel continues.

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Much has happened in the chapters since last week, and now Mary Barton faces the complex situation of trying to save her innocent lover from being convicted of a wrongful crime while not incriminating her father, who has actually committed the murder. I can't predict where the story will go, but I do hope that somehow, an innocent man is not punished. Something unrelated that I noticed while reading was that Alice Wilson begins to lose her hearing during these chapters, which I found strongly connected to Margaret's loss of sight. I don't know exactly what this absence of senses symbolizes in the larger context of the story but I think it is not just a coincidence that it happens to two of the key female characters in Mary Barton.

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This was my second time watching the movie Parasite, and I think it allowed me to analyze more instead of just watching for entertainment. Something that really stood out to me was the idea of the concrete use of the staircase and the division between up and downstairs to symbolize the divide between upper and lower classes. The Park family lives on the top floors of a mansion, while the Kims live in a small basement house. The man that inhabits the Park's basement is physically trapped in there, illustrating the impossibility of social mobility. The structure and nature of capitalism makes it so that lower classes are stuck in their positions while the rich live excessively and happily and can increase their wealth. I enjoyed how the director of Parasite used material representations of this concept, and wrote about it in more depth in my paper for this class.

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Illness has played a major role in the book, and it continues to all the way through the last chapters. One by one many characters have fallen ill and then died, starting with Mary Barton (the elder) in the beginning of the book and ending with her sister, Esther, at the conclusion. John Barton gets incredibly sick in the last few chapters up to his death, and I interpreted this as sick with guilt, as he finally confesses to Mr. Carson about the murder of his son. I was surprised by the scene where he dies in Mr. Carson's arms after Carson prays for them about mercy and forgiveness, which meant he can pass on in peace. The conclusion of the novel with Esther's death after her years of homeless and prosecution tied back to the beginning of the novel with her disappearance, and I think that cyclical nature might connect to the cycle of poverty and how impossible it is for the lower classes to be socially mobile.

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"Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day's serious work of beating back the past" (86). In the first 100 pages of Beloved, Morrison introduces a few characters that are all accustomed to work, especially the characters from Sweet Home, the Southern slave plantation. Because of the trauma in their pasts, they struggle to move on. Even though Denver and Sethe believe that the 124 house is haunted, they cannot and will not move out because of the history the house holds as the first place that was their own. The character Beloved also shows up with little memory of her past but with weird connections to Sethe that are reminiscent of her lost baby from so many years before, but Beloved cannot talk about her past to the family and only eventually tells Denver what she remembers - the dark, a bridge, the living and the dead. Sethe has permanent reminders of her traumatic past in the scars that form the shape of a tree on her back. All of the characters in the story so far bring forth themes of trauma, family, remembrance, and forgetting, and I assume this ideas will continue to develop as I read further.

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A scene from Part II that really stood out to me occurred after Sixo explains to the schoolteacher how he killed and took some meat and his logic is that it is "improving your property" (224), to which the narrator says, "Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers--not the defined" (225). This point reminds me of many of the class discussions we have been having about Beloved, and the dehumanization of Black people under slavery. It also connects to how even though Mrs. Garner treats Sethe "well" for a slave, she still refers to her as "Jenny" because she owns her and can. Morrison shows how autonomy and the right to both define and name one's self disappears for Black people under the control of the dominant white society, which I think really characterizes the narrative of the book and slavery overall.

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Though I predicted the surprise twist at the end with the protagonist Adelaide, I did still enjoy the film even though I'm not usually a fan of horror or scary movies. I wasn't scared as much as I was unnerved and anxious as we saw more violence and more hints to this underworld. Something I started thinking about at the end of the movie was how the Tethered did not do anything to be born into their life of horror and sadness, but were assigned it anyway with no escape route except for the murderous one they eventually chose. It reminded me of themes of class divisions and immobility that we have discussed earlier in this course, because the regular families have no idea the privilege that they maintain simply by being born in the normal world, and therefore do not attempt to help the "lower" classes symbolized by the Tethered families in the film.

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It is clear from the beginning of the movie how the white settlers view and treat Natives: as savages and enemies. The central character Uncle Ethan talks down to the man who is 1/8 Cherokee, and one character even jokes, "A human rides a horse until it dies, then he goes on afoot. A Comanche comes along, gets that horse up, rides him 20 more miles, then eats him." There is little to no humanization or development of any Native character, as I assume is typical of the white-centered western genre. Throughout the film I could only focus on how the line between white and Native is drawn as uncrossable, with the white characters as the heroes and the Natives as the villains, and even the film's 1956 release does not make me comfortable with this as a lauded and glorified work today in 2020 with our current accurate understanding of the relationship between settlers and Natives.

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This film was hard to watch for me, and throughout it I was thinking about how people enact justice in lawless places, or areas where the law is not the top authority, like this region of Wyoming. I was glad that at the end, the main rapist suffers the same torturous, painful death as the Native woman he hurt, because in that case I don't see how the law can ever make him suffer enough for what he did and what she experienced and died from. But I also believe in a society managed by rules and laws so it's a hard realization that often people don't get the punishment they deserve to fit the crimes they committed. Should vigilantism be permitted when it comes to brutal crimes where the punishment equals the action committed? I think the answer is no, because I support a civilized, law-based society, but I know I would've been disappointed if nothing at all happened to the rapist in Wind River.