I never know when someone’s on drugs or had plastic surgery, or when a poem is supposed to “really” be about sex even though it’s clearly about plants. I never get metaphors. Everything always has to be explained to me, like Ax in the Animorphs series.
“The Goblin Market,” Christina Rossetti
“Hills Like White Elephants,” Ernest Hemingway
‘It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,’ the man said. ‘It’s not really an operation at all.’
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
‘I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.’
The girl did not say anything.
‘I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all
perfectly natural.’
‘Then what will we do afterwards?’
‘We’ll be fine afterwards. Just like we were before.’
‘What makes you think so?’
‘That’s the only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy.’
It’s about abortion. I had no idea.
“After Apple-Picking,” Robert Frost
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples:
I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
It’s about dying. I had no idea.
“This Is Just To Say,” William Carlos Williams
and so cold
It’s about cheating on your wife, I guess. It made sense, once someone spelled it out for me.
“The Rocking Horse Winner,” D.H. Lawrence
“And he would slash the horse on the neck with the little whip he had asked Uncle Oscar for. He knew the horse could take him to where there was luck, if only he forced it. So he would mount again and start on his furious ride, hoping at last to get there.
“You’ll break your horse, Paul!” said the nurse.
“He’s always riding like that! I wish he’d leave off!” said his elder sister Joan.
But he only glared down on them in silence. Nurse gave him up. She could make nothing of him. Anyhow, he was growing beyond her.
One day his mother and his Uncle Oscar came in when he was on one of his furious rides. He did not speak to them.
“Hallo, you young jockey! Riding a winner?” said his uncle.
“Aren’t you growing too big for a rocking-horse? You’re not a very little boy any longer, you know,” said his mother.
But Paul only gave a blue glare from his big, rather close-set eyes. He would speak to nobody when he was in full tilt. His mother watched him with an anxious expression on her face.
At last he suddenly stopped forcing his horse into the mechanical gallop and slid down.”
It’s about masturbation, I’ve been told. Not sure I buy it.
“The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck
“I got thinkin’ how we was holy when we was one thing, an’ mankin’ was holy when it was one thing. An’ it on’y got unholy when one mis’able little fella got the bit in his teeth an’ run off his own way, kickin’ an’ draggin’ an’ fightin’. Fella like that bust the holi-ness. But when they’re all workin’ together, not one fella for another fella, but one fella kind of harnessed to the whole shebang—that’s right, that’s holy.”
“His initials are J.C…he dies at the hands of a violent mob…his sacrifice inspires others to change their lives…are you really not getting this?” I really didn’t get it.
That’s what everyone tells me, at least, but I remain only partially convinced, even now. Please comfort me in the comments by talking about metaphors you never understood until recently.
Tags: books, christina rossetti, ernest hemingway, mallory does not understand imagery, poetry, robert frost
Everything about Chaucer escaped me until it was spelled out with a stern hand, including that “Britomart” is a human woman name and not a type of English K-Mart store that happened to come mounted upon a horse made entirely of temptations. Not The Temptations, either, just plain usual temptations.
I think you’re thinking of Britomart in Spenser’s Fairie Queene. To be fair, both Chaucer and Spenser are often hard to understand, but Spenser usually takes the high road. Chaucer… Chaucer’s just ribald most of the time.
This is how lost I was in that class. Also, accurate, and I once again curse IntenseDebate because I cannot change this, even though everything about the Wife of Bath escaped me ALSO.
I had this English teacher in middle school who was very, very devoutly Evangelical Christian, and her decision to wait until marriage to have sex was common knowledge around school (she was in her mid-thirties and unmarried and it was East Texas so… she was clearly a dried-up spinster in our preteen eyes). Anyway, we did this whole Shakespeare unit in 8th grade and she was SO DELIGHTED to point out each and every reference to sex/penises. Like, thought it was hysterical.
It was weird.
Shakespeare brings it out of people. I had an English professor in college who, when reading my argument against the Oedipal reading of Hamlet (sorry, I don’t think he’s trying to kill Claudius because he’s in love with Gertrude), asked me “Why are you so prudish about sex?”
“. . . .”
RELEVANT: http://the-toast.net/2013/10/15/female-students-d….
Eating plums = Infidelity! WHAT?!!!
*throws degree out window*
Eh, I don’t think it’s a definitive analysis (either textually or academically).
tell that to my high school English teacher!!!
high school english teachers are ALWAYS saying a poem or an image or whatever is definitely, absolutely, no holds barred about one very specific thing.
Yeah, we were always taught with Williams not to read anything into it, because he is writing about “the thing itself” and a plum is just a plum. imagists not symbolists, etc etc
“Hi, Imagists? The death of the author called…SUCK IT!”
/prank calls i guess you could leave imagists
It only makes sense to me if he cheated on her with the person that she was…saving for herself to cheat on him with???
Yeah, that was my reaction. “Oh by the way, it turns out that your girlfriend isn’t really a lesbian, ask me how I know *wink wink*”.
I’m…not sure I’m on board with that poem being about infidelity.
I have slept with the graduate student who was in the back bedroom, and whom you were probably saving for my evening away. Forgive me, he was delicious: so sweet, and so warm.
it’s not a LINE FOR LINE direct metaphor, if I remember what my teacher said, so much as a general apology for ‘giving into temptation’ and being a shitty husband who just takes what he wants regardless of what she’s planning?
