Four kinds of misunderstanding in reading poetry as discussed by I.A. Richards

Name:- Parmar Milankumar

Batch year:- 2014-15

Class:- M.A. semester2

Enrollment no.:- 14101026

Course name:- criticism2

Topic:- Four kinds of misunderstanding in reading poetry as discussed by I.A.Richards 

Department of English

M.K.Bhavnagar University  

Four kinds of misunderstanding in reading poetry by I A Richards

Introduction-

The essay "Figurative Language" was written by I A Richards. Ivor Armstrong Richards is one of the great critics of the modern age. He was the pioneer in the field of new criticism with the help of T S Eliot, though Eliot has more importance. "I A Richards was the first great critic since Coleridge who has formulated a systematic and complete theory of poetry and his views are highly original and illuminating" Like Coleridge he was a man of wide learning.

Life and works of I A Richards:-

He was born in 1893. He was educated at Cambridge, where in 1912, he was appointed as a professor of English literature. And thus he began a long and distinguished career both as a teacher and critic. His first published work was collaboration with   C K Ogden in 1922. His other works are-

1) The Meaning of Meaning- 1923

2) the Principles of Literary Criticism 1924 It is one of the major works and in which he has put the best of himself.

3) The Practical Criticism (1929) the work by which we can call him an advocate and practitioner of practical criticism. This work illuminates and explains the theories given by him.

His other works are-

1) Science and Poetry

2) Coleridge on Imagination

3) The Philosophy of Rhetoric etc.

His aims for writing practical criticism:-

While writing his book, he had set three aims before him. They are as below-

1)      To introduce a new kind of documentation to those who are interested in contemporary state of culture whether as a critic, philosopher, as a teacher, psychologist or merely as a curious person.

2)      To provide a new kind of technique for those who wish to discover for themselves what they want think and feel about poetry and why they should like or dislike it.

3)      To prepare the way for educational methods are more efficient than those we use now in developing discrimination and power to understand what we hear and read.

                He was a staunch advocate of a close textual and verbal study. His technique or the method is that of pragmatic and empirical. He did an experiment with students. He gave some poems to his students and asked for comments, students commented on the poems without title and author. And then he gave his own comments and suggestions and interpretations and these are incorporated in the third part of the book.

                His practical approach gave new path to literary criticism. Instead of intuitive and impressionistic criticism, it became more factual and scientific. His factual and scientific method of critical analysis, interpretation and evaluation has exercised considerable influence on the new critics.

Now we come back to our real question what are the four types of misunderstandings?

1)      Careless, intuitive reading(rhyme or irregular syntax)

2)      Over-literal reading

3)      Defective scholarship

4)      Difference of in meaning of words in poetry and prose. Example- 'Solemn and Gray'

I A Richards begins this essay by pointing out the four kinds of possible sources of misunderstanding as far as poetry is concerned. All types of misunderstandings are internally connected with each other in various subtle ways. It becomes very difficult to find out, with particular mistakes or misunderstandings.

          The diagnosis of the source of misunderstanding in poetry is as difficult as the case of troublesome mind-set or a patient in psychological choirs; simple case do occur but they are rare.

           These kinds of warning are given initially by I A Richards. The learned critic proceed to macerate various sources of misunderstanding in poetry.

Careless, intuitive reading:-

The first possible source of misunderstanding in reading poetry might be misunderstanding may arise from inattention, or sheer carelessness. But carelessness or inattention results from distraction and the meter and verse form of poetry itself may be a powerful source of distraction. To some readers, the meter and verse form of poetry are as powerful as distraction as a barrel organ or a brass band is to one trying to solve difficult mathematical problems.

Meter and rhythm are essential parts of poetry and cannot be dispensed with. Therefore a poem must be read several times before it is fully understood. In each reading, attention may be paid to one particular factor. After several readings, the various factors would fit in together and the full sense would be grasped.

Over literal meaning:-

Another source of misunderstanding of the sense of poetry arises from the fact that often poet themselves live to play all manner of tricks with their sense. "Sometimes a poet may dissolve the coherence of his sense altogether, and may seem chaotic and incoherent".

