Masque of the Red Death

     Born January 19, 1809, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor Edgar Allan Poe's tales of mystery and horror initiated the modern detective story, and the atmosphere in his tales of horror is unrivaled in American fiction. With his short stories and poems, Edgar Allan Poe captured the imagination and interest of readers around the world. He was called the "Father of the Detective Story" because of his creative talents. Poe never really knew his parents; his father left the family early on, and his mother passed away when he was only three. Separated from his siblings, Poe went to live with John and Frances Allan, a successful tobacco merchant and his wife, in Richmond, Virginia. He and Frances seemed to form a bond, but he never quite got along with John. Preferring poetry over profits, Poe reportedly wrote poems on the back of some of Allan's business papers.Money was also an issue between Poe and John Allan. When Poe went to the University of Virginia in 1826, he didn't receive enough funds from Allan to cover all his costs. Poe turned to gambling to cover the difference, but ended up in debt. He returned home only to face another personal setback—his neighbor and fiancée Elmira Royster had become engaged to someone else.

 
 A terrifying disease called the Red Death ravages the dominion of Prince Prospero. So lethal is it that it kills within a half-hour after the onset of its symptoms: sharp pain, dizziness, and bleeding from the pores. 
.However, the prince is safe and happy in an abbey to which he has withdrawn with a thousand knights and ladies selected from his court. The abbey, which resembles a great castle, is surrounded by a sturdy wall. Its iron gate has been welded shut, making it impossible for anyone to enter or leave.
Inside, the prince has stocked food and drink aplenty and maintains companies of musicians, dancers, and clowns for entertainment.  After about six months, while the disease was taking its toll outside, the prince held a masked ball in a maze-like suite of seven rooms specially decorated according to a theme color. One room was blue; the second, purple; the third, green; the fourth, orange; the fifth, white; and the sixth, violet. A stained-glass window in the wall between each of these rooms and the outside corridor matched the color of the room. The seventh room was hung with tapestries of black velvet. However, here the stained-glass between the room and the corridor was scarlet instead of black.  
       In Renaissance Europe, a masque was an elaborate entertainment featuring participants wearing costumes and masks. They sang, danced, recited poetry, and sometimes participated in a dramatic presentation. A masque could also consist only of a procession or pageant of costumed persons–or simply the kind of costume ball staged by Prince Prospero in “The Masque of the Red Death.” Of course, in Poe’s story, masque not only refers to Prospero’s ball but also to the disguise (mask) of the Red Death. One may also argue that it refers to an entertainment staged by Death, for it was he who drove Prospero and his friends into the abbey–a grand stage where, he knew, they would seek to put him out of mind with a divertissement. In short, Death had a ball.
    Poe’s fictional red death resembles a real disease that occurred in Medieval and Renaissance Europe–septicemic plague. Within hours after infecting a person, this deadliest form of plague caused high fever and turned the skin purple. A victim of septicemic plague sometimes got up in the morning hale and healthy, without an ache or a pain, and went to bed in a grave. Plague was spread from rats to humans by fleas. The disease manifested itself in three forms: bubonic plague, which caused painful swellings (buboes) in the lymph nodes of the armpits and groin; pneumonic plague, which filled the lungs with fluid; and septicemic plague, which poisoned the bloodstream. Septicemic plague was far less common than the other two forms of the disease. Sometimes one form of the disease killed by itself; at other times, it progressed into another of the forms before claiming a victim. Together, these three manifestations of plague were known as the Black Death because of the livid hue of corpses caused by subcutaneous hemorrhaging. Black, of course, is the color of the seventh room in “The Masque of the Red Death.” 




Sources:  

Website:http://www.biography.com/people/edgar-allan-poe-9443160

http://cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides7/Masque.html

Image: http://tranceworldnow.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/edgar_allan_poe.jpg

http://www.soundonsight.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Roger-Corman-Masque-Of-The-Red-Death-poster-1-400x316.png

Media: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_-zILF-bbc

                                                            

The Importance of "A Song to Myself"