I am going to keep thinking it’s about plums, because I am a lot more on board with a poem about how sometimes in general we are selfish in tiny ways that cause the other people in our lives a little bit of sadness, even when we love them. Stealing the plums is bad enough, man. A thousand tiny plum-thefts would lead to a righteous divorce.
Stealing the plums is bad enough: truth.
The poem is about the importance of labeling your food in a shared refrigerator.
This, forever and ever, amen.
I keep thinking about the motherfucking PLUMS and I can only come up a scenario where he just fucked a non-spousal entity (what. michelle. they’re called people.) and went to the fridge for a post-coital snack and ate these plums, and of all the shit to apologize for, he’s going to go with “sorry i ate these plums hahaha I just reailzed they were cold yet still more sensuous than you will ever be again.”
and that’s how some plums took me hostage please send help
I was skimming your comment without fully taking it in and for some reason I thought you were about to reach the conclusion that “he fucked the plums.”
HAS ANYONE CONSIDERED THAT POSSIBILITY? He had sex with the plums guys, that’s what he did.
They are juicy.
This is just to say
I have fucked
the plums
that were in
the icebox
…you probably shouldn’t eat them
“mmm, that was some good infidelity, wasn’t it, old friend?” he asked as he ate all those plums aw yeah
Ohhhh no then what is this one about?
They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her
This is obviously what he meant and my favorite interpretation.
MTE
Although I think it makes more sense if it’s him sleeping with someone ELSE’s spouse. (If the icebox is their marriage.)
*throws plums out window*
Oh, you probably don’t need to be too worried about some of these being “about” something else, like poems are codes or pictographs and all the red wheelbarrows and such can be translated like a language. If good poems were so simple, they wouldn’t be so evocative.
And things like the Hills Like White Elephants–yep, they are talking about abortion, and that matters, but at the same time, if they were talking about getting an appendectomy or even a tattoo, the rest of the story remains. Their fight, the suggestion that the so-called simple procedure will not fix them.
(don’t worry this is not keeping me up at night)
You own the internet, so I am sure you are fine! But I wanted to put my two cents on the counter for any other folks/my former students who worry that literature is words with meaning black-magicked into them.
Yep yep yep I agree. If you just let the words and imagery and whatever wash over you you’ll probably get a feel for what it means without really consciously knowing it.
“bathing in poetry”
I am still unconvinced that the Frost poem is about death. I mean, I guess the last couple of lines (“One can see what will trouble/This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is./Were he not gone,/The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his/Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,/Or just some human sleep.”) does sort of sound like it’s about what dying is like, but the rest of the poem is just such a good description of what you feel like after apple picking that I sort of refuse to believe it’s about something else too.
THE TURTLE IS THE AMERICAN FARMER
THE TURTLE IS THE AMERICAN FARMER
THE TURTLE IS THE AMERICAN FARMER
THE TURTLE IS THE AMERICAN FARMER
and apparently that’s all anyone needs to know about the grapes of wrath so go home
I read The Grapes of Wrath as summer reading between 9th and 10th grade, and our essay assignment for it was, and this is an almost direct quote, “1,000 words analyzing the use and development of a symbol or metaphor Steinbeck employs in the book.
Not the turtle.”
I’m usually pretty good with poems, but am dumb about metaphors in prose/novels, fwiw.
Also, I’d venture to say that the majority of people who corner you into a conversation about what a work’s “really about” are full of it.
It’s ok if you don’t get What It’s REALLY About, because if it’s any good at all (and these examples are), it’s about more than one thing. It’s about a lot of things! And the magic happens when all those things come together and give you a sense of depth and ambiguity and weirdness and possibility. And that’s a good thing! Because otherwise there would be a Big Book of What This Literature Means and we could just go look it up and it would be incredibly boring and also I’d be out of a job. Vive l’ambiguity!
This isn’t about literature but it took me an awfully long time to realize that the Beatles’ “Blackbird” was about civil rights. It was my favorite Beatles song in high school because I thought it was about a generalized ~free spirit~ but when I found out the original intent of the song I thought it seemed kind of condescending!
I literally had not heard this until Paul said it at his concert this year, and I was all “wait, what?”
I just learned this RIGHT NOW. ???
Apparently my tattoo does not mean what I thought it means now that you’ve said that. Shit.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA
No, I’m really sorry, that is aggravating as shit. Can you email me a pic of your tat, tho?
POST IT HERE
Ah, sorry you guys. Yes, I will do that. It’s on my shoulder so I will have to get my husband to take one for me.
Here it is: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v335/ifoundneve…
It has definitely faded after the past five years, but underneath the bird is says ‘drømen’. I kind of fucked that one up because I thought that it meant “dreamer” in Norwegian, but it actually means “dream” in dutch. So basically, I am fucked both ways. 😛
WAIT, WHAT?
Not even joking. My best friend and I looked at each other, stopped “woo”-ing, and decided:
a) He made it up afterwards because it sounded plausible and people think he’s a schmaltzy guy.
b) It’s true, and stupid.
The man went on to write “Ebony and Ivory.” I wouldn’t overestimate his depth when it comes to racism.
