Dr. Elizabeth Rambo, a professor of English at Campbell University, teaches English by examining themes in pop culture hits like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, “Angel”, “Harry Potter” and “The Matrix”. She recently wrote a paper titled, “’Queen C’ Goes to Boys’ Town, or, Killing the Angel in Angel’s House”. In this paper, she uses Virginia Woolf’s famous trope, “Killing the Angel in the House”, in Woolf’s essay, “Professions for Women“, as a lens through which to examine the character, Cordelia, in “Angel”.

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Kate’s speech in The Taming of the Shrew in V.ii is a complicated joke, like her speech in IV.v. It represents the culmination of the lessons she learned from the games Petruchio played with her throughout Act IV. Some of those lessons were intended to train her to direct her wit at others upon cue from him. This goal he accomplished. He intended to teach her the lesson that she would be rewarded for obedience and punished for disobedience, which he also accomplished. Kate also learned, however, the paradoxical art of being submissive and subversive at the same time, which was a lesson Petruchio certainly did not intend to teach her. She achieved a subtle, subversive mocking effect by carrying a given premise of Petruchio’s to its extreme logical conclusion, thereby exposing it as ridiculous and ironically implying just the opposite.

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Shelley has often been criticized regarding his love life. Every student of Shelley is familiar with his capricious and insensitive behavior toward the loves in his life. However, what many students may not realize is that he was an inevitable victim of illusions, and that the only alternative was to give up on lust for life. A passage from a letter he wrote to his friend T.J. Hogg in 1815 will help clarify exactly what I mean.

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One of the most appealing characters in the first book of The Faerie Queene is Satyrane, the bastard child of a lady who was ravished by a satyre. He grows up in the forest outside of all law and culture, learning nothing but how to cultivate and exercise his will to power. He tyrannizes over the forest creatures with his arbitrary whims, ripping nursing bear cubs away from their mother and other acts which make all the animals tremble in fear of him.

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In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, aestheticians debated about whether the Divine Horticulturalist created a neat and geometrical or a wild and irregular Garden of Eden. The question was of crucial importance to them, because the nature of nature was regarded as the philosophical underpinning for the nature of everything that people should believe, feel and do. The nature of nature had ramifications as to whether people should live by intuition or by reason, whether artists should be rule-bound or spontaneous, whether art of all kinds should be rigid or free-form, whether the ideal human is a rationalist urbanite or a noble savage, whether society should be an orderly hierarchy or a diverse democracy, and whether standards of judgment should be objective or subjective.

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“The Maids” by Jean Genet is a play not given to a conventional plot breakdown. It is designed to repeatedly dissolve audience perceptions as soon as they are formed. Mirrors are the dominant feature of the play, both physically and metaphorically. The characters, two maids and their Madame, serve as mirrors for each other. They also look in mirrors literally every time they turn around.

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“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” seems very enigmatic at first. The more one dwells on it, the more it seems suffused with tragedy. The vision of the death-pale kings, princes and warriors is haunting to the imagination. The cry, “La belle dame sans merci hath thee in thrall,” coming from their starv’d lips in the gloom, is a horrific cry of belated warning from the world of the dead victims. It is likewise haunting to the imagination. The more I read and re-read the poem, the more I got a sense that it had a very personal meaning for Keats, but a specific meaning still eluded me until I began reading his letters to Fanny Brawne. Then the whole, profoundly sad story became clear.

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Goethe’s Faust is a mythic projection of a man torn between Western dualisms, arising from the mind/body split, that have both philosophical and psychological dimensions. Mephistopheles, who functions in the text as Faust’s double in many ways, represents the side of these dualisms that is more associated with the body. Just before the poodle that has followed Faust home turns into Mephistopheles, Faust is in his study trying to decide what there was in the beginning – the Word, Mind, Power or the Deed. This hesitation suggests an inability on Faust’s part to unite the mind and the body, the contemplative life and the engaged life, theory and praxis. (The Word is used in the Bible to refer to God’s means of creating the world. The apostles who wrote some of the books in the New Testament were influenced by the neo-Platonism of their time, and this influence informed their use of ‘the Word” as a signifier. Both traditions, Platonism and Christianity, have kept the mind/body split alive in Western culture, although there have been forms of Christianity that encouraged engagement rather than withdrawal. Faust’s hesitation between the Word and the Deed prefigures modern existentialism. One of the most characteristic themes of existentialism was the profound contempt for theory without praxis, or the Word without the Deed.) While Faust is torn between the dichotomies his culture has reproduced in his mind, Mephistopheles looms up. It is significant that Mephistopheles urges worldliness upon Faust. The timing suggests the emergence of Faust’s repressed non-intellectual side.

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The Bostonians is almost like an allegory of the battle of the sexes. Olive the feminist and Basil the male supremicist engage in a battle of ideology, the battleground being Verena’s heart and mind. Despite Verena’s long indoctrination into feminism by Olive, Verena abandons her feminist commitments to surrender to Basil, a man she knows to be an unabashed anti-feminist. By the end of the novel, it appears that Basil has been right to think that an instinct to exist for nothing but a man’s love would prove to be the most natural and powerful force in Verena’s feminine nature, despite the superficial overlay of feminist ideology. continue reading »

The last of Malory’s Arthur tales, “Le Morte d’Arthur,” could be regarded as the tale that deconstructs all the preceding tales. The very codes of conduct which made Arthur and his Round Table powerful are depicted backfiring at an amazing speed. As power deconstructs itself, we are shown the hidden and unacknowledged weakness which was always part of it. The glory and the romance are transformed into tragedy or travesty, or both. Yet, as the illusions are in their death throes, they seem to have a power to live in our imaginations that they didn’t when all seemed well. Just when Camelot is dead, it seems most desirable. The question of how it ended this way causes a backward glance at all the stories.

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