Ford vs Forest: The Confrontation of Nature and Technology

In William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark” we see a major juxtaposition of nature and technology. The speaker comes upon a dead doe on the side of a road in the night and, thinking of the other drivers on the road, decides to roll it off the road into the canyon. This decision is part of a much larger dilemma between humans and nature. The speaker hesitates when he learns that the doe is pregnant and that her baby is still alive inside of her. His deliberations over whether to roll the still living fawn into the ravine with its dead mother reflect the greater conflict between nature and technology. As a race we often think of ourselves before we think of nature and in most cases we destroy nature for our own convenience. Stafford uses this simple situation to show the greater decisions we make regarding nature and through the speaker’s decision shows the usual outcome. In reference to his earlier line “to swerve might make more dead,” the speaker refers to his indecision over the fate of the unborn child as “swerving” and his swerving did make more dead, namely the fawn.

Throughout the poem technology, more specifically cars, is personified as a predator that kills off nature, the doe. The doe that the speaker finds on the road has been presumably killed by another car, the car has become the predator. While the speaker is dealing with the doe he describes his car in a manner that implies that it is a living beast. “The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights,” as if in deep thought over this recent kill as “under the hood purred the steady engine.” These images give the sense of a powerful predator, and by placing a car in the space that ought to be filled by a living creature Stafford shows how technology has become a predator of nature. The cars prey on the does and leave behind the carcasses to rot, which ironically poses a threat to other cars, “to swerve might make more dead.” The doe represents nature and the car represents technology, and in this recurring confrontation nature is losing. The car a, hulking metallic beast, takes on the doe, a small undefended creature, and crushes it instantly. But even though it kills the doe it leaves hope of new life in the doe’s unborn fawn and the speaker’s decision regarding it. Unfortunately the speaker decides to kill the unborn deer and with it the chance for new life.

The title of “Traveling Through the Dark” conveys the path that the speaker takes during the course of the poem. The darkness is representative of the indecision and moral ambiguity that the speaker must battle in his decision between nature and technology. He must decide over the life and death of the unborn deer and in doing so serves as a greater allegory for man’s choices between nature and technology. At first when the speaker assumes that it is just a dead doe he speaks in very matter of fact tones about how it is better to roll the carcass into the canyon but when he realizes that there is still a living baby inside her he realizes his dilemma and finds himself in the darkness. As he “stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red,” he comes to his realization. The light is the symbol of his decision and since it comes from the car itself it is no surprise at his decision comes as it did. In the end we are left with the image of the doe being pushed into the river and the man driving on to forget about what has occurred. Nature loses another battle to technology and man stands by and watches it happen. (633)

Willy Loman: Complete Failure?

In “Death of a Salesman” discussion this week in class we predominantly talked about the success, or lack thereof, of Willy. While we did come to the conclusion that Willy was indeed unsuccessful in life I think that there may be more to his success than we give him credit for. We all came to the agreement that Willy is in no way successful in his own mind. He constantly compares himself to his rich older brother Ben and is always stretching the truth about his salary and his sales. Willy believes that his clients and fellow salesmen laugh at him behind his back and he attributes that to his failure in life. He always thinks about the opportunities that he has lost and how he could just be rich if he had been like other people. Willy as a self measured success is indeed a failure in almost every aspect of his life. In his eyes he has failed as a businessman, father, and husband. His delusions and attempts at suicide also portray him as a mentally unstable man who is a danger to himself and his family. Over all Willy is a very unsound character that we as readers do not trust or for the most part sympathize for over the course of the play. Even with his shortcomings in life Willy is not a complete failure and in fact could be called a success by several measures.

