Haunted By Pride and Prejudice's Zombies

After reading Act 1 of Chekov's The Cherry Orchard, I feel my analyze-and-detect-literature-similar-to-Pride-and-Prejudice-to-establish-a-preemptive-strike-slash-boycott-slash-mental-slash-emotional-preparedness sensor go off.

The first sign arrived when Dunyasha eagerly tells Anya how "the clerk, Yepikhodov, proposed to me just after Easter" (319). Anya confirmed my first fear with an indifferent reaction I feel I will share later on when complaining how "you always talk about the same thing..." (319).

My alarm peaked when Varya tells Anya, "if we could marry you to a rich man, I'd be at peace" (321). In an attempt to mimic the strategy I devised to survive Pride and Prejudice, all my energy desperately focuses on the finding the play's positive traits.

The defining moment arrived when Gayev criticizes how one of his aunts "married a lawyer, not a nobleman ... She married beneath her, and it cannot be said that that she has conducted herself very virtuously ... [and] you must admit she leads a sinful life" (333).

By this point, I could only focus on keeping my imaginable emotion from depleting, and I couldn't help but compare the narrator's highly-energetic indicators to a mockery of unrealistic, exaggerated emotions in modern text conversations. (Link soon to come)

Campion's Woman

OK so maybe this does not depict the attractive woman Campion attempted to illustrate in "Cherry Ripe". However, I do find it "visually appealing"... to a bee.

Potato Potaato, Tomato, Tomaato

Could early African-American vernacular model Huck's voice? Besides eliminating some of Twain's racist reputation in his novel, what other repercussions this have? Are scholars overanalyzing a meaningless possibility?

Maybe my radar-for-historically-important-possibilities-infered-from-literature is a little rusty. What is the difference between a white Huck Finn, and a black Huck Finn if Twain considers him "the most artless, sociable, and exhaustless talker I ever came across" (NY Times, 1874)?

The ultimate message remains unchanged, does it not?

When Idiots Joke, The Joke Is On Us

When reading Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I can not decide whether Huck and Jims' absurd conversations are meant to mock ignorant beliefs, or reenact discriminatory minstrel shows. I found myself laughing at Jim's twisted logic in chapter 14. Ironically, his rhetoric defeats Huck's, when explaining why Frenchmen talk the way they do. Irony presents itself when Huck states that "it warn't no use wasting words—you can't learn a nigger to argue. So I quit" (102).

Maybe Twain planned his work to spark controversy all along, writing along the fine line of humor, separating racism and idiocy. I prefer to consider the more flexible approach, and enjoy Twain's questionable challenge to society's sense of humor.

A Controversial N-Word

Since the n-word "will be replaced in each instance by "slave" (Page, Benedicte), can we assume they are synonyms? Huckleberry notices an ironic situation when he asks "what it was he'd planned to do if the evasion worked all right and he'd managed to set a nigger free that was already free before" (370)? Can one set a free slave free? Then he wouldn't be a slave to begin with. For this reason, altering the word in such a generalized manner may prove incoherent. I believe "nigger", a more derogatory term today than before, refers to the automatic degradation of the person's social status if their skin is colored. It has nothing to do with their situation as free or enslaved. In Huckleberry's time period, free niggers existed.

I believe, as does Geff Barton, that "It seems depressing that we are so squeamish that we can't credit youngsters with seeing the context for texts."

"The point of the book is that Huckleberry Finn starts out racist in a racist society, and stops being racist and leaves that society. These changes mean the book ceases to show the moral development of his character" (Churchwell, Dr. Sarah). One could even see a parabolic tendency in the novel's purpose.