Author Archives: Danny Jiang

Apr 22 2021
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Simple Bibliography (AILD as an epic)

These are some sources I found on AILD in conversation with the Odyssey and epic. As recommended, I looked up the T. S. Eliot essay on Joyce and his work Ulysses. From there I found the Haneş article; previous readings of creatures and animals in the Odyssey led me to the White article on animals in AILD.

Boswell, George W. “Epic, Drama, and Faulkner’s Fiction.” Kentucky Folklore Record, vol. 25, no. 1, Kentucky Folklore Society, 1979, p. 16–.

DICKERSON, MARY JANE. “Some Sources of Faulkner’s Myth in ‘As I Lay Dying.’” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 3, 1966, pp. 132–142. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26473551. Accessed 22 Apr. 2021.

Eliot, T. S. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” UVA Public People Search, U.Va., people.virginia.edu/~jdk3t/eliotulysses.htm. 

Haneş, Ioana-Gianina. “Ulysses as Modern Prototype of Homo Viator.” Journal of Humanistic and Social Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, Universiteatea “Aurel Vlaicu” Arad Editura / Publishing House, 2019, pp. 27–36.

MIDDLETON, DAVID. “FAULKNER’S FOLKLORE IN AS ‘I LAY DYING’: AN OLD MOTIF IN A NEW MANNER.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 9, no. 1, 1977, pp. 46–53. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/29531827. Accessed 22 Apr. 2021.

White, Christopher T. “The Modern Magnetic Animal: ‘As I Lay Dying’ and the Uncanny Zoology of Modernism.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 31, no. 3, Indiana University Press, 2008, pp. 81–101.

Apr 12 2021
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Research Question

AILD’s title is derived from Book XI of the Odyssey: “As I lay dying the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.” What aspects of the Homeric epic (as well as aspects of Vergil’s Aeneid) do we see in AILD—and how can we compare the journey to Jefferson to Odysseus’s (and/or Aeneas’s) journey? Additionally, how can Joseph Campbell’s outline of the monomyth (hero’s journey) be applied to the progression of the novel itself? Does the novel follow the template of the monomyth—can we deem it an epic? Who is the hero of the story, and what are the tribulations they face? Knowing that Faulkner took the title from the Odyssey, I’m interested in seeing if we can trace the scattered events of AILD to the often rigid narrative pattern of the hero’s journey laid out by Joseph Campbell.

Mar 08 2021
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Woolf’s “Legacy” and the kerb

In reading Mrs. Dalloway, I have always kept Woolf’s short story “The Legacy” in the back of my mind. In the short story, Gilbert Clandon, a wealthy politician, is clearing the effects of his wife, Angela. However, it’s strange that Angela has taken the time before her death to leave items for her loved ones and friends: “It was as if she had foreseen her death. Yet she had been in perfect health when she left the house that morning, six weeks ago; when she stepped off the kerb in Piccadilly and the car had killed her.” Curious as to what his wife has left him, Gilbert notes that it was probably nothing, save for her volumes of diaries, which have been the subject of arguments in the past. He notes that Angela was always against him reading her writings, saying that it should wait until “‘After I’m dead—perhaps.’ So she had left it him, as her legacy. It was the only thing they had not shared when she was alive.” As he reads her diaries and letters, he finds that Angela starts out praising her husband, but stops mentioning him as she begins communicating with a mysterious B.M., who is eventually revealed to be the late brother of Angela’s secretary, Sissy Miller. The “legacy” she left Gilbert in her diaries was the fact that she had stepped off the kerb to kill herself and rejoin her lover—and to escape her marriage.

Though the kerb is only explicitly mentioned twice in the novel, my reading of “The Legacy” has added a new dimension to how I interpreted the two scenes. In the first mention of the kerb, as Clarissa set out to buy flowers, “she stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass” (p. 4). As she she waited on the kerb, the letters which Peter wrote her occupied her mind. The kerb is mentioned a second time when Peter follows a young woman, after visiting Clarissa. As she “waited at the kerbstone,” Peter thinks that “there was a dignity about her She was not worldly, like Clarissa; not rich, like Clarissa” (p. 53). In both these instances, Clarissa and Peter have each other on their minds—the kerb serves as a place for them to consider the other.

