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| My Literary Criticisms; Poe and Eliot | |
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| Topic Started: Dec 18 2007, 09:16 AM (96 Views) | |
| StillCrazed | Dec 18 2007, 09:16 AM Post #1 |
 
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So, I had to write these two papers in my English II class, and I got an A on both papers. I figure I'll post them here, see what people think. Obsession Leads to Hate: The Logical Fallacies and Cognitive Distortions of Edgar Allan Poe It seems like a fair and safe assessment to say that Edgar Allan Poe wasn’t really all about the sunshine and buttercups. Poe’s work seemed to have two shades. Dark and even darker. However, some might say that Edgar Allan Poe found his ‘light’ in women. In poems like “Annabel Lee” and “The Raven”, we see, through the melancholy, a deep, binding love for the female species, one so deep, that without the radiance of Woman, Man is left with nothing but darkness. However, upon further investigation of Poe’s work, one might stumble across works like “Berenice”, “Morella”, “The Oval Portrait”, and “The Fall of the House of Usher”, all of which contain horrific scenes of females being tortured and ultimately killed. So, ultimately, the question begs, why is Edgar Allan Poe so hypocritical when it comes to his stance on women? Could it be mere coincidence? Poe, did, after all, have a very diverse collection of works. “There simply were no well-defined stages in Poe’s writing, no set periods during which he concentrated exclusively upon some particular aspect of his prose material.”(Griffith 71) Or could it be, that Poe did, in fact, LOVE women, in fact, too much, and ultimately went from love, to need, to obsession, and ultimately, to hate. In Poe’s short story, “Ligeia” we are treated to a perspective shown in both his prose and his poetry. There are, ultimately, two halves of this story. The first half is about subservient love and worship of Ligeia, a woman, who, to the narrator, took on a “radiance of an opium-dream”(Poe 569). We see a man who views “Ligeia as a sort of personal Venus Aphrodite”(Basler 53, giving her a goddess-like air of magnificence, beauty, awe, and wonder. IN her death we see a man who has been “crushed into the very dust with sorrow”(Poe 574) and, essentially, exiles himself into “the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England.”(Poe 574) However, the second half introduces Lady Rowena Trevanion, a “fair-haired and blue eyed”(Poe 574) maiden, whom the narrator marries, and “loath[es] her with a hatred belonging more to a demon than a man.” (Poe 575) Through the course of his book, the narrator “goes from a state of near childlike dependency on his first wife to aversion and hatred toward his second.”(Magistrale 62) We are treated to two different characters in the narrator, and, thus, are also treated to the two different views that Poe has on woman, views that are tainted by Logical Fallacies and Cognitive Distortions. The first problem with Poe’s narrator, and Poe himself, is that the image he places on Woman is one of godly proportions. This Cognitive Distortion is known as Magnification. “You exaggerate the importance of things(such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny(your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the ‘binocular trick’.”(Burns) The narrator is not just in love with Ligeia. He is “suffering from obsession”(Basler 56), and has, thus, magnified his first wife, Ligeia, to proportions not fitting a human. The narrator does not love a woman, but rather, the exaggerated image of his woman. In fact, the narrator is SO convinced of Ligeia’s goddess-like proportions, that he believes his lover can defeat death. This is, for the narrator, the purpose of Rowena. Rowena is merely “the sleeping beauty whose soul and body…..are necessary for Ligeia’s return.”(Magistral 62) Rowena, to both Poe and the narrator, is simply a pawn, a means to a greater cause, and her life is forfeit for the greater good, the return of Ligeia. Poe seems to care so little for Rowena, that he barely gives her any description at all, minus noting her hair and eye color, a vastly inferior description when compared to the nearly two page description of Ligeia. But how does this, directly, relate to Poe? How can it be proven that Poe, himself, magnified women. In examining Poe’s work, specifically his poetry, such as “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee”, the lack of woman, i.e. Lenore and Annabel Lee, causes the narrator to sink into melancholy and hopelessness. In both examples, we see men who are unable to feel happiness without the warmth of their women’s love, and in Annabel Lee, we even see the narrator try to satisfy his need by sleeping with the corpse of his bride. “For these pathetic figures, Woman is all, and her death generates various compulsive behaviors which imply psychic devastation.”