The aspect of New Year’s Sacrifice that I am focusing on is the patriarchal nature and stigma of mental health in Chinese culture. As we can tell from the story, the main character does not even have a name; she is only known as Xianglin’s wife. The only job that she could get after her husband died was as a maid in another household. She did all the cooking and cleaning and never complained but just worked diligently. In ancient Chinese culture, women only had the role of being a wife and mother so once the mother-in-law found Xianglin’s wife another suitor, she was carried off against her will to be married to him. She had no other use than to be a wife but since her husband died so young, she had the opportunity  to be given to another family. No matter how much she struggled, they still forced her to marry the other man. Once she settled in, she had a baby boy whom she loved very much but unfortunately, both her new husband and her son died. All of these tragedies really took a toll on her and she could not be content with life anymore. Although she was such a great worker the first time she came to the Lu’s house, her body and mind had deteriorated from all of the stresses she suffered through and could not work as well as before. The Lu’s, even after hearing her story, could not empathize with her and became annoyed that she was doing so poorly and called her “unclean” and unfit to do anything with the ancestral sacrifices. After a while everyone in the village started mocking her instead of feeling for her. Mental health was and still sort of is considered non-existent in Chinese culture. Xianglin’s wife probably developed depression from dealing with the things that she had to but people just regarded her as crazy. Traditional Chinese culture would consider symptoms of depression as being lazy and sad and moping around rather than an actual condition that people don’t have control over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyyrwoCec1k

8:52-9:51

In this video, John Green brings up the point that even though Frankenstein is telling his story to Walton as a cautionary tale, he tells Walton that he should continue his expedition in the Arctic. This part of the story confused me a bit because Victor Frankenstein pushed the limits of science by creating his monster but when Walton and his crew want to explore the Arctic for scientific discoveries, Frankenstein tells him this story as a lesson to not go too far with science… and then when Walton tells his crew to turn back and give up on the expedition, Frankenstein goes backwards and says that they should go forward and “not to turn their backs on the foe.” In this quote, “foe” is referring to science. Why does Frankenstein refer to science as an enemy that humans have to conquer? The contradiction of his statements didn’t make much sense but John Green explained that this was normal for a Mary Shelley story because Mary Shelley herself was a very ambivalent person. She wrote in her journal, “I am not a person of opinions because I feel the counterarguments too strongly.” I relate to this statement on a personal level because I am one of the most indecisive people I know and so I can’t pick sides in arguments and debates when both sides have valid points. So for this debate on whether science should keep pushing the limits of knowledge and technological advancement, I don’t know which I agree with more.

I actually read Frankenstein in English class in my freshman year of college (the whole semester was focused on this debate of whether scientific advances are good or bad). The aspect that I focused on for my final paper was social media and how technological advancement is fueling both the positive and negative sides of social media. For the positive side of the argument, I believe that the generation that is growing up alongside technology benefits because they learn how to use technology at such a young age and that makes them tech savvy starting from their childhood which will only grow from there. Technological advancement also helps people connect across the globe. For the negative side, people are becoming more isolated because they are so focused on their phones and some people feel the need to hide their real selves behind a facade on the internet. The debate on science will always be relevant and affects everyone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqS3uKyi79U 

6:45-8:25

In this video, Nicole Ravey explains how she reads a text, focusing on Oroonoko. Some of the themes are slavery, rebellion, and betrayal. Oroonoko was royalty who became a slave, and throughout his time in slavery, he organized a slave revolt and was betrayed by people who he thought were his friends. Ravey also talks a little bit about the author, Aphra Behn; she was the first female novelist in England but was not accepted by society, of course, because of the patriarchal ways of the time. Aphra Behn was also a spy for the English which I think is a really cool profession. Behn put herself into the story as the narrator who was in Suriname, and happened to meet Oroonoko there. In the text she praised him highly for his physical beauty: “He was pretty tall, but of a shape the most exact that can be fancied: the most famous statuary could not form the figure of a man more admirably turned from head to foot.” I thought this was very interesting because many English people might have thought of black people as lower than them and therefore forced them to be slaves, but here, Behn was praising him. BUT, she also says, “His face was not of that brown rusty black which most of the nation are… His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat,” which means that she called him beautiful because he does not look like how Africans usually look like. She goes on to say “The whole proportion and air of his face was so nobly and exactly formed that, bating his color, there could be nothing in nature more beautiful agreeable, and handsome.” She literally says that everything about him is beautiful except for his skin color which I guess was a very 17th century European point of view and it’s pretty common for writers to have the perspective of their time incorporated into their writing.

