Family Nightmares

     I thought the idea of how the family was twisted in The Shining was the most interesting aspect of it. Since we have been studying the inner evils of ourselves, even though the horrors of the house stood out the most, the reality of what the family was going through before they arrived and while the house was preying on their darkest moments seemed a larger part of the message of the story.

     I liked the idea of breaking down each family member into the ideals of their family position and  the way it resembled the signs of domestic violence, being an interesting and large part of Jack's past. Now Jack is suppose to be the head of the household and he is at that. He shows he is in control and has power over Wendy and Danny, but perhaps much of this is due to them fearing him and due to his past. Wendy, being the woman of the house and with the roles in women still leaning more towards family than being independent, she sort of serves the family, especially Jack. The timidness of Wendy and how she keeps an eye on Jack all the time shows how she fears him. Already knowing of his past of drinking and violence, she notices the signs coming back and admits to herself that ""The most frightening thing, vaporous and unmentioned, perhaps unmentionable, was that all of Jack's drinking symptoms had come back, one by one…all but the drink itself." The main thing that stands out here is the unmentioned/unmentionable part. Wendy doesn't dare talk about the horrible things Jack has done due to his temper out of fear he will find out and hurt her. She also notes how "he got irritated over little things. He would unconsciously start snapping his fingers in a nervous rhythm when things got to quiet. Increased profanity. She began to worry about his temper too." Increased anger and verbal abuse, while not acknowledged enough as abuse even though it is a high form of it, are some telling signs of domestic abuse besides the most obvious sign of fear in partners. Alcoholism also is involved in many domestic violence cases, though I'm not sure if it is the majority.

Going back to how "hush hush" most victims are in these situations, another factor that prevents people from how serious and common domestic violence is, when Jack broke Danny's arm, no one in the family made a big deal of it, even though the was the undertone that it had been more than an "accident." Wendy tried to play it off as an accident, but the strange thing was when Jack openly admitted that he "meant to do it. I guess someplace inside I really did mean to do that to him. Or something even worse." This openness strays from normal signs of harassment, but instead shows that while Jack was doing this to Danny, he had some control over it. The Overlook Hotel plays much with the mind so it leaves me to wonder if the intention was to reveal that the choices each family member made were purely reasonable to them and less because of what the hotel was doing to them. Danny, being the child who are known to say whatever is one their mind, is one of the only people who confronts Jack head on about his violent tendencies when he asks him "you'd never hurt Mommy, would you, Daddy?" "No." "Or me?" "No." Silence again, spinning out." Being an only child as well as knowing of the divorce has already taken a hold of his childhood, so being onto the violent tendencies coming for Jack shows the strain in family relations. It appears that Danny does not trust Jack. The story is already threatening enough before you add the supernatural elements, which is what makes me believe the real story lies in the reality of it instead of the ghost story.

    The disguise of the perfect family. How much do we hide about it to the world? How much of ourselves do we hide from our families?


     Finding the inspiration or connection the author, Stephen King, has with their work has always interested me so I did some research in a biography of Stephen King to see if his own past and childhood could reflect why he wrote such stories, including The Shining. It turns out the King's father deserted his family at a young age, leaving his mother to take care of the family. He never said if his father had an alcohol problem, but he does reveal that while writing The Shining, he himself was battling being an alcoholic. A little while after his father had left,  at the age of six he punctured his eardrums, which he said he could never forget the pain of it. I wondered if in his mind he connected the two and while the rest of his life was a decent one, children can feel and experience many things that affect the rest of their lives. This may be the psychologist in me, but I do feel that the pain and negativity put out in the lack of a father figure combined with a connection to the pain of his multiple injuries could be the premise for his beginning writing, as well as the violence and horror style. His earlier works tend to focus on the horrors of being a child, parental neglect, and abuse, which fall very well along the lines of Danny and the others in The Shining. In his later novels, shift more towards the pain and loneliness of being an adult. King explains that meaning and purpose of his books are not a dance of death at all, not really. There is a third lever here, as well. It is, at bottom, a dance of dreams. It's a way of awakening the child inside, who never dies but only sleeps ever more deeply. If the horror story is rehearsal for death, then its strict moralities make it also a reaffirmation of life and good will and simple imagination - just one more pipeline to the infinite." So it seems his childhood is very important to his writing and that it's also about taking the darkness and learning from it to be good. Do you think the attack on Jack as the father figure and his fate reflects King's deeper feelings about his father? How much of Jack do you think could reflect King himself? Could he be reflecting the evils in himself instead?

