apophenia

Ruby | 21 | welcome to my virtual commonplace

[missdashwood]

You're lucky, Miss Eyre. If you do not love another living soul then you'll never be disappointed.

JANE EYRE | Episode 1 | 2006.

[look4rubyred]

yesterday was so insanely productive, purely because i tried something new and went to a coffee shop. my little college town is full of them, but until yesterday i never tried anywhere else but campus. i showed up around 14:00 and just immediately locked in, it was nuts. physics never became so easy. i finished a chapter of organic chem too.

[bpdohwhatajoy]

[look4rubyred]

real

[look4rubyred]

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Of course, reading The Wizard of Oz as a child provided a completely different experience to the one I had reading it now as an adult, but not in the ways I thought. I was expecting to be bored by the simplistic language and unimpressed by the one-dimensional characters; instead, I found myself just as charmed by the whimsical world of Oz as I did 10 years ago. What changed was my ability to research the deeper themes in the novel about the frontier and American colonialism; specifically, the allegory of the bimetallic standard - that the Yellow Brick Road would be the archaic gold and Dorothy, who brings great change and "improvement" to the lands she visits, represents the silver standard with her prized silver shoes. Even Oz can literally be taken as "ounce," as in measured ounces of gold or silver. The Emerald City is a sham because it represents greenback paper money issued during the Civil War that was fiat - that is, not backed by a precious metal. People in Oz think the Yellow Brick Road (gold) leads to the answer to all of Dorothy's problems - in other words, the gold standard is the way forward for America. Yet in the end, Dorothy's silver slippers are the savior that take her back to Kansas, and since Dorothy is likely to represent the average American layperson, her slippers indicate how silver could be the rescue or "way back" to the financial boom before gold became the standard. 

A fun fact I learned while researching the allegories in the book:

When Dorothy is taken to see the Wizard of Oz, Baum specifies that she is led though 7 passages and up 3 flights of stairs in the Emerald Palace, which could allude to the Coinage Act of 1873. This Act ended bimetallism by limiting the rights of holders of silver bullion to have it made into silver dollars. Among many reasons, this Act was passed after major silver motherlodes like the Comstock Lode in Nevada were found, and economists feared that Americans would convert large amounts of silver into coins, drive down their value, and inflate the economy. To salvage the economy, they banned silver coins and only gold holders were allowed to coin their bullion. The law was kept very quiet from the American public and received very little publicity.

Shortly after President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill into law in 1873, silver's market price dropped as economists predicted, and silver producers brought their bullion to the Mint only to realize the Mint was no longer in the practice of coining it and their silver was functionally worthless. This is equivalent to Dorothy setting her hopes of getting home on the Wizard only to find he has no real power or ability to do so. The Coinage Act caused massive political upheaval and class conflict, as silver with its fluctuations in value was preferred to be held by the poor working class, and now their silver could not circulate at all, something they didn't realize until it was too late. Meanwhile, the elite class mainly kept gold and remained impervious to this measure.

The tornado that takes Dorothy to Oz could represent this upheaval, the Scarecrow could be satire for the foolish farmers that got duped by the Act, the Cowardly Lion could be the politicians who were in the pocket of rich bankers and industrialists and failed to stand up for the working man, and the Tin Man could represent factory workers who were once thriving families but under the new standard were forced to become soulless robots slaving away at work due to serious debts under the deflationary impact of the gold standard.

Just a thought.

[look4rubyred]

Nelly in Wuthering Heights

The Gothic nature of Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte necessitates darker, perhaps even morally ambiguous figures. While Nelly, the Earnshaw servant, supposedly has their best interests at heart out of both her sense of duty and human empathy, she makes many morally suspicious decisions throughout the story. Through Nelly, Bronte employs characterization and point of view techniques to reveal Nelly as an ambiguous character in the field of vices and morals, ultimately hinting at how bystanders to major events can have an inflated sense of self-importance.

Nelly first appears to be the paradigm of a nurturing and caring housekeeper, with both the Earnshaw's and Linton's best interests at heart. As a servant in both households, Nelly was responsible for raising both Cathy and Hareton when their respective mothers died. Despite her lowly societal status, Nelly raised both as a mother ought to, describing Hareton as a lovely boy and Cathy as an angel. Thanks to Nelly's kindness, neither grew up without female love in their lives. In fact, Nelly even said that to see their union in marriage would be the "crown of all her wishes." Nelly's willingness to raise someone who is of no relation to her and for whom there is no guarantee she will receive anything in return speaks to her generous nature; she cannot possibly be a wholly corrupt person.

When it comes to the execution of such intentions, however, Nelly often finds herself making decisions that reflect her clouded judgment and difficulty to distinguish right from wrong. At Thrushcross Grange, for example, Nelly sees Catherine fall ill over the course of a week but opts not to alert her husband Edgar to her failing condition. This action stems not from ineptitude as a caretaker for the Lintons, but a grandiose sense of self-worth, for Nelly had decided for herself that Catherine was faking her consumption. Aside from her incessant need to insert her opinion where it isn't required as a servant, Nelly's failure to report on a wife's illness to her husband when it has reached life-threatening status strays beyond the ill-advised ignorance of a moral obligation into the definitive moral crimes of purposeful negligence and apathy to one's suffering. This negligence leads to Catherine's early death as she is not able to receive medical assistance and Edgar's sorrow at not being able to spend sufficient time with her before the bereavement. More ammunition with which to question Nelly's character comes in the nature of her reaction to her mistake: callous, with no shown remorse for her deeds. In fact, Nelly goes so far as to justify her actions and claim that Catherine's passing was imminent and her actions would have made no difference, when in fact there is ample evidence that her condition could have improved if Nelly had not dismissed her symptoms outright. Her point of view on the matter despite the objective facts pointing to her lapse in judgment also generates suspicion in Lockwood and the reader's mind about the reliability of her moral compass and thus in this instance she is invalidated as a truthful narrator.

By playing Nelly's positive characterization against her seemingly morally faulty opinions and point of view at certain points in the novel, Bronte explores the complexity of the bias that can be generated out of a false sense of one's relevance in a situation. Thus, Nelly can be seen as both a meddler who caused Catherine's death and the warm matron who mothered her daughter expecting nothing in return, and is conclusively ambiguous.

[look4rubyred]

pareidolia

par·​ei·​do·​lia ˌper-ˌī-ˈdō-lē-ə -ˈdōl-yə : the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern. The scientific explanation for some people is pareidolia, or the human ability to see shapes or make pictures out of randomness.