My coworker is a Beatles mega-fan – I asked him “do you believe Blackbird is really about civil rights or do you think Paul was BSing after the fact?” and he replied “He is a master at revisionist history, so your second comment is right on the money. In ’68, he explained that he was inspired after hearing a bird singing outside his window in St. John’s Wood. That civil rights shit started up just a few years ago in interviews. He’s a manipulator.”
CASE CLOSED.
Yeah, way to place yourself on the right side of history, Paul, but it probably would’ve been more helpful to mention this sometime during the actual 60s…
I mean, I am not the person to decide if that would be condescending and dumb, but I definitely was not thrilled by the idea.
If that’s the case, making it a blackbird seems a little bit on-the-nose.
Mr TARDIStime is learning “Norwegian Wood” as part of his musical repertoire right now:
“I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me…
She showed me her room, isn’t it good, norwegian wood?
She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere,
So I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair.
I sat on a rug, biding my time, drinking her wine
We talked until two and then she said, “It’s time for bed”
She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh.
I told her I didn’t and crawled off to sleep in the bath
And when I awoke, I was alone, this bird had flown
So I lit a fire, isn’t it good, norwegian wood.”
He thinks it’s about a lady nicely hosting a man in her home for the night, and him leaving having feelings for her in the morning.
I think it’s about a guy who expected sex, did not get the sex and set the lady’s house on fire in the morning.
WHO IS RIGHT?!?!?
It is TOTALLY about a guy who wanted sex, didn’t get sex, and set the lady’s house on fire. ABSOLUTELY
I’m confused about whether I love or hate this girl, though – on one hand, she’s a terrible host; who makes their guests sleep in the bath when there is a rug, at the very least?
On the other hand, her approach to hosting this guy makes me think maybe she’s Mallory The Misandrist, collecting men for her Throne of Male Apology (I mean, she’s doesn’t have a chair, it says in the song).
How dare you. I would never let a man find rest in my home; I would make him run laps around the house, slowly, in the cold and in the dark, until dawn came for him.
BRB, telling Mr TARDIStime to rewrite the song so that when the dawn comes, he’s tired from his laps around the house and Mallory is there waiting with her Misandrist Spider Army. His body will provide much-needed fuel for their hatred.
Wait wait wait, I always understood that Norwegian Wood is about smoking pot with a girl. The “I lit a fire” is lighting up a joint in the morning? I feel like I picked that up out of Beatles Anthology…
I honestly have no idea, I’m just going off the lyrics.
I kind of can imagine Paul being a Nice Guy ™ as a youngster, though, you know? Like, he sits on the floor all night, talking with this girl, patiently waiting for her to get drunk enough to do him and then she’s all “I’m tired, bed time” and banishes him to the bathroom, and then in the morning he gets pissed off and sets her house on fire and then bitches to his friends about how she’s a cock tease?
Well, he probably bitched to his friends about how she’s a cock tease but just IMAGINED setting the house on fire IRL. I don’t know that Paul’s an arsonist.
It’s a John song, and he does seem like he would be a big enough asshole to set a girl’s apartment on fire, so I guess it could go either way.
He is. John has pretty much said the song is based on an affair he had (but without the setting on fire part. I think). Also, I have always interpreted that sitar interlude right after the third verse as the part where they have sexytimes. Seriously, listen to it again.
You know, if a girl brings you into a room and tells you to sit down, but the only place to sit is the bed… but then the guy sits on the rug instead? She gives him wine, she tells him when it’s time for bed, she teases him about having to work in the morning… but he goes to another room and sleeps in a bath? He never had the girl, but she had him?
I actually read this backwards. I thought the girl brought the guy up for sex, and she got frustrated when he completely failed to take every hint she threw at him. And then he wakes up, starts the fireplace, and sits around being ignorantly happy.
It IS? How did this actual late boomer not know this? Mind blown
that song was ruined for me when the druggie/deadbeat sister of the cute young female doctor on ER scream-sang it during the birth of the child that she quickly abandoned.
that song was ruined for me when the druggie/deadbeat sister of the cute young female doctor on ER scream-sang it during the birth of the child that she quickly abandoned.
Someday I’ll write a book wherein every character’s initials are J.C., and not a-one of them’ll be Christ-like. Just to mess with high school English teachers.
(It will, of course, be a modern American classic and taught in all the schools. Penguin will put out an edition with a sober painting from 1880 on the cover. There will be Cliff Notes.)
“As you can see here with this masterstroke, the fact that all of these characters’ initials are J.C. and yet none resembles Christ, we can infer that the entire book is about Christ. Here, the negative space is the metaphor. Or is it the symbolism? Whatever. Anyway, what isn’t there is what the book, and therefore each character, actually is. By not acknowledging its greatness, by being utterly un-selfconscious about this fact, we see the very definition of a Christ-like existence. Each character represents just a small facet of Christ’s existence. As well, the author is very clearly telling the reader that Christ exists in all of us. Christ was, after all, human. Taken together, the characters portray his omniscience. Because they exist everywhere in the universe contained in the book, they are also omnipotent, as they are able to affect the direction of the universe by their actions.”
Oh, hi, are you the guy who wrote every single essay my husband reads to me when grading papers?
This is the highlight of my day and for it I thank you.
