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The first time I read The Crucible in grade 12, I picked up on a quote by John Proctor near the end of the play:

Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!

While I fought to decide whom I believed were good or bad in the play, I kept this quote in mind when thinking about Proctor. Morality plays a huge part when reading this text, and it’s hard to side with anybody at all (it’s not hard to determine that Abigail is a horrible person, and Parris is super annoying, let’s just come clean with that now).

So what’s in a name? It turns out that there is a lot that is tied to one’s name. Names identify us, and we, as humans, like to name and classify things in order to give it purpose (Q: What would a stapler be if it didn’t have a name? A: Probably nothing, since we only give names to things we can conceive, or conceive to exist). Aside from that, t is the only thing we have when we have nothing left. After everything comes and goes, we are left, at the end of the (extremely dreadful and theoretical) day, with what we call ourselves.

Proctor, I believe, was so obsessed with refusing to sign his name on the written confession because it is the only thing he had left to pass on. His soul and his body are incapable of being handed down to his children or over to his wife, but his name is. Elizabeth already shares his name, and therefore, if he signed his name upon the confession, he would have “shared” with her his “fault” (if that makes sense). The same applies to his children (and future child). Proctor’s sins would have been carried down through his name.

I think of this like Hitler. The name “Hitler” (and even “Adolf”, as seen in Until the Dawn’s Light) holds very negative connotations because he was associated with the Holocaust in WWII. Imagine if Hitler had kids; imagine the dread they would have had to live solely because of the name they bore. Because the community in which the Salem witch trials took place was highly religious, carrying the burden of sin would have been a big deal.

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There were two questions that struck me particularly hard during today’s seminar:

1. Should be be reading Heart of Darkness in Arts One at all, given its criticisms?
2. Why are we blaming Conrad, who wrote in 1899, for not being more mindful of the social wrongs?
3. The n-word is used in a surprisingly numerous amount of texts – did seeing the n-word strike you in any way?

After thinking more about it, I came up with these responses:

1. I think that the fear in getting people to read any piece of work that could potentially be controversial is that we might be influenced negatively by what we take in, or that the reading is taught so that it is praised rather than objectively addressed. But I don’t think that there is harm in reading controversial things so long as there is a conscious effort to try and see the bigger picture and how it fits into the context of our education. This may be confusing, so I’ll give an example: Mein Kampf was Hitler’s manifesto in which he outlines his political ideologies and impending plans for Germany’s future. While I don’t agree with or support the Nazi regime whatsoever, I believe that people will inevitably read it regardless of the controversy behind it to further their understanding of world history and politics in and around that time period. I think that there is a value in submerging yourself in worlds unlike our own through literature and art because it gives us perspective, and it also helps us strengthen our own personal values. However, I think that anybody that reads Mein Kampf in the twenty-first century and DOESN’T feel a loathing hatred towards near-totalitarianism is using the text in a retrogressive way and needs to be dunked into a tank of ice water.
2. At first I, too, blamed Conrad for his  attitudes towards the social wrongs presented in the novella. I wondered why someone of such literary regard had the capability to become well known with his mindset. But then I realized that perhaps it is wrong to apply the social context of today to the early twentieth-century. Conrad wrote about things he felt were necessary to talk about, and in truth, he was not born in the twentieth-century anyway. His personal ideologies would have been influenced by his society during his time, and I do think that his intentions weren’t malicious in writing this story. I now believe that it’s isn’t totally fair to blame Conrad; however, that doesn’t mean we let the various messages of the story slip away.
3. I feel that the n-word belongs to black people as they changed it from an insult to using the word as a form of liberation – taking the word and using it to demolish the slander used to fuel that word. I was shocked and rather offended whenever I see the n-word being used by people who are not black. I also hadn’t realized that it was used in so many texts – some of which I read in high school and completely didn’t pay attention to the fact that the n-word was used! It especially surprised me to hear that John Lennon wrote a song called “Woman is the N****r of the World”, which I think is extremely racist. Personally, it just further proves to me why our feminist attempts must be intersectional and conscious of the multiple sub-categories that women fall under, not just white, working class, able women. I digress. Back on track – however, as discussed in my last point, Conrad was exposed to that ideology and probably saw it as “just a word to describe dark skinned people”.

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I found it rather amusing that Hacking wrote about multiple personality and stylistically, his writing reflected that. It seemed to jump around, moving back and forth between ideas, much like multiplicity. I just thought I’d put that out there.

However, after listening to Jill’s lecture today, I was extremely disturbed by the fact that until the 1970’s, child sexual abuse wasn’t really talked about because we didn’t have the language to talk about it.

Like…what?

