Tenessee Williams The Glass Menagerie - 1957 Words

TThis essay will discuss the metaphors associated with the characters in The Glass Menagerie and how each of these metaphors represents a fragment of the American Dream. She is like a piece of her glass collection, too fragile to be brought into the real world without being devastated. Because of her sensibility, she has avoided dealing with people for so long that when she finally tries to socialise with Jim, she fails to see that she is being manipulated. Amanda is a faded Southern belle who is trying to relive her past by using her daughter to mirror her former self. She represents nostalgia for the Old South in the play. Tom is a struggling poet who dreams of real adventures but has to provide support for his family. Jim, despite†¦show more content†¦However, Tom feels that he does not belong there; he feels that he belongs somewhere else. He dreams of adventures, like his father before him. On the top of that, his mother constantly tries to inflict him with a feelin g of guilt in order to make sure that he stays at home. She claims that he will end as faithless and irresponsible his father. Like his sister, he is victim of his mother’s expectations and comparisons . Unlike Laura, however, he refuses to have his life dictated by them . He protests his right to individualism: It seems unimportant to you, what Im doing--what I want to do. As if Tom’s life situation wasn’t already difficult enough as it is, it is made even worse by an important paradox. He constantly tries to escape from his work and familial responsibilities by drinking and going to the movies yet, when given the opportunity, he only uses his artistic prowess to recreate a miserable scene from his past. By writing this play, Tom becomes the victim of his own art as he is unable to use his own talents to bring happiness upon his life. Even after having escaped his monotonous life, he continues to be haunted by his past. Tom feels guilty for abandoning h is sister who depended on him. This feeling of guilt is epitomized in his final speech at the end of the play. â€Å"Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!† Therefore, Tom, the poet, becomes incapable of expressing any emotionShow MoreRelatedTenessee Williams: the Glass Menagerie1551 Words   |  7 PagesThe Glass Menagerie The glass menagerie is a superb work of art by Tennessee Williams. It is a play that highlights the various realities and desperations of its characters in their response to a confused society. Williams has an admirable talent for creating a play that’s genre is serious and has a tragic ending; yet he keeps the story interesting to the audience whether it be through reading it as a text or in the theater. The story of the Glass Menagerie is an emotional recount of memoriesRead MoreLiterary Analysis of The Glass Menagerie by Tenessee Williams1462 Words   |  6 PagesThe Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams had ordinary people in an ordinary life that closely resembled the influences of Williams’ personal life while having reoccurring themes and motifs throughout the story. The play has been done by many with some variations in the scripts and setting while still clinging to the basic ideas of the original play. Amanda Wingfield was a complex character that encompassed many facets of her personality. She longed to have the life she had as a girl and youngRead MoreAnalysis Of The Play The Glass Menagerie 1281 Words   |  6 PagesDevin Simpson Professor Carusp The Glas Menagerie 4/29/15 Within the play The Glass Menagerie, Amanda, Laura, and Tom Wingfield all of have their own dreams that are continuously destroyed by the harshness of reality. Amanda, stuck in the ease of her youth, tries to relive her life through her daughter Laura. Being crippled both physically and mentally, Laura struggles to escape the bubble she has created around herself that her mother Amanda so strongly tries to force her out of. Tom whom, althoughRead MoreBelonging Essay4112 Words   |  17 PagesHeat and Dust Winch, Tara June, Swallow the Air Gaita, Raimond, Romulus, My Father Miller, Arthur, The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts Harrison, Jane, Rainbow’s End Luhrmann, Baz, Strictly Ballroom - film De Heer, Rolf, Ten Canoes - film Shakespeare, William, As You Like It Skrzynecki, Peter, Immigrant Chronicle Dickinson, Emily, Selected Poems of Emily Dicksinson Herrick, Steven, The Simple Gift Baillie, Alan, The China Coin Russell, Willy, Educating Rita Cleven,Vivienne et al (eds), Conte mporary Indigenous

Personal Narrative My Experience Within Classrooms Essay

Fieldwork Summary Paper Miele 1 My Experience Within Classrooms As I graduated into Concordia College I was already positive that education was going to be the major I was going to study and pursue a career in. With the motivation of my aunt, whom is a teacher, I always looked up to her. The only aspect I wasn’t sure of was what grade I would want to teach. I have always loved kids, which is why I have always been predicting I would teach within early-childhood grades. Within this course I was given the opportunity to sit and observe classrooms of grades of my choice. I resolved that I would sit within a kindergarten class, a third grade class, and a fifth grade class. With this experience I was able to get an idea of what grade I would want to preserve a career in as I followed my dream as a teacher. The first class I attended and scrutinized was a kindergarten class taught by Mrs. Brenda Buccheri Miele, who was my aunt. Not only was I thrilled to observe what it was like to teach a kindergarten class, but I was also excited to see my aunt in action for the first time. As soon as I entered the classroom at Concord Road Elementary School, I couldn’t help but smile because of all the inventiveness of the creative projects the students had put together to hang up around the room. Being that it was my first time observing a classroom, I was a little apprehensive to meet the kids and spend four hours with them. I didn’t know how they would react to me being there, or ifShow MoreRelatedDiversity in the Classroom Essay examples876 Words   |  4 Pagesdiversity within a classroom. According to Websters New Pocket Dictionary, diversity means variety, a number of different kinds. I often discuss and read about diversity in terms of cultural backgrounds; the unification of h istories and stories from people from all over the world. 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Conclusion For Frankenstein Essay Example For Students