       This most famous of Whitman’s works was one of the original twelve pieces in the 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass. Like most of the other poems, it too was revised extensively, reaching its final permutation in 1881. “Song of Myself” is a sprawling combination of biography, sermon, and poetic meditation.   Whitman says that he celebrates himself and that all parts of him are also parts of the reader. He is thirty-seven years old and “in perfect health” and begins his journey “Hoping to cease not till death.” He puts all “Creeds and schools in abeyance” hoping to set out on his own, though he admits he will not forget these things. Whitman then describes a house in which “the shelves are / crowded with perfumes” and he breathes in the fragrance though he refuses to let himself become intoxicated with it. Instead, he seeks to “go to the bank by the wood” and become naked and undisguised where he can hear all of nature around him. Whitman describes an encounter between his body and soul.  He invites his soul to “loafe with me on the grass” and to lull him with its “valved voice.” Whitman recalls a scene in which a child came to him with a handful of grass and asked him what it was. Whitman has no answer for the child. The grass is “the flag of my disposition” and it is the “handkerchief of the Lord….” It is also the child or a symbol for all of humanity. Whitman sees the grass sprouting from the chests of young men, the heads of old women, and the beards of old men.
     Whitman describes groups of people that he stops to observe. The first is a “butcher-boy” sharpening his knife and dancing. He sees the blacksmiths taking on their “grimy” work with precision. Whitman then observes a “negro” as he works a team of horses at a construction site. Whitman admires his chiseled body and “his polish’d and perfect limbs.” He sees and loves this “picturesque giant….” He admits in the next poem that he is “enamour’d…Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods, / Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes / and mauls… / I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.”  Whitman describes himself as “old and young” and “foolish as much as…wise….” He is “Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man….” He is of all the land of North America from the South even into Canada. He notes that these are not his own original thoughts.

 


Sources: http://www.gradesaver.com/leaves-of-grass/study-guide/section3/
http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/whitman/section2.rhtml


Media Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cm-n9wFZMiE

Image Source: http://www.shambhala.com/images/covers/large/157062369.jpg

Why was Incidents of a slave girl relevant?

     It was relevant because Harriet Jacobs wanted everyone one to know the stuggles she went through as a black woman. Not only was she doing it for her, but she was trying to tell the story of all African-Americans. Harriet Jacobs was a very strong woman to do some of the things she did to survive.
When Harriet Jacobs learned that President Lincoln was going to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, she wrote a friend: "Life has just begun, and I pray to God to spare all the dear good people. . . that have labored so faithfully to see the fruit of their labor gathered in."
     Harriet Jacobs was born in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813. She learned from her mistress to read and write, an activity that became illegal in North Carolina in 1830. According to Incidents, as a child she remained unaware of being a slave "till six years of happy childhood had passed away." The family, which included a brother, lived in a home behind the tavern owned by their mistress, Elizabeth Horniblow. Harriet's father, of mixed parentage like her mother, was a carpenter and was allowed to hire himself out. Life was comfortable. It chanced that a white unmarried gentleman had obtained some knowledge of the circumstances in which I was placed. He knew my grandmother and often spoke to me in the street. He became interested in me, and asked questions about my master, which I answered in part. He expressed a great deal of sympathy, and a wish to aid me. He constantly sought opportunities to see me, and wrote to me frequently. I was a poor slave girl, only fifteen years old. Jacobs acknowledged the tale would shock audiences, but attempted to justify her actions.
      This book was important because as I said earlier not only was she concerned about her life she was tired of being told what to do and she didn't want her children to grow up around that. When she stayed behind and allowed them to leave I felt amazed by that. Hariiet Jacobs was an amazing women because she told the story of every black African American man and female. I now see things that I didn't know before.









Websites: http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html
http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2004-01/incidents.html

Image: http://cimages.swap.com/images/books/36/9780674035836.jpg

Media: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20EHtBdnaVE&feature=related

Rip Van Winkle

                                                                    








 "Rip Van Winkle" is a short story by the American author Washington Irving published in 1819, as well as the name of the story's fictional protagonist. The story of Rip Van Winkle is set in the years before and after the American Revolutionary War. In a pleasant village, at the foot of New York's "Kaatskill" Mountains, lives the kindly Rip Van Winkle, a colonial British-American villager of Dutch descent. Rip is an amiable though somewhat hermitic man who enjoys solitary activities in the wilderness, but is also loved by all in town—especially the children to whom he tells stories and gives toys. One autumn day, Rip is escaping his wife's nagging, wandering up the mountains with his dog, Wolf. Hearing his name being shouted, Rip discovers that the speaker is a man dressed in antiquated Dutch clothing, carrying a keg up the mountain, who requires Rip's help. Without exchanging words, the two hike up to an amphitheatre like hollow in which Rip discovers the source of previously-heard thunderous noises: there is a group of other ornately-dressed, silent, bearded men who are playing nine-pins. Although there is no conversation and Rip does not ask the men who they are or how they know his name, he discreetly begins to drink some of their liquor, and soon falls asleep. After a failed business venture with his brothers, Irving filed for bankruptcy in 1818. Despondent, he turned to writing for possible financial support, though he had difficulty thinking of stories to write. He stayed in Birmingham, England with his brother-in-law Henry Van Wart. The two were reminiscing in June 1818 when Irving was suddenly inspired by their nostalgic conversation.Irving locked himself in his room and wrote non-stop all night. As he said, he felt like a man waking from a long sleep. He presented the first draft of "Rip Van Winkle" to the Van Wert family over breakfast.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rip_Van_Winkle

