'Tis the season for Dickens

It's been a crazy few weeks, but finally I have a second to sit down and update this. I uploaded all my Christmas music, stole all the Christmas movies I could find from my parents' house, and am debating the merits of decorating my room.

One of my favorite parts of Christmas, though, is how it brings together two of my favorite things: Charles Dickens and the Muppets. If you haven't seen The Muppet Christmas Carol, you need to. Immediately. It's absolutely fantastic, and my favorite Christmas movie of all time.



Merry Christmas!

Cover that up

So I have to write a paper on disguise in 18th-century literature. I love disguise. I even kind of love 18th-century literature, so this topic is actually pretty exciting. What I don't like is the page limit, because 4-6 pages is just not going to be enough to spout all my thoughts on masking and taking on other identities.

My favorite book about disguise is not 18th century, but rather a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth called Til We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis. The main character, because she is not as beautiful as her sister Psyche, but extremely smart and a kick-ass Queen, decides to hide her face behind a veil. She comments on how most of her subjects cannot imagine that behind the veil is just an ugly woman; they say she's a goddess, or so beautiful that her face would stun anyone who looked on it, or that she's faceless, or any number of things except the simplest explanation.

That's the awesome thing about disguise in literature. Characters get to try on someone else's life or identity for a while, and basically become whomever they want. How they react and how other characters react to them says a lot about their personalities and motives, and I know more than once Shakespeare has used disguise to show characters' stupidity or malleability.

But often characters go into these other personas thinking they'll have unlimited freedom, and they just don't get it. They have rules and restrictions placed on them that they didn't expect. The Queen in Lewis's book is free from the stigma she'd receive if she were ugly, and endowed with a divine status by her more superstitious subjects. But she can never lift that veil, as it makes her Queen. Once she's put it on, she cannot revert to her status as an individual with faults and feelings like anyone else.

She has to supercede these limitations and own her original identity, though. The Queen takes a spiritual journey through her sister's trials -- her search for herself is connected with Psyche's search for Cupid. They're two halves of a whole, and the meaning of Psyche's name ("soul"), makes her representative of her sister's soul and identity.

That's true of anyone who disguises him or herself in literature; they always have to return to their own identity when all is said and done, and it's only when that happens that the world is right again.

Which, I guess, brings me back to Joseph Campbell's hero's journey...which is another topic for another blog post. :)

Cinderelly, Cinderelly

I was thinking this morning about how there has to be more to Cinderella. I'm not talking about turning the story into something like Ella Enchanted or Ever After (God forbid). I just mean that Cinderella is cooler than she's usually portrayed, and all because of the glass slipper, something that's usually kind of overlooked.

All the "updated" versions of the tale I have seen either ignore the issue of the slipper completely or hold that Cinderella left it by accident. In Ella Enchanted, the slipper has very little to do with Charmont's recognition of her, I believe that Ever After ignores it completely, and even the Disney version has Cinderella literally stepping out of her shoe on the stairs.

She had to have left the shoe on purpose. There's no way she could have just stepped out of it while running down the stairs. In order to be running that fast in those heels, they would have had to fit absolutely perfectly, especially for a girl who has been living her life as a maid and who is more used to going barefoot. And to run later in only one heel, as the Disney movie suggests, is virtually impossible and probably a scenario dreamed up by a man.

The French version of the tale says that Cinderella "left behind" one of her slippers; it's her stepsisters who attribute the loss to "haste." The Cinderella of this story is much more quick-witted than that of other versions; she "jests" with her sisters, "amusing" them (and herself) while in disguise, and though she is certainly patient and kind to them, it's easy to see how she is just biding her time until she can out-smart them and somehow gain control.

As opposed to just giving her the attributes of "graciousness" and a good heart, Perrault also gives her "intelligence, courage...[and] common sense", a list of virtues usually absent or ignored in this story. What girl wouldn't drop a slipper and hold on to the matching one, so the prince could track her down and make certain of her identity? It's really a brilliant move, and I think it's sad that the character doesn't get enough credit for it.

(As a side note, I love how blogs let you totally go off on tangents in the middle of a sentence with a simple hyperlink. I can point you to the French Cinderella without even breaking the rhythm of my sentence. Awesome.)

The Obligatory Welcoming Post

If you're reading this, you somehow found my blog. I know there's not much yet, but I promise at some point this will be my outlet for all literary thoughts that never make it into an English paper, for some reason.

Often, it's not going to make sense, and a lot of it is not so much based on scholarly research as it is my personal opinion on everything from Dickens to Chaucer to Rowling to Lahiri and whomever I happen to be reading at the moment. No doubt I will often write incredibly stupid stuff down, but hopefully some of you will find it interesting.

I'm open to co-authors as well, so feel free to comment with your interest! Happy Reading ~