(Kennedy 117) Poe himself suffered from the same source of depression. Poe was miserable without women, saying himself, in a letter sent to Marie Louise Shew in 1848: “Unless some true and tender and pure womanly love saves me, I shall hardly last a year longer, alone.” Poe suffered the same melancholy and hopelessness as his poetic and prose counterparts. “And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted-nevermore!”(Poe) It was even “the poet’s late, curious habit of pursuing several women at once”(Kennedy 118) which proved that Poe felt a “consuming need for female warmth and care.”(Kennedy 118) This NEED for Woman, in this case, Ligeia, can be traced back to an over-glorification of women. But WHY do Poe and the narrator over-glorify women? What does the Magnification distortion stem from? You may find, in considering the Logical Fallacy of Self-Esteem, that both Poe and the narrator did not think very highly of themselves. “Feelings of inferiority result from the thought that you’re inadequate in comparison with others. You think, ‘She’s much better looking than I am’ or “He’s so much smarter and successful. What’s wrong with me.’”(Burns) The narrator in “Ligeia” refers to himself as “child-like” when compared to Ligeia, and describes Ligeia’s love for him as “unmerited” and “unworthily bestowed”. The only strength the author finds is through his wife, and without Ligeia, he himself is nothing, at least in his skewed perspective. During his second marriage, we see the author try to replace that emptiness he feels with, at first, opium, and later, cruelty towards Rowena. We see a similar dependence in Poe himself when we refer back to his letter to Marie Louise Shew, and when we also look at his constant quests for love, we see that Poe thought nothing of himself without women. “After Virginia’s death, he craved a new bride, and fell in love with Annie Richmond, openly hoping for the decease of her husband so he could propose to her. His contingency plans during those last years also included marriage proposals to the poet Sara Helen Whitman and(just weeks after his fatal collapse) to his childhood love, Sarah Elmira Shelton.”(Kennedy 118) Poe shows his own lack of self-esteem through his NEED for female warmth, comfort, and protection. Without it, he can barely find the strength to go on, and he projects that mentality onto the characters in his poems and short stories, in this case, the narrator of “Ligeia”. The narrator and Poe are SO obsessed with their over-glorified image of Woman, that they begin to believe their own outrageous claims and ideas. This Cognitive Distortion is known as Emotional Reasoning. “You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: ‘I feel it, therefore it must be true.’”(Burns) The narrator assumes that, since he feels strongly about Ligeia being this goddess-like figure, and that he can’t live without her, that it MUST be possible to bring her back to life. This is why the bridal chamber resembles a torture chamber. This is why he, though he never directly admits it, poisons Rowena. He HAS to sacrifice one life, or, at least, he believes he must sacrifice one life, to bring back the life of Ligeia. He devises all these elaborate measures for the demise of Rowena, like the torture chamber-esque bridal chamber, because, in his mind, it WILL bring his “opium-dream” back to him. And this is also why, at the end of the story, the narrator truly believes that he, somehow, reincarnated his lost wife Ligeia. Did he truly bring her back to life? Some would say yes, but, then again, our narrator is not very credible. It’s hard enough to believe his obsessed, murderous mind as it is, but when you add that, by his own admission, his “memory is feeble through much suffering”(Poe 569), and also factor in that he was “habitually fettered in the shackles of the drug[opium]”(Poe 575), we can see that this man is, more than likely, a confused, sorrow ridden individual rather than a necromancer. Still, he truly believes that he had brought his Ligeia back to life, and, since he feels so strongly about Ligeia’s goddess-like air, it MUST be true, for him, anyway. Once again, Poe gives his narrator a trait that he too shares. When you again look at the letter Poe sent to Mary Louise Shew, he believes, without the love of Woman, he will surely die. He won’t “last a year longer” if he does not receive the warmth that only a woman can give. In fact, he believed so strongly in the power of a woman’s love, that it became a central point in his poetry. “Ulalume, “The Raven”, “Annabel Lee”, and “Lenore” all show male narrators pining over the loss of their women, and unable to fill the void that their deaths caused. In his personal life, Poe barely took the time to grieve his lost wife, Virginia Poe, before he began searching for a new wife, proposing to fellow poets, childhood friends, and even married women. Poe believed SO strongly in the NEED for female affection, that it consumed both his writing and his life. So why do we see so much hate against women? If Poe loved women so much, why does the narrator despise his second wife? In fact, why does Poe, in many of his works, describe horrible scenes of torture and death towards beautiful women? Why does the husband in “Morella” hate his wife? Why does the man in “Berenice” rip out his dying cousins teeth, while she is STILL alive?! Why does Roderick in “The Fall of the House of Usher” attempt to bury his own sister, Madeline, alive? The reason being that, Poe, despite being obsessed with women, could have very well also hated women. Poe could very well have been a sexist, a key logical fallacy in understanding “Ligeia”. Poe shows his sexism through his narrator in “Ligeia”, a man that “is likewise clear from his behavior toward Rowena that Ligeia’s mate harbors similar antagonism toward women that links him closely to the narrator in ‘Morella’.”