Media: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae-LMi7AZ9I&feature=fvsr

Image:       
 http://swanretirement.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/rip-van-winkle-image.jpg

Trancendentalism

    In the early to mid-nineteenth century, a philosophical movement known as Transcendentalism took root in America and evolved into a predominantly literary expression. The adherents to Transcendentalism believed that knowledge could be arrived at not just through the senses, but through intuition and contemplation of the internal spirit. As such, they professed skepticism of all established religions, believing that Divinity resided in the individual, and the mediation of a church was cumbersome to achieving enlightenment. The genesis of the movement can be accurately traced to 1836 and the first gathering of the Transcendental Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The father of the movement, an appellation he probably did not relish, was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other prominent contributors included Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, William Henry Channing, and George Ripley. In the grand scheme, the Transcendentalist’s moment on the literary stage was decidedly brief. With Fuller’s death in 1850, one of the movement’s great advocates was silenced. Emerson lacked the vitality and desire to follow in her path. Though their hold on the public imagination was short-lived, the long-lasting influence that the Transcendentalists had on American literature cannot be denied. Even the philosophy’s critics were forced to acknowledge the effects that the Transcendental Movement had on the world, particularly the American experience of the world. For Transcendentalism was a distinctly American expression, with concerns and ideals that perhaps did not fully translate in England or Continental Europe. http://www.online-literature.com/periods/transcendentalism.php
   The philosophy was inexorably bound together with American’s expansionist impulse, as well as the troubling question of slavery and women’s place in society. A philosophical-literary movement cannot solve such problems, but it can provide the vocabulary to discuss them reasonably.  Not surprisingly, the conflation of German philosophy and English Romanticism transplanted on American soil produced something quite original. The fact that the United States was still such a young nation, still seeking out her borders, had a powerful impact on the literature being produced. Emerson and his contemporaries saw a nation on the brink of discovering its own voice. Until that time, American literature had merely replicated the fashions of Europe. There was precious little originality or innovation. Furthermore, the cultural hub of the new nation was firmly rooted New England. The remainder of the continent was still rather a wild place, where surviving was a more pressing concern than producing high art or pondering the day’s big questions. The Transcendentalists saw an opportunity to make a break with England and forge a new literature for a new continent. That literature would be bold and expressive, and a bit wild, like the land itself. If the Transcendental Movement had a founding father, then he was most certainly Ralph Waldo Emerson. However, he only reluctantly adopted the role of figurehead. He mostly preferred to remain behind the scenes, observing the action but not participating. Emerson was a man of deep faith, though in his personal life he was struck down more than once by tragedy. His first wife Ellen Tucker died of tuberculosis after just two years of marriage. The loss was deeply felt by Emerson. He later remarried, only to lose the first child of that marriage to illness as well. Such tragedies naturally came to inform Emerson’s way of seeing the world. Despite such ample experience of the dark side of life, Emerson managed to carry forward with a sort of resolute stoicism, if not optimism. At Harvard Divinity School’s 1836 Commencement, he delivered an oration that would become the foundational document of New England Transcendentalism. In “The American Scholar,” Emerson beckoned for a new kind of spirit to take root in humanity, a spirit fueled by individualism, creativity, and a tireless work ethic. That Emerson’s idealized scholar was “American” is not by accident. The belief that the young nation was fertile ground for a new and more enlightened kind of citizen was quite popular at the time. The Puritan forebears planted the seed of American exceptionalism, which grew fast and strong in the intellectual atmosphere of nineteenth century New England. The death of Margaret Fuller took much of the steam from the Transcendental Movement. Coupled with the growing unease over slavery and the economy, the intellectual climate simply no longer supported the high-minded idealism of the Transcendentalists. Everyone sensed that the nation was headed towards a cataclysm that a quasi-philosophical literary movement was in no position to avert. http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/.

Why was Thomas Paine"s writing of the Comman Sense so effective?