                In this above statement what he said is that sometimes poet himself lost control over his language, and sometimes it happens that he forget the sense of coherence or togetherness means to put different things together appropriately. And that's why to understand or to read poetry becomes difficult.

              The ordinary laws of syntax and grammar may be thrown to the wind. Such looseness of syntax maybe most undesirable, but a poet is certainly at liberty to indulge in it, it furthers his purpose.

In the field of literature society has given the freedom to poet. So, he uses it very well for its own purpose to make poetry more clear and powerful, and thus it happens that he may not follow grammatical structure of language and this also creates a confusion and leads to misunderstanding and this gives rise to the misunderstanding or wrong notion that syntax is of less importance in poetry than in prose, and that the proper way of understanding poetry is through a kind of guess work, which may even be called intuition. In other way to understand poetry, there is no proper or crystal clear way one has to assume the meaning of the poetry.

           And such notions are dangerous and hard to deal with, more so because they are true to some extent. This element of truth in them makes them most deceptive and misleading. I A Richards warns his reader against this danger and writes

" In most poetry the sense is as important as anything else; it is quite as a subtle and as dependent on the syntax as in prose; it is the poets chief instrument to other aims when it is not itself his aim. His control of our thoughts is ordinary. His chief means to the control of our feelings and in the immense majority or instances, we miss nearly everything or value if we misread his sense".

In the above quotation, what I A Richards wants to tell the reader of poetry is that one has to have a sense of poetry and in poetry, sense is given much importance and by this sense, poet controls our thoughts and our feelings? And if we miss this sense, then we miss nearly everything.

However this does not mean that the sense or a poem can be fully understood apart from the context that a prose paraphrases. However accurate, can fully express is sense. The sense as expressed in prose paraphrase is never the full burden of the poem: it can never express its full significance. Besides, the literal meaning of a poem also conveys through a rendering of its sense. In other words over literal reading is a great source of misunderstanding in poetry as careless or intuitive reading.

Both are equally dangerous and both must be avoided with care and diligence. To quote Richards own words-

"These twin dangers- careless, intuitive reading and prosaic over literal reading- are the simple gaggles- the reading poem between which too many ventures into poetry are attached”

Defective Scholarship:-

It is the third source of misunderstanding in poetry. The reader may fail to understand the sense of poet, because he is ignorant of the sense of many words used by the poem. The words may be new, difficult, unfamiliar to him, or he may lack necessary intellectual context. Words used by poet, besides having a literal meaning, may also have acquired additional richness and value from their having been used by other poets and writers in different contexts and this associate clue and significance would be lost upon a reader unfamiliar with this literary text of words.

Thus we can say defective scholarship is on the part of the reader and reader should be familiar to the contextual use of words otherwise it leads to misunderstanding.

The fourth source:-  of misunderstanding is a far more serious cause of misunderstanding is the failure to realise that the poetic use of words is different from their use in prose. Literal sense of the word can be easily understood with the help of a dictionary "but an inability to seize the poetical sense of word is not so easily remedied".

Here I A Richards present one poem to support and to explain his point.

" Solemn and gray, the immense cloud of even,

pass on their towering unperturbed way,

through the vast whiteness of the rain-swept heaven.

The moving pageant of the waning day;

Heavy with dreams, desire, prognostications,

Broading with sullen and Titanic crests,

They surge, whose mantles wise imaginations,

Trail where Earth's mute and languorous body rests

While below the hawthorns smiles like

milk splashed down

From Noon's blue pitcher over mead and hill

The arressed distance is so dim with flowers

It seems itself same coloured cloud made still

O, how the clouds this dying daylight crown,

with the tremendous triumph of tall towers".

Some critics call it the rubbish and write or give their comments on this.

Ø    A cloud cannot have desires.

Ø    A mantle cannot have imaginations.

Ø    Imagination cannot trail, it has no physical-literal existence.

Ø    Milk does not smile.

Ø    Dim with flower is rather weak, for flowers are bright things.

Ø    Tall towers do not triumph so far as I know anyhow I never saw one doing it! Might be an interesting sight !

These complaints rest upon an assumption about language that would be fatal to poetry. All these things may happen in poem if there is any good reason for their happening or any advantage is gained from their happening.