(Magistrale 62) Rowena is never given a clear description, which leads us to believe that she is a representation of women, and that, despite his quest for love, Edgar Allan Poe hates women, as, through out his life, the one thing Poe felt he needed most, he could never really get. “Resisting autobiographical oversimplification, we may yet observe that in three notable instances, the women on whom he depended for comfort, approval, and affection-not to mention other creaturely needs-died and thus deprived him[Poe] of emotional sustenance and solicitude.”(Kennedy 117) It can be inferred that Edgar Allan Poe felt resentment towards women, as he did believe that they were the only source of happiness, yet he could never attain that happiness, having lost his wife, mother and foster mother. It can be inferred, through the violent depiction in Poe’s prose work against women, that Poe was blinded by his own pain, and believed that women were the cause of male suffering. In his poetry, he illustrates the pain women cause men, and in his prose, he essentially gets even. In the case of the narrator in “Ligeia”, he mistreats Rowena, and when he sees Ligeia, rather than being overjoyed at the return of his goddess, he seems more frightened. “And given more time in their marriage, it is possible that he would have committed ever more overt acts of cruelty toward Ligeia herself.”(Magistral 62) Is Poe’s stance slightly hypocritical and, in the end, very hopeless? Very much so. It is clear that “Ligeia”, Poe’s poems and prose works, and even his own life, are riddled with logical fallacies and cognitive distortions. Poe loved women, and in fact, he loved them so much, that he began to hate them. He made beautiful women goddesses, and then cursed the heavens which he could not enter. Poe always craved and obsessed the affection of women, and then hated them for needing them. This may be why Poe considers “Ligeia” one of his favorite pieces. It covers the obsession and the hatred of women, all in one ten page prose. Works Cited 1. Poe, Edgar Allan. “Ligeia.” Edgar Allan Poe Complete Tales and Poems. Ed. Wilbur S. Scott. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2002 2. Kennedy, Gerald J. “Poe, ‘Ligeia’, and the Problem of the Dying Woman.” New Essays On Poe’s Major Tales. Ed. Kenneth Silverman. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 3. Basler, Roy P. “The Interpretation of ‘Ligeia’.” Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robert Regan. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967. 4. Magistrale, Tony. Student Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. 5. Burns, David D., MD. The Feeling Good Handbook. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1989 6. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Raven.” Edgar Allan Poe Complete Tales and Poems. Ed. Wilbur S. Scott. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2002 7. Griffith, Clark. “Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ and the English Romantics.” Modern Critical Views Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York, NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985 Notes On Critics 1. Basler, Roy P.- Director of the Reference Department of the Library of Congress, is the editor of the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. 2. Kennedy, Gerald J.- Professor of English at Louisiana State University, has published The Astonished Traveler and Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing, and is the author of the book Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity. 3. Burns, David D., MD.- Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He has served as a Visiting Scholar to Harvard Medical School and has served as the Acting Chief of Psychiatry at the Presbyterian/University of Pennsylvania Medical Center in Philadelphia. He is the author of Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. 4. Magistrale, Tony- English Professor and the Director of Undergraduate Advising at the University of Vermont. He has published two books on Poe, The Poe Encyclopedia(Greenwood 1997) and Poe’s Children: Connections Between Tales of Terror and Detection(1999). He is the author of The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape(Greenwood 1992). 4. Griffith, Clark- Professor of English at Iowa and is the author of The Long Shadow: Emily #$%&inson’s Tragic Poetry. |
 