It just seemed like a startling revelation, but brilliant cover at the same time for a horror story. To me, King was actually showing that the reality of our own family flaws and decay can be more frightening and strange than the supernatural. While the spooks were a huge part of the past of the hotel, they really represented the human mishaps from the people who used to be in the hotel. King has used the nightmares of dreams and spirits to hide the actual horror of the novel, the horror and fear a family can have just from realizing themselves and facing the 'ghosts of their past. Do you think people really deal with their pasts? No matter what amount of therapy given, can we really let go of some of the worst things about us or that have happened to us, or do we just hide them away until the right thing causes us to break?



King, Stephen. The Shining. New York, New York: Pocket Books, 1977. Print. 

"Love and Death, Don't You Mess, With My Heart"

     While I hate to be the one to point out a negativity when it comes to love, one of the strongest themes I noticed in the Edgar Allan Poe stories we read was the connection between love and violence. Now I'm not saying that this has to be a romantic sort of love, but that it is a strong connection of the heart to someone else that caused the decay into violence in this case.
     In the tales "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," there seems to be a progression in events that lead the narrator's love to become a feeling that leads them to acts of violence, which both result in death. In "Black Cat," the narrator begins by confessing "my tenderness of the heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions. I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them." This begins his basis of love which defined his later love in life for animals and having many pets. When he was older, he also had many pets with his wife and among getting the black cat, his "favourite pet and playmate," his love for the cat replaced his love for all of the animals equally. This led to him to make his pets "feel the change in my disposition. I not only neglected, but ill-used them." Then, the night his love for the cat was replaced by his love for alcohol, he "grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of it's eyes from the socket!" Sure, he was taken over by the alcohol which clouded his judgment, but the act of causing pain, the thirst for bloodshed caused his love for the before to turn into a new passion for violence. His natural urges to be a predator took hold after getting a first taste, which made him finish off the cat because "I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offense; hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin," so he had to get rid of the former love to make room for the new. He had to destroy it from his life. The same happened with the doppelganger cat. The memory from his old love had not been purged so when his new love for violence tried to outdo his love for the cat, he ended up accidentally killing his wife, which could be argued would happen eventually since she had been a previous love. Basically when his inner savage nature came out, it took over because it had been supressed for so long and the narrator needed to indulge it, and honestly, enjoyed watching and causing the pain in the end.
     In "The Tell Tale Heart," the narrator also constantly reminds the reader how calm, precise, cautious, and sane he was during the sins he committed. Though he lived with this other man and claimed "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire," for some reason that he cannot even morally describe, he slowly plotted the man's death. The narrator came to the conclusion that "it was not the old man who vexed me, but this Evil Eye." The old man had an eye that "resembled that if a vulture--a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees--very gradually--I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever." It is said that the eye is like a window to the soul and vice versa, so perhaps the narrator felt the old man's eye could see the evil within him and it caused those realized evils to take hold of him out of paranoia in the end. Again, his love and caring for the old man was corrupted by his need to destroy what was preventing him from contentment. The way he committed the crime and how calm he was with the police at first after the deed was done, shows that he did take pleasure and satisfaction in the bad deed.
     The horrific deeds done and questionable loss of sanity in these men reminded me a lot of our class discussions on morality, mainly how morality was created by man. I feel this was possibly to contain our natural animal urges inside a more rule bound human being. A way to separate ourselves from the darkness that we know lies inside of us. There is a quote by Samuel Johnson that goes, "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." I feel that the pressures of life morals and love along with the desires man pushes down inside himself caused them to snap. I don't think it's so much that they went completely insane, but more like their real inner desires became to much to hold back and so they took over the outside man full of worldly morals and became too overwhelming. Much like our conversation in class on mental illnesses, I do wonder if outbreaks such as the ones in these tales as well as real life mental cases are really just caused by our natural animal instincts and wants resurfacing or the pressures of society to keep them repressed.
     These beastly tendencies and the way the men witnessed things that felt real but were never verified to actually be true felt similar to the horror stories of Lycanthropy. Now I will be the first to admit my obsessive interest in wolves and werewolves from films to folklore to the actual root and stem of these fantasies. It may sound silly at first, but Lycanthropy is a very serious and very real mental illness. In the scientific research and lore book, "The Book of Were-Wolves(1865)" by Sabine Baring-Gould it's found that "It was not till the close of the Middle Ages that Lycanthropy was recognized as a disease." This disease takes on not only mental effects, but can take physical ones as well. "Among the ancients this kind of insanity went by the names of Lycanthropy, Kuanthropy, or Boanthropy, because those afflicted with it believed themselves to be turned into wolves, dogs, or cows.It makes the person psychologically believe they are turning into a monster, an actual beast that goes about doing horrible things. These thoughts can become so controlling over the person that it can physically alter their hormones and body, including excessive hair growth, which adds to their thoughts of becoming a beast, as well as fever and anger issues. While the exact cause of such an absurd psychological disorder hasn't been pin pointed, "the propensity, however, exists in different degrees. In some it is manifest simply as indifference to suffering, in others it appears as simple pleasure in seeing killed, and in others again it is dominant as an irresistible desire to torture and destroy." The most common acts committed in these cases are murder, rape, and cannibalism. A better known historic account of Lycanthropy involved a man named Jean Grenier. During the 1600's in southwest France several children went missing and a young girl was attacked. Jean Grenier confessed to these acts in court saying "the charge of Marguerite Poirier is correct. My intention was to have killed and devoured her, but she kept me off with a stick." "When questioned touching the children, whom he said he had killed and eaten as a wolf, he allowed that he had once entered an empty house on the way between S. Coutras and S. Anlaye, in a small village, the name of which he did not remember, and had found a child asleep in its cradle; and as no one was within to hinder him, he dragged the baby out of its cradle, carried it into the garden, leaped the hedge, and devoured as much of it as satisfied his hunger. What remained he had given to a wolf." Grenier claimed he had sold his soul to become the wolf. His disease which caused him to have the urge to kill and not control himself are much like the narrators in Poe's tales because "startling though the assertion may be, it is a matter of fact, that man, naturally, in common with other carnivora, is actuated by an impulse to kill, and by a love of destroying life." After Grenier's first taste of misdeeds, his psychological disorder drove him to commit more out of the enjoyment and love for pain just like the narrator's who could not stop their urges to continue watching others suffer by their hand.