Conclusion For Frankenstein Essay A Tale of Two CitiesA Tale of Two Cities opens in the year 1775, with the narrator comparing conditions in England and France, and foreshadowing the coming of the French Revolution. The first action is Jarvis Lorrys night journey from London, where he serves as an agent for Tellsons Bank. The next afternoon, in a Dover inn, Lorry meets with Lucie Manette, a seventeen-year-old French orphan raised in England. Lorry tells Lucie that her father, the physician Alexandre Manette, is not dead as shes always believed. Dr. Manette has just been released from years of secret imprisonment in the Paris prison, the Bastille. Lorry escorts Lucie across the English Channel to a house in a poor Paris suburb where her father, in a dazed state from long solitary confinement, confusedly works at the shoemakers trade he learned in prison. Dr. Manette has been taken care of by Ernest Defarge, a former servant of the Manette family, now the keeper of a wine shop. Defarge and his wife- a strong-looking, c onfident woman- appear to be engaged in antigovernment activity. Lucie is saddened by her fathers state and, resolving to restore him to himself, she and Lorry carry the doctor back to England. Five years pass. In London, at Old Bailey (the courthouse) we meet Charles Darnay, a French expatriate who is on trial for treason. Lucie Manette and Jarvis Lorry both testify that they met Darnay on their return trip across the Channel five years earlier. John Barsad, an English spy, swears that Darnays purpose in traveling was to plot treason against England. Darnay is acquitted when his lawyer, Stryver, shatters a witness identification by pointing at Darnays uncanny resemblance to Sydney Carton- a brilliant but dissolute lawyer who is wasting his talents in poorly paid servitude to Stryver. Lucie and her father- who has regained his faculties and returned to medical practice- now live happily in a quiet corner of Soho with Lucies fiercely loyal companion, Miss Pross. They are frequently v isited by Lorry (now a close family friend), Darnay, and Carton. Lucie imagines hearing hundreds of footsteps thundering into her life- a fantasy that in fact foreshadows the revolutionary strife in France. The scene shifts to France. Driving in his carriage through the streets of Paris, the cruel Marquis St. Evremonde runs over and kills a poor mans child. We learn that the Marquis is Charles Darnays uncle (out of shame for his wicked male forebears, Darnay had changed his name from St. Evremonde to the English-sounding Darnay). Meeting the Marquis at the St. Evremonde chateau, Darnay says he will renounce the family property when he inherits to show his disgust with the aristocracy. St. Evremonde expresses his hate of his nephew, and his continued support of the old, unjust order. The next morning the Marquis is found stabbed to death. Gaspard, the father of the boy the Marquis ran over, has killed him as an act of vengeance. Back in England again, Darnay becomes engaged to Lucie. Sydney Carton also declares his hopeless, lasting devotion to Lucie, and vows he would give his life to save anyone dear to her. Barsad, now a spy for the French monarchy, tips off the Defarges in Paris to the impending marriage of Lucie and Darnay. Privately and meaningfully, Monsieur Defarge comments that he hopes destiny will keep Lucies husband out of France. The marriage ceremony, together with a story Darnay has told about discovering hidden papers in a prison, send Dr. Manette into amnesiac shock. For nine days, until Miss Pross and Jarvis Lorry pull him out of it, he reverts to his former shoemaking habits. We learn later that on the wedding morning, Dr. Manette secured Darnays promise not to reveal his true name- St. Evremonde- to anyone, not even Lucie. Paris, 1789: the French Revolution breaks out. Defarge leads the attack on the Bastille, while his wife marshals the revolutionary women. In the country rebellious peasants burn down the St. Evremonde chateau. Gabelle, the propertys rent and tax collector, is eventually arrested and thrown into Paris LAbbaye prison. Rushing overseas, Darnay is at once seized by the revolutionaries as an aristocrat, and flung into another prison, La Force. Lucie, her young daughter, Miss Pross, and Dr. Manette rush to Darnays aid, lodging in Paris near Jarvis Lorry, whos there on business. As an ex-Bastille prisoner, Dr. Manette has sufficient influence to visit his son-in-law in La Force, but he is unable to free Darnay. For fifteen months Lucie stands each afternoon outside of La Force, praying that Charles may catch a glimpse of her. The Terror is in full swing, the guillotine shaving innocent and aristocratic heads alike. At last Darnay is brought up before the French Tribunal. He is released through the testimony of Dr. Manette and the long-suffering Gabelle. But the very night of his freedom the Defarges and one other denounce Darnay. On the spot, he is hauled back to the Conciergerie, the scene of his trial. Ig norant of the disaster, Miss Pross and Jerry Cruncher, Lorrys jack-of-all-trades, go shopping for provisions and encounter Miss Pross long-lost brother, Solomon. Cruncher recognizes Solomon as the spy-witness John Barsad who once testified against Darnay. Suddenly Sydney Carton is on the scene (he has come to Paris to help his friends). Leading Barsad off to Tellsons headquarters for a meeting, Carton informs Jarvis Lorry that Darnay has been rearrested, and forces Barsad to cooperate with him by threatening to reveal the spys turncoat maneuvers. Currently in the pay of the revolutionaries, Barsads job is to spy on their prisoners, and so he has access to Darnay in the Conciergerie. Carton sets a secret plan in motion, using Barsad. Darnays retrial the next morning produces a sensation. A journal discovered by Defarge in Dr. Manettes old cell at the Bastille is read aloud to the Tribunal. In his journal Dr. Manette blames his arrest on two brothers of the St. Evremonde family who ha d summoned