Pygmalion: Act 1

In the first act of Pygmalion, I found myself laughing at all of the sly and not so sly comments that were made by Higgins, the note taker. For example, on page 16, he asks a bystander that was giving him issues if he had realized that it was no longer raining. Without any further knowledge, I could tell that the note taker was going to be a feisty one. Just by this comment alone, I could tell that he does not let just anyone talk to him any kind of way. He seems like the kind of person that would recall all of his prior information just to prove the point that he is right. After the rain has stopped and the flower girl is still standing around, he says that he can pass this “creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days” off as a “duchess at an ambassador’s garden party” (18). When I read this part, my immediate thoughts that I had to write down in the margins of my book were that Higgins is a harsh and sarcastic man.

Another thing that I noticed in the first act alone is that the flower girl is a very sneaky one. While reading, she kind of reminded me of the homeless women on the streets of Italy. My senior year in high school, I was fortunate enough to travel to Italy for Spring Break. One of the things my teachers warned us about was to not talk to or make any type of contact with people who approached you on the street begging for money. They are con artists and will appear that they are helpless. This reminded me of the flower girl because while she was attempting to sell her flowers to random patrons, she would tell one person that she had change for a certain amount of money, but then she would change her story when she saw another person with a different amount.

I've never read Pygmalion before, but I can tell it's going to be good.

George Orwell, "Politics & the English Language"

In Orwell’s essay, he states that “a man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.” This statement alone began to set the tone of how I thought the rest of the essay was going to go. Not only did reading this essay make me feel inadequate about my writing, but it also made me think. It made me wonder if I really did these types of things he was describing in my own essays.

At the beginning of the essay, Orwell gives examples of passages “that literature various of the mental vices that we now suffer.” He then goes on to explain what is wrong with each of the passages. For example, he specifies for the fourth passage that “the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink.” I feel that Orwell’s opinions and criticisms are very ruthless in this essay. However, even though he is harsh, his essay made me wonder if I do these things in my writing and even worse, scares me to continue doing so. As I continued reading through the essay, all I kept thinking about was which one of these have I done in my essays and how many times have I done them?

Although I think that Mr. Orwell was harsh in his essay, I do feel that it was necessary. Not everyone can be the nice guy and tell every person that their writing is great with the exception of a few grammatical errors. Someone has to be the big bad wolf and blow a couple of dreams away in order to get the good writers back to reality.

Wuthering Heights: Feminist Criticism

In today’s reading I learned a lot about what people, more specifically, what females think about how they are viewed as writers in today’s society. For example, French feminists believe “that the structure of language is phallocentric: it privileges the phallus and, more generally, masculinity by associating them with things and values more appreciated by the (masculine-dominated) culture (452).” In other words, I think that this means the French feel like they are competing to gain the respect of all of their readers in a world that is basically geared toward the male’s likes and dislikes.

When I thought about this particular passage, it kind of reminded me of today’s society. In some cultures, women are still expected to stay at home and cook, clean, and if needed, take care of the kids. I believe that today’s world is still mainly a “masculine-dominated culture.” Generally, people aren’t looking for females to be bold enough to come outside of their comfort zone and write a book. Of course, you do have exceptions like Oprah and other powerful women like herself; but for the most part people are still in the mentality that women shouldn’t stand up for themselves, shouldn’t be able to have much of an education because all they are going to be doing is staying at home keeping everything in order. And to be honest, I loathe this mentality. If someone ever comes up to me and tells me that all I’m going to be is a housewife, I can go from happy go-lucky Shanelle, to angry-serious Shanelle in 2.5 seconds. I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that in some cultures, women are still expected to do that. But, I am not here to judge at all; that’s not my job. This is just simply my opinion.