Lucy and Language

While reading the first section of Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy i began to notice two themes:the first that the main character, who i'm assuming to be named Lucy, is never actually called Lucy, and the second, she is never fully understood. What I'm sure of about the narrator is that she is a teenage girl brought from her home to a new world- new to her in every sense of the word. The weather and season of winter is new; the house she is in; the people she's living with; the room she sleeps in; some of the clothes she wears; the location; the country; the train she rides on; the children she watches. Everything in the world she is living in is new. She doesn't understand winter, or why Mariah is anxious for spring and going to her childhood home. The language used in describing these things to her are not words she knows or concepts she's learned about. 

Language takes another form in Lucy's life-the language she uses. It's different from how the family she is with speaks, and her ideas don't come across as clearly as she assumes they do. There is a language/cultural barrier present which has yet to be broken down. Lucy thinks by telling Lewis and Mariah about a dream she has they will understand it as her accepting them and having them as a big part of her life, but they don't see it that way. The maid doesn't like her for how she talks either. Language is used as one major barrier between her and this new world she's in, and inhibits her understanding of it.

Displacement and Belonging

This past week I had an experience of someone I know feeling displaced when she was with two of her longest and best friends. One of my close "Rome" friends, we'll call her A (she goes to SMC, I just met her on the Rome program), came to me upset about an issue of essentially, displacement. She was feeling left out and somewhat abandoned by her two friends, B and C, for a few reasons, the main one being that they both now attend Notre Dame and not Saint Mary's. One of them transferred at the beginning of this year, and the other one went to Rome with us, and transferred at semester. Seems like a lot going on, but its essential girl drama-I'm sure most of you can keep up :) A was upset because she has been trying to keep close with B and C, and has been succeeding for most of the semester until now. A has been working to keep these friendships because she has known B since the beginning of high school and C since the beginning of her time at SMC, and they were Rome roommates. But now, A feels B and C have been changing their plans and saying they were invited to more exclusive events and parties by their new "friends"-since they're ND girls and not SMC ones. To A, and it would to me too if I had that happen, it hurt A LOT. A feels betrayed, forgotten about, and unloved by two of her best friends, and in a way displaced I think. She doesn't know how this happened or why, especially since these are supposed to be her friends. A bigger issue here is that all three of them have been aligning themselves with stereotypes it seems: A is the SMC girl vs. B and C, the ND girls. How did three friends who were so close get stuck in such a situation?

This situation also led me to make some connections to Woolf's relation of how she wasn't allowed into the library or chapel alone at Oxbridge since she was a woman. A isn't invited to these parties since she's a SMC girl, not an ND one like B and C. 

Displacement can have many meanings, as we discussed at the start of Othello and asked What is displacement? For A, it's feeling out of place with two of her best friends. Often our location and surroundings can change us, affect us, and how we identify ourselves can too. Rome changed me and many of the other girls I was there with. For me, it wasn't anything like a complete personality change, but smaller, yet significant, changes. It seems to be happening once again with B and C attending ND and not SMC. A is noticing a change in who they are, and it hurts when she's not doing the changing too. Place changes us. Displacement can happen even with two of our best friends. 

Universality of "O" and Shakespeare

Watching the film "O" over the last class periods, and our discussions on other Shakespeare plays being made into modern movies, I started to really think about one of the questions raised in class: do these films suggest Shakespeare to be universal? Shakespeare's works have been enjoyed on the stage and screen, in reading their texts, and turned into operas since the time they were written. They continue to be studied in a wide range of classes from one generation to the next, and continue to have an affect. His lines rhyme and flow, tell timeless stories of love, hate, war, families, traditions, and kings and queens of times past. His characters are wild and free, tame and uptight, villains and the most gentle of beauties. His works are read and reenacted, interpreted and referenced all around the world, either inspiring other works or being rewritten to fit the modern times such as in "O." Shakespeare has had so great an effect on the theatrical, literary, scholarly, historical, and humanistic worlds of our time, so how can he not be universal? His name is recognized by scholars across the globe, and his genius cannot be replicated. He was a mind of his own whose stories still apply today. All you had to do with "Taming of the Shrew" was make the father a successful doctor, have the mother leave the family years before, the younger daughter Bianca the high school sophomore sweetie, and older sister Kat the school well, bitch, who spoke her mind and didn't care what others thought of her, and you have a Box Office hit with "Ten Things I Hate About You." There's even a character who loves Shakespeare so much she can identify the most random lines from it. There's even a movie about Shakespeare and his own life, mostly fictional I'd guess but still had enough to win an oscar.

The effect Shakespeare has had on the modern world is unlike any other writer's that I've been able to see. Sure, movies by authors such as Jane Austen and Nicholas Sparks get made into movies like I mentioned in my other post, but nothing like the countless ways Shakespeare's have. If his plays aren't being performed on stages, they're either being made into movies themselves or turned into adaptions like "O" or "She's the Man." Taken all that he's had an effect on, I'd say Shakespeare is pretty universal.