And curse you for all the freshman lit essays my friends will have to grade in future, for they will complain at me LOUDLY as I live my non-teacher life. *does the English major ritual knock on wood*
Aw, you’re the highlight of my day! Thanks!
Now I’m going to be sure to include a character with the initials C.J. and that kid will totally be the anti-anti-Christ. Just to make your friends even happier. (And hey, it can happen, the not going into teaching thing. I mean, sure, my husband didn’t escape it, but I’ve spent all my years since graduation in the accounts department. So.) (Knock on wood once more, is what I’m suggesting.)
My high school’s english department was largely predicated upon the notion that the teachers had THE definitive answer to all interpretations of poetry and literature ever and students’ grades were dependent upon divining those definitive interpretations. It really sucked the life out of me. Instead of learning how to write better and more effectively, we spent much of our lives making up some bullshit to keep teachers happy.
One day we were studying one of Margaret Laurence’s books. Can’t remember which one, but there’s a scene with a waterbug in it. We’re going through the book in class and the teacher works himself into nigh-orgasmic bliss as he launches into an hour-long explanation of the depth and breadth of that waterbug as a metaphor for everything important that ever happened ever. It was very clear that this was the one and only interpretation possible, and that one’s worth as a person and as a student was directly correlated with buying in to that interpretation.
The one problem with that is that the student sitting in front of me had a father who was (1) also an english teacher, and (2) a personal friend of Margaret Laurence. Turns out he had asked her personally about that much-fapped-to scene and she maintained that it had no larger meaning whatsoever.
Sometimes it’s okay to just enjoy. Or not.
Don’t you wish you could have magically produced Margaret Laurence, who would turn to the teacher and say “I heard what you were saying! You know nothing of my work!” (See Annie Hall — Scene from movie line – “Marshall McLuhan”)
But! writers are not to be trusted. They don’t know half of what they’ve written and once they’ve set it loose in the world, it’s all ours to unpack and explode.
My favorite English teacher was very much in the “whatever you can prove with text evidence” school of metaphors and literary interpretation, and very much against the “there is only one right answer, and it’s the one the teacher said” school, and I am basically the same sort of English teacher. A student obviously can be wrong, given the context of the story, but there are many possible right answers.
With that in mind, I am myself pretty terrible at symbolism at times, and have had to look stuff up many times, including Hemmingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”. Once you know it’s about abortion it seems obvious, but I only had about one student in each honors class who figured it out before I explained it to them (after having Wikipedia explain it to me). I’m not sure I could have handled this teaching thing before the invention of the internet and google.
I bet you are an awesome teacher, because I loved being able to let my imagination run free with what I interpreted it to be about. I still do that in fandom, but it’s usually shipping unusual pairings.
Ha, I think of the “text evidence” argument every time I hear about the Dean/Castiel and Dean/Sam shippings on Supernatural. I tend to roll my eyes at those fans, but the writer’s do obviously have fun with them and throw them a supporting “bone” (ah hahaha, bone) every now and then.
I am perfectly willing to admit that I read way too much in things, but Misha Collins and Jensen Ackles’ chemistry is sizzling. 🙂
Your first paragraph is why I made it all the way to graduate school convinced that I hated Shakespeare because why bother if we already know everything there is to know about the plays? Turns out I just had a series of the worst Shakespeare teachers on the planet and when I finally got a good one, the whole universe opened up to me.
oh my, I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to hear another English teacher (and a lovely one, as you clearly are from your first paragraph) admitting to looking stuff up on Wikipedia! I feel so much better now 🙂
Nick is gay for Gatsby. Gene is gay for Finny. Why did no one tell me these things earlier? Why did I need to be told?!
Oh I FOR SURE missed how many gay people were in Gatsby the first go-round. JORDAN IS A DYKE, Y’ALL.
Is she? I haven’t heard that one before. Now I need to go reread it.
I had always thought the references to moustaches of sweat and all that were supposed to be indicative of Nick’s latent homosexuality but yeah, Dana from the L Word is totally based on that character.*
* I have no evidence of this
Watch out for that lever in the elevator.
We read Gatsby in my 8th grade English class followed by an analysis essay. Mind you this was a Lutheran school. I couldn’t understand what made Nick so obsessed with Gatsby. Then one day a couple guys in my class were complaining about the book (the usual complaints from typical meatheads) and one guy goes, “these people are so gay”. I swear a lightbulb went up over my head. How did I not see this? Long story short, I didn’t have the guts to write about the homoeroticism of the book openly so instead I used a lot of euphemisms like “devotion” and “male friendship”. Ended up getting an A and was one of 3 papers selected for class presentation. I still regret being too lily livered to write about the true meaning of the book. You live and you learn.
I was kinda into slash in high school, and when we got to read A Separate Peace I was SECRETLY SO DELIGHTED. And thinking the whole time, “oh my gosh no one else realizes how gay this is!!! Hee heeeeee”
I was also into slash in high school, and merrily paired up pretty much everyone in all the required reading. I was very into Julius Caesar/Mark Antony, Hamlet/Horatio, Nick/Gatsby, and, my favorite, Roger Chillingworh/Arthur Dimmesdale from The Scarlet Letter. (Oh, and Summoner/ Friar from Canterbury Tales, for FoeYay reasons.)
hamlet/horatio 4EVER
I’M SO GLAD I’M NOT THE ONLY PERSON WHO REALIZED THIS.