Indeed Willy is more than adequately successful in both his role as a parent and a salesman. He makes at least seventy dollars a week which at the time was not a paltry sum. On his salary he could support his wife nicely and live a comfortable life. We are informed after his death that Willy’s house has been completely paid for, a feat which even today is rarely achieved. His two sons worship him, even if Biff doesn’t admit it until the end, and they only want to make him proud and live up to his expectations. If Willy was not suicidal and possibly insane his life would be an example of the American dream. He is a proud father, he has little to no debt, and he gets a very respectable salary. He is even a capable carpenter which is a rare skill. Willy is a very successful man if he is viewed from a different perspective and although he does think that he is a failure, with some degree of merit, he is not completely correct. Willy could have had a happy life if he hadn’t had such high expectations to live up to, if he had thought about his life as something other than a measure of how many diamond mines he found in a jungle he would have been pleasantly surprised at how successful he really was. (472)

A Doll No More

In “A Doll’s House” we see Nora in the first scene portrayed as a frivolous spender and a sickeningly sweet wife. This first impression of her sticks with her through the play until the very end. Even when confronted with Krogstad’s blackmail she remains on the whole the same character. Through the play she dances and flirts and acts as childish as her never seen children all in an attempt to get what she wants. She even flirts with a man to whom she is not married in an attempt to procure a large sum of money to pay off her debts. Nora, although the focus of the play, becomes in the reader’s eyes an almost despicable character whose antics grate on our very nerves. Nora is the “typical” woman as described by Ibsen’s play and in the time period the typical woman was dependent on her husband for everything and had endless time to practice dancing or shop. From the beginning we see Nora as a very silly thoughtless woman who does not take the time to think about the consequences of her actions, and would not know about those consequences if she were to actually think about them.

In the third act of the play we see Nora break out of her role as the doll and become an independent woman who must rely on her own abilities to survive. She quickly finds out that, because she could not save his job, Krogstad intends to reveal her illegal money borrowing to her husband and she knows that she can not pay off her debt in time to save herself. Her naiveté leads her to believe that getting the money back will solve all her problems but she fails to realize that Krogstad, who has been accused of fraud, has lost his job and is in very little position to acquire a new one. When she learns that even had she paid him back he would have kept the IOU she begins her change from the “little squirrel” to the independent woman she becomes. Once Torvald finds out about the whole affair Nora is catalyzed into her change and she realizes that the reason for all this trouble was her attitude in general. She was so used to being the “little spendthrift” that she had assumed all aspects of that role, but she realizes that there is more to life than being your husband’s “kitten.” In the end we find Nora leaving Torvald because of the mess she has made and not the other way around. Nora stands up for herself and makes the biggest decision of her life to not be an unthinking shopaholic but to be a woman who makes her own way in the world. Nora evolves, though slowly, over the course of the play into a woman who can bravely leave her husband and children and start anew. (483)

The Devil Went Down to Denmark

The argument has been made that the ghost in Hamlet is actually the Devil come to trick Hamlet into killing everyone connected to him. I personally believe that there is a good chance that this argument is valid because of the outcome of Hamlet’s revenge and the significant absence of the ghost at said outcome. Posing as Hamlet’s father the Devil convinces him that Claudius killed Hamlet the elder and took his wife as his own. Hamlet’s fragile mental state and his position as the “emo prince” as well as subsequently mourning for his late father makes for a perfect opportunity for the Devil to plant the seed of revenge. Once the seed is sown he needed only to sit back and watch the body count go up.

One of the points brought up as a counterargument is that the ghost argues for Gertrude’s innocence and that she should not be hurt. I feel that this only strengthens the fact that he is not Hamlet’s father, if he was truly the late king he would be a bit more upset about his wife sleeping with his brother so soon after his death. By arguing for Hamlet’s sympathy he gives away the fact that he is an imposter, after all, the greatest trick the Devil ever played was to convince us that he didn’t exist.

In some of his more sane moments, or arguably his more insane moments, Hamlet questions whether the ghost is truly his father or the devil come to snare him. Hamlet plants the idea that the ghost is the devil in the audience’s mind and once he has done so the earlier scenes with the ghost take on a whole new light. The ghost’s every word takes on a dubious meaning and every motive becomes suspect.

Hamlet’s revenge kills more people than he had anticipated, approximately seven more, and I don’t believe that there was any other way that it could have ended. The ghost gets him so incensed to kill Claudius again in Gertrude’s chambers that he mistakenly kills Polonius. Polonius’s death leads to Ophelia going insane and drowning herself, which leads Leartes to seek revenge for both his father and his sister. Claudius takes advantage of Leartes’ anger and plots to kill the now threatening Hamlet, which leads to the deaths of the Leartes and the entire Danish royal family. And in the course of events Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are killed in Hamlet’s place in England.

