Great Works of Literature I, Spring 2020 – Online – One

Christine de Pizan is an author whose best known work, The Book of the City of Ladies, attempts to destroy the argument that women are weak and useless creatures by building an entire city on the exploits of great women who came before her. She uses an argumentative strategy where she highlights in these women the very qualities they were reputed not to have. One such woman is Queen Dido, who is depicted by great male writers such as Virgil in the Aeneid as a great force of nature who loses herself in her passions, particularly in her love for Aeneas. Pizan chooses to attack the traditional image of Dido by emphasizing her unmatched ability to outwit her perceived enemies.

Pizan’s Dido is a master in various forms of cleverness. In her main example of Dido’s ability to plan and act out feats of great cunning, Pizan explains how Dido maneuvers to prevent Dido’s brother, Pygmalion the king, from stealing the great wealth of her husband, whom the king has murdered. Dido always anticipates Pygmalion’s actions and reacts in such thoughtful and clever ways that she thwarts his efforts at every turn. It is as if he can read into the heart of this horrible person. When she decides to leave her native town and go somewhere else, she realizes that the king will have her chased down and she schemes accordingly to remain alive and to keep her husband’s fortune.

Later, when she has arrived in Africa and managed to win a vast parcel of land for her people with the great cowhide trick, Dido learns that Pygmalion is chasing her again. She doesn’t defeat him again with her superior army but with great planning and strategy. She knows she needs people by her side, so she gathers her people and tells them her plan. Everyone agrees to stay by her side because she is loyal and persuasive. She acts very cleverly and wins over her brother. This description of Dido as a clever, level-headed is a wonderful opposition to the depictions by Virgil, Dante, and others.

 

Pizan’s book brings about changes in womanhood that men are often too blind to notice. It has also contributed significantly to the debate that men hold on wanting to keep on maintaining their positions and ranks without the interference of women. Men have always wanted to be rulers and authority in society. Her constant use of virtues and achievements from the past from various women, Christine is able to adopt a three-way focus in the lives of women, that is, the intellectual, the spiritual, and the physical. All of these show that women are equal and just as powerful as some of the best-known men in the world.

Augustine recalled that he deeply loved one of his friends, but this friend died so he fell into confusion and thought death was the end of love. His fundamental criticism of earthly love is that you only love a mortal person.
This criticism went deeper and rose to the level of existence. The person you love will die, and this death destroys love. He said that true love is to love an immortal thing. For God’s sake, to love enemies and friends, first of all, we must regard all people as part of the world created by God. Love must overcome death. If you do not overcome death, you cannot say this is love. Love and death are mutually exclusive.

Unfortunately, in Hamlet, women are depicted as people who are much lower than men and are merely objectified and looked down upon as frail beings. They were often times found answering to the men and not really having important roles in the play. The way that the men are seen as superior, in my opinion, led to the manipulation of the women in the play and led to the many tragedies and issues. Shakespeare simply left them as secondary characters instead of primary ones like most of the men.

If death is a real person then it would be the main character of the play, even more important than Hamlet, because it is the beginning and the ending of the story. It all started with the death of the old King of Denmark, which leads to Hamlet wanting to seek revenge and eventually causing the death of all the characters. It shows that death created a loop in the story because every death leads to another one, and pushes the storyline forward. While the play is so concentrated on death, it actually highlights the purpose of life, since death is unavoidable, it enhances the significance of how people choose to live their lives.

Augustine believes that only goodness is the essence of man. It comes from God, but sin is a lack of goodness. Goodness is absolute, and God is the source of goodness. Evil is relative. God does not create sin in man. Evil is the result of God’s absence, and evil itself does not exist. The reason for sin is that people abuse the freedom that God has given them and deviate from the goodness of God. The things God creates are good, not bad. It is our desire to destroy the grace of God, and only God’s grace can make people regain good will.

Socrates and Phaedrus describe the various kinds of behavior between lovers based on Lysias’s speech in which he argues that physical love without emotional attachment is preferable to physical love with emotional attachment. Socrates and Phaedrus both agree with Lysias’s notion that there are two kinds of lovers: a lover, and a non-lover. However, the differences between Socrates and Phaedrus begin with who is the better type of lover. Phaedrus believed Lysia’s speech to be excellent and offers an extensive argument from the speech. Phaedrus believes in maintaining self-interest and because this believed that a young man should choose to engage in a relationship with a non-lover as opposed to a lover. This is because of the idea that being in a relationship with a lover is synonymous to an emotional rollercoaster. The feedback would almost always be biased and in turn offer no constructive criticism which would help a young man grow. Socrate’s on the other hand believes it is beneficial to be with a lover because if one doesn’t experience the madness of true love they will never experience the true beauty of love. Socrates values the beauty of love over a superficial relationship where there is a lack of true love which contradicts Phaedrus’s take on love.

The conflicting imagery of Gertrude emerges from remarrying Claudius and being Hamlet’s mother. The marriage seems immoral and has no doubt strengthened the hate and Hamlet’s determination to revenge. However, in my opinion, marrying King Claudius is probably the only way for Gertrude to keep Hamlet safe and keep him with her. When Hamlet pretends that he is going crazy, Gertrude worries about him the most. Gertrude is just a mother, trying to protect his son from being hurt. In the final scene of the play, Gertrude drinks the poisoned wine that Claudius has prepared for Hamlet. Even though Claudius tells Gertrude not to drink, Gertrude does it for his son. Shakespeare depicts the role of Gertrude with a traditional view of women. Gertrude is criticized because of remarrying Claudius for her benefits. On the other hand, the role of being a mother keeps showing throughout the entire play.

As we can see from the play of Hamlet, Shakespeare depicted women as dependent and below men. This can be seen as Ophelia’s action of giving up the letter from Hamlet to his father Polonius, and how Polonius tend to have to the relationship between Hamlet and his daughter. Feeling and thoughts of Ophelia do not matter; she is more of a “tool” for her father and brother. And the word frailty is used to describe women, which also shows how women were being treated and seen in the time the play was written and even today. It is also shown that women are more of a “demon” than an “angel.” There are lots of hate to women, as we can see from the main character Hamlet to other women, especially to his mother after the death of old Hamlet.

Augustine describes the students in Carthage are gross and beyond all measure. Those students commit many outrages, extraodinarily stupid acts, deserving the punishment of the law. They blindly do something which make themselves to be suffered. Augustine also refers some students as eversores. Eversores is a diabolical name for those who are assailing newcomer with cruel mockery for no reason. Augustine thinks what the eversores do is very like the actions of devils and he does not want to be one of them.