The part when Gene describes in great detail the shape of Brinker’s butt kind of clued me in.
I have this sort of obsession with slightly depressed, gay narrators, like Nick Carraway, Gene, and Johnny Wheelwright (from A Prayer for Owen Meany)…
Oh my godddd, someone brought that up in sophomore English and our teacher was super Catholic and was all “NO THERE’S NO GAY PEOPLE IN THIS BOOK NO WHY WOULD YOU THINK THAT LALALALA.” Which is, like, the absolute best way to get forty baby English students to spend three weeks whispering about how their teacher is totally hiding something. There was nearly a riot when we got to The Butt Paragraph.
I went through a brief Hemingway phase in my teens, and after I read Hills Like White Elephants, I wrote a parody in which the couple discusses obliquely their decision that the man will begin to use Rogaine.
everything in DH Lawrence is about masturbation. Even when actual sex is occurring, it’s still about masturbation.
/does not have any sort of literature degree
With DH Lawrence if it isn’t about masturbation then it’s about the penis. I got so tired of reading Women in Love because of all the phallic symbols everywhere. I had to give it a second go before being able to fully appreciate it. Don’t even get me started on Lady Chatterly lol.
This is a safe space for you to rant about Lady Chatterly.
Ugh, Lady Chatterly’s Lover! I can only imagine DH being a terrible lover because of this book.
Somewhere in his writings about Italy I came upon a phrase that was something like “the soft, hot, alert duck” of masculinity. Something about diving underwater followed. I was trying hard up to that point to take DH seriously, but… can’t. Not after the duck of masculinity.
“This Is Just To Say,” William Carlos Williams
I just asked W. C. He said: “Poem? What poem? That’s my post-it note from the fridge! Where did you find that thing… Oh, it must have fallen, damn post-its…. hrrmphhh, grumble, hrrrrmmmmmmmmph.”
Oh man. Also, every single thing in Like Water For Chocolate, we spent six weeks on mind maps about chicken castration and sex it was a weird time.
My favorite sexual symbolism to teach is Whitman’s “To a Locomotive in Winter”, and the only hint I give the students before we begin reading is, “The train is not *just* a train.” It’s more fun to tell them that, then let them read it silently, and watch their faces to see who is confused at the end, and who “gets it” and is either shocked (funniest reaction) or amused.
You remind me of my favorite high school English teacher. He was a huge Whitman fan and really got his students excited about writing and poetry especially. I credit him with my life long devotion to Whitman.
I just read that poem for the first time. Yup. That is definitely not just about a train at all.
It seems to me that watching students read literature for the first time in the classroom would be an absolute joy.
Sometimes a pickle dish is just a pickle dish.
ETHAN FROME MY WINTER BLASTED HEART IS AFIRE WITH THE SPEED OF A THOUSAND HELLBOUND SLEDS
That Britney Spears song “If You Seek Amy”=”Eff You Cee Kay Me” (not so much a metaphor, but it still escaped me. At least once I knew that I could stop yelling “WHO IS THIS AMY CHICK WHY IS SHE SO GREAT??” at the radio.)
Harry Potter = Jesus (he dies for a little, talks to an old guy with a beard that kind of sacrificed him, then comes back to life to save everyone, in a chapter named “King’s Cross,” and I still didn’t get it until Mark Does Stuff covered that chapter.)
re. Harry Potter: AHHHH WHAAAAT
And the part that dies/gets sacrificed is part of Voldemort’s soul, so he’s pretty much just effectively defeating (a part of) Voldemort.
I don’t remember Jesus marrying a ginger/Weasley and having three kids with terrible names though.
ETA: Lily and James are perfectly fine names, but for *some* crazy reason my mind immediately goes to Sr. Albus Severus Potter when I think on this topic.
MARY MAGDALENE IS OFTEN REPRESENTED WITH RED HAIR IN CHRISTIAN ART THOUGH
o_O
…
Oh, then well played, JK Rowling. Well played. God knows that it seems like swaths of Potter fandom sees Ginny as a whore, even though she is not.. much like how Christianity through the ages saw Mary Magdalene.
ummmmmmmm… I’m having a Moment right now.
But maybe I also secretly knew this because it’s v. Chronicles of Narnia, and I remember how I felt betrayed finding out Aslan = Jesus.
When I read The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe I remember thinking “I know that this is supposed to be symbolism but I don’t know what it’s supposed to be symbolising” because I wasn’t steeped enough in Christianity to get the allegory.
This is particularly amusing in view of the fact that many of the more severe evangelical groups thought the Harry Potter books to be demon-worship, witchcraft and anathema.
I am literally going to cry in the middle of class about that Harry Potter thing though
Ugh I’m so late to this conversation but I must say something re:J.C.!
My sci-fi prof made the case that John Connor in the Terminator films is a Christ figure. At first I was skeptical but HE TOTALLY IS and it kind of blew my mind. We’re mainly just talking films 1 and 2 here, although I think The Sarah Connor Chronicles follows through on a lot of the original symbolism pretty faithfully.