3:10-4:50

I chose this video because it explains Franz Kafka’s upbringing which was the influence behind all of his works. Most other videos I found only focused on summarizing and/or interpreting the story itself but I think that for Kafka’s stories, his family life played a critical part in the creation of his works. According to the video, Franz Kafka had an extremely psychologically abusive father and a spineless mother who could not stand up for her own child. The actions of his father left a negative impact on his mental health. Kafka’s father was the super controlling type of parent which usually has two different outcomes depending on the personality of the child — either the child will act out and rebel against the parent or the child will take everything in and bring themselves down. Kafka was of the latter personality type; he had basically zero sense of self-worth and self-esteem because he could only take in what his father did to him and resort to writing as an outlet to relieve stress. At age 36, he finally wrote out his feelings towards his father in a 47-page letter which did not even reach his father because his mother was a coward. He was a grown adult and still could not even deliver his feelings to his father. In the letter he said, “I was a mere nothing for him.” Because his father never showed him any affection, he really believed that his father hated him and thought he was worthless — only an extra mouth to feed and nothing good coming from it.

Later on in the video, the narrator explains The Metamorphosis and how it’s a story of self-hate. Gregor woke up one day as a bug which was how he felt others viewed him — a disgusting, useless bug. His father is abusive, of course, beating Gregor whenever he sees him. His mother can’t do anything but faint when she sees him. His sister is his only savior, for a bit, bringing him food scraps to eat. As the story progresses though, she eventually wants to kick him out as well.

“‘Listen’, said the chief clerk in the next room, ‘he’s turning the key.’ Gregor was greatly encouraged by this; but they all should have been calling to him, his father and his mother too: ‘Well done, Gregor’, they should have cried, ‘keep at it, keep hold of the lock!’”

I think this quote is really important because it showcases how Gregor just needed some encouragement from his parents to know that they supported him, but instead they treated him with a cynical curiosity. When Gregor finally dies, his family becomes happy rather than sad. It seems like everything is going well after he is gone which is ironic because he was the only person who was suffering working a job before he became a bug. He was content with dying in the end because he felt he really didn’t have any worth as a bug and had no hope of turning back into a human.

16:19-17:15

Again I have chosen a video by Nick Courtright, but for the reason that his explanations of the text are comprehensive. In the section of the video that I chose, Courtright talks about the short appendix at the end where the narrator mentions that Bartleby may have worked in the Dead Letter Office in Washington before working as a scrivener for the narrator. The Dead Letter Office was where all the letters that could not be delivered went, whether the receiver had passed away or could not be found. The name “Dead Letter Office” itself sounds very morbid; I don’t think I would be happy working in a place with a name like that — and then to be fired as well! In that sense, I think that we all understand Bartleby a little more and why he was so depressed and lost all will to live at the end when we learn of this rumor about him.

Courtright said that perhaps we are all dead letters. We are all going to end up in the same place in the end; so what is the point of life then? We are going nowhere, and Bartleby may have made this connection when he was working in the Dead Letter Office, seeing all those letters hit a dead end, never being able to go to where they were meant to go, messages going undelivered and unheard. Bartleby must have become so depressed and so unsatisfied with life. Although he was young, his job was of low status and there may have been little to no social/professional upward mobility. Even if he was able to move up in the world, what would he do when he got to a higher point? It seemed like Bartleby didn’t have any family or friends either, as he lived in the office and rarely went outside. What would he do with the extra money he made? There was no one to give it to or to spend it on. He couldn’t see a point in working or making a living or in capitalist society in general. Everyone else could not understand Bartleby because they were so used to having a job to make money to provide for themselves and, probably, a family, and they didn’t see any other way of living or maybe had never thought about why they were doing the things they were doing. The last sentence of the story, “On errands of life, these letters speed to death,” shows the irony of the dead letters, and perhaps why Bartleby doesn’t see a point in living. These letters had a message to deliver, full of life, but in the end they just died in the flames of the Dead Letter Office.

3:38-5:20

Two things that I have to talk about: the ambiguity of poetry and section 6 of Song of Myself.

I have never been much of an interpreter, or at least thought of myself as one who is good at interpreting. When I was in elementary school, I thought I really liked poetry because of its sing-song-y rhythm and rhyming words. But then I went to middle school and then high school, and poetry just got more and more confusing and I stopped being able to understand them because they weren’t those short and simple and straightforward lines about liking cats and hating bats or something like that. Poems became something too complex for my brain to wrap around. Sure I could read them, but I definitely couldn’t understand them because it really just sounded like random words put together to me. Other students would be able to pull analyses of single lines or whole stanzas out of thin air, it seemed, and I was just stuck in a fog of confusion. When I read interpretations of poems though, they make much more sense. For Song of Myself, I read two interpretations: one from Sparknotes and one from Shmoop, both having been reliable sources for book summaries in the past. It was then that I realized poems could be interpreted differently depending on who is doing the interpreting (duh!). The Sparknotes interpretation talked about how Whitman was describing the self in relation to everything around it, and the Shmoop interpretation talked about how egotistical the speaker of the poem was. Now, there’s no right or wrong interpretation, unless you can ask the author himself, but I like the Sparknotes one better because it’s more positive.

