Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour"

Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour"

Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," is the story of a lady, Mrs. Mallard, discovering that her husband is "dead." Because of her heart condition, her friends delayed telling her of her husbands death, in fear of upsetting her enough to kill her. Instead Mrs. Mallard's sister hinted at the death of her husband, Brently Mallard, until one bright, spring day, when the world around Mrs. Mallard seemed happy and prefect, Mrs. Mallard felt that something ominous was going to happen. Finally her sister told her, and after pondering the idea, Mrs. Mallard was happy and began to rejoice her new found "freedom." Mrs. Mallard then went insane and died from her heart condition, "the joy that kills," and then her husband returned home, not having died, not knowing what had happened.

"The Story of an Hour" relates with "The Yellow Wall-Paper" in their goals of the wives. In the "Yellow Wall-Paper," the wife is suppressed by the demands and treatments of her husband, and in "The Story of an Hour," the wife does not care for her husband but instead feels held down by her husband. Both wives find some way out of their "husband-created bondage," through different means, but arrive at the similar results. In "The Yellow Wall-Paper," the wife goes insane and escapes her bondage through "escaping into the wallpaper" In "The Story of an Hour," the wife escapes her bondage through the "death" of her husband. Upon being "released" from bondage, both women become extremely happy. Ironically both women are also likely dead at the end of their stories.

What drives these women to act is such a manner as to try to turn against their husbands? Is it a sense of natural mistreatment, or is there something wrong in the society itself?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper"

"The Yellow Wall-Paper"

Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" is a story of the wife of a doctor. The doctor and the wife decide to rent a (cheap!) house for three months, while they wait for their own house to be built. The doctor's name is John and he has a sister named Jane who watches over both the house and his "sick" wife. According to John, the wife is sick through "over working her mind", but the wife does not agree and instead writes a secret diary which she must keep hidden so that neither John nor Jane can find her thinking or writing. The wife acts against John's wishes in her diary by expressing her ideas and suspicions. This angers the "Enlightened" John who believes only the reasonable to exist (nothing unreasonable exists). However, the story also centers around one room, which during the night, when John is around (occasially also when Jane is around), serves as a prison for the wife. The wife begins by describing the room with its prison like features (there are four windows but they are all tightly barred and the bed is hard and nailed to the floor). However the worst part of the room for the wife is the yellow wallpaper. She described this wallpaper being "a constant irritant to a normal mind" (1664). Throughout the story the narrator (the wife) studies this paper in secret and describes it in her diary. The wife eventually comes to the conclusion that there is a figure trapped behind the wallpaper during the night which during the day roams around the world in one of the four windows of her room. Finally, on the last day of the rent, the wife decided to tear down the wall paper. The wife locked the door while she did this and refused to let John into the room telling him to get the key for himself and finally, when John enters the room, the wife says that she "got out" and John faints.

Another Enlightenment v. Romantic idea clash can be seen in this story. John personifies an Enlightenment man who believes only that which is reasonable exists, however his wife believes the opposite, and believes that there is more than reason. The wife's desire for the unreasonable personifies and persists in the yellow wallpaper. The wall paper is "unreasonable" as it has no design and is harsh to the eye, and also is one of the reasons that the wife persists in writing and thinking. Whenever she stopped thinking she would always return to the strangness of the wallpaper and what "came out of it". Finally in the end the "Enlightened" John falls to "unreasonable" effects. This is an ironic stab against Enlightenment where the man who did not believe in the "unreasonable" fall prey to its ills.

"Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!" Where is teh narrator during this quote, and why does she add the words, "every time"?

Jonathan Franzen's "Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts."

Jonathan Franzen's "Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts."

In this article, Franzen makes a very bold claim which states that liking and being "likable" are bad things for people to to. Franxen begins his argument by discussing what happened when he changed BlackBerries. His first BlackBerry he had for three years and liked it very much, but his liking was one-sided and the BlackBerry only acted as a "likable" object to appeal to him. When the BlackBerry lost its appeal, Franzen, painlessly, replaced it with a newer, more appealing BlackBerry. Following his discussion of hiw BlackBerries, Franzen states that the goal of technology is to replace the natural world (which does not care about who we are) and replace it with something which merely reflects the individual. From this goal of technology, Franzen shifts to love and states that due to technology (mainly Facebook) liking something has become a substitute love. Next, Franzen shifts from the problem of liking and begins discussing the problem of people who make themselves likable. According to Franzen, people who try to be "likable" to you act as mirrors of you and only make your life more pleasurable. Franzen contrasts this idea of a "mirror-friend" by stating that a friend who loves you makes themselves unappealing and acts as a "mub-splattered mirror". The friend no longer shows you through them but instead shows you how they are different. Franzen continues, by stating that "a world of liking is a lie" but that people can fully love each other. According to Franzen, love reveals the lie of technology. According to Franzen love is the complete acceptance of another being(s) (preferably one but can be multiple). Also according to Franzen, to be loved is more difficult than to be liked, because to be liked a person can hide his unlikable qualities and can easily be accepted by everyone, but to be loved a man must show his whole person, perfections and imperfections, and will easily be rejected by most people. Franzen shifts from this point of painful love and states that it is good because it shows that you are living. According to Franzen, men love and make themselves loved have more value than others and those men who refuse love, are "worthless resource wasters." Franzen conludes his article by talking about how he used to "like" nature, but then he found a "love" in birds and left his self-centeredness and changed.  Through this Franzen makes a conclusion that love forces men to turn away from inward thinking away from everything, toward outward being.