John Connor = JC
Saviour = he’s the one who leads the human resistance against SkyNet/only hope for humanity’s survival
Miraculous pregnancy = his father travels back in time to save/impregnate his mother, and also dies before he’s born, which means that JC’s mystical father (God) is absent from his life
I read “Hills Like White Elephants” really early in the morning, right before an American Literature class, in college and thought that whole conversation was about trepanning. I was very confused during the class discussion.
Can Trepanning Save Your Relationship? An investigation
TREPANNING.
That’s perfect. His arguments are so much like the script on pro-trepanning sites!
wait wait wait there are pro-trepanning sites?! … of course there are. UGH HUMANITY.
…unless you legit become like, a shaman afterwards. Because that would be boss.
My aunt gave me a copy of Animal Farm at age 8 or so. (It’s about animals! Kids like animals!)
Everything fell into place, TEN YEARS LATER when I learned about you know. communism.
ooh, that’s a rough book for an eight-year-old.
Napoleon is always right.
….”Boxer?” *single tear*
Cannot give enough support to this comment
Ahh, the biggest problem my AP class had with “Hills Like White Elephants” was not knowing the phrase ‘white elephant’. I remember one of the comprehension questions in the textbook was ‘how is the baby like a white elephant?’ and we were like a) what baby? and b) wait, WHAT?
theories about shakespeare comedy titles:
much ado about nothing: actually originally no (space) thing, a euphemism for vaginas (no dick)
twelfth night: a chrismas tradition/holiday. also the number of nights after which a man can have sex with a woman who just gave birth
all’s well that ends well: an idiom, also orgasms
measure for measure: a play on the Janus/twin theme, but also about men comparing the length of their penises.
Love’s Labour Lost: pretty sure it’s about prostitution.
I really, really don’t believe any of those. Especially the “heheh, any time anyone in Shakespeare says the word ‘nothing’ they mean CUNT VAGINA LADYPARTS WHOOOOOAAAA I AM AN ENGLISH PROFESSOR PLEASE HAVE SEX WITH ME.”
This is frustration with a particular strand of 20th C criticism, not you personally of course. I just realised I was done the time I saw someone claiming that Sonnet 116 is dirty, because “…nor BENDS with the remover to remove”, heheh, BENDS, right??? I mean BENDS? Like a PENIS? Being withdrawn from a VAGINA? Okay it makes no kind of sense nor adds to the poem in any way and why on earth would the writer do this? But you know it’s true because PENIS?
I mean try to imagine doing this with modern poems. It’s totally possible and it sounds moronic. “When I am old I shall wear purple with a red hat…” RED HAT = VAGINA OBVIOUSLY and PURPLE = ENGORGED PENIS she is going to LITERALLY BECOME A PENIS PROBING A VAGINA WHAT COME BACK PLEASE HAVE SEX WITH ME.”
Also there are no twins in Measure for Measure.
My entire AP English Language class was not clear on the fact that Alcee and Edna bone in The Awakening. We were all like, Welllll they made out and then she went home?? No.
Wait… what?! I remember being SO disappointed in that book because of the fainting dead away and so on. Next you’re going to tell me they did it in Ethan Frome too.
GOD all I remember about Ethan Frome is the fucking sled. Was it literally a fucking sled? Probably not?
IT WAS. They broke Zelda/Zinnia/Zebra’s pickle dish that wasn’t, and then, because of the Inevitable Death of all who Succumb to Infidelity/teh_sex/The Brutal Will of Nature, they went and rode on a fucking sled.
Hills Like White Elephants had a footnote to that it was about abortion in the 1984 or so edition of Norton’s Short Fiction. Or did I make that up? Is that possible?
And I was taught Rocking Horse Winner by a crazy lady who loved for things to be about sex and had a poster of D.H. Lawrence on her classroom wall, and she never mentioned it. Actually, I can’t remember what she said it was about. We didn’t always arrive at any conclusion in her class.
I didn’t know Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening was about death until Meadow Soprano said it.
You could check out the Kinuko Craft illustrations for Goblin Market if you want to see some intensely on-the-nose interpretation of the text, and by on the nose I mean penis-tastic. Originally published in Playboy I believe, back when the target Playboy demographic was Christina Rossetti enthusiasts. Though who am I to say it isn’t still?
Fine with literary imagery: did not get that Get Into The Groove was about sex/masturbation until my mid twenties.
Now I’m scared that Ax is a metaphor for something incredibly nasty and I just didn’t figure it out. Thanks, Mallory.
I had a professor who gleefully read aloud the sperm squeezing scene from Moby Dick and then said loudly, “face it, guys! there was a lot of gay sex on whale ships!”
It hadn’t even crossed my mind that that scene was about gay sex. I am glad someone with a PhD could tell me this.
How about the fat rendering scene? The cassock made of whale penis! The congregation roaring BIBLE LEAVES as he slices fat as thin as he can!
It does make Queequeg that much more heroic and awesome – he had a dream of his death and the loss of the ship, and he would not rest until he could save his husband from the disaster.
Wait. If it was about masturbation, then what was money? That was the, “There must be more money” one, right? He rode the horse and then knew the names of horses that would win and that was saving the broke family? And finally he did it until he died, trying to save them but they were unsaveable because his mother was a spendthrift? That one?
I challenge.