I’m not much of a philosophical thinker but I like the idea of a connection of the self to its environment, which leads me into the content of the actual video. Nick Courtright talks about Section 6 of Song of Myself — the one where a boy asks Whitman, “what is the grass?” Everyone lives and dies; everyone is part of the same entity; everyone is one. Everyone lived and ate from the earth and eventually returns to the earth when they die which feeds the things that grow in the grass which feed animals and humans which die and are buried again — a continuous cycle. Courtright says, “even when you die, there is still a long future ahead of you.” So death is short lived, as you will become a part of life again, and this is why Whitman says, “And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” Death is not as bad as it seems because you will live again. If you think about it, we are made of the same atoms that were on this earth millions of years ago, and these atoms are just being recycled every time something decays. Humans are recyclable…?

~2:41

I have chosen this video because this person brought up Don Quixote’s relevance today as a parallel to reality television, video games, and celebrity culture. I had not realized this connection until I watched this video but now it seems so clearly obvious. Pop culture encourages people to idolize and become obsessed with these famous figures that we see on television. An extreme example of this parallel would be K-pop fans. Many K-pop fans are very young, some still in middle school, which makes them very impressionable. They are easily carried away by ideas and their devotion to idols is unlike any other I’ve ever seen. Most fans spend hundreds, maybe even thousands, of dollars a year on merchandise, including multiple versions of the same album, clothing, and novelty items. Not only do they spend a lot of money, but they also spend a lot of time. K-pop is appreciated globally so fans on the other side of the world will stay up until early morning just to watch live videos or wait for the release of a new music video or album. As one can see, this obsession affects these fans’ daily lives, and so many of them being young children, it isn’t good for their health. Actually, there are some fans that are so delusional to the point that they try to hurt the idols in order to get the idols to notice them — these are called “sasaeng” fans. Idols or idol groups hold fan meets in different cities in Korea so they can engage with their fans, which makes sense, but can also be dangerous because of the sasaeng fans. There have been multiple instances where idols have been poisoned or given disturbing gifts, such as messages written in blood. These fans are like Don Quixote because they are so obsessed with the idea of the idols that their perception of reality is actually distorted. I would also like to point out that K-pop culture is a huge industry in Korea. Entertainment companies train children from as early as eight years old (maybe even earlier) to become idols and actors so it’s no wonder that kids so young are obsessed with this. These companies use the idols and actors to exploit fans. They aren’t just selling entertainment — they are selling a fantasy. Idols and actors live for the fans; everything they do is for the fans. The fans know everything that the idols do in their daily lives because they post videos and pictures.  The companies basically control their lives, and this is because of the fantasy that they’re selling. These celebrities are usually prohibited from dating. Idols can’t date because they are “dating their fans,” or at least that’s what they have to say because if they don’t, the fans will get jealous and angry as if they really were dating them. This example of the parallel between Don Quixote and modern day pop culture shows how Miguel de Cervantes’s thoughts on idealism surpass time and space and is able to still be relevant today.

Thug Notes breaks down the plot of King Lear in a way that is easy and fun to listen to. It’s as informal as one can get. The thing that I want to focus on the most is the analysis. Some videos talk about the acting that brought the play to life, and some articles/essays talk about the themes of family and relationships, but Thug Notes brings forward a theme that I hadn’t seen before: loss. He says that one of the biggest themes in King Lear is loss — “loss of power, love, life, and sight.” Loss of power is clearly demonstrated through King Lear handing over his kingdom and thus, having no more power over his daughters. King Lear also experiences loss of love through the two daughters who expel him and his soldiers from their homes and out into a raging storm. Loss of life is inevitable in a Shakespeare tragedy; in this one, only two characters remain alive in the end. And as for loss of sight, Gloucester had his eyes gouged out.

Another thing that I really liked about Thug Notes’s analysis is that they included important quotes from the play itself. The first one, “The tempest in my mind/Doth from my senses take all feeling else,/Save what beast here: filial ingratitude,” illustrates the process of King Lear going mad through imagery of a storm which shows how unstable his mind is. King Lear knows that there is a storm brewing in his head but he is mainly concerned with how ungrateful Goneril and Regan are. Clearly, he has much worse things to be worried about. The second important quote is by Gloucester: “I have no way,/and therefore want no eyes./I stumbled when I saw.” This one quote alone summed up the motif of loss of sight. Gloucester doesn’t care about losing his eyes anymore when he realizes what had actually happened — that Edmund is the terrible child who had tricked him, and that Edgar is the good son. He couldn’t see the truth even when he did have the ability to see so what use were his eyes anyway? King Lear also couldn’t see the truth when he asked his daughters to profess their love to him. He was too self-centered and only listened to what he wanted to hear. Both King Lear and Gloucester lacked the ability to see through the lies.