Not only does Hamlet’s revenge take away everyone who ever mattered to him but it also robs Denmark of its entire royal lineage. After the turbulent events of the “bloodbath” the king is replaced by a Norwegian. The outcome of Hamlet’s plot with the ghost only further convinced me that the ghost had a nefarious intent for the whole scheme because if he were truly Hamlet’s father he would have tried to stop the carnage of his young son’s vengeance. If the ghost is the Devil he profited nicely from the entire deal, he gained at least three souls for Hell in Hamlet, Ophelia and Claudius. The ghost was the only character to make it through the play unharmed, or as unharmed as a ghost can be, and in the end he got what he wanted no matter if he were the devil or not.

The Immortal Laws of the Gods

In Antigone we learn one basic truth about life. Never question the gods. Sophocles stresses this point in both Antigone and Oedipus Rex. Oedipus focuses on the prophecies of the gods and their infallibility. Antigone however focuses on the laws of the gods and their precedence over the laws of man. Creon as the king who has newly come to power passes the law that Polyneices may not be given the burial rites because of his supposed treachery to his country. Antigone poses the fact that the laws of the gods supersede any mortal given law and therefore can not be ignored. Her burial of her brother causes Creon to demand her death but his rash reaction was due to hubris and not logic.

As a new king, not of the main royal line, he must stake his claim as king by quickly showing his authority. He also angers easily at the breaking of his law, one that is not only rash but conflicts with the gods’ will, much as Oedipus reacts with anger before reason. This impulsive anger by Creon, much out of character from the Creon of Oedipus Rex, may be due only to the fact that Antigone preceded Oedipus Rex or may be the direct cause of the stresses of a new kingship and cleaning up the remnants of a civil war for power. Whatever the reason he sentences Antigone to death, to which she goes willingly. It seems that everyone in Thebes except for Creon himself agrees with Antigone’s belief that the gods will forgive her for breaking the law as voiced by his son Haimon. Antigone brings forth an age old question of whether the laws of men are more important than the higher intrinsic laws.

In both plays, but especially Antigone, Sophocles notes that the will of the gods does not bend no matter what the circumstances may be. His plays no doubt were meant at the time to remind the Grecians that they ought to respect their gods and to remind them that they did indeed owe their fealty to them. But these thoughts are not that uncommon even today, the laws of the church sometimes come into conflict with the laws of man and there are very heated debates on which laws should be adhered to. Such as with abortion, contraception, and gay marriage the laws of God and the laws of man come head to head in a battle for supremacy. In these matters I generally take the side that agrees with my sensibility, usually not the church, and it seems that on the whole the world has deviated from Sophocles’s unyielding gods. Antigone still poses the questions about whether the laws of gods or man should be held onto but where the play provides an answer for Sophocles’s Athens it has no simple solution in the modern world. Now the line between what is right and what God says is blurring more and more. People decide for themselves where for centuries they followed blindly what they were told. In the modern world people can choose for themselves where they were once told what to think, we no longer live in the out dated world of Sophocles. (536)

Caius and the problem with Mortality

I was struck by one paragraph in particular in Tolstoy’s story, the one pertaining to the humanity of Caius. I was especially drawn to the fact that I could identify in his assessment of life and humanity and that I was of the same mind set. “Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal.” This logic is inherent in all of us as humans but so is the following logic as referenced by Ivan; while Caius is a man and mortal, Caius is not Ivan so therefore the same logic does not apply to Ivan. Ivan is horrified to find that these principles of mortality apply not only to the generic Caius but also to little Vanya, to Ivan Ilych, to Jean, to his entire being. The fact that after death the person he has been and the person he is known as will cease to exist horrifies him just as it horrifies anyone who thinks about their own mortality a little too closely.