I think it is absolutely masturbation imagery plain as day but that doesn’t mean it directly means/is masturbation in the story in the Aslan-is-Jesus sense, that would make no sense like you say.
but it is hard to interrogate sexual metaphors in the work of a writer when it is no way clear that he even understood what sex was. Of Lawrence I have only read this one story plus Lady Chatterley’s Lover but from that, if you told me he was known to have died a virgin, I would believe you.
The whole story has a barely repressed sexual undercurrent. There are some memorable lines about the invisible voices clamoring for money, slowly building from whispers to climactic wailing and moaning. Then there’s the odd little conversation about “filthy lucker” (think about what that sounds like) between Paul and his mother. One could also read Paul’s secret arrangement to bet on the ponies with his uncle and one of the servants as symbolizing child abuse (a little boy getting involved in questionable adult activities and growing up too fast). Money is perhaps a stand-in for sex–they are both things that differentiate adulthood from childhood.
I always thought the hills like white elephants were boobs.
I read both 1984 and Brave New World as a kid and thought they were wonderful sci-fi novels.
Sometimes when I hear about “the deeper meaning” of such-and-such book/poem/graffiti (fuck you, Banksey) I roll my eyes because I feel like it’s often such a crock of shit – people are forcing these weird metaphors on things.
Then sometimes I think that maybe I’m just woefully shallow because I *never* friggin see a metaphor for what it is or might be until someone points it out to me.
When my English teacher asked us what we thought “Hills Like White Elephants” was about, one of the guys in my class who never ever paid attention immediately shot his hand in the air. Pleased but also slightly alarmed, the teacher called on him.
Beaming, he shouted, “He wants her to get BREAST IMPLANTS.”
LOL forever, did he think implants were just balloons with air in them?
I expect so.
I once wrote an essay interpreting an e.e. cummings poem as being about death. apparently it was about love. same thing amirite guys? apparently not, I got a 25% on the paper. grumbles.
With e.e., everything is about love or sex, with a few death-poems thrown in there for good measure.
Ha, I was just looked up & read “The Goblin Market” after watching Friday’s episode of Dracula. You can take heart that Herbert Tucker thought it was about Victorian Era advertising (according to Wikipedia, anyway).
I once had an extended argument with my HS English teacher about Sylvia Plath’s poem “Metaphors.” He kept insisting about death rather than pregnancy, even though the imagery is not exactly subtle:
I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.
I did not know “She’s My Cherry Pie” by Warrant was about oral sex until I read it somewhere recently. I didn’t know that was what I was singing about in the 80s. I was very naive though .
I made a Warrant joke at Thanksgiving last year and no one laughed. I need a better family.
I read Rhinoceros by Ionesco a bit too young, thought it was a hilarious surreal romp about people turning into rhinos. Turns out it wasn’t.
Every famous thing that Stephen King writes is a thinly veiled metaphor for how fucked up being an addict is. Even Maximum Overdrive, somehow. The new one is apparently his least subtle.
Also Moby Dick is well gay but Billy Budd is perhaps even gayer.
Most of my knowledge w/r/t this stuff has to do with music. Bands with multiple songwriters who hate one another are a treasure trove (the Beatles, etc). Lots of bands have songs about murder, lots of female singers have songs about infanticide.
Billy Budd, alias “Baby.” Yep.
SO MUCH with the Billy Budd. I read that in a class once, and the gayness of it didn’t really come up in the discussion, and I thought I was just off from years of seeing everything through slash goggles.
And yes, the interpretative joy that comes from knowing how much the Beatles hated each other! (Well, Paul, John and George.) I just pointed out to my boyfriend the picture of the two beetles, um, copulating on the back of Paul’s Ram and said “THIS IS DIRECTED AT JOHN” and completely blew his mind. Oh, and the entirety of John’s “How Do You Sleep?” And so many others! God, I could go on about Beatles craziness for hours.
…..wait, really on the William Carlos Williams one?
I thought it was just about snacks. Shit.
ALL of William Carlos Williams poems are about sex. Although that white elephant story surprised me. That guy was a jerk. She should leave him. Let the air in…what nonsense
I never, ever get these things either, but I got Hills Like White Elephants and was given a D for my insight. When I went back to school a few years ago, one of my first assignments was to write a short analysis of that story without consulting any other sources. I got that the train being due in 9 minutes = 9 months of pregnancy and I remembered from reading Cider House Rules that a lot of abortions back in the day involved prying open the cervix (letting some air in) and then letting the body miscarry. I was so proud of myself! Then I got the paper back with a D for using outside sources. My instructor was so used to teaching 18-year-olds fresh out of high school that she didn’t expect an older student who had a few kids and would understand the clues that she assumed no one in her classes was capable of understanding that much without consulting SparkNotes. Fortunately I got a decent grade after having a chat with her, but I was a bit traumatized.
Ugh. I too had one of those high-school English teachers who believe literature is a secret code of one-to-one symbolic equivalencies.One day she lost her temper because no one could tell her what rats symbolize in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Everyone who ventured a guess (“Evil?” “Winston’s own weakness?”) was shot down – wrong, wrong, wrong! Not only did she end up yelling at us about how stupid we were, she also refused to tell us the answer. To this day, I still don’t know – what do the rats symbolize???
