On one side, the Monster has the ability to depict a sense of purity and fairness as his role of a newborn creation within the novel, not yet poised by society. He holds the innocence of a newborn in his interests to explore different aspects of the world, literature, language, and even people. However, in actuality, the Monster’s short-lived pureness is quickly torn down by society’s reactions and influences and abandonment. Now, he sees himself just as society and his creators do - a horrid and ugly mistake - no longer who he wishes he was or could have been. While he “ought to be thy Adam,” complete with the pureness and innocence of a newborn creation, he is instead “the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” Before being subjected to society’s cruelty and hateful influences, the Monster “was benevolent and good…[but] misery made [him] a fiend.” The Monster holds two sides - two faces - of who he is and who he could have been, speaking to the effect of society’s disgust and hatred on his own personal perspective of his character. As soon as his birth, his identity is quickly altered as his creator faces him with disgust and hatred, abandoning him and with that, tearing down the innocence and pureness the Monster could have held. Now, the Monster remains on the inside how society views him on the outside - a true monster - no longer the pure Adam he could have been, but the monstrous devil, just as this project paints him to be.
Within this image of the Monster, the reflected surface signifies his own interpretation of his character, like a mirror bouncing back on him, similar to the moment in the novel he had first seen his appearance through a reflection. The reflected image represents the two sides to the Monster’s character - who he longs to be versus who he actually is. Through this portrayal, the Monster wishes to be pure and good, similar to the depiction of Adam within Paradise Lost, but in actuality is simply the horrid creation nobody cares for, not even his own creators. All of society’s judgments and reactions pushed the Monster away from who he could have been and have shaped him into who he actually is, which is what this project portrays by the two different reflections depicted in the Monster’s perspective.
On one side, the Monster has the ability to depict a sense of purity and fairness as his role of a newborn creation within the novel, not yet poised by society. He holds the innocence of a newborn in his interests to explore different aspects of the world, literature, language, and even people. However, in actuality, the Monster’s short-lived pureness is quickly torn down by society’s reactions and influences and abandonment. Now, he sees himself just as society and his creators do - a horrid and ugly mistake - no longer who he wishes he was or could have been. While he “ought to be thy Adam,” complete with the pureness and innocence of a newborn creation, he is instead “the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” Before being subjected to society’s cruelty and hateful influences, the Monster “was benevolent and good…[but] misery made [him] a fiend.” The Monster holds two sides - two faces - of who he is and who he could have been, speaking to the effect of society’s disgust and hatred on his own personal perspective of his character. As soon as his birth, his identity is quickly altered as his creator faces him with disgust and hatred, abandoning him and with that, tearing down the innocence and pureness the Monster could have held. Now, the Monster remains on the inside how society views him on the outside - a true monster - no longer the pure Adam he could have been, but the monstrous devil, just as this project paints him to be.
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I created this colored-pencil art piece to represent the relationship between human consciousness and sublimity in the landscape depicted in Shelley's "Mont Blanc". Starting from the Arve River as an "everlasting universe of things", the force of the rushing river overwhelms the reader's mind and seemingly the rest of the atmosphere in its "own deep eternity" (1). Thus, I decided to incorporate a variety of colors within the waters, symbolizing the unceasing chaos and sensory its power carries and takes from its environment. I took inspiration from Van Gogh's "Starry Night" to draw the style, as I also wanted to capture the emotional and "trance-like" state it induces within the reader. The Arve River's sudden sublimity overpowers the reader, but it is after they become more passive and susceptible to the river that they are able to muse on their "own separate fantasy" and have "wild thoughts", allowing their mind to create its own imaginings and interpretations (2). In this way, the unusual pattern and swirls of the river represent the human mind's ability to break beyond the Arve River's "traditional power structure", in which our power to imagine counters the river's power to subdue. In drawing Mont Blanc, I depicted it according to the lines describing it as "rude, bare, and high, / Ghastly, and scarr’d, and riven” (2). I wanted the contrast of Mont Blanc's sublimity to the Arve River's to be evident, but still blend into the same style of intersecting but slightly more calm strokes. The "viewless gales" and serene but barren environment of Mont Blanc implies a more hidden interexchange of consciousness, one not as obvious and dominating as the Arve River's and needed to be discovered instead (2) . The straighter colored-pencil strokes intersecting in Mont Blanc represent a more direct connection to human consciousness: the subconscious. Unlike the Arve, where the sublimity lied in chaotic processing and rational thought more easily able to access from information pushed out and given, Mont Blanc's sublimity bestows a wisdom that requires the reader to stop, learn, and question "large codes of fraud and woe" within their subconscious (3). Thus, once the reader reaches the top of the mountain (me depicted sitting), and in turn, learns the "higher wisdom", there is a guiding light revealing a constellation of a brain (knowledge). Both the Sun and Moon are present within the art piece instead of just one or the other, because part of the human mind's relationship to nature's sublimity is finding harmony within each other. Within this partnership, we learn the interdependence of human consciousness and nature's wisdom: “And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea / If to the human mind’s imaginings / Silence and solitude were vacancy" (4). As Mont Blanc teaches us to listen, learn, and interpret and as the Arve River unites us and processes chaos, there really is no vacancy or silence for nature when the human mind is able to imagine and fuel its own adventure into sublimity.