The Russian society of the time was of this mindset of immortality, or at least non-mortality. We see in Ivan’s “friends” the same disregard for his illness and death as something that happened to someone else. Even his childhood friend Peter Ivanovich brushes off the feeling of horror with thoughts “that this had happened to Ivan Ilych and not him.” It was not just the Russian society, society as a whole has this same mindset on human mortality. Even today no one thinks of their own mortality unless forced to stare it straight in the face. People do not like to think of their own mortality, as far as anyone is concerned there is no such thing as death until they are dead.

I empathize with Ivan in his thinking, and so do most people I know. Death, pain, hardship, these are all things that occur to other people. I personally think about my own mortality more often than most people but I still hold to the same hope that maybe death does not apply to me. That is the way we live as a society, anything that challenges our normal life is wrong. We block out these thoughts about death or being robbed or losing everything because it is easier to deny that they happen than it is to face them and realize that they are real and very well may happen, or in some cases will indeed happen. Mankind is afraid of facing their mortality because once you admit it it becomes truth. We are not comfortable facing our own mortality as a species and we hide our fear of death under a façade of bravado and confidence. Our mortality is a part of our culture no matter where we live humans have adapted their customs around death and our mortality. Some embrace it such as the Dia De Los Muertos in Hispanic culture and some try to hide that it exists by ignoring it completely like in Western culture. No matter who you are or how you like to think you deal with your own mortality the same holds true for everyone, every human hides from their own mortality in some way and until we are faced with the inevitable end we like to think we are exempt. (548)

Summary of 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica "European Reaction to Leopold's Abuses" and Leopold II's letter "The Sacred Mission of Civilization"

        -- In the late 19^th Century the Belgian parliament had passed controversial decrees. These decrees made all vacant land in the Congo the domain of the state and created a state monopoly on ivory and rubber. This monopoly was amended to allow for private companies to trade in the Congo but those companies were either influenced by the state as a major shareholder or gave a percentage of their profits to the state.

 

       -- Several major powers brought many charges against the state, the major player being Great Britain. These countries accused The Congo government of monopolizing and treating the natives harshly. A British official made a trip through the Congo in 1903 and wrote a report about the conditions there, greatly strengthening the British accusations. Leopold was forced to create a commission of inquiry to go to the Congo and “investigate the condition of the natives, and if necessary recommend reforms.

 

        -- The commission of inquiry published a report on its findings in 1905. They found that while the condition of the natives was less than satisfactory, forced labor was the only possible way to reap the benefits of the natural resources. They did acknowledge as well that there was no trade between the natives themselves and that a law be passed limiting the amount of labor per native be kept to 40 hours a month. As this report was published a commission to “study the recommendations contained in the report and formulate detailed proposals” was formed.

 

        -- King Leopold passed several decrees to rectify the problems which fell far short of serious reforms. The Belgians however viewed the decrees as restriction of Belgium’s liberty of action in the Congo. Britain on the other hand was not happy with the reforms and threatened that they would have to reconsider their treaties in the Congo if things did not change.

 

         -- Britain and America became increasingly hostile to Belgian reforms after this and demanded that something be done to improve the Congo system. In 1907 Belgium signed a treaty announcing the cession of the Congo to Belgium. This move aggravated even the most loyal Belgian politicians.

 

            -- Leopold gave up the Foundation in the Congo but he got a very generous compensation package. He retained most of his personal land in the Congo and was to be paid by the conony two million pounds in debt. Belgium also respected the concessions granted to the companies that held large amounts of land.

 

           -- Leopold states in his letter that, “When our directing will is implanted among [the natives] its aim is to triumph over all obstacles.” He believed that philanthropic influence could achieve the results that he wanted.

 

           -- He also states that action is a necessary option. To him war does not mean destruction it only serves as a means to implant that directing will. His agents “feel profoundly reluctant to use force” on the natives.

 

     --  The soldiers who are recruited from the natives are of the belief that an enemy is only defeated when he is destroyed. They must follow the influence of the White Officer to find the true way. These natives must find their civilization through their European leaders.

 

             -- The officers, volunteers from the Belgian army, all have a strong sense of honor and patriotism. They will spare the natives and teach them the benevolent ways of civilization.