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.