Jonathan Franzen and Carr seem to have similar problems with technology. They both fear that it is dehumanizing people. Carr makes this claim against Google when he talks about Google's mission. According to Carr the problem of technology is that it changes the way we think away from a complex  decision making process into a more definite and efficient process which gives no reason for thinking deeply. Franzen states that technology dehumanizes men in another manner, in which it make it harder for them to love, therefore weakening their ability to feel pain and finally taking away their worth as living human beings. According to Franzen pain shows both caring and humanity through the change in devotion of oneself to another being.

Is a man's humanity valued by his ability to love and feel pain?

Jamais Cascio's "Get Smarter"

Jamais Cascio's "Get Smarter"

In his "Get Smarter," Jamais Cascio urges his readers to change themselves and as the title of the article suggests, "get smarter". Cascio begins his "Get Smarter" by mentioning the long passed eruption of Mount Toba. Cascio states that this eruption forced the world into such a harsh climate that it forced humans to evolve or more simply, "to get smarter." Cascio leads this opening idea into a statement that men evolve through the process of becoming smarter. Cascio finally connects this statement of intelletual evolution with modern life stating that if life will be harsh in the future then we as humans must become smarter in order to overcome the harsh environment. Cascio concludes his opening section with another statement in which he gives power to the individual stating that the individual does not need to wait for "evolution" to make humanity smarter but instead can make themselves smarter. Cascio validates this last statement saying that the process of men making themselves smarter (which he calls "intelligence augmentation") has already been smarter through many examples such as: the Internet, science, and drugs. Cascio continues his argument by briefly discussing the advance of technology and how it benefits humanity. Cascio follows this discussion by mentioning the ideas of internet skeptic Nicholas Carr and his article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" as well as Linda Stone who worries that men have obtained a sense of "continuous partial attention," or a sense of having too many activities present at once. Cascio brings these two authors together into an idea which he calls "continuous partial attention-deficit disorder" (which he shortens as "technology-induced ADD"). Cascio finally concludes his response to skepticism by suggesting that technology-induced ADD is only a temporary side effect of the vast amount of available information, and that eventually men will create a solution to this problem and make information gathering more efficient for the individual. Cascio continues his article by telling people how they should become smarter. According to Cascio, due to the constantly changing technology, humans should not try to drastically "update" themselves for fear of becoming quickly "obsolete." Instead Cascio urges people to use "external technology" to boost themselves so that the technology they use is still beneficient and replacable when better advancements are created. Continuing his argument, he discusses the usage of drugs to make people more focused and talks about his own experience with using them. Following his discussion of the advantage of drugs, Cascio discusses the advatages and weaknesses of artificial intelligence. Cascio states that while smarter artificial intelligence is possible it can never exceed the exponenially expanding human mind and that humans are better off with their own reason and with "robots on the side." For Cascio, the robot is just another helpful tool which despite its advances will never exceed the abilities of men. Cascio concludes his argument by describing what he believes life will be like in the future. He believes that in the future men will have greatly overcome "partial attention," will have a larger pool of information to absorb from, and that our intellectual debates and differences will become much more active. Cascio believes that humanity as a whole will inevitably advance and "get smarter" the only question will be that of when and who will "unreasonably" resist.

Cascio seems to discuss many of Nicholas Carr's skepticisms. In his article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Carr addresses many fears toward the growing technology. Carr's main fear is that the internet is changing the way that men think in a way that is destroying their ability to think deeply. Cascio directly responds to this fear by suggesting that the current internet system is still primitive and, due to the large quantiy of information, forces the individual into a sense of "partial attention." Cascio's solution to this side effect is to use what is available until the technology advances allowing men to absorb more information quicker. Carr also fears the achievement of Google's mission statement, "The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people---or smarter." Carr specifically fears that the creation of such a device will replace the human mind with something which only gives answers and does not think deeply about anything. Cascio also addresses the fear of artificial intelligence surpassing the human mind through two descriptions. First, Cascio discusses the advantages of technology which customizes itself for the individual and how it can benefit that same individual through its enhanced knowledge. Then, he states that the human mind is always advancing and getting smarter and will therefore always be better than any artificial mind that we create. ("As intelligence augmentation allows us to make ourselves smarter, and then smarter still, AI may turn out to be just a sideshow: we could always be a step ahead.")

Carr also provides one more criticism of the internet, in which he states that because of the internet's need and desire for money, the internet also innundates individuals with many advertisements and distractions. Therefore due to necessity would not the distractions continue to exist and plague the attention of simple knowledge seekers?