him to their country house to treat a young peasant wife the younger St. Evremonde had raped. The womans brother lay beyond treatment, dying from a wound received when he tried to attack the rapist. After both the brother and sister had died, Dr. Manette received a visit in his home from the elder St. Evremondes wife and her small son, Charles Darnay. The Marquise St. Evremonde believed the dead woman had a sister, and wished to make reparations to her. Dr. Manette attempted to reveal the St. Evremonde brothers infamy, but they arranged for him to be arrested and put in jail. Dr. Manette ended his story with a curse on the whole St. Evremonde clan, and hid the document in a hole in the chimney. On this evidence Charles Darnay is condemned for his ancestors evil deeds, and is sentenced to die in 24 hours. After the verdict, Sydney Carton, drinking in the Defarge wine shop, overhears Madame Defarge announce that she is the missing sister, the last survivor of the family ext erminated by the St. Evremondes. She swears to complete her vengeance by wiping out all of Darnays relations- Lucie, her little girl, and even Dr. Manette himself. Carton goes to Jarvis Lorrys lodgings where both men receive Dr. Manette, who, from the shock of Charles condemnation has again slipped into his amnesiac-shoemaker role. Carton warns Lorry of Madame Defarges murderous intentions, and they plan an escape from the country. Carton tells Lorry to keep the proper papers ready, and when Carton appears at two the next afternoon, all- including Lucie and her child- will ride swiftly away. The following day, Carton enters Darnays cell, drugs him, and exchanges clothes with him. Carton intends to take Darnays place on the guillotine, and thus fulfill his old promise to give his life for anyone dear to Lucie. As agreed, Barsad hurries Darnays unconscious body- dressed as Carton- out of the Conciergerie to the coach where Jarvis Lorrys party awaits. All flee successfully. In the mean time Miss Pross, alone in the Manette apartment, has a grim meeting with Madame Defarge, who has come armed with pistol and knife to take her personal revenge. There is a struggle and the pistol fires, killing Madame Defarge and forever deafening Miss Pross. Nonetheless, she is able to meet Jerry Cruncher as they have planned, and escape. Sydney Carton goes to the guillotine with dignity. (For the first time Madame Defarges ringside seat is vacant.) He comforts a little seamstress, has a final vision of better times ahead, and reflects: It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known. .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933 , .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933 .postImageUrl , .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933 .centered-text-area { min-height: 80px; position: relative; } .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933 , .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933:hover , .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933:visited , .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933:active { border:0!important; } .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933 .clearfix:after { content: ""; display: table; clear: both; } .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933 { display: block; transition: background-color 250ms; webkit-transition: background-color 250ms; width: 100%; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #95A5A6; } .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933:active , .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933:hover { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #2C3E50; } .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933 .centered-text-area { width: 100%; position: relative ; } .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933 .ctaText { border-bottom: 0 solid #fff; color: #2980B9; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; margin: 0; padding: 0; text-decoration: underline; } .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933 .postTitle { color: #FFFFFF; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 600; margin: 0; padding: 0; width: 100%; } .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933 .ctaButton { background-color: #7F8C8D!important; color: #2980B9; border: none; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: none; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 26px; moz-border-radius: 3px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-shadow: none; width: 80px; min-height: 80px; background: url(https://artscolumbia.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts/assets/images/simple-arrow.png)no-repeat; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; } .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933:hover .ctaButton { background-color: #34495E!important; } .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933 .centered-text { display: table; height: 80px; padding-left : 18px; top: 0; } .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933 .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933-content { display: table-cell; margin: 0; padding: 0; padding-right: 108px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle; width: 100%; } .u232be3d883d4aa81b0773eeff7335933:after { content: ""; display: block; clear: both; } READ: The Laws of Life Essay English Essays

The Harrowing of Hell Dialectic and Spectacle Essay Example For Students