Only much later in university did I learn the appropriate response to anyone who makes you feel dumb for not picking up on some purported metaphorical meaning: [in a condescending tone] “Don’t you think that’s kind of reductive?”
And the person who figures it all out is cool for figuring it all out like that, and cool for explaining it to me, but also he makes the whole thing suddenly boring, and makes me boring if I try to I explain it. That’s the part I wish somebody would figure out and explain.
Yep. I hate discussing books to this day – I read more than most people I know, but dissecting the books that I love just kills them dead for me.
News flash: Sheena Easton’s “Sugar Walls” was not about a romantic confectionary castle. Once I figured that out, age 10, I was still left with a disturbing mental image of the vagina, and I’m pretty sure my go-to anatomical visualization was for many years a slippery pink bouncy castle, with turrets and errything. Super ominous. TARDIS-like in dimensions.
Thanks Prince.
Regarding “The Rocking Horse Winner,” consider two things: (1) DH Laurence was all about Teh Gay Sex and masturbation. (2) if the kid was female, you wouldn’t be talking about *metaphors* at all. And trust me, little boys aren’t *that* different.
For “Plums” — I dunno, it stands pretty well on it’s own as a common human experience. Certainly, the emotional motif can echo on multiple levels, but that’s why that tiny little scrap of blank verse has become a much-riffed classic.
And for “The Grapes of Wrath” — there may well be *allusions* in there, but there’s also some perfectly good overt texts about man’s inhumanity to man. And the “wise fool” — the “idiot” whose very ignorance lets him see truth — is a classic motif in literature, going right back to mythology.
For most of the others, I think those are reasonable interpretations.
Metaphors in general, and especially in poetry, are not always simply reduced. I mean, yes, sometimes they’re about what your HS English teacher says they’re about, but not necessarily in a “this is clearly a symbol for this”.
There’s a Frost poem, “The old dog barks backwards without getting up/ I can remember when he was a pup” and EVERYONE (including our substitute) was saying that the dog is clearly the speaker, and I was like “um, it can be about getting old and dying without the dog being a direct metaphor for the speaker. You can look at things that are aging around you and be reminded of your own mortality thusly.”
Metaphors (and allegory and parable) are probably my favorite element of human communication; I use them A LOT, but I think a lot of people try to force them either in speaking or in reading. The plums might be about giving into carnal temptation and infidelity, they may also be about the shitty selfish domestic things we do to the people we live with, they may be all of those things. Also, as far as I’m concerned, all art (literature included) exists in dialogue with the audience. The meaning is subject to both authorial intent AND audience interpretation. And these things are colored by other art out there in the world and our own personal experience and education.
_What fun this all is!.I am enjoying the comments immensely._ As an English Major, after the 5th lit class with ‘Hills Like White Elephants’, I just wanted to scream “it’s the abortion, stupid!” whenever I saw it on the syllabus. And all the metaphor and simile and ‘meaning” either is or isn’t. Sometimes a goat is just a goat._As a poet, I know what I mean when I write, but the reader doesn’t have to get the same meaning. The whole purpose of writing is catharsis. and my catharsis may not be what the reader needs.
I love to hear you say this. Thanks.
my relationship to literature is so personal, the act of reading is such an individual one, that to seek perfect sympathy between reader and writer, or between readers, is an exercise in frustration.
When I read King Lear in college, I entirely missed that when Gloucester’s heart “bursts smilingly” upon being reunited with his son, HE ACTUALLY DIES. I thought he was just happy. Nope, heart attack. This is really what one should expect from family reunions.
In Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, one of the characters is telling another that he won’t get her pregnant by saying “There’s not much risk for you really — not in the Gretchen way.” I assumed “the Gretchen way” was a euphemism for either coitus interruptus or anal sex, and when he later complains that she’s always “clenched against [him],” I thought well, that settles it, they must be having anal. But I was too embarrassed to ask the professor how on earth this gently raised woman would be so familiar with slang terms for anal sex. Turned out “Gretchen” was a reference to Goethe’s Faust getting Gretchen pregnant. OOOOOOOPS.
Waiting for Godot was completely lost on me. My English teacher had to physically erase the “ot” at the end of the title on the board and told me deadpan “It’s God. They’re waiting for God.” I had no idea.
Agreed. I understand mathematical truth so much more than these literary interpretations.
Ah, sorry you guys. Yes, I will do that. It's on my shoulder so I will have to get my husband to take one for me.
Here it is: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v335/ifoundneve…
It has definitely faded after the past five years, but underneath the bird is says 'drømen'. I kind of fucked that one up because I thought that it meant "dreamer" in Norwegian, but it actually means "dream" in dutch. So basically, I am fucked both ways. 😛
I remember having to read "The Colour of His Hair" by AE Housman in high school…and no one knew it was a poem about being gay.
When I was a kid I had a bunch of Christian friends who really loved Veggie Tales, and introduced me to them through the silly songs. I was just a bit surprised when I realized what all the other Veggie Tales videos were about.
I read “The Sun Also Rises” by Hemingway in high school and would NEVER have understood that the main character is impotent if my teacher hadn’t explained it. In college, i had a professor who used flower imagery in “Hamlet” to explain why he thought Ophelia was pregnant with Hamlet’s baby and that’s part of why she went crazy. I’m not entirely sure I buy it, but maybe it kinda makes sense?