Blog Four (Quiz #6)

The catharsis as I see it happens in the hotel scene between Bob and Madge. It was manifested physically in their little wrestling match, followed by Bob running away with the urge to puke. Their past or future interactions were made irrelevant by this defining scene, because that was the point at which Madge claimed total power over Bob - she could have screamed at any moment, but she did not. This leads to Bob's anagnorisis, where essentially he admits that Alice's ideal lifestyle is right and it would be easy to go on living with the knowledge that he must be a sub-par human being. Yet in his discussion with Alice he also admits that he cannot accept that into his life. Though he becomes aware of the futility of his hostile attitude toward white people, he refuses to change his ideology for the sake of comfort. I personally have a hard time seeing the peripeteia, because Madge wins in the end, just as she was meant to since the catharsis. Perhaps the fact that Bob should have run away with Alice and lived happily ever after but instead found himself running straight into Madge can be seen as the tragic but necessary twist.

Blog Assignment Two

A section of the novel Ruth Hall that we had not looked at very closely in class was Ruth's visit to Katy in chapter 63, where Katy remains at her grandparents' house in a miserable state. Though a very brief chapter, there are several points raised here such as Katy's mistreatment and Ruth's unending perseverance, however the one that caught my eye was at the very end of the chapter, when the doctor remarks about Ruth "she's fit for nothing but a parlor ornament, never was. No more business talent in Ruth Ellet, than there is in that chany image of yours on the mantel-tree, Mis. Hall. That tells the whole story" (166).
                The reason I liked that particular statement was because it not only illustrated a generational misogyny regardless of kinship as the doctor manages to not only mistreat Katy in the same scene, but also insult Ruth and his own wife in one go. The doctor is always teasing Mrs. Hall, pointing out that her hair is false or generally telling her she is mistaken. While he doesn't seem to be particularly cruel most of the time, in this part he compares her to Ruth, whom they have made out to be the ultimate bane of their existence. It is completely tasteless and derogatory to his wife to compare her talent to Ruth's, and he makes the comment casually and definitively. Despite the power Mrs. Hall tries to establish over Harry, over Ruth, over Katy and anyone she can get her hands on, her husband can easily put her back in her place with a few words of discouragement. His unkindly-spirited but not necessarily actively evil character actually offsets Mrs. Hall's active destruction to her environment by creating a completely unquestionable power greater than her. This adds to the idea that no matter how much power a woman might try to attain, in that society and especially in that particular home, there will always be a man who can take away that power in an instant if he sees fit. 

Blog Assignment One

As far as my reading of Linda Grasso's "Anger in the House: Fanny Fern's 'Ruth Hall' and the Redrawing of Emotional Boundaries in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America goes, I found the lack of the author's input and ideas rather unattractive, but Grasso uses Elizabeth Cady Stanton's analysis of Ruth Hall to make several interesting connections. The most outstanding of these is the relationship of the women's rights movement to the abolitionist movement. Grasso explains that women used the abolitionist arguments to organize their own outcry of activism, and that Stanton directly related the plight of women to that of the slave. Grasso also provides Caroline Dall as a contrasting opinion, mentioning that Dall not only believes that Fanny Fern is disrespecting her male family members in her writing but also lacks talent. This idea of respect and a “ladylike” resistance to oppression strongly contradicts Stanton’s idea that a woman’s anger is key in expressing her need for liberty, in writing and in protest.

One part that stood out to me in stark contrast to the points Grasso’s essay was in Chapter 47 of Ruth Hall, when Mr. Skiddy’s wife walks out on him, leaving Mr. Skiddy with their nursing baby. There are plenty of examples of perfectly kind and generous men in Ruth Hall and of course the odious mother-in-law Mis. Hall to give a perfect example of a wretched woman – therefore in my interpretation the novel is not quite as extremely feminist or activist as the essay suggests. The reason the scene with Mr. Skiddy caught my attention was because of the phrase at the end of the chapter that calls him “the victimized man” (Fern 177). In a way, this could be seen as ironic and almost sarcastic in making out the man’s life to have taken a tragic turn just because he now has to care for an infant. Because of the tone of the rest of the story however, I chose to see this part more as an equalizer, showing that a man could just as easily as a woman be left in utter distress with the loss of a partner. The parallel to Ruth’s situation drew more of a relationship to the destructive results of corruption within a family unit rather than an allusion to the struggle of women in particular.

Anger in the House: Fanny Fern's "Ruth Hall" and the Redrawing of Emotional Boundaries in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America

Linda Grasso

Studies in the American Renaissance , (1995), pp. 251-261

Published by: Joel Myerson

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30227673

Fern, Fanny. Ruth Hall. Mason Brothers 1855. Harvard University. Sep 23, 2005.

http://books.google.com/books/reader?id=R2R5cJtXkxAC&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&pg=GBS.PA178.w.1.1.0