The Harrowing of Hell Dialectic and Spectacle Essay Roland Barthess essay on The World of Wrestling draws analogically on the ancient theatre to contextualize wrestling as a cultural myth where the grandiloquence of the ancient is preserved and the spectacle of excess is displayed. Barthess critique which is above all a rewriting of what was to understand what is is useful here insofar as it may be applied back to theatre as another open-air spectacle. But in this case, not the theatre of the ancients, but the Middle English pageant presents the locus for discussing the sport of presentation, or, if you prefer, the performance of the sport. More specifically, what we see by looking at the Harrowing of Hell the dramatic moment in the cycle plays that narratizes doctrinal redemption more graphically than any other play in the cycle as spectacle offers a matrix for the multiple relationships between performance and audience and the means of producing that performance which, in turn, necessarily produces the audience. The implications of the spectacle could sensibly be applied to the complete texts of the cycle plays, and perhaps more appropriately to the full range of the pageant and its concomitant festivities. The direction of pseudo-historical criticism, especially of the Elizabethan stage, certainly provides a well-plowed ground for advancing the festive and carnivalesque inherently present in the establishment and event of theater. Nevertheless, my discussion here is both more limited and more expansive: its limits are constructed by the choice of an individual play recurrent through the four extant manuscripts of what has come to be called the Corpus Christi plays; its expansion is expressed through a delivery that aims to implicate the particular moment of this play in the operations of a dominant church-state apparatus, which is, ostensibly, a model of maintaining hegemony in Western culture. The Harrowing provides a singular instance in which the mechanisms of control of the apparatus appear to extend and exploit their relationship with the audience (i.e. congregation). The play is constructed beyond the canonized operations of the sacred, originating a narrative beyond (yet within) the authorized vulgate; it is constructed only through church authority yet maintains the divinely instituted force of the orthodox doctrine. We will write a custom essay on The Harrowing of Hell Dialectic and Spectacle specifically for you for only $16.38 $13.9/page Order now Two introductory instances, one from the Chester cycle and the other from the Towneley cycle, situate the narrative and event of the play as a spectacle which engages the possibility of being consumed by its historical and particular mass culture a culture which was primarily illiterate in both the official and the vernacular writings of the church and being understood within the hegemonic orthodoxy. The introductory speech in the Chester Plays (The Cookes Play) describes a previous knowledge that Adam as representative for a fallen humanity apprehends exactly at the moment he articulates his speech:Nowe, by this light that I nowe see,joye ys come, lord, through thee,and one thy people hast pittyeto put them out of payne. Similarly, though now through Jesuss self-proclamation, the introduction in the Towneley cycle reveals the already known nature of its narrative:A light will thay haueTo know I will com sone;My body shall abyde in gaueTill all this dede be done. The doubled nowe of Adams speech and the perfected futurity of Jesuss speech dictate a time before narrative. By expressing the nature of narrative to be known and that the outcome of the particular battle which is hardly a battle between Satan and Jesus is already determined, both Adams and Jesuss speeches establish a code for participating in the festival. The audience is relegated within this code beyond the activity of interpretation; they are placed outside of the hermeneutic circle. Instead of calling for interpretation, the play calls for consumption, which means, in this case, to view the spectacle. The public then is subordinated to its own activity of visualization its own sense of perception to gain access to the operations of the festival. At this point of subordination to the visual, the audiences motives, according to Barthess description of the effects of the spectacle, are extinguished: The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees. Though Barthess explanation is particularized to explain our fascination with wrestling, his reading may become more useful if we explore exactly the points of knowing and not knowing which are significant for the audience of the Harrowing. The virtual awareness that the Harrowing is rigged becomes impertinent in comparison to the consequence of knowing the narrative as sacred as authorized and privileged text of doctrinal truth. By seeing what they know, the members of the audience affirm their own knowing that is their own capacity to know validating their own immersion in the light. As Barthes suggests, the activity then is not of thought, but instead, of repetitive affirmation. The yearly festival reincorporates the known realities of the church year into the memories of its congregation. The Harrowing happens because it always happens; its events do not change because the narrative is merely spectacle, revealing the necessity of its outcome it happens because it always happens or it happens because God (i.e. the church) says it happens. Every sign of the players and the play is endowed with an absolute clarity, since one must always understand everything on the spot. The play is constructed in and as total intelligibility, which should empower the audience to affirm and control its relationship to the spectacle to judge its authority and position. The play gains its position as spectacle through repetition and institutionalization. The pageants yearly performance, as an iteration of doctrinal litanies, hypostatisizes the narrative of redemption in the cultura l milieu. Moreover, the authority by which the play is produced and written validates the history being told. Indeed, it is not a history, but the history. Even beyond the force of the church-instituted process of validation, the play holds ceratin social values through convention, concretization, and repetition. W. A. Davenport has noted that though these scenes convey no great moral force, the morality theme, present in the cycle as it is in even lesser known morality plays such as Mary Magdalene, gains liveliness by the conventionality of its presentation. If Barthes is correct about the nature of the spectacle, then our reading of the Harrowing should allow for a positioning of the audience where it obtains to a judgement concerning the outcome. For Barthes, the audience must participate in a pure and full signification:Leaving nothing in the shade, each action discards all parasitic meanings and ceremonially offers to the public a pure and full signification, rounded like Natur e. This grandiloquence is nothing but the popular and age-old image of the perfect intelligibility of