It’s interesting to see the similarities between the relationships of the characters in Mrs. Dalloway and “The Legacy.” Clarissa, like Angela, is married to a wealthy politician who is not exactly the most present husband. The two women are not entirely happy with their marriages, and there is another man who serves as a “what-if” to the married women. However, what’s different about the two is that Clarissa has come to terms with her marriage. She has a daughter with Richard (Angela notes in her diary that she wishes she had a child with Gilbert), and realizes that though she may not be happy with her marriage, she is at the very least content. In the moment that Clarissa and Peter share a kiss (p. 47), Clarissa has a moment of doubt. She thinks that if she had married Peter, happiness could have been hers forever, and she thinks of running off with Peter—only to be grounded by the appearance of Elizabeth, her daughter.

The similarity of Woolf’s use of the kerb as a literary device in Mrs. Dalloway and “The Legacy” leads me to think the following: firstly, could Angela be Clarissa? I once read somewhere that Woolf’s original plan for the novel was for Clarissa to die by suicide during the dinner party, and that Septimus would not appear in the novel. What would the effect of this have been—would we read it like “The Legacy,” that Clarissa seeks to escape her marriage? Secondly, the kerb as a literary device: the act of waiting on the kerb and stepping off it presents us with a sense of limbo—yet, why is it only women (Angela, Clarissa, the woman Peter watches) who wait at the kerb? Angela steps off the kerb to be hit by a car, Clarissa stiffens as a van passes; there is no mention of a vehicle with the woman Peter follows. What is the effect of Woolf’s placing of women at the kerb, and how do these three instances of being at the kerb, and varying appearances of a vehicle create distinct visions of life and death?

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Feb 25 2021
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What We Know From What Maisie Sees

Henry James creates an interesting juxtaposition in What Maisie Knew with Maisie’s age and how she sees and understands her world despite her age. The duality of Maisie’s perceptiveness and naïveté establishes irony for both the reader and the novel’s characters. Irony is strewn throughout the novel: when Sir Claude is first mentioned in Chapter 6, prior to meeting him Maisie asks Miss Overmore if the gentleman her mother has been seeing should be made her tutor. She asks, “mightn’t that make it right—as right as your being my governess makes it for you to be with papa?” Upon hearing this, Miss Overmore blushes, signaling that Maisie’s comment is exceptionally perceptive. Maisie understands the implications of Miss Overmore’s relationship with Beale, and Sir Claude’s relationship with Ida, and the irony in this scene is twofold: Miss Overmore recognizes the situational irony of Maisie’s question, and we as the reader recognize the dramatic irony of the role Sir Claude comes to play in Maisie’s life. Though Miss Overmore rejects Maisie’s proposition, Sir Claude does end up, in some sense, tutoring Maisie. Though he doesn’t give her a formal education, the outings Sir Claude has with Maisie give her an informal education of her world.

How Maisie sees the world is interesting, especially given the context of how spectating is used throughout the novel. As both an object and subject of spectating, Maisie transitions from the former to the latter over the course of the story. In the earlier chapters of the novel, Maisie exists passively; in her first stay with Beale, she is observed by the men going in and out the house, and “her features had somehow become prominent; they were so perpetually nipped by the gentlemen who came to see her father and the smoke of whose cigarettes went into her face. Some of these gentlemen made her strike matches and light their cigarettes; others, holding her on knees violently jolted, pinched the calves of her legs till she shrieked—her shriek was much admired—and reproached them with being toothpicks” (Ch. 1). Similarly, when Mr. Perriam is first introduced to Maisie he remarks that Maisie is not a “myth,” as her mother was “always talking about you, but she’d never produce you” (Ch. 11). However, in the latter half of the novel, as Maisie ages she begins to gain agency, partly because of how she becomes more perceptive of the world around her—”so the sharpened sense of spectatorship was the child’s main support, the long habit, from the first, of seeing herself in discussion and finding in the fury of it—she had had a glimpse of the game of football—a sort of compensation for the doom of a peculiar passivity” (Ch. 12). Maisie uses her position as the subject of spectating to overcome the passivity that she has been cast into. This is shown in the multiple times Maisie pretends to not know anything, acting innocent and childlike to avoid confrontation with the adults in her life. With this action, Maisie reverses who is the subject and object of spectatorship; using the situational irony of feigning ignorance, she places herself as the subject to the reader, while she remains the object to the characters in the novel.

Perhaps James’s experimentation with the child as the focus of his novel is an exercise of literary modernism in its infancy. This is one of the earliest works I’ve read that establishes a child as the focal point of narration. The use of a child’s perspective gives way to ironic situations which arise from how adults see the child and degree of how much the child is expected to understand. Maisie is more emotionally aware than what we would consider the “average child” because she has been exposed to the difficulties of divorce and her role in the game that her parents play. James not only disrupts 20th century notions of a child, but our notions of children in literature as well.

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Feb 08 2021
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Does Maisie Know Who Her Parents Are? Do We?

Something that struck me was Maisie’s realization that she had “two fathers, two mothers and two homes, six protections in all, she shouldn’t know ‘wherever’ to go” (Ch. 12).
When I picked up the reading from Chapter 10, I was confused by the question Sir Clause posed to Maisie, regarding Mrs. Beale: “Do you think she really cares for you?” What confused me was the name that Miss Overmore had taken after marrying Beale Farange—I had thought that “Mrs. Beale” referred to Ida Farange, and it wasn’t until later on in the chapter when both Mrs. Beale and Ida were mentioned within the same sentence that I had realized my error. This deliberate choice by James to change Miss Overmore to Mrs. Beale without informing the reader presents us with the same confusion that Maisie faces over her multiple parents. Part of this confusion comes from the fact that Maisie’s four parents (Beale Farange & Mrs. Beale, Ida Farange & Sir Claude) have all encountered one another. Before Mrs. Beale had married Beale, she was know to both us and Maisie as the governess Miss Overmore, employed by Ida. Additionally, it’s revealed that Sir Claude had been visiting Mrs. Beale on multiple occasions, which he’s lied about to Maisie.

As Ida begins to spend less and less time with both her daughter and new husband, she delegates the responsibility of her daughter—whose custody she’d furiously fought for in her divorce—to Sir Claude; she even directly tells Maisie that “I’ve washed my hands of you” (Ch. 11). Ida’s deterioration as Maisie’s mother leaves her with no concrete maternal figure, as Maisie has a caring governess in addition to a stepmother. Maisie asks Sir Claude if she has brought him and Mrs. Beale together, as she’d brought Beale and Mrs. Beale together, and asks if the three of them can live together. This request shows the fluidity of who occupies the parental positions of Maisie. Rather than it being one couple (whether it be the Beales or Ida and Sir Claude), Maisie seems to want her parents to be those who are closest to her, both physically and emotionally. In the earlier chapters, Maisie shows loyalty to her father as she spent the first six months with him. After Miss Overmore is introduced when Maisie is sent to Ida’s, Maisie adopts her as the maternal figure in her life; Maisie is overjoyed when Miss Overmore abandons her post at Ida’s to move in with Maisie and her father. Not long after, when it’s revealed that Ida has remarried, Maisie becomes infatuated with (the photograph of) Sir Claude, and replaces him as her paternal figure when her custody returns to Ida.

Maisie’s choice of parents are a mix of proximity and loyalty. This is shown in Chapter 13, when Sir Claude brings Maisie to the Beale’s new house, and she remarks that if she is to return to them she must give him up, “as I gave up Mrs. Beale when I last went to mamma’s.” Though Maisie realizes she has multiple parents, she still processes the idea of mother and father as singular; she cannot consider Mrs. Beale if she is at her mother’s, and when she is at her father’s with Mrs. Beale she does not consider Ida to be her mother. James uses the multiple adults in Maisie’s life to establish confusion for her, as she must deliberate which one of the adults she wishes to be her true parents.

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