Overall, the choice to depict this art piece in a surrealist type of style ties into the overall dream-like and subconscious theme to the relationship of the subliminal landscape in "Mont Blanc" through human consciousness. Breaking free from the “detested trance” of "the race / Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling / Vanish”, humans are able to find purpose beyond the superficial and fruitless cycles of life and death that seem to predict an ominous ending (3). By taking inspiration from nature's eternal silence and solitude as powerful instead of vacant, we, in turn, are also reignited to find passion within our own imaginings. Venturing beyond mere rational thought, when we reach the subconscious we unlock a world between life and death where we find purpose in interpretation and teaching wisdom. By realizing and recognizing power in nature, we discover the ability to use our own power: imagination and enlightenment to discover beyond what is given to us. Though depicting the Arve River in more of a surreal adaptation than Mont Blanc may weaken the metaphor of it being more of "rational thinking" than Mont Blanc, the overall message still seems to come through, especially since it helps me reinforce the idea of Mont Blanc representing the "teacher" of wisdom. My monochromatic acrylic painting of the Arve and Mont Blanc was particularly inspired by Shelley’s “Mont Blanc.” To establish an initial connection between my work and Shelley’s poem, I incorporated scenic elements like the “giant brood of pines” beside the Arve and supposedly continuing into the distance on the mountain (Shelley 20). I’ll note that I also considered the perspective of Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, which I hoped to contrast in my piece and convey Shelley’s emphasis on the sublimity of nature as instilled by relative physical powerlessness through the viewer’s lower vantage point at the foot of the mountain rather than its summit.
Perhaps the largest artistic choice I made in my painting was to paint the mountain and river with only blue. I recognize that the monochromatic scheme conflicts with Shelley’s description of the Arve as “many color’d,” though I believe the piece ultimately gained more from the loss of the spectrum of colors than it would have preserved with the rainbow of greens and grays that might have otherwise adorned the river and mountain (Shelley 13). The monochromatic scheme allowed me to reduce nature to portray the mountain as even more silent than it might be in full color. This choice followed my desire to emphasize Shelley’s acknowledgment of a unique dynamic between silence and perceived vacancy that might conflict with sublimity, where the mountain is both starkly powerful and silently at the mercy of the viewer to recognize its sublimity: “And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea / If to the human mind’s imaginings / Silence and solitude were vacancy,” (Shelley 142-144). Essentially, through my piece as in Shelley’s poetry, the mountain is only completely sublime when a viewer can see beyond the silence and solitude of nature to appreciate it as more than vacant. I hope the monochromatic “silence” of my piece, especially as it still conveys much of the sublimity of the physical scene described by Shelley through natural subject matter, will also force the viewer to recognize the boundaries of their appreciation for Mont Blanc and, by extension, other elements of nature. I chose blue for my monochromatic color because it matches the softness of audible silence, though the blue-painted mountain is hopefully appreciated despite the limited color in my piece, just as the very real mountains, stars, earth, and sea are, despite what might typically be conceived as vacancy due to silence or lack of human bustle. Through the absence of a complex color palate, the viewer should come to appreciate the painted mountain as sublime despite limits to a usual perception of the mountain in much the same way human "imaginings" might of the mountain be constrained by perceptions of it as silent (Shelley 143). On the contrary, a viewer could understand the muted color scheme of my piece to more directly support Shelley's admiring description of the actual mountain when my mountain--further from its natural form without assorted and contrasting colors--loses some sublimity as the white peaks no longer rise as distinctly from the lower crags, nor battle the sky’s softness. All of these choices should lead the viewer to ponder a more complex view of natural sublimity that includes silence as much as it does conflict, without mistaking silence for vacancy. Testing Wordsworth's Role of the Poet: "Daffodils in a Living Room" By Siena Traynor (Project 1/3)2/25/2024 My mixed media ink and acrylic piece was inspired primarily by Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” though also in consideration of his ideas about the role of the poet in his Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads. I set my piece in a living room where I imagined the narrator of “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” might “oft” lie on their couch (upper right, in my piece) when the remembered daffodils “Flash upon [their] inward eye,” (9,11).