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| StillCrazed | Dec 18 2007, 09:17 AM Post #2 |
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Logical Fallacies, Cognitive Distortions, and Dysfunctional Thinking in T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock What might stick out to the reader of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is that calling this a love song is really not a proper title. In fact, T.S. Eliot himself referred to the poem as observational. The book that “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was published in is titled The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock and Other Observations. Reading it, one does not uncover an overly poetic and romantic tale of a lover, pining for a woman. In fact, any references made to women are desexualized at best: “in fact, when a woman is introduced into the poem, she is presented impersonally: ‘if one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl…’ Prufrock calls her one because he is frightened of any relationship that may involve him; he desexualizes her, so as to take away fear”(Braybooke 14). So if it’s not a ‘love story’, what is the point and purpose of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? Upon reading the poem, we see that T.S. Eliot has created a hopeless, obsessed, and depressed character. Prufrock is a miserable character, consumed by his own personal sadness, comparing himself, unkindly, to Guido Montefeltrano, Michelangelo, Hamlet, John the Baptist, and Ulysses. T.S. Eliot is writing of a character who has failed, at what exactly can’t be exactly certain, but for Prufrock, that failure consumes him. Understanding this, we must then begin to unravel the mind of Prufrock, and realize that it is littered with cognitive distortions, logical fallacies, and dysfunctional thinking. At the 2000 APA conference, Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis discussed their theories on dysfunctional thinking. According to Ellis, dysfunctional thinking “ boils down to 3 things. 1. I must do well. 2. The world must treat me well. 3. The world must be easy”(Ellis). Examining these three tenants of dysfunctional thinking, one can find the flaws in Prufrock’s thinking. Examining the first tenant, “I must do well”, we see the primary flaw in Prufrock’s thinking. “At the same time the literary allusions suggest unrealistic models for comparison. Adequacy is not enough. Prufrock follows the internalized directive, which orders him to be as good as, if not better than, the heroic figures of history and myth: Ulysses, Hamlet, and John the Baptist.”(Salmon) Prufrock creates unrealistic expectations on himself, and when he cannot reach those expectations, he is crushed. Since he “must do well”, and hasn’t, his dysfunctional mindset creates a negative outlook on the world, and thus, everything he says is bleak, depressing, and hopeless. The second dysfunctional thinking tenant leads to theories on what Prufrock might have failed at, possibly why this story is, ironically, referred to as a love song. “My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin- (They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’)”(Eliot 1052) The second tenant, “the world must treat me well” explains these lines in the poem. Even though Prufrock dressed nicely, and attempts to make himself look good, he assumes that people are speaking negatively of his appearance behind his back. This is not simply dysfunctional thinking, but it is also a cognitive distortion. This distortion is labeled by David Burns as Jumping To Conclusions, the Fortune Telling Error. “You anticipate that things will turn out badly and feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact”(Burns). We see that Prufrock has not been treated well by the world, because he is already assuming that the world won’t treat him well. This may be why the title of the poem is a love song, and why Prufrock desexualizes women. It can be reasoned that Prufrock’s failure was failed love, in some fashion, and it is this reason that he hates himself. He can be reasoned that, since he doesn’t believe the world will treat him right, someone, possibly a woman, hasn’t treated him right. The final tenant, “the world must be easy”, is revealed early in the poem. Prufrock describes the evening as, “like a patient etherized upon a table”(Eliot 1051). To be etherized is to not feel pain and anguish. Prufrock is expressing his want to remove himself from pain and torment. He wants things to be painless and easy. This line of the poem, “suggests the desire for inactivity to the point of enforced release from pain”(Williamson 59). Prufrock compares himself, or at least his story, to Guido Montefeltrano, a tortured soul in Dante’s Inferno. As Guido was reluctant to tell his story, revealing why he is in hell, Prufrock is reluctant to tell his story and travel through is own personal hell. “These words are spoken by Count Guido de Montefeltrano(1223-98) in