        Thomas Paine in 1776, Common Sense was one of the most famous political treatises from the literature of the American Revolution.  Thomas Paine wrote Comman Sense because he was trying to help with the Revolutionary War he wanted them to fight. Paine's political pamphlet brought the rising revolutionary sentiment into sharp focus by placing blame for the suffering of the colonies directly on the reigning British monarch, George III. First and foremost, Common Sense advocated an immediate declaration of independence, postulating a special moral obligation of America to the rest of the world. Not long after publication, the spirit of Paine's argument found resonance in the American Declaration of Independence. Written at the outset of the Revolution, Common Sense became the leaven for the ferment of the times. It stirred the colonists to strengthen their resolve, resulting in the first successful anticolonial action in modern history.  Americans could not break their ties with Britain easily. Despite all the recent hardships, the majority of colonists since birth were reared to believe that England was to be loved and its monarch revered. Americans were divided against themselves. Arguments for independence were growing. Thomas Paine would provide the extra push.Paine avoided flowery prose. He wrote in the language of the people, often quoting the Bible in his arguments. Most people in America had a working knowledge of the Bible, so his arguments rang true. Paine was not religious, but he knew his readers were. King George was "the Pharaoh of England" and "the Royal Brute of Great Britain." He touched a nerve in the American countryside.

  

Image: http://mitchellarchives.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/crisis-end-bright.jpg
Website: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/161744.Common_Sense
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100218181500AAJTwcQ
http://www.ushistory.org/us/10f.asp
Media: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3kTkeUOSEk&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL662EE49BE32A5C08
                                                          

What effect did the Great Awakening have on Jonathan Edwards?

Jonathan Edwards

     

    

     In July 1741, Jonathan Edwards accepted an invitation to preach at the neighboring town of Enfield, Connecticut. It was the height of the Great Awakening (1740–42), one of the most intense outpourings of God’s Spirit in American history. The fire of God was falling everywhere. Despite the fact he had delivered "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" to his own congregation with little effect, he felt led to use it again at Enfield. His techniques were unimpressive. He always read his sermons in an even voice, but with great conviction. He shunned shouting and theatrical antics. Impressing the listener with the power of truth and his desperate need for God was Edwards’ goal.

Nothing in his style or presentation could account for what happened that day at Enfield. An eyewitness, Stephen Williams, wrote in his diary, "We went over to Enfield where we met dear Mr. Edwards of Northampton who preached a most awakening sermon from these words, Deuteronomy 32:35, and before the sermon was done there was a great moaning and crying went out through ye whole House…. ‘What shall I do to be saved,’ ‘Oh, I am going to Hell,’ ‘Oh, what shall I do for Christ,’ and so forth. So yet ye minister was obliged to desist, ye shrieks and cry were piercing and amazing."

Williams continued, "After some time of waiting the Congregation were still, so yet a prayer was made by Mr. W. and after that we descended from the pulpit and discoursed with the people, some in one place and some in another, and amazing and astonishing ye power of God was seen, and several souls were hopefully wrought upon that night, and oh ye cheerfulness and pleasantness of their countenances

    Wherever there is fire there is also smoke. Many excesses accompanied the revival as people experienced highly unusual spiritual phenomenon. Sometimes, during sermons, they screamed and dropped unconscious to the floor. Edwards’ own wife sat trance-like in a corner of their living room for long periods, unable to move, utterly overwhelmed by God’s love.Reverend Wheelock’s diary for October 1741 is typical. "The zeal of some too furious: they tell of many visions, revelations, and many strong impressions upon the imagination…. Preached twice with enlargement. Many cried out; many stood trembling; the whole assembly very solemn."⁵ After another meeting he writes, "Thirty cried out. Almost all the Negroes in town wounded (convicted of sin)…. I was forced to break off my sermon before done, the outcry was so great."

As in every revival, some of these manifestations were from God, some from the flesh, and some demonic.

This mixture ensured much criticism. (Every age has its self-appointed Spirit-quenchers.) Edwards believed the essential work was from God. But he recognized that the entire work would be discredited and abandoned unless the church learned to sort the wheat from the chaff. He wrote prolifically to this end. His most important work on this subject was On Religious Affections, a Christian classic still in print today by at least three publishers.

 

Websites:  http://enrichmentjournal.ag.org/200201/200201_104_johnathan.cfm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinners_in_the_Hands_of_an_Angry_God
 www.nhinet.org/ccs/docs/awaken.htm

Media:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zt57rFcpnr4