reality. What is portrayed . . . is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction. By the positioning and antecedent action of the Harrowing of Hell, the signification of plot articulates itself in totality an ideal understanding of things. Since the center of dramatic action hinges on Christs confrontation with Satan, the dramatic action folds to that exact point, where Satan has already been diminished as a force of opposition and the playwright had prepared for his demise. In the Chester Plays, specifically, the audience has already been told that Christ hasse overcommen the devil (Chester 224, line 176). But what Barthes f ails to negotiate or perhaps notice in ascribing a power to the full signification of the spectacle is the audiences necessary involvement in the perfect intelligibility of reality when it is predicated not on the intelligible reception but on the nature of reality. When the stage is more than the wrestling mat, but the very ground of heaven and hell, the audiences position becomes tantamount to eternal destruction or eternal bliss within this intelligible reality. It is exactly at the point where the audience loses control in the appearance of control that the operations or mechanisms of the hegemonic orthodoxy become discernible. Just as the spectacle privileges the audience and not the production of the spectacle, so the play, at least the Cookes Play in the Chester cycle, suggests a privileged subjectivity for the members of the audience a privileged subjectivity that will ultimately be rewritten in the master narrative of Gods (that is the churchs) history. As David comments o n the spectacle for the audience, he describes his own privileged position, which, in turn, escalates the position of the audience to a heightened knowledge of self-delivery or self-redemption:I, kinge Davyd, nowe well may sayemy prophecye fulfilled is, in faye,as nowe shewes in sight verey,and soothly ys seene. .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5 , .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5 .postImageUrl , .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5 .centered-text-area { min-height: 80px; position: relative; } .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5 , .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5:hover , .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5:visited , .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5:active { border:0!important; } .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5 .clearfix:after { content: ""; display: table; clear: both; } .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5 { display: block; transition: background-color 250ms; webkit-transition: background-color 250ms; width: 100%; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #95A5A6; } .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5:active , .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5:hover { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #2C3E50; } .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5 .centered-text-area { width: 100%; position: relative ; } .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5 .ctaText { border-bottom: 0 solid #fff; color: #2980B9; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; margin: 0; padding: 0; text-decoration: underline; } .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5 .postTitle { color: #FFFFFF; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 600; margin: 0; padding: 0; width: 100%; } .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5 .ctaButton { background-color: #7F8C8D!important; color: #2980B9; border: none; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: none; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 26px; moz-border-radius: 3px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-shadow: none; width: 80px; min-height: 80px; background: url(https://artscolumbia.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts/assets/images/simple-arrow.png)no-repeat; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; } .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5:hover .ctaButton { background-color: #34495E!important; } .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5 .centered-text { display: table; height: 80px; padding-left : 18px; top: 0; } .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5 .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5-content { display: table-cell; margin: 0; padding: 0; padding-right: 108px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle; width: 100%; } .u46097d7cf146859a8c78bebdd9e857d5:after { content: ""; display: block; clear: both; } READ: Things Are Different From Each Other, And Each Can Be Reduced To Very EssayI taught men thus here in my lyefe-dayeto worshippe God by all waye,that hell-yates he should afrayeand wonn that his hath bynne. (Chester 332-3, lines 185-192)Davids speech couples the fulfilling of his prophecy that Christ would overcome Satan and the gates of hell and his didactic function as Israels king. He has taught the act of worship, and, in the juxtaposition of prophetic fulfillment and Judaic history, Christs actions become utterly dependent on the activity of the people. Fulfillment is necessarily derived from the worshippe of God by all waye. The apparent privileging of human activity in enabling the freeing of the spirits in hells prison is problematized, however, by the synchronizing of history by the completion of the act of redemption in a single speech (or series of plays within the pageant) and by the position of the plays audience in relationship to human activity. The Corpus Christi pageant posits a temporal space that constructs human history as a priori in other words, human history exists only insofar as it can be narrativized in the playing of the historical scene. For the audience, history is not a text, but is instead, to borrow form Spinoza, an absent cause that is only accessible in textual form. Or, as Fredric Jameson says in his contesting of the master narrative of history that people desire to possess, history is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious. The entire history of humankind is consequently directed by an absent cause or master narrative that is only accessible