Dante’s Inferno xxvii, 61-6. Dante recounts his visit to the underworld. In the Eighth Chasm of Hell he meets Guido, punished here, with other false and deceitful counselors, in a single prison of flame for his treacherous advice on earth to Pope Boniface. When the damned speak from this flame, the voice sounds from the tip, which trembles. Guido refers to this, and goes on to explain that he speaks freely only because he believes that Dante is like himself, one of the dead, who will never return to earth to report what he says”(Southam 33). Prufrock, like Guido, reluctantly tells his story, because he believes no one else will ever hear the tale, and thus, Prufrock feels comfortable traveling through this personal hell of his. In a sense, the doomed state of the reader, as Prufrock commonly uses plural pronouns to describe his depressing symbols, such as “we drown”(Eliot 1054), is the ether for Prufrock. He will only delve into his own depression, his personal hell, if he can do it in a fashion that he views as easy. Once we’ve discovered that Prufrock suffers from all three tenants of dysfunctional thinking, the next conclusion in that train of thought would be that Prufrock also suffers from the cognitive distortion of All-Or-Nothing Thinking. Prufrock has failed, quite possibly in love, and thus, does not feel the world treats him well, and thus, does not feel the world is easy. That one failure has lead Prufrock to a destructive stream of thought that causes Prufrock to descend into a hell of depression, hopelessness, and misery. According to David Burns, All-Or-Nothing Thinking is, “see[ing] things in black and white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure”(Burns). The best example of this is the contrast to Hamlet Prufrock tries to present. Unfortunately for Prufrock, contrasting himself to Hamlet actually compares him more than Prufrock would desire. “Hamlet was given to self-scrutiny and tormented by indecisiveness. Thus, Prufrock’s sudden exclamation is to cut short the Hamlet-like soliloquy he has just indulged in and to assert his own subordinate, unheroic role in life”(Southam 35). Though Prufrock tries to make you think otherwise, possibly a final, pitiful attempt at seeming heroic, Hamlet’s indecisiveness and self scrutiny describe Prufrock to the letter. “It is evident in Shakespeare’s depressed Hamlet who like Eliot’s Prufrock makes his decisions and revisions and blames himself for not being able to take effective action”(Salmon). Prufrock’s self-scrutiny, his tendency to allow the whole to fall because of one failed detail, is a perfect example of the All-Or-Nothing cognitive distortion. The final flaw in Prufrock’s logic comes from an exploration of all the various biblical and Christian references in the poem. From Guido in Dante’s Inferno, the reference to Ecclesiastes, and the comparison to John the Baptist, specifically the death. Prufrock suffers from the logical fallacy of Argument by Authority. Prufrock justifies his depression, pain, and failure by making it MORE hopeless. Not only has he given up because of failure, but he is destined to fail. He is on a path of failure, set by God. Just as the denizens of Dante’s Hell are required, by divinity, to rise from their graves and speak, and are compelled, by divinity, to continue their tortures. So, by comparing himself to Guido, Prufrock is claiming that he is compelled, by divinity, to suffer in his own personal Hell. After all, it’s easier and less painful to blame God for one’s own problems. The most important aspect, in order to fully understand Prufrock’s state of mind, is the three tenants of dysfunctional thinking. Once you have uncovered Prufrock’s dysfunctional thinking, a whole realm of cognitive distortions and logical fallacies become apparent. But, at the center of it all, is those three tenants. Prufrock failed. Prufrock is not loved by the world. And, for Prufrock, the world is not easy. Works Cited Southam, B.C.. A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1968. Eliot, T.S.. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. 10th ed. 2007. Williamson, George. A Reader's Guide to T.S. Eliot. 2nd ed. New York, NY: H. Wolf Book Manufacturing Co., 1966. Fenichel, Michael. "APA 2000: Historic Dialogue between Beck and Ellis." fenichel.com. 29-Dec-1997. PsychServices. 15 Nov 2007 http://www.fenichel.com/Beck-Ellis.shtml. Salmon, A.E.. "Shadow on the Leaves." English Literature 1102 Syllabus. 08-Jan-2002. Seminole Community College. 15 Nov 2007 http://www2.scc-fl.edu/asalmon/Eliot,%20Pl...he%20Leaves.htm. Salmon, A.E.. "T. S. Eliot's Love Song and Prufock's Dilemma." English Literature 1102 Syllabus. 08-Jan-2002. Seminole Community College. 15 Nov 2007 http://www2.scc-fl.edu/asalmon/Eliot,%20Pl...he%20Leaves.htm. Burns, David D., MD. The Feeling Good Handbook. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1989 Braybrooke, Neville. T.S. Eliot: A Critical Essay. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1967. |
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9:43 AM Jul 30