Though I preserved many of the elements described in Wordsworth’s poem, I chose to cut out the physical form of the poet because I wanted to test Wordsworth’s ideas that the poet was “A man…endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind,” by visually adapting his poetry without a specific person distinctly at its center (Lyrical Ballads 81-85). Instead, I portrayed the living room–a man-made environment incomplete without its inhabitant–as the primary space to suggest the presence of a person who is the writer of the poem more than the beautiful place in nature that inspires “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” would. At the same time, I hope to make it plausible with my piece that the poet doesn’t need to be anyone in particular. As the room comes to represent the presence of a poet, the fluidity of the person who can be a poet is conveyed by the malleability of the living room space in my piece. Though I used ink to draw the room to contrast the vibrant image of “A host, of golden daffodils” that inspires the poem, the black-and-white quality of the media also suggests that portion of the piece could be unfinished and therefore subject to change (“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” 4). Using the qualities of the room as reflections of its inhabitant, the suggestion that one could substitute any living room or human space for the one I drew allows the viewer to conceive of any inhabitant as sufficiently inspired by the daffodils creeping into the room from the lower left-hand corner to fulfill the role of “poet.” Inspired by Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” this project is a two-panel piece with a photograph I have taken of a Canadian mountain (left) and an oil pastel rendering based on the photograph (right). In his ode to a majestic mountain, Shelley inserts key characteristics that I conveyed in both art pieces of the same mountain, including the “brood of pines” and the “ice-gulfs” encasing the subject (20, 17). He speaks of the “Ravine of Arve” with its water that flows through the human mind, so I used an interesting adaptation of this river to be the winding slope on which people are skiing (12). It looks very much like a river run, and it fades into the midground for the observer to imagine its endpoint.
This incorporation of a ski run allows the observer to view humans (in their tiny insignificant markings) against the great mountain imbued with “still and solemn power” (128). By existing “in scorn of mortal power,” its “awful scene” becomes a power to be reckoned with (103, 15). Seeing how small humans look in comparison makes the mountain subliminally beautiful in its perception of impressive terror. This converges with Shelley’s poetic theme of the sublime. The choice to place two renderings of the same subject side by side helps me explore Shelley’s understanding of the poet and poetry. The left picture is the most similar image of the scene that I could encapsulate and share, yet it looks very different from the artistic illustration on the right. Similarly, even though poetry is meant to be an “image of life expressed in its eternal truth,” life’s translation is contingent on the middleman (the poet) conveying it (Lecture). In this understanding, the poet is an imperfect translator to the reader rather than an invisible vessel. This weakens Shelley’s claim that poetry is a truthful distillation of life because the truth can never be truly conveyed with a middle man (Lecture). As a result, I had to approach this description from a different angle: seeing the “image of life” not as an actual physical scene in reality, but as a theme or a characteristic of human life that Shelley hopes to authentically recreate. His poem is not simply about the awful nature of Mont Blanc, but about the relationship between the humbling power of nature to the humbled man. The mountain, as such, becomes the metaphorical vehicle for him to express that “eternal truth,” but it is not the truth itself. William Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” has a notable scene in which the narrator stumbles upon “a host, of golden daffodils” (4). This image seeks to illustrate this flower field using the oil pastel medium, attempting to represent these flowers’ “dancing” in a “never-ending line” (6, 9). The poem encapsulates the happiness that the poet felt upon first seeing the scene, and again when the poet recalls the nostalgic memory retrospectively. Wordsworth sees the latter effect of beauty as stronger than the former because he does not know the “wealth” of beauty in the moment (18). He understands poetry in general as a resistance to the “uniformity” that “blunt[s] the discriminating powers of the mind” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads). Drawing from both his poem and his poetic purpose, I sought a way to represent this departure from worldly hindrances. To emphasize the memory’s almost dreamy reminiscence as it appears in his mind, I used a more abstracted vision of the flowers with oil pastels. Like the poem itself, my interpretation rests on the impressions associated with the flowers, like “pleasure,” not the perfect rendering of the flowers themselves (23).