Sadly the video wouldn't come up so I had to only post the links. But these clips are from the film, "The 10th Kingdom," one of my favourite films. It's a scene where the character 'Wolf' is on trial for doing bad, wolfy things. I thought it was the perfect mock trial representation of how I felt Grenier's trial went. Unfortunately the scene was cut on YouTube...... So start watching at 4:15 then go to part 2 (although I personally recommend watching the entire movie haha).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgvf6rIDSZg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEgSHOjVoKM&feature=related

     Poe has delved inside the human soul and heart to tell all sides of what humans are capable of, even when their sanity is intact, though questionable. He has created macabre romance in showing that love comes in many forms, it all just depends on what our natural animal hearts really desires deep down when we let ourselves abandon morals and act purely for our own strange ideas, and scarier yet, realities.

"Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright." -The Wolfman(1941)


 Baring-Gould, Sabine. The Book of Were-Wolves. 1st ed. New York: Cosimo Classics, 1865. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Selected Tales. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.

Survive Yourself

     After reading In the Heart of the Sea, watching Fight Club, and having our class discuss survival instinct, I kept visualizing the same diagram or pattern in my head, a sort of triangle of repetition for the characters and myself. Our need to survive has been around since mankind began, but I feel only certain stories and films have really captured the insanity and suffering a person must go through when they realize what they are really fighting. Sure, our basic needs will be the core of our driven actions in the end, but what really makes it so hard for us to survive, is in our minds, it's that we realize, in the end, we are really fighting against ourselves to stay alive, feel alive, to feel human.
     I started off analyzing the roles of the crew on a ship. The captain of the ship has to keep the entire operation running. He must have control over his crew and holds the responsibility of what turns out in the end. I guess you could say the captain needs to be a very strong and stable man. Captain Pollard seemed this way in the beginning, winning over the crew in a slightly different way than cruelty though. While he was able to keep his men in line, he also "paused to consider their arguments" instead of ignoring their ideas and being a selfish captain. His surprising strength came from his difference 'without overbearing display or ungentleman-like language." The ship is like a government and Pollard created a democracy in it, but his affection towards pleasing his crew ended up being his weakness. He was not tough enough, like Owen Chase, to do what was best for his crew without sparing their feelings. In this way, I saw him a lot like Jack in Fight Club. While he was suppose to be an important person, he didn't actually have the means to be a leader at the beginning. He was a bit feminine, in the theme of masculinity, in letting others run his actions instead of grabbing the reigns for himself and taking charge. It was as if he cared too much of what people thought of him. Though I saw Pollard actually changing into the character of Tyler, symbolically, by the end of the book.
      Pollard was quite rule driven, being a captain's duty, and kept to his standards. I found this was much like how Brad Pitt's character, Tyler, kept so strongly to his rules for the fight club and also for the things he taught Jack. They seemed to govern over both their lives and actions, Tyler's in leading these men into freedom, Pollard in leading his crew. But the way he relates to Tyler is more symbolic, than physical. They way his being, who Pollard thought he was, began to disintegrate was like when Jack discovered Tyler was himself, he was the same as such a destructive being. All morals and rules abandoned in the end to try to survive raw, was like Tyler's existence disintegrating from the world. He was no better than Chase, which was hard to take. His struggle to survive was when he realized he was a coward, no better a captain or a hero than any of the rest, perhaps even worse.