I’m taking linguistics concurrently this term and it intrigued me to no end how this could have been. We recently went over the idea that language is productive; that is, since our environment is always changing, our language has to adapt to those changes in order for us to be able to continue talking about them. If child sexual abuse existed, then by definition we should have had the capacity to talk about it. It occurred to me that perhaps it wasn’t a matter of not understanding child sexual abuse, but rather the victims of it not being able to talk about it as openly as it can be talked about today (ex. to a therapist etc.)

Furthermore, after we developed the language to talk about child sexual abuse, it also disturbed me that psychologists would correlate multiple personality with the abuse the same way that it was associated with hysteria in 19th century France. It seems so silly to think of things in such a formulaic way. I like to think of this using words as examples: if the plural of mouse is mice, then the plural of house is hice. Clearly that is not the case, and native English speakers will know this isn’t true, but attributing grammar rules to deviations and irregularities will cause what is known as “bad English”. Similarly, attributing a common factor, like child sexual abuse and hysteria, to a case like multiple personality which has many different defining features and has been difficult to diagnose in the past anyway causes detrimental effects to the patients.

It also plagued me to think about how the psychiatrists would actually impose multiple personality onto their patients through their goal of trying to uncover some sort of child sexual abuse that may not actually have been there in the first place, causing their patients to “remember” events that did not actually happen.

And if all of that wasn’t disturbing enough to me, I have to sleep with the book on my side table with the creepy cover staring back at me. Thanks a lot, Hacking…

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It fascinates me that Hobbes was able to produce such progressive arguments in the 17th century. The idea that the state must possess complete power in order to benefit society is something that people today really try to digress from for fear of corruption and chaos. But that wasn’t what Hobbes was focusing on, necessarily. I think what he was trying to get at was that a good government (in his eyes, a monarchy) minimizes factors that can lead to discord;  a good government isn’t divided amongst itself, which can lead to separate agendas, which in turn will lead to civil war.

I am one that vouches fully for basic human rights – the right to live, the right to choose, etc. – so when I read a synopsis of the Leviathan, I was almost deterred from actually reading it. However, Hobbes’s argument made sense to me. If we are talking about the greater good – one that benefits a whole and not just individuals – then a monarch (with good intentions) is the best option. Then I thought about individualistic vs. collectivistic countries (such as America, Canada vs. Singapore, Japan) and rethought my initial argument: is individualistic culture really more beneficial as a whole?

I remember in AP Psych last year reading about how collectivist societies are actually happier than individualistic societies simply because they all work towards common goals. Furthermore, they feel like they can rely on the strength of the population, whereas the last time I believed in the strength of a population was when I got sick (I actually believed in the strength of the population of white blood cells inside me. Ahem).

Moreover, I read a tweet this morning while I was creeping somebody that said, “We blame society, but we are society” and I think that pretty sums up Hobbes’s argument (and what Crawford was trying to reiterate): that we can’t keep placing faults in the things we chose to implement due to our own inability to govern ourselves.

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If you survived the Holocaust, you haven’t truly experienced it.

It was the above paradox that struck me the hardest during yesterday’s seminar and, after reading the text, it wasn’t a surprise to me why Appelfeld couldn’t talk about what happened in WWII directly, even if he hadn’t “truly experienced it”. It was easy enough to assume there was a parallel between the Adolf in the story and how he behaved and the Adolf that went down in history for mass genocide and tyranny. It’s hard to believe that it was purely coincidence that the boy Adolf punched at school, named Ernst, for being annoying, was Jewish. This book holds a thick undertone of eerie foreshadowing of what would come in the years after this story takes place.

But what bothered me further on a more personal level was the topic of assimilation that was also brought up in seminar yesterday. It is a particularly predominant issue today, even if we don’t think of it as such in a country like Canada that promotes multiculturalism. I often find that my relatives in Asia are surprised when they find out I can speak Mandarin Chinese fluently, as if being Canadian automatically means that I am incapable of doing so; they’re pleased when I tell them I still hold many Chinese traditions close to heart; they’re almost offended that even though I believe in tradition, I still believe in modernism too (“Nose ring? Tattoo? What kind of young Chinese woman are you?” some of them have said [to my face]).

I know it’s worse in other parts of the world, and has been detrimental in the past for many groups of ethnic people. There are some who, in the 21st century, still feel that their culture is embarrassing, and some who are forced into believing that their culture is equivalent to shame. I don’t know what I would do if I were in Blanca’s shoes; my cultural identity is important to me and I’ve always believed that assimilation was not an option, but then again, Blanca and I live in vastly different worlds. Some describe assimilation as merely “washing out” culture; I believe it leans more towards “scrubbing a ‘stain’ clean”. In the text, assimilation goes beyond washing, scrubbing, scouring, bleaching, or any other related cleaning technique; in the text, to assimilate is to attempt to rewrite a history of peoples as if they never existed.

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