I also took creative liberties to add a farmer looking over his flowers in the bottom left of the illustration. I felt this was an important inclusion considering Wordsworth’s understanding of a poet, who has the unique “ability of conjuring up in himself passions” more realistic than what “other men are accustomed to feel in themselves” (Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads 92, 97). This interpretation implies that a poet’s role, one honed “from practice,” is a skilled trade or livelihood (Preface 98). He cultivates a connection to beauty for his reader, similar to a farmer cultivates his crop for his consumers. Therefore, the farmer tending to his crop represents the poet tending to and improving his expression of real events. By drawing from Wordsworth texts to illustrate his beautiful poem, I grasped a new understanding of the poet’s relationship to their art and their reader that contrasts with Keats’s ideas. In a Wordsworthian environment, poetry is a product very natural and fundamental (like a farmer’s crops), and the poet shapes it into something special and crucial to our development. The bystander and the art are unable to communicate with each other because the former is unintelligent about their sensibilities. The poet must be an active agent in conjuring and converting their expressions in a template appreciable by the reader. Eye of the Beholder, Lens of the Poet (1/3): A Keatsian View of Poetic Responsibility [Dashmi Singh]2/7/2024 This mixed-media work illustrates Keats’ understanding of poets and artists as having “no identity” other than “filling some other Body” (17, 21). His job is only to channel external ideas and entities rather than imbue his own character in his art. Keats pointedly rejects the “egotistical sublime” of Wordsworth to explain that he is of no significance in his writing, other than acting as a vessel for other agents (9). To me, this gives the impression of the poet being a servant to his own craft and to the “poetical Character” (7). While the world he hopes to convey and the words he writes are wondrous and brilliant (denoted by the quill that rests in his hands), the poet is bound by his work and to the soul of another character (pictured here has his hands in chains). The “wretched” life he mourns is depicted by the deep black and white coloration of his own hands and his chains, while the beautiful, free quality he ascribes to the Character is contrasted with the colored feathers and gold ink of the responsibility he is tasked with, channeling “Beauty & Truth” (28, 5). Keats’s words paint a very somber image in my head of the ironic limitations placed on the poet as he writes about themes as free as a singing nightingale.
This brings me to a question that has bugged me ever since I read Keats’ letters. If the poet lacks autonomy and agency in his own work, who is the reader in dialogue with when reading poetry, or observing any art? Rather than understanding a poem as a poet conversing with the reader, we must interpret it as a direct confrontation with the character itself. The poet becomes the unfortunate middle man who transcribes subjects that the reader is unable to see without assistance (like Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”). According to Keats, as the readers, we no longer have to consider the poet’s motivations or underlying emotions in poems because we can take the poet’s faithfulness for granted. Instead, our analytical questions should focus on how the poet chooses to encapsulate the truth of his subject. Recalling our Week 18 discussion on certainty and honesty in subliminal themes, I believe that the way this truth manifests will reveal an artwork’s leaning towards either wonder or the sublime. For my creative project, I chose to represent Ariel’s enslavement to Prospero and his confinement in their relationship in Shakespeare’s The Tempest using a black ballpoint pen drawing. I attached my overall impression of Ariel’s involvement in the creation of his confinement and its layers to the motif of the “cloven pine,” as the first place Ariel was physically confined (1.2.276). Since reading The Tempest, I’ve been especially interested in the different degrees of confinement visible in Ariel and Prospero’s relationship. For simplicity, in my drawing, I sought to represent two: emotional and physical confinement. The larger tree on the left represents Ariel’s physical confinement, which has been mitigated by Prospero’s aid in his liberation. However, in the play, Ariel is far from free when he escapes the tree–now dead and harmless in my drawing–because he’s Prospero’s indentured servant instead.
