Monthly Archives: March 2015

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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