Not only many metaphors or for the matter of that, much poetry will survive such deadly demands for scientific precision. Poetic use of words is different from their use in prose, and such literalism is the most serious obstacle in the way of a right understanding of such poetic use of words. "How are we to explain" asks Richards "to those who are nothing in poetical language but a tissue of ridiculous exaggerations, childish 'fancies' ignorant conceit and absurd symbols- in what way its sense is to be read? Poetry is different from prose and needs a different attitude for right understanding.

Conclusion:-

Apart from this source of misunderstanding in reading poetry, there are others like figurative language, the poetic figures of speech possess number of difficult and interesting problems. There are metaphors and mixed metaphors, personifications and elaborated personifications create or sometimes itself became the source of misunderstanding in reading poetry.

                                                                                                                                                             

Feminism in Frankenstein

Name:- Parmar Milankumar.L

Batch year:- 2014-15

Class:- M.A. Semester 2

Enrollment no.:- 14101026

Course name:- Romantic Literature

Assignment topic:- Feminism in Frankenstein 

submitted:-    Department of English

                        M K Bhavnagar uni

Index

I.                   Introduction of feminism

II.                 Introduction of the author

III.              Feminism in Frankenstein

IV.              Social condition of 19thcentury

V.                 Gender and sex

VI.              Females in Frankenstein

VII.            Psychological reading

VIII.         Feminist critic’s comments

IX.               Conclusion

 Introduction to feminism:- 

Before we discuss the feminist approach in Merry Shelly’s Frankenstein, first I would like to provide some information about Feminism.

What is Feminism?

Feminism can be defined as political, cultural, pedagogic and theoretical response to the patriarchal structure of power that seeks to subordinate women’s lives, interest, bodies and sexualities. It argues that these structures create and enforce all relationship between men and women.  The feminist took various issues for the gender debate science, politics, economics, culture, and epistemology. In the literary arts the feminist critics exposed the patriarchal ideology that informed the construction of the ‘English Literary’ in the first place, and which made male–centered writing possible. During the 1970s feminist theory emerged with works such as

·        Kate Millet’s ‘Sexual Politics’

·        Shulamith Firestone’s ‘The Dialectic of sex’

·        Simon de Beauvoir’s ‘second sex’  “women are not born but  made” "

              

              Feminism is a collection of movements and ideologies that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve equal political, economic, cultural, personal, and social rights for women. This includes seeking to establish equal opportunities for women in education and employment. A feminist generally self-defines as advocating for or supporting the rights and equality of women (Wikipedia)

           All women or men writer who wrote about the problems of the women in the society can be termed as feminist writer in. In broader sense feminism not only applies to women but also to the other males and other marginalized group of society. Feminists have worked to protect women and girls from domestic violence, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. Feminists have also advocated for workplace rights, including receiving the right to paid work, paid maternity leave, and eradicating all forms of discrimination against women.

Gynocriticism:-   is the historical study of women writers as a distinct literary tradition. Elaine Showalter coined this term in her essay "Toward a Feminist Poetics."  It refers to a criticism that constructs

"a female framework for the analysis of women's literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories".

 The work of gynocriticism has been criticized by recent feminists for being essentialist, following too closely along the lines of Sigmund Freud and New Criticism, and leaving out lesbians and women of color.

Gynocriticism is the study of feminist literature written by female writers inclusive of the interrogation of female authorship, images, the feminine experience and ideology, and the history and development of the female literary tradition During the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds respectively, Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir began to review and evaluate the female image and sexism in the works of male writers. During the nineteen sixties the feminist movement saw a reaction and opposition to the male oriented discourse of previous years. Most thoroughly developed during the late seventies and early eighties, gynocriticism was a result of the interrogative critiques utilized in post-structuralism and psychoanalysis.

Introduction of the author of the novel :-

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on 30 August 1797, was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist. She was best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet P.B. Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was also the philosopher. She was died on 1 February 1851.

In her 1831 introduction to the novel Shelley writes of her husband’s anxiety that she should prove herself worthy of parentage- her parents being of literary fame. Whilst holiday with her future husband and poet Lord Byron in Geneva in 1816, Byron decided they should write a ghost story. Motivated by this conversation between Byron and Shelley, and also by the scientific works of scientists such as Galvani, Erasmus, Darwinan  Humphrey, marry begun Frankenstein. All ideas Shelley had for the novel came from her acquaintances or from her studies, either way, her influence were predominantly male and greatly affected the outcome of the novel. One would perhaps assume a female author would write to try to advance the position of women in era where they virtually unheard of in a field such as science –the subject of the novel

Works of Marry Shelley

Ø  History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817)

Ø  Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

Ø  Mathilda (1819)

Ø  Valperga; or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823)

Ø  Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824)

Ø  The Last Man (1826)

Ø  The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830)

Ø  Lodore (1835)

Ø  Falkner (1837)

Ø  The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839)

Feminism in Frankenstein:-   In Marry Shelley’s Frankenstein she had given more important to male characters but they just suffer from their power and knowledge, whereas to the women character she portrayed them as passive, disposable and serving, and women are useful function. This may have been caused by the time period in which she wrote: one in which females considered inferior to males. Female characters like Savile, Elizabeth, Margaret, Agatha and even Lady Monster providing nothing but a channel of action to the male characters in the novel. Events and actions happened to them, usually for the sake of teaching a male character a lesion or igniting an emotion within him. Each of the women has serves some specific role in the novel.

    

Condition of women in Nineteenth century:-

While reading Frankenstein one can understand the patriarchal nineteenth century. It was social norm where men are part of public sector and women for domestic. Deformity of Monster expresses obstacles in a culture, in which feminine self-expression is very much difficult. Shelley, writing in the first half of the 19^th century, was in a period in which a women “was conditioned to think she needed a man’s help”(one critic). Men such as Victor Frankenstein and Walton endeavor on quest in search of knowledge, happiness, personal fulfillment and experience. Men take on the role of scientist, explorer and merchant whereas women were confined to the house and kept outside of the male public sector, where the intellectual activities was abundant, in that time women were considered weak, sexless, and treated as material things.

“I looked upon Elizabeth as mine - mine to protect, love and cherish. All praises bestowed on her I received as made to a possession of my own” (21) -Victor Frankenstein

 Even in our country like India, at the present time women’s condition is no better than this.  

Gender and Sex:-  

 Gender and sex are different things from each other. Gender is what is based on the biological difference, and it is created by nature we have no control over it. Whereas the sex is men made thing and we created the difference among male and female, among girl and boy. And in this term women has been suffering from long time.

           Shelley has presented fragmented psyche of men and their external action is the subject of behavioral psychology. She has presented intangible character especially male characters, and it is what she thought about/ or has the image of male in her mind, she has presented in the novel.

“I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretch-the miserable monster whom I had created.”

           The creation of the Monster by Victor Frankenstein is very badly reflected the ugliness his mind, we can say that it is the ugliness of victors mind that comes to physical existence through the creation of Monster, what it called in scientific language the anima personality. But both either Victor or the Monster in reality created by Marry Shelley, and it is her thinking, her perspective, her point of view, how she looks at the men, as ugly, wicked, hostile, vicious. It may be said that it is the reflection of her society that she has presented in her novel. As R.J. Rees says ”literature is the mirror of the society”.

           Though the novel is written by women author she could not give enough justice to female characters in her novel because of the patriarchal structure of the society and even of language. Even she herself could not keep aloof from this structure. That’s why she had to encoded women’s voice within the structure of it. Though written by woman novelist but there is no change in the language and even in the presentation

Female characters in the novel:-

There are three main female characters in the novel they are Elizabeth, Savile and Justine. The female characters are very weak in this novel, especially Elizabeth, Victor’s cousin/fiancé. She is portrayed as the perfect women especially after the death of Victor’s mother. She takes the place of the mother figure in the household. But just like all female characters in the story, her character has little substance. Victor’s character is described in detail, as is that of the Monster, and Henry Clerval. When Henry get kill, sympathy is really felt towards Victor, because he has just lost his lifetime friend. When Elizabeth is murdered, the reader finds it hard to connect with what Frankenstein is feeling. Elizabeth the main female character and Justine and Caroline are there to reflect the male characters. Professor Smith states in her essay that “women function not in their own right but rather as signals of and channels for men’s relations with other men.” This is especially clear when the Monster kills Elizabeth on their wedding night. The Monster is upset with Victor, so instead of hurting him, he kills his wife. Elizabeth is used as sort of ruler to measure the relationship between Victor and Monster.

Psychological level:- The structure of the novel is very extra ordinary, that present the mind of the Marry Shelley or rather woman, and that makes a novel psychological. Within the novel we can read/ study the mind of the characters like Victor, Monster and Walton and in other way we also can read the psychology of woman author, what kind of mental condition she has that enforced her to write such work/ descriptions. In other way she had taken revenge against the male dominant society by portraying them physically defect and mentally wicked. Dreams allow something to speak which is not normally present in the patriarchal course of things. Such a bringing to the surface of a troubling otherness, sometimes explicitly connected to the unconscious, has been described as an effect of women's writing.

The novel is directed towards Savile (Walton’s sister) a woman, who is both inside and outside of the narrative structure to whom victor is telling the story of his experience. The structure of the novel allows us to read the mind of three male characters. As the story starts with Robert Walton, there after forward by Victor Frankenstein who tells half of the story, and his narrative disrupted by Monster. So reader can get chance and even the role of the female in their life. We get three stories by three different narrator and that help us to study three male characters and importance of women in their life. And through the whole structure of the novel we read the mind of Marry Shelley. In adopting a male voice, the woman writer is given the opportunity to intervene from within, to become an alien presence that undermines the stability of the male voice. Three narrators of the novel, Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and the monster, each of these men is an image of the others all are wandering creatures who are in some way deviant. Walton’s narrative was interrupted by an accidental entry of Victor whose story is insufficient since it is broken by faints, fevers, dreams, inexplicable silences that dislocate narrative sequence. Monster displaces Victor’s narrative in the middle of the novel. The three narratives are incomplete without each other. None of them is the centre of the novel. Doubling and dislocation of the identity of man, that changing the shape of man can only result in the creation of monstrosity.

Some feminist critics view on Frankenstein:

Ellen Moers:-  

“Frankenstein’s most important source is not Faustus but rather Mary Shelley’s experience as a mother and a very particular kind of mother. Out of Shelley’s experience as a mother, Moers argues, comes a “a myth of genuine originality” and one that focuses less upon “birth” than upon the “after-birth”, specifically Frankenstein’s abandonment of the Creature.

As Moers reads it, it is “a horror story of maternity” (220).

Ø  Victor > lab > Creature

     parallels

Ø  Shelley > journals (books and babies) > Frankenstein

As Moers reads the novel, Shelley’s biography provides all of the material that makes up the Gothic power of the novel; she details the way in which life forces (love-making, pregnancies, births, and marriages) and death forces ( stillborn, miscarriages, suicides, and sexual betrayal) are entwined in Mary Shelley’s lived experience as a woman).

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar:-

In the madwomen in the attic, they argue that nineteenth century women writers, socialized to act like good domestic women, manifest rage and anger when they do pick up pen to write. This they argue, results in women writing where we find counter-figures to the ideal feminine figure: Marry Shelley’s figure.   In The Madwoman in the Attic, they argue that nineteenth-century women writers, socialized to act like good “domestic” women, manifest rage and anger when they do pick up the pen to write. This, they argue, results in women’s writing where we find counter-figures to the ideal feminine figure: Mary Shelley’s Creature.

“For her developing sense of herself as a literary creature and/or creator seems to have been inseparable from her emerging self-definition as daughter, mistress, wife, and mother. Thus she cast her birth myth – her myth of origins – in precisely those cosmogenic terms to which her parents, her husband, and indeed her whole literary culture continually alluded: the terms of Paradise Lost (228).

Conclusion:-

Let me quote from Gayatri Spivaks’ “Three women’s text and critic of Imperialism” to conclude my point

“The task of the post-colonial writer, the descendant of the colonial female subject that history did in fact produce, cannot be restrained within the specular master-slave enclosure so powerfully staged in Frankenstein but must represent “the post-colonial performance of the construction of the constitutional subject of the new nation” (269).