For my final essay, I would discuss about ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ in Pamela by Samuel Richardson. Even though ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ came out in 1973, which was much later than the time the book Pamela published in 1740, the relationship between main character Pamela and her master Mr. B assumes aspect that syndrome. She was in situations that can cause the syndrome, which were being aware that Mr. B was life-threatening but also sometimes he was kind to her, being isolated from people except for Mr. B and his people, and recognizing that she cannot escape from Mr. B.

Pamela says that she realized that she had been falling in love with Mr. B as like Mr. B fell in love with her but I thought that’s because Pamela would feel safety when she believed that she was already falling in love with Mr. B. Also, if she believed that she is falling in love with him, she can marry him, which could be the way to protect her religious faith about her virginity and morality (protecting her virginity before marriage). She has kept protecting her faith as like her life under lots of threats, so persisting threaten above her virginity from Mr. B could lead to conclusion that she should love him.

When I searched ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, it says that especially when attacker (Mr. B) being nice to victim (Pamela) during victim is under the situation being threatened, victim’s ego considers that kindness as the only way to survive.  And victim builds attachment relation because the victim thanks to attacker not have harmed (Mr. B didn’t actually rape her before they married).

‘Stockholm Syndrome’ is described as giving up freedom on consciousness (mind or spirit). Some victims who have aspects of the Stockholm Syndrome defend their attackers or kidnapper when they make a statement about them because they already equate themselves with kidnappers and sympathize them deeply.

So, with this all situations above my central question is ‘how explain Pamela’s fear of Mr. B turned away to love him?’ and ‘Could reader think that love is true love?’

 

 

 

 

 

In the very first page in this book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman which is chapter 1 and page 1, the narrator, Tristram Shandy, describes the moment that his parents were having sex. During that moment, his mother interrupted his father because he did not wind up the clock, which was the signal of having sex. On the movie ‘Cock and Bull Story’ also has this scene and Tristram Shandy thinks that every bad and unfortunate thing is already made before he was born.

Tristram says about ‘animal spirits, as how they are transfused from father to son’. (5) I think that Tristram thinks that because of his mother’s interruption made his father’s emotion was not happy and that unhappiness was transfused to his son during the production of Tristram Shandy. In the foot note, it says that stern draws principally on John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding which had great influence on eighteenth century epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, however, the explanation on foot note about ‘animal sprits’ are much different with Tristram’s use of that word which is just saying his parents’ unhappiness passed to unborn (even unmade I think) Tristram and unexpected happening (because his father did not wind up the clock) has effect on his future life. The foot note says “though it remains uncertain whether Sterne had really studied the Essay, or was simply familiar with some of its principal ideas” (542) and I think that the author Laurence Sterne used theory as his own interpretation of that.

 

work citation:

Sterne, Laurence, and Ian Campbell. Ross. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.

 

 

The Castle of Otranto is regarded as the Gothic novel and it has many supernatural elements. Reeve insists that this book has a redundancy in degree of the marvelous, to excite the attention, which palls upon the mind. Also she says the supernatural elements must keep within certain limits of credibility. However, ‘supernatural’ means ‘(of a manifestation or event) attributed to some force beyond scientific understating or the laws of nature’ and originally supernatural things are not existing in reality. A ghost, giant helmet which kills Manfred’s son, or enchanted sword that all of them do not exist in real life so that nobody sees actually even Horace Walpole who is the writer of this book. We, as adult-reader and grown up people who have less imaginative power than children, could say those supernatural and fanciful elements make a novel immature or childish, however, we cannot say ‘this element is out of limitation!’. Even though Reeve tells that imagination is destroyed because of redundancy, imagination has no limitation.