for the Harrowings audience through the offices of the church proper. Human activity is subdued beneath the force of a performative narrative that gains its position from the sacramentalizing of its word. The word is not contestable; it derives its puissance from its history and from its already known and knowing completion as narrative. The history of the Corpus Christi pageant in general and the Harrowing of Hell in particular provide a ground for the authority of the text and performance. Some scholars have debated, often with little effect, the doctrinal and historical connection between the Feast of Corpus Christi and the cyclic drama that literary historians have attached to it. Indeed, Harden Craig zealously argues that the necessary historical connection between the two is possibly an ineradicable heresy. Likewise, Glynn Wickham encourages us to question how the plays ever became attached to a procession, a form of celebration so antipathetic to their performance. Nonetheless, as Jerome Taylor has aptly noted, the feast did attract and gather the procession, and, historically, the plays as contained within the festival represent the cultural activity of re-historicizing the present in the master narrative of Catholic history. We may establish part of the Harrowing of Hells historical significance by relating the audiences participation, which is an active-passivity similar to the effects of a lack of drama under Calvinist dogma, to the congregations delimited and litanized response to the office of readings for Holy Saturday:Quid istud rei est? Hdie silntium magnum in terra; silntium magnum, et solitdo denceps; silntium magnum, quniam Rex dormit; terra tmuit et quivit, quniam Deus in carne obdormvit, et a sculo dormientes excitivt. Deus in carne mrtuus est, et infrnum concitvit. Something strange is happening there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silent because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised all who has slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear. The prevailing silence controls the responsiveness of the congregation. Sovereignty is determined only through the agency of Christ a real privileged subjectivity whose sleeping or waking determines the trembling of the world. And just as the world trembles so does hell the two becomes analogous spaces marking a simultaneous harrowing of hell and harrowing of here. The congregations response to the Matins reading confirms its position in the present only as it is textualized and narratized in the past performance of Christ: This is the day when our Savior broke through the gates of death. The audience of the feast of Corpus Christi, like the congregation of Holy Saturday, responds to the power of the dramatic harrowing by realizing a position of deprivation. The audience cannot act; it can only be acted upon. The audiences passivity is further underscored by both the textual and visual representations of the Harrowing of Hell preceding the dramatic performances during the Corpus Christi pageant. The narrativizing of the visual in the iconography (see the Holkham Bible Picture Book, for example) again represents the completion of activity before the activity begins. As in much of medieval iconography, temporal spaces are collapsed, endings and beginnings are conflated in single representative moments, and the spatiality of the image subjugates the implicit narrative of events. Rosemary Woolfs description of the Limbo of Fathers demonstrates the conflation of crucifixion, harrowing, and resurrection in a single spatial moment: the Limbo of Fathers is depicted as a small, battlemented building: its doors with their heavy locks, have already crashed to the ground at the touch of Christs Resurrection Cross (emphasis mine). Complementing the iconographic representations of the Harrowing, the Go spel of Nicodemus, in its full mystical and miraculous detail, was the popular and textual source for the Harrowings dramatists. Yet, as Rosemary Woolf and other contextual critics have noted, the plays hardly convey the dramatic force or poetic possibility of the Gospel. Instead, the plays textualize the apocryphal source into the orthodox doctrine, creating a spectacle of excess without the empowering visual interpretation by the audience. To some degree, the iconographic and apocryphal referents of the Harrowing of Hell provide the base level for interpretive possibilities: the historical and textual referent. However, as I would hope to demonstrate, interpretive possibilities are obliterated in the dominating desire of the play and the church to control the social structure and to entrench the values and therefore laws of the church apparatus. Oscillating within the literal referential articulations of the play, the allegorical, moral, and anagogical levels or senses operate. The allegorical mode is directed through the implicit parallel between Christs history his redemption of the souls and the churchs history the break near the end of the play (Chester 337 and Towneley 305) when the audience/congregation chants the Te Deum laudamus. The moral level is the individual, where the subject in the audience is able to participate in self-interpolation, placing the individual of today in the history of both the pas t and the future simultaneously. The individuals redemption, however, remains collective, addressed to Adams osspringe:Peace to thee, Adam, my dearlynge,and eke to all thy osspringethat ryghtwise were in yearth livinge. From mee yee shall not severe. To blys nowe I wyl you bringethere you shalbe withowt endinge. (Chester 334, 205-210)Isias. Adam, thrugh thi synhere were we put to dwell,This wykyd place within;The name of it is hell;here paynes shall neuer blyn. That wykyd ar and fellloue that lord with wyn,his lyfe for vs wold sellEt cantent omnes salutor mundi, primum versum. (Towneley 294, 37-44)Identification with Adams sinfulness prefigures a (re)collection in Jesuss redeeming effort to break the gates of hell. Nonetheless, the activity is utterly collective; morality cannot be apprehended on an individual level, excluding individual interpretation from the audiences role. The exclusion of the individual places the interpretive dilemma at the anagogical level, confronting the collective meaning