So, it has pretty much been two years since I actively worked on this blog, owing largely to life and work rearing their ugly heads (Isn’t that every blogger’s excuse?). A lot has happened in that time (including the creation of my professional blog, here), but I am glad to say that I am back here and will be updating and fixing this blog a lot more frequently now; I have some cool ideas, but more on those later.
The immediacy of this post is to comment on something a reader posted on here a couple days ago. On my post Carpathia, By Jesse Lee Kercheval, A Quick and Dirty Analysis from October 19, 2012, I posted the text and an analysis of a piece of prose featured in a literature class I was taking at the time. Eflows commented that I was missing that last sentence of the piece. Holy bologna, it’s been two years! I haven’t taken the time to dig out the original piece of paper from my Lit class (from which I would have typed the original post), so I cannot say that I missed the sentence or if the document my professor gave us was missing the sentence. I admit that the sentences sound familiar, so I am guessing that I neglected to type them in the first place. In any case, the last sentences ought to have read:
She was the one drowning. But there was no one there to rescue her.
Kind of totally important, no? So, thank you, eflows for pointing that out!
So, the upshot of this post is to acknowledge that correcting and to announce that I am coming back, though now that two years have past, I cannot say how many eyes peruse this blog anymore. We shall soon see!
Not too long ago, in my Lit class, our professor told us we were going to do some analyzing. Not too uncommon for a Lit class, after all. The class is about Education in Pop Culture, so I was surprised when she said that we’d be reading a poem called “Carpathia”. I doubted very much that it would be about the ship I knew, and instead thought it would be mythological, or maybe about the Carpathian Mountains. Nope! She hands out a yellow paper with the following printed on it:
“Carpathia”
By Jesse Lee Kercheval, from Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories, edited by Jerome Stern
It happened on my parents’ honeymoon. The fourth morning out from New York, Mother woke to find the Carpathia still, engines silent. She woke Father; they rushed to the deck in their nightgowns. The first thing they saw was the white of an ocean filled with ice, then they saw white boats, in groups of two or three, pulling slowly toward the Carpathia. My father read the name written in red across their bows—Titanic. The sun was shining. Here and there a deck chair floated on the calm sea. There was nothing else.
The survivors came on board in small groups. Women and children. Two sailors for each boat. The women of the Carpathia went to the women of the Titanic, wrapping them in their long warm furs. My mother left my father’s side to go to them. The women went down on their knees on the deck and prayed, holding each other’s children. My father stood looking at the icy water where, if he had been on the other ship, he would be.
When the Carpathia dropped off the survivors in New York, my parents too got off and took the train home, not talking much, the honeymoon anything but a success. At the welcome-home party, my father got drunk. When someone asked about the Titanic, he said, “They should have put the men in the lifeboats. Men can marry again, have new families. What’s the use of all those widows and orphans?” My mother, who was standing next to him, turned her face away. She was pregnant, eighteen.
Interesting little story, right? And I was overjoyed that we would get to talk about the Titanic in class! How often does that happen? We split into groups to analyze it using different modes of literary thought. I ended up being one of only two guys in the Feminism group with about eight girls. It was actually pretty interesting what we came up with:
It was decided the first paragraph didn’t have much to analyze.
Some of the ladies in the group decided that the “Women and Children” rule referenced in the second paragraph was an antiquated notion. That led to a classroom discussion on chivalry and what it meant. “My mother left my father’s side to go to them,” and “My father stood looking at the icy water,” indicated a certain level of emancipation, which, depending on your understanding of the 1910’s may seem out of place or may seem normal.
The third paragraph shifts things back to the really unappealing view a lot of people have on the Edwardian Era regarding the treatment of women. “’They should have put the men in the lifeboats. Men can marry again, have new families. What’s the use of all those widows and orphans?’” His words are harsh, but not unusual for a 1910’s man. That line led us on to a discussion of mourning in the 1910’s (can anyone say Downton Abbey?) which made me think of Isabella Paradine (Catherine Zeta-Jones) from the miniseries Titanic, but that is another thing altogether. The mother here, we read is eighteen and pregnant. Unusual in our times, but something that we know happened thin with much more frequency. The group as a whole decided that, from a Feminist’s point of view, the prose would be an example of chauvinism insofar as the Father’s treatment of the Mother and chivalry as a form of chauvinism in the rule “Woman and Children first.” There was some dispute in the classroom as to whether or not that was the “true” intent of the piece.
Interestingly enough, upon some research, I noticed that a fuller version of the prose exists. It has an extra two sentences at the end of the third paragraph reading, “She was the one drowning. But there was no one there to rescue her.” I imagine that if that line had been there, there would have been no argument as to the intent of the piece.
Another group in the room was supposed to analyze the piece using a Marxist view. I won’t break it down too far, but their basis knowledge of the classes was used in their discussion though, interestingly enough, there is no real mention of that in the piece. There were two other groups in the room, but those analyses didn’t go too far.
Another something I learned while researching the prose on my own, was regarding the author’s background. Jesse Lee Kercheval is a professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was born in 1956, and is not the daughter of anyone who was on the Carpathia. Needless to say, I was a little disappointed. The prose was a short story she had written for a textbook called Building Fiction. Kind of put a dampener on the whole thing.
I am glad that my Lit professor used the piece in class though for our analysis. It is interesting to read and consider, and has added one more piece of Titanic literature to the collection.
thetitaniac 