Jane Erye and Countries other than England

A lot can be said about who non-english society is portrayed in the Jane Erye Novel. India, a country rich with a written history dating back to before King Arthur, has been type-casted into a place where uneducated mongrels live and good white british christians go to do god’s work in an inhospitable country in order to hedge their bets of getting through the pearly gates to heaven under the name of educating and converting the natives.

Come to think of it, I can think of a time where a mission to educate and convert a people made their lives any better, the indians got a british empire, africa, british empire, Mayans, Spanish empire. It’s almost like the primary job requirement for education and conversion is begin a stool pigeon for your countries expansionist goals. I mean sure the counter example of the Peace Corps comes to mind, but they are truly the frontline soldiers of Americanizing the third world. Yes they add infrastructure to villages and improve quality of life, but they also alter the cultures they aid.

The only fleshed out character of non-British origin in the book is  Bertha Mason. The character who was smote with insanity for her hedonistic ways of doing the exact same kind of sleeping around her husband was and being female at the same time. I’m not saying that the discription of this Jamaican woman was done in a bigoted manner… No wait, yes I am saying just that. She was labled as a mad woman, and locked into the attic. She gets taken care of by a woman that can’t like her job, and her brother visits maybe 3 times a year.

But dispite all this, she’s still the closest thing this book has to a villain because she’d rather burn down her prison than see, and given what the quality of houses from that era were hear, her husband seduce a plain young woman right under her nose.

In the Garden of Eden Baby!

I can’t ignore the  blatant garden of Eden parralism, not because I perticularly care for it or even seen but because  thats the prompt and if I don’t write about that I won’t be getting a grade of any noteable source. It seemed abundantly clear that there is one, in hindsight. Lets start with the man who created the garden and most of the plants in it, maybe because his name is in the bloody title. It’s clear that Rappaccini is the God in this story, not only as the dispassionate creator, but the understanding of everything that he sees in his domain. After that’s established it seems easy to call Baglioni the snake figure. He is the one working against Rappaccini, and the one whose forked tongue of lies damns a man through his desires. It seems like Beatrice is the apple, the mouth-watering forbidden fruit hanging in the garden. By that extension Guasconti is the Eve. Ignoring all the gay marriage/Adam and Steve jokes that I could make about having a male play the role of eve, it fits. He was reached for what he thought he wanted ignoring the consequences hurting himself and one he ‘loved’ in the process. At the end of the book Beatrice becomes Adam, eating something for Eve, and dieing for it.  I honestly didn’t see the parralism  before it had been pointed out to me, and honestly it doesn’t surprise me that there is a story that seems so identical to this one, as there is only 7 stories that can be told in different combinations it seems unlikely that anything written or told has a unique story structure. But that’s neither here nor there.

The things that this story is missing to be a better mirror to the Eden tale.

1) A strong Adam

2) A Lilithe

3) A degradation of the world at the loss of the garden.

A few lessons you can learn from my mistakes

• Don’t try to take a unicycle down a half-pipe.
• A potato cannon can be cited as a lethal weapon by the police.
• A good author is not held accountable for the actions of his characters, the characters are held accountable for their own actions.
• The difference between fantasy and high fantasy amounts to if you have to tell the reader that the princess is a human.
• Don’t argue with an idiot, he’s doing the same thing and it’ll soon be on YouTube.

An open welcoming hand, the other holds the dagger

Welcome this humble blog. Either you are here because you are in my Intro to Fiction Class, or you searched the term psionic liquir on google. I hope these post do not disappoint either group, nor that you might catch what ever virulent pathogen that causes my mind to drip a busted watermelon spinning in a colander.