Within his enslavement to Prospero, Ariel becomes more and more trapped as the play progresses, largely because he becomes more emotionally involved. Following the chronology of his increasing enslavement, Ariel’s place of physical confinement is in the left half of the frame and the words and pine cones representing his more complex psychological confinement are on the right. I used the striking line, “Do you love me, master?” to represent Ariel’s mental confinement within his enslavement to Prospero (4.1.48). I elected to leave out the word “master” in my piece to capture the essence of Ariel’s sentiment more sympathetically, and focus on Ariel's emotional need for "love." The phrase's connection to Prospero is contextually defined nonetheless. Though physical confinement, like Ariel’s in the tree, may seem more intuitively inescapable than anything, Ariel’s emotional attachment to Prospero proves more gripping when it leaves the reader questioning if he would be able to leave his master even if his enslavement “split,” or presented an opportunity to escape, like the tree. In the end, Ariel’s emotions are more inescapable than anything. Unlike the dead, harmless, already-split tree on the left, the falling seeds sown in Ariel’s mind with each of the words in his question are bound to grow into incredible prisons. For this assignment, I chose to illustrate “Letter SycoraX,” particularly focusing on the imagery of Sisyphus employed by Brathwaite throughout the second part of the poem. I was drawn to this idea because of its ability to powerfully depict important aspects of “Caliban’s” struggle – the heavy burden, its cyclic nature, and, thus, the feeling of frustration. He repeatedly writes, “a cyaan get nutten write,” therefore declaring this feeling of not being good enough and not being able to live up to the standards forced upon him by the “Prosperos,” while he emphasizes the prolonged experience of “slide / in black down” and losing any progress he might have made. Another key aspect of the poem that I tried to capture here in the rough, unpolished style of this drawing, is Caliban’s relaxed imperfection in the letter, which I found to be a strong source of argumentation in itself: Brathwaite’s writing showcases a version of Caliban that does not appeal to any audience other than his own mother, SycoraX, enabling him to reveal emotions ranging from anger to joy. In a similar way, leaving these imperfections in my own visual interpretation of the text allowed me to include ideas I may not have been able to otherwise, like the way previous iterations of the sketch remain visible in layers underneath, as if they represent such parts of Caliban’s identity.
Moving to specifics, on the left side of my illustration, I decided to place the Caliban-figure in a stance representing his resilience: the arms outstretched and feet flat on the ground as if he is preparing to stand. Although he may have previously been overcome by the difficulty of his task, remaining stationary simply to hold the weight of the rock, he gets ready to continue on. Drawing from Brathwaite’s play-on-words between “write,” “rite,” and “right,” which, to me, suggest that a heavy burden facing Caliban comes from language itself, I chose to add letters of the alphabet on the boulder to highlight this notion. “Caliban” appears etched into it, as well, because this identity, and even the name itself, are additional weights he must carry as he is put into boxes by Prospero and others. The right side, is meant to display the lasting effects of Caliban’s writing, leaving the viewer with the repeated affirmation “i is a somebody” (that is positioned specifically at the top of the hill), asserting his place in the world and the power of his words. I decided to create an optical illusion that represents Eve’s view of herself in the latter half of John Milton’s Paradise Lost based on the argument that Adam and Eve are meant to be equals. After eating from the Tree of Knowledge, Eve wonders if the fruit will “render [her] more equal … for inferior who is free?” (9.823, 9.825). Eve’s comments imply that she views herself as unequal and inferior to Adam. Part of her reasoning behind this perspective is Adam’s reinforcement of these ideas by saying that Eve is “[s]afest and seemliest” when she is with him (9.268). Adam paints himself in a stronger light, so Eve develops the attitude that she must “prove” her worth to make up for her inferiority. However, Eve is not inferior to Adam; the two of them are a team where Adam is the “head” (logical and cautious), and Eve is the “heart” (instinctual and ambitious) (8.562, 4.484). They both have their strengths and weaknesses, but those traits do not put one over the other. I chose to use an illusion because it intentionally warps the audience’s perception of the world, which is how I see this epic; on the surface, it may seem that Adam and Eve are on different hierarchal levels, but a closer examination reveals that they are equal. This illusion uses forced perspective to make it seem as if two objects of the same size are actually different sizes. In this case, Eve can only see herself as smaller/inferior while Adam is bigger/superior. Since Eve does not believe herself to be equal to Adam without eating from the Tree of Knowledge, she is “trapped” in the illusion, reflecting her question, “[F]or inferior who is free?” (9.825). However, the audience can see the illusion the way it is presented to them, or they can step back to see the reality that both figures are the same size. They can choose the interpretation that they think Milton is presenting, unlike Eve. |
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