of history and giving authority to the spectacle of the performance itself. Earlier in this paper I identified the performance with sport a type of game in which the arbitrariness of the result is predetermined by the apparatus of its production. What the Corpus Christi pageant in general and the Harrowing of Hell play in particular present is a dialectical foundation of empowerment and control. The spectacle posits a knowing of truth, creating an audience empowered by its own capacity to know what is and to therefore possess that knowledge. The real, as it is signified in the clarity of its repetition and form, is entrusted to an audience of arbiters, who decide a personal validity for the means of its articulation (to extend Barthess reading of wrestling, the audience may judge the performance and the value of the performance even if it does not judge the necessary relationship between the body of the wrestler and the outcome of the event). The play, however, within its limited origination as church extension, reaffirms the authority of the church by limi ting the authority of the individual. The collective is privileged over and against the individual so that, indeed, an individual consciousness exists in the play only as rebellion (e.g. Judas and Cain are left to dwell in hell with Satan exactly because they positioned themselves as individuals, against the dominant domain of Adams sinfulness). The dialectic between the play as spectacle and therefore a means of enlightenment and value-producing mechanism of the collective church which institutes the myth as valid poses the problem of seeing both operations, that is both functional modes, within the play as identical. Adorno and Horkheimers potent and persuasive definition of myth and enlightenment shows how each mode of cultural operation serves to exercise power through what Lukacs calls reification:Myth turns into enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity. Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenme nt behaves toward things as a dictator toward men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them. For Adorno and Horkheimer, myth and enlightenment, magic and science, mechanization and spirit, all serve as polar oppositions in a dialectically organized agenda of manipulation and control. Likewise, the pageant and the play orchestrate a subsumption of the individuals power especially the interpretive power of the masses into the collectivized agency of the church. The result of transforming the individual consciousnesses present in the audience and the congregation into a homologized and homogenized extension of orthodox values is coded in the presentation of its form. All history as it is posited within the play has already been written; the only question and here I mean the undervalued question of a member in the audience is what position is marked not necessarily predestined or predetermined, although the means of making this a self-determination have been completely rem oved from the mass culture of medieval Catholic orthodoxy for the individual. Will the audience member be a member classified as goat or sheep (a question addressed in a parable played briefly before the Harrowing? Is hell harrowed for him/her? Moreover, the result of the question interrogates mass culture itself, for the operations of the church-state apparatus are not distinctly separate in effect from the culture industry and the mechanization of the factory that Adorno and Horkheimer evaluate:Culture as a common denominator already contains in embryo the schematization and process of cataloging and classification which bring culture within the sphere of administration. And which entirely accords with this notion of culture. By subordinating in the same way and to the same end all areas of intellectual creation, by occupying mens senses from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again the next morning with matter that bears the impress of the l abor process they themselves have to sustain throughout the day, this subsumption mockingly satisfies the concept of a unified culture which the philosophers of personality contrasted with mass culture. Indeed, what could be more subsumptive than a mythos of redemption and salvation, constructed through a series of social and socially required events, that ultimately demand a vilification of self-value and a celebration of the church establishment. .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6 , .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6 .postImageUrl , .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6 .centered-text-area { min-height: 80px; position: relative; } .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6 , .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6:hover , .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6:visited , .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6:active { border:0!important; } .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6 .clearfix:after { content: ""; display: table; clear: both; } .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6 { display: block; transition: background-color 250ms; webkit-transition: background-color 250ms; width: 100%; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #95A5A6; } .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6:active , .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6:hover { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #2C3E50; } .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6 .centered-text-area { width: 100%; position: relative ; } .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6 .ctaText { border-bottom: 0 solid #fff; color: #2980B9; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; margin: 0; padding: 0; text-decoration: underline; } .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6 .postTitle { color: #FFFFFF; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 600; margin: 0; padding: 0; width: 100%; } .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6 .ctaButton { background-color: #7F8C8D!important; color: #2980B9; border: none; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: none; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 26px; moz-border-radius: 3px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-shadow: none; width: 80px; min-height: 80px; background: url(https://artscolumbia.