Letteratura inglese 1

Pride

“Pride” was taken from the last volume of stories; this story is about shame, since both of the 2 characters experience it due to different reasons; shame is the feeling that brings them together (they are both cut off and isolated).

The male narrator, whose name is unknown, is ashamed because he has a harelip, so he’s disfigured; at the beginning of the second half of the 20th century, it could not be really well repaired. His appearance was a motive for shame, which made him feel like he had to choose a profession which put him into contact with the public. He wasn’t even able to go to war (his mother rejoices because he can’t be enrolled in the army) and he’s also going to deny himself a sexual life because of his harelip. He belongs to the lower-middle class.

Oneida feels shame because of her father’s failure, especially due to the fact that he was involved in something dishonest (her father was a banker and he was led into mismanagement).

because he met someone who wanted to revive the steam engine in that period and that was going to create a workplace for the community). She belongs to the wealthiest family in town. They're both single and isolated and apparently they have nothing in common, but they actually share the feeling of shame. They have the same age, but they went to different schools, since she went to a private school. It's her who is going to talk to him first and is going to propose him to live together, and this is very unusual. At the end there's an epiphany, a sudden revelation. The term "epiphany" comes from the Bible and it refers to the moment when baby Jesus, who is less than 2 weeks old, is revealed to be the saviour of the world. James Joyce has used this term to describe a literary experience that is the revelation of an essence (suddenly understand the significance of a human being, the meaning of an object). From the narrator's house, Oneida and the narrator see.skunks in the garden; it's an epiphany because this sight makes them feel happy and delighted and they experience a sense of reparation: they're both unsatisfied with their appearance and they see the most despised and isolated animals in the country, which makes them identify with skunks (the 2 characters make a secret alliance through the identification with animals). They feel skunks themselves and since that sight is delightful, the epiphany is reparative. By identifying with the family of skunks, they recover a sense of pride: it's a psychological itinerary that has been delineated and that leads to reparation. The animals project the union between Oneida and the narrator. Munro often shows us this itinerary of rehabilitation; she has been interested in people with handicap and she's always tried to provide an empowering image. When Munro wrote this story, she had probably read 2 poems about skunks (this is probably her answer to those poems), one by an American author.Robert Lowell, called "Skunk Hour", and one by an Irish author, Seamus Heaney, called "The Skunk". ( texts) A transnational dialogue is being established. Munro changed the tone of those poems completely; she probably had in mind an English expression, "to keep a tight upper lip", which indicates someone who never complains, never lets himself/herself go. The fact is that the man cannot keep a tight upper lip, since he has a hare lip, but she wants to underline that both of them keep a tight upper lip: they have denied themselves the right to express their emotions, so their love is going to be transformed into care. She's drawing a humorous picture of the couple. So we have a rehabilitation of what's bad; she refuses to be sentimental. The atmosphere of the story is the atmosphere of empowerment through the possibility of writing one's life and re-envisioning the experience (from disempowering to empowering). Her characters are unconventional.

Just like the experiences she writes about. Alice Munro is really interested in films, especially European movies, that's why the filmic hypotext is permanent in her works. An example is "Mrs Miniver" (1942): it's the story about how people lived in England at the time of WW2, when people were living on shortage of food, there were people dying, but they refused to give up, they were resilient in difficult living conditions. Survival among the difficulties of nature are what all stories in Canadian literature are about; a fundamental theme in Munro's works is resilience.

She probably read Henry James's works. Some of the most important themes in Munro's stories are shame and class difference, biblical theme, deprivation of love and of the expression of emotions.

NIGHT

It's one of the last stories she's written; her last volume of stories is called "Dear life": it is a sort of farewell to writing (she said she was not going to

write anymore) and a way ofwelcoming the joy of being alive and celebrating life. The last 4 stories are special, since sheexplained that “they are the first, last and closest things she’s ever said about her own life”:they are the first because she reveals things she’s never said, last because she’s not writingstanymore, and closest, because we have a female, uneducated, 1 person voice, speaking not as anarrator, but as Alice Munro. She tells us that when she was 14, lying at night on the top bedshe was possessed by the fear of wanting to kill her little sister without any motivation. It’s aconfession near madness: she’s prey to demonic desires and to fear of losing control ofherself. The description of the sleeping arrangement is very precise: she describes the top bunk,“Thanks for the right” in which she uses a male voice, just like in “Walking on water” ( Bible).20which is linked to “bunkum”, that

means rubbish, nonsense (old-fashioned) and “(go)bonkers”, which means going mad (contemporary language).

We can also think of Shakespeare’s “A mid-summer night dream”, which is the story of a group of young people who go into the forest, a place where during the night rational life is suspended and there’s the intervention of magical creatures and fairies that will change the rules of everyday life. It’s a light-hearted comedy, in which after a lot of misunderstandings the normal order of the world will be restored and the characters will be reintegrated through marriage.

This story is darker than Shakespeare’s comedy, so she must have had other sources, like her own ancestors: as a matter of fact, she’s the descendant of a Scottish family of writers on the father’s side, people who moved from Scotland to Canada in the 19th century because of poverty. Before her ancestors moved, at the beginning of the 19th century there was a

man, whose name was James Hogg, the brother of his great great-grand-father, who was a writer: he obtained a great success with his novel "The private memoires and confessions of a justified sinner", in which the narrator reveals that he's killed his brother and his mother, because he was possessed by the ideology of the time and he thought that he had to kill those who did not believe in the same faith he believed in (the narrator went mad). When Munro is writing stories about her life, she's also speaking about other lives and the experiences of other writers (ex. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Finnegan's Wake); for instance, at the beginning of the text, when she describes the storm, we can underline the fact that the storm in literature has a history to itself, from Chretien de Troyes, passing through Wuthering Heights, to contemporary literature, especially in Canada, where storms and blizzards are everyday experiences. In this story, she talks about the body, which isunusual in Canadian literature and Presbyterian experience, but it has a meaning which is not completely revealed: she has to be taken to hospital, but when she goes into surgery, it's discovered that she has cancer. Cancer is alluded to through periphrasis and metaphor: the word "cancer" looks like a crime, a creature that has to be kicked out, something disgusting and rotting; instead her mother changes it into "a turkey's egg" ( what people eat at Christmas, which is a happy celebration), which has nothing malignant or frightening about it and appears to be a part of the process of life. We have ambivalent images, images of life and death: this is what it's called co-extensivity of life and death, which means that life and death are not binaries, but they reverse into each other (page 275). The idea of falling is repeated and it's a preparation for what is going to happen to her, that is her fall into a delirium; another word that is repeated.

is hang up, which is linked to hang-ups, that means “having problems hanging in your mind” ( in the past people who committed crimes were hung). Then she encounters her father and she confesses her fear (just like the confessions made by the main character of her ancestor’s novel), but her father does not punish her, does not look surprised or frightened. He dismisses the possibility of a problem and considers it as nothing abnormal or wrong. What he says sets her down and makes her find the possibility of being stable, stop having things hanging up in her mind and going down into reality: her father does that by not punishing her and by remaining in the real world. The return to the norm is performed thanks to the law, which sets her back into reality. This expression has another meaning: set something down also means writing something, which makes it right. Writing it has performed a cathartic process, which allowed her to go back to reality. The story finishes with

“Never mind”, which has 2 meanings: the first is “that’s okay” and the second one refers to the fact that mind should not be trusted, since delusions are inside it (only the body can be trusted).

Here she alludes to a short story by Hoffmann (a German author), called “The sandman”, taken from a volume entitled “Night”; in this story the narrator, Nathaniel, has been told the story about the sandman and fears having his eyes pulled out by him; when he grows up, he falls in love with who he thinks is a woman, Olympia, a doll invented by a scientist exploring possibilities of transforming human beings into inanimate beings ( “freakish foreign doll”).

Freud used it to represent the fear of castration. This man is going to go mad; instead, Munro reverses the scenario, since she’s going to set down and come back to reality, she’s not going to kill her little sister. Therefore, Munro’s story is a terrifying story.

il periodo dell'era vittoriana. Questo segna l'inizio di un nuovo capitolo nella storia dell'arte e della cultura: il modernismo. Il modernismo è un movimento artistico e letterario che si sviluppa nel corso del XX secolo, caratterizzato da una rottura con le tradizioni del passato e una ricerca di nuove forme di espressione. Uno dei principali obiettivi del modernismo è quello di rompere con il realismo e l'idealismo del periodo precedente, cercando di rappresentare la realtà in modo più soggettivo e personale. Gli artisti modernisti cercano di esplorare nuove tecniche e stili, spingendo i limiti dell'arte tradizionale. Nel campo della pittura, ad esempio, si sviluppano movimenti come il cubismo, il futurismo e l'espressionismo. Questi movimenti cercano di rappresentare la realtà in modo non convenzionale, utilizzando forme geometriche, colori vivaci e pennellate energetiche. Anche nella letteratura, il modernismo porta a una rottura con le convenzioni tradizionali. Gli scrittori modernisti cercano di esplorare nuove forme narrative e di esprimere le loro esperienze interiori in modo più diretto e personale. Questo si traduce in opere caratterizzate da una struttura non lineare, un uso innovativo del linguaggio e una maggiore attenzione alla psicologia dei personaggi. Il modernismo ha avuto un impatto duraturo sulla cultura e sull'arte del XX secolo. Ha aperto la strada a nuove forme di espressione e ha influenzato generazioni di artisti successivi. Nonostante le critiche e le controversie che ha suscitato, il modernismo ha contribuito a ridefinire il concetto stesso di arte e ha reso possibile l'emergere di nuove prospettive e idee.