     Now Owen Chase was the complete opposite! Though he seems to be the masculine one, he is hiding behind his need to succeed. Being the first mate, he is higher in command, but lacks the ability to become a leader until his successor is gone. In Fight Club, before Jack met Tyler, he felt no means or way out of his position. Owen feels the need for complete control over his life, this is a lot like how Jack started out. While he becomes apathetic to it, his life in completely routine down to every detail he needs to know. But eventually the need to rise above this takes hold, his real desires to move up in life. The way Jack once to have feeling and perhaps even an actual life, Chase wants to take more glory and sort of become captain. Both characters also fill their own voids with little tasks, Chase keeping his log and Jack shopping through his IKEA magizine. These tasks are meant to keep them sane through the mental destruction they feel is going around them. While Chase's seems much more horrific, being stranded and all, it's the mental torture that is the real struggle. They are both trapped in the desires that they long to have, but are kept from. While in the end, the true identities of Pollard and Chase are finally revealed to themselves, but the intensity of how they wanted to be presented to others, instead of focusing on surviving themselves, I feel helped lead to their insanity in the end. Though they handled in it different ways, facing themselves, even their own failures became too much because they didn't see it coming, or perhaps wouldn't accept the truth, which you could argue was human.

     I suppose this means that in order to survive, we feel the need to hide who we really are, we fight to push our real nature deep below so to every day others we seem like completely different people than we really are. In order to survive, some try to blend in with the rest, we disguise ourselves like wolves dressed like sheep, until the right time. But these attempts get the best of us, in order to actually survive we have to be true to ourselves. The true nature of man or beast are one in the same at the core and in the end, if we keep it buried too long, we will never fully know ourselves so when we have to face our true nature, we won't be prepared, and it could destroy us. Not in such a savage way, such as death, but it will destroy the life we could be experiencing, the life we want to live, but will not allow ourselves to until we reach this epiphany. What are some times in your life when you remember holding back out of fear or some other emotion? What are you still holding back?
  


Philbrick, Nathaniel. In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 2000. Print. 

From Fascination to Obsession

     It always starts off harmless. Something that intrigued you, makes me learn more about it until you've studied so hard that it's always on your mind, then it stays on your mind so much that it becomes the only thing on your mind, the only thing that seems to matter anymore. That's when your little fascination in something that seemed so small turns into a life size obsession.
     While Moby Dick is an obvious tale of an interest leading to obsession there is also an obsession in Emerson's Self Reliance, maybe less so for himself, but more for his ideas in being self reliant. In Moby Dick, a seaman named Ishmael decides to join a whaling ship since he had never done such a thing before and wanted the experience, but ends up being plunged into a captain's descent into further madness. When on the ship, Captain Ahab's obsession has already become just not full blown as Ishmael sees "there seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from any." I took this line as not only a reflection of how Ishmael saw him, but as a foreshadowing of what looks good at first, but there is something strange and foreboding about it, even before it happens. It's the little wording too, like how he refers to him as being "branded" almost like his obsession is a curse,  since he has already lost his leg to the whale, leading to his pursuit to destroy it. What started out as a love for the sea, became full of vengeance to get revenge on this whale. Ahab sees it as this demon out to get him and his desire to kill it leads to obsession when he abandons his role as captain by neglecting the safely and control of his crew so that he could get this whale. "Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad" which led him to throw away the responsibility and morals of his title to go after pure selfish obsession, even though he suspected the worse within him. This whale was more than a whale, it was the evil he wished to overcome, his own wrongdoings personified, confusing him to do what he thought was right, which only furthered his bad judgment of morals.
     Since I just watched the movie last night, I found a comical, but true connection to a man lost to his obsession in Frank N Furter from The Rocky Horror picture show. While we don't know exactly why they all came to Earth from the planet Transexual, we are given a glimpse of Frank N Furter's ways in the past and how they build up to his creation of Rocky. When Brad and Janet reach the mansion, they learn he wants to create the perfect man. When he sees Rocky is what he considers perfection, all he's concerned about is taking care of Rocky and making sure he is in tip top shape for Frank's desires. His tendencies led him to think you should always "give yourself over to absolute pleasure" so he ends up using all of his friends for his own personal gain. This is revealed after he becomes fed up with his guests and Columbia tells him she "can't stand any more of this! First you spurn me for Eddie, and then you throw him off like an old overcoat for Rocky! You chew people up and then you spit them out again... I loved you... do you hear me? I loved you! And what did it get me? Yeah, I'll tell you: a big nothing. You're like a sponge. You take, take, take, and drain others of their love and emotion." Even after he seems to understand what he has done was a bit immoral, his past selfishness and obsession for lust lead to his demise, by those he the servants he thought were on his side. His obsession led to his death, just like Ahab's did because they could see nothing but what they wanted, without a thought of anything else, perhaps even their own well being in the end.

     Though Self Reliance does not seem as dangerous an obsession as pursuing Moby Dick, it ties in another point I wanted to make of how obsession can lead us to abandon our own morals, or more so, when we've gone so far, how can we judge what's right and wrong? Though Emerson talks about becoming self reliant, I also wonder if the things he says can be taken too far. We talked in class about how, men would leave society to go live as hermits by themselves, only relying on what they could provide for themselves by what was naturally around them. Though it seems quite manly and heroic, the question of the cost of being self reliant came up. Losing communication with others and isolating yourself can lead to a loss of actual reality with the rest of the world. Though I don't blame Emerson for his writing, as I actually loved it and was inspired by it, I feel the idea of being self reliant is easily misunderstood. When you are completely self reliant, I feel your morals change and are different from if you depended on at least some things in normal life. Emerson says "good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong, what is against it." I agree with this, but wonder if anything can really be considered moral if everything can be morally good or bad, it just depends on what the person thinks. I think "killing puppies" is bad, but a puppy killer probably thinks it's a good idea. I may be wrong but it seems Emerson feels if this puppy killer thinks it's right, then it is right. I believe when reading Self Reliance we are figuring out our own morals as we go through what he says. We interpret it our own way, which is brilliant, but can be misinterpreted and therefore taken too far in the minds of some people's morals. Very, VERY confusing ha! Another quote I liked that goes along was "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string." It's true that we should trust ourselves, but how do we know if we can trust ourselves if we are on our own, completely self reliant, wouldn't we start to question ourselves in a "Cast Away" sort of way? I think we need some sort of connection to others that are like us to establish our own sane morals, otherwise we will become obsessed with needing to be disconnected, we will all start having deep conversations with volleyballs, or with an object of our desire that is unhealthy because our morals have been blurred.
     A documentary that I remembered and was inspired by from this was "Grizzly Man." It was about a man named Timothy Treadwell, a man so fascinated and in love with bears that he left society to go try to live among them. His fascination grew to obsession when he began thinking he could touch them and communicate with them without harm. He had done much research and know a lot about their habits, but his "need" for acceptance by the bears made him drop his caution of them still being a wild animal because he really thought he could be one of them. In the end, his love and obsession ended up getting him killed by the animal he thought he had such a connection with. It also took the life of his girlfriend, who ended up getting pulled into his obsession as well. Perhaps his abandonment of society, left him feeling outcast with these animals being his only connection anymore, which is where the idea of self reliance can be taken too far. One of the quotes I liked from Emerson was "what I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think." Though good advice, I feel from experience that while we go after what we want most, sometimes to isolation is too strong and breaks a person down. It really is sad because I was always hoping it would work out for him but because he lost sight of reality a bit in his obsession, his desire was taken from him. I really recommend watching it because while he seems a bit insane at times, watching his motives and heart for what he is doing shows a lot about where obsession comes from. It's strange, but it's sort of beautiful.  

This leads to my final questions:

When we do become obsessed, are we sane enough to know what is right or wrong, even if we don't do what's right? I really am not sure since, from experience I do have that feeling of guilt when I am doing something wrong, even when I am doing it. I do not consider myself obsessed when doing these things though so I feel that doesn't count. Since the examples I made show people abandoning morals in pursuit of what they do think is right, I think the answer is probably no, we are not sane in to make these decisions while obsessed, but what do you think?

Like the thought of how our own white whale is an obsession deeper than just the thing itself, in the words of Melville, "can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause we seek?" Can we do this especially if we are not sane?


Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Oxford University Press, 1851. Print. 

Herzog, Werner , Dir. Grizzly Man. Perf. Treadwell, Timothy. Lions Gate Films: 2005, Film.