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts/assets/images/simple-arrow.png)no-repeat; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; } .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6:hover .ctaButton { background-color: #34495E!important; } .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6 .centered-text { display: table; height: 80px; padding-left : 18px; top: 0; } .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6 .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6-content { display: table-cell; margin: 0; padding: 0; padding-right: 108px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle; width: 100%; } .u7bcbb09adc104fa687e32800d03ce7d6:after { content: ""; display: block; clear: both; } READ: Harrison bergeron by kurt vonn EssayIn both the Towneley play and the Chester play, the chorus of prophets, all participating in the monolithic community of hell-to-be-redeemed, offer a collective subsumption of the individual. The greatest desire of the audience must be to share in voice with the prophets who speak of both praise and thankfulness. The consumptive and subsumptive chorus in the Towneley play moves from Moses to David to Isaiah in progressively shorter lines to silence the audience, rather ironically, by invoking their collective chorus in litany:Dauid. As I saide ere yit say I so,ne derelinquas, domine,Animum meam in inferno;Leyfe neuer my saull, lord, afte r the,In depe hell wheder dampned shall go;suffre thou neuer thi sayntys to seThe sorow of thaym that won in wo,ay full of fylth and may not fle.Moyses. Make myrth both more and les,amd loue oure lord we may,That has broght vs fro bytternesIn blys to abyde for ay. Ysaias. Therfor now let vs singto loue our lord ihesus. (Towneley 305, 389-402)Affirmation through association becomes the fulfillment of the audiences constructed desire. The members of the audience join ranks with the great prophets who have all been associated with their own histories during the action of the Harrowing. The audience must join, for it does not have access to the already written history; by being displaced from the narratizing of redemption, it can only associate with the characters who already participate in the code. By this code I intend to suggest the positioning of the already achieved narrative action which cannot be possessed as spectacle, but, instead, must be apprehended as the mechanism of the church-state apparatus to maintain power. The state apparatus is defined by the perpetuation or conservation of organs of power. The state apparatus, to borrow an analogy from Deleuze and Guattari, is a contained system with components and limits similar to the game of chess. The game is played with a definite code, the pieces are determined to be what they are by what they are. A knight is always a knight simply because he is. A king will always be protected. In the same way, as a character to be played again and again, in every year of the pageant and in every other formulation of church doctrine, Jesus is always Jesus; he must always win against Satan who is always Satan. God, in his redemptive activity must be consistent (we still have this code and its response in contemporary culture, as is ty pical in the Baptist belt where the phrase thats not my God, my God is indicates an utter lack of interpretive understanding as it is constrained by the operations of a fundamentalist approach to a univocal God in a univocal way). The consistency of the players, whether on a chess board or a medieval horse-drawn carriage platform, necessitates the homogenization of the players audience the churchs congregation. Deleuze argues that the states ability to reproduce itself exactly is determined through its own public presentation i.e. the fact that the state is and must be public: The State-form . . . has a tendency to reproduce itself, remaining identical to itself across its variations and easily recognizable within the limits of its poles, always seeking public recognition (there is no masked state).The Corpus Christi plays offer then an extension of the church-state apparatus to construct, even as the mass does, a congregation utterly unified in its interpretive understanding and consolidated in its desire for redemption and its means of happening. The collective meaning of history the anagogical level of interpretive meaning is discernible only through the allegorical which is to say that church history accurately reflects redemptive history to the point of requiring participation in one to assure inclusion in the other. These claims concerning the plays and its most dramatic representative of redemptive force, the Harrowing of Hell, attempt to discern the mechanism of producing the power of the church-state apparatus how indeed, the superstructure gains support from its base and how, in fact, the pageant is the most accessible form for disseminating the conservation of this power. The plays demonstrate as a combination of social artistry and cultural design an historical moment of political conservation and dominant authorizing. It seems we are not merely to claim, as Hardin Craig does, that the plays are a theological intelligence motivated by struc tural imagination that lasted from age to age in the development of a great cycle of mystery plays. Instead, we should interrogate the multiple dimensions of artistry and artificiality of the play; our task is to ask how these plays operate as a performative moment coming directly from the dominant arms of orthodoxy while still being influenced by the severely limited mass culture. We may find, then, at the center of the controlling mechanisms of the church-state apparatus, the necessitated desire for community that even Satan validates and proclaims: Nay, I pray the do not so; Vmthynke the better in thy mynde; Or els let me with the go, I pray the leyffe me not behynde! The desire, of course, extends past Satans plea, for the homogenized desire of the congregation ultimately which is in history written and yet to be is directed toward a different answer from Jesus: one that affirms salvation and